Who Owns the Stars and Stripes?

In a vanished time of simpler Fourths of July. Woodrow Wilson proudly hailed the American flag as "the emblem of our unity." For many Americans on Independence Day 1970, to unfurl, or not unfurl, the front-porch flag is an unsettling dilemma. What was once an easy, automatic rite of patriotism has become in many cases a considered political act, burdened with over tones and conflicting meanings greater than Old Glory was ever meant to bear.

In the tug of war for the nation's will and soul, the flag has somehow become the symbolic rope. It takes no Swiftian eye to be astonished by what Americans are doing with -- and to -- the national banner.

Some, mostly the defiant young, blow their noses on it, sleep in it, set it afire, or wear it to patch the seat of their trousers. In response, others wave it with defensive pride, crack skulls in its name, and fly it from their garbage trucks, police cars and skyscraper scaffolds. In pride or put-on, Pop or protest, Old Glory's heraldry blazons battered campers and Indianapolis 500 racers, silver pins and trash bins, glittering cowboy vests and ample bikinied chests. The flag has become the emblem of America's disunity, and, in a land where once only wars abroad set it fluttering in vast numbers, the caricature of a new conflict is raging right at home. The old meaning still persists; hardly any American could escape a thrill of pride when Neil Armstrong planted his vertebrate flag on the airless moon. But some Americans could also sympathize with the emotion that moved a student at Kent State to rip down a flag after the shootings. It is as if two cultures, both of them oddly brandishing the same banner, were arrayed in some 18th century battle painting, the young whirling in defiant rock carmagnole against the panoplied Silent Majority.

Honor America Day in Washington on July 4 could prove a microcosm of the national encounter. Its sponsors conceived it as a nonpartisan happening, a patriotic family outing on a Disney scale. As an earnest of their neutral intentions, they enlisted Senator George McGovern and some other heroes of the war-protest movement. But the rally will be dominated by Evangelist Billy Graham, Comedian Bob Hope--both close friends of President Nixon's--and a 1967 Miss Teen-Age America finalist who will recite "I Speak for Democracy." To many, it appears to be aimed at implicit support for the policies of the Nixon Administration.

Rennie Davis and other radicals immediately formed "The Emergency Committee to Prevent a July Fourth Fistfight"--a group whose purpose seemed to be thwarted in advance by Davis' demands that, among other things, his people receive the right to plant miniature Viet Cong flags on the Ellipse behind the White House, where Boy Scouts and others will set out American flags. The request was, of course, denied, but an attempt by antiwar groups to do anything similar could produce trouble. Ambassadors from the Woodstock nation promise a huge pot party on the Mall for the Fourth, threatening to appear with red, white and blue marijuana joints. Some will doubtless wear flag shirts and bell bottoms, the paraphernalia of their wholly different patriotism. Not everyone will appreciate the distinction.

Inevitably, the fight for the flag has had a commercial fallout. Flag manufacturers have doubled their sales in the past year, and some cannot keep up with orders. An entire generation of novelty and boutique entrepreneurs is outfitting the counter-culture with starred-and-striped pants, ties, ashtrays, shaving mugs, pillowcases, pens and even, in the most tasteless exploitation of all, toilet paper. Manhattan's Earthra Gift Shop does well with its Old Glory cigarette lighters (made in Japan). Jeans West, started 18 months ago, uses the flag motif on T shirts, vests and other items; the owners expect to gross $10 million in their second fiscal year. "Old Glory," says Vice President Ben Serebreni, "is here to stay." Thus far, Manhattan Clothier Steve Goldberg's Naked Grape boutique has sold 36,000 flag shirts to retailers across the nation. In a freeway dialogue, decals and bumper stickers are everywhere--LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT, AMERICA; IF YOUR HEART ISN'T IN IT, GET YOUR ASS OUT OF IT; THE FLAG, DEFEND IT, SILENT MAJORITY; AGNEW TELLS IT LIKE IT is. In rebuttal, flag users of a different persuasion have come up with PEACE NOW, GET OUT OF VIET NAM; MAKE LOVE NOT WAR, disarmament semaphores and ecology symbols.

