Allegiance to a Flag
Why do we Americans put our flag everywhere? Recall also how almost all U.S. states require public schools to have students recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. For those who may not know, the Pledge of Allegiance is literally a pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States. The exact words of the Pledge of Allegiance are codified in federal law as Title 4, Section 4 of the U.S. Code:
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.
As a kid, it was easy to tell when I walked in late to class, since I would awkwardly enter in the middle of the Pledge. In addition to public schools, one of the first things that members of Congress do every morning to begin their daily proceedings is recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Throughout history, the people of various countries have pledged allegiance to kings, queens, and emperors. On the contrary, the people of the United States pledge allegiance to their flag. Just as we Americans have found a way to put the American flag everywhere, we have chosen it as the foremost symbol of the republic to which we affirm loyalty.
At the time of the nation's founding, the 13 former British colonies embodied people from a variety of backgrounds, religions (ranging from Quakers to Protestants to Catholics to Jews), and ways of life. In lieu of the British monarch, Americans needed to find a new symbol of unity to which they would express their loyalties. Enter the flag. During the War of 1812, the United States found itself at war again with Great Britain, and during a key moment in the war, the Battle of Baltimore, U.S. forces mounted a desperate defense of their base at Fort McHenry. An American diplomat named Francis Scott Key was aboard a British ship to negotiate the exchange of prisoners and overheard plans for this imminent attack on Fort McHenry, so the British forced him to remain on their ship until the battle was over to prevent him from warning the U.S. about the attack. As the famous story goes (a story I recounted on this blog nearly a decade ago, when I was an underclassman in high school), the only way that Key could know that the fort was still under American control despite the heavy bombardment was the sight of the American flag flying over it. As night fell and the bombing continued, Key could no longer see the flag, but caught occasional glimpses due to "the rockets' red flare, the bombs bursting in air". When "dawn's early light" broke out, Key was overjoyed to see that the flag remained over the fort, indicating that the Americans had not lost control over it.
The romanticism behind the Star-Spangled Banner underscores the idealistic symbolism behind the American flag. The flag is a representation of the ideal America: a "land of the free" and the "home of the brave". Unfortunately, throughout the history of the United States this idealistic image of liberty and justice for all was not the reality. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slavery institutionalized inequality for Black Americans, and even after the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery, the Reconstruction era failed to prevent continued systemic racial discrimination, including segregation, which continued well into the twentieth century. Women could not participate directly in the political process until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. Laws discriminating on the basis of sex were commonplace until 1971, when the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time held that discrimination on the basis of sex was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Asians were denied entry to the United States, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and later expanded with further legislation such as the Immigration Act of 1924. During World War II, the United States federal government placed Japanese Americans in internment camps, a practice upheld as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1944. Only with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Cellar Act) did the United States re-allow Asian immigration, and it came only on the coattails of the civil rights movement, which had culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in the context of employment and voter registration. It took until 2020 for the legal effects of the Civil Rights Act to extend to gay and transgender people. All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. Today, the country remains thoroughly divided on issues relating to immigration, race, the economy, and human rights.
It has reached the point where today if I see someone prominently displaying the American flag on their personal property, I am prejudiced to believe they are ignorant to these discrepancies between the idealistic image of the flag and the historical reality. I am aware, of course, that this is merely a prejudice. I suppose that it is still possible to be proud of the ideal that the American flag symbolizes: liberty and justice for all. The remarkable diversity of the United States results in no shortage of conflict and tension, but it is also a gift that is central to the identity and promise of the country. In countless other places, national identity is like an exclusive club; it is practically synonymous with ethnic identity. Not in the United States. America is a club you can join, filled with an array of cultures, upbringings, and lived experiences. How do we unify a country whose people come from such diverging backgrounds? What kind of cultural symbol could even begin to represent such a multicultural population? We may not have a monarch, but we do have a flag.