Worth Dying For E-Book

Tim Marshall

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 410

Beschreibung

In his gripping new book The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World, Marshall digs deep into the past, present and future of the new 'astropolitics' that are set to change the face of life on Earth. Available to PRE-ORDER NOW in hardback, ebook and audio - out 27th April 2023When you see your nation's flag fluttering in the breeze, what do you feel?For thousands of years flags have represented our hopes and dreams. We wave them. Burn them. March under their colours. And still, in the 21st century, we die for them. Flags fly at the UN, on the Arab street, from front porches in Texas. They represent the politics of high power as well as the politics of the mob.From the renewed sense of nationalism in China, to troubled identities in Europe and the USA, to the terrifying rise of Islamic State, the world is a confusing place right now and we need to understand the symbols, old and new, that people are rallying round.In nine chapters (covering the USA, UK, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, international flags and flags of terror), Tim Marshall draws on more than twenty-five years of global reporting experience to reveal the histories, the power and the politics of the symbols that unite us - and divide us.

Leseprobe

‘Full of sharp analysis and a very entertaining read’

– Andrew Neil

‘A fascinating tour of the world’s ensigns, their histories and meanings . . . a sobering lesson in just how silly we human beings can be’

– Daily Mail

‘This might be the comprehensive flag volume we’ve all been waiting for – a slick yet detailed and well-researched journey through some of the world’s most infamous and interesting flags . . . Marshall guides us through this myriad of stories admirably’

– Geographical magazine

‘Insightful and entertaining . . . a truly fascinating book that feels all the more considered and urgent in today’s world of Brexit, Trump, China and ISIS’

– Dan Lewis, Wanderlust magazine

‘Marshall points out that we often forget the aggressive symbolism of established flags . . . [they] are a quick, visual way of communicating loyalties, power and ideas’

– Robbie Millen, The Times

‘An engagingly written, veritable page-turner. Whether the topic is ethnic identity, Japanese imperialism, Panamanian shipping law or the defeat of Nazism, flags speak volumes about our human condition’

– Lawrence Joffe, Jewish Chronicle

‘In today’s globalised and media savvy environment, the role of state and non-state symbols has become more important and in many cases more dangerous and evocative. This witty book brings to our attention this power, alongside the reality that we must not underestimate or misunderstand how the flags of our world came to be. A must read for anyone wishing to grasp the meanings behind today’s international affairs.’

– Human Security Centre

CONTENTS

Introduction

1   The Stars and the Stripes

2   The Union and the Jack

3   The Cross and the Crusades

4   Colours of Arabia

5   Flags of Fear

6   East of Eden

7   Flags of Freedom

8   Flags of Revolution

9   The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

About the author

INTRODUCTION

‘I am no more than what you believe me tobe and I am all that you believe I can be.’

The American flag ‘in conversation’with US Secretary of the InteriorFranklin K. Lane (Flag Day, 1914)

ON THE DAY OF 9/11, AFTER THE FLAMES HAD DIED down and the dust had mostly settled, three FDNY firefighters clambered onto the still-smoking wreckage of the World Trade Center in New York City and raised the Stars and Stripes.

The event was not planned, there were no official photographers; the three men just felt that amid such death and destruction they should do ‘something good’. A local newspaper photographer called Tom Franklin captured the moment. Later he commented that his picture ‘said something to me about the strength of the American people’.

How could a piece of coloured cloth say something so profound that the photo was reproduced not only across the USA but in newspapers around the world? The flag’s meaning comes from the emotion it inspires. ‘Old Glory’, as the Americans know it, speaks to them in ways that a non-American simply cannot share; but we can understand this, because many of us will have similar feelings about our own symbols of nationhood and belonging. You may have overtly positive, or indeed negative, opinions as to what you think your flag stands for, but the fact remains: that simple piece of cloth is the embodiment of the nation. A country’s history, geography, people and values – all are symbolized in the cloth, its shape and the colours in which it is printed. It is invested with meaning, even if the meaning is different for different people.

What is clear is that these symbols have as much significance as they ever did, and in some cases more. We are seeing a resurgence of nationalism, and with it a resurgence of national symbols. Around the turn of the twenty-first century it had become fashionable in some intellectual circles to argue that the nation state would wither away in the age of globalization. That view completely missed the strength of identity still present in each nation.

Each of the world’s flags is simultaneously unique and similar. They all say something – sometimes perhaps too much.

That was the case in October 2014 when the Serbian national football team hosted Albania at the Partizan Stadium in Belgrade. It was Albania’s first visit to the Serbian capital since 1967. The intervening years had witnessed the Yugoslav Civil War, including the conflict with the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. That ended in 1999 with the de facto partition of Serbia, following a three-month NATO bombing of Serb forces, towns and cities. Then, in 2008, Kosovo unilaterally declared itself an independent state. The move was supported by Albania and recognized by many countries – notably, Spain was one that did not. It understood that the sight of the Kosovar flag flying above the capital of an independent Kosovo might galvanize the Catalonian independence movement.

