Category: History

Happy Juneteenth 2023!

Happy Juneteenth!

“Juneteenth,” or “America’s second independence day,” commemorates 19 June 1865, the day at the end of the Civil War when the last slaves in the United States learned that they were free in a proclamation from General Gordon Granger in Galveston, Texas.

He wrote, in part:

“The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.”

This year we’ve upgraded to a version of the Juneteenth flag without the date integrated into the design, an objectively better design. You can read more about Juneteenth and its flag and see the version of the flag that includes the date in our post from last year.

Happy Juneteenth!

State Flags: Vermont

Happy Flag Day 2023!

I thought about starting this post by pondering the efficacy of having recurring columns on a blog and, well, a job, but it seems like I began the last installment, written, in part, on Flag Day last year, with just that sort of disclaimer. I’ll try to pick up the pace.

We’re flying the flag of “the Green Mountain Boys” this year which is possibly the most recognizable regimental flag of the Revolutionary War. It was likely flown at the Battle of Bennington in 1777 by John Stark.

At least, there is a fragment of a flag that was flown by Stark at that battle in the Bennington Museum. It’s the canton of the flag with what appears to be remnants of green silk on three sides. But the flag as we have it today is a reconstruction; its connection to the Green Mountain Boys and its relation to Vermont are disputed.

The Fragment of Stark’s flag from the Bennington Museum

Other sources suggest that The Green Mountain Boys’ flag was the unofficial flag of the Vermont Republic and served as the unofficial state flag from Vermont’s admission to the union in 1791 to 1804.

So, how does this fit into our series on State Flags? If you recall our first installment, we’re dividing the US state flags into four categories

  1. Flags that need no changes
  2. Flags that only need very slight changes
  3. Flags that have well-established, aesthetic alternatives and
  4. Flags that require significant changes.

The Green Mountain Boys’ flag fits firmly into category three even if its early history is unclear. Multiple proposals have tried to revert the design of the state flag to the Green Mountain design, but none have been successful. That though is enough for me to consider it a “well-established” alternative.

Is it aesthetic? I think so, even if it is a bit bland. The thirteen stars in a “natural arrangement” sets it apart from other flags with stars in the canton and the green field is appropriate for the “Green Mountain State.” I won’t list them here but it easily clears the NAVA’s five principles of good flag design.

Consider the history of the Vermont flag. The Green Mountain Boys’ flag was the unofficial state flag from Vermont’s admission to the union in 1791 to 1804 when Vermont’s “second state flag” was adopted. There were 17 states at this time and the designers decided that adding stars as well as stripes was still a pretty neat idea (it wasn’t), this banner consists of 17 stars and 17 stripes. To distinguish this from a theoretical national flag, “Vermont” is written across the uppermost stripe. The third state flag, adopted in 1837, reverted to thirteen red and white stripes but had a single eight-pointed star in the canton, surrounding the pastoral scene from the center of Vermont’s coat-of-arms. On 1 June 1923, almost exactly 100 years ago, the current flag was adopted consisting of the state coat-of-arms on a field of azure.

Among the three official state flags, two are strikingly similar to the United States flag (or perhaps Liberia’s). The third is a classic seal on a bedspread. While the Green Mountain Boys’ flag isn’t necessarily the quintessential flag for the state of Vermont, in this company is it the clear choice.

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Happy Birthday Susan B. Anthony!

It’s Susan B Anthony’s 203rd birthday. Here’s a nice post about her. if I read this correctly, her middle name was “B.”

Good morning everyone, hope you’re all doing well. First off I just want to say that my heart goes out to everyone involved and affected by the …

Happy Birthday Susan B. Anthony!

If you like your biographies in comic book form, there’s another biography of Ms. Anthony here: Votes for Wonder Women.

National Woman’s Party Flag

Today is the 102nd anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment when the United States officially recognized women’s right to vote. In August we usually do something to commemorate this. We flew a “19th Amendment Victory Flag” in 2019 and 2020. The story about how the amendment finally passed is mind-boggling. Women’s suffrage is unequivocally righteous yet its passage came down to a single vote in a single state. It’s a great story which you can find in our 2019 article, 19th Amendment Victory Flag.

This year, because of recent events, we wanted something broader, so we’re flying the flag of the National Woman’s Party, as a way to not merely recognize suffrage but to stand for all rights for all women. The NWP was founded in 1913 during the final push to achieve suffrage and has been fighting for women’s rights ever since.

The flag is a gold, white and purple horizontal tri-color; those are the official colors of the NWP. The meanings of the colors were explained in the Suffragist in December 1913.

