<HTML>Hi Claire,
Also in yesterdays Observer (which I admit I only got for the Billy Connolly biography) was this <a href=""></a>
<a href="[
www.observer.co.uk]; on the US flag. Well I found it interesting even if nobody else does.
KRs,
Duncan
Waving not drowning
Peace protesters hold it aloft - as do the advocates of war. The Right rallies round it - but so do radicals. It's now a flag of defiance, and of mourning. Ed Vulliamy explores the many meanings of the Stars and Stripes
Sunday September 23, 2001
The Observer
In a landscape smothered by the dust of death - Pompeii in our lifetime - three New York firemen rigged the fallen antenna, which only hours before had stood at the apex of the World Trade Centre, and turned it into a flagpole. Amid the devastation, they hoisted the Star Spangled Banner - a simple, instinctive gesture charged with many things, and not only patriotism: it was an act of defiance, hope, mourning and more.
The scene spoke louder than words; and it recalled another in America's collective mind's eye: the raising of the Stars and Stripes by a band of Marines atop Mount Surihachi at Iwo Jima on 23 February 1945, at the end of a battle that had cost 6,000 American lives - roughly the same toll as the attack on New York.
Within hours and days of the firemen's flag flying over the devastation, all New York - and all America, to a lesser degree - was festooned with flags. Across the country, Wal-Mart sold 450,000 of them. The Star Spangled Banner was posted on almost every wall or window in the city. It was hung from fire escapes, from scaffolding on construction sites and from skyscrapers. It was attached to the radio aerials of taxis, to cash registers in shops and cafes. Tough policemen had silly little flags sticking up out of their caps; streetwise kids had them sticking out of the back pockets of their baggies; dummy models held them in boutique windows. The Stars and Stripes became a bandanna, a wristband, a T-shirt, a miniskirt. USA Today published detailed instructions on how to treat a flag - it must never, ever touch the ground.
Newspapers - even the venerable New York Times - printed flags across entire back pages for affixation to windows. One bore the instruction: 'Display Prominently. Defend Freedom'. One firefighter scaled a skyscraper adjacent to the wreckage and hoisted the very flag that had been wrapped around the coffin of his father - killed on duty in the fire service.
But this was not flag-flying as Europeans understand it, not even in time of emergency or war, like the Union flag during the Falklands conflict. This was the exposure of a raw American nerve, something in the American mythic psyche that is desperate but proud, subliminal but articulate.
There are two images in history comparable to the Marines at Iwo Jima: that of Soviet soldiers fixing the Hammer and Sickle to the ravaged Reichstag in 1945, and Delacroix's painting of Liberty Leading the People, carrying the Tricoleur. Both of these images eulogise flags of revolution like America's. But theirs were revolutions that forged a new order out of the old; neither the French revolutionaries nor the Soviets forged the country itself. The US flag is different; it is woven, somehow, of a different cloth, bound by different thread.
Flying the flag in New York last week said many things. First, it expressed bitter grief, it was a flag of mourning. There were no black flags, no black ties or ribbons - they were included in the Stars and Stripes. The flag of the United States was a way of saying that the city was aware, every waking second, of its 5,000 inhabitants buried in a mass grave beneath the rubble of two iconic buildings that had vanished from the skyline; that New York had tried to imagine what it must have been like on those stairwells when the world collapsed; that - and it was no exaggeration - nothing would be the same in New York again.
'The flag is the way we say we'll never forget who's inside that smoke,' said Susan Gillespie from Harlem, cutting her painting of the Stars and Stripes into the shape of a heart, with the twin towers drawn in the middle. 'For me it's instead of going to church. One of my neighbours is missing and there's been no funeral, but putting out a flag is like having one. They'll never find her now - she's called Beverley - but you get to mourn her.'
