For Which it Stands
It began long before any of us first placed our right hand over our heart and joined our teacher and classmates in our most cherished profession of national faith: “I pledge allegiance…” On June 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress declared that the United States would have one flag with stars and stripes commemorating both the original and future makeup of the country. This particular one (pictured above) wasn’t our first flag, but by legislative decree it served as the model for all successive ones, our blue field finding room for each new state admitted to the union. Interestingly the flag predates the U. S. Constitution by a decade, yet it symbolized then, as now, more than any legal document could contain or exhaust.
The American flag is more than a pattern of stars, stripes, colors and cloth, however familiar and beautiful these are to those of us who claim it as our own. It is a symbol, which means it does more than merely depict and signal. Symbols are more powerful and evocative than that. Unlike signs we regularly see and to which we respond almost without thinking, e.g. stop signs, traffic lights, directional arrows, checkered and yellow flags in racing, and those shapes and Greek letters we employ when do math, symbols are multivalent, depicting that which cannot be contained in just one word or idea. Symbols open up for us a world of meanings, identities, values, and recollections from which we draw so much of our meaning and find so much of our identity.
I’m certain all national flags hold powerful symbolic meaning for the citizens of each country. Yet because they are symbols rather than signs, no two of them inspire the same feelings or trigger the same historical memories. Looking at what is left of the 15-starred garrison flag that flew over Fort McHenry when it was shelled by the British on September 13, 1814, we are taken back to a pivotal moment in our early history, when the future of our country was yet in doubt. But more than that, we grasp the context in which Francis Scott Key penned the words that would someday serve as our National Anthem. Each time we sing it or hear it played we become more than spectators enduring a moment of political or sports’ formality—we take our place alongside every citizen who ever lived for, fought for, and died for the Republic for which this flag stands and continues to fly.
No matter how many stars dot the field of blue, whether representing our humble origins as 13 confederated states, or the 35 that President Lincoln insisted on keeping in spite of the secession of 11 from the Union he gave his all to preserve, or the 51 we have called our own since 1960, the American flag has served
as an emblem of more than political jurisdictions, legislative proclamations or shifting partisan ideologies. It represents the millions of men and women who have labored to build this nation, who have contributed and sacrificed in ways beyond our ability to measure or fully appreciate. It represents every person, native born or immigrant, who has accepted the responsibilities of citizenship in helping create the climate and culture in which individual freedom, social progress, and civic consciousness have been able to flourish as nowhere else in this world.
That may be why so many of us feel such passion and conviction about how we honor our national symbol. For the respect we show the flag is nothing less than the respect we give to the Republic for which it stands, a republic that was created from the dysfunctions of our first government by those intent on creating a “more perfect union” in which justice, tranquility, safety, and the welfare of all could be established as never before in the history of the human race. Like the torn and shell-damaged remnant of the Fort McHenry flag, our nation is not without its blood-soaked stains, tears and scars. The dream of a perfect union remains to be fulfilled, yet we are more perfect than we were in 1788 when our Constitution was first ratified; more perfect than we were in 1814 when, by dawn’s early light, Mr. Key wondered if our flag stilled waved; more perfect than we were in 1916 when, on the eve of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed June 14 as a day to honor the flag; and more perfect than we were in 1949, when we were climbing back after the terrors of the Second World War, and Congress authorized a National Flag Day to be observed each year. I suspect most of us would agree that we are a more perfect union now, 27 amendments and 230 years after America was created as a democratic Republic designed to protect the shared sovereignty of this nation of aligned, cooperative states while ensuring the rights to which citizens, each of us, are entitled.
As I think about what our flag means to me today, and reflect back over a lifetime repeating the Pledge of Allegiance and singing the National Anthem, I am reminded of what Paul the Apostle wrote to the church he had helped establish in Corinth in the first century. Like all communities, associations, and even nations, churches are only as strong as and always as weak as the people with whom they are comprised. To this reality he said, “we have this treasure in earthen vessels…” I see America and the flag that symbolizes us in much the same way—a treasure whose greatness and whose weakness depends on the earthen vessel—the human community of citizens—in which it thrives or struggles. Every time we honor our flag, or pledge our allegiance to the Republic for which it stands, we do so as a gesture of respect and remembrance for those who have preceded us, and as a promise of fidelity and faithfulness to those whose future will depend on us. It is for their sake, as much as our own, that we may be bold enough to claim both our heritage and our destiny as Americans.
