Poetic Facts

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

— George Orwell

Conservatives love their myths.

They don't want to hear that Betsy Ross didn't design the American flag—no more than they want to hear that Blacks didn't arrive in America as "immigrants" or that Ronald Reagan didn't have an ounce of intelligence.

They'd much rather cherish myths.

Liberals aren't much different, when it comes to it.

They don't want to hear that early feminists didn't burn their bras or that Martin Luther King was less than a saint.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it," Joseph Goebbels famously said.

The same holds for myths or, more accurately, "poetic facts."

The Betsy Ross Flag is one such poetic fact.

Betsy indeed worked as a seamstress in Philadelphia and was acquainted with George Washington, due to his occasional attendance of her church.

But that's as far as things went. 

That Betsy made our first flag was a yarn spun by her grandson, who in an 1870 speech claimed she'd been hired by Washington to design a flag for his army.

Harper's Weekly, an immensely popular magazine, picked up the speech and spread the tale nationwide.

Talk about "false flags."

The story was nothing but star-spangled bullshit.

"Every historian who’s looked into it has found no credible evidence that Betsy Ross made the first American flag," historian Marc Leepson told National Geographic last year.

The "Betsy Ross Flag" is a myth made of whole cloth.

And it's become lodged in the fabric of history—much like the "voluntary" nature of slavery and the "genius" of Ronald Reagan.

An analogous tall tale concerns how the Betsy Ross Flag was unveiled.

Flags in general weren't flown by infantry during the Revolutionary War; they were flown only by ships and forts.

But that fact didn't deter patriotic Delawareans from insisting the Betsy Ross Flag was unfurled for the first time at Cooch's Bridge, site of the only Revolutionary War battle in the state.

Cooch's Bridge—fought September 3, 1777—was a British victory, so perhaps the fiction felt consoling.

Howard Pyle's The Nation Makers

The hard facts were: the Continental Congress indeed resolved—on June 14, 1777—that the nation would adopt a flag comprising stars and stripes; and it made that resolution public three months later—on the very day of the Battle of Cooch's Bridge.

And so it seems the first announcement of the flag became the first appearance of the flag.

The fiction took root in Delawareans' imaginations not in 1777, but in 1940, when it was included in The Battle of Cooch’s Bridge, whose author claimed that "circumstantial evidence" proved the story to be true.

And the circumstantial evidence? 

A "history painting" by Delaware artist Howard Pyle that appeared on the cover of Collier's Magazine in June 1906.

Pretty flimsy evidence—especially when you consider the painting depicted another battle altogether.

Historian Wade Catts told National Geographic the Betsy Ross Flag wasn't carried into the Battle of Cooch's Bridge for practical reasons.

"The American formation fought as an ad hoc light infantry corps," Catts said. "The whole purpose of the infantry was stealth and secrecy, so it is highly unlikely they would have carried a flag into battle."

But how much more comforting is it to cherish the poetic fact that the embattled Americans carried the Betsy Ross Flag into the Battle of Cooch's Bridge?

And how unromantic to say that it never happened.

As the late historian Ed Bearss was fond of saying, "It never happened—but it should have."