The History of the Stars and Stripes: From Betsy Ross Legend to the Flag on the Moon

Not a single person ever witnessed the scene said to have taken place: George Washington calling on a Philadelphia seamstress to commission a flag design. The story was first told to the world by Betsy Ross’s grandson, William Canby. Standing before the Pennsylvania Historical Society in March 1870, Canby announced that his grandmother had been visited in June 1776 by Washington and a delegation from the Continental Congress, and that she had sewn the first Stars and Stripes right there on the spot.

The problem is that the only evidence for this story is Canby’s own testimony — delivered ninety-four years after the event was said to have occurred. And yet the tale became one of the most widely believed founding myths in American history. How did a story with not a shred of contemporary evidence become such a powerful national legend? And how did the actual flag come to look the way it does today?

The Betsy Ross Legend: A Myth Built on One Grandson’s Testimony

The story Canby told was specific. In June 1776, he said, a committee made up of George Washington, Robert Morris, and George Ross — a relative of Betsy Ross — visited a Philadelphia seamstress to discuss the design of a new flag. Betsy Ross, according to the account, suggested using five-pointed stars instead of the six-pointed stars the committee had proposed, and even demonstrated a sewing trick for cutting a perfect five-pointed star with a single snip of the scissors.^[1]

But when historians began scrutinizing the story, cracks appeared everywhere. First, there is no record anywhere that the Continental Congress formed a committee in 1776 to discuss flag design.^[1] Betsy Ross is documented to have made flags for the Pennsylvania Navy, but there is no evidence that any of them was the national flag. All of the testimony Canby offered as evidence came not from Betsy Ross herself, but from descendants who claimed to have heard the story from her. In other words, not a single person who actually witnessed Washington’s visit ever gave an account of it.^[1]

The Smithsonian and the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia both treat the legend with caution. Betsy Ross was certainly a real person and a skilled seamstress, but the claim that she made the first American flag remains, in the current consensus among historians, an unverified piece of family lore.^[1] At the time, at least seventeen other flag makers and upholsterers were active in Philadelphia alongside Betsy Ross.^[1] That alone makes it unlikely the flag was the work of any single individual.

Francis Hopkinson: The Real Candidate Who Left a Bill

In contrast to the Betsy Ross story, which has no primary source whatsoever, another figure left behind documented evidence: Francis Hopkinson, a delegate from New Jersey. He signed the Declaration of Independence and is credited with designing several national symbols, including the flag of the United States Navy, the design of Continental currency, and the Great Seal of the United States.

On May 25, 1780, Hopkinson wrote to the Continental Board of Admiralty requesting compensation for the various patriotic designs he had completed. The list included “the flag of the United States.”^[2] His request was modest — instead of a large cash sum, he asked to be paid with “a Quarter Cask of the public Wine.” He submitted a second bill on June 24 of the same year for his “Devices, Ornaments, & c.”^[2]

The claim was denied. In a report submitted to Congress on October 27, 1780, the Board of Treasury ruled that Hopkinson was not entitled to claim full compensation alone, since he had not been the only person involved in the design work.^[2] In other words, even the Board of Treasury acknowledged that Hopkinson had been involved in designing the flag. He may not have been the sole designer, but contemporary documents confirm that he was, at minimum, a participant.

The contrast is stark. The Betsy Ross story rests entirely on ninety-four-year-old family lore, while Hopkinson’s claim is backed by two government documents written at the time the events took place. And yet Betsy Ross remains, by far, the more famous name in popular memory. Historians frequently cite this as a case where the reliability of a historical source and the popular appeal of a story bear no relationship to each other whatsoever.

From Thirteen to Fifty: 150 Years of Adding Stars

The number of stars on the American flag was first written into law on June 14, 1777. The Continental Congress passed a brief resolution that day: “Resolved, That the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.”^[3] But the resolution said nothing about how many points each star should have or how they should be arranged. As a result, several different versions of the flag — circular arrangements, grid arrangements, and others — were made side by side in the early years.