While some flags flew at half-mast, others, significantly, refused to do so. Because, as a slogan painted across a flag hung in Union Square put it, the flag also represented: 'Phoenix 2001'. It would be a flag of defiance, unity and refusal to be cowed. The motto beneath another flag on Sixth Avenue read: 'These Colours Do Not Run'. There was even an invocation of America as the underdog, a redeployment of an old theme from another time: 'We Shall Overcome'.
'It's a proud flag,' insisted Luis García Ramirez from Brooklyn, with Old Glory hanging from his belt alongside an array of tools and a huge Maglite torch. 'And if you fly it now you're saying that if you mess with the US you mess with the best. Right now, this city is crying, right? But after crying we know who we are and we are stronger. That's what the flag is saying.'
As President Bush ordered America to war, defiance spawned a different, more bellicose meaning - the meaning that those in Europe who love to hate America usually associate with the Star Spangled Banner. As written carefully into one flag hanging near the site of the collapsed towers: 'Have Faith In God - But Nuke 'Em Just In Case'. That's the familiar flag of Uncle Sam the aggressive international citizen, now dispatching his bombers against yet more innocent civilians.
'Send them back to Allah,' said Jason Meredith, with a flag flying from the aerial of his car and 'God Bless USA' sprayed across the rear window screen. 'Or, put it this way: let there be peace on earth, after we've blown those @#$%& away.'
In parallel, something more complicated was happening to the flag in New York, unique to America. Swelling candlelit vigils assembled in Washington Square Park and Union Square, and along the Brooklyn boardwalk, entwining all the sentiments of sorrow and outrage with a plea for peace.
Carpets of little flames, flowers and personal offerings were surrounded by boards and sheets on which people wrote: 'An Eye For An Eye Makes The World Blind' and 'War Is Not The Answer'. There is something almost occult about this: as though the crowds that look as though like they are attending Jerry Garcia's funeral - people with no overt loyalty to America's patriotic heritage - and the Christians praying for peace along the Brooklyn waterfront, are, in claiming the flag as a sign of peace, ritually contaminating its connotations from Vietnam. By making the flag a totem of their own, they exercise a power over events. Some students have manufactured and welded a huge, unfurling flag out of strips of steel and brass, into which people were asked to engrave their hopes for peace.
'We've been working on it ever since the night of the explosions,' said one of them, Silvia Fontana, 'it was just a reaction - to make a piece of art out of the one thing that unites all of us. The point we're trying to make is that war is terrorism too, and our protest is to make something creative and constructive out of our flag.' 'It's patriotism but not nationalism' said her friend Sara Healey.
Outside New York City, along the verdant avenues of New England, lined with picture-postcard white slat wood houses, the flag is flown for more traditional reasons on balconies and sports utility vehicles. School students are told by their teachers to attend 'Pep Rallies' on the town green in places like Guilford, Connecticut.
This is the US establishment grinding into gear, and it invokes the reaction of an anti-flag counter core. Students refusing to go, not wanting to sing or light candles, are objects of scorn. One student at Yale University called Alan - whose brother was in the World Trade Centre, but escaped - told his professor last week that he was saddened, frustrated and appalled that his parents were flying a flag which remained to him that of oppressive capitalist power - and how they simply could not understand his objections.
Almost everyone in the US claims the flag with passionate intensity. It stands not for ideology or party, not for any government or even necessarily the establishment, but for a collectivity. A US flag is an unassailable icon. Unlike France or Russia - let alone Britain - this is a country that created and invented itself through revolution, the Declaration of Independence and a Constitution - all of which, wrapped in the flag, are points of departure on a road down which Americans search for national identity. In his 'Concord Hymn' of 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson defined the dawn of the nation in terms of the flag: 'By the rude bridge that arched the flood / Their flag to April's breeze unfurled / Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard around the world.'
It is an assertive and proud identity, but also uncertain. In a nation built on immigration, often by those in flight from poverty or oppression, the flag - to which all must pledge allegiance upon taking citizenship - is an embrace. It belongs to the Union and to the people; to car dealerships and fighter bombers, rock bands and Perkins Pancakes. When it is hoisted to the accompaniment of the national anthem before every sporting occasion, no one remains seated.