“Purple is the color of loyalty, constancy to purpose, unswerving steadfastness to a cause. White, the emblem of purity, symbolizes the quality of our purpose; and gold, the color of light and life, is as the torch that guides our purpose, pure and unswerving.”

The Victory Flag incidentally is quite similar, it’s merely the NWP flag with 36 stars added for the thirty-six states that approved the amendment.

But for the main part of this article, we want to go back a bit farther than that and simultaneously closer to the present.

In 1872, Susan B. Anthony voted illegally; she was arrested and fined $100.

On the hundredth anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, she was granted a pardon in what can only be described as a cynical attempt to court the women’s vote. The pardon was rejected by Deborah L. Hughes, President & CEO of The National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House. She wrote,

Anthony wrote in her diary in 1873 that her trial for voting was “The greatest outrage History ever witnessed.”  She was not allowed to speak as a witness in her own defense, because she was a woman. At the conclusion of arguments, Judge Hunt dismissed the jury and pronounced her guilty.  She was outraged to be denied a trial by jury. She proclaimed, “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.” To pay would have been to validate the proceedings. To pardon Susan B. Anthony does the same.

She was right. If you’ve violated an unjust law, you don’t accept a pardon. Accepting a pardon acknowledges wrongdoing. Scream it from the rooftops, put it on your resume, or have t-shirts printed up but don’t accept a pardon.

Here’s what Susan B. Anthony said at the time.

Is it a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?

Friends and fellow citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus doing, I not only committed no crime but, instead, simply exercised my citizen’s rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny. 

Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual member thereof to a voice and a vote in making and executing the laws. We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their inalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. No one denies that before governments were organized each individual possessed the right to protect his own life, liberty, and property. When 100 to 1,000,000 people enter into a free government, they do not barter away their natural rights; they simply pledge themselves to protect each other in the enjoyment of them through prescribed judicial and legislative tribunals. They agree to abandon the methods of brute force in the adjustment of their differences and adopt those of civilization.  

Nor can you find a word in any of the grand documents left us by the fathers that assumes for government the power to create or to confer rights. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several States and the organic laws of the Territories, all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights.

“All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Here is no shadow of government authority over rights, or exclusion of any class from their full and equal enjoyment. Here is pronounced the right of all men, and “consequently,” as the Quaker preacher said, “of all women,” to a voice in the government. And here, in this first paragraph of the Declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can “the consent of the governed” be given, if the right to vote be denied? The women, dissatisfied as they are with this form of government, that enforces taxation without representation – that compels them to obey laws to which they have never given their consent – that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury of their peers – that robs them, in marriage, of the custody of their own persons, wages and children – are this half of the people who are left wholly at the mercy of the other half, in direct violation of the spirit and the letter of the declarations of the framers of this government, every one of which was based on the immutable principles of equal rights to all. By these declarations, kings, popes, priests, aristocrats, all were alike dethroned and placed on a common level, politically, with the lowliest born subject or serf. By them, too, men. as such, were deprived of their divine right to rule and placed on a political level with women. By the practice of these declarations all class and caste distinctions would be abolished, and slave, serf, plebeian, wife, woman, all alike rise from their subject position to the broader platform of equality.

The preamble of the Federal Constitution says: 

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people – women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government – the ballot.

The early journals of Congress show that, when the committee reported to that body the original articles of confederation, the very first one which became the subject of discussion was that respecting the equality of suffrage . . . 

James Madison said:

Under every view of the subject, it seems indispensable that the mass of the citizens should not be without a voice in making the laws which they are to obey, and in choosing the magistrates who are to administer them . . . Let it be remembered, finally, that it has ever been the pride and the boast of America that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human nature. 

These assertions by the framers of the United States Constitution of the equal and natural right of all the people to a voice in the government, have been affirmed and reaffirmed by the leading statesmen of the nation throughout the entire history of our government. Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania, said in 1866:

I have made up my mind that the elective franchise is one of the inalienable rights meant to be secured by the Declaration of Independence.” . . .

Charles Sumner, in his brave protests against the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, insisted that so soon as by the Thirteenth Amendment the slaves became free men, the original powers of the United States Constitution guaranteed to them equal rights – the right to vote and to be voted for . . . 

The preamble of the constitution of the State of New York declares the same purposes. It says: “We the people of the State of New York, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom, in order to secure its blessings, do establish this constitution.” Here is not the slightest intimation either of receiving freedom from the United States Constitution or of the State’s conferring the blessings of liberty upon the people; and the same is true of every other State constitution. Each and all declare rights God-given, and that to secure the people in the enjoyment of their inalienable rights is their one and only object in ordaining and establishing government. All of the State constitutions are equally emphatic in their recognition of the ballot as the means of securing the people in the enjoyment of these rights . . . 