Fast-forward six years and tensions between Serbia and Kosovo, and by extension Albania, were still high. In the certain knowledge that they would be attacked, away fans had not been allowed to attend.

It was a slow-paced game, albeit with a highly charged atmosphere, punctuated by loud chants of ‘Kill the Albanians’ ringing out from the stands. Shortly before half time, fans and then some players began to notice that a remote-controlled drone was approaching slowly out of the night sky towards the halfway line on the pitch. It was later discovered to have been piloted by a thirty-three-year-old Albanian nationalist called Ismail Morinaj, who was hiding in a tower of the nearby Church of the Holy Archangel Gabriel, from where he could see the pitch.

As the drone came lower, a stunned silence began to descend around the stadium and then, as it hovered near to the centre circle, there was a sudden explosion of outrage. It was carrying an Albanian flag.

This wasn’t merely the flag of the country, which alone would likely have caused problems. This flag bore the double-headed Albanian black eagle, the faces of two Albanian independence heroes from the early twentieth century and a map of ‘Greater Albania’, incorporating parts of Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and Montenegro. It was emblazoned with the word ‘autochthonous’, a reference to ‘indigenous’ populations. The message was that the Albanians, who consider themselves to be of ancient Illyrian origin from the fourth century BCE, were the real people of the region – and the Slavs, who only arrived in the sixth century CE, were not.

A Serbian defender, Stefan Mitrovic´, reached up and grabbed the flag. He later said he began folding it up ‘as calmly as possible in order to give it to the fourth official’ so that the game could continue. Two Albanian players snatched it from him, and that was that. Several players began fighting with each other, then a Serbian fan emerged from the stands and hit the Albanian captain over the head with a plastic chair. As more Serbs poured onto the pitch, the Serb team came to their senses and tried to protect the Albanian players as they ran for the tunnel, the match abandoned. Missiles rained down on them as the riot police fought fans in the stands.

The political fallout was dramatic. The Serbian police searched the Albanian team’s dressing room and then accused the brother-in-law of the Albanian prime minister of operating the drone from the stands. The media in both countries went into nationalistic overdrive; Serbia’s foreign minister, Ivica Dacˇic´, said his country had been ‘provoked’ and that ‘if someone from Serbia had unveiled a flag of Greater Serbia in Tirana or Pristina, it would already be on the agenda of the UN Security Council’. A few days later the planned visit of the Albanian prime minister to Serbia, the first in almost seventy years, was cancelled.

George Orwell’s aphorism that football is ‘war minus the shooting’ was proved right and, given the volatility in the Balkans, the mix of football, politics and a flag could even have led to a real conflict.

Planting the US flag at the site of the Twin Towers did presage a war. Tom Franklin said that when he took his shot he had been aware of the similarities between it and another famous image from a previous conflict – the Second World War, when US Marines planted the American flag atop Iwo Jima. Many Americans will have recognized the symmetry immediately and appreciated that both moments captured a stirring mix of powerful emotions: sadness, courage, heroism, defiance, collective perseverance and endeavour.

Both images, but perhaps more so the 9/11 photograph, also evoke the opening stanza of the American national anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, particularly its final lines:

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

At a moment of profound shock for the American people, the sight of their flag yet waving was, for many, reassuring. That the stars of the fifty states were held aloft by men in uniform may have spoken to the streak of militarism that tinges American culture, but to see the red, white and blue amid the awful grey devastation of Ground Zero will also have helped many ordinary citizens to cope with the other deeply disturbing images emerging from New York City that autumn day.

*   *   *

Where did these national symbols, to which we are so attached, come from? Flags are a relatively recent phenomenon in mankind’s history. Standards and symbols painted on cloth predate flags and were used by the ancient Egyptians, the Assyrians and the Romans, but it was the invention of silk by the Chinese that allowed flags as we know them today to flourish and spread. Traditional cloth was too heavy to be held aloft, unfurled and fluttering in the wind, especially if painted; silk was much lighter and meant that banners could, for example, accompany armies onto battlefields.

The new fabric and custom spread along the Silk Route. The Arabs were the first to adopt it and the Europeans followed suit, having come into contact with them during the Crusades. It was likely these military campaigns, and the large Western armies involved, that confirmed the use of symbols of heraldry and armorial markings to help identify the participants. These heraldic bearings came to be linked with rank and lineage, particularly for royal dynasties, and this is one of the reasons why European flags evolved from being associated with battlefield standards and maritime signals to becoming symbols of the nation state.

Every nation is now represented by a flag, testament to Europe’s influence on the modern world as its empires expanded and ideas spread around the globe. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe told the designer of the Venezuelan flag, Francisco de Miranda: ‘A country starts out from a name and a flag, and it then becomes them, just as a man fulfils his destiny.’

