Urban Legend

Who's a Pepper?


Claim: A new Pepsi can design omits the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance.
Status: False.

Origins: Although there once was some truth to the item quoted above, the information it contains is long outdated and never had anything to do with Pepsi or Coca-Cola. Neither soda company is producing, or has ever produced, redesigned cans bearing any portion of the Pledge of Allegiance or an image of the Empire State Building. This issue concerns a special patriotic can design produced by Dr Pepper back in November 2001, a can which was marketed for a limited time and has been off of store shelves for three years now (since February 2002).

The brouhaha began in mid-November 2001, when the Dr Pepper soft drink company, in response to the terrorist attacks on America a few months earlier, introduced a new can design featuring the Statue of Liberty with the words "ONE NATION . . . INDIVISIBLE" from the Pledge of Allegiance displayed above it.
Dr Pepper did not print the entire Pledge of Allegiance on their cans while leaving out the words 'under God'; they invoked the Pledge of Allegiance by using a mere three words from the pledge. However, because the three words Dr Pepper chose to use were the words surrounding the phrase 'under God' (which was not itself part of the original pledge as written by Francis Bellamy in 1892 but was added to the pledge by an act of Congress in 1954) the new patriotic can design prompted calls for boycotts from some religious groups and news media who maintained that Dr Pepper had "omitted 'under God'" from their version of the Pledge (because it falls where Dr Pepper used ellipses) and publicized the issue by encouraging a campaign of sending e-mail and letters of complaint to the Dr Pepper company:
Dr Pepper has designed a new patriotic can featuring the Statue of Liberty and the Pledge of Allegiance, but they left out the phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. When asked why, Dr Pepper replied: "We felt 'One Nation . . . Indivisible' best represented the message we were trying to get across."