I submit that in the view of the explicit assertions of the equal right of the whole people, both in the preamble and previous article of the constitution, this omission of the adjective “female” should not be construed into a denial; but instead should be considered as of no effect . . . No barriers whatever stand today between women and the exercise of their right to vote save those of precedent and prejudice, which refuse to expunge the word “male” from the constitution.

. . . When, in 1871, I asked that senator to declare the power of the United States Constitution to protect women in their right to vote – as he had done for black men – he handed me a copy of all his speeches during that reconstruction period, and said:

Put “sex” where I have “race” or “color,” and you have here the best and strongest argument I can make for woman. There is not a doubt but women have the constitutional right to vote, and I will never vote for a Sixteenth Amendment to guarantee it to them. I voted for both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth under protest; would have insisted that the power of the original Constitution to protect all citizens in the equal enjoyment of their rights should have been vindicated through the courts. But the newly-made freedmen had neither the intelligence, wealth nor time to await that slow process. Women do possess all these in an eminent degree, and I insist that they shall appeal to the courts, and through them establish the powers of our American magna charta to protect every citizen of the republic.

But, friends, when in accordance with Senator Sumner’s counsel I went to the ballot box last November, and exercised my citizen’s right to vote, the courts did not wait for me to appeal to them – they appealed to me, and indicted me on the charge of having voted illegally. Putting sex where he did color, Senator Sumner would have said:

Qualifications can be in their nature permanent or insurmountable. Sex can not be a qualification any more than size, race, color or previous condition of servitude. A permanent or insurmountable qualification is equivalent to a deprivation of the suffrage. In other words, it is the tyranny of taxation without representation, against which our Revolutionary mothers, as well as fathers, rebelled.

For any State to make sex a qualification, which must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of attainder, an ex post facto law, and is, therefore, a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it, the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity. For them, this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. For them this government is not a democracy; it is not a republic. It is the most odious aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe. An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household; which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects – carries discord and rebellion into every home of the nation. This most odious aristocracy exists, too, in the face of Section 4, Article IV, which says: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a republican form of government.” . . . 

It is urged that the use of the masculine pronouns he, his and him in all the constitutions and laws, is proof that only men were meant to be included in their provisions. If you insist on this version of the letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent and accept the other horn of the dilemma, which would compel you to exempt women from taxation for the support of the government and from penalties for the violation of laws. There is no she or her or hers in the tax laws, and this is equally true of all the criminal laws.

Take for example the civil rights law which I am charged with having violated; not only are all the pronouns in it masculine, but everybody knows that it was intended expressly to hinder the rebel men from voting. It reads, “If any person shall knowingly vote without his having a lawful right.” . . . I insist if government officials may thus manipulate the pronouns to tax, fine, imprison and hang women, it is their duty to thus change them in order to protect us in our right to vote . . .

Though the words persons, people, inhabitants, electors, citizens, are all used indiscriminately in the national and state constitutions, there was always a conflict of opinion, prior to the war, as to whether they were synonymous terms, but whatever room there was for doubt, under the old regime, the adoption of the Fourteenth amendment settled that question forever in its first sentence:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside.

The second settles the equal status of all citizens:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, or deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? I scarcely believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens, and no State has a right to make any new law or to enforce any old law, which shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as is everyone against negroes.

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Happy Independence Day!

Happy 4th of July! We’ve made it a tradition to begin flying a historic American flag each July 4th. In 2018, it was the “Betsy Ross” flag. In 2019 we flew the Bennington Flag. Then came the Star-Spangled Banner and the Bunker Hill flag. This year we’re flying the flag that flew over Fort Sumter in 1961.

The Fort Sumter flag is a 33-star variant with the stars in a striking pattern. Twenty-five stars are arranged in a diamond centered in the canton with the remaining 8 placed in the four corners in pairs.

The historical significance of the flag is, of course, obvious. Two flags of this type flew over Fort Sumter during the bombardment marking the Civil War’s first engagement, the Garrison Flag and the smaller storm flag.

Major Robert Anderson was allowed to lower the flags and take them with him when he surrendered the fort on 13 April 1861. The stripes of the garrison flag were in tatters but in an impressive happenstance of symbolism, the canton, representing the union of the then 33 states, remained virtually untouched. The coincidence defies belief but certainly foreshadows the end of the war; that the union would persevere.

The storm flag, in better condition, became a patriotic symbol. Major Anderson brought the flag to a rally in New York City on 20 April. With more than 100,000 people in attendance, it was the largest gathering in the U.S. up until that time.