One Detroit potato-chip manufacturer offers flag decals with his jumbo size. In Chicago, the Cubs announcer, Jack Brickhouse, appears in an ad with a star-spangled crone playing Betsy Ross. "I'm keeping busy," says Betsy. "I've got to get ever so many flags over to the American National Bank for their special holiday offer . . . Made of my best colorfast bunting, too." Gas stations pass out antenna flags with each purchase. In Atlanta, the Winn Dixie supermarkets offer flag pins with each $5 purchase--one to a customer. One Detroit department store is pushing a line of red, white and blue plastic dinner plates called Glory. Some concessionaires, such as the G.I. Joe hot-dog vendors in New York, are virtually forced by the company to display the flag.

Many well-known national firms--Pepsi-Cola, Mobil Oil and American Tourister among them--have long used red, white and blue in their trademarks. In view of the conflict over the flag, however, many advertising directors are beginning to shy away from the national colors. Says Charles Overholser of Young & Rubicam: "Overuse could easily offend consumers." The aesthetics of the flag as high fashion are also somewhat in dispute. "I just dig the colors," says a Berkeley coed with a flag knee patch. "And I love stars. The flag's groovy from an aesthetic viewpoint." Marget Larsen, a San Francisco graphic designer, does not agree: "The idea of stars and stripes is awfully self-conscious and precise. It's a little too busy, with too many stars crammed in the corner."

Plight of the Moderates

Old Glory has become so ubiquitous and frequently so bewildering in its political, cultural, commercial, civic and patriotic implications that millions of American moderates are left simply regretting the loss of its earlier innocence. Some have decided, rather sadly, not to fly the flag these days lest it be misinterpreted. In this sense, there is a new group of silent Americans--the ones who feel that their flag has been expropriated by the right or by commercialism, but also feel no impulse to turn it into a shirt.

Says one young Atlanta father: "I told the children we would not be getting the flag out for Flag Day this year. When I was a kid during the Second World War, the flag stood for something decent and humanitarian. But how do you tell children about a national sickness, or about the way that symbols of one ideal can be subverted to become symbols of something entirely different?" A Denver housewife, Mrs. Kitty Boyd, explains: "We have a flag in the closet, but I won't fly it right now, because right away I think: 'Republican, Nixon, war.' But please understand that if I dropped it or anything, I'd burn it as you're supposed to." Adds her husband Bill: "We've made the flag a sacred, spiritual kind of thing." Others are deeply unhappy about the furious ostentation or the denigration they see the flag enduring. One New York hardhat, Edward Polito, looked at the flag decals plastered on his coworkers' helmets and shook his head: "They should show the flag in their heart, not on their helmets." But he marched along with them anyway.

As in a spiraling arms race between nations, it is sometimes difficult to tell just who started the flag-waving. Certainly a primary stimulus for the newly demonstrative patriotism came from the much publicized antiwar dissent. Just as the televised image of flaming Vietnamese villages aroused visceral protest, the spectacle of flag burnings and Viet Cong banners detonated a deep patriotic emotion in millions of Americans.

Protest and Put-On

The young, especially of the campus left, often carry--or wear--the flag with a studied, shocking irreverence, a theatrical impulse common enough to the young in any period but skillfully developed now by the example of such public relations geniuses as Abbie Hoffman. Some, of course, costume themselves in the Stars and Stripes with no overt political intent. But however faddish the flag fashions are, they implicitly contain a put-on or a flare of adolescent rebellion. "Desecrating the flag is just fun," explains Beth Spencer, 21, of Berkeley. "It's burned, torn or worn for the sheer joy of doing something naughty and getting away with it." Says Carl Boockholdt, a boutique operator in Indianapolis: "It could be a parody type of feeling, to signify that the red, white and blue shouldn't be such a heavy symbol as it's been." Richard Spiegel, a member of the Boston cast of Hair, says simply: "This generation really has no sacred objects."