The first change came in 1795. After Vermont (1791) and Kentucky (1792) joined the Union, a new Flag Act mandated that both the stars and the stripes be increased to fifteen.^[3] This fifteen-stripe, fifteen-star flag was flying over Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor in 1814, and it was the sight of this flag that moved Francis Scott Key to write the poem that later became the U.S. national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”^[4]

But continually adding stripes was not sustainable. Adding a stripe for every new state would have made the flag absurdly cluttered. So in 1818, Congress established a new principle: the stripes would be permanently fixed at thirteen, representing the original thirteen states, while only the number of stars would grow with each new state.^[3] That principle has held ever since. Since the flag’s original adoption in 1777, its design has been officially revised twenty-six times to reflect each new state joining the Union, which makes today’s fifty-star flag the twenty-seventh official version.

The most recent revision took place between 1959 and 1960. And tangled up in that process is the story of a high school student.

How a B-Minus Homework Assignment Became a Flag

In 1958, Robert G. Heft, a junior at Lancaster High School in Ohio, was given an unusual assignment in history class. His teacher, Stanley Pratt, gave the students an open-ended task: make something. Alaska was about to become the forty-ninth state, and Hawaii’s admission was also under discussion at the time. Inspired by this, Heft decided to try making a fifty-star American flag of his own.

He worked at his grandparents’ kitchen table for more than twelve hours. He bought blue fabric and white iron-on material, hand-cut and applied a hundred stars — fifty on each side — and stitched the whole thing together on his grandmother’s sewing machine.^[5] When he turned in the finished flag, Heft received a B-minus. His teacher, Pratt, then made him an offer: “If you can get this design accepted in Washington, I’ll change the grade.”^[5]

Heft actually sent his design to his local congressman, Walter Moeller, who forwarded it to the chairman of the congressional committee on flag design. With Alaska (January 1959) and Hawaii (August 1959) admitted as the forty-ninth and fiftieth states in succession, a new flag design was needed. President Dwight Eisenhower received more than 1,500 proposed designs, at least three of which were identical to the fifty-star flag we know today.^[5] The design that was ultimately adopted was the same one Heft had made at his kitchen table. On July 4, 1960, the fifty-star flag became the official flag of the United States. True to his word, Pratt changed Heft’s grade from a B-minus to an A.^[5]

This story, however, should not be taken entirely at face value. A 2022 investigative report found that a considerable portion of the account Heft repeated to the press and in speaking engagements over the following decades — including claims that President Eisenhower personally called him with the news of the flag’s adoption, and that he attended the Washington announcement in person on July 4, 1960 — could not be corroborated by any contemporary documentation. The current fifty-star pattern, which alternates rows of six and five stars, had already been proposed in similar form in multiple places as early as 1952. It remains unclear, then, whether the flag Heft made for his homework assignment was truly the design that was “uniquely” adopted, or whether it simply happened to match an arrangement that several other people had already conceived independently.^[5]

What makes this story compelling is not merely that it is heartwarming. The fact that the final design of a national symbol as significant as the American flag was not the product of careful deliberation by a government committee, but rather the result of a coincidental overlap with a high school student’s homework assignment, reveals something about how national symbols come into being: the process can be far more improvised than we tend to assume.

Flag Etiquette: A Law With No Punishment

There is something peculiar about the way Americans relate to their flag. The United States enacted the Flag Code in 1942, laying out in considerable detail how the flag should be handled. It contains rules specifying that the flag must never touch the ground, must never be flown lower than another flag, and must never be displayed while wet, among many other provisions.^[6]

But the law has an unusual quirk: it contains no penalty provisions whatsoever for violations. The entire text is written using the advisory word “should,” and no fines or punishments are prescribed anywhere in it.^[6] In effect, the Flag Code functions less like an enforceable statute and more like an officially sanctioned code of etiquette. There is a reason it took this form. Long before the 1942 law was enacted, social conventions around handling the flag were already widely established, and the government chose simply to codify those existing norms in writing, without attaching any penalties.^[6]

This peculiar status as “a law without punishment” was put to the test in a 1989 Supreme Court ruling. In 1984, an activist named Gregory Lee Johnson burned an American flag outside the Republican National Convention in Dallas as an act of protest, and was convicted under Texas law, receiving a $2,000 fine and a one-year prison sentence. But the case eventually reached the Supreme Court as Texas v. Johnson, and the Court ruled 5–4 that burning the flag constituted symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment.^[7] That ruling instantly invalidated the flag-desecration laws of forty-eight states.

In response, Congress passed a new federal Flag Protection Act in 1989, but that law, too, was struck down as unconstitutional the following year in United States v. Eichman.^[7] In other words, burning the American flag may be widely regarded as offensive, but it is, legally speaking, unambiguously protected expression in the United States.

