Flag Day honors June 14, 1777, the day the Second Continental Congress passed a resolution approving the creation of an American flag.
The father of Flag Day was Bernard John (B.J.) Cigrand, a 19-yr-old schoolteacher who on June 14, 1885, asked his students in Waubeka, WI to write essays on what the flag meant to them. He went on to write countless articles and speeches promoting a national flag day, which he called Flag Birthday.
At first, Flag Day was recognized locally, through mayoral proclamations and privately sponsored patriotic rallies. But on May 30, 1916, as the U.S. prepared to enter World War I, Woodrow Wilson signed a presidential proclamation establishing a national Flag Day.
On Aug. 3, 1949, President Harry S Truman signed a congressional resolution making June 14 'National Flag Day.' However, it has never been a legal public holiday -- except in PA, which made it a holiday in 1937.
[Source: Flag: An American Biography by Marc Leepson, St. Martin's Press]
IN ADDITION...
The first real American flag was the Continental Colors, unfurled by George Washington on New Year's Day, 1776. It has 13 red and white stripes, but instead of white stars on blue, the canton carried the British Union Jack, a measure of how closely the colonists still associated themselves with 'the mother country.'
Yes, Washington really did cross the Delaware on Chirstmas night, 1776. But the famous painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze has it all wrong, flagwise. If the general carried a flag at all, experts agree, it would have been his personal headquarters flag, with 13 stars on a blue field only, not the stars and stripes.
In Archibald M. Willard's iconic 1875 painting The Spirit of '76, the flag bearer is carrying the 'Betsy Ross flag' -- with the stars in a circle on the blue canton. But historians agree it's highly unlikely the Stars and Stripes was flown during the Revolutionary War.
Broadway star George M. Cohan was inspired by a chance meeting with a Civil War veteran at a funeral. The vet, seated with a tattered flag folded in his lap, referred to it as 'a grand old rag.' Cohan introduced the result,
You're a Grand Old Rag in his 1906 show George Washington Jr., but audiences didn't get the bittersweet irony Cohan had intended and he quickly changed the title.
Our most famous flag, the Star-Spangled Banner that flew over Baltimore's Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, inspiring lawyer Francis Scott Key to write what would become the national anthem, was sewn by Mary Pickersgill. She was paid $405.90 for her work and assembled the giant 30-by-42 foot flag on the floor of Claggett's Brewery -- appropriately, it turns out, as Key's poem is now sung to the tune of To Anacreon in Heaven, a popular English drinking song.
[Source: Palm Beach Post undocumented 6/14/05]
YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY KNOWN SOME, MOST, OR ALL OF THESE INTERESTING FACTS, BUT IT'S NEVER A WASTE OF TIME TO HONOR OUR AMERICAN FLAG!