This flag was brought from city to city after this and used, not just to inspire patriotic fervor but as a fundraising tool. The flag was “auctioned” to raise money for the war with the understanding that the winner would donate the flag back to the country so the process could repeat itself in the next town. The storm flag became a famous and salient patriotic symbol for the Union over the course of the war.

Almost exactly 4 years after the surrender of Fort Sumter, Robert Anderson, now a Major General, raised the flag over the fort once again. Henry Ward Beecher, the main speaker at the event, expressed a hope now embodied in the flag.

…Terrible in battle, may it be beneficent in peace [and] as long as the sun endures, or the stars, may it wave over a nation neither enslaved nor enslaving…. We lift up our banner, and dedicate it to peace, Union, and liberty, now and forevermore.”

Rev. Henry Ward Beecher

Both flags are in the care of the National Park Service and the Storm Flag is on display at the Fort Sumter Museum.

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Happy Juneteenth!

Happy Juneteenth! We’re flying the Juneteenth flag for the second time and I’m happy to report that this year Elmira College has designated the day as an official college holiday.

“Juneteenth,” also known as “America’s second independence day,” is a recognized holiday in all 50 states since South Dakota recognized it this February. It’s an official state holiday in 24 states and the District of Columbia. It commemorates the end of slavery in the US after the Civil War.

The name “Juneteenth” is a contraction of “June nineteenth” or a “portmanteau” if you want to be all fancy about it. It’s been a national holiday since President Biden signed the “Juneteenth National Independence Day Act” into law on 17 June 2021. That was long overdue; we should be celebrating the moments when we actually got closer to the ideals the US is supposed to represent.

Some History

President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and it took effect on 1 January 1863. It proclaims that “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” This changed the character of the war, transforming it from a conflict that could be perceived as an internecine squabble to a quest to expand basic human rights, Of course, it wasn’t that simple. But it meant that the tide of freedom advanced as the Union gained territory.

The Army of the Trans-Mississippi was the last major Confederate force to surrender. On 19 June 1895, when General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas to take command of the Army forces there, one of his first actions was to issue General Order 3, which informed the citizens of Texas that slavery there was ended. It read in part:

“The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.”

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Juneteenth_general_order3.jpg

Celebrations erupted as Granger’s men traveled forth announcing the order. A few months later, slavery finally ended throughout the US on 18 December 1865 when the 13th Amendment officially became part of the Constitution. One year after General Order 3, the first commemoration took place in Galveston as “Jubilee Day.” That became an annual tradition.

The Flag and its Symbolism

The Juneteenth flag is stunning! it was originally designed by Ben Haith in 1997 and refined by graphic designer Lisa Jeanne Graf. The symbolism of the flag is profound.

The colors are an intentional callback to the American flag emphasizing that the people freed that day and their descendants were, are, and remain Americans.

The central five-pointed star not only represents the freedom of African-Americans in all 50 states but also symbolizes Texas, the Lone Star State, where the celebration originated.

The burst that surrounds the star is a nova, a new star that represents a new freedom, a new people, and a new beginning for African Americans.

Finally, the arc depicts the horizon; a new horizon representing the promise and opportunities that lie ahead.

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State Flags: Missouri

Happy (belated now) Flag Day 2022! We’re flying the Missouri state flag for the occasion.

Columns. They seem like a good idea at the time, but then things get busy and you start to feel self-consciously like Doctor Who (the program). It’s been altogether too long since your last episode and you’re hoping that people are going to lose interest. But you have a season of Sherlock to do, or whatever it is that Chris Chibnall did in between seasons. You get the idea.

Without further ado, here’s our latest installment on State Flags. If you recall our first installment, we’re dividing the US state flags into four categories

  1. Flags that need no changes
  2. Flags that only need very slight changes
  3. Flags that have well-established and aesthetic alternatives and
  4. Flags that require significant changes.
The Great Seal of Missouri

We’ve run through the top category in our first two installments but today we’re jumping ahead to category four because we’re flying the Missouri flag as we did for the Bicentennial of Missouri becoming a state last August when I started this post.

You might recall that Missouri was admitted to the union as part of the Compromise of 1820. It was a very similar situation to today. Today a potential state can’t become a state, even if it makes perfect sense for it to be one because it’s likely to elect Senators and Representatives from the wrong party. It was the same deal in 1819 except we cared about whether a state would support slavery or not. The Compromise of 1820 allowed Missouri and Maine to enter the union together one as a free state, the other as a slave state.