Comparing this to other countries reveals a striking contrast. Germany, France, South Korea, and many other nations criminalize the public desecration of their own national flags.^[12] The United States, by contrast, is a country known worldwide for the unusual intensity of its ceremonial attachment to its flag — and yet it is also a country whose constitution guarantees the freedom to destroy that very flag. A law recommending that citizens treat the flag with the utmost respect coexists with legal precedent guaranteeing the right to burn it. That the United States demands cultural reverence for its flag as fiercely as any nation on earth, while refusing to enforce that reverence through law, is perhaps the most paradoxical feature of American flag culture.

The Flag on the Moon: Why It Appeared to Wave Without Any Wind

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted a nylon American flag on the lunar surface at the Sea of Tranquility. The flag, designed in just a few short months before the landing by a team led by Jack A. Kinzler of NASA’s Technical Services Division, had a special feature: a gold-colored aluminum horizontal crossbar threaded through a fabric sleeve sewn along the top edge of the flag.^[8]

That crossbar allowed the flag to remain extended sideways, appearing to wave, even on the airless Moon. But contrary to popular belief, the rippling seen in the footage was not caused by wind. It was simply the transmitted vibration from the astronauts’ movements as they planted the pole in the ground and rotated it. Because there was no air resistance to dampen the motion in the vacuum of space, a single vibration appeared to persist far longer and more dramatically than it would have on Earth.^[8] In other words, the flag on the Moon never once waved in the wind.

An even more striking fact concerns the fate of that first flag. Planted just 8.2 meters from the lunar module, it was directly exposed to the exhaust blast of the ascent stage engine during liftoff. Buzz Aldrin later testified that he personally watched the flag topple over through the ascent module’s window.^[9] Humanity’s first flag on the Moon, in other words, did not remain standing for even a full day. Later missions learned from this: starting with Apollo 12, the procedure was changed so that flags were planted much farther from the lunar module.^[9]

Five more American flags were subsequently planted on the lunar surface, during Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17. High-resolution photographs taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in 2012 revealed shadows suggesting that the flags at the Apollo 12, 16, and 17 landing sites are still standing.^[10] No such flag shadow was observed at the Apollo 11 site, consistent with Aldrin’s account of the flag falling over. At the Apollo 14 and 15 sites, the shadows could not be clearly identified, so their current condition remains uncertain.^[10]

What about the color? Because the Moon has virtually no atmosphere or magnetic field to block ultraviolet radiation, the nylon fabric of these flags has been exposed for more than fifty years to intense UV light, solar wind, and extreme temperature swings ranging from roughly 100°C during the day to about minus 150°C at night.^[11] Scientists estimate that under these conditions, most of the dye in the nylon has likely broken down, leaving the flags faded to nearly white, with their original red and blue largely gone. This remains an inference based on materials science, however, rather than a conclusion confirmed by precise direct observation of how much the colors have actually faded.^[11] Humanity’s first flag planted on a celestial body beyond Earth may now stand as little more than a blank white piece of cloth.

Between Myth and Record

The Betsy Ross legend has no witnesses. Francis Hopkinson’s bill has a signature. And yet the name most Americans remember is Betsy Ross. The growth of the stars from thirteen to fifty looks, at first glance, like the product of a carefully engineered system of national symbolism — but the final touch was, in fact, a homework assignment made at a kitchen table by a high school student in Ohio. A law exists recommending that citizens handle the flag with reverence, yet there is no way to punish anyone who violates it, and the Constitution itself protects the right to burn the flag. And this first flag humanity ever planted beyond Earth was engineered to look as though it were waving in a breeze that could never reach it — only to topple over in less than a day.

What keeps surfacing, again and again, when you trace the history of the Stars and Stripes, is this: stories tend to outlive official records. Which version comes closer to the “real” flag may, in the end, be a question with no fixed answer at all.

For readers outside the United States, the sheer intensity of American flag culture — flags on porches, in classrooms, at car dealerships, sewn onto astronauts’ shoulders — can look startling next to the more restrained, occasion-only flag displays common in much of Europe or Asia. But that intensity was never handed down by decree. It grew out of a country that spent nearly two centuries improvising its own symbol, piece by piece, through a seamstress’s disputed legend, a poet’s forgotten bill, and a teenager’s kitchen-table homework, and then chose, deliberately, not to legislate the reverence it clearly felt anyway.^[6]