“Flag Day, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” 1942 photo by John Vachon (1914-1975) for the U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. Image from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
Fathers Day, third Sunday in June (June 18 in 2023)
Several states celebrate statehood. New Hampshire, Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia celebrate statehood; Kentucky and Tennessee share the same date.
Kentucky, June 1 (1792, 15th state)
Tennessee, June 1 (1796, 16th state)
Arkansas, June 15 (1836, 25th state)
West Virginia, June 20 (1863, 35th state)
New Hampshire, June 21 (1788, 9th state), and
Virginia, June 25 (1788, 10th state)
Additionally, Congress passed a resolution designating the week in which June 14th falls as National Flag Week, and urging that citizens fly the flag each day of that week. In 2023 that will be the week of June 11, which falls on Sunday, through June 17.
The resolution naming Juneteenth National Independence Day a holiday was signed into law last year by President Joe Biden. Juneteenth is June 19 — day after Fathers Day in 2023.
Flag-flying days for June, listed chronologically:
Kentucky and Tennessee statehood, June 1
Flag Day, June 14; National Flag week, June 11 to 17
Arkansas statehood, June 15 (duplicating a day in National Flag Week)
Fathers Day, June 18
Juneteenth National Independence Day, June 19
West Virginia statehood, June 20
New Hampshire statehood, June 21
Virginia statehood, June 25
As you know, any resident may fly the flag any day of the year, under the etiquette provided in the Flag Code.
National Archives caption: This illustration entitled, “Flag Day – 1900”, by cartoonist Clifford Berryman, which appeared in the Washington Post on June 14, 1900, depicts the growth of American influence in the world as the European powers watch in the background as new century is ushered in.
Flag Day, 1918, at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Photo by Miles F. Weaver (1879-1932), from the collection of the National Archives (NARA).
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Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
It’s cruel to people who want to fly U.S. flags often, but only on designated flag-flying dates. (April is also National Poetry Month, so it’s a good time to look up poetry references we should have committed to heart).
For 2023, these are the three dates for flying the U.S. flag; Easter is a national date, the other two are dates suggested for residents of the states involved.
One date, nationally, to fly the flag. That beats March, which has none (in a year with Easter in April and not March). But March has five statehood days, to April’s two.
Take heart! You may fly your U.S. flag any day you choose, or everyday as many people do in Texas (though, too many do not retire their flags every evening . . .).
April usually sees the opening of Major League Baseball’s season — some teams jumped into March in 2018. In this photo, U.S. Navy sailors assigned to the USS Bonhomme Richard practice for the San Diego Padres’ opening day flag ceremony in San Diego on April 5, 2011. The ship sent nearly 300 volunteers to unfurl an 800-pound U.S. flag that covered the entire field. The Bonhomme Richard was in dry-dock for maintenance and upgrades. Defense Department photo via Wikimedia.
Young John F. Kennedy as a foreign correspondent for Hearst Newspapers, in 1945. Photo may be in Berlin. The book he appears to be consulting is his book about allied dithering about entering the war. Typewriter is an Underwood, common issue to reporters and standard equipment in many newsrooms of the time.
Michael Beschloss’s posting of historic photos on his Twitter feed turns up some real gems. Sometimes, other gems get posted in response. The photo above is a publicity photo of a young John Kennedy, perhaps in Berlin, in 1945 after the end of the war. He was hired as foreign correspondent by Hearst Newspapers, about the time his book, Why England Slept,was published.
Tip of the old scrub brush to @BeschlossDC and @keoni999 on Twitter.
Who knew? JFK was a journalist in Berlin in 1945 covering the Pottsdam conference. https://t.co/taM15we8yJ
In 1823, the poem “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas” was published anonymously in the Troy (N.Y.) Sentinel; the verse, more popularly known as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” was later attributed to Clement C. Moore.
Regardless who wrote the poem first published 199 years ago, how did the poem influence America’s view of St. Nicholas, or Santa Claus? And how much of the Santa Claus story really was invented in America?
Thomas Nast invented Santa Claus? Clement C. Moore didn’t write the famous poem that starts out, “‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house . . . ?”
The murky waters of history from Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub soak even our most cherished ideas and traditions.
Isn’t that part of the fun of history?
