by Anne Fadiman
In 1904, an article about John Sharp was published in the monthly magazine of the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It pointed out that had Sharp stayed in Scotland, he might never have left the coal pits. His life, noted the anonymous author, “teaches the lesson that to succeed one must struggle with circumstance, and overcome by faith and toil; that change, evolution, and action, secure mental and material progress; while, on the contrary, traveling self-satisfied in ruts, seeking sameness, and courting inaction, are conditions to be avoided.”
A PIECE OF COTTON
hen we bought an old farmhouse last summer in a small New England town, the elderly couple who had lived there for many years left us a set of plastic lawn chairs, a garbage can, a tool bench, a wheelbarrow, and an American flag. On September 13, two days after the attacks, we raised it, with our children’s help, to half staff. Our six-year-old son enjoyed pulling the halyard; on its way up the peeling white-painted pole, next to the big maple tree in the front yard, the flag made an interesting and satisfying sound, partway between a squeak and a ring. We’d read up on halfmasting protocol, which dictates raising the flag briskly to the peak and then slowly bringing it halfway down. George said, “This flag is lowered now, but it will rise again, just as our country will.” It is useful to have children around at such times: they authorize clichés that their parents deeply believe but might otherwise hesitate to voice.
Neither George nor I had ever owned a flag, not even a little one to wave on the Fourth of July. The closest George had come was the pair of stars-and-stripes bell-bottoms he had worn in the sixties (in violation of section 176d of the United States Flag Code: “The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery”). The closest I had come was the handkerchief-sized Whole Earth banner that I had knotted to the aerial of my brother’s car in the fall of 1970, before we drove from our home in California to college in Massachusetts. We took the whole earth idea seriously: what a provincial notion, I remember thinking, to fly a flag that implied one was a citizen of only part of the earth!
If you had asked me then what it meant to be a flag owner—or, as I would have called it, a flag-waver, as if holding a flag in one’s hand was inherently more ridiculous than stringing it up a pole—I would have said “Vietnam.” (Silly question; everyone knew what it meant.) But my answer would have been false. My disdain for the flag wasn’t political; it was social. When I burrow back into my seventeen-year-old self as thoroughly as the intervening decades allow, here’s what I fear she was thinking: If you were a flag-waver, you lived in a split-level house with vinyl siding in a suburb of Omaha. You had a crew cut. Your children belonged to the 4-H Club and had a dog that, without irony—there was no irony within a five-hundred-mile radius of Omaha—they had named Fido. You read Reader’s Digest and listened to Andy Williams. You ate tuna casserole and frozen peas for dinner, followed by lime Jell-O with little pieces of banana suspended in it. You had never traveled east of Wichita (or maybe west; I had never been to either Omaha or Wichita, and knew only that they were both somewhere in the amorphous middle of things). You had never heard of Herman Hesse.
“Sept. 11 made it safe for liberals to be patriots,” the critic George Packer has written. Like me, Packer once considered flag-waving an embarrassing display of bad taste, though he associated it more with the working class than with the Cleaveresque middle class. Either way, it wasn’t the sort of thing our families indulged in. When people like Packer and me were teenagers, we had little interest in the socioeconomic tiers that separated the upper middle class, to which we belonged, from what we might have called the “underprivileged class,” a group with which we professed heartfelt solidarity, whether or not we’d ever met any of its members. And in those days, in those circles (which pretended to be egalitarian but were in fact unthinkingly, unapologetically, unbelievably snobbish), America was itself déclassé, a simpleminded concatenation of Uncle Sam and log cabins and Smokey the Bear. I mean, really: if you wanted a stimulating dinner companion, would you pick Betsy Ross or Jean-Paul Sartre?
In March of 1918, a year after the United States entered World War I, a mob surrounded a Montana man named E. V. Starr and tried to force him to kiss an American flag. Starr refused, saying, “What is this thing anyway? Nothing but a piece of cotton with a little paint on it and some other marks in the corner there. I will not kiss that thing. It might be covered with microbes.”