Senator John McCain's recollections of his time in the 'Hanoi Hilton' jail include the story of Mike Christian, who sewed a US flag on the inside of his shirt. One day, his captors found it and tortured him. Once recovered, Christian sharpened a piece of bamboo into a needle and made another from little bits of cloth. A few years earlier, the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King had marched throughout the South carrying the US flag. Dr. King's National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People denounced the barbaric bombing of black churches by the Ku Klux Klan as 'sins against the flag'.
The emotions of those who reject it are equally charged: flag-burning was the heartfelt, bitter and - to the rest of the country - shocking hallmark of the anti-war protests in the Sixties. And it was later twisted into something very different: the emblematic and now spine-chilling expression of fundamentalist Islam's war against the 'Great Satan' - first in the streets of Tehran, then elsewhere - that was brought to Manhattan on 11 September.
It is the duty of every schoolchild and immigrant to know the history of the flag. They learn that the first national flag was raised by George Washington on New Year's Day 1776: the 'Grand Union', putting the crosses of English St. George and Scottish St. Andrew in the top left hand corner, with 13 stars and stripes.
But this design offended radicals and federalists, and a resolution of the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia, in summer 1777, ordered 'that the union be thirteen stars (one for each state in the revolutionary union), white in a blue field, representing a new constellation'. Red for valour, blue for justice, white for purity. The vagueness of Congress's prescription led to a number of designs, and widespread uncertainty as to what the American flag was - until Betsy Ross arrived.
Betsy Ross is a fascinating figure, a Quaker seamstress from Philadelphia who ran off with an Anglican priest and renounced her pacifism to support the revolution. She lost two consecutive husbands in the revolutionary war, and is the only woman in the otherwise very male pantheon of the Founding Fathers.
Ross designed the flag's magical circle of 13 stars after meeting with a clandestine Congressional Committee in a back room of her house. But the only certification of the story is her own account. At the age of 84, on her deathbed in 1836, she confided it to her 11-year-old grandson, who did not tell anyone until 1870 when he presented the claim to the Pennsylvania Historical Society - this in the aftermath of the Civil War when Yankee Americans were hungry for myths surrounding the early flags of their bloodied union.
The direct ancestor of the Star Spangled Banner was first hoisted at the height of the second War of Independence against Britain. It is an epic tale, and one of America's favourites: Not long after the sacking of Washington DC in 1814, the British set about Baltimore. Defending the port, the Americans erected a vast flag over Fort McHenry. While the bombardment raged, it was watched by three Americans detained aboard a British ship, heartened in the morning when they saw the banner, 42 feet by 30, still waving over the fort. One of them, Francis Scott Key, wrote a poem on the back of an envelope that began, 'O say can you see...' It became a popular revolutionary handbill and was later set to the tune of an old English drinking song, 'To Anacreon in Heaven' - a racy ode to Venus and Bacchus. Decades later, it became America's national anthem, also known as 'The Star Spangled Banner'.
The flag went through copious mutations as states joined the union. Civil War made it iconic again, an affirmation of the authority of the Union against the rebel Stars and Bars of the Confederate South. President Abraham Lincoln ordered a 35-star flag to fly on all buildings, including one for each of the 11 Confederate states.
Although slavery was legal in revolutionary America long after it was abolished in Britain, the legacy of the US flag as one of liberation lingers in the South. After the unspeakable lynching to death of a black man, James Bird, in Jasper, Texas in 1998, a rally by the Ku Klux Klan was faced off by a counter-demonstration in the little streets around a gazebo. The Klan hid behind their hoods, carrying their Stars and Bars, while middle-aged and elderly African-American women shouted their challenges, eyeball to eyeball, brandishing the flag of the United States.
