The soiling of the American flag… again

by David Benjamin

“… The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free… The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever… No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform… The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing…” — 4 U.S. Code § 8. Respect for flag (passed by Congress, 1942)

MADISON, Wis. — One of the most infamous photos ever shot of the American flag was by Stanley Forman of the Boston Herald-American on 15 April 1976. In the tableau is an angry white male, enraged over the mixing of races in the Boston schools. He levels a flagpole bearing the Stars and Stripes at a black man, who struggles in the grip of another angry white male. Taken at the height of Louise Day Hicks’ racist crusade against busing in Boston, the photo has gone down in history under the title, “The Soiling of the American Flag.”

I learned flag etiquette in a parochial school, which meant that I was educated to regard the flag with a depth of reverence that I otherwise applied only to Jesus, the Eucharist and Henry Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves. Each morning at St. Mary’s began not with a prayer but with a Pledge of Allegiance to the Republic, and to the Republic for Richard Stans (whoever he was). 

My allegiance to the republic grew more nuanced as I grew up and dealt with dilemmas like the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, the Vietnam War and the madness of Richard Nixon. But I never lost my conviction that the flag was a unique symbol in all the world of liberty, enlightenment, sacrifice, unity and brotherhood. Even as a little kid, I knew that my flag, unlike any other, represents refuge, welcome and new hope to everyone everywhere, especially those evocative and nameless “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

When I saw Stanley Forman’s photo, I wasn’t surprised by the the image of a bigot using the flag as a weapon to assault a fellow American. After all, by the time I started high school, I’d seen the flag abused a thousand times in a hundred ways, either by luckless folks who hadn’t learned flag etiquette from Mrs. Ducklow at St. Mary’s, or by zealots seeking to use Old Glory as a prop for propaganda. 

One of history’s quirks is that between 1794 and 1818, the US.A. had no official flag. Betsy Ross’ thirteen-star original (based on Britain’s “Grand Union” flag) was adopted in 1777 by the Continental Congress. A fifteen-star successor became official in 1794. But then a series of new stars went unapproved by Congress. The Flag Act of 1818 made the Stars and Stripes America’s flag forever, requiring no special legislation to add more states to the upper-left constellation. 

Congress codified proper treatment of the flag in 1942, with a set of explicit rules, including this: “The flag should never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free.” This is the section that the anti-busing protester violated when he lowered the flag and turned it into a spear.

The NFL also tramples this rule whenever it ”honors America” by covering a football field with a hundred-yard mega-flag. Congress also stipulated that the flag shouldn’t touch “merchandise.” I would contend that, considering ticket prices, any use of the flag at a major sporting event — other than leaving it alone on its pole for purposes of the national anthem — is a manifest desecration. 

In my days of youthful defiance, I committed a few — private — offenses against Old Glory, including the adaptation of a huge flag found at the Goodwill Store as a bedspread in my dorm room. But I’ve never really been able to shake my grade-school adherence to proper, restrained and even solemn flag behavior. 

I’ve always seen the flag as representing not only every American but anyone elsewhere on earth who wants to be American. The flag has had rivals, beginning with the Union Jack, but most perilously the Confederate Stars and Bars, which were designed to symbolize not only the bloody cleaving of our union but the consecration of human bondage and white supremacy. 

Since those forgotten rules were written in 1942, flag abuse has become both commonplace — it is mistreated both for patriotic clothing and provocative burning — and divisive. There has emerged among us a vocal and implacable minority who dearly believe that the flag belongs to them — just them, not us — and that anyone who opposes their cantankerous faith is an enemy of the republic and a hater of the flag for which it stands.

This strident few, virtually all of whom deem their cause “conservative,” (save in matters of flag exploitation), drags out the Stars and Stripes for their every gathering. They festoon arenas with the flag, wear the flag from head to toe, as capes and t-shirts, jumpsuits, brassieres, sombreros, pantyhose, armbands and tattoos, as blimps, balloons and parachutes, buses and tractor-trailers, as backdrop or foreground, as a circus tent, an advertising tag, and even as a sort of garish drapery that shrouds the full expanse of the Green Monster in Fenway Park. The bigger, the redder, the bluer, the whiter, the better.  

The better to shove the flag into the faces of their foes and call them traitors.

We’ve seen this phenomenon rear back up in the midst of the pandemic. America harbors a vocal, embittered minority weirdly convinced that, by sheer force of being pissed off at a government — goddammit — that ain’t gonna order them around, they can immunize themselves against a global pestilence that has killed, so far, 47,000 fellow (and insufficiently loyal) Americans.

Protests staged by these patriots, who are egged on by an incongruously anti-state chief of state, are awash in both flags and irony. Their demonstrations feature Old Glory in a host of variations, both appropriate and transgressive. Some flags are held upright and fly properly free. But there are also flag scarves, flag cowboy hats, flag antenna-banners, flag bandannas, flag hankies, flag vests, flag sweatshirts and — really — flag face-masks. Each misuse of our national symbol flouts the rules as egregiously as if it were stitched to the seat of a hippie’s blue jeans. 

In these protests — here’s the irony — the American flag shares prominence with the Stars and Bars, a banner under which 360,000 Americans died defending the Stars and Stripes. Also, seen among the protesters who waved Old Glory in the cause of freedom from public health, were a few folks waving swastikas (a flag that killed another 300,000 Americans) and one clever effigy of a rat wearing a Star of David (see “swastika”). 

The images remind me of Boston in 1976. But thankfully, they also take me back to mornings at St. Mary’s, dutifully chanting “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” It was rote recitation and I didn’t think much of the words as I spoke. Who does? But I believed them. I trusted that everyone shared my respect — my reverence — for a symbol that has waved mute and changeless outside every school in the United States since, at least, 1818. 

I understood then that, though Americans argue and bicker and insult one another in every matter of political discourse, they fall silent at the sight of the flag and the sound of the anthem. We take off our hats and look up. In the presence of the flag, we are all — for the fleeting duration of Francis Scott Key’s ancient parody — “one nation, under God, indivisible.”

Treated properly, the flag takes no sides. The flag is the absence of sides. 

Well, used to be.