Stars, Stripes, and Stitches
Summary: Every year, Princeton, NJ, our Executive Director Jay’s hometown, hosts a flag day ceremony. Jay gave the keynote at this year’s ceremony, and we’re publishing an abridged version of those remarks here for the 4th of July.
Flag Day commemorates the adoption of the flag of the United States by the Second Continental Congress in June, 1777. As is the case with many moments of national importance, this holiday has a connection to my tiny town: it was Woodrow Wilson (a former President at Princeton University) who in 1916 designated June 14th as Flag Day.
With that in mind, how can we make meaning of Flag Day in our own community? The flag has been flown in Princeton since before we had an official national flag. Most famously, in January 1777 it was a Battle Standard. In John Trumbull’s famous painting of the Battle of Princeton, George Washington sits atop his horse in a heroic pose in the center of the frame, with the 13-star flag just over his left shoulder.
In the foreground, we see the death of General Hugh Mercer, the namesake of Mercer County, New Jersey. In the far background, we see Thomas Clarke’s home atop a hill. He was a Quaker and a farmer, and was opposed to war, but war came to him. In the days following the battle, he opened his home as a field hospital serving the dying and wounded soldiers from both sides.
If you were to visit the Princeton Battlefield, you’d still see the Thomas Clarke House standing to this day. I like to think we’ve preserved the Clarke home on the Battlefield because it serves as a pretty good metaphor for our small town: in Princeton, world-shaping events can happen in your front yard. On a given weeknight here, we have scientists making plasma sources for particle accelerators at the Plasma Physics Lab about a mile from kids playing baseball. A guy I coached my 9 year-old with this year is literally an astrophysicist.
We’ve counted among our residents the likes of Paul Robeson, Albert Einstein, and Robert Oppenheimer. They’ve shared the town with people who are less historically notable but whose lives are no less profound. People like my grandmother and grandfather—Italian immigrants who arrived here in 1955, who built a life and a family here, and who became stalwarts of the community and who love their country.
When we look at our flag and feel pride, I think that pride comes from a couple of places. There’s a generalized pride that makes us proud of our country’s achievements: victories in war that cemented our national experiment in self-governance, a civil rights movement that brought us closer to our founding ideals, scientific breakthroughs that have extended the frontiers of human capacity. I like to think of this as pride in the Stars and the Stripes.
But there’s another, more specific kind of pride, that is personal to each family, to each individual. I remember my cousin AJ, as a high-schooler, organized a fundraiser he hosted at the Italian American Club. He used the money to send my Marines some goodies when we were in Iraq in 2008. He had the moral framework do this because he had a set of patriotic values that had been enforced in the setting of an old Italian tradition of hundreds of large Sunday meals. He had a place to do this because a bunch of his forebears cultivated a community that was eventually strong enough to construct a small building at the edge of town.
This type of pride is a bit less ambitious, and much less symbolic than the pride of the Stars and Stripes, but it’s more essential and functional. I like to think of it as pride in the flag’s stitching, holding everything together.
Great countries like ours need both. We need common symbols and commonly-understood points of pride, and we need ambitious men and women who can offer new generations new things to hold in universal regard. But like everything, that ambition, when unmoderated by personal virtue or unconstrained by a bigger mission, can become harmful.
He’s not in Trumbull’s painting, but Alexander Hamilton was also in the Battle of Princeton, serving as a Captain of the Artillery, where he fired on the British and Hessians making their last stand in the University’s Nassau Hall. Twenty-eight years later his ambition and pride led to his death in a duel with Aaron Burr, who himself is buried at Princeton Cemetery.
We don’t duel anymore, but we do fight. Red, White and Blue often just seems like Red versus Blue. Re-mending the flag, I think, is less a matter of Stars and Stripes, and more a matter of stitching.
I’m now a father of four. I chose to move my family back to the place I consider home because it is a wonderful, safe place with great schools, and a place where I’m confident that each of my children will have an opportunity to cultivate their talent to the utmost. But I also moved them back here to be with people like their grandparents, their great-grandparents, and their cousin AJ.
In a place like Princeton, I’m not too worried about cultivating my children’s ambitions—to try and forge the sorts of people that give us pride in the Stars and Stripes. But I do think it’s harder than it once was to cultivate kids who are proud of the stitching.
I might ask you, then, to use this flag day (or the Fourth of July, in the case of this newsletter) to think about your own stitching, and to help your children look closely enough to see how vital these threads are. As important as it is for your children to get into a great school, and eventually find a great job, it’s equally important—and, I think, much more difficult today—to ground them in something real, in something vital.
Simply stated: get involved—coach, mentor, volunteer, join a club. Use today to reflect on the stitching that’s given you and your family pride, and if you have children, help them to see and understand the same.
We can’t do this without you!
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