The Union Civil War Banner

It took nearly a century for Missouri to adopt a state flag although there were many unofficial flags flown by Missouri regiments fighting on both sides of the Civil War. These included flags with the state’s Great Seal in gold on a blue background, which is a quintessential seal on a bedsheet. The confederate version of this flag has the cloud of stars reduced to just a single star to symbolize Missouri as an independent state.

The creation of the official state flag started in 1908 when the Daughters of the American Revolution in Cape Girardeau noticed the need for a state flag. They set up a committee and appointed Marie Elizabeth Oliver its chair. Oliver researched state flags extensively, especially the methods for their design and adoption. She came up with her own design starting with the state coat of arms with the cloud of stars recycled as a blue circle with white stars surrounding the rest of the design. This was then superimposed on a red, white, and blue horizontal tri-color. This design was proposed to the state legislature in 1909 and 1911 before finally being adopted in 1913.

The Flag inherits a lot of symbolism from the Great Seal. The cloud of stars signifies that Missouri was the twenty-fourth state to join the union while two bears on either side of the central shield represent courage and strength. The belt buckle is an interesting element; it’s part of the circle that proclaims “United We Stand Divided We Fall.” That a belt with that motto could be unbuckled seems like a bit of a mixed message. One source I consulted suggests that the buckle combined with the helmet stand for the idea that Missouri is a strong state that must be free to solve its own problems while another explicitly ties the buckle to the possibility of secession. The crescent moon holds out hope for the future.

The additional elements of the flag enhanced the symbolism. As quoted by US Flag Supply:

“…The Oliver flag embraced national pride and at the same time expressed characteristics of Missouri and Missourians. The three large stripes were symbolic of the people of the state was the blue stripe represented vigilance, permanency and justice, the red represented valor, and the white stripe symbolized purity. The Missouri coat-of-arms appeared in the center of the flag, signifying both Missouri’s independence as a state, and its place as a part of the whole United States. Having the coat-of-arms in the center of the national colors represents Missouri, as she had the geographical center of the nation. By mingling the state coat-of-arms with the national colors of red, white and blue, the flag signified the harmony existing between the two. Twenty-four stars surrounded the coat-of-arms, representative of Missouri’s position as the 24th state admitted to the Union.”

Using the tricolored background makes Missouri’s flag more attractive than the typical state flag that just utilizes a seal on a solid background. Still, it’s far from ideal. The seal with its small sections and text is too detailed to be discernible from any distance.

In considering a redesign of the flag, it makes sense to maintain the best elements of the flag while using them in a simplified design and incorporating some more modern symbols. I started with the wavy blue and white lines from the flag of St. Louis to represent the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. The arch, as it does for St. Louis, can represent Missouri’s importance in the exploration and settlement of the American West. As I was writing this I encountered a claim that not only is St. Louis the westernmost eastern city in the US, Kansas City is the easternmost western city in the nation. The colors, the bear, and the crescent can maintain their original meanings.

Full disclosure here: I’ve seen similar proposed flags, lots of which predate this one, on the Facebook group U.S. State Flags – Current, Historical, and Proposed. That group is worth checking out if you’re interested in state flags and/or flag design.

My wife, Joanne was born and raised in Missouri and her favorite element of the state flag is the bears, particularly the two larger ones. Here’s an earlier attempt including one. Unfortunately, I don’t have the skill that I would need to have the bear hug the arch like it does the disk. As an interesting side note, the bears on the Missouri flag are described as Grizzlies even though the only species of bear that is native to Missouri is the American Black Bear. The use of Grizzlies may have been inspired by encounters that Missourians Hugh Glass and Jed Smith had with the creatures. Those harrowing stories can be found here.

Finally, you might think that a less radical redesign is in order, in which case I would suggest something like this, cleaning up the design by replacing the seal with a single element contained within it. Again I’m sure that there are many proposals similar to this one and I’ve seen one with a fleur de lis. There are many potential options for that central element. I’m deferring to the Missouri native in the family; we’re going with the bear.

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The Atomic Age

https://comicstheuniverseandeverything.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/b2b06-6a010536b86d36970c0162ff153566970d-600wi.jpg

There are a few anniversaries of major historical events at this time of year. A couple of weeks ago we had the anniversary of humankind’s first landing on the Moon. That commemorated a momentous occasion. Speaking on CBS News, Robert Heinlein called the Moon Landing the “greatest event in all the history of the human race up to this time.” “This is New Year’s Day of the year one,” he continued; if we don’t change the calendar, certainly others in the future will change it for us. Heinlein saw in the Moon Landing the very survival of our species. “The descendants of all of us will be in colonies elsewhere, the human race will not die. Even if we spoil this planet, the human race will not die. It will go on and on and on…”

Even if we spoil this planet, the human race will not die. That’s a theme he returned to in his writing; it’s not true as of yet, but it may well be true in the future. It was a hopeful moment.