What does it mean to try to encapsulate a nation in a flag? It means trying to unite a population behind a homogeneous set of ideals, aims, history and beliefs – an almost impossible task. But when passions are aroused, when the banner of an enemy is flying high, that’s when people flock to their own symbol. Flags have much to do with our traditional tribal tendencies and notions of identity – the idea of ‘us versus them’. Much of the symbolism in flag design is based on that concept of conflict and opposition – as seen in the common theme of red for the blood of the people, for example. But in a modern world striving to reduce conflict and promote a greater sense of unity, peace and equality, where population movements have blurred those lines between ‘us and them’, what role do flags now play?

What is clear is that these symbols can still wield a great deal of power, communicating ideas quickly and drawing strongly on emotions. There are now more nation states than ever before, but non-state actors also use flags as a kind of visual sound bite to convey concepts ranging from the banality of cheap commercial goods to the depravity of religious and racial violence. This is something we’ve continually witnessed in recent history, from Hitler and the Nazi swastika – an image which even today evokes a powerful reaction – to the emergence of Islamic State (IS) and its emphasis on religious or prophetic symbols that can grab attention and, sometimes, garner support.

They go back to antiquity, and yet show no signs of going out of fashion. The most up-to-date consumer technology, the smart phone, can now provide you with the national flag emoji of your choice, and when there is a national tragedy, people from all over the globe will post messages along with the nation’s emoji flag as a mark of solidarity.

This book could have told hundreds more stories than those found here; for example that of each of the 193 nation states, but that would have turned it into a reference work, and a very, very thick one at that. Instead, the stories recounted are those of some of the major national flags; some of the more obscure ones; and some that simply have the most interesting histories. In most cases the original meanings of the patterns, colours and symbols are important, but sometimes, for some people, those meanings have morphed into something else, and that is what the flag stands for now. The meaning is in the eye of the beholder.

We open with what is probably the most recognizable flag in the world: the Stars and Stripes, a visual representation that captures the American dream. Deeply revered by the vast majority of the population, it is the strongest example of how a symbol can come to define and unite a country. From the world’s current empire we move to one of the past: the influence of the Union Jack extended to the furthest reaches of the globe, the flag representing the united front of a vast empire, but beneath the surface strong national identities persisted within the British Isles, and they haven’t gone away, as shown by both the 2016 Brexit vote to leave the EU and continuing calls for Scottish independence.

The flag of the European Union also struggles to unify; in a continent with deeply rooted identities many Europeans are more attached to their national flags than ever. While some of these flags are based on Christian imagery, over the years the religious associations have mostly faded. Not so in the Arab nations to the south: their flags often feature powerful Islamic symbols and ideas that speak to the population. The symbolism is strong, but the nation states are weaker. The future may yet bring further change to the forms of these nations and their flags. A possible catalyst for this is the various terror cells operating in the region; the actions and influence of these organizations, ever present on our screens, are important to understand. Groups such as IS also use religious symbolism to great effect, instilling fear and creating global recognition.

Moving eastwards across Asia, we find an array of flags that reflect the sweeping movements of ideas, peoples and religions, in the twentieth century and well before. Many of these modern nation states have reached back to the roots of their ancient civilizations for their flags, often in response to a turning point in their history, in a fusion of old and new. In Africa, by contrast, we see the colours of a very modern conception of the continent, one that has thrown off the shackles of colonialism and faces the twenty-first century with increasing self-awareness. Latin America’s revolutionaries kept closer cultural ties to the colonizers who shaped our world, and many of the continent’s flags reflect the ideals of the nineteenth-century nation-builders.

Flags are powerful symbols, and there are plenty of other organizations that have used them to great effect – they may embody messages of fear, peace or solidarity, for example, becoming internationally recognizable in the shifting landscapes of identity and meaning.

We wave flags, we burn them, they fly outside parliaments and palaces, homes and showrooms. They represent the politics of high power and the power of the mob. Many have hidden histories that inform the present.

We appear to be in the midst of a resurgence of identity politics at the local, regional, national, ethnic and religious levels. Power shifts, old certainties fall away and at such times people reach for familiar symbols as ideological anchors in a turbulent, changing world. The reality of a nation does not necessarily live up to the ideals embodied in its flag; nevertheless the flag can, as Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane ‘quoted’ the Stars and Stripes as saying, be ‘all that you believe I can be’.

This is the emotion-charged emblem that is a flag. It has the power to evoke and embody sentiments so strong that sometimes people will even follow their coloured cloth into gunfire and die for what it symbolizes.

CHAPTER 1

THE STARS ANDTHE STRIPES

‘There is not a thread in it but scornsself-indulgence, weakness and rapacity.’

Charles Evans Hughes, USSecretary of State 1921–5

Supporters of the banned organization Jamaat-ud-Dawa burn the Stars and Stripes in Quetta, Pakistan, in May 2016, protesting against a US drone strike on Pakistani soil.

