Children, as I have rediscovered since having one of my own, love holidays. They also love feeling like they’re a part of things: teams, friend groups, families, schools, nations. And so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that my own 6-year-old has become a Fourth of July enjoyer, despite being born to leftist humanities types who are not shy about sharing all of the reasons not to feel especially proud of the United States. She wears red-white-and-blue dresses in late June and early July, and she loves to sing “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” This past weekend, she got a little American flag from a veteran passing them out at the farmers market and, as we were driving home, began waving it out the window, transforming our Subaru into a one-car parade.
I understand her enthusiasm for this time of year. When I was in elementary school in the 1980s, I dressed up as Betsy Ross for the Fourth, even sewing my own American flag, which I carefully draped over my arm. But things feel a little different now, and perhaps have since 2016. The national flag’s symbolic partisan drift hasn’t gone as far here as it did in Brazil, where, during the recently concluded presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, the right wing appropriated national symbols so completely that left-wing counterprotesters wore black to draw a contrast between themselves and the green-and-yellow-clad Bolsonaristas. But there are plenty of people who now see an American flag used as decor—on a bumper sticker, a T-shirt, or a windsock—and read that car, person, or house as MAGA. In fact, the pickup trucks that drove the streets of our town, covered in Trump paraphernalia, right before the 2020 election? They waved American flags out of their windows too. Crystal Statues
This, my daughter would insist if she understood 15 percent of what I just wrote, is not fair. She wouldn’t be wrong: It’s not fair that we’ve had to cede—willingly or not—all stars and stripes to the right wing. And so, last year, for the first time in a long time, I started decorating for the Fourth. I found a Sasquatch American Flag wind spinner, one with the Bigfoot doing a little finger-pointing dance, and bought it to hang on the seasonally decorated shepherd’s crook in our front yard.
My family’s collective excitement about the perfection of this wind spinner got me thinking. There should be more ways for people who are left-ish of center, but who would still like some way to visually stake their claim to patriotism (even if only at their children’s insistence), to decorate for the Fourth. I think it’s time for the people who sell windsocks, bespoke flags, and T-shirts on Amazon, Etsy, and their competitors to tap this market. I call upon these fabricators—Sasquatch aside—to go full Union. The North was plenty racist, not every Union soldier fought to end slavery, and Reconstruction was a disaster, I know. But as far as good, hopeful moments in American history go, emancipation is very high on my list, and the decor possibilities are many.
There’s already a little market developing for patriotic Abraham Lincoln decorations. A few years ago I interviewed historian Matt Karp about the right’s abandonment of “Lost Cause” iconography and its increasing appropriation of Union imagery. (Slate’s excellent art team illustrated the Q&A with an iconic collage of Tucker Carlson in a Lincoln T-shirt.) A search of Etsy for Lincoln-themed patriotic gear shows how this project is developing. Witness “Abe Lincoln, the Operator,” an absolutely incredible poster featuring the 16th president roaming mountain peaks—alongside a bear companion wearing night-vision goggles—sporting muscles, tattoos, tactical gear, and a backwards baseball hat.
The Fourth of July is the perfect time to take back our boy! If more Lincoln-with-the-flag kitsch were available, and not decorated with repurposed-for-the-right quotes about not interfering with anything in the Constitution, I’d buy it. Check out something like “Most Interesting Abe Lincoln,” a piece of metal wall art featuring Lincoln drinking a beer and sitting in front of an American flag. That could work for our front porch. And there should be far more John Brown– or Frederick Douglass–themed flag options. Consider it, Zazzlers!
A more personalized way to go might be to hang a reproduction of the 35-star flag from 1863, when West Virginia, the next state over from where I live now, split off from Virginia so it could be part of the Union. Or, if we are dreaming dreams of great specificity, perhaps the cavalry guidon of the 18th Ohio Infantry Regiment, to represent my current hometown. Or a reproduction of the battered battle flag of the 5th New Hampshire Infantry Regiment, which was organized half an hour south of where I was born and sustained the greatest total losses in battle of any infantry or cavalry regiment in the Union Army. Or the flag of the 22nd Regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops, which has a certain flair to it.
A candidate for more universal adoption by leftist patriots could be a replica of so-called Old Glory, the flag that 19th-century loyalist William Driver, a Massachusetts Yankee who was living in Nashville during the time of the Civil War, defied at least two search parties, one armed, to keep preserved in his attic, after Tennessee seceded and his city turned against the Union. Eventually, Driver, apparently a stubborn old son of a bitch, had neighbors help him sew the flag into a coverlet to hide it. When Union troops entered the city in February 1862, he took the quilt to the confused Union commander, took out his jackknife, and tore it open, revealing Old Glory. “I have had hard work to save it,” he reportedly said.
I am not as brave as Driver, who literally said, to the group of Confederate guerrillas who darkened his doorstep looking for his flag, “Over my dead body.” But what is patriotism if not feeling a little bit vicariously thrilled by the deeds of fellow countrymen who really did the thing? In their honor, and in repudiation of those who would’ve stopped them, let us let our red-white-and-blue Sasquatch flags fly this Fourth of July.
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