June 14 marks Flag Day, commemorating the Second Continental Congress’s authorization for a new American flag. But it is an unusual holiday.
Flag Day is little celebrated, sort of a poor relation to Memorial Day and Independence Day, which bracket it. And since what is being celebrated is a symbol, and symbols are slippery, it involves substantial amounts of ambiguity. To some, a flag might represent the ideals of a country at its founding. To others it might represent support for the current government of the country. To still others, it might represent the failings of a country to live up to its ideals and promise. And when you add the connections between the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, the national anthem, and a contentious history of flag burning, it can lead to disagreement and divisiveness over a host of issues, rather than unity. Those issues have included charges that the flag represents nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, American exceptionalism, racism, xenophobia, not to mention what questions of what symbolic meaning should be attached to refusing to stand for the national anthem.
Given all the ambiguity and potential for confrontation between people whose veins are throbbing on their foreheads that our flag can cause today, it makes sense to clarify what the flag represents to us, to minimize such confusion-fueled confrontations. So, because of my commitment to liberty, I choose to see the flag as a symbol of American ideals.
From that perspective, one of the most inspiring views of our flag was given in an 1861 address by Henry Ward Beecher, “the most respected and idealized religious figure of the day,” who was considered by some as “America’s leading moral and spiritual teacher.” At a time when many have lost touch with the ideals of America’s experiment in freedom, it merits revisiting:
Our flag…means just what Concord and Lexington meant, what Bunker Hill meant…the rising up of a valiant young people against an old tyranny to establish the most momentous doctrine that the world has ever known—the right of men to their own selves and to their liberties. It means all that the Declaration of Independence meant. It means all that the Constitution of our people, organizing for justice, for liberty, and for happiness, meant.
A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation’s flag, sees not the flag only, but…the principles, the truths, the history that belongs to the nation that sets it forth….the American flag is the symbol of liberty, and men rejoiced in it. Not another flag has had such an errand, carrying everywhere, the world around, such hope for freedom—such glorious tidings.
Our flag carries American ideas, American history, and American feelings….it has gathered and stored chiefly this supreme idea: Divine Right of Liberty in man. Every color means liberty; every form of star and beam or stripe of light means liberty; not lawlessness, not license, but organized institutional liberty—liberty through law, and law for liberty.
This American Flag was the safeguard of libertyIt was an ordinance of liberty by the people, for the people. That it meant, that it means, and, by the blessing of God, that it shall mean to the end of time!
Henry Ward Beecher’s vision of America, symbolized in our flag, echoed our founders’ ideal “that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.”
I think it is unfortunate that many do not see that in America’s flag today. And those who have mixed or even hostile feelings toward our flag and the country it represents, because America has fallen short of its ideals, are misplacing their idealism and efforts. If they recognized, with Beecher, that “The history of this banner is one of Liberty,” and put their energy into reclaiming our founding vision of providing the broadest possible canvas for human freedom, they could reshape the world for the better instead of endlessly creating and repeating grievances. The harms we have suffered because America has too often abandoned its founding principle of liberty do not mean we should reject liberty; the decline in our liberty reveals just how essential it is.