In January 1863, Thomas Nast portrayed Santa Claus as he delivered gifts to Union troops a few days earlier in Washington, D.C., wearing a blue, star-spangled coat.
Yes, Virginia (and California, too)! Thomas Nast created the image of Santa Claus most of us in the U.S. know today. Perhaps even more significant than his campaign against the graft of Boss Tweed, Nast’s popularization of a fat, jolly elf who delivers good things to people for Christmas makes one of the great stories in commercial illustration. Nast’s cartoons, mostly for the popular news publication Harper’s Weekly, created many of the conventions of modern political cartooning and modeled the way in which an illustrator could campaign for good, with his campaign against the graft of Tammany Hall and Tweed. But Nast’s popular vision of Santa Claus can be said to be the foundation for the modern mercantile flurry around Christmas.
Nast’s drawings probably drew some inspiration from the poem, “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas,” traditionally attributed to Clement C. Moore, a New York City lawyer, published in 1823. The poem is among the earliest to describe the elf dressed in fur, and magically coming down a chimney to leave toys for children; the poem invented the reindeer-pulled sleigh.
Modern analysis suggests the poem was not the work of Moore, and many critics and historians now attribute it to Major Henry Livingston, Jr. (1748-1828) following sleuthing by Vassar College Prof. Don Foster in 2000. Fortunately for us, we do not need to be partisans in such a query to enjoy the poem (a complete copy of which is below the fold).
The Library of Congress still gives Moore the credit. When disputes arise over who wrote about the night before Christmas, is it any wonder more controversial topics produce bigger and louder disputes among historians?
Moore is thought to have composed the tale, now popularly known as “The Night Before Christmas,” on December 24, 1822, while traveling home from Greenwich Village, where he had bought a turkey for his family’s Christmas dinner.
Inspired by the plump, bearded Dutchman who took him by sleigh on his errand through the snow-covered streets of New York City, Moore penned A Visit from St. Nicholas for the amusement of his six children, with whom he shared the poem that evening. His vision of St. Nicholas draws upon Dutch-American and Norwegian traditions of a magical, gift-giving figure who appears at Christmas time, as well as the German legend of a visitor who enters homes through chimneys.
Again from the Library of Congress, we get information that suggests that Moore was a minor celebrity from a well-known family with historical ties that would make a good “connections” exercise in a high school history class, perhaps (”the link from Aaron Burr’s treason to Santa Claus?”): (read more, below the fold)
Clement Moore was born in 1779 into a prominent New York family. His father, Benjamin Moore, president of Columbia University, in his role as Episcopal Bishop of New York participated in the inauguration of George Washington as the nation’s first president. The elder Moore also administered last rites to Alexander Hamilton after he was mortally wounded in a tragic duel with Aaron Burr.
A graduate of Columbia, Clement Moore was a scholar of Hebrew and a professor of Oriental and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan. [See comment from Pam Bumsted below for more on Moore.] He is said to have been embarrassed by the light-hearted verse, which was made public without his knowledge in December 1823. Moore did not publish it under his name until 1844.
Tonight, American children will be tucked in under their blankets and quilts and read this beloved poem as a last “sugarplum” before slipping into dreamland. Before they drift off, treat them to a message from Santa, recorded by the Thomas Edison Company in 1922.
But Henry Livingston was no less noble or historic. He hailed from the Livingstons of the Hudson Valley (one of whose farms is now occupied by Camp Rising Sun of the Louis August Jonas Foundation, a place where I spent four amazing summers teaching swimming and lifesaving). Livingston’s biography at the University of Toronto site offers another path for a connections exercise (”What connects the Declaration of Independence, the American invasion of Canada, the famous poem about a visit from St. Nick, and George W. Bush?”):
Henry Livingston Jr. was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, on Oct. 13, 1748. The Livingston family was one of the important colonial and revolutionary families of New York. The Poughkeepsie branch, descended from Gilbert, the youngest son of Robert Livingston, 1st Lord of Livingston Manor, was not as well off as the more well-known branches, descended from sons Robert and Philip. Two other descendants of Gilbert Livingston, President George Walker Herbert Bush and his son, President-Elect George W. Bush, though, have done their share to bring attention to this line. Henry’s brother, Rev. John Henry Livingston, entered Yale at the age of 12, and was able to unite the Dutch and American branches of the Dutch Reformed Church. At the time of his death, Rev. Livingston was president of Rutgers University. Henry’s father and brother Gilbert were involved in New York politics, and Henry’s granduncle was New York’s first Lt. Governor. But the law was the natural home for many of Henry’s family. His brother-in-law, Judge Jonas Platt, was an unsuccessful candidate for governor, as was his daughter Elizabeth’s husband, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Smith Thompson. Henry’s grandson, Sidney Breese, was Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court.