OSAY, CAN YOU SEE, BY THE DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT? IN the USA the answer is an emphatic yes. From dawn to dusk America is a riot of red, white and blue. The flag flies from government buildings, atop supermarkets and car showrooms, from the roof of the grandest mansion to the humblest white-picket-fenced homestead, and from the log cabin to the White House. In the morning it rises, hoisted onto a million flagpoles, as ‘God’s Own Country’ sets about creating anew each day the most successful nation yet seen on earth.

This is the Star-Spangled Banner. The most recognizable, loved, hated, respected, feared and admired flag in the world.

The flag flies above well over 700 military bases in more than sixty countries around the globe, with over a quarter of a million US personnel serving overseas. To some of the people in these countries, the sight of the Stars and Stripes in this military context is a reminder that their security is partially dependent on the superpower. However, for America’s detractors it is a symbol of overweening power and hubris. It represents the now out-of-date post-Second-World-War order, or even the flag of imperialism. Seen from outside a base in Poland, the flag is likely to give rise to a different emotion than when spotted in Iraq. A Japanese fishing fleet off the island of Taiwan will not question the right of an aircraft carrier flying the Stars and Stripes to plough the sea lanes in the way that a Chinese fleet would. Such is the disparity of emotion that some anti-Americans, particularly those on the European hard left, even depict it with swastikas instead of stars, displaying their own lack of historical knowledge, and spell America ‘Amerika’. But this is alien to the countless people around the world who admire the USA and indeed call on Uncle Sam in times of need.

For Americans, the sight of their flag abroad is a reminder of just how engaged they are in the world, of their history in various wars; criticism of their flag feeds into the perpetual debate in the USA about isolationism and engagement. President Bush entangled US military forces abroad in new wars, President Obama tried to get them out; he learnt the complexities of foreign policy, and ended up taking military action in more countries than his predecessor. As President Trump is now finding, for better or worse the power of America makes its presence on the international stage indispensable. A presidential decision not to act can have as many repercussions as that of intervening.

Americans revere their flag in a way few other peoples do. Its primary colours are their primary symbol of national identity, and at times the Stars and Stripes is considered an art form. The artist Jasper Johns has devoted much of his career to depicting it on canvas, in pencil, with bronze, and superimposing it on many other surfaces. For him it is not an icon to promote or denigrate, but the sheer power it projects and the emotion it arouses fascinates him as an artist. Andy Warhol also picked up the banner and took it forward, hinting at it in his visual commentary on America and Americana. For example, he took Neil Armstrong’s photograph of Buzz Aldrin next to the flag on the moon, fused it with other photos from the epoch-making trip, and coloured it, including the flag, in pinks and blues. Warhol was not overtly political in his art, but he recognized not only an amazing moment in history, but also the time in which it took place. The psychedelic nature of the silkscreen paintings complemented the technological brilliance of the event at the end of the 1960s. The flag also featured on Bruce Springsteen’s most successful album, Born in the USA; theories abounded as to the intentions behind the album artwork and what political message it conveyed. As Springsteen said in a Rolling Stone interview: ‘The flag is a powerful image, and when you set that stuff loose, you don’t know what’s gonna be done with it.’

On the political front, the flag was used to tremendous effect in Ronald Reagan’s seminal TV ad campaign of 1984, ‘Morning in America’. Towards the end of the fifty-nine-second commercial, the voiceover delivers its killer line: ‘It’s morning again in America’, and then Uncle Sam’s future – young children – gaze in admiration as the Stars and Stripes goes up into a new day, a day of hope. The use of sunrise, the flag and an expectation of a bright future spoke to the collective consciousness of a nation still recovering from the Vietnam War and unsure of itself after the Carter presidency of 1977–81 in which Iran humiliated the USA during the Tehran Embassy hostage crisis.

From gazing at the flag from their front yard the children would have gone to school and recited: ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ The Pledge of Allegiance, first published in 1892, spread slowly across the country and was useful in forging a national identity in the aftermath of the Civil War and during a period of high immigration. The flag was used to promote loyalty and unity in a fractured and diverse country; generations of Americans have since stood to attention, hand on heart, to acknowledge this symbol of the nation each morning. The Pledge became official when the National Flag Code was adopted at the National Flag Conference in 1923, by which time twenty-eight states had incorporated it into school ceremonies, and passed into law by Congress in 1942. In 1943 it became unconstitutional to require the Pledge be made, but it is still a widespread practice and one almost unknown in other modern democracies.

