The Star-Spangled Banner. COURTESY THE SMITHSONIAN.
Not much gets past Officer Ira Green. For the last three and a half years, she has stood guard over the dimly lit room at the Smithsonian Institution that holds one of America’s most treasured artifacts. She is a security guard who doubles as an unofficial tour guide, glad to tell anyone what they want to know about the Star-Spangled Banner.
“It looks a lot better now,” she said. “It was really beat up before but now it looks at rest.”
The first known photograph of the flag, taken by Navy historian George Preble in 1873, shows that the banner’s white stripes were already dark with age, its tatters more than apparent.
Older visitors to the Smithsonian may recall seeing the flag on display before it was moved to this sealed room at the Museum of American History. Covered by a replica, the actual flag was revealed under dim lighting for a few minutes every hour. The national anthem played while the flag was on view.
That public display took a further toll on the flag already assaulted by British bombs and nineteenth century souvenir-seekers who had trimmed a full eight feet off its trailing edge. After nearly 200 years, the red stripes had faded to pink. Exhaust drifted in from the streets of Washington and attached itself to the woolen fibers, causing further harm.
In 1999, an $18 million restoration project began to save the historic flag from the ravages of time. Fashion magnate Ralph Lauren, whose designs often incorporate the flag, contributed $10 million to the effort.
The flag was taken down and moved into an atmospherically controlled room. There, conservators lay on their stomachs on thin mattress pads on a mobile steel platform suspended above the horizontal surface of the flag. The 6,000-pound platform can only be moved by hand because there’s no electricity involved. Conservators weren’t sure how electricity would affect the fabric. Plus, as Officer Green pointed out, there have been fires before at the museum. Eliminating electricity from the flag room reduced the risk of fire.
“We’re not trying to restore the flag, we’re not trying to make it look the way it did the morning Key saw it,” explained Suzanne Thomassen-Krauss, chief conservator for the Star-Spangled Banner Preservation Effort at the Smithsonian. The goal is to return the flag to the condition it was in when acquired by the Smithsonian in 1907.
Through a large glass wall, visitors can see the conservators work on the flag stitch by stitch. It is not exactly exciting to watch unless you bring a sense of imagination and remember the colorful history involved. On my visit, the flag looked a little sad, its deteriorated state in sharp contrast to the almost medically sterile conditions surrounding it. It reminded me of visiting a very old relative in the hospital and seeing the depressing contrast between leathery, wrinkled skin and crisp, white hospital sheets. Fortunately, Officer Green was there to liven things up. “I love being part of this project,” she said. “This is a neat place. I’m still amazed all the time.”
Thomassen-Krauss and the other conservators are mainly undoing earlier attempts at preserving the Star-Spangled Banner. The flag became part of the museum’s collection in 1912 when the loan became a permanent gift to the Smithsonian from Eben Appleton, a descendant of Fort McHenry’s Major Armistead. Incredible as it sounds today, the flag at one point was actually hung outside from the walls of the Smithsonian’s original “castle” building on the National Mall. In 1914, renowned flag restorer Amelia Fowler was hired by the museum to work on the Star-Spangled Banner. She and her team of workers stitched a linen backing to the flag using a fishnet pattern. The flag soon had twelve to fourteen stitches per square inch for a total of nearly two million stitches.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the approach Fowler took. In fact, the stitches helped hold the flag together all those years so groups of schoolchildren on field trips could admire it hanging on the museum wall. However, the linen backing meant only one side of the flag could be seen.
The current conservators are removing that linen backing in a slow process, snipping free all two million stitches by hand. I mentioned to Thomassen-Krauss that this seemed like grueling work. “All conservation work can be considered painstaking and tedious,” she said.
What did it feel like to work on such an historic flag? Was there any sense of awe? “I think as you’re working you are too busy concentrating,” she said. “You don’t really have the time or the leisure to think about it too much. You have a job to do.”
She pointed out that while the flag is one of the most significant artifacts in the Smithsonian’s collection, it is surrounded by items of great historical value, including the lunch counter from the Greensborough, North Carolina, civil rights protest, the desk where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, even the chairs in which Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant sat as they signed the Confederate surrender that ended the Civil War at Appamattox, Virginia. “You could name thousands of important artifacts,” Thomassen-Krauss said.