The previous month, Montana had enacted a flag-desecration statute that became the model for the 1918 federal Sedition Act, outlawing “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government or its flag. Starr was charged with sedition, fined $500, and sent to the state penitentiary for ten to twenty years of hard labor. Ruling on Starr’s appeal, the federal district court judge who heard the appeal wrote:
In the matter of his offense and sentence, obviously petitioner was more sinned against than sinning.… [The mob’s] unlawful and disorderly conduct, not his just resistance, nor the trivial and innocuous retort into which they goaded him, was calculated to degrade the sacred banner and to bring it into contempt. Its members, not he, should have been punished.
Although he called the court that had sentenced Starr “stark, staring, raving mad”—no penalty that severe had ever been meted out, or would ever be meted out again, in a United States flag desecration case—the judge ruled that the state law was nonetheless constitutional and that he had no other choice than to uphold the conviction.
The unfortunate Starr’s only bit of luck was that the Montana mob did not assault him, unlike the automobile workers in Lansing, Michigan, who, the same winter, after a fellow employee wiped his hands on a flag, had chopped a hole in the ice that covered the Grand River, tied a clothesline to the man’s foot, and submerged him until he apologized; or the saloon patrons in Thermopolis, Wyoming, who, the previous year, had lynched a man for shouting “Hoch lebe der Kaiser.” (In the latter case, the victim was cut down in the nick of time by the city marshal. The Chicago Tribune reported: “Revived with cold water, he was forced to kneel and kiss the American flag. He then was warned to get out of town. He did.”)
I read about these cases—they are collected in a fascinating and disturbing book called Desecrating the American Flag: Key Documents of the Controversy from the Civil War to 1995, edited by Robert Justin Goldstein— while I was attending a conference in Colonial Williamsburg, the omphalos of Americana. It felt strange to underline E. V. Starr’s question in a hotel room crammed with hooked rugs and embroidered samplers. What is this thing, anyway? I thought. Is it just a piece of cotton? Is it, as Katha Pollitt put it, explaining why she had refused her daughter’s request to hang a flag in their window, a symbol of “jingoism and vengeance and war”? Or is it, as a group of New York women wrote in the dedication of a silk flag they had sewn for Union soldiers in 1861, “the emblem of all you have sworn to defend: / Of freedom and progress, with order combined, / The cause of the Nation, of God, and Mankind”?
In the weeks after September 11, I saw for the first time that the flag—along with all its red, white, and blue collateral relations—is what a semiotician would call “polysemous”: it has multiple meanings. The flag held aloft by the pair of disheveled hitchhikers who squatted next to their backpacks on Route 116, a mile from our home, meant We will not rape or murder you. The red, white, and blue turban worn by the Sikh umbrella vendor a friend walked past in Dupont Circle, not far from the White House, meant Looking like someone and thinking like him are not the same thing. The flag on the lapel of a Massachusetts attorney mentioned in our local paper—on seeing it, his opposing counsel had whispered to a colleague, “I’m so screwed, do you have a flag pin I can borrow?”—meant I am morally superior. The flags brandished by two cowboy-hatted singers at a country fair we attended on the day the first bombs fell on Afghanistan meant Let’s kill the bastards. The Old Glory bandanna around the neck of the well
-groomed golden retriever I saw on a trip to Manhattan meant Even if I have a Prada bag and my dog has a pedigree, I’m still a New Yorker and I have lost something. The flag in our front yard meant We are sad. And we’re sorry we’ve never done this before.
Newspapers printed full-page color flags for flagless readers to tape on their windows. NBC put stars and stripes on its peacock. The Macdougal Street Tattoo Company in Greenwich Village gave pro bono patriotic tattoos—something new under the sun—to nearly five hundred World Trade Center rescue workers. A Pennsylvania man had a flag shaved into his buzz cut. A New York restaurant called The Tonic introduced a dessert called Stars and Stripes: white mascarpone panna cotta encircled by red and blue pomegranate-and grapeflavored stars. The design of a new 34-cent flag stamp, captioned united we stand, was rushed through several layers of U.S. Postal Service red tape in record time so that a billion stamps could be available by November 1. The space shuttle Endeavor carried more than six thousand flags to the International Space Station and brought them back for distribution to the families of those killed on September 11. Our son made a flag from a leaf and a twig to mark the final days of his vegetable garden and asked if he should fly it at half staff.