Known for his encyclopedic knowledge and his love of literature, Henry Livingston was a farmer, surveyor and Justice of the Peace, a judicial position dealing with financially limited criminal and civil cases. One of the first New Yorkers to enlist in the Revolutionary Army in 1775, Major Henry Livingston accompanied his cousin’s husband, General Montgomery, in his campaign up the Hudson River to invade Canada, leaving behind his new wife, Sarah Welles, and their week-old baby, on his Poughkeepsie property, Locust Grove. Baby Catherine was the subject of the first poem currently known by Major Livingston. Following this campaign, Livingston was involved in the War as a Commissioner of Sequestration, appropriating lands owned by British loyalists and selling them for the revolutionary cause. It was in the period following Sarah’s early death in 1783, that Major Livingston published most of his poems and prose, anonymously or under the pseudonym of R. Ten years after the death of Sarah, Henry married Jane Patterson, the daughter of a Dutchess County politician and sister of his next-door neighbor. Between both wives, Henry fathered twelve children. He published his good-natured, often occasional verse from 1787 in many journals, including Political Barometer, Poughkeepsie Journal, and New-York Magazine. His most famous poem, “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas,” was until 2000 thought to have been the work of Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863), who published it with his collected poems in 1844. Livingston died Feb. 29, 1828.
Thomas Nast’s full realization of Santa Claus, “Merry Old Santa Claus,” January 1, 1881. Harper’s Weekly, from Wikimedia.
Our views of Santa Claus owe a great deal also to Coca-Cola advertising campaigns. Coca-Cola first noted Santa’s use of the drink in a 1922 campaign to suggest Coke was a year-round drink (100 years after the publication of Livingston’s poem). The company’s on-line archives gives details:
In 1930, artist Fred Mizen painted a department store Santa in a crowd drinking a bottle of Coke. The ad featured the world’s largest soda fountain, which was located in the department store of Famous Barr Co. in St. Louis, Mo. Mizen’s painting was used in print ads that Christmas season, appearing in The Saturday Evening Post in December 1930.
1936 Coca-Cola Santa cardboard store display
1942 original oil painting – ‘They Remembered Me’
Archie Lee, the D’Arcy Advertising Agency executive working with The Coca-Cola Company, wanted the next campaign to show a wholesome Santa as both realistic and symbolic. In 1931, The Coca-Cola Company commissioned Michigan-born illustrator Haddon Sundblom to develop advertising images using Santa Claus — showing Santa himself, not a man dressed as Santa, as Mizen’s work had portrayed him.
For inspiration, Sundblom turned to Clement Clark Moore’s 1822 poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (commonly called “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”). Moore’s description of St. Nick led to an image of Santa that was warm, friendly, pleasantly plump and human. For the next 33 years, Sundblom painted portraits of Santa that helped to create the modern image of Santa — an interpretation that today lives on in the minds of people of all ages, all over the world.
Santa Claus is a controversial figure. Debates still rage among parents about the wisdom of allowing the elf into the family’s home, and under what conditions. Theologians worry that the celebration of Christmas is diluted by the imagery. Other faiths worry that the secular, cultural impact of Santa Claus damages their own faiths (few other faiths have such a popular figure, and even atheists generally give gifts and participate in Christmas rituals such as putting up a decorated tree).
For over 100 years, Santa Claus has been a popular part of commercial, cultural and religious life in America. Has any other icon endured so long, or so well?