But long before this, the causes of liberty were divided over the Star Spangled Banner. Resentment at the flag began at home, in the militant labour movement. The New York historian Alan Brinkley charts a history of the flag as an important ingredient in the campaigns to 'Americanise' the immigrants who arrived between 1870 and 1920. During the Depression, the flag was deployed as it was in Europe, symbol of the ruling class of a nation state defending itself against an 'enemy within' - its own proletariat. In the US, there was an additional dimension: in the persecution of radicals and unions after World War I, radicalism and socialism were seen as 'un-American' imports festering among immigrant communities. It was in 1931 that Key's 'Star Spangled Banner' was adopted as the national anthem.
War again brought unity beneath the flag: in 1942, despite shortages of cotton and rayon, the War Production Board gave flag-making a 'very high preference' rating, assuring an adequate supply. 'The American flag is a very important part of the war program,' said a WPB official. 'The production of more flags at this time is very essential.' The Stars and Stripes landed in Liverpool and helped liberate tranches of Nazi-occupied Europe, but war's aftermath made the flag a banner of the Right on the world stage. It was one side of the Cold War, it adorned missiles that drove the arms race at a terrifying speed; it was the flag of the superpower attempting to subjugate Vietnam with Agent Orange. It was the flag nestling among palm trees behind the wire at embassies in Santiago de Chile, Jakarta, San Salvador, Guatemala City and Buenos Aires while atrocities were committed by America's clients, puppets and allies. And this made it a flag to burn.
In 1960, President Eisenhower unveiled the present-day flag to accommodate new stars for the arrival of Alaska and Hawaii into the Union. In that year, more than a million of the old 48-star flags were sold in uncut bolts of cloth to Haiti, and the island was ablaze with starred-and-striped dresses, shirts, tablecloths and sheets. But by 1968, things had changed: the Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman was arrested for wearing an American-flag shirt when asked to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Two years later, Hoffman wore his flag shirt on a TV show and had his image blocked out, so he could be heard but not seen. It was the considered judgment of network lawyers that wearing a flag shirt raised serious legal problems. By then, the burning flag had become the hallmark of anti-war protests.
Flag-burning was more than most Americans could take. Even the most liberal supporters of the anti-war movement were appalled. Between 1968 and 1974, the popularity of the war plummeted, but so did that of the peace movement. In 1971, Marcy Taylor, a 25-year-old from San Francisco, dashed into an anti-war demonstration and smothered a burning flag with her bare hands. She became a national heroine and celebrity. States passed statutes banning flag-burning, but they were overturned by the Supreme Court in 1989, after some of the most passionate exchanges and disagreements in its history. In 1990, Congress passed a law to outlaw flag-burning, but that was in turn invalidated.
Still, the flag was claimed by the radical movement as America's true but sullied colours. The late socialist leader Norman Thomas argued that radicals in America should have held mass flag-cleansing rallies, not flag burning. The soundtrack not only to Woodstock but all it stood for was Jimi Hendrix's yearning account of the 'Star Spangled Banner' - and this was not all pastiche and irony. The American flag was ubiquitous in album cover art, and on stage with Neil Young or the Grateful Dead - and now it adorns Union Square as well as the Pentagon.
One of the organisers of the 1960s anti-war movement, and of demonstrations that routinely involved flag-burning, was Todd Gitlin - now a professor of sociology, with an American flag hanging from his balcony facing what was the World Trade Centre.
'It's an affirmation of solidarity,' he said. 'It's not an affirmation that America deserves to rule the world, just that America is a community entitled to public affection.'
But, he added, 'it's not a blank cheque'. Speaking only minutes after watching President Bush declare war in the name of the flag, Gitlin said: 'I can easily imagine circumstances in the coming days in which I would be repelled by crimes committed in the name of the flag, take it down or turn it upside down.'
