In time for July 4, a salute for ‘A Flag Worth Dying For’
There’s many a story behind the banners nations 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 new book, A Flag Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of National Symbols (Scribner, 272 pp., 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 colorful banners that cause chests around the world to swell with pride, often at a military or sporting event.
Marshall, an experienced 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 people take seriously without taking himself seriously, and the result is a book that explains where many of the flags that capture the world’s imagination come from and why.
Flags, Marshall writes, are often designed with one idea and then adopted by groups with an entirely different agenda. For example, the Gadsden Flag, the hissing rattlesnake above the words “Don’t Tread on Me,” was originally 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 Con- federate battle flag, Marshall writes, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so sometimes is ugliness.”
So it is with the Japanese flag with its simple red dot on a white background. Revered by the Japanese, it’s considered “a symbol of darkness” by residents of nations attacked and colonized by Japan.
In Africa, new nations just shucking the yoke of European colonialism veered as far as they could from the colors and symbols associated with their former colonial masters. Many adopted the pan-African colors of green, gold and red for their flags, although the exact origin of these colors as symbols for Africa is unknown. Marshall traces some of this back to the flag of Ethiopia, which once featured a lion striding boldly over horizontal green, gold and red stripes.
Marcus Garvey, leader of the early-20th-century Back to Africa movement, attributed various meanings to the colors, and while his reasoning may have been off, Marshall writes, “the colors became associated with Africa, as did the red, green and yellow or gold on the Ethiopian flag.”
A Flag Worth Dying For is a fresh explanation of symbols we often take for granted and a keen meditation on what flags mean to those who embrace or recoil from them.
It’s not a book worth dying for, but it’s one worth reading.