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A Grand Old Flag
The Stars and
Stripes stands for the union of the American states.
In 1958, high school student Robert G. Heft of Lancaster, Ohio, was
spurred by his interest in politics, and talk of Alaska and Hawaii
becoming states, to design a 50-star flag as a school project. His
teacher, Stanley Pratt, gave him a B-minus, describing it as unoriginal.
However, he said he would grant Heft a higher grade if the U.S. Congress
accepted the design. Thanks to the efforts of his local congressman,
Walter Moeller, Heft earned his A grade when the design was accepted by
Congress on July 4, 1960. Hawaii had become the 50th state the year
before.
Although Americans fly the flag everywhere on Independence Day, or July
4, on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, at school graduations, outside
schools and government buildings and any other time they feel like it,
there are special remembrances, particularly on June 14. On that day in
1777, the Continental Congress approved the stars and stripes design as
the emblem for the new United States of America, which was fighting for
its existence. More than a century later, President Woodrow Wilson
issued a presidential proclamation declaring June 14 as Flag Day. It's
not a national holiday, though; only Pennsylvania has made it a state
holiday. Although most schools are closed for the summer on Flag Day,
lessons earlier in the year include learning to recite the Pledge of
Allegiance and to perform patriotic songs, such as You're a Grand Old
Flag, written by George M. Cohan as part of a Broadway musical in 1906.
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This iconic symbol
of American patriotism isn't without its share of myths and
controversy. For example, many Americans believe that Betsy Ross, a
Pennsylvania seamstress, stitched the first American flag and
personally displayed it to then head of the Continental Army George
Washington. There is even a famous print, made by Percy Moran in
1917, that has imprinted that scene on the minds of millions of
American schoolchildren. However, there are no records that make
certain who designed and made the first Stars and Stripes. The
journals of the Continental Congress indicate that Francis Hopkinson,
a congressman from New Jersey and signer of the Declaration of
Independence, may have been the first to modify the unofficial
Continental flag, which at first still carried the Union Jack from
the British flag. |
Historians believe that Washington did
know Ross, and she did sew flags. The Continental Congress was meeting
in Philadelphia, where she lived, in the early years of the War of
Independence. In May 1777 she had been commissioned by the State Navy
Board of Pennsylvania to sew flags for Navy vessels. Ross' descendants
recounted that a month later, when the new U.S. flag design was
determined, Ross was the first to make one, and that she changed the
six-pointed stars in the design to five-pointed ones to speed up her
work. Within a few months, American troops had the Stars and Stripes
with them to carry into battle, at Brandywine, Pennsylvania. The
American flag flew over foreign territory for the first time in early
1778, at Nassau in the Bahama Islands, where the Americans had captured
a fort from the British.
To date, there have been 27 official
versions of the flag, but the arrangement of the stars varied according
to the flag-makers' preferences until 1912, when President William
Howard Taft standardized the flag's 48 stars into six rows of eight. The
49-star flag (1959-60), as well as Robert Heft's 50-star flag, also have
standardized star patterns.
The Founding Fathers were fully aware of the symbolism of the nascent
nation's flag and so they took the trouble, in an act passed on June 14,
1777, to specify:
"That the Flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes,
alternate red and white, that the union be thirteen stars, white in a
blue field, representing a new constellation."
Washington, who was to become America's first president, explained it
this way: "We take the stars from heaven, the red from our mother
country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have
separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity
representing liberty."
After Vermont and Kentucky became states in the 1790s, Congress approved
adding two more stars and two more stripes to the group that represented
the original 13 colonies. It was this "Star-Spangled Banner" that poet
and lawyer Francis Scott Key saw flying over Fort McHenry in Baltimore,
Maryland after an all-night bombardment by the British navy during a
subsequent war, in 1814. This is the flag that inspired him to write the
poem that became America's national anthem by an act of Congress in
1931. As more states were added to the union, Congress decided in 1818
that new stars would be added for states, but the original 13 stripes
would remain.
Based on material from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and The
Library of Congress.
Courtesy: SPAN Magazine editorspan@state.gov
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