32 Years Ago in TIME

By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, Sean Gregory, Janice M. Horowitz, Benjamin Nugent, David Robinson and Rebecca Winters

As the first Fourth of July since the Sept. 11 attacks approaches, Americans' enthusiasm for the flag has never been higher. But in 1970 OLD GLORY was provoking passions of a more complex sort.

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 in 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 overtones 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... 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 set it fluttering in vast numbers, the caricature of a new conflict is raging right at home. --TIME, July 6, 1970