Flag Day is an often overlooked holiday tucked in the holiday-packed month of June. Let us remember to give our flag the greatest honor, because: “I am whatever you make me, nothing more. I swing before your eyes as a bright gleam of color, a symbol of yourself, the pictured suggestion of that big thing which makes this nation.” (Franklin Knight Lane)

An Appeal For Flag Day Recognition

by Gerald D. Swick

June 14 is Flag Day, one of our less-celebrated annual events. The paparazzi swarm the Fourth of July with its fireworks and parades, but generally overlook this quiet little observance tucked into the middle of June.

That doesn’t reflect a blasé attitude of our times. It seems the day has always struggled for recognition. A writer in Wheeling’s The Intelligencer bemoaned a lack of enthusiasm for Flag Day in 1921, just three years after World War I and America’s great patriotic efforts associated with that conflict. Here are his words, with a few breaks inserted into what were very long paragraphs:

“Today is Flag Day in West Virginia, as well as in other parts of this great country,” The Intelligencer said, “and it is a pity that there will not be a wider observance of the date. The Elks lodges at some points in West Virginia are planning to observe the day, but there will be many points where Flag Day of 1921 will pass like Flag Days of the past with only a few flags displayed . . .

“What the flag symbolizes is worthy of the greatest honor and it is to be regretted that the custom of uncovering when it passes in parade is not more generally observed in this state. Only a small portion of the men watched at parades in Charleston, Clarksburg and Fairmont in the last years have lifted their hats when the flag was carried past. This in the vast majority of cases was not intentional disrespect, but evidence of the forgetfulness that comes to many people in the days of peace.

“The salute to the flag is a salute to all the American citizen holds dear and it is a salute to those millions who have died in wars to make this nation free, united and strong. It is a salute to our-selves as citizens, the unforced tribute of freemen to the beautiful symbol of our country. No American flag in parade should fail to receive the civilian’s salute and the forgetful should be reminded by bystanders.

“If you do nothing more in the way of observing Flag Day, determine to salute the flag the next time it passes you in a parade.”

Even Flag Day’s beginnings were modest. It probably started in 1885, according to www.usflag.org, when B.J. Cigrand, a school teacher in Fredonia, Wisc., had his students observe what he called Flag Birthday.

He chose June 14 because on that day in 1777 the Continental Congress officially adopted a banner with 13 stars in a blue field and 13 alternating red and white stripes. He continued to promote June 14 as Flag Birthday or Flag Day. Along with Leroy Van Horn, he founded the American Flag Day Association and moved the celebrations beyond Fredonia. The first time Chicago participated, some 300,000 people turned out.

The idea was slowly picking up steam in other parts of the country. In 1889, George Balch, a New York kindergarten teacher arranged ceremonies at his school. New York State Board of Education adopted June 14 as Flag Day, and in 1894 the state’s governor directed all public buildings to display the flag on that day. And so it went, spreading across the country in a grassroots movement that literally “ran it up the flagpole” to see who would salute.

President Woodrow Wilson established the first official national Flag Day with a 1916 proclamation, but it still wasn’t an annual observance. Finally, on Aug. 3, 1949, President Harry S. Truman signed an Act of Congress that designated June 14 as National Flag Day.

Let me leave you with these words by Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane from a 1914 Flag Day ceremony. Voicing what he claimed the flag whispered to him that morning, he said, “I am whatever you make me, nothing more. I swing before your eyes as a bright gleam of color, a symbol of yourself, the pictured suggestion of that big thing which makes this nation.”