When I visited my mother in Florida, I paused at the window of the gift shop in the Fort Myers airport. Outside, a National Guardsman with an M-16 patrolled the corridor. Inside, on a bed of gold-flecked gauze, reposed the largest collection of red, white, and blue objects I had ever seen: flags, streamers, key chains, pens, fans, T-shirts, baseball caps, figurines, coffee mugs, beer steins, shot glasses, menorahs, postcards with photographs of flags surrounded by oranges and flamingos, bumper stickers that said THESE COLORS NEVER RUN, starfish that said GOD BLESS AMERICA. The meaning of these objects had nothing to do with terrorism; the flag was a “theme,” like the “Underwater Theme” we’d chosen for our high school senior prom. (“Japan?” “Too hard to draw all those geishas.” “Outer Space?” “Too much black and white.” “Underwater?” “Now there’s an idea.”) I had recently seen a coffee-table book of flag-oriented antiques, each beautifully photographed and embellished with little airbrushed shadows, arranged on the pages like jewels in a Tiffany vitrine. Patriotic Shield Pin Box. Uncle Sam Hat Brooch. Presidential Cigar Band. Admiral Perry Whiskey Flask. Wheatlet Trading Card. They all looked incredibly expensive, but what they had gained in value over the years they had lost in meaning: they were no longer about patriotism in wartime, they were about being collectible. The Fort Myers gift shop window was indistinguishable from a page in that book. It was already meaningless. All it needed was a caption: “Americana—Assorted Ephemera & Folk Art, 2001.”
But just because most of the flag paraphernalia was dreck didn’t mean that all of it was. I was caught short by the reproduction of Edward P. Moran’s flag-filled 1886 painting Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, placed in The New York Times by the Museum of the City of New York, accompanied by a quotation from Le Corbusier: “New York is not a completed city.… It is a city in the process of becoming. Today it belongs to the world. Without anyone expecting it, it has became the jewel in the crown of universal cities.… New York is a great diamond, hard and dry, sparkling, triumphant!” Just typing those words, nearly three months later, brings on the peculiar feeling of congestion I still feel every morning when I read the obituaries in the Times and start thinking about the widow who gave birth to twins on September 15 or the woman who lost both a husband and a son. I had lived in New York for twenty-five years, twenty-two of them within walking distance of the World Trade Center. The trauma center nearest the site was the hospital where our daughter was born; Engine 24/Ladder 5, where Mayor Giuliani, covered in ash, set up his temporary command post, was our corner firehouse. I felt ashamed when I caught myself thinking of this as a neighborhood tragedy rather than a global one; it was the solipsistic fallacy of believing that the telephone pole you’re closest to is taller than all the rest, just because it looks taller. Our Massachusetts friends said to us, “You must be so relieved to have moved!” And though we did feel relief, our feelings were complicated and contradictory. We loved New York all the more because of what had been done to it. George said it was like the upwelling of tenderness one might feel upon hearing that an old lover had been grievously injured. I knew, though it seemed like a shamefully trivial emotion, that one of the reasons Moran and Le Corbusier affected me was homesickness.
It was good to see George watching the World Series one night. Until then, we had been unable to watch any television programs that did not deal with September 11. Flying above center field at Yankee Stadium was a torn flag. It was shaped like an oriflamme, the banner the king’s army carried in twelfth-century France, split at one end with flying edges like two flames. The flag, which had flown somewhere inside the World Trade Center, had been found in the rubble and nearly disposed of (Flag Code section 176k: “The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning”). The Port Authority intervened, and Sergeant Antonio Scannella, a police officer who had lost thirteen of his squad’s eighteen members, became the flag’s unofficial caretaker, saying, “You can’t throw an American flag in the garbage.” When Max von Essen, the son of the New York City fire commissioner, sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” (the only national anthem I can think of that is explicitly about a flag), my throat surprised me by catching.