Coca-Cola’s film, “The Legend of Coca-Cola and Santa Claus”:
Do we, you and I in 2022, stand as witnesses to the end of newspapers in America? In recent years we’ve seen body blows to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the San Diego Union, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and far too many others. Who anymore remembers the Washington Star, or the wonderfully-named San Antonio Light, or the Dallas Times-Herald? Some experiments might work. The Salt Lake Tribune turned non-profit.
Those are just the dailies. Smaller papers, especially weeklies, are all but wholly disappeared.
It’s painful to compare where Americans got their news, and what they thought about it, during the Watergate crises leading to the almost-impeachment and resignation of Richard Nixon, and today’s multiple crises leading to the impeachments of Donald Trump, and the insurrection against the U.S.
It’s been a grand history. Newspapering gave us great leaders like Benjamin Franklin. Newspapering gave us wars, like the Spanish-American War. Newspapering gave us Charlie Brown, Ann Landers, the Yellow Kid, Jim Murray, Red Smith, Thomas Nast (and Santa Claus), the Federalist Papers, Watergate, Herblock, news of Vietnam and Pearl Harbor, Neil Armstrong on the Moon, the Pentagon Papers, and coupons to save money on laundry soap.
It’s been a curious history, too. An 1897 editorial vouching for Santa Claus rates as the most popular editorial of all time, according to the late Newseum in Washington, D.C. That’s 125 years ago, and that’s quite some staying power.
The man who saved Christmas, at least for Virginia O’Hanlon, Francis Pharcellus Church, probably about 1860 – Wikipedia image
In autumn, 1897, 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon of 115 West 95th Street in New York, wrote to the New York Sun with this simple question:
“Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?”
In the age of Yellow Journalism, the fiercely competitive Sun‘s editors turned the letter to Francis Pharcellus. He responded to little Virginia on September 21, 1897:
Church’s brother, William Conant Church, owned and published the newspaper. Both had followed their father into the news business. They co-founded The Army-Navy Journal in 1863, and went on to a series of journalistic collaborations. Francis was 58 years old when he answered Virginia’s letter. (He died at age 67, in 1906.)
The New York Sun held down the conservative corner in New York journalism at the time, versus the New York Times and the New York Herald-Tribune. But it also had an interesting history, to a blogger intrigued by hoaxes. In 1835 the paper published a series of six newspaper stories falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, a well-known astronomer, claiming to describe a civilization on the Moon — the Great Moon Hoax. The discovery was credited to a new, very powerful telescope.
In 1844 the paper published a hoax written by Edgar Allen Poe, the Balloon Hoax. Under a pseudonym, Poe wrote that a gas balloon had crossed the Atlantic in three days.
The Sun also featured outstanding reporting. A 1947 and 1948 series about crime on the docks of New York City won a Pulitzer Prize for writer Malcolm Johnson. That series inspired Elia Kazan’s 1954 movie On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden and Lee J. Cobb.
Despite the occasional hoax, people trusted newspapers to get the basic facts right, most of the time.
The New York Sun ceased publication in 1950.
For all of its history, the Sun and the Churches are most remembered for that defense of belief in Santa Claus.
Virginia O’Hanlon, about the age of 8, when she wrote to The New York Sun’s editors to inquire about the veracity of the Santa Claus story.
Virginia O’Hanlon grew up, graduated from Hunter College, got a masters at Columbia, and earned a Ph.D. from Fordham Univeresity. She taught in the New York City Public School system, from which she retired in 1959. She died in 1971.
Birth of tradition
Columbia University was Church’s alma mater, as well as O’Hanlon’s. Her letter and his response get a reading each year at the Yule Log Ceremony at Columbia College, along with the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Animated, live-acting, and other television productions have been mounted in 1974, 1991, and 2009. Is there a Santa Claus? Did Church write a credible defense?The text of the letter and answer, below the fold.
More:
Yes, this is a Christmas tradition here at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub. Some years I even edit and add something to the piece.
From Dayton Daily News: Jeff Duford, curator for the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, with a flag that flew on the U.S.S. St. Louis in Hawaii during the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The same flag flew aboard the U.S.S. Iowa in Tokyo Bay on September 16, 1944, as Japan signed instruments of surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri. Photo by Ty Greenlees, Dayton Daily News [This flag was displayed for one day at the museum, on Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day 2016.]
December 7 is a two-fer flag-flying day.
