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But a great many of the young who use the flag without restraint are very serious indeed, even if they deliberately employ shock tactics for effect. Says Sal Arnold, a 19-year-old Chicago hippie: "None of us hates the country. We love the country—what it's supposed to be." A friend of his, Ray Meyerbach, adds: "The intentions of the founding fathers—they're really groovy. We're saying it's the ideal that's important, not how you show the flag."
In their own causes, they attach great importance to how it is shown. The day after the Kent State shootings, a crowd of 20,000 young people gathered on the steps of the Massachusetts Statehouse to protest. As Republican Governor Francis Sargent looked down, the crowd chanted: "Lower the flag! Lower the flag!" Sargent did so. The encounter was an indirect affirmation by youth of the country's most enduring symbol; the lowering of the flag to half-staff seemed to them a proper and necessary tribute to their fellow students who had fallen.
Though those who fly the flag in a traditional spirit sometimes speak in voices that are capable of chauvinism and boosterism, they very often feel an intensely deep patriotism. To begin with, observes Political Scientist Sidney Hyman, "many Americans are first, second-or third-generation. The proudest moment in the lives of their parents or grandparents was the citizenship ceremony when they received the flag. My own immigrant father took every chance to fly the flag as an affirmation of citizenship. You don't have to do this in England or France, where nationhood is deduced from history. Here you've got a created country with a continuing history, and you see it all written on the flag."
The construction workers, who have become the most aggressive defenders of the flag's virtues, often reflect their ethnic and social distance from the dissenting young whom they so fiercely resent. The rush to the flag, Harvard Professor of Sociology Martin Lipset suggests, is a symptom of tribalism. Thus in a matter of months the hardhats have constituted themselves as a new militant fraternity in American life. "That's my flag they're burning," a carpenter named Clem Perke said in defense of a parade of 15,000 hardhats two weeks ago in Baltimore. "Look back at the Depression. I came here from the Pennsylvania coal mines. We had plenty to demonstrate about, but we didn't. We just worked harder."
Pride and Passion
In much of the country, flags also seem to excite some emotion that cries for more of everything. In Munster, 111., for example, Mrs. Mary Lou Kieswetter heads Project 41, a plan to have "Old Glory flown in front of every home and place of business along U.S. Highway 41 from Upper Michigan to Miami, Fla." Says Mrs. Kieswetter: "The inert majority have got off their duffs and begun to protest in a beautiful, constructive way."