The flag of freedom’s nation

Many flags utilize the colors red, white, and blue, but America’s Stars and Stripes is unique. We celebrate this flag, “and the Republic for which it stands,” annually on June 14 (Flag Day), the day in 1777 when the basic design was authorized by Congress. But the meaning of Old Glory’s colors and symbols is quite different from the tricolor flags of countries such as France and Russia.

Europe has many red-white-blue tri-colored flags, usually in horizontal or vertical rows. Historians tell us the first such modern flag was that of The Netherlands, and that its design came from the royal flag of the most powerful Dutch prince in the 1570s. That flag had an orange band that was changed to red over time. After three centuries of active use, the queen of the Netherlands reaffirmed the tricolor in 1937.

Significantly, it was elite choices and aristocratic heraldry that created the Dutch flag, unlike that of the young United States. The same was true in Moscow. Russian Emperor Peter the Great saw the flag of The Netherlands, and we have his hand-drawn sketch for a similar flag for Russia. He changed the horizontal bands to the vertical red-white-blue of the Russian flag that is used today by Putin’s Russia.

The most famous red-white-blue is that of the French Republic, and it is still in use today. According to the French government, “The ‘tricolor’ (three-color) flag is an emblem of [France]. ... It had its origins in the union, at the time of the French Revolution [1794], of the colors of the King (white) and the City of Paris (blue and red).”

Foreign national flags rightly deserve the respect of their people. But, as John Philip Sousa wrote in our national march, The Stars and Stripes Forever,

Other nations may deem their flags the best, and cheer them with fervid elation, but the flag of the North and South and West is the flag of flags, the flag of freedom’s nation.

From the beginning, what became the American flag was symbolic of “We the People” in the sense that the representative institutions—the 13 colonies, or states—were visually represented on the flag. As the original Congressional resolution stated on June 14, 1777,

Resolved, That the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.

“A new constellation.” Stars provide guidance, and constellations of stars symbolize unity and hope. This was a different type of nation, a “city on a hill,” as John Winthrop envisioned all the way back in 1630. America was to provide hope to all nations of the earth. That is because the new nation, despite the diversity of 13 different constituent states, was unified around a set of principles proclaimed a year before in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Thus, the basic American flag was not created by the whim or fancy of a monarch, nor was it vaguely drawn from symbols of the past. True, historians tell us that there were predecessor ideas, such as the familiarity of the red, white, and blue colors from the Union Jack. But the design was decisively meaningful from the very birth of the nation.

What about those colors? Are they symbolically meaningful, or were they just an elite choice, as in the case of Russia’s Peter the Great?

We often teach our children that those colors are significant, but it is noteworthy that the symbolic language is not a part of the 1777 Flag Resolution. Instead, the meaning seems to derive from the official authorization of the Great Seal of the United States in 1782. The secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson, consolidated and explained the significance of all the elements of the Seal, such as the eagle, the band of stars on a blue (“azure”) field, etc. Drawing on the historical legacy of ancient heraldry, Thomson clarified that white stands for “purity and innocence,” red represents “hardiness and valor,” and blue symbolizes “vigilance, perseverance, and justice.”

In sum, the American flag tells a story. Its stripes remind us of thirteen colonies banding together against tyranny and forming a new nation. Fifty stars are a visual reminder of the lived reality of our national motto: E Pluribus Unum, “out of many, one.” Since the time of the American War for Independence and to this very day, the Stars and Stripes calls our citizens and our government officials to purity of motives, hardiness and valor, and vigilance in the pursuit of justice.