The Stars and Stripes - 9 November 2001

Something that every first visitor to America notices - and I mean during my lifetime here - is the constant display of the American flag, in places both public and private.

I couldn't count the hundreds of times that a visiting European friend - off, say, after arrival on a little tour of the town or the village - has seen the flag draping from a pole outside the firehouse or hanging from a humble bedroom window.

And the visitor says: "Hello, what's the occasion, some famous American date?"

"No," you say, "nothing special. Somebody got up in the morning and felt good and instead of taking the dog for a trot or cooking up a special batch of pancakes decided to hang out the flag."

In country places there are always families who make a point of hanging out the flag every Sunday morning in summer.

The first, flaming, public response to 11 September was an outburst of flags.

Overnight two suddenly-famous flag factories were reported to have gone a 24-hour working day. And orders came roaring in for flags to be woven or impressed or embedded into every sort of item of clothing or decoration.

The two teams playing off the baseball championship appeared, the second night, with a neat Stars and Stripes planted above or alongside their team's logo.

A hundred flags flew outside Rockefeller Plaza. Flags flapped into the late afternoon fog atop San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

Flags on hats, sweaters, blouses, trousers, motor cars, bikes, shopping bags, from windows, roofs, awnings - a continent blanketed by the Stars and Stripes.

I didn't hear or read a squeak of a complaint from anybody about the wholesale violation - punishable by fine and a prison sentence - that this coast-to-coast flourish represented. Which just shows how old I must be.

Some days after the original horror which stirred this vast wave of patriotism I had a most lively recall of a time when I was begged by the newly-arrived British ambassador, no less, to do a broadcast to Britain, as soon as possible, and acquaint the people of Britain with the hideous crime that an English manufacturer was perpetrating against the law of the United States.

The time was 59 years ago. The United States had come into the Second World War and the first shipment of American troops was about to arrive in England.

A British manufacturer, in the Midlands I believe, had an idea - of heart-warming hospitality - to make and deliver an item of clothing for each and every arriving American soldier which should have knitted into it the American flag.

Now whether or not the Foreign Office or the prime minister was consulted about this idea, all the evidence suggests that they thought it a splendid and a touching tribute to the arriving allies.

Nobody, it seems, had ever heard of the Code of Etiquette issued by the United States War Department in the early 1920s to dictate once and for all how the flag was to be flown, where and when, and especially certain abuses of the flag which must be forever prohibited.

The code is a pretty elaborate one but the gist of it says that the flag is to be flown only between sunrise and sunset. Is to be hoisted briskly but lowered ceremoniously. That it must never touch the ground. It may be displayed at night only on special occasions and then it must be lighted.

Another thousand words prescribes the flag's role, position and function in the United States, its dependencies and at sea whenever a president or former president dies.

The really tough part of the code is the list of prohibitions. The flag must not be dipped to any personal thing. It must not be displayed on a float, motorcar or boat except from a staff.

It is by no means ever to be used - here's the nub, or the rub - as a receptacle for anything or for any advertising purpose nor to be embroidered on such articles as cushions, handkerchiefs or boxes of any kind.

The code did not even reach to what a United States senator once called "the obscenity of the flag's being printed on the cover of a box of chocolates" which was a very frequent and welcome sight to me as a boy at Christmas time - except of course the flag was the Union Jack.

You'll gather at once that no such code had ever been thought of in England, where the royal standard and the Union Jack were indeed the most popular emblem for advertisers of everything from biscuits to a mysterious potion, I well remember, called a "lung tonic" - the implied suggestion, I suppose, was that if it could liven up the royal lungs it certainly could ginger up yours.

Well imagine the moment in Washington when the British ambassador was told, by an American friend, that a British manufacturer had delivered to this American camp in England a whole year's supply of an object of clothing which violated the official American code in a particularly tasteless way.

"What," asked the embattled ambassador, "is the code and what is the offending object?"

He was told about the code and according to his own later testimony blushed with embarrassment.

But the blush was nothing to the groan that followed on his hearing about the item of clothing which the innocent manufacturer - bless his warm intentions - had thought would be specially cute.

A pair - a thousand pairs - of, how shall I put this?, ladies' short undergarments, the seat being composed of the stars and stripes.

I was asked to broadcast a report on the War Department's code and the next we heard was - you can well believe - that the panties were immediately ... withdrawn, I suppose is the inevitable word.

The result of this famous clanger or boo boo was that within months, in June 1942, Congress passed a resolution amending into public law all existing rules and customs pertaining to display and use of the flag.

The assumption was that from then on nobody - not even the British - would dare desecrate the American flag in any of the stated or unstated ways.

We had a quarter century to observe the code and by now the law.

We reckoned without Vietnam and the uproar of students in the streets in an outbreak of deliberate burning of the flag - an act so outrageous to many Americans in many states that in 1968 Congress passed a law making it a federal crime to burn or otherwise desecrate the flag, on pain of one year's imprisonment or a thousand-dollar fine.

And for 20 years that law was on the books but only randomly observed for in several states the students went on burning the flag.

Eventually an appeal against the new law was taken to the Supreme Court and the court ruled, only 12 years ago, that burning the flag is a permissible expression of free speech.

The effect of this was to have the flag desecration laws of all the states declared unconstitutional.

And from now on, plainly, you can do anything you like with the flag - wear it on top or underneath, hang it, flaunt it or, if the war goes on too long for the already chanting students at Berkeley, you can freely flout it by burning it. So yet another old value bites the dust.

Already though the wholesale displaying of the flag, on humans particularly, is fading along the gently-falling graph of the president's popularity.

Only two weeks ago 87 Americans in a hundred approved of President Bush and the war in Afghanistan. Today it's down to 69%.

And these two parallel falling lines are a graphic reminder of something about the American character, if there is such a thing, which is its impatience with difficult, slow solutions.

This is essentially the nation of the quick fix, the miracle drug. And though so many such promises turn out hasty and false it's surprising in even the last hundred-year stretch of American history how often the sudden flash of intelligence, rather than interminable research, has produced a whole raft of blessings to mankind.

Think of cheap steel, the dollar watch, the refrigerator, traffic lights, the assembly line, the oil freighter, the electric bulb.

The president said a month ago that the new war would be strange and long. He never defined long.

But day after day at the White House press briefings the president or his press secretary or Secretary Powell are unceasingly pressed by the media to say how long.

There are people, raving enthusiasts in the week after September 11, who already suggest the war is not showing results.

They can't have thought much about the history of Afghanistan and its guerrilla warriors. They've lived on a battleground for eight centuries.

In the 19th Century Great Britain fought them for eight years, tried to conquer them and failed.

In 1979 the Soviet Union moved in to occupy the country and after fighting for nearly 10 years, with 300,000 men, the Soviets gave up and withdrew.

Our trouble is, I think, that to the old generation of Americans war recalls the long quagmire and defeat of Vietnam.

And to the middle and younger generations the only war they remember is the Gulf War - a spectacular display of night missiles flying, minimum casualties, of the enemy surrendering. And all over in a hundred hours. So how long is long?

If Americans are looking for a role model they couldn't do better than think of Thomas Edison, a man who didn't flaunt his patriotism but acted on it.

He had one brilliant, bright idea - the electric light bulb - but not before he'd failed with 6,000 different vegetable fibres did he find one, in a Japanese bamboo, a high-resistance filament that would burn permanently in a vacuum.

He had inspiration which was God-sent but he had something better: Stamina.

And you can sense, I think, that behind President Bush's gung-ho assurances there is a slightly nervous, earnest, appealing manner that stamina is what more than anything he wants people to begin to show.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.