Best remembered as the author of the United States' Pledge of Allegiance, Bellamy also worked as a minister and allied himself with the nineteenth-century Christian socialist movement.
He earned a theology degree from New York's University of Rochester.
He launched an unsuccessful New York gubernatorial campaign.
He grew up in Rome, New York as the son of a Baptist minister. In the early 1880s, he married his first wife, Harriet Benton; the union produced sons named David and John (following Benton's death, Bellamy wed Marie Morin).
He and fellow Writer John Ruskin were both Christian socialists of the late 19th Century.