Yesterday was the anniversary of a less hopeful moment but one that probably had a far greater impact on day-to-day life in much of the world. Not the dawn of the Atomic Age precisely, but it was the day that the world at large learned that the Atomic Age had begun. It’s likely the reason that the survival of the human race was foremost on Heinlein’s mind mere moments before Armstrong took his first step onto the Lunar Surface. August 6th is the day the United States dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima.

It’s hard to overstate the changes that came about as a result of the Atomic Age. The Soviet Union detonated its own “device” on 29 August 1949. The Cold War followed, as did nuclear proliferation, civil defense drills, duck and cover, the red scare, proxy wars, and fall-out shelters.

Asimov’s Foundation is one of those Science Fiction series that, as much as anything else, deals with the long sweep of history. While we were preparing for our next episode of The Stars End Podcast we realized that the story for the episode appeared in the first issue of Astounding that was published after that initial atomic bomb and John W. Campbell dedicated his monthly editorial to the event and we chat about it a bit on the podcast. It’s not every day that you run across a primary source of this salience.

Why? Well as Campbell points out, unlike the general public who were learning about nuclear energy for the first time, the SF community had been thinking about it for years. It’s a major plot point throughout the Foundation series for example; Asimov uses it as a metaphor for modernity. Campbell mentions three short stories specifically, two by Heinlein and one by Lester Del Rey. All three of these stories were published in Astounding, “Blowups Happen” in 1940, “Solution Unsatisfactory” in 1941, and “Nerves” in 1942. All three were prescient. “Blowups Happen” and “Nerves” foresaw the possibility of incidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima while “Solution Unsatisfactory” preconfigured the debate about the United Nations’ role in preventing this use of Nuclear Weapons.

Here’s the editorial in its entirety. This issue went on sale on 16 October 1945, so I’d guess this was written in mid to late August. It’s a fascinating read, mixing common-sense proposals with a realistic fatalism about what’s possible before the people are ready for it. It reminds me of the debates about taking COVID precautions vs. reopening the economy and it reminds me of the Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man. “For where I live the game to play is compromise solution… well now, what can a poor boy do, ‘cept to sing in a rock-n-roll band?”

The Atomic Age

by John W. Campbell, Astounding Science Fiction, November 1945

There’s a considerable lapse between the time Astounding goes through make-up and the time it appears on the newsstands, as you are well aware. We are not, nor have we tried to be, a news magazine. This time it made a difference, of course; not knowing beforehand when the news would be released made us a little behind the times for a change.

The atomic bomb fell, and the war was, of course, ended. During the weeks immediately following that first atomic bomb, the sciencefictioneers were suddenly recognized by their neighbors as not quite such wild-eyed dreamers as they had been thought, and in many soul-satisfying cases became the neighborhood experts.-Perhaps they’ve been able to do some good — give the people near them, who had no intellectual forewarning of what was coming, some idea of what it means. I recommend, as most salutary little lessons, the stories “Nerves”, “Blowups Happen” and “Solution Unsatisfactory” — particularly the latter. It is of some interest that, at the moment, there is considerable agitation toward the idea of a world peace force, a United Nations set-up, using the atomic bomb as a weapon to enforce peace. The precise proposal made by “Solution Unsatisfactory”.

It might work as a stopgap, and, at the moment, all we can hope for is a stopgap. The troubles to come have their roots in two factors, factors already quite evident in the world today.

People do not realize civilization, the civilization we have been born into, lived in, and been indoctrinated with, died on July 16, 1945, and that the Death Notice was published to the world on August 6, 1945.

The second factor is this: it is a basic characteristic of people that they refuse to accept change when it arrives.

On that latter point, which is, of course the most important, you can readily observe by the various newspapers and magazines that the Socialists go on being socialists, and see in the atomic bomb and its consequences the opportunity to spread and enforce socialism. The Communists see in it the final proof of the necessity of being communist. The Anarchists naturally see it as the perfect way of obtaining the annihilation of all government. And, of course, the reactionary sees it as the way we can finally teach those blasted revolutionaries to behave themselves.

People simply go on trying to be just what they were before, with the same old viewpoints, the same demands, the same prejudices and intolerances. Each sees the atomic bomb only as a way of enforcing more violently his own particular will.

