Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (53 page)

In fact, it was not until 1814, nearly forty years after its authorization by Congress, that the flag began to be widely discussed by Americans as a symbol of the country. In that year, an American flag bearing fifteen stars flew over Fort Henry at Baltimore, inspiring Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Where in the gradual, piecemeal evolution of the American flag does the figure of the Philadelphia seamstress born Elizabeth Griscom belong?

Betsy Ross
. When John Ross, an upholsterer, was killed in a munitions explosion in 1776, his wife, Betsy, took over operation of their tailoring business. The Ross store was on Philadelphia’s Arch Street, not far from the State House, on Chestnut Street, where history was being made almost daily.

According to legend, Betsy Ross was visited at her shop by General George Washington in June of 1776. They were supposed to have discussed various flag designs. And Washington allegedly settled for one composed of seven red and six white stripes, and thirteen five-pointed white stars arranged in a circle—though he had requested six-pointed stars. Betsy Ross is said to have convinced him that it would be easier for her to cut out five-pointed
stars. When the general departed, legend has it, the seamstress commenced stitching the official American flag.

Historians find it significant that not a single one of the numerous flags that flew at different times and places during the Revolutionary War is of the design alleged to be the handiwork of Betsy Ross.

Further, the tale recounted in history books was told by Betsy Ross herself—on her deathbed in 1836, and to her eleven-year-old grandson, William J. Canby. Betsy Ross at the time was eighty-four years old. Canby, in turn, did not publicly relate the tale until 1870, when he presented it at a meeting of the Pennsylvania Historical Society. That was thirty-four years after he had heard it as a boy, and almost a hundred years after the incident was alleged to have occurred.

Historical records verify that George Washington was in Philadelphia in June of 1776. But in his written itinerary there is no mention of a meeting with a local seamstress. Nor in Washington’s diary is there any evidence of his concern with the design of an official American flag. In fact, Congress had not yet convened a committee to tackle any flag design, nor at the time was there congressional talk of replacing the Grand Union Flag. Washington had made personal modifications in that flag, combining American with British features, but he had not expressed a desire to abandon it entirely. The consensus among historians who have investigated the Betsy Ross legend is that it’s no more than that—a legend: a nonverifiable story handed down from generation to generation. And one begun by the lady herself.

History and legend, though, have a way of blending in the crucible of time. Betsy Ross’s deathbed tale has inextricably rooted itself in the heart of American folklore. And whether in time it is unequivocally proved or disproved, it almost assuredly will be told and retold.

Pledge of Allegiance: 1892, Rome, New York

The pledge of allegiance to the American flag is neither an old verse nor one composed by the Republic’s founding fathers. It was written especially for children in the summer of 1892, to commemorate that year’s celebration of Columbus Day in public schools throughout the country.

The pledge’s first appearance in print was on September 8, 1892, in
The Youth’s Companion
, an educational publication. It is estimated that more than ten million American schoolchildren recited it that Columbus Day. In its original form, it read: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands—one nation indivisible—with liberty and justice for all.”

Its author was an editor of
The Youth’s Companion
, Francis Bellamy of Rome, New York. Bellamy intended his verse to be a one-time recitation. But its immediate popularity among the nation’s schoolchildren and teachers transformed it first into an annual Columbus Day tradition, then into a
daily classroom ritual. It became one of the earliest verses memorized by schoolchildren.

Since its debut, Bellamy’s pledge has undergone two alterations. In 1923, the United States Flag Association replaced the somewhat ambiguously personal “my flag” wording with the more explicitly patriotic “the Flag of the United States of America.” And in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill that introduced a religious note to the pledge, with the addition of the words “under God.”

Washington, D.C.: 1790

Although much has been written about the selection of Washington, D.C., as the nation’s capital, little has appeared concerning one of the early motivating factors for locating the center of government in an area that then was a remote swampland. This part of the story involves the desire of congressmen for a safe haven where they could peacefully conduct business without harassment by disgruntled civilians and soldiers.