All day these bits of painted cloth flutter in the breeze from sea to shining sea, with representations visible in every store, school, place of work and administration. And then at night, often with great ceremony and attention to strict guidelines, if ‘Old Glory’ is to be taken down it is done slowly, ensuring that no part of it touches the ground and that it is received ‘by waiting hands and arms’. The Flag Code tells us: ‘It is the universal custom to display the flag only from sunrise to sunset on buildings and on stationary flagstaffs in the open. However, when a patriotic effect is desired, the flag may be displayed twenty-four hours a day if properly illuminated during hours of darkness.’ There are eight types of site where the flag is flown day and night under specific legal authority. These include Fort McHenry National Monument, Baltimore, the US Marine Corps Iwo Jima Memorial, Arlington, the White House, and at US Customs ports of entry.

For many Americans their flag is almost akin to a holy symbol. It is the representation of what they themselves describe as ‘One nation under God’, and American politicians have frequently paraphrased a saying of Jesus’s, advancing the idea that America is ‘a shining city upon a hill’. True or not, its flag is the subject of songs, poems, books and works of art. It represents its people’s childhood, their dreams, their original rebellion against tyranny and now their freedoms. Its story is that of America itself, and the feelings Americans have for it represent the story of a nation. No other national flag comes close to equalling the recognition commanded by the US flag, nor the scale of negative and positive emotions it evokes.

This was highlighted after the 9/11 attacks when many American politicians, and some TV news reporters and anchors began to wear a flag pin on their lapels. In the highly charged atmosphere of 2001 it quickly became either a badge of honour to show you cared, or, by not wearing one, grounds for suspicion of a lack of patriotism. It was of course a false dichotomy, but in the age of the febrile twenty-four-hour news cycle many people opted for safety first. Almost all members of staff in the George W. Bush administration wore them. The then Senator Obama briefly donned a flag pin after 9/11, then didn’t, then, when challenged as to why during the 2008 presidential campaign, found it again and wore it almost every day.

It is ironic that many of these little metal symbols of emotion come from factories far away in East Asia. In 2010 the State Department was embarrassed to discover that its gift shop was selling USA flag pins in plastic bags marked ‘Made In China’.

It took 183 years and several iterations for the flag to appear as we know it today. The current version with its fifty five-pointed stars, representing the fifty states of the Union, may not be the last. The prototypes for the flag emerged in the mid 1760s before the nation was born, and even now we hear the echo of those days in the modern conservative Tea Party; its members take their name from the original ‘Sons of Liberty’, who in 1773 threw 342 British chests of tea overboard in Boston Harbor in protest at unfair taxation. This event, which became known as the Boston Tea Party, consolidated the identification of Massachusetts as home of the ‘Patriots’ against what was increasingly being seen as an alien Britain. The Sons of Liberty had a flag with nine white and red horizontal stripes, and it is thought, but not proven, that the basic design of the Stars and Stripes was taken from this.

During the first skirmishes between the British and the colonial militia in the American War of Independence, the rebel soldiers fought under a flag known as the Continental, or sometimes the Grand Union. It used thirteen alternating red and white stripes to symbolize the thirteen rebel colonies. On 4 July 1776, Congress declared independence from Great Britain and a year later passed the first of three major Flag Acts. The Marine Committee of the Second Continental Congress adopted a resolution which ‘Resolved, that the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field representing a new constellation.’ Both thirteens represented the thirteen now independent colonies, which made up the brand-new (but then not so shiny) United States of America.

However, the Act did not designate what star pattern should be used or whether the stripes were to be vertical or horizontal, and to this day the flag is sometimes hung with the stripes vertical, as this is not considered wrong. Why the stars? That was not explained at the time, but a 1977 publication by the House of Representatives states that ‘The star is a symbol of the heavens and the divine goal to which man has aspired from time immemorial.’

Nor was the symbolism of the colours of the flag explained. However, they match those of the Great Seal of the United States, the design of which Congress commissioned in 1776. The committee tasked to do this was told to come up with something that reflected the Founding Fathers’ values. It chose red, white and blue, and the Great Seal was adopted in 1782. Upon presenting the seal to the Continental Congress, its secretary, Charles Thomson, said the colours ‘are those used in the flag of the United States of America. White signifies purity and innocence. Red, hardiness & valour, and Blue . . . signifies vigilance, perseverance & justice.’ It is still used to authenticate some Federal documents, and appears on American passports.

You’d think that would be that, but as it is every American’s flag, every American is free to interpret the colours as they wish. Some say the red is for the blood of the patriots who died in the War of Independence, some say it is for all those who have died fighting for the country. It is of course possible that red, white and blue came to mind in 1776 as they are the colours of the British flag, but that interpretation might not go down so well in the land of the now free.

The identity of the designer of the original flag is unclear. Legend has it that a seamstress called Betsy Ross, who made flags for the Pennsylvania navy, was responsible for the first version. That at least is what her grandson told a Historic Society meeting in Philadelphia in 1870. However, there also exists an invoice submitted to Congress by one Francis Hopkinson, who insisted that in return for designing the flag Congress owed him ‘two casks of ale’. The jury is out.

