Unhappy Flag Day

It was destined, eventually, to become the runty stepchild among American national holidays. One hundred and fifty years after its original creation, no one ever hosts a Flag Day cookout or sends a Flag Day greeting card. Nobody gets to take a long weekend away from the office. Even the most customer-hungry car dealers don't advertise Flag Day sales.

And today, exactly 150 years ago after it was first celebrated, almost no one seems to have noticed the anniversary. Google searches for "sesquicentennial of Flag Day" and similar phrases yield exactly zero hits.
Yet the holiday was inaugurated in 1861 with promises of revelry to rival the orgiastic festivals of ancient Rome: feasting, dancing, garlands of flowers, and Arcadian bliss among the towns of lower New England. It also began amid one of the most thrilling and tempestuous moments in American history: the beginning of the Civil War. It marked a turning point in the definition of national identity, and of the flag itself. And it seems to have originated '" like so many American cultural phenomena '" as the offspring of idealism and commerce, midwifed into existence by journalists.

It all started with an editorial in the Hartford Evening Press. The piece's writer, the paper's chief editor, was Charles Dudley Warner, who would eventually become better known as the co-author, with his friend Mark Twain, of the 1871 novel "The Gilded Age." (It was also Warner who made a famous remark often attributed, wrongly, to Twain: "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.") Warner apparently undertook the editorial at the urging of a friend, a Hartford banker and staunchly Unionist Republican named Jonathan Flynt Morris.