The idea for a national capital city in a remote, inconvenient area originated at a June 1783 meeting of the Congress in the Old City Hall in Philadelphia. While several factors contributed to the decision, one in particular galvanized Congress to action.

The War of Independence had recently been concluded. The treasury was flat broke. The new nation had no credit, still lacked a President, and was heavily in debt to its soldiers for back pay. On June 20, a large and angry mob of unpaid soldiers invaded Philadelphia to present their grievances to Congress. It was not the first such violent confrontation. That day, though, a number of agitated congressmen—some angry, others frightened—expressed their weariness with such direct public intrusions. They launched a movement to establish a federal city where lawmakers could transact the business of state without civilian intimidation.

Several locations were considered. New Englanders, led by Alexander Hamilton of New York, sought a capital in the north. Southerners, represented by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, argued for a location in the south. In 1790, in an attempt to placate both sides, the recently elected President, George Washington, chose a site eighteen miles up the Potomac River from his home in Mount Vernon—a location then midway between north and south. In addition, the area was between the thriving seaports of Alexandria, Virginia, and Georgetown, Maryland. No one denied, however, that the ten-mile-square site was a bog.

After several years of planning, in September 1793 President Washington himself laid the cornerstone for the first U.S. Capitol. Office buildings were quickly erected. By 1800, the U.S. government had officially moved headquarters from Philadelphia to Washington.

No one was pleased with the new city.

Congressmen complained that it was
too
isolated. A wilderness. They and
their families resisted constructing homes there; as did government employees. Groups of citizens petitioned that the capital city be relocated to a more desirable, prestigious, and accessible location. What had been conceived by Washington as a “city of magnificent distances” was now disparagingly attacked by congressmen as a “capital of miserable huts,” “a mud-hole.” Abigail Adams, wife of the first President to occupy the presidential mansion, expressed a desire to move out, lamenting, “We have not the least convenience.”

By the close of Thomas Jefferson’s term of office, in 1809, the population of the nation’s new city was scarcely five thousand. To foreign heads of state, America’s capital was a nightmare. With a dearth of cultural institutions and personal conveniences, and with the Potomac continually muddying the dirt streets, foreign ambassadors stationed in the capital actually collected “hardship pay” from their governments.

The advent of the steam engine and the telegraph quelled some of the complaints. These inventions put the city in touch with the outside world. But the real change of attitude toward the new capital, in the minds of both ordinary citizens and government officials, resulted from a national tragedy.

In August 1814, the British invaded the city. They burned the President’s mansion, the Capitol, and the Navy Arsenal. Americans were incensed. And they were united, too, against an enemy that had attempted to destroy the nation’s capital—even if that capital was inaccessible, inhospitable, and undesirable to live in.

All clamor to relocate the city ceased. An immense and patriotic rebuilding effort began. Jefferson donated his own extensive collection of books to replace the destroyed contents of the Library of Congress. And the badly charred wooden planks of the President’s mansion were painted a shimmering white, conferring upon it for all time the title the White House.

In 1874, Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park, began landscaping the Capitol grounds with trees from various states and foreign countries. Contributing to that effort in 1912, the Japanese government presented the United States with a gift of three thousand cherry trees, whose blossoming thereafter would signal the city’s annual Cherry Blossom Festival. By then, of course, the site on the Potomac once intended to keep citizens from lobbying Congress had become the home of lobbyists.

Mount Rushmore: 1923, South Dakota

The faces originally to be carved into Mount Rushmore were not the fatherly countenances of four famous Presidents but the romanticized visages of three Western legends: Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and John Colter. Planned as a tourist attraction to draw money into South Dakota’s economy, the monument, as originally conceived, might scarcely have achieved its goal.

The full story of the origin of Mount Rushmore begins sixty million years ago, when pressures deep within the earth pushed up layers of rock. The forces created an elongated granite-and-limestone dome towering several thousand feet above the Dakota prairie lands. The first sculpting of the mountain was done by nature. The erosive forces of wind and water fashioned one particularly protuberant peak, which was unnamed until 1885.

