How did we get so red, white and blue?

Whether you fly it, wear it or want nothing to do with it, the American flag says a lot in and about the United States. Red, white and blue is far from exclusive to our nation and yet it is very much our brand... and very much branded on anything we can think to put it on. So where did the American obsession with our flag come from? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:31Hannah McCarthy?

  Nick, the other day I was craving a vanilla soft serve ice cream with rainbow sprinkles because I have never not craved a vanilla soft serve with rainbow sprinkles. And at a certain point, I realized that, as an adult, I can just choose to eat kid-coated desserts and I will be just fine.

• 1:49Nick Capodice?

  Just a quick reminder, Hannah, this is Civics 101.

• 1:52Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 1:54Nick Capodice?

  And I'm Nick Capodice, and I'm here to get you back on track.

• 1:57Hannah McCarthy?

  OK, this story serves a purpose, I promise. Because when my ardently anticipated ice cream was handed out that window, it was not rainbow sprinkled at all.

• 2:08Nick Capodice?

  Everybody's on the edge of their seats here, Hannah.

• 2:10Hannah McCarthy?

  The sprinkles were red, white, and blue. And I thought, right, of course, it's almost summer. It is almost the 4th of July. It is almost the 250th birthday of America. So red, white and blue, which are everywhere anyway, was going to be especially everywhere lately. And then I thought, I really wish that I could ask for regular rainbow sprinkles. But what would that say about me?

• 2:37Nick Capodice?

  Probably that you're more red than you are red, white and blue. If you know what I'm saying, Hannah.

• 2:42Hannah McCarthy?

  Probably. So today, where for the American obsession, devotion, adoration, deification of the red, white and blue? Now, Nick, ours is not the only flag with these colors by a long shot.

• 2:57Nick Capodice?

  Oh, absolutely. There is France, Norway, the Netherlands.

• 3:02Hannah McCarthy?

  Great Britain notably.

• 3:04Nick Capodice?

  Oh, yeah, duh.

• 3:05Hannah McCarthy?

  In fact, there are dozens and dozens of countries and territories with red, white and blue flags. But here, those words in that order are shorthand for America.

• 3:30Nick Capodice?

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• 4:15Nick Capodice?

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• 4:36Nick Capodice?

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• 5:21Nick Capodice?

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• 6:26Hannah McCarthy?

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• 7:04Hannah McCarthy?

  So I wanted to know, does everyone's heart be true for the red, white, and blue, or their nation's equivalent, or is it just us? But first, where did it come from?

• 7:15Nick Capodice?

  Come from? Our flag? Like, who designed it?

• 7:17Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, we've talked about that a bit before on the show. It likely was not Betsy Ross, despite the way the story goes, but it is possible. It is far more likely it was a guy named Francis Hopkinson, who designed flags for the Navy. He is the only one who made a documented claim to it in his lifetime, and there is evidence that he requested payment in the form of a, quote, "quarter cask of the public wine."

• 7:40Nick Capodice?

  Only a quarter cask? In exchange for the enduring symbol of American freedom, equality, and union?

• 7:47Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, whoever did design it had no idea what the flag would come to mean. And at the time, it really was not that big a deal.

• 7:56Nick Capodice?

  How could that possibly be the case?

• 7:58Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, let's get back to where the flag came from. Or maybe a better way of putting it is what the flag was for. Because the first American flag was a basic necessity during the Revolutionary War. The Continental Army, who entered armed conflict with the motherland in 1775, needed to distinguish itself from the British Army. Specifically, it needed an ensign that was different from their ensigns.

• 8:28Nick Capodice?

  An ensign?

• 8:29Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah.

• 8:29Nick Capodice?

  Like in Star Trek?

• 8:30Hannah McCarthy?

  Like in Star Trek, and also in militaries in the real world. Still holding out hope, of course, that Star Trek is the future of the real world. But I digress. Ensign can be the title of a ranking officer in the military, or it can be the name of a flag. Specifically, a flag that identifies a ship as military or civilian. So for the British, they took their existing flag, the Union flag or the Union Jack, and they shrank it and they stuck it in the canton.