While Thomassen-Krauss managed to keep a professional detachment from the flag, that was not the case with Officer Green. She had learned everything she could about the flag and shared that knowledge with visitors. “If someone has questions, I want to know the answers,” she said.
She has even gone behind the scenes to see what the conservators were up to. They call her Officer Flag Girl and she calls them The Flagettes. “You know, like a musical group,” she explained.
She said there is a constant stream of visitors to see the flag. For some, the Star Spangled Banner sets off a flood of emotions. Some feel compelled to put their hands over their hearts. Some cry. Others sing.
“I had a little girl who was four, she sang the national anthem all the way through,” Green said. “I was so impressed. Another time, a boy came through here saying, ‘This is so boring.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about, it’s boring? This flag is part of your history, your family’s history, your country’s history.’ So I challenged him – we played a flag quiz game and he left here learning something.”
An exhibit tells the story of the flag and the battle of Baltimore. The kid-friendly display had pieces of wool bunting and even shrapnel to touch. Young visitors were eager to show off their newfound knowledge.
“How much does it weigh, mom?” asked a girl.
“Two hundred pounds?”
“Way wrong!” the girl shouted with delight, one up on mom. “Forty-five pounds!”
Upon seeing the exhibit, visitors are sometimes taken aback by the idea of nineteenth century Americans heartily cutting away pieces of the flag as tokens and souvenirs. Officer Green offers them an explanation. “When you went to the Armisteads’ house for dinner, instead of a slice of apple pie for dessert you got a piece of the flag. If you were a really important visitor, you got a star.”
Sharing pieces of the flag seemed like a nice tradition to me, considering it was done to honor veterans or simply as a way to connect with history. According to Thomassen-Krauss, the Smithsonian tried to track down all the missing pieces of the flag. Thirteen fragments turned up and were given to the Smithsonian. Finding all the pieces proved impossible. “They were scattered far and wide,” she said.
As I left the exhibit, Officer Flag Girl was already busy greeting a group of visitors. “There it is,” she proudly announced. “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
. . .
Thomassen-Krauss pointed out that in creating the flag, Congress had simply declared that it would have stars and stripes, with a red, white and blue color scheme. No symbolic value was placed on the flag. “All of the symbolism has been applied as a result of the culture and history of the flag,” she said.
During my visit to Washington, D.C., I was reminded that the flag and the United States are a work in progress. As it happened, I arrived along with 200,000 people who had come to protest President George W. Bush’s intent to go to war with Iraq. Our train was jammed with protesters. On the metro platform at the national mall, where we all got out and crept in one human mass toward the exit, I found myself shuffling along next to a man dressed as Uncle Sam, another legacy of the War of 1812.
“So, you’re protesting the war,” I pointed out with an amazing grasp of the obvious, considering he was holding a large picket sign that stated, “Forget the toys boys! Give diplomacy a chance.”
“Yes,” he said warily.
“How about that.” The truth was, I didn’t know who was right about the looming war. Citizens must have felt the same way leading up to the War of 1812.
At the Smithsonian, on the way to The Star-Spangled Banner exhibit, I passed a huge garrison flag that had hung off the walls of the Pentagon following the September 11, 2001 attack. Visitors clustered beneath, looking up at the Pentagon flag spotted with grease and soot, serving as a reminder that new symbols are being born all the time.
While the Star-Spangled Banner is America’s most famous flag, several others are almost as well-known. The Revolutionary War flag with its circle of 13 stars in a blue field. Old Glory – a generic nickname for all flags – actually comes from the legend of a particular Civil War flag. The Confederate flag remains a lightning rod for political controversy. The most famous flag of the twentieth century was raised by three Marines at the battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.
The current preservation effort at the Smithsonian is meant to ensure the survival of the flag for another 500 years. As Thomassen-Krauss pointed out, in centuries to come The Star-Spangled Banner might inspire new democracies and generations yet unborn. One strand at a time, that preservation effort continues. In the end, it turns out the real enemy of the Star-Spangled Banner was not so much the British, but time itself.