Some years later a problem arose. In 1791 Vermont joined the Union, and then, the next year, so did Kentucky. This led to the Flag Act of 1794, which stipulated that for each new state that joined, another star and stripe would be added to the flag. It is this flag that would eventually become known as the Star-Spangled Banner, due to the poem that became America’s national anthem – more of which later.

By 1818 the flag was becoming more stripy than a zebra, with eighteen states and Maine and Missouri already a twinkle in the Union’s eye. So the Third Flag Act was passed, retaining the idea of an extra star for each new state, but returning to the original thirteen stripes of the original thirteen states. Congress still hadn’t nailed down what pattern the stars should form, however, so there are numerous nineteenth-century versions of the flag still to be found in museums across the country. In 1912 President Taft passed an Act setting out exactly how the (by then) forty-eight-star flag should look, and that, apart from the addition of two more stars, is the one we see today.

Bar a star or forty, the flag of 1792 is pretty much the one for which the American lawyer and poet Francis Scott Key wrote his inspired ode in 1814, which became the national anthem, though not until 1931. The poem is the key to understanding how and why the flag captured the public’s imagination; how a simple – even arbitrary – design created in the ferment of revolution could, over time, come to embody the highest values of the most powerful nation on earth.

The anthem arises from a conflict the British didn’t start. They were fighting the French in the Napoleonic Wars and the conflict spilt over into the New World, because they occasionally plundered American shipping. President Madison took the opportunity to declare war on Britain in 1812. Sadly for Madison, Napoleon got it horribly wrong, lost the war he was fighting with most of Europe and was exiled in 1814, thus freeing up the might of the world’s then superpower to have words with the country which would eventually take its place.

By 1814 Britain’s troops had burnt the White House to the ground and its navy was sitting off the coast of Baltimore preparing to bombard Fort McHenry, the vital structure defending the city. Which it did. A lot. Just as the attack was about to commence, Francis Scott Key showed up, bobbing around in a boat alongside the might of the British navy, and asked for some prisoners to be released. He was eventually successful, but because he might have seen the British preparations for the assault, the Brits thought it wise to keep him on board for a few days while they demolished the fort.

Beginning at 06.30 on 13 September 1814, with Key on the deck of one of the warships, they launched the first of 1,500 bombs and 800 rockets at the structure. For much of the following twenty-five hours he peered through the smoke and the light thrown by the explosions to see if the huge American flag hoisted above the fort still flew, or if the bombardment had allowed the waiting British ground troops to storm in and raise their own.

The attack was a complete failure: the fort stood, and there were only four casualties on the American side. As Key looked on, the Stars and Stripes still billowed in the morning wind. He wrote the anthem there and then on the deck of a British warship: ‘And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.’ The first verse ended with a question, as he was still uncertain if the USA would prevail: ‘O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?’ In the next few weeks the verses were printed and spread from Baltimore across the United States. Over the years the question mark seems to have become redundant in an increasingly confident American century.

The original flag that survived the shelling of Fort McHenry has been at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History since 1907. It now hangs in a low-oxygen, low-light, environmentally controlled chamber to help preserve it.

This is the design of the banner under which the Americans fought, as the Marines’ Battle Hymn has it, ‘From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli’. This is the flag they flew as they created the American Empire, pushing ever further westwards across the continent, from the Appalachians, across the plains to the Rockies, and on to the Pacific.

It changed along the way, with extra stars added as new states joined the Union. Artillery units were the first in the military to use its basic design (with alternations) as a battle flag in the 1830s, then the infantry in 1842, and finally the cavalry in 1861. The cavalry had a Stars and Stripes guidon, which was a flag with a triangle cut out of the middle of the right-hand side, creating two points, and with the stars set in a clustered circle at the top of the hoist side. This was one of the designs carried by General Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Big Horn in Montana in 1876.

Custer’s men will have been familiar with another famous flag, the Gadsden, although even by that time it was already considered a relic of the colonial war. The Gadsden flag was designed by Brigadier General Christopher Gadsden (1724– 1805) during the American Revolution and used as a battle flag by the Continental Marines. It has a yellow background featuring a coiled rattlesnake, beneath which are the words ‘Don’t Tread On Me’. This is not a request; it is a warning.

At the time the message was clear; the rattlesnake was found in some of the thirteen colonies and by the time of the Revolution was already associated with them. The motto ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ was clearly a warning to the British and served to help rouse public opinion against being part of their empire.

Thereafter its use declined, despite a temporary uptick in the south during the Civil War. However, in the 1970s it was taken up again by activists in Libertarian circles as a symbol of individualism and mistrust of big government.

After 9/11 its popularity surged. The slogan hit a chord with a public stunned at being attacked in the homeland. Sales of the flag, and associated paraphernalia, grew steadily through the early part of this century and it began to feature on license plates and baseball caps.