• 8:57Nick Capodice?

  The canton. Well, I know what that is as a self-described amateur vexillologist. And this is something we've talked about before on Civics 101. It is the upper left-hand corner of a flag. For us, at least today, it is blue with stars.

• 9:11Hannah McCarthy?

  Bingo. So in the British ensigns, the Union Jack was in the canton. And the rest of the space might be blue. It might be red. It might be white with a red cross. And the revolutionaries looked at that and realized they needed something different. States had flags, but the army and Congress did not. So we also shrank that Union Jack down for our canton and made the rest of it red and white stripes.

• 9:36Nick Capodice?

  And keeping that Union Jack, that was to symbolize loyalty? Like, we're fighting with you and we're different from you, but we're still part of you?

• 9:46Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, historians haven't actually come to a consensus on that point. In 1775, when we first started using it, we hadn't yet declared independence. We hadn't yet blamed King George for our ills. Our beef was with Parliament. Now, one theory is that this was a way for the Continental Army to, yes, show loyalty to the king. Another is that it was supposed to show resistance to Parliament. Or both. And one way or another, it is nearly identical to the British East India Company flag.

• 10:17Nick Capodice?

  Which was a self-governing company that managed to take over India while remaining loyal to the king. So it's sort of like we could be our own self-governing entity and maintain Britishness.

• 10:30Hannah McCarthy?

  Yes. And again, who knows if that's what we were trying to say exactly? The symbolism of flags has always been important, but not in the same way it is today. We have to be careful about giving 18th century flags a 21st century interpretation. At that time, flags were almost entirely about military operations. The Continental Congress passed the flag resolution on July 14, 1777. It says, quote, "Resolved that the flag of the 13 United States be 13 stripes, alternate red and white, and that the Union be 13 stars, white and a blue field, representing a new constellation."

• 11:09Nick Capodice?

  And this was because we had actually become the United States at this point? We had finally blamed the king? We are finally thinking about ourselves as an independent nation?

• 11:20Hannah McCarthy?

  There's a bit of that. There is also a bit of, uh-oh, when we have the Union Jack on our flag, we might accidentally get fired on by our own side. Better switch it up. And we already have the stripe thing going. That's pretty familiar. So let's just change the canton.

• 11:36Nick Capodice?

  Hannah, was it really that casual?

• 11:38Hannah McCarthy?

  I think it's more like one small detail among many decisions being made about the operations of a burgeoning military within a tenuous, brand-new country. And for years to come, these United States flags would be haphazard. There was no standard design, no direction on how many points the stars should have, how the stars should be arranged, how many red versus white stripes. I mean, some of the flags even had blue stripes.

• 12:06Nick Capodice?

  Blue? Even though Congress passed an act saying red and white stripes? Also, Hannah, if you're going to say, "This is our flag," why wouldn't you, I don't know, include a picture? Or a press release of some kind that says, "And this is what it looks like."

• 12:25Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, over the course of the revolution, there were a lot of questions about the standard. People wanted to know, you know, like, what exactly is the design? Do we have some standard that we can use to base our military flags on? But again, the flag is part utilitarian object, a military tool. Was a flag representative of shared ideals and solidarity? The sort of thing that could remind people, namely soldiers, what they were on about? Totally. Was it this mere sacred beacon for all citizenry to fly with pride? Uh-uh.

• 13:05Hannah McCarthy?

  It was far more a way of saying, hey, don't shoot. We're friends, or we're still here, or this is ours now, or this is not a warship.

• 13:14Nick Capodice?

  Or watch out, we're gonna get you.

• 13:17Hannah McCarthy?

  Sure, but you weren't walking down to the corner store to buy a flag to hang by your front door. The average person is not flying the flag at all.

• 13:26Nick Capodice?

  All right, so obviously, something changed, majorly. What happened?

• 13:32Hannah McCarthy?

  We're gonna get to that after the break.

• 13:46Nick Capodice?

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• 14:31Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics, or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 14:53Nick Capodice?

