Grand Old Flags

In the darkness of a tiny prison cell, an American flag patch on a dirty uniform was Army Staff Sgt. Andrew Ramirez’s link to his past and his hope for the future.

When Ramirez felt alone or afraid during his 32 days in Serbian captivity last year, when his mind played tricks on him from dehydration and exhaustion, he stared at his uniform’s Stars and Stripes.

The emblem lifted his soul.

“It made me feel that I was going to be OK, that we wouldn’t disappear off the face of the Earth, that we had the support of our families and of all Americans,” said Ramirez, 26, an East Los Angeles native.

Guards had stripped the American flags off the uniforms of the two other soldiers held in nearby cells; Ramirez never knew why his captors left his patch alone.

“Sometimes the guard would spit on it, like he was spitting on America. I would clean it when he left because I knew America was there for us. And I knew I would be back to see that flag flying, that flag we were there for.”

Throughout history and across cultures--from Iwo Jima to the moon--flags have evoked unparalleled passions, stoked tragic conflicts, inspired great conquests and held out comforting images of home.

This week, in marked contrast, Ramirez and millions of Americans will fly Old Glory to celebrate Flag Day while South Carolinians and many others remain divided over a Confederate battle flag that has waved over the state Capitol for nearly 40 years.

How can a nation simultaneously glorify one set of red, white and blue stars and stripes as a symbol of the land of the free, and feud bitterly over whether another set of red, white and blue bars and stars means just the opposite? The answer says as much about a flag’s power to bring people together and to drive them apart as it does about human nature.

Beyond whatever obvious symbols they bear, flags tap into a universal desire to display the intangible values that distinguish nations and cultures from one another.

“If [we’re] a nation or a culture, what makes us French or Hawaiian?” said David Murray, a Washington, D.C.-based anthropologist. “There’s something . . . that pulls us together. We use cultural and dominant symbols to condense and carry those intangible yearnings.”

As symbols go, flags are uniquely powerful, said Whitney Smith, executive director of the Flag Research Center in Winchester, Mass.

“What other symbol can assert independence, provoke a war, demand surrender, support a political idea and represent a club?” Smith said. “What other symbol can indicate the presence of a military force, honor a hero, mark a victory or lend dignity to a ceremony?”

As national sales manager for the largest and oldest flag maker in the country, Bob Caggiano knows he is selling more than just pieces of cloth.

“It doesn’t keep you warm physically. It doesn’t look pretty on you like a shirt, blouse, pair of pants or shoes,” said Caggiano, who represents the New Jersey-based Annin & Co. “You’re selling a feeling, you’re selling an emotion. You’re selling patriotism.”

That spirit led Los Angeles Police Department Officer Daniel Jaramillo to buy an American flag to hang outside his new home on Memorial Day. The flag, purchased at Flag Headquarters in Burbank, was one of an estimated 5 million sold in the U.S. each year, totaling about $125 million in receipts.

“It raises patriotism, and it reminds me of the partners that I lost at work,” Jaramillo said. “They made the ultimate sacrifice, and the flag helps me not to forget them as well as pay respect to people like my grandfather, who was a World War II vet and my brother-in-law, who served in the Gulf War.”

Although there is no documented first flag, the first flag-like objects--made of leather, wood or metal--have been traced to the ancient civilizations of India and Egypt. The oldest flag in existence is a 5,000-year-old metal version of the national flag used today by Iran. The Stars and Stripes, young by comparison, turns 223 on Wednesday. June 14 was not officially recognized as Flag Day until 1949, although many Americans and most schools had been observing the day since the flag turned 100.

The original flag of 13 stars and stripes, adopted June 14, 1777, probably was not created by Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross. That legend was all but debunked by the heirs of Francis Hopkinson, a New Jersey signatory to the Declaration of Independence, who billed the Continental Congress $2,700 for designing the flag and other related expenses.

The American flag has retained its basic look since 1818. Stars had not been used on national ensigns until the United States made them the symbol of independence and liberty.

In the design, the Continental Congress sought to define the new nation: white stripes for purity and serenity; red stripes for the blood shed by American revolutionaries; a blue field to symbolize freedom and justice. The stars represented the 13 states, the stripes the original colonies.

“What the flag means today is not what it meant 25 or 100 years ago because flags change over time,” said Smith, author of “The Flag Book of the United States” (William Morrow & Co., 1970).

Flag Reflects Nation’s Growth

As the nation grew, the flag shifted from a symbol of rebellion to a sign of enterprise and commerce, Smith said. During the 19th century, the flag represented imperialism and, during the Civil War, commercial growth and the suppression of slavery.

“This flag, which we honor and under which we serve, is the emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and purpose as a nation,” President Woodrow Wilson said during a 1917 Flag Day address. “It has no other character than that which we give it from generation to generation. The choices are ours.”

An expression of the human need to belong, flags serve as identity badges, said Albert Boime, a UCLA art history professor and author of “The Unveiling of the National Icons” (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

“When you go abroad and you see the American flag, there is a symbol of pleasure and emotional well-being,” he said. “It makes you feel you have a place in the world. It’s always high, reaching toward the heavens, and visible for miles. Those are metaphors for our nation’s pulling together to master a situation.”

Steve Frank, clinical director of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, described the human connection to flags as a gang-like psychology.

“There are certain markings that represent what’s important to us and what is ours. We all have a need to belong and to justify what we find meaningful,” he said.

Just as flags have the power to unite, they also can provoke and divide.

When the flag was burned to protest American involvement in the Vietnam War, the demonstrations inspired campaigns to protect the flag that continued through the 1990s. Several members of Congress introduced amendments that would allow states to ban desecration of the American flag. None was adopted.