But a great many of the young who use the flag without restraint are very serious indeed, even if they deliberately employ shock tactics for effect. Says Sal Arnold, a 19-year-old Chicago hippie: "None of us hates the country. We love the country--what it's supposed to be." A friend of his, Ray Meyerbach, adds: "The intentions of the founding fathers--they're really groovy. We're saying it's the ideal that's important, not how you show the flag."

In their own causes, they attach great importance to how it is shown. The day after the Kent State shootings, a crowd of 20,000 young people gathered on the steps of the Massachusetts Statehouse to protest. As Republican Governor Francis Sargent looked down, the crowd chanted: "Lower the flag! Lower the flag!" Sargent did so. The encounter was an indirect affirmation by youth of the country's most enduring symbol; the lowering of the flag to half-staff seemed to them a proper and necessary tribute to their fellow students who had fallen.

Though those who fly the flag in a traditional spirit sometimes speak in voices that are capable of chauvinism and boosterism, they very often feel an intensely deep patriotism. To begin with, observes Political Scientist Sidney Hyman, "many Americans are first, second-or third-generation. The proudest moment in the lives of their parents or grandparents was the citizenship ceremony when they received the flag. My own immigrant father took every chance to fly the flag as an affirmation of citizenship. You don't have to do this in England or France, where nationhood is deduced from history. Here you've got a created country with a continuing history, and you see it all written on the flag."

The construction workers, who have become the most aggressive defenders of the flag's virtues, often reflect their ethnic and social distance from the dissenting young whom they so fiercely resent. The rush to the flag, Harvard Professor of Sociology Martin Lipset suggests, is a symptom of tribalism. Thus in a matter of months the hardhats have constituted themselves as a new militant fraternity in American life. "That's my flag they're burning," a carpenter named Clem Perke said in defense of a parade of 15,000 hardhats two weeks ago in Baltimore. "Look back at the Depression. I came here from the Pennsylvania coal mines. We had plenty to demonstrate about, but we didn't. We just worked harder."

Pride and Passion

In much of the country, flags also seem to excite some emotion that cries for more of everything. In Munster, 111., for example, Mrs. Mary Lou Kieswetter heads Project 41, a plan to have "Old Glory flown in front of every home and place of business along U.S. Highway 41 from Upper Michigan to Miami, Fla." Says Mrs. Kieswetter: "The inert majority have got off their duffs and begun to protest in a beautiful, constructive way."

The Chicago suburb of Midlothian is promoting itself as "the village of Lighted Flags," installing illuminated flagpoles (protocol requires lights at night if the flag is to be flown) so that the Stars and Stripes can fly 24 hours a day. Thirty such poles are now in place. Says Midlothian President Harry Raday: "I don't think it's political. It's the simple fact that the majority of people in the U.S. are pretty damned proud to be here. And they're tired of seeing pictures of people with beards hanging down to their damned navels with love beads on, pulling down the flag or urinating on it or some other damned thing. It's our flag. Thousands of guys died for it." Detroit's station WJBK runs a spot on its evening news beginning: "Today the flag flies at . . ." and showing footage of houses or stores that display the Stars and Stripes.

In the South, until recently, the main concern was the use and abuse of the Confederate flag, and the Fourth of July was a Yankee nuisance that coincided with the fall of Vicksburg. Now, there is a new passion for the national symbol. Ronnie Thompson, the mayor of Macon, Ga., enlists the city fire department each day for a solemn flag-raising ceremony in front of city hall. Georgia's Lester Maddox, in the hospital with a kidney ailment, is embowered in red, white and blue floral arrangements.

