Americans should reclaim Betsy Ross flag
recent days, Nike has scrapped plans for a line of shoes featuring the so-called Betsy Ross flag because of concerns that some racist white nationalist groups have used it as their symbol. This is a case where it would be better to seek to recapture the flag than to abandon it.
As a people we live by symbols. Some symbols, like the Confederate flag, come with such historical freight that they may better be relegated to museums and private graveyards than to wearing apparel or public marches. This doesn’t give racists, or any other hate groups, the right to appropriate the Betsy Ross flag any more than they have the right to monopolize any other cherished American symbol.
The Betsy Ross flag consist of 13 white stars in a blue canton with 13 alternating red and white stripes in the field. The likelihood that Ross, a Philadelphia seamstress, designed this flag is fairly remote and originated from a speech about 100 years later. In addition to being popular during the Revoin lutionary War era — numerous African Americans who served in George Washington’s armies would have rallied to this flag — it was quite popular during the both the centennial and bicentennial celebrations of the Declaration of Independence. Like the Starspangled Banner that flew over Fort Mchenry and that was sewn by Mary Young Pickersgill, one attraction of the Betsy Ross flag is that we associate it with a woman, who like African-americans of her day, did not have full citizenship rights.
The colors of the flag are largely derived from the flag of Britain. The idea of setting stars in a circle or in rows where none was larger or stood in distinction from others was meant to represent a new small-r republican constellation in which a single monarch or sun king would no longer dominate.
Whatever the flaws of the new nation that the Betsy Ross flag represent
ed, the Declaration of Independence, which served as its birth certificate, proclaimed that “all men are created equal” and that all were equally entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
In the early 19th century, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison described the U.S. Constitution as “a covenant with death” and “an agreement with hell” because of its failure to condemn slavery. By contrast, Frederick Douglass observed that the American framers had envisioned a nation where they thought slavery was on a path to ultimate extinction and that it was better to work within the Constitution than to abandon its nobler principles. During the fight for women’s suffrage and later marches for civil rights, demonstrators proudly waived American flags even though they knew that they still represented unrealized ideals.
Members of the Ku Klux Klan have burned crosses, yet we still humbly display them in our churches. We further ennoble our symbols as we refine our nation’s principles.
The Betsy Ross flag and our current stars and stripes are collective symbols, and we would be foolish to concede them and the patriotic emotions they evoke to the most extreme elements and un-american elements among us.
If these flags are endangered, let’s show some of the courage that has kept our nation free and recapture them rather than let them remain in enemy hands.
John R. Vile is dean of the University Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University and the author of “The American Flag: An Encyclopedia of the Stars and Stripes in U.S. History, Culture and Law.”