In a loosely connected country, a flag is a fetish. In a city like New York where some 200 first languages are spoken at home, you have two flags: the flag you left at home, and that of the country you invested with dreams - even if those dreams have been shattered. Even if they have been twisted into nightmares, the myth is a stubborn one. In America, it is automatic and emblematic for almost every immigrant group to cross the flag of their country of origin with that of the United States. It is an entwinement - each identity reinforces the other. It happens in restaurants and on the streets; on brooches and at national festivals or parades.
The flags of Puerto Rico and the USA hang together from fire escapes. When the Bronx Baby Bombers baseball team (all from the Dominican Republic) played in the Little League championships last month, the proud parents who packed buses to travel and support them in a verdant Pennsylvania valley waved the flag of their own country and the Stars and Stripes. Mexicans and Dominicans are invariably the first to stand to attention, caps on hearts, when the flag is raised before a Yankees game.
The communities whose names begin or end in 'O' - the Irish and the Italians - cross their flags most zealously. Cubans - for their own particular political reasons - are passionate US flag-wavers except when the Feds come for Elián González, when it is suddenly equated with the swastika. Chinese and Korean Americans assert the intense duality of their national loyalty - as do, of late, the Jamaicans.
Of course it is not that simple: for many immigrants - markedly non-white immigrants - this is an ambivalent loyalty, reflecting the fact that the US embassies besieged by lines of applicants for visas and asylum are invariably located in poor countries where America is at best distrusted and at worst despised, especially Islamic ones. The addition of American Somalis, Ethiopians, Haitians and West Africans to any patriotic roll call is complicated, if not prevented, by race, racism and police brutality - especially in New York of late - as these communities discover what African-Americans have known for centuries. Black Americans in the industrial North tend to view the flag through a different, alienated prism to those in the South: Uncle Sam and his red, white and blue has done little or nothing for the ghetto. The title of the book There Ain't No Black In The Union Jack by British sociologist Paul Gilroy could apply just as appropriately to the Star Spangled Banner.
But this weekend, almost every American, rightly or wrongly, claims the flag. The coming war will fragment them, but almost every political shard will insist that the flag is theirs. And almost every American misses that lost age of only a few days ago when they were tempted to agree with Mark Twain that 'We Americans are the lavishest and showiest and most luxury-loving people on the earth; and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen.'
Now the flag is everywhere, but nowhere is it felt to be gaudy.
Stars of heaven and stripes of liberty: how the flag has changed
The 'Betsy Ross' flag. Seamstress and upholsterer Betsy Ross is believed to have sewn the first American Flag by hand, between late May and early June, 1777. This was commissioned by George Washington, who is thought to have had a meeting with her about it in her home. The original layout of stars was circular.
In June, 1777, the National Congress adopted this flag, and it was flown on Independence Hill, on 4 July that year. At this stage, the stars and stripes represented the 13 original states in the union: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island.
The flag became 15 stars and 15 stripes upon the inclusion of Vermont and Kentucky in 1795. George Washington gave this explanation of the symbol of the flag: '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.'
The Bennington Flag. In the spring of 1777, the British Army started to advance down the Hudson River from Canada. Patriot militia from Vermont and New Hampshire gathered to defend their land. This is the battle (won by the Americans) when General John Stark is reported to have said to his men: 'Yonder are the redcoats. We will defeat them or Molly Stark will sleep a widow tonight.' This flag is also known as the Fillimore Flag, because Nathaniel Fillimore brought it home from the battle.
In 1818, with the inclusion of Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, and Mississippi, it became clear that there were too many states to continue to increase the number of stripes added to the flag in accordance with each new state. At this time, a Congressional Act mandated that the number of stripes be fixed at 13 (to represent the original 13 states) and one star be added on the fourth of July the year following inclusion for each new state.
The 1912 Flag. By this time, there were 48 states. A Presidential order was issued fixing the position of the stars for this flag, which features 6 rows of 8 stars.
The American Flag as it has been since 4 July, 1960: The 13 horizontal red and white stripes, and in the canton, 9 rows of stars, alternating 6 and 5 in each row, making a total of 50 states.</HTML>