That year, a New York attorney, Charles E. Rushmore, was surveying the mountain range on horseback with a guide. Rushmore inquired about the impressive peak’s name, and the guide, ribbing the city lawyer, answered, “Hell, it never had a name. But from now on we’ll call the damn thing Rushmore.” The label stuck. And later, with a gift of five thousand dollars, Charles Rushmore became one of the earliest contributors to the presidential memorial.

The origin of the sculpture is better documented and more inspiring than that of the mountain’s name.

The idea to transform a gigantic mountaintop into a colossus of human figures sprang from the mind of a South Dakota historian, Doane Robinson. In 1923, Robinson presented to the state his plan to simultaneously increase South Dakota’s tourism, strengthen its economy, and immortalize three “romantic western heroes.” A commission then sought the skills of renowned sculptor John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, an authority on colossi.

Idaho born, Borglum started as a painter, then switched to sculpture, and his fame grew in proportion to the size of his works. The year Doane Robinson conceived the idea for a Mount Rushmore memorial, Borglum accepted a commission from the United Daughters of the Confederacy to carve a head of General Robert E. Lee on Stone Mountain in Georgia.

Mount Rushmore, though, beckoned with the greater challenge.

Borglum opposed sculpting Western heroes. The notion was overly provincial, he argued. A colossus should capture prominent figures. In a letter dated August 14, 1925, Borglum proposed the faces of four influential American Presidents.

Construction on the 6,200-foot-high wilderness peak was fraught with dangers. And the mountain itself was inaccessible except by foot or horseback, which necessitated countless climbs to lug up drills and scaffolding. But for Borglum, two features made the remote Rushmore peak ideal. The rocks faced southeast, ensuring maximum sunlight for construction, and later for viewing. And the peak’s inaccessibility would protect the monument from vandals.

Bitter winters, compounded by a chronic shortage of funds, continually threatened to terminate construction. Weathered surface rock had to be blasted away to expose suitably firm stone for sculpting. The chin of George Washington, for instance, was begun thirty feet back from the original mountain surface, and Theodore Roosevelt’s forehead was undertaken only after one hundred twenty feet of surface rock were peeled away.

Borglum worked from a scale model. Critical “points” were measured on the model, then transferred to the mountain to indicate the depth of rock to be removed point by point.

In 1941, fourteen years after construction began—and at a total cost of $990,000—a new world wonder was unveiled. There stood George Washington, whom Borglum selected because he was “Father of the Nation”; Abraham Lincoln, “Preserver of the Union”; Thomas Jefferson, “The Expansionist”; and Theodore Roosevelt, “Protector of the Working Man.”

The figures measure sixty feet from chin to top of head. Each nose is twenty feet long, each mouth eighteen feet wide, and the eyes are eleven feet across. “A monument’s dimensions,” Borglum believed, “should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events commemorated.”

Gutzon Borglum died on March 6, 1941, aged seventy-four. The monument was essentially completed. His son, also a sculptor, added the finishing touches.

Boy Scouts of America: 1910, Chicago

A good deed performed by an anonymous boy prompted a wealthy Chicago businessman to found the scouting movement in America. The boy was already a scout, a British scout, a member of an organization begun in England by Colonel Robert Baden-Powell. (The scouts’ motto, “Be Prepared,” is not only a forceful exhortation but also something of a tribute to Baden-Powell’s initials, a coincidence he enjoyed calling attention to, since practically no one else noticed.)

While serving his country in Africa during the turn-of-the-century Boer War, Baden-Powell complained that young recruits from England lacked strength of character and resourcefulness. On returning home, he assembled twenty-two boys, to imbue them with the attributes of loyalty, courage, and leadership. And in 1908, he published
Scouting for Boys
, a stalking and survival manual, which formally marked the start of the British Boy Scouts.