Thursday, June 14, 2018

Our Flag Floats Over Battlefields in Europe, Fighting Hordes of the Autocracy, 1918


From the front page of the Chattanooga News, June 14, 1918
The Flag, Our Flag, the Oldest Flag That Flies
One hundred and forty-one years ago there appeared on the face of the globe a new flag. It was the flag of a new nation, a state dedicated to freedom, liberty and justice. It floated over a people at war in a country undeveloped but rich in hope and purpose. It floats today over the sons and daughters of those peoples and over all the other human beings who have sought safety and freedom beneath its folds.
It is the Stars and Stripes, floating on this anniversary of its birth over millions of homes from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada’s border to the gulf, and—what is newest and so superbly grand—it floats this day on the battlefields of Europe where the hosts of democracy are fighting the hordes of autocracy!
Our flag has a history rich in deeds and glorious in hope. It is the oldest of all the flags that now fly in the whole world. The flags of our allies are younger. The present tricolor of France appeared in 1794, fully 17 years after Old Glory had come into existence. Italy’s flag was born in 1870, the British flag in 1801, Portugal in 1815, Belgium, 1831, and our South American allies even later. The flags of Japan and China of today are not as old as the Stars and Stripes.
But it is not because our flag is the oldest of all flags that we love it so well and honor it so truly. Our flag stands for the things we love and admire and hope to attain in the most wonderful measure. Our flag is the emblem of the highest ideals any nation has set out to reach. There is something great and good back of our flag: liberty, justice humanity and equality. However, let us not be misunderstood. It is not he cloth of which our national emblem is made that we love and for which our sons gladly storm the heights of fame and death. We honor and respect it and died for it because—
“A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation’s flag, sees not the flag, but the nation itself,” said that great preacher and American, Henry Ward Beecher. “And whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the government, the principles, the truths, the history, that belong to the natin that sets it forth. The American flag has been a symbol of liberty, and men rejoiced in it.
“The stars upon it were like the bright morning stars of God, and the stripes upon it were beams of morning light. As at early dawn the stars shine forth even while it grows light, and then as the sun advances that light breaks into banks and streaming lines of color, the glowing red and intense white striving together, and ribbing the horizon with bars effulgent, so, on the American flag, stars and beams of many colored lights shine out together. And wherever this flag comes and men behold it they see in its sacred emblazony no embattled castles or insignia of imperial authority; they see the symbols of light. It is the banner of dawn.”
And today, on this anniversary of our flag’s birth, the Stars and Stripes float in France—the banner of dawn to the peoples whom the iron heel of German military might seeks to crush into cruel and heartless slavery as it demolishes their homes, ignores their rights and destroys their lives.
All along the battleline, from the channel to the Alps, this flag—Our Flag—is the flag of hope and promise, the emblem which adds strength to the arm and courage to the heart of liberty’s fighters. God speed the day when we make good this hope and promise. For until that day has arrived the power of the Huns cannot be overcome and civilization will continue struggling in the grasp of her worst enemies, the Teuton and the Turk.
We Americans ourselves must carry that banner of dawn to the trenches “over there.” To do this means carrying the heaviest portion of the war burden in the battlefields “over there” and in the homes and fields and shops here at home. We must not only fight but we must help our allies to carry on their end of the war. It is a wonderfully large piece of war we have set out upon, greater than that attempted before by any nation, but we can do it if we concentrate our war so that all business, all pleasures, all hopes shall meet in the one undertaking—War—winning the war!
We must win or our flag ceases to be the Banner of Dawn.
We can only win by putting every ounce of our energy and our every thought into the fight. Any effort less than that places our flag, our country, ourselves in peril.
“Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”


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