Sunday, June 14, 1998

Celebrating a birthday for Old Glory

Today is a special day that requires no cards or gifts. It is Flag Day, the 221st anniversary of the Stars and Stripes.

The actual origin of the design is obscure, but the Continental Congress, when it adopted an official flag the summer following the Declaration of Independence, was absolutely clear in its own mind what the flag should be and what it meant.

The white stars represented a new constellation, signifying harmony, rising in the West. (The founders, engaged in a war with Great Britain at the time, tended to be Eurocentric in their thinking.) The 13 stars, one for each of the colonies, were to be in a circle, symbolizing "the perpetuity of the Union," a commitment that was to be brutally tested in a civil war only 84 years away.

Of the colors, blue, from the Covenanters Banner of Scotland, represented a covenant against oppression; red, from the Romans, defiance and daring; and white, purity.

A nearby seamstress, Betsy Ross, was said to have sewn the first flag as George Washington looked on, and that's as good and as beguiling a story as any. American troops first fought under it at the Battle of Brandywine that September.

Flag Day asks nothing of us but that we think about the flag. As Woodrow Wilson said, on a Flag Day when U.S. troops were being sent off to World War I, "It has no other character than that which we give it from generation to generation."

Over two centuries and many generations, much changes, but the flag remains what the Continental Congress, at the outset of a war with an uncertain outcome, so hoped it would be: the banner of a free people.

Fly the flag today. It's yours.