Stiff-Arm Salute: Must We Know Everything?

Claim­ing it is “his­tor­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant,” the Sun defend­ed pub­li­ca­tion of a six-year-old Princess Eliz­a­beth, coached by her moth­er the future Queen Eliz­a­beth and her uncle the Prince of Wales (lat­er Edward VIII, still lat­er the Duke of Wind­sor) rais­ing her arm in the stiff salute now iden­ti­fied with the Nazi par­ty. It’s “in the pub­lic inter­est,” wails the Sun.

It’s in the inter­est of sell­ing news­pa­pers. Buck­ing­ham Palace respond­ed:

“Most peo­ple will see these pic­tures in their prop­er con­text and time. This is a fam­i­ly play­ing and momen­tar­i­ly ref­er­enc­ing a ges­ture many would have seen from con­tem­po­rary news reels. No one at that time had any sense how the salute would evolve. To imply any­thing else is mis­lead­ing and dis­hon­est. The Queen is around six years of age at the time and entire­ly inno­cent of attach­ing any mean­ing to these ges­tures.”

Quite so, and the stiff-armed salute last­ed even longer in Amer­i­ca, where school­child­ren used it in the Pledge of Alle­giance from 1892 until 1942, when Con­gress amend­ed the Flag Code. This was the so-called Bel­lamy Salute, con­ceived by the Chris­t­ian Social­ist Fran­cis Bel­lamy. Is this real­ly “his­tor­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant”?

Purloined symbols

It’s not news that the then-Prince of Wales was emp­ty-head­ed enough to think Hitler & Co. were fas­ci­nat­ing rather than  fright­en­ing. He was not the only one to think that way in 1933-34. His fool­ish­ness con­tin­ued well into the war. The most ludi­crous exam­ple I know of is his mes­sage in 1940 to Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt, ask­ing if the FDR might offer to medi­ate an end to the war. The Duke would pub­licly sup­port the offer, and said the Eng­lish would rise up in revolt, thus forc­ing a peace. The Pres­i­dent respond­ed to that by call­ing him “Lit­tle Wind­sor.”