Then, around 2010, supporters of the Tea Party and gun rights group took it up as a rallying call, but it also began to pick up other connotations. Extremists, opposed to the first black president, appropriated the flag and gradually, in some minds, it became associated with racism, helped by the fact that Gadsden had been a slave owner.

In 2014 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was asked to hear a case brought by a Postal Service worker that a co-worker’s habit of frequently wearing a Gadsden flag cap to work was racial harassment. The Commission agreed the facts were enough for it to investigate but in a directive stopped short of deciding that the flag was a racist symbol and that wearing it constituted discrimination.

To those vehemently for or against the flag, ambiguity on the issue is not part of their world view. If you are on one side of the argument, you point to the part of the Commission’s directive which states, ‘It is clear that the Gadsden Flag originated in the Revolutionary War in a non-racial context.’ On the other side the paragraph that leaps out at you is that the flag is ‘sometimes interpreted to convey racially tinged messages in some contexts.’

To the rest of us the key words here are ‘in some contexts’. As we will see later in the book, the British, especially the English, have been through similar arguments. There were periods late last century where, in context, flying the British flag was construed as potentially racist.

Flags can have ‘multiple meanings’. You may mean one thing by flying one, but someone else may think you mean something entirely different. Proving intent, unless the symbol is overt, is difficult. Which brings us to the second most famous American flag.

During the American Civil War (1861–5), the North fought under flags featuring the Stars and Stripes, and it is from one of these that we get the nickname ‘Old Glory’. A retired sea captain from the North, William Driver, had long given that name to the Stars and Stripes he flew on his ship. During the war he found himself in Nashville, Tennessee, where local armed Confederates demanded he hand over the flag, only to receive the reply, ‘If you want my flag, you’ll have to take it over my dead body.’ The flag was then hidden until Union forces from the 6th Ohio Regiment took the city and were presented with it by Mr Driver. The 6th Ohio later adopted the motto ‘Old Glory’ and the tale spread around the country. Captain Driver is buried in Nashville and his grave is one of the few sites where the American flag can officially be flown twenty-four hours a day.

The North had their banner, but the armies of the Southern states also had theirs – in fact, there were several versions, and the one that has become the recognizable symbol of the south started off as the battle flag, rather than the official one of the Confederacy. It became known as the Confederate flag (and also as the Dixie flag or the Southern Cross) and had a red field with a blue diagonal cross with white stars on it. The Northern states won the war, and in its aftermath many Southerners continued to fly the Confederate flag at Civil War reunions, ceremonies and funerals. It commemorated the war dead, and celebrated a distinctly Southern culture. However, it also became associated with those in the South who had fought to defend slavery, and who, in the aftermath, ensured that the black population were subjected to numerous acts of racism designed to ensure they could not lift themselves from servitude. Among these were the notorious ‘Jim Crow’ laws, which effectively prevented many black people from voting. However, the Dixie flag, as the most overt symbol of this, only became nationally and then internationally recognized in the late 1940s. If you watch the epic 1915 blockbuster silent movie The Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith you will see, along with incessant racial stereotyping of black Americans, numerous scenes depicting massed ranks of the Klu Klux Klan, which was formed in the aftermath of the Civil War. However, in none of them is the Confederate flag seen, nor is it featured in the earlier Civil War battle scenes.

After the First World War there was a rapid growth in white supremacist groups, especially in the South, and gradually the Klan adopted the emblem. In 1948 the Confederate flag became the symbol of the States’ Rights Democratic Party as it sought to shore up segregation against the fledgling civil rights movement. Article 4 of the constitution of what were nicknamed the ‘Dixiecrats’ stated: ‘We stand for the segregation of the races.’

Despite this negative association, through the 1950s the flag also began to appear more and more as a cultural icon. To some it was simply a way of identifying heritage and regional pride, and representing the fact of the Civil War. It became widely used in advertising and popular culture. For example, the long-running Dukes of Hazzard TV series features two cousins riding around Georgia in a souped-up Dodge Charger, which was nicknamed the ‘General Lee’ after the famous Civil War hero. On its roof was the Confederate flag. This was not intended to suggest that the Dukes supported segregation, simply that they were ‘good ol’ boys’ from the South.

However, given its political overtones and associations with the Klan, the flag has in some circumstances come to be considered as unfit to be flown in public places. In South Carolina in 2015 it was ceremoniously lowered and removed from the grounds of the capitol building following the murder of nine black churchgoers by a white man, Dylann Roof. Roof’s online presence showed him spitting on the Stars and Stripes and waving the Confederate flag. After the ceremony President Obama tweeted: ‘South Carolina taking down the Confederate flag – a signal of good will and healing and meaningful step towards a better future.’

Between 1865 and approximately the 1950s the Confederate flag had never seriously challenged the Stars and Stripes in popularity, but during the second half of the twentieth century it did grow into a reminder that not all the issues of the Civil War were in the past. However, by then its colours were firmly embedded in America’s consciousness in the shape of the Stars and Stripes.

