Celebrating Flag Day

Walt Disney once observed: Actually, if you could see close in my eyes, the American flag is waving in both of them and up my spine is growing this red, white, and blue stripes. Monday is Flag Day and commemorates America’s approved of the design for the national flag in 1777.

Flag Day has been celebrated since 1916. President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation that established national Flag Day on Jun 14th. Since 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential proclamation establishing a national Flag Day. Americans celebrate this day by displaying the flag in the front of homes and business. Some localities celebrate the occasion with parades, speeches, and other patriotic observances. President Harry Truman signed national Flag Day into law in 1949.

The Library of Congress reported: George Washington commissioned Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross to create a flag for the new nation. Scholars, however, credit the flag’s design to Francis Hopkinson, who also designed the Great Seal and first coin of the United States. Even so, Ross most likely met Washington and certainly sewed early American flags in her family’s Philadelphia upholstery shop. To date, there have been twenty-seven official versions of the flag, but the arrangement of the stars varied according to the flag-makers’ preferences until 1912 when President Taft standardized the then-new flag’s forty-eight stars into six rows of eight. The forty-nine-star flag (1959-60), as well as the fifty-star flag, also have standardized star patterns. The current version of the flag dates to July 4, 1960, after Hawaii became the fiftieth state on August 21, 1959.

Great Americans have shared their thoughts about the flag:

Thomas Paine wrote: And when we view a flag, which to the eye is beautiful, and to contemplate its rise and origin inspires a sensation of sublime delight, our national honor must unite with our interests to prevent injury to the one, or insult to the other.

Abraham Lincoln observed: Standing as I do, with my hand upon this staff, and under the folds of the American flag, I ask you to stand by me so long as I stand by it.

President Ronald Reagan observed: When we honor our flag we honor what we stand for as a Nation -- freedom, equality, justice, and hope. We take the star from Heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity representing liberty.

Calvin Coolidge said: We identify the flag with almost everything we hold dear on earth. It represents our peace and security, our civil and political liberty, our freedom of religious worship, our family, our friends, our home. We see it in the great multitude of blessings, of rights and privileges that make up our country.

Henry Ward Beecher concluded: If one asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him:; It means all that the Constitution of our people, organizing for justice, for liberty, and for happiness, mean. Our flag carries American ideas, American history and American feelings. This American flag was the safeguard of liberty. It was an ordinance of liberty by the people, for the people. That it meant, that it means, and, by the blessing of God, that it shall mean to the end of time!