How ‘Flag Man’ lifted S.F. post-9/11
Real estate agent’s daily walks with Old Glory across the Golden Gate Bridge inspired unity
“Doing the Flag Man walk back then — it was an amazing journey . ... The whole thing touched a nerve with people.” Jeffrey Orth on his walks across Golden Gate Bridge after the terror attacks
It was an impulsive move, driven by the fear and patriotism swirling after the Sept. 11 attacks. Hearing Gov. Gray Davis say on TV that the Golden Gate Bridge was a potential terror target, Jeffrey Orth grabbed a small flag from his house in San Francisco and dashed off to the span to wave it.
He wound up walking all the way across the bridge, holding the Stars and Stripes high. Then he did it again the next day. And the day after that — again and again, for nearly a year. Before long, it became an obsession, and he’d picked up a nickname.
Orth, until then a little-known 52-year-old real estate agent, became the Flag Man.
And so began a rare, seldom-remembered chapter in post-9/11 America, highlighted by this one man’s crusade to symbolically buoy everyone’s spirits with a patriotic gesture. Orth came to embody a time when everyone seemed, for a brief period, to universally embrace the U.S. flag as a rallying symbol — in stark contrast to long-held perceptions, still strong today, that conservatives claim it more as their own.
Flag stores everywhere, even the giant AAA Flag & Banner in San Francisco, sold so heavily they ran out. Banks, flower stands and head shops posted flags on their windows and walls. The colors fluttered from ranch trucks with George W. Bush bumper stickers, Prius sedans with leftover Al Gore stickers, porches and poles from coast to coast.
The universal embrace didn’t last. But for the first several months that Orth, a gay, liberal military veteran from left-coast San Francisco, waved his flag every day on the bridge, there was unity around the nation’s banner from both the right and the left.
Scholars say it seems to have been the only time in recent memory that’s happened.
“There was a brief period right after Sept. 11 where the flag really did transcend all of its ambiguity and for a while became a universally positive thing about what we hoped was going to happen after this disaster,” said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor who studies popular culture. “One could make the argument that the three months or so after Sept. 11 may have been one of the only times, and the last time, when we reached something like a consensus on the flag in modern times.
“There really was a sense that it represents a multifaceted nation. And your guy on the bridge was a perfect example.”
Orth’s schtick was simple. All he did was walk from the San Francisco side of the bridge to Marin and back again every morning, a 3½mile round trip, holding a 10-by-12-inch flag above his head. But the fact that he was waving the red, white and blue on what is arguably the world’s most famous bridge at a time when the country was united and boiling for revenge drew international headlines from Costa Rica to Australia.
Commuters honked and waved, police officers and soldiers guarding the bridge slapped high fives with him, People magazine and network television profiled him.
On one of his walks in November 2001, Orth stopped to chat with M16-toting National Guard Sgt. Arthur Acosta, who had been on the other side of the Vietnam protests back in the 1970s. “If we’d met then, we probably wouldn’t have talked to each other,” Orth told Acosta. “And back then, it was totally uncool to wave the flag — but that’s all changed now. Since Sept. 11, it’s everyone’s flag again.”
Acosta shook his hand. “He’s an amazing inspiration,” he told The Chronicle at the time.
Orth began his daily walk on Nov. 2, 2001, and stopped it on, appropriately, Independence Day 2002 — but continued to make the trip on the 11th of every month for two more years. By that July 4 in 2002, he’d clocked 680 miles, lost 25 pounds and turned what started out as an hour-and-20-minute trip into a brisk 42-minute jaunt. Wind and rain shredded three flags.
“Doing the Flag Man walk back then — it was an amazing journey,” Orth recalled the other day from his home in Atlanta, where he is retired at age 71. “I’m proud of what I did, but it wasn’t really me that it was all about. The whole thing touched a nerve with people. It wasn’t really just patriotism — it was love of country, love of people. And I still absolutely feel that way today.”
As unifying as those first few post-9/11 months were, it was all but inevitable that attitudes about the flag that have persisted for generations would creep back in, said Lawrence Rosenthal, chair and lead researcher at the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies at UC Berkeley.