The natural result is that they are trying very hard to patch up the old civilization. It won’t work, of course. The chicken has been beheaded; it still runs squawking across the world, acting very much alive, and not yet knowing it is dead. But you can’t sew the head back on, no matter how hard you try. You can’t simply outlaw the atomic bomb, and expect, thus, to thrust it back into the limbo of undiscovered things.

Civilization — the civilization of Big Power balances, of war and peace and bad international manners, of intolerance and hates, of grinding poverty and useless luxury — is dead. We are in the interregnum now, the chaos of moving our effects, our ideas and our hopes from a blasted edifice into a new structure. If we can make it in one move, we are an extremely wise, sane, and fortunate race. Probably we will require about three to six moves, from one unusable structure of world order to another before we find one that can work.

Each time we move — as in moving from one house to another — we will leave behind a few more things that we find we don’t need, can’t use, or were even responsible for the ills we knew in the old place.

The interregnum is beginning now, and we do not have a Hari Seldon to predict the ways in which sociopolitical psychology will work out. What structure the new culture will have, we can’t imagine, because we know too little of what atomic powers can be made to do. It’s conceivable that we might discover, in a period of a few brief weeks, the secret of the force-wall — something that can establish an absolutely impenetrable barrier. In that case, rather minor modifications of our culture would be possible.

If we do not — and I do not expect it — cities are impossible. At least until such time as the human race has learned to get along without intolerance, without hatred, and without their inevitable concomitant — vigorous, even violent, proselytizing.

What the world most needs is a breathing spell long enough to permit the peoples of the world to absorb the basic facts that we of science-fiction have at least a fair appreciation of. Too many people see the atomic bomb as simply a Bigger and Better, New-Type Bomb. There is only one appropriate name for the atomic weapon: The Doomsday Bomb. Nothing known to man can stand against its power. Some writers have proposed that this will mean “cities of the future, if they are to be safe, must be underground” — which is sheer balderdash. It’s a perfect acknowledgment that the writer doesn’t even vaguely know the score. The man who says any such thing is blatantly admitting that he believes that mere mechanical strength of material can defeat the power of the atomic bomb.

Of course, part of the reason for that misapprehension is that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first ever made. They were the weakest, crudest, least effective atomic weapons that will ever be used. Those who have followed the discussions of atomic power and atomic weapons in Astounding will certainly recognize that the United States Army, in applying its available atomic arsenal to the purpose of forcing the Japanese to defeat, consciously and carefully selected the least damaging, gentlest application of the terrible agency at their disposal. Then that manifestation of the weapon — the simple energy bomb — was applied in the least damaging possible manner; it was set off in the air, not on the ground.

Talk of cities safe underground is nonsense for the very simple reason that atomic powers are such that, if the rock is solid enough to resist the titanic blow of atomic detonation, the delicate isostatic balance of the Earth’s crust can always be upset. If the city can’t be reached directly, it can be destroyed by earthquakes.

Personally, I’d prefer being above ground, a long, long way from any target of sufficient concentrated value to merit the attention of the atomic bomber.

Everyone knows that the first atomic bomb was the death of the city of Hiroshima.

It would probably save a lot of lives if they would recognize that it was, equally, the death of every big city, the death of an era, and the death of a cultural pattern based on a balance of military power, controlled exclusively by big and wealthy nations.

Atomic war is as suicidal as a duel between two men armed with flame-throwers in a vestibule. Neither party can have the slightest hope of surviving.

The atomic weapon is, to nations, what the revolver was to the men of the old West — the Equalizer. It didn’t make any difference how big you were; the gun makes all men the same size. The atomic bomb makes all nations the same size.

And, just as the revolver produced an era of good manners or sudden death, the atomic bomb must, inevitably, force upon us an era of international good manners and tolerance — or vast and sudden death.

When the peoples of the world fully — both intellectually and emotionally — realize that, we may get somewhere.

THE EDITOR

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We Came in Peace…

Each year, on 20 July, we fly a flag to commemorate when the first humans landed on the Moon. Two years ago was the 50th Anniversary. That was a lot of fun and also a good day for the blog. We flew the NASA flag, wrote about the probable state of the flags still on the Moon, and watched a lot of the coverage in real-time, just 50 years removed. I’ll share those posts below.

This year, we are flying an Apollo 11 flag. Well, kind of. We’re flying a flag that was marketed as an Apollo 11 flag. But it’s probably something that was cooked up for the semicentennial. It’s just the Apollo 11 mission patch on a black background. Vexillologists would call this a seal on a bedsheet like most of the state flags in the US.

But honestly, it’s better than those for a few reasons. First, the background is black, while most seals on a bedsheet have a blue background. Most predominantly black flags are black-and-white, so this one is distinctive in both of those groups.