  Holiday season is coming, and I don't think I have to tell you this might be a tough one, because things are expensive in the fall of 2026. Everyone I know is looking for ways to make a little extra money, prowling around the side hustle subreddits. But I will say, if you're looking to sell something to launch a store fast before the holiday rush, Shopify is the one-stop-shop platform for making a professional-looking store without touching a line of code. You can sell anything, and you can sell it anywhere that people shop online. You can have it done in minutes, and you can launch before Black Friday, that time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to

• 15:36Nick Capodice?

  buy. So if you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/civics to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/civics. Just go to Shopify.com/civics today to hear your first.

• 15:55Speaker 01

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• 16:34Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. We're talking the red, white, and blue, stars and stripes, Old Glory.

• 16:39Nick Capodice?

  The Star-Spangled Banner.

• 16:41Hannah McCarthy?

  Actually, the Star-Spangled Banner is the nickname of a real, actual flag. And there is only one, and you can go see it at the Smithsonian. And it is the one that Francis Scott Key wrote the poem about, and that is how it got its name. But that was not until 1814.

• 16:55Nick Capodice?

  During the War of 1812, when the British were like, "Actually, you know what? We're not done here."

• 17:02Hannah McCarthy?

  Actually, we started the War of 1812 over trade restrictions during the Napoleonic Wars. Britain was not really in any real way trying to regain North America.

• 17:13Nick Capodice?

  And there is yet another global conflict I missed in grade school.

• 17:16Hannah McCarthy?

  You and me both. Anyway, yes, during the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key wrote the poem that would eventually be excerpted for our National Anthem.

• 17:30Hannah McCarthy?

  And what happened was this. The British Royal Navy bombarded the American Fort McHenry in Baltimore. And when all was said and done, the American flag was still there. Huzzah. And that success was immortalized in poetry.

• 17:49Nick Capodice?

  And so the Star Spangled Banner, our national anthem, is actually a war poem.

• 17:54Hannah McCarthy?

  It is very much a war poem, and it isn't even called the Star Spangled Banner. It is called the Defense of Fort McHenry. The song, our national anthem, leaves out a lot of the war stuff.

• 18:05Nick Capodice?

  So Francis Scott Key was documenting the horrors of war and the success of this new country, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

• 18:14Hannah McCarthy?

  Right. And if you think of the line, "Does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave?" He's saying, "Do we still have the fort?" And also, more broadly, will this free and brave country prevail in this war? The flag is the signifier that we are continuing. If it is still there, we are still here.

• 18:52Hannah McCarthy?

  And yes, the tattered Fort McHenry flag was trotted out for special occasions in the decades following the war. It was representative of something far greater than itself. The Star Spangled Banner was revered, make no mistake. But we are trying to figure out when this symbol became something that we all possessed, something that projected our American-ness to others, something we revered, something we put on our hats and t-shirts and pillows and mugs and rugs and shorts and bikinis and anything else we can manage to stick it on. So when did that happen? Right?

• 19:29Nick Capodice?

  Right.

• 19:30Hannah McCarthy?

  Civil war, my friend.

• 19:31Nick Capodice?

  No way.

• 19:33Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:34Nick Capodice?

  So that is like 100 years of the flag mostly being this military symbol, not something that everyone, or anyone else really, displayed. And then, all of a sudden, it's everywhere?

• 19:47Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, in terms of the Stars and Stripes, the defining moment was the capture of Fort Sumter by the Confederacy. When they took it, they raised a new flag. Their flag.

• 19:58Nick Capodice?

  Right, the Stars and Bars.

• 20:05Nick Capodice?

  So Hannah, was this, the Confederacy, purposefully riffing off the Stars and Stripes?

• 20:10Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, very much so. And very quickly here, the Stars and Bars is not the same thing as the Confederate battle flag that many Americans display proudly to this day. The Stars and Bars has the blue canton with a circle of, as the name suggests, stars, and three bars of color, two red and one white. As one newspaper put it, "It bore, quote, 'a sufficient resemblance to the old one to keep in everlasting remembrance the glorious deeds achieved beneath its fold,' unquote." The idea was not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but to retain an old patriotism while building a new one.

