June 14 is Flag Day, a time that honors America’s best-known symbol of freedom, Old Glory. In celebration of our iconic flag, we’ve compiled a few flag fun facts we thought you might enjoy.
The biggest. The Superflag, as it’s known, is the largest American flag in the world. In 1996, as it was draped down the side of the Hoover Dam, the Guinness World Book of Records measured it at 505 feet long by 255 feet wide. The flag weighs about 3,000 pounds and takes hundreds of people to maneuver and unfurl. Until 2009, Superflag was the largest flag anywhere in the world. It was beat by a North Korean flag measuring 900 feet long by 300 feet high.
The oldest. The Forster Flag is the oldest surviving flag said to represent America, though it looks nothing like the Old Glory we’ve all come to know and love. Created during the years of the American Revolution, it’s made from a square of red silk bearing the 13 white stripes of the original colonies. Legend says the flag’s silk was cut from a British flag captured on the first day of the Revolution in 1775.
As a claim in space. On July 21, 1969, the American flag became the first to grace the surface of the moon, thanks in part to astronaut Buzz Aldrin. The flag, one of six that astronauts would plant on the moon during various Apollo missions, was said by Aldrin to have blown over from rocket blast as the astronauts returned home. Space crews were more careful in later flag plantings. Other than the U.S., only the former Soviet Union, Japan, China and India have flags on the moon.
As inspiration. In 1814, poet Francis Scott Key was inspired to write our national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner,” after seeing a war-battered American flag flying over Fort McHenry in Baltimore. The song, originally called “The Defense of Fort McHenry,” became America’s official national anthem in 1931.
In 1892, the flag inspired Francis Bellamy and James B. Upham to write the Pledge of Allegiance. First published in a youth magazine, the Pledge of Allegiance was part of the duo’s marketing strategy to sell flags to schools—they sold thousands. Congress formally adopted the pledge in 1942.
As courtroom controversy. In 1984, the American flag sparked off a debate on the rights of free speech when a man at a Dallas protest set Old Glory ablaze as a political statement. The man, Gregory Johnson, was arrested and convicted in a Texas court of desecration of a venerated object. But a series of appeals eventually led to a Supreme Court ruling that flag burning, in cases like Johnson’s, was protected under the First Amendment. In 1989, Congress enacted the Flag protection Act. But that, too, was overturned because of free speech concerns.
From all of us here at Veteran Energy, happy Flag Day, Texas.