“Right after 9/11, there was that moment of, ‘We are all one.’ But as you know, it didn’t last,” he said. “It is a reasonable thing to say that the flag as a symbol belongs to the right in this country.”
Before terrorists slammed planes into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and and a windswept field in Pennsylvania 20 years ago, killing more than 3,000 people in the deadliest terror attack on American soil, the Stars and Stripes had largely been considered by left-leaning people to have been co-opted by conservatives. It had been that way since the 1960s.
“The flag is a varied, multifaceted, in-need-of-context symbol,” Thompson said. “The flag today might as well be a Rorschach test. It means whatever it means to the person holding it or talking about it . ... In the 1960s, you had the love-it-or-leave-it kind of thing, the Archie Bunker attitude often associated with the anti-youth movement, opposing people who were against the war. The flag was seen as anti-hippie.”
In return, the left came to see, and still sees, typical flagwaving as a right-wing expression — or, as author Bruce Watson wrote in a 2018 essay for USA Today, “too corny, too conservative.”
“I remember when I was a kid, U.S. flags were being sewn on the butts of teens,” Thompson said. “That infuriated people. I remember people calling for laws and regulations for what you could or could not do with flags. And, of course, there were flag burnings along with draft cards.”
Former President George H.W. Bush highlighted the split in the 1980s when he proposed a constitutional amendment banning flag burning. Former President Donald Trump — whose rallies are notably festooned with flags — revived the sentiment, proposing that Americans who burned the flag be jailed or stripped of citizenship.
Obviously, the split is not absolute, Rosenthal said. Plenty of liberals, like conservatives, do display flags — in lapel pins, on holidays like July 4 and more — but the overall divide is real, though complicated, he said. He boils it partially down to conservatives historically sticking more to symbols like the flag, and liberals sticking more to writings and words like “all men are created equal” when it pertains to interpreting the founding of the country.
“The flag ultimately reflects white evangelical America,” Rosenthal said. “I would say that point of view has been consistent through American history, but it came of age in its current incarnation in the 1960s.”
Orth is circumspect about all this.
He grew up in a military family and served in the Air Force in 1970-71 until he was honorably discharged after telling his superiors he was gay. But he also vigorously protested the Vietnam War and considers himself “very liberal.”
“There was a great deal of pride in place and country in my family when I was growing up, and even though getting out of the Air Force radicalized me, I have always seen the flag as a source of pride,” he said. “I never stopped embracing it. I stand up at ball games, take the ball cap off and hold it across my chest when they play the anthem and show the flag.”
He said it has always saddened him to see a right-left chasm on the flag. Orth is both proud and wistful for that time after 9/11 when the chasm seemed invisible. And he maintains contacts with people from those days on both sides of the aisle.
One of those people is Julio Bandoni, a self-described conservative and retired California Highway Patrol officer who used to chat with Orth during the Flag Man walks. They often call each other on Sept. 11.
“I’m still in awe,” Bandoni said last month from his home in the Central Valley. “He was out there rain or shine, and if you’ve ever been out there with the wind blowing hard, it’s not fun. But he did it, every day.”
As for right-left debates on the flag, Bandoni waves them off.
“I learned a long time ago you want to stay friends with someone, never talk politics and religion,” he said with a chuckle. “The only thing I can call Jeffrey is a patriot who loves the U.S. I think it was pure heart, what he did.”
On Sept. 11 this year, Orth said he plans “quiet reflection.” And he will post a flag at his home — an act that he just might have wavered on not so many months ago.
“It was disheartening to me during the last administration — horrible that it started to represent a right-wing culture again,” Orth said. “Jan. 6 was the worst. Seeing the flag being used as a battering ram against the police was heartbreaking. And for a little while I stopped wearing a cap outside that I have that has an American flag on it because I thought people would think I was a right-wing supporter.
“But that just lasted a couple of months,” he said. “I felt very sad that I had to think about whether I wanted to carry or display my flag. So I decided that I couldn’t let them own that part of me.
“The flag is for all of us.”