In 1994, the red, green and white flag of Mexico proved pivotal in the fight over Proposition 187, the California measure to deny public benefits to illegal immigrants. Polls showed the measure was not going to pass, but it triumphed after protesters hoisted Mexican flags during several demonstrations. Whatever the protesters’ intent, many believe the flags exacerbated anti-immigrant sentiment.

Last year, a video store owner in Orange County’s Little Saigon displayed a Communist Vietnamese flag and a poster of Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, sparking 53 days of demonstrations by crowds of as many as 15,000 people.

And in April, Cuban Americans demonstrating to keep Elian Gonzalez on U.S. soil were criticized for choosing the Cuban flag over the Stars and Stripes. But protesters insist their native island, and not its Communist regime, is what is represented by the flag.

On such occasions, the majesty of a flag is used for dramatic effect, said anthropologist Murray.

“It’s theater of the heart and mind and of the gut,” he said.

In South Carolina, a Confederate battle flag flying since 1962 has instigated its own battle. For some white Southerners, the Confederate Stars and Bars stands for the Civil War’s legacy of sacrifice and duty. For others, especially members of the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups, the battle flag is a symbol of white supremacy.

For many African Americans, the flag is a painful symbol of the periods when the nation supported segregation and slavery and, as such, does not belong atop a building that represents all of the state’s citizens.

A Potent Debate Over the Message

The battle flag is set to be removed from the Capitol dome to a nearby Civil War memorial July 1 in a compromise that few expect will quell the controversy. The debate is so potent, Murray said, because the flag is yet another proxy by which Americans are attempting to work out unresolved racial conflicts.

“The Confederate flag in this case has become the available, empty space where the message goes,” he said. “Two groups are grappling blindly to engage with each other, but they can’t find a way. So they land on a symbolic point. But the debate is about something else. That’s why the debate won’t stop when the flag comes down.”

The Confederate battle flag was born in 1861 after seven seceding Southern states needed a representative emblem. The first Confederate standard looked too much like the Stars and Stripes, causing confusion on the battlefield. The flag was redesigned, giving birth to the Stars and Bars, which was first raised over the Alabama state Capitol in Montgomery, at the time the seat of Confederacy. An adaptation of the Scottish Cross of St. Andrew, it was never officially adopted as the Confederate flag but was the standard most used by Southern armies.

After the South’s defeat, the Stars and Bars vanished, as most battle flags do. Few Americans remember the Pine Tree Flag of the American Revolution, even though it was a candidate to become the nation’s flag.

“The Confederate flag has a fascinating history because it’s a flag that was dead and brought back to life because the issues associated with it are still very much alive,” Smith said.

Protest Against Civil Rights

Several Southern states temporarily waved the battle flag atop capitols in 1962 to repudiate the Northern-based civil rights movement. South Carolina is the only state that kept it.

Since 1892, when a patriotism campaign led to the waving of the American flag at 30,000 schools, children have learned to revere the flag by pledging allegiance to it before class.

“The pledge is like saying a prayer,” said Boime, the UCLA art history professor. “Those rituals have transcendental meanings.”

Time can alter those meanings, and respect toward a flag can be forsaken more easily than it is cultivated, Murray said.

“It’s easy to break that attachment,” he said. “If it’s not systematically instilled in every generation, the flag becomes something else. It’s not automatic and guaranteed that we will always view the flag as sacred. It’s easy for it to be neglected and forgotten.”

In life, and in the death he envisions, super patriot Ski Demski is making sure no one forgets Old Glory. Every day, Demski flies a 20-by-38-foot American flag on a 137-foot pole in front of his Long Beach house. His chest and back are tattooed with elaborate Stars and Stripes, and he owns what the Guinness Book of World Records regards as the world’s largest flag, one that covers almost three football fields.

That huge American flag, manufactured in Pennsylvania in 1990, cost Demski $45,000. He rents it for special events for $10,000.

“It stands for freedom, and I love it,” said Demski, who also wears the Stars and Stripes in a band around his head.

When he dies, the 70-year-old man wants his friends to hold a wake in his garage, where his casket will be surrounded by American flags. Then, after he is cremated, he wants his remains placed in a vault inside the huge flag pole in his front yard. He’s already arranged for a friend to live in his house and preserve his flag collection.

“It’s so nice to see it waving,” Demski said. “I want that to continue.”

Bea Jones, a 59-year-old businesswoman, shares Demski’s regard for flags.

The Garden Grove mother devotes 10 to 20 hours a week to teaching children and adults about the heritage of the Stars and Stripes and the significance of a flag she was unaware of until she was 28 and in graduate school--the 80-year-old Pan-African International Flag, a unity symbol of the African diaspora.

That flag, also known as the Black Liberation Flag, was created in 1920 by Marcus Garvey, who organized the Universal Negro Improvement Assn. and African Communities League as a global effort to promote a unified Africa as the national homeland of African people throughout the world.

Says Jones, “There’s a whole generation that got lost in terms of their culture. They don’t know who they are, or where they came from because their parents got lost too. They got wrapped up in the commercialism and capitalism of mainstream America and forgot to do any of the cultural things that keep a people together and a family united. That’s the first thing a flag does, is unite.”

At the Festival of Queens of African Royalty at Cal State Long Beach last month, Jones displayed her red, green and black flags, drawing students to her table with a spirited voice.

“This is your flag!” she called out, holding the Pan-African International in the wind. “Isn’t it beautiful? When a flag is raised, it looks like it has a mind of its own. It looks like it’s alive.”

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Maria Elena Fernandez can be reached at maria.elena.fernandez@latimes.com.