Grant Wernick is a fourth-year undergraduate studying History. He is primarily interested in United States foreign policy and military history.
Americans feel in our bones that we have nothing to learn from the British, much less the British monarchy (notwithstanding Prince Harry’s universally well-received musings on our democracy, like when he declared the First Amendment “bonkers”). Yet, when it comes to flag protocol, and showing the Stars and Stripes the respect they deserve, we would do well to swallow our pride and look to the example of our Anglo allies across the pond.
The British maintain strict rules about when to lower their flag, and they do so rarely. Lowering the flag to half-mast is traditionally reserved for the death of a member of the royal family. Notoriously, they even initially refused to lower the flag for Diana, who technically was not a princess at the time of her death. When a compromise was finally reached, which saw the Union Jack go down for a brief period, Prince Phillip privately grumbled of a “great humiliation” having occurred.
In the Land of the Free, there is no need for a special flag carveout for kings or queens (though you wouldn’t know it from the near-Divine Right veneration that deceased former presidents seem to receive). However, the lesson that we should take from the royals is to be very sparing in the lowering of our beautiful flag, which also happens to be our ultimate national symbol.
I first noticed an excessive number of days with a lowered flag during my freshman or sophomore year on campus. Frequently the flag would be at a morose half-mast without any clear national tragedy. Combing through past North Carolina flag alerts revealed that many of the instances were decisions by then-Governor Roy Cooper to commemorate the passing of a former member of the state legislature.
Admittedly, this decision is within the wide latitude granted to governors by the US flag code. But the passing of a local politician, which has no national significance, is a poor reason to lower what is the ultimate national symbol.
Governor Cooper would have seemed as conservative as Prince Phillip compared to his counterpart in New Jersey, Phil Murphy. During a summer family reunion in a scenic seaside town in the Garden State, my bliss was interrupted by the sight of the American flag at half-mast over the town hall. I had not seen the latest news and could not discount the possibility of a mass shooting or some other heinous event.
No large-scale tragedy of the sort had occurred. Rather, the lieutenant governor of New Jersey, Sheila Oliver, had passed away. In Executive Order Number 338, Governor Murphy mandated that US and New Jersey state flags be lowered for one month to commemorate Oliver.
To put 30 days in perspective, that was how long John F. Kennedy was honored after being assassinated by the CIA (er… Lee Harvey Oswald). It was 20 days longer than the flags were lowered after 9/11, the most lethal attack on civilians in our nation’s history. And it was nearly one month longer than the four measly days ordered by Governor Murphy after the terrorist attack at Abbey Gate that claimed the lives of 13 US service members, during the disastrous evacuation of Afghanistan.
Murphy may have considered Ms. Oliver “a trailblazer and an icon,” but honoring the memory of a deceased politician for three and half weeks longer than those 13 young Americans who gave their lives in Afghanistan was obviously disgraceful.
There are more modest and fitting ways of commemorating public servants, whether a lieutenant governor or a former president, than lowering the American flag to half-mast. We are not in the Old World, and our deceased politicians should not be mourned as monarchs.
Leave the Stars and Stripes at their high and happy height, gallantly streaming o’er the Land of the Free, except for a brief period after the most devastating national tragedies. Doing so will not make us more British, God forbid, but it will give us a dose of that unity, resilience, and patriotism that sustained Francis Scott Key at the Battle of Fort McHenry in 1814, and will continue to sustain us as we kick butt far into the future. God Bless America.
By Grant Wernick