Those students who fight back against dissenters are especially prized. In Houston, a 20-year-old Rice University graduate student, Sidney Drouilhet II, was guest of honor at a Chamber of Commerce banquet because he filed charges against three other young men for dishonoring a flag. When 150 San Diego State College students tried to half-staff a campus flag after Kent State, Bill Pierson, a 6-ft. 5-in., 250-lb. football center, held them off singlehanded for three hours and became a Horatius figure in conservative San Diego.

Many Americans, particularly those with memories of World War II, retain a sense of the flag as a solace. Says Psychiatrist William D. Davidson: "When an American soldier dies, what is his family given in exchange for his life? A flag. This gives his death meaning."

Double Standards

The Establishment--especially local and state authorities--is increasingly un-amused by unorthodox use of the flag. In recent months the number of arrests for flag abuse has risen geometrically. In Massachusetts, under an 1889 law recently dusted off, two youths have been sentenced to a year each in prison for wearing the flag as a patch on their trousers. At Denver's El Rey shop, customers are returning their flag vests because they cause so much trouble with the police.

Authorities often practice a political double standard. A Long Island housewife last year found herself in court for protesting the war by flying her flag upside down (the international signal of distress). No action was taken when an American Legion post near by flew its flag upside down to protest Government inaction over the Pueblo's capture. Last month Michael Sauter, 20, was arrested in Topeka for displaying on his car a flag decal with an overlaid peace symbol. The charges were dropped after his lawyer argued that 1) a decal is not a flag, and 2) Topeka police cars bear decals on which the flag design is defaced by the slogan: "Love It or Leave It."

During the President's visit to Indianapolis last year, the city bloomed with billboards, the names of sponsoring businesses superimposed on American flags--even though state law forbids writing on the flag. But when an Indianapolis art student hung the flag upside down in his apartment window, he was arrested and taken before a judge who declared: "It looks to me like we have before us one of those young men who want to destroy our society."

In Illinois, the state legislature recently increased the penalty for defacing or showing contempt for the flag from a one-to a five-year jail term or a fine of $1,000 to $5,000. Peter Stowe, an economics professor at Southern Illinois University, was haled into court under the law. In their car's rear window, his wife had stuck a flag decal with a peace sign where the stars should have been. Says Stowe: "I'm willing to live with people who think that the flag is sacred. But I'd appreciate it if they wouldn't lock me in jail if I don't feel the same way."

Flag Law and Protocol

The increasing number of prosecutions troubles legal experts, many of whom believe that the flag-veneration laws--including a federal measure passed two years ago--are in violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. The Supreme Court has established that symbolic political acts --such as displaying a red flag or wearing black armbands--come under First Amendment protection. Yet it has sidestepped the issue of whether laws specifically forbidding abuse of the American flag are valid. Says Burt Neuborne of the American Civil Liberties Union: "Our position is that any person attempting to express a political idea is protected by the First Amendment. The flag is entitled to no protection. Certainly the burning or mutilating of the flag will affect some people's sensibilities, but it should not be the basis for a criminal prosecution."

Unless an act of flag abuse presents an immediate danger to public safety --for example, it incites to riot--then, by Neuborne's reasoning, it represents a political statement. Says U.C.L.A. Professor Melville Nimmer: "When we have symbolic speech, and the only reason the authorities prohibit the speech is because they object to what is being said, then that is suppressing speech." In the early 1900s, some states enforced religious orthodoxy through blasphemy statutes under which a person was held criminally liable for showing indignity or irreverence toward God. In some ways the flag laws are a political analogue.

The laws raise the issue of what desecration of or contempt for the flag really means. No one doubts that burning a flag, spitting or stomping on it, represents contemptuous treatment. At the same time, the public relations talent of the radical left and the outrage of the right have exaggerated the number of such incidents. The more difficult question is to decide whether or not it is desecration to wear a flag-shirt, or to fly the flag upside down, or to substitute a peace sign or ecology symbol for the flag's canton.

