Hiding the Flag?
For the first time ever, I wondered if any of my neighbors would look askance at the thirteen star flag I hang every Fourth of July.
This flag, for me, as well as any version of the American flag (I have 48 and 50 star versions), stands for the ideals of the American Republic—to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for “all.”
But this year, Nike famously withdrew its 13 star flag shoes because Colin Kaepernick said the first flag of the Republic flew over, and therefore “represented,” a slave-owning nation. I am not ignorant of the ways in which American understandings of what “all men” means were shamefully limited at the beginning. But more generous understandings, with laws to bolster them, have advanced since then precisely because of those founding words.
Is the Betsy Ross flag now to be linked with Confederate general statues erected specifically to celebrate the triumph of Jim Crow in the South? What about the 48 star flag that flew over the Jim Crow South, or the 50 star flag that flies today over a nation still struggling to fulfill its promise—a promise that has grown in meaning and scope over our nation’s nearly 250 years?
Growing Understandings
I know that “all men are created equal” didn’t really apply to black slaves kidnapped from Africa in 1776, (or to women!) but I also know that there were many people, even then, that saw the contradiction. I’ve learned that John Quincy Adams used the phrase in the successful argument before the Supreme Court that freed the Amistad slave ship captives. The phrase has inspired the aspirations of African-Americans for generations, who have demanded, as did Martin Luther King, Jr., that America live up to its promise. The flag is a symbol of that promise, not just a begrimed reminder of our national faults and failures.
That is why I am disturbed by all too many “progressive” people who seem to be ceding the American flag to the Right, which is happy to claim it for its meaner vision of the “real” America. Why should they be allowed to co-opt this national symbol?
And yet, I’ve had more than one progressive friend, though the ages, look askance as they come up my front walk, if I have a flag hanging on the porch, as I do on national holidays: the 13 star for July 4, the 48 for D-Day and Flag Day, the 50 for Memorial Day, Labor Day and Veteran’s Day. More than one has said that “they don’t like the current associations,” or that they don’t believe in such displays of “patriotism,” as if love of one’s country and its ideals belongs to the Right.
The Way Forward: Affirmation not Denial
The way forward in this national struggle is not to cede patriotism to one political slice of the population, but to affirm its original and continuing power to signify the best of the nation’s founding values, however flawed our realization of them may be in any era.
In the run up to the national disaster of the 2016 presidential election, our most right-wing neighbor heard a group of us lamenting the increasing popularity of Donald Trump. “It’s clear,” she said, “who the people that love America are on the street—we fly the flag.” One of my fellow progressive neighbors muttered that he wouldn’t fly the flag because it now “stands for people like her.”
I challenged him: “How can you let people like her claim the flag for themselves?” A discussion ensued, and the next day a tiny, hand-held American flag appeared, stuck in a flower pot, on his porch—the only flag he had. (A larger one was to follow). Since then, I’ve heard more than one anti-Rightist citizen talk about “that Constitution of ours” as a barrier to progress, rather than the launching pad of revised understandings and social progress through the years. I grow uneasy.
As the 20th century historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it; invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.” We will not realize a more generous America by denigrating our Founding Story, but by building on it.
If Progressives cannot, or will not, root their vision of “America” in the “creed of equality” proclaimed by our Founders, flawed as they were; if they do not seek to “mend its flaws” by appeals to their daring promise, I fear we will not prevail in the struggle against those who would shrink that vision to some smaller, meaner version.