By public law, December 7 is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, and Americans fly the U.S. flag in memory of those who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. U.S. flags should be flown at half-staff.
In 1787 Delaware quickly and promptly elected delegates to the former colony’s convention to ratify the Constitution proposed at the Philadelphia convention just over three months earlier. The ratification of the Constitution won opposition from strong factions in almost every state. Pols anticipated tough fights in New York, Virginia, and other states with large populations. They also expected other states would wait to see what the bigger states did.
Delaware didn’t wait. On December 7 Delaware became the first of the former British colonies to ratify the Constitution. Perhaps by doing so, it guaranteed other states would act more favorably on ratification.
Because Delaware was first, it is traditionally granted first position in certain ceremonies, such as the parades honoring newly-inaugurated presidents. Delaware’s nickname is “The First State.”
In Delaware and the rest of the nation, fly your flags on December 7, 2022. If you can, fly your flag at half-staff to honor the dead at Pearl Harbor; if you have a flag on a pole that cannot be adjusted, just fly the flag normally.
Mrs. Rosa Parks asked a question of the policeman who arrested her for refusing to move to the back of the bus on December 1, 1955. In 2022, it is again, and still, a chilling question, to which we have no good answer.
Mrs. Parks being fingerprinted in Montgomery, Alabama; photo from New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, Library of Congress
Rosa Parks: “Why do you push us around?”
Officer: “I don’t know but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.”
From Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed, Quiet Strength (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Pub. House, 1994), page 23.
On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black passengers to relinquish seats to white passengers when the bus was full. Blacks were also required to sit at the back of the bus. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system and led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation.
Rosa Parks made a nearly perfect subject for a protest on racism. College-educated, trained in peaceful protest at the famous Highlander Folk School, Parks was known as a peaceful and respected person. The sight of such a proper woman being arrested and jailed would provide a schocking image to most Americans. Americans jolted awake.
Often lost in the retelling of the story are the threads that tie together the events of the civil rights movement through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. As noted, Parks was a trained civil rights activist. Such training in peaceful and nonviolent protest provided a moral power to the movement probably unattainable any other way. Parks’ arrest was not planned, however. Parks wrote that as she sat on the bus, she was thinking of the tragedy of Emmet Till, the young African American man from Chicago, brutally murdered in Mississippi early in 1955. She was thinking that someone had to take a stand for civil rights, at about the time the bus driver told her to move to allow a white man to take her seat. To take a stand, she kept her seat.
African Americans in Montgomery organized a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. This was also not unique, but earlier bus boycotts are unremembered. A bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, earlier in 1955 did not produce nearly the same results.
The boycott organizers needed a place to meet, a large hall. The biggest building in town with such a room was the Dexter Street Baptist Church. At the first meeting on December 5, it made sense to make the pastor of that church the focal point of the boycott organizing, and so the fresh, young pastor, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was thrust into civil rights organizing as president, with Ralph Abernathy as program director. They called their group the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). When their organizing stretched beyond the city limits of Montgomery, the group became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Litigation on the boycott went all the way to the Supreme Court (Browder v. Gale). The boycotters won. The 381-day boycott was ended on December 21, 1956, with the desegregation of the Montgomery bus system.
Solidarity with the United States: “Tel Aviv city hall, lit up in the colors of the American flag to honor the victims of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, on October 2, 2017. (AFP Photo/Jack Guez)” – From the Times of Israel
October is not a big month for dates to fly the U.S. flag. Only one state joined the union in October, and only two other dates received Congress’s designation for flag-flying.
Here are October’s three flag-flying days, in chronological order:
Columbus Day, October 10 — tradition puts Columbus Day on October 12, but in law it is designated as the second Monday in October (to make a three-day weekend for workers who get a holiday); in 2022, October 10 is the second Monday of the month.
Nevada Statehood Day, October 31; Nevada joined the union during the Civil War, in 1864, the 36th state.
Federal law also designates October 9 as Leif Erickson Day, a concession to Scandanavian-descended Americans who argue Erickson beat Columbus to the Americas by a few hundred years. Congress’s recognition does not include an urging to fly the flag, though the President may issue such a proclamation.