This flag has seen the Americans through two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and 9/11. It has also flown in the dust bowls of the Great Depression and during the civil rights movement. It has flown at hundreds of Olympic gold medal ceremonies as the country celebrates its continuing youth and vigour. It has flown at the top of Mount Everest and even been displayed on the Moon. Through all these struggles and victories, it has come to encapsulate so many of the values America holds dear, most importantly freedom and success. Small wonder that most Americans treat the flag with such respect, some to a degree outsiders can find strange.

The laws and codes of conduct surrounding the treatment of the American flag are staggering in their complexity, symbolism and number. It is in these laws that we glimpse the depth of feeling for what appears at times to be almost a sacred object, and we hear again and again the key words which press the emotional buttons of many Americans, such as ‘allegiance’, ‘honour’ and ‘respect’. The rules about the flag would fill a book, but the few examples below, some of which are federal law under the Flag Code, tell us what patriotic Americans feel when they see, touch and think of their flag.

When the national anthem is played and the flag displayed, Americans not in uniform are supposed to stand to attention facing the flag with their right hand over their heart. Those in uniform should begin saluting the flag at the first note of the music, and hold the salute until the last note is played. That it is sung to a tune more suited either to a drunken karaoke night in downtime Tokyo, or perhaps the finale to a Verdi opera as a fat lady dies of consumption, is not the point. It is not the fault of the great American public that their anthem has an octane-fuelled octave and a half to it. It is regularly mangled at baseball, basketball and ‘football’ games by someone who won a Little League competition the year before and gets to destroy it by pitching their voice too high or too low. It is such a complex mix of chord changes that if you start wrong, you will finish wrong.

But back to the laws regarding the treatment of the symbol of the country. Things start to get serious – ‘No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America; the flag should not be dipped to any person or thing.’ ‘When the flag is unfurled for display across a street, it should be hung vertically, with the stars arranged to the north or east. It must not touch the buildings, ground, trees or bushes’ and so on for several pages, including, ‘When the flag is used to cover a casket, it should be placed with the union at the head and over the left shoulder. The flag should not be lowered into the grave or allowed to touch the ground.’ ‘The flag should never be used for any advertising purposes.’ ‘The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin, being a replica, should be worn on the left lapel near the heart.’

Although not all these rules are adhered to, notably that about advertising, the fact remains that the flag is a revered symbol. This reverence extends to folding it. I have seen this done several times at the funerals of American servicemen and women. On paper it reads oddly; if the flag were merely being put away in a drawer, the ritual might seem a bit much, but during a funeral ceremony, the slow, careful method of recovering and folding the flag, done in silence, can be quite moving. Belief in service to one’s country is arguably more developed in the United States than in many other places, and the idea of sacrifice for a cause retains a hold on the collective psyche of the American military, especially the Marine Corps. When you attend the funeral of, or remembrance service for, a US Marine killed in combat you sense that it is a family affair.

That is why, while the detail of the flag-folding sounds overdramatized in theory, in practice it can seem fitting: ‘Straighten out the flag to full length and fold lengthwise once. Fold it lengthwise a second time to meet the open edge, making sure that the union of stars on the blue field remains outward in full view. A triangular fold is then started by bringing the striped corner of the folded edge to the open edge.’ And so it continues until only the blue shows and the shape of the flag is now that of a cocked hat, emblematic of the tricorn worn by the Patriots during the American Revolution.

For the US Armed Forces, which oversee a flag-lowering and folding ceremony every evening or at funerals, each fold has a meaning. The first symbolizes life, the second the belief in eternal life, the third the belief in the resurrection of the body and so on through the fifth, which references naval officer Stephen Decatur’s famous words about ‘our country’, ‘right or wrong’, to the eighth, ‘a tribute to the one who entered into the valley of the shadow of death, that we might see the light of day’. In the end sequence the red and white stripes are finally wrapped into the blue and, according to the military, ‘the light of day vanishes into the darkness of night’. Some of this could be considered problematic given its Christian undertones but, just as the Constitution does not stipulate which God the United States worships, the US military doesn’t go into detail.

The Flag Code also guides Americans as to how to clean and mend the flag when necessary, but ‘When a flag is so worn it is no longer fit to serve as a symbol of our country, it should be destroyed by burning in a dignified manner.’ And therein lies a tale – nay, a funeral. The US Flag Code guidelines on the ceremony for burning the flag include the following advice:

For individual citizens, small groups, or organizations, this should be done discreetly so the act of destruction is not perceived as a protest or desecration . . . an empty chair may be included as a ‘Place of Honor’ for those lovers of Old Glory who have passed on or are too infirm to attend.

Begin Ceremony. Include a chaplain or prayer per your tradition.

CEREMONY LEADER