Written by Todd DePastino
If a nation’s flag represents something of a nation’s character, then our Stars and Stripes captures perfectly America’s dynamism and anticipation of change. It’s the only flag designed to be redesigned. And for a country so fervent in the rules and etiquette governing flag display, the United States has played fast and loose with the regulations defining the look of Old Glory.
Only three laws in U.S. history have bothered to spell out what our national flag looks like, and the last one was in 1818. That’s right: the American flag isn’t rigidly defined by statute. The Flag Acts of 1777, 1794, and 1818 each gave only the broadest brushstrokes of a design, specifying numbers of stars and stripes but omitting details like the flag’s shape, proportions, or how the stars should be arranged.
This legal brevity left enormous wiggle room for improvisation. By the early 20th century, there were at least 66 different star patterns in use on U.S. flags. It wasn’t until President William Howard Taft stepped in with an executive order in 1912 that some uniformity was imposed. Taft defined the hoist (width), the fly (length), and the width of each stripe, along with the specific placement of the stars in the Union canton field. But it didn’t codify the colors.
All subsequent refinements have been through Executive Order, ending with President Eisenhower’s order setting the current 50-star layout. Because these specifications are all by Executive Order rather than Congressional statute, they could legally be changed at the stroke of a President’s pen. If a President wished to redesign the flag on a whim, he could.
This ambiguity is a theme that runs through our flag’s history from the beginning.
The Continental Congress’s first Flag Act, passed on June 14, 1777, declared “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.”
That’s it. Those scant 31 words established the Stars and Stripes as the national flag, but they left almost everything to the imagination. The resolution didn’t say how big the flag or canton should be, how the stars should be laid out, or the shades of red or blue to use.
Early flag makers just winged it. Surviving Revolutionary-era flags show stars scattered in different patterns. Sometimes in circles, sometimes in rows, once in one big star. Several have the stars sprinkled randomly or huddled in one corner of the canton. A few use different sized stars, as if amplifying the significance of one state over another. The one we remember best is the most elegant “Betsy Ross” design: the 13-star arrangement a ring.
The Betsy Ross story, of course, is the popular legend that the Philadelphia seamstress sewed the first flag at George Washington’s behest. It’s a beloved piece of Americana, but the evidence for it is flimsy, resting solely on a tale told by Betsy Ross’s grandson a century later. Records from the 1770s indicate Francis Hopkinson as the flag designer. He actually billed Congress his design work.
In 1794, after Vermont and Kentucky joined the Union, Congress decided that the flag should grow along with the nation. The second Flag Act upped the design to 15 stars and 15 stripes. For the first and only time, Congress added stripes for the new states. This 15-stripe, 15-star banner would have looked familiar to us in its basic elements, but with two extra red-white stripes and a clutter of 15 stars in the canton (again, arranged in whatever pattern a flag-maker fancied).
The U.S. expanded rapidly over the next 20 years, and the flag didn’t keep up. By 1818 there were 20 states, yet the flag was still stuck at 15 stars and 15 stripes because Congress hadn’t gotten around to updating it.
During those years, the 15-star, 15-stripe flag became famous as “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key. It was this flag that flew over Fort McHenry in 1814 during the War of 1812 and survived the British bombardment. In one of the only songs to open with a note of shocked astonishment, our eventual National Anthem begins, “O! Say, can you see?” That moment enshrined our flag as a national symbol of resilience. The War of 1812 may have been a draw, but this “Second War of Independence” guaranteed that the United States wasn’t going away and would, in fact, grow westward unimpeded.
The large Star Spangled Banner Flag that inspired the lyrics of the US national anthem when it flew above Fort McHenry in the 1814 Battle of Baltimore. Shown here on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of History and Technology, around 1964. Many pieces were cut off the flag and given away as souvenirs early during its history. A linen backing, attached in 1914, shows the original extent of the flag. (Star Spangled Banner, NMAH, Smithsonian Institution Archives)
The oversized flag that flew over Fort McHenry and is now preserved at the Smithsonian Institution bears 15 stripes.
By 1818, with five more states admitted and more on the way, Congress finally got practical. At the urging of naval officer Samuel Chester Reid, it passed a third and final Flag Act: the stripes would remain 13 in honor of the original colonies, and a new star would be added on the July 4th following the admission of each new state. That law is still in effect. It says nothing about star arrangement, flag proportions, or colors. And it hasn’t been updated in over 200 years.
The ambiguity left by the law gave rise to an astonishing diversity of flags in the 19th century. Star patterns ranged from ovals and arcs to geometric bursts and great stars-within-stars. When a new state joined the Union, flag makers just picked their favorite layout. In the run-up to the Civil War, U.S. flags could look very different from one another, depending on who made them. And that was just fine.
This 31-star “Grand Luminary” flag was immensely popular in the United States after the admission of California as a state in 1850. It represented the idea of the national motto E Pluribus Unum. Each star is separate and distinct, yet all work together to create a unified pattern and a Union of states (See https://www.flagcollection.com/itemdetails.php?CollectionItem_ID=179)
The came the Civil War. This all-important event effectively birthed a new nation, a new United States, while killing more Americans than all our nation’s other wars combined. Former Union soldiers, including the over 200,000 Black men who served, now saw the Stars and Stripes as a sacred banner worth dying for. The flag of the United States, more than any other symbol, came to represent this newly baptized postbellum nation, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Between 1880-1920, American flags proliferated like glitter on the seas when the sun appears. Bunting and banners hung everywhere in public life, and no civic ritual was complete without a generous display of American flags. It helped that over 20 million exotic-looking immigrants, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, came to our shores. Old stock Americans sized these strangers up as needing to be Americanized. Public school teachers stood on the front lines of these efforts, and several of them advocated for a new public holiday–Flag Day–that would be observed every June 14 to teach immigrants about our nation’s history and values.
Author, Baptist minister, and Socialist activist Francis Bellamy drafted a “Pledge of Allegiance” specifically for school children as part of a movement to place an American flag above every school in the nation. The schoolhouse flag movement transformed the civic life of our nation and introduced flag raising and flag salutes as a routine part of the American day.
As the flag accumulated more and more symbolic significance, the government moved to standardize what had been haphazard folk tradition. President Taft’s 1912 Executive Order nailed down the flag’s specifics by standardizing the arrangement of stars into neat rows for the then-48 star flag and set official proportions for the field and stripes. No more oddball star patterns or whimsical layouts as in the pre-Civil War years. From now on, every new star added would snap into a predetermined grid. Our flag’s look became consistent.
When Alaska and Hawaii entered the Union in 1959, President Eisenhower followed tradition by soliciting ideas for new star arrangements. He ultimately approved a symmetrical pattern of nine staggered rows of stars for the 50-star flag and issued Executive Order 10834 in 1960 to formalize the design.
The United States flags remains ambiguous in terms of the law. Much of what we consider the flag’s sacred design isn’t sacrosanct legal canon. It’s custom with the force of a changeable Executive Order behind it.
In many way, our Stars and Stripes is an ideal symbol of the American people: resilient, adaptable, and never quite fixed. And yet, it has accommodated change without losing its identity.
Like our nation, the flag is a work in progress.