October 27 is also the birth date of Theodore Roosevelt (1858), the Secretary of the Navy who led the dramatic updating of the fleet that preceded the U.S. push to become a major international power. Navy Day was set on October 27 partly to honor Teddy’s work, and Teddy himself — the “birth” date of the U.S. Navy is considered to be October 7. Here’s a brief history of TR before his presidency, at the Miller Center, written by Sidney Milkis.
Fans of Roosevelt may get an little extra kick flying the flag on his birthday.
Fourth grade students practice U.S. flag etiquette with the help of National Park Service Rangers at Sagamore Hill National Historic Site in New York. Sagamore Hill, at Oyster Bay, was the home of Theodore Roosevelt and his family. National Park Service Photo
Yes, this is an encore post. Defeating ignorance takes patience and perseverance.
If you see a Democrat like this go on Fox news and just destroy them all take a moment and thank them by giving them a follow and retweet. This is @JessicaTarlov and she humiliated an entire network tonight. We need more of this in our Party. pic.twitter.com/3aT19wWlv7
We can be quite sure Fox did not intend to give air to a complimentary and good view of President Joe Biden’s months in office, but they did invite Jessica Tarlov (@JessicaTarlov) on to talk on August 20, 2022.
Talk she did. She told the truth, and didn’t let the hosts shut her up.
Tarlov said:
It’s unfair to reduce a thing that is unequivocally a good thing to just ‘oh it’s one good thing.’ There are a bunch of good things in there. Just because it’s not your politics doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.
(Crosstalk)
It’s about green energy. It’s about saving people’s lives; it’s making sure they have health care — oh yes, health care saves people’s lives.
When history looks back at the first two years of the Biden term, they will see the American Rescue Act. They will see bipartisan Infrastructure, the PACT Act, the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act.
They will see that al Zawahiri is dead.
They will see record jobs numbers and they will see low unemployment. And I’m not saying they will think that Joe Biden was God’s gift to the presidency. But do not reduce what has been accomplished in this term. And Democrats got that done with the slimmest of majorities.
If you see a Democrat like this go on Fox news and just destroy them all take a moment and thank them by giving them a follow and retweet. This is @JessicaTarlov and she humiliated an entire network tonight. We need more of this in our Party. pic.twitter.com/3aT19wWlv7
Democratic candidate for Governor of Texas, Beto O’Rourke, roused delegates at the Texas Democratic Convention, July 15, 2002. iPhone photo by Ed Darrell.
Rev. Frederick D. Haynes III introduces, Beto O’Rourke delivers.
Why is the Environmental Protection Agency and its powers to order and end to and cleanup of pollution important to America?
Consider America before EPA.
Twitterer Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) took some EPA file photos to show what things used to look like, before EPA really got going. This is a small sample of the good work EPA has done, and does.
“SCOTUS just limited the authority of the EPA. Here’s a brief thread that gives everyone an idea of what America looked like before pollution was regulated.”
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) June 30, 2022
If you visit those sites in 2022, you will not be met by the awful smell of sewage or industrial waste. You will not need to wear a mask to protect your lungs from the air pollution including carcinogens that give you equivalent to a pack of cigarettes smoked in a day.
The cleanups may not be perfect, but they make America great.
Cleaning up carbon pollution from our air is necessary to keep America great, and to save the planet — again.
Please ask your Congressional representatives to strengthen the law so EPA can get on with its work.
Tip of the old scrub brush to 50 Shades of Whey (@davenewworld) on Twitter.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
July 4. Surely everyone knows to fly the flag on Independence Day, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.*
In the month of the grand patriotic celebration, what other dates do we fly the U.S. flag? July 4 is the only date designated in the Flag Code for all Americans to fly the flag. Three states joined the union in July, days on which citizens of those states should show the colors, New York, Idaho and Wyoming.
Plus, there is one date many veterans think we should still fly the flag, Korean War Veterans Armistice Day on July 27. Oddly, the law designating that date urges flying the flag only until 2003, the 50th anniversary of the still-standing truce in that war. But the law still exists. What’s a patriot to do?
Patriots may watch to see whether the president issues a proclamation for the date.
