What Is Flag Day?
The Birth of Old Glory (Library of Congress)
By the Editors
What is Flag Day, and how did this day of national observance originate?
On June 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress adopted this short resolution: “That the flag of the United States shall be of thirteen stripes of alternate red and white, with a union of thirteen stars of white in a blue field, representing the new constellation.”
One hundred seventy-two years later, President Harry Truman signed the law that designated June 14—the anniversary of the Continental Congress’s decision—as Flag Day. But Flag Day isn’t an official federal holiday. Rather, the legislation says, “The President is requested to issue each year a proclamation (1) calling on United States Government officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on Flag Day; and (2) urging the people of the United States to observe Flag Day as the anniversary of the adoption on June 14, 1777, by the Continental Congress of the Stars and Stripes as the official flag of the United States.”
Long before Truman signed that 1949 law, many had pushed to set aside a day to honor the Stars and Stripes.
As early as 1862, the Connecticut legislature passed a resolution recognizing June 14 as Flag Day. Over time, other communities began hosting celebrations on June 14. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson became the first U.S. president to issue a proclamation suggesting Flag Day celebrations across the country. Wilson called on every community to observe the American flag’s anniversary on June 14 with “special patriotic exercises.”
But Calvin Coolidge did at least as much as any other president to draw the people’s attention to the importance of Flag Day.
“Devotion to the Unseen Things”
Coolidge embraced Flag Day even before he went to Washington. In 1919, his first year as governor of Massachusetts, he issued a proclamation in which he set June 14 as Flag Day and “earnestly recommended that it be observed by the people of the Commonwealth by the display of the flag of our country and in all ways that may testify to their loyalty and perpetuate its glory.”
Coolidge issued a similar proclamation the following year. In it, he noted that the American flag “stands for order and liberty, for freedom of the human hand and the human mind, free speech, free press, free church.” He added, “It means that property and life and honor shall be inviolate, and it recognizes the duty of the people to protect each other in the security of these rights, and that all experience and all reason demonstrate that the sole source of such protection is in government according to law.”
In 1925, as president, Coolidge sent a message to Bernard J. Cigrand, president of the National Flag Day Association. Cigrand has been called the father of Flag Day for the decades he spent promoting the need for an annual observance of the Stars and Stripes on June 14. In the message to Cigrand, Coolidge wrote of Old Glory: “Alone of all flags it expresses the sovereignty of the people, which endures when all else passes away. Speaking with their voice it has the sanctity of revelation. He who lives under it and is loyal to it, is loyal to truth and justice everywhere.”
President Coolidge went further in 1927, the 150th anniversary of Congress’s adoption of the American flag. In early June of that year, he issued a proclamation calling on Americans to observe the 14th as Flag Day. Coolidge wrote that the public should commemorate “the emblem of our nation” and “what it represents to our citizens and to the nations of the earth.” But Americans should not merely “show outward respect” to the flag. No, we must “rededicate ourselves to the high principles for which our ensign stands” and “cherish in our hearts an unquenchable love of and devotion to the unseen things which it represents.”
Coolidge did not stop advocating for Flag Day when he left the Oval Office. In June 1931, he used his syndicated column to write:
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 in it the great multitude of blessings, of rights and privileges, that make up our country.
But when we look at our flag and behold it emblazoned with all our rights we must remember that it is equally a symbol of our duties. Every glory that we associate with it is the result of duty done. A yearly contemplation of the meaning of our flag strengthens and purifies the national conscience.
Coolidge concluded, “A yearly contemplation of the meaning of our flag strengthens and purifies the national conscience.”
And that’s what Flag Day offers us.