The “seal,” as noted, was a mission patch, and unlike most state seals, patches are designed to be visible on clothing from across a room. That gives the design a simplicity that’s missing from most state seals. It’s clear what you’re looking at even from a distance. That makes it work much better as a flag.

Thirdly, the symbolism is clear and straightforward. The black background represents space, while the meanings of the Earth in the background and the lunar landscape in the foreground are self-evident. The eagle carries an olive branch in his talons to denote the spirit of peaceful exploration. The plaque left behind in the Sea of Tranquility is moving, “We came in peace for all mankind.” The eagle itself can be seen as a representation of its namesake, the lunar lander. Of course, the eagle, a national symbol of the United States, also proclaims that it’s the United States that got there first. Peaceful exploration is all well and good, but it’s impossible to deny the underlying motivation; the US had a Cold War to win.

There’s a lovely article on the NASA Website about the design of the patch.

There are also a couple of things that would mark this flag down according to the North American Vexillological Association (NAVA) standards from Good Flag, Bad Flag. and so, I decided to play with the image.

The first is that there’s text. The NAVA standards point out that text is problematic on Flags. It’s both notable and gracious that Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins declined to have their names incorporated into the patch. That allowed it to represent all of the thousands of people who had a part in the endeavor. But it still says “Apollo 11.” How does the flag look without it? Pretty damn good. We don’t need the text to tell us what this is about; that’s undeniable.

The other place that this doesn’t meet the NAVA standards is in the colors. NAVA recommends no more than 4, but this flag has at least ten. That presents a question. Do we need the circles? Here’s a version without them.

I replaced the moonscape and background with part of one of the photos from the mission. This looks a little bland. I think I would be inclined to enlarge the Earth and eagle. And I’d make the background either a black and light grey bi-color or an extended drawing of the Lunar surface from the patch.

The other thing that I did on the 20th was to watch this again, the CBS interview with Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. It’s always a treat.

My initial plan for this article was to transcribe this video and annotate it. There’s some great stuff there, but that turned out to be a time-consuming process. That might be the plan for next year.

For now I’ll leave you with this portion of the interview:

At about 3 minutes into the video, Cronkite muses, “I can’t imagine a moment to equal this. The only thing I could imagine is if some fella came forward and could say, positively, that we’re not going to have any more war.” “I think this is a step in that direction,” Clarke responds, “because this sort of thing is making our stupidities here on Earth seem more and more intolerable. And I think this might be the greatest result of the Space Program.”

Let’s hope that he was right.

Here are the posts from 20 July 2019.

Apollo 11 on CBS News
One Giant Leap for Mankind
Tranquility Base, Revisited

References:

A Flag for the Fourth

Happy Independence Day!

We’ll begin in our usual way. To mark the occasion this year, we’re flying the “Bunker Hill Flag” which is a bit different from our usual July 4th flag; its not one of the variations of the stars and stripes. It’s famous for flying at the Battle of Bunker Hill the first major conflict of the Revolutionary War, except that it isn’t. I’ll explain. It’s a story reminiscent of the history of the Bennington Flag.

The Bunker Hill Flag, so named because many believe it was flown by the colonists at its eponymous battle, has a blue field with the red St. George Cross on a white background in the canton. In the upper left hand corner of the canton is a pine tree which to the colonists symbolized liberty.

There are no contemporary accounts of this flag being flown at the battle and most likely the colonists flew what is known as the colonial flag; a red ensign with a pine tree shown in the canton. Both of these flags are modeled on British flags with only the addition of a pine tree because at the time, many colonists still believed that reconciliation with Great Britain was possible.

The evidence that the blue Bunker Hill flag was flown at Bunker Hill consists entirely of a painting done by Jonathan Trumbull, an eye witness to the battle, and an interview of the daughter of a veteran of the battle.

But the daughter’s account only said that her father claimed to have raised a blue flag at the battle while an earlier version of Trumbull’s painting showed the blue flag colored red; that painting is considered to be evidence that the Continental Flag was used.

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There’s one piece of direct evidence that the Bunker Hill Flag was actually flown at the battle, a book published early in the 19th century. The book contained a picture of the flag but the description described it as red rather than blue. This is generally considered to be a printing error.

Despite it’s questionable origins, the Bunker Hill Flag became a symbol of both the Revolution and of New England. It remains in use as a flag of New England today.

This seems fitting. Despite Bunker Hill being the original objective of both the Americans and the British, most of the fighting occurred a third of a mile south on Breed’s Hill. Some even cal it “The Battle of Breed’s Hill.”

References