Generally we don’t note state holidays or state-designated flag-flying events, such as Utah’s Pioneer Day, July 24, which marks the day in 1847 that the Mormon pioneers in the party of Brigham Young exited what is now Emigration Canyon into the Salt Lake Valley. But it’s a big day in Utah, where I spent a number of years and still have family. And I still have memories, not all pleasant, of that five-mile march for the Days of ’47 Parade, in that wool, long-sleeved uniform and hat, carrying the Sousaphone. Pardon my partisan exception. Utahns will fly their flags on July 24.
National Korean War Veterans Armistice Day, July 27 (flags fly at half-staff, if you are continuing the commemoration which was designated in law only until 2003; tradition keeps proclamations coming)
* July 4? But didn’t John Adams say it should be July 2? And, yes, the staff at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub sadly noted that, at most July 4 parades, it appears no one salutes the U.S. flag as it passes, as the Flag Code recommends — though there were several people properly saluting the leading flags at the Duncanville Independence Day parade in 2021. MFB’s been fighting flag etiquette ignorance since 2006. It’s taking much, much longer than we wished.
Yes, this is an encore post. Defeating ignorance takes patience and perseverance.
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Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
John Adams, by By John Trumbull, 1793. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
“The Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. . . . It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” — John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776
Surely John Adams knew that July 4 would be Independence Day, didn’t he?
In writing to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776, John Adams committed one of those grand errors even he would laugh at afterward. We’ll forgive him when the fireworks start firing.
Scene of the crime — Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the Second Continental congress approved the resolution to declare the colonies independent from Britain – (Photo credit: National Park Service)
Two days later, that same Congress approved the wording of the document Thomas Jefferson had drafted to announce Lee’s resolution to the world.
Today, we celebrate the date of the document Jefferson wrote, and Richard Henry Lee is often a reduced to a footnote, if not erased from history altogether.
Who can predict the future?
(You know, of course, that Adams and Jefferson both died 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1826. In the 50 intervening years, Adams and Jefferson were comrades in arms and diplomacy in Europe, officers of the new government in America, opposing candidates for the presidency, President and Vice President, ex-President and President, bitter enemies, then long-distance friends writing almost daily about how to make a great new nation. Read David McCullough‘s version of the story, if you can find it.)
The Lee Resolution, passed by the Second Continental Congress on July 2, 1776 – Wikipedia image (Wait a minute: Are those numbers added correctly? What are they?)
Yes, this is an encore post. Defeating ignorance takes patience and perseverance.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
“Flag Day, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” 1942 photo by John Vachon (1914-1975) for the U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. Image from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
Fathers Day, third Sunday in June (June 19 in 2022)
Several states celebrate statehood. New Hampshire, Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia celebrate statehood; Kentucky and Tennessee share the same date.
Kentucky, June 1 (1792, 15th state)
Tennessee, June 1 (1796, 16th state)
Arkansas, June 15 (1836, 25th state)
West Virginia, June 20 (1863, 35th state)
New Hampshire, June 21 (1788, 9th state), and
Virginia, June 25 (1788, 10th state)
Additionally, Congress passed a resolution designating the week in which June 14th falls as National Flag Week, and urging that citizens fly the flag each day of that week. In 2022 that would be the week of June 12, which falls on Sunday, through June 18.
The resolution naming Juneteenth National Independence Day a holiday was signed into law last year by President Joe Biden. Juneteenth is June 19 — same as Fathers Day in 2022.
Flag-flying days for June, listed chronologically:
Kentucky and Tennessee statehood, June 1
Flag Day, June 14; National Flag week, June 12 to 18
Arkansas statehood, June 15 (duplicating a day in National Flag Week)
Fathers Day, June 19 (shared with Juneteenth in 2022)
Juneteenth National Independence Day, June 19
West Virginia statehood, June 20
New Hampshire statehood, June 21
Virginia statehood, June 25
As you know, any resident may fly the flag any day of the year, under the etiquette provided in the Flag Code.
National Archives caption: This illustration entitled, “Flag Day – 1900”, by cartoonist Clifford Berryman, which appeared in the Washington Post on June 14, 1900, depicts the growth of American influence in the world as the European powers watch in the background as new century is ushered in.
Flag Day, 1918, at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Photo by Miles F. Weaver (1879-1932), from the collection of the National Archives (NARA).
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Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
