This Day in History — "In God We Trust" Becomes the U.S. Motto
On this day in 1956
On July 30, 1956, Eisenhower signed the resolution making "In God We Trust" the official U.S. motto — a phrase first stamped on a two-cent coin in 1864.
The Off-Key Bard turns the page of history and finds that a nation's identity is shaped not only by its battles or inventions, but by the exact words it carves into its civic bedrock…
"Every nation carries symbols. Some build monuments. Some raise flags. Others encode their values into a few carefully chosen words."
On this day in 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Joint Resolution 396 into law, officially declaring "In God We Trust" the national motto of the United States. The resolution had passed both chambers of Congress unanimously and without debate — a remarkable fact given that the phrase has generated sustained legal controversy ever since.
The motto didn't appear from nowhere in 1956. It had been accumulating weight in the American civic vocabulary for nearly a century:
The Anthem's Echo: Long before it appeared on any coin or law, the phrase traced to Francis Scott Key's 1814 poem "Defence of Fort M'Henry," which became the basis for the national anthem. The poem's fourth stanza reads: "And this be our motto — 'In God is our Trust.'" Key wrote those words after watching the British bombardment of Fort McHenry through the night of September 13–14, 1814. The phrase entered the national vocabulary there, more than four decades before it reached official coinage.
Forged in the Civil War: In 1861, as the nation fractured, Reverend M.R. Watkinson of Ridley Township, Pennsylvania wrote to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase urging that the nation's coins acknowledge God — arguing it would preserve a spiritual record for posterity should the Union not survive. Chase agreed and instructed the Director of the Mint to prepare a suitable motto. The director proposed "God, Our Trust." Chase changed it to "In God We Trust." The phrase made its official debut on the two-cent piece in 1864, and the following year Congress authorized it on all gold and silver coins that had space for it.
The Cold War Crucible: The 1956 elevation to official national motto came in a specific ideological climate. Florida Representative Charles Edward Bennett, who sponsored the legislation, stated plainly that "in these days when imperialistic and materialistic communism seeks to attack and destroy freedom, we should continually look for ways to strengthen the foundations of our freedom." The move came two years after Eisenhower had signed "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 — a pair of decisions that reshaped the public face of American civil religion during the Cold War, and that critics have since argued blurred the constitutional line between government and religion.
Federal courts have consistently upheld the motto's use on currency and public buildings, with rulings that its function in those contexts is ceremonial and historical rather than strictly religious. The debate over where that line falls continues.
"A nation's words can carry weight,
Through changing times and changing fate…
For every phrase we choose to keep,
Reflects the promises we seek."
History reminds us: national symbols often tell us as much about the ideological anxieties of the era in which they were formally adopted as they do about the long historical roots from which they grew. The phrase on the coin predates its critics and its champions alike — it belongs, at this point, to the full complicated sweep of American history.