Giving life to symbolism in ‘ A Flag Worth Dying For’
There’s many a story behind the banners nations and groups wave
Most Americans know almost from birth the story of the creation of the U. S. flag, how Betsy Ross, a seamstress for the Pennsylvania navy, first designed the Stars and Stripes during the American Revolution. Or do we? “That at least is what her grandson told a Historic Society meeting in Philadelphia in 1870,” author Tim Marshall writes in his entertaining book, A Flag Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of National Symbols ( Scribner, 272 pp., eeeg out of four).
“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 remains out.” So it is with many of the banners that cause chests to swell with pride.
Marshall, a British journalist and foreign policy analyst, writes with the cool drollery that characterized the work of Christopher Hitchens or Simon Winchester. He tackles a topic that many take seriously without taking himself seriously, and the result is a book that explains where many flags that capture the imagination come from and why.
Flags, Marshall writes, often are designed with one idea and then adopted by groups with a different agenda. For example, the Gadsden Flag, the rattlesnake above the words “Don’t Tread on Me,” was a warning “to the British and served to help rouse public opinion against the empire.”
In recent years, however, “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.”
For this flag as well as the Confederate battle flag, Marshall writes, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so sometimes is ugliness.”
Another example is the Japanese flag with its simple red dot on a white background. Revered by the Japanese, it’s considered “a symbol of darkness” by nations attacked and colonized by Japan.
In Africa, nations just shucking the yoke of colonialism veered as far as they could from the colors associated with their former masters. Many adopted green, gold and red for their flags. Marshall traces some of this back to the flag of Ethiopia, which once featured a lion striding over horizontal green, gold and red stripes.
A Flag Worth Dying For is a fresh look at symbols we often take for granted and a meditation on what flags mean to those who embrace or recoil from them.