What the Flag Means

Protocols governing the use of the flag dictate that it should not be used as a costume--so that Uncle Sam should be indicted first, followed by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Abbie Hoffman and millions of the young, hardhats, police, and even those who wear the flag as a lapel pin. Against all the rules, construction men leave their gigantic flags hanging from girders, unlighted through the night and exposed in any weather.

For years, politicians, including Abraham Lincoln, published their campaign messages against a flag backdrop--a practice that was partly responsible for a wave of flag laws around the turn of the century. According to custom, the flag should be raised and lowered by hand; yet Barry Goldwater has his flagpole in Scottsdale, Ariz., run by an electronic gadget. Will the producers of Myra Breckinridge (see CINEMA] be arrested for a scene in which Raquel Welch, wearing star-spangled bra and striped bikini pants, performs a spectacularly unnatural act on a young man?

Obviously, the offense is in the sensibility of the beholder. But the fight for the flag is much deeper than legal is sues. Says Dr. Paul Chodoff, professor of psychiatry at George Washington University: "How a man feels about the flag may be a better index of his feeling about the country than what he says about the country. For the hardhats, the flag is an ego ideal purified of all doubts and contradictions. The flag also represents the motherland, to be defended like their wives and mothers against the assaults of the rapist flag burners. For the radicals, the flag represents a negative identity. They express their hatred and contempt and lover's disappointment in America."

The flag has always occupied a much stronger place in American life and mythology than have flags in other countries. In a nation created as an experiment, a republic as much willed as evolved, the flag has embodied an entire national idea. And in "one nation under God," the idea implies divinity. For many Americans, the flag is literally a sacred object. Insists Arthur Stivaletta, an organizer of last April's "Wake Up America" rally in Boston: "I see the flag as I see God: a supreme being." Now hear the word of Billy Graham: "The American flag is what the black man means when he says Soul. It's like the Queen of England--the flag is our Queen."

At the same time, the flag is a collage of collective memories and assumptions about what America is and ought to be. W.S. Barber, commander of a Houston American Legion post that will fly 1,500 flags along the city's freeways on Independence Day, spent three years in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. "I was out from under this flag for three years," he says. "It's a symbol that means apple pie and baseball, and a long, hard pull for me without it." Boston City Councilwoman Louise Day Hicks, who wears a rhine-stone-spangled flag pin, defines the whole matter with finality: "The flag is motherhood and apple pie."

Still, Americans are increasingly troubled about the moral content of their assumptions. A group of Marines in Viet Nam were discussing the flag raising over Iwo Jima, that heroic image of World War II. "Hell," said one Marine, "a man could get himself killed doing that." "Within the kids' lifetimes, this flag hasn't stood for the things it stood for when John Glenn and I were young." says Allen Brown, a Cincinnati lawyer. "The flag then was still the flag of the dream. It's hard for us to understand kids who have only a book idea of the flag. They didn't see men die within the framework of that idealism of World War II. It's as if people see the flag the way Moses saw the golden calf. Half our population remembers it as a blessing, and the other half, who have grown up since World War II, see it only as a golden calf. If only both could get beyond the symbolism."

The battle over the flag tends to erase distinctions. Says S.I. Hayakawa, president of San Francisco State College: "You can be a rightist or a leftist and be a patriotic American. When a symbol becomes a fetish, then you make the semantic error of confusing the symbol with what it is supposed to symbolize." The flag in theory symbolizes national unity, but such a unity in the U.S. has always been somewhat illusory except when war or depression joined together the nation's disparate cultures to overcome an overriding threat. In any case, national unity can never be legislated or policed into being. Ideological bullying cannot conjure it up when it does not exist, nor when it does can the infantile desecrations of the radical left destroy it.

James Steam, 24, fought for three years as a Marine in Viet Nam. "I didn't fight for the flag," he says. "I fought for the freedom we were supposedly there to protect. When I come back and try to exercise that freedom, they say you don't have the right." He wears a flag shirt anyway.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.