TOPEKA, Kan. — The woman often credited with sewing the first national U.S. flag — at the request of George Washington himself, her descendants claimed — might have been puzzled by Saturday’s modern Flag Day.
In Betsy Ross’ day, flags marked ships and told soldiers where they should move in the confusion of battlefield smoke and noise. The intense reverence many Americans feel for Old Glory arose from the Civil War, when the need to keep the banner aloft in battle led the Union army to treat the deadly job of flag bearer as a high honor — and men responded with fatal heroics.
The first, local Flag Day observances came after the Civil War and eventually a federal law designated June 14 as Flag Day in 1949, under World War I combat veteran Harry Truman. He declared in a proclamation the next year that the U.S. flag symbolizes freedom and “protection from tyranny.”
Americans’ attachment to their flag is imbued with feelings that in other nations might attach to a beloved monarch or an official national religion. The flag is a physical object “that people can relate to,” said Charles Spain, director of the Flag Research Center in Houston.
“If you put a flag on a pole, the wind makes it move,” Spain, a retired Texas Court of Appeals justice, added. “Therefore, the flag is alive.”
The holiday marks the date in 1777 that the Continental Congress approved the design of a national flag for what to Great Britain were rebellious American colonies.
It set the now-familiar 13 alternating horizontal stripes of red and white, one for each self-declared U.S. state, along with the blue upper quadrant with white stars. The Journals of Congress from 1777 says that the stars represented “a new constellation,” but a 1818 law mandated one white star for each state.
National observances for Flag Day began well ahead of the law signed by Truman, with a proclamation issued by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916.
Wilson’s action came several decades after communities began Flag Day celebrations. In 1891, Philadelphia held its first — at one of Ross’ former homes — and it evolved into an annual, weeklong Flag Fest.
The small village of Waubeka, Wisconsin, north of Milwaukee, claims the first observance in 1885.
According to the National Flag Day Foundation headquartered there, a 19-year-old teacher in a one-room school, Bernard Cigrand, put a small flag on his desk and had students write essays about what the flag meant to them. He advocated a national holiday for decades as he worked as a dentist in the Chicago area.
Lisa Acker Moulder, director of the Betsy Ross House historical site in Philadelphia, said that for Ross, conferring with Washington would have been the key point of her account. The U.S. flag wasn’t as venerated before the Civil War in 1861-65 as it is now.
Keeping flags aloft was crucial to maneuvering troops in Civil War battles, and that made flag bearers big targets for the enemy. They couldn’t shoot back and had to stand tall, said Ted Kaye, secretary for the North American association for flag scholars, known as vexillologists.
Both sides’ propaganda told soldiers that carrying a flag into battle was an honor reserved for the most morally fit — and that view took hold, Kaye said. One Michigan cavalry regiment’s red flag declared, “Fear Not Death –Fear Dishonor.”
“This created this cult of honor around these battle flags, and around, by extension, the national flag,” Kaye said.
Civil War soldiers showed extraordinary courage under fire to keep their colors aloft, and multiple flag bearers died in single battles, said Matt VanAcker, who directs a now decades-old project at the Michigan Capitol to conserve flags from the Civil War and later conflicts. Michigan has collected about 240 old battle flags and had a display in its Capitol rotunda for decades.
Replicas have replaced them so that the original banners — and pieces of banners — can be preserved as a physical link to the soldiers who fought under them.
“Many of the flags in our collection are covered with bullet holes,” VanAcker said. “A lot of them have blood stains — the physical evidence of their use on the battlefield.”