Flag Day

In 1885 Bernard J. Cigrand, teaching at Stony Hill School near Waubeka, Wisconsin, stood a ten-inch, 38-star flag in an inkwell and set his pupils to write essays on what it meant to them. He called June 14 the flag's birthday, its 108th.

George Balch, a kindergarten teacher in New York City, planned patriotic activities for his students on June 14, 1889, and the New York State Board of Education is said to have adopted his observance statewide.

In 1893, on the suggestion of Colonel J. Granville Leach, the Pennsylvania Society of Colonial Dames urged Philadelphia to display the flag on June 14, and Leach recommended the day be known as Flag Day. Dr. Edward Brooks, the superintendent of public schools, held exercises in Independence Square, where every child was handed a small flag. The American Flag Day Association formed the next year and drew more than 300,000 children into Chicago's parks for the first general school children's celebration.

The statute arrived thirty-three years later. H. J. Res. 170 became Public Law 203, approved on August 3, 1949. It runs to a single sentence: it designates June 14 of each year as Flag Day, and the President is "authorized and requested" to issue an annual proclamation.

Congress used the same phrase seventeen years later, asking the President to proclaim the week containing June 14 as National Flag Week. The text moved into the United States Code in 1998. In 2004 the House of Representatives passed H. Res. 662, resolving that Flag Day originated in Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, and reciting that Wilson's proclamation had officially established the day, where Wilson's own text says he suggested and requested.

Not one of those documents ordered a private citizen to do anything.