Why did the lopsided flag that billowed across our television screen pull strings that had previously been unpullable? I think it moved me because it was damaged, like the city itself. A clean rectangle whose proportions conform precisely to the executive order issued in 1912 by President Taft—hoist (height) 1.0, fly (length) 1.9, hoist of union (blue field) .5385, fly of union .76, width of each stripe .0769, diameter of each star .0616—calls up less passionate associations than, for instance, the flag flown by the 16th Connecticut Volunteer Regiment in the Civil War. When surrender was inevitable, the soldiers tore the flag into fragments to keep it from falling into enemy hands. A historian named F. C. Hicks wrote in 1926:
The regiment, some five hundred strong, was sent to a prison camp where most of the men remained until the close of the war. Each piece of the colors was sacredly preserved. When a soldier died his piece was entrusted to a comrade. At the end of the war the weary prisoners returned to their homes, each bringing his bit of star or stripe with him. All these torn fragments were patched together and the regimental colors, nearly complete, are now preserved in the State House at Hartford.
To read about our nation’s vexillological history—“vexillology,” the study of flags, is an excellent crossword-puzzle word that derives from the Latin vexillum, or banner—is to experience a series of bitter disillusionments. Betsy Ross did not design the Stars and Stripes; she sewed flags for the navy in the spring of 1777, but there is no evidence that the flag as we know it was conceived before June 14 of that year, when the Continental Congress, which had previously been more concerned about designing a national seal, finally got around to the flag: “RESOLVED: that the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” (Many historians now attribute the circular shape of that constellation to Francis Hopkinson, a delegate from New Jersey, though late-eighteenth-century flags show the stars disposed in a variety of arrangements, including a single vertical line and an X.) George Washington did not cross the Delaware with flag in hand; the Battle of Trenton was fought six months before the Flag Resolution. The flag’s design did not immediately engrave itself on the memories of all who beheld it; in 1778, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams informed the King of the Two Sicilies that the stripes were “alternately red, white, and blue,” and on a ceramic jug manufactured in Liverpool at about the same time, an American ship flew a flag with blue and yellow stripes. “The Star-Spangled Banner” did not immediately become the nati
onal anthem; though it was written by Francis Scott Key during the Battle of Fort McHenry in 1814 (and set to the tune of “To Anacreon in Heaven,” a British drinking song celebrating a bibulous Greek poet who is said to have choked to death on a grape), it was not officially adopted until 1931.
In fact, as Scot M. Guenter explains in The American Flag, 1777–1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification, it was not until Rebel forces fired on the flag at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, that the flag, which earlier had been used mainly for identifying naval and commercial vessels, was transformed into a symbol men were willing to die for. If it took the Civil War to sacralize the flag—as the historian George Henry Preble wrote in 1880, “its prose became poetry”—it took the commercialism of the ensuing decades to turn its poetry back into prose. In 1905, an anti-desecration circular lamented the use of the flag in advertisements for “bicycles, bock beer, whiskey, fine cambric, bone knoll, sour mash, tar soap, American pepsin chewing gum, theatres, tobacco, Japan tea, awnings, breweries, cigars, charity balls, cuff buttons, dime museums, floor mats, fireworks, furriers, living pictures, picnic grounds, patent medicines, poolrooms, prize fights, restaurants, roof gardens, real estate agencies, sample rooms, shoe stores, soap makers, saloons, shooting galleries, tent makers, variety shows, [and] vendors of lemon acid.” Tame stuff, perhaps, compared with David Bowie, his face painted red, white, and blue and a miniature vodka bottle resting on his naked clavicle (caption: “Absolut Bowie”), or with the nightmarish ads that clog the Internet (“Render this Osama Voo-Doo doll completely Pin-Laden! 6-inch doll for a Stocking Stuffer Price of $9.99! Comes with 6 red, white, and blue extra-sharp Patriot Pins”).