• 20:48Nick Capodice?

  So Sumter was captured, and then what? Suddenly, everyone, or every Unionist, I guess, wants to display old glory?

• 20:56Hannah McCarthy?

  Basically, yeah. Flag culture took off very quickly. Flag Day, which we now celebrate on June 14th, was proposed shortly after the capture of Fort Sumter, conceived of as a way to support the Union troops. We were a nation divided, clashing ideals. So, on the battlefield, flags signified, literally and politically, spiritually, where you stood, where the lines were drawn, as brothers and fathers, sons and friends, killed each other for what they believed in. The flags were the objects that told everyone who you were, what you represented, and what represented you.

• 21:43Nick Capodice?

  And I guess if you're going to roll out a brand new flag to represent your side, your movement, and I'm talking about the Confederacy here, you're going to want a lot of people to see the Stars and Bars.

• 21:54Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, and there were these local flag-raising ceremonies throughout the South. There were schematics of the design available for people who wanted to copy it. It appeared on newspaper mastheads, on envelopes, on railroad cars, courthouses, hotels. Likewise, in the North, the Stars and Stripes was displayed on schoolhouses, churches, and even tucked into hats and lapels.

• 22:16Nick Capodice?

  Lapels? So people are wearing the thing that used to be reserved for the military in special occasions?

• 22:23Hannah McCarthy?

  That's right. During the Civil War, displaying your flag became fully entwined with patriotism for whatever side you were on. And a lot of historians think of this as the beginning of the American flag as a symbol of devoutness to the only national religion America has: itself.

• 22:46Hannah McCarthy?

  It has been referred to by some as a flag cult.

• 22:50Nick Capodice?

  Wait, what does that mean?

• 22:51Hannah McCarthy?

  Officially, Nick, we have no religion, right? Though I'm sure many would beg to differ, we have no national religion, we have no king. But people are people, and a lot of the time, they need fervor, they need to worship something. And after the Civil War, after so many had died for an idea and by transference for a flag, and the idea and the flag that won out was the Stars and Stripes, Old Glory, its sacredness took hold.

• 23:21Nick Capodice?

  Well, Hannah, is it treated as sacred, though? Like, if we're putting it on beach towels and underwear?

• 23:30Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, I mean, Nick, that's an issue in religious sects around the world. Is it right and pious to create physical representations of something you worship? Is iconography holy, or is it blasphemy? And in the United States, that truly runs the gamut. There are those who see their Jesus t-shirts, or car decals, or any number of other objects as a signifier of their devotion, and those who see it as oppositional to real Christian piety.

• 23:57Nick Capodice?

  Right. So speaking of the iconography thing, Hannah, when did we start putting the flag on everything?

• 24:03Hannah McCarthy?

  By the first centennial, 1876, photography and lithography had made it possible to stamp the symbol of freedom of persevering ideals on loads of commercial products. It also allowed politicians to stamp the flag on their campaign materials.

• 24:20Nick Capodice?

  All right, so the flag became a tool for commercialism and politicking.

• 24:25Hannah McCarthy?

  Just as it is today. Simultaneously, there were those who saw this as an exploitation and desecration of the sacred symbol of the United States. We established Flag Day in 1877. Flag committees were formed around the country to dictate the proper use of the Stars and Stripes. To learn, by the way, how the Pledge of Allegiance came to be, check out our episode on that. World Wars I and II certainly catapulted the flag to a new stratosphere of reverence and representation of liberty. And finally, Congress approved a flag code that would tell people exactly how they should and should not treat the flag.

• 25:01Nick Capodice?

  To that point, Hannah, the flag code says that the flag must not be used for advertising purposes of any kind whatsoever. So what does that make all those Old Navy shirts?

• 25:14Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, the flag code is more guidelines than actual rules.

• 25:21Nick Capodice?

  You're always finding a way to sneak it in, Hannah.

• 25:23Hannah McCarthy?

