BeeLines - June 13, 2018
By Marybelle Beigh, Westfield Town & Village Historian
Why Isn’t Flag Day – June 14th – an Official Federal Holiday?
Every since I was a young child, my family always celebrated Flag Day, but there was a particularly compelling reason to do so – it was also my mother’s birthday!
My mother – the late Frances [Dibble] [Blackburn] Anderson – was very particular about celebrating all of our national holidays – Lincoln’s Birthday, Washington’s Birthday (those two are President’s Day now), Decoration Day (that’s Memorial Day, now), Flag Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, and Armistice Day (that’s Veteran’s Day now) – by flying the American Flag. On Decoration Day, we would also go to the cemetery and place flowers (lilacs and peonies) at the grave of my paternal grandfather – Arthur Williams Blackburn. And whenever there was a parade, we got to watch, and later my brother and I marched with various groups – 4-H Club, Brownies, Little League, and the WACS marching band, in our white skirts or slacks and blue jackets, ties, and sharp hats.
As the years went by, and family members moved away to their later adult lives, it seemed that fewer and fewer of those holidays were observed in the way we used to do – they lost the strong significance they’d had formerly. Mother had been born just before the US entered the First World War; I was born a year before Pearl Harbor and US entered the Second World War; and the whole family experienced the vast changes in the 1940s and 1950s with Hiroshima, Atom Bombs, the United Nations, the Korean War – they called it a “police action” as I recall. And then came the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War that tore so many families apart.
The 1980s and 1990s were a much different time, with the dismantling of the USSR and the Berlin Wall of major note. But then came “Nine-Eleven” in 2001, and the surge of patriotic flag flying everywhere – flags on vehicles and just about every other place one could think of to place or fly them. When I returned to Westfield in 2003 to care for my aging parents, I again was drawn into the faded but familiar activities of decades before.
When I was preparing to open my short-lived Parkview Ice Cream Parlor, I wrote a BeeLines musing about wanted a flag to fly at the business and expressing my sadness at finding a worn-out flag crumpled and tossed on a trash pile, rather than being properly disposed of at the American Legion by their burning ceremony. I took it home and gave it to a seamstress to repair so that it could fly proudly again.
This year, noting that Flag Day is arriving this week, it occurred to me to wonder about the history of Flag Day, and why it is not among the official federal holidays. Mail will be delivered, and federal employees will not get the day off from work. So, it was off to do some research. Other than a statement that Flag Day was not included in the 1968 list of federal holidays to be celebrated on Mondays making a three-day weekend, so far there has been nothing located to explain WHY it was left off that list.
So how did Flag Day originate? Most US citizens probably recall that the flag of the United States was designed in 1777, to have thirteen stripes of alternating red and white with at blue field at one corner containing the thirteen white stars representing the original thirteen colonies formed into the United States. On June 14, 177 the Continental Congress made that a resolution, and a flag of this design was first carried into battle on September 11, 1777 – the Battle of Brandywine during the American Revolution.
But observing the adoption of our flag as an official Flag Day did not happen until almost a century later, at Hartford CT during the first summer of the Civil War, 1861. There are several later claims for the establishment of state or national Flag Days.
- “Father of Flag Day” has been claimed to be Bernard Cigrand, who wrote an article – “The Fourteenth of June” – in the historic Chicago Argus newspaper of June 1886, proposing that it be observed each year, although none was reported as actually happening that year.
- Another “Father of Flag Day” honor has been designated as William T. Kerr, who founded the American Flag Day Association in 1888, while a school boy in Pittsburgh PA
- A close second is Professor George Bolch, principal of a free kindergarten for the poor in New York City who, on June 14, 1889, held a patriotic celebration of the Flag’s resolution date.
- In 1893 the Society of Colonial Dames got Philadelphia PA to have a resolution passed to display the flag on all the city’s public buildings on June 14th
- President Wilson, in 1916, issued a proclamation that June 14 be observed the National Flag Day
- President Coolidge issued a similar proclamation in 1927
- Finally, August 3, 1949, Congress approved the national observance, and President Harry Truman signed it into law.
Returning to my musings from 2009, Flag Day that year being a Sunday, I took some time walking long Main Street, looking to see how many businesses were flying the American Flag. There were a few flags hanging from street light poles beyond the business district, but the only flag I saw in front of a business was at The Tap Room. And this flag pole was inserted into a hole in the sidewalk, in front of the building.
Later I asked my mother to confirm (or deny) what I thought I remembered from my childhood and teen years growing up in Westfield - that every business had one of those flag-pole holes and all businesses put out the flag on every Memorial Day, Flag Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day. Yes, she did confirm this, and we pondered whatever happened to those holes, which she remembered from her own youth. We decided that most of the holes were removed or not replaced when the major renovation of Main Street was done, a number of years ago. Perhaps we might renew that tradition, reconstruct those flag-pole holes and provide each business with American Flags to proudly fly on those main American holidays?