For many Americans, the Pledge of Allegiance is the quintessential childhood reflex. It is the ritual that began each school day, simultaneously unthinking and sacred, like all liturgies. Most schoolchildren stand up and place hand over heart without a second thought. Surely the Pledge is an indisputable Ur-text scratched out on the back of some Founding Father’s dinner napkin. Or more likely, the pious architects of democracy found it in their Bibles, right after the part where Jesus denounces Obamacare.

The Pledge is the most recent in a long line of books which remind us that our kneejerk assumptions about those familiar thirty-one words are not only wrong, but perilous. This retelling of the Pledge’s origins and controversies offers no historical revelations or deep analysis, but it is highly readable narrative that can take the reader in a single sitting through remarkable episodes in the life of a vow that is “perhaps the most often repeated piece of writing in the history of the English language.” The story is by turns not only political, but mercenary, xenophobic, and downright gruesome.

We owe our schoolhouse rite and loyalty oath to a displaced Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy. Pressured to leave his Boston church because his progressive Social Gospel sermons did not suit his robber-baron congregants, Bellamy found work in 1891 at a long-forgotten children’s magazine called Youth’s Companion, which Jones and Meyer call “the Life magazine of its day.” The editors employed Bellamy to promote a national celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World planned for 1892—a holiday which they believed would instill patriotism in millions of schoolchildren and boost sales in their ongoing “Flag Over the Schoolhouse” promotional program.

To turn-of-the-century progressives, Columbus’s journey was a “protest against ignorance,” a rebellion against superstitious Europeans’ maps of a flat world. The immigrants swarming through the gates of Ellis Island—which opened the same year—arrived blinkered by medieval worldviews that might retard America’s progress if they failed to learn New World values. Bellamy, for his part, shuddered at the thought of a “melting pot” in which Old World ethnicities might taint Anglo-Saxon American stock. “The people must guard, more jealously even than their liberties, the quality of their blood,” he later wrote. When he sat down to draft the flag salute that would crown the Columbus Day celebrations, he wrote partly for native-born Americans (who needed a reminder that their country was “one nation, indivisible” only thanks to their forefathers’ sacrifice in the Civil War), but also for immigrant children badly in need of “liberty, justice,” and a creedal deep-cleaning.

Bellamy was a masterful promoter, wrangling a meeting with President Harrison and roaming the halls of Congress until his pleadings on behalf of patriotism and citizenship produced a joint resolution to declare Columbus Day a national holiday “with suitable exercises in the schools.” His pledge appeared in the September 8, 1892 issue of the Companion in its shorter original form: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”