  And by that, I mean, it doesn't contain much in the way of enforcement. Are the Old Navy t-shirts and all of the other flag things illegal? There are those who say technically yes, but without any actual penalty, there's not much you can do. Now, there are state American flag laws as well. In 1907, for example, the Supreme Court upheld a Nebraska law prohibiting desecration of the flag when a businessman was charged for putting an American flag label on a bottle of beer. That said, Nick, if patriotism is one American deity, capitalism is another. The towels and the shoes and the board shorts and the rugs, they're here to stay.

• 26:01Nick Capodice?

  All right. So I am wondering if we really are a little bit more flag obsessed than other countries. Like, we clearly have a unique history with it, but are we the only ones who do this? Who like, print every object we can think of with the stars and stripes?

• 26:18Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, not exactly. The Union Jack is heavily merchandised in Great Britain, though the national devotion there is more entwined with the royal family, admittedly a complicated and not at all universal devotion. In Denmark, the Danish flag is displayed everywhere, including on Christmas trees. In France, the flag, blue, white, and red, continues to serve as a symbol of a successful revolution and of national principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. But Americans are undeniably among the most fervent flag devotees on earth.

• 26:52Nick Capodice?

  All right. Last question here, Hannah. We have talked before about the proliferation of different kinds of flags in the United States in recent years. Flags that represent or signify movements, opposition, division. Flags that say, sometimes by way of redesigning the American flag, "We are the true representation of America." And the American flag itself has become, to some, divisive. Or at the very least, conflicting. Because what it means to be a patriot, to be an American, to honor and revere liberty, is incredibly fragmented right now. The flag itself, by way of its use, or some might say overuse,

• 27:36Nick Capodice?

  in certain spheres, has been perceived as politicized. As representing a party instead of a people. So my question is, has this ever happened before? Has the symbol of unity ever been a symbol of division?

• 27:54Hannah McCarthy?

  Whether it comforts you or not, it most certainly has. Overwhelmingly for the Black American population of the United States, for whom the symbol of unity and of freedom did not represent their reality, whether under enslavement or in the ensuing decades of oppression and violence, the American flag has been conflicting or worse. And it was following the Vietnam War that flag burning was found to be a constitutionally protected form of speech after anti-war protesters burned Old Glory when, to them, it had become representative of the American government's transgressions. But I think if there were ever a time that the flag was as widely fraught as it is today, it would be the exact same era that made the flag what it became.

• 28:38Nick Capodice?

  And you mean the Civil War?

• 28:40Hannah McCarthy?

  I do. There was pain, melancholy, longing, disgust, and fury in the South when it came to the Stars and Stripes. The Union, as they saw it, had been destroyed by, as one historian put it, "abolitionist fanatics and their unprincipled despotic president." It doesn't surprise me, Nick, that the Civil War complicated and cemented the American flag as something so much grander than a military tool. When we turned our resistance and weapons against each other, against ourselves, the American flag became a symbol of division, even as it fervently united one half of the nation.

• 29:25Nick Capodice?

  But even the Confederacy couldn't let it go, not entirely. If they were going to have a new flag, it was going to honor what the original represented or what it had come to represent.

• 29:38Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, and I think that even if today Americans are once again looking at one another over that flag, it is hard, to the point of being painful, to ignore the people and victories and defeats and joy and anguish woven into it. I'm not sure we can stop the flag from meaning something more than any one era or body politic or movement or president. For what my two senses worth, I think we threw that constellation of stars too far up into the heavens. It's more a question of whether we can still see it by the dawn's early light.

• 30:48Hannah McCarthy?

  That does it for this episode. It was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy, with Nick Cappadicei. Marina Hanke is our producer, Dana Cataldo is our digital producer, and Rebecca Lavoy is our executive producer. Music in this episode comes from Epidemic Sound. We have certainly talked about the American flag before on Civics 101, and we will almost certainly talk about it again. But in the meantime, you can check out our additional episodes on our website civics101podcast.org to fill in the gaps in the red, white, and blue. And don't forget to follow us wherever you get your podcasts so that Civics 101 is always in your feed. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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• 32:42Speaker 01

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• 33:03Speaker 02

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