Do kids still learn about Betsy Ross and the first American flag?

When I was a kid, I learned that Betsy Ross, a woman in Philadelphia, made the first American flag. I don’t recall learning how she came to have that job or how we knew that she carried it out. I just knew it was true. If I needed any proof, I could have found it in the fact that on January 2, 1952, the United States Post Office Department issued today’s #stampoftheday day, honoring the 200th anniversary of the birth of Betsy Ross by showing a reproduction of Charles Weisgerber’s painting of her presenting the flag she made to George Washington, Robert Morris, and George Ross.

The only problem is that the story almost certainly isn’t true. Rather, “for scholars, the story of how Betsy Ross made the first American flag is about as credible as Parson Weems’s fable about little George Washington cutting down the cherry tree,” wrote Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a history professor at Harvard, in an 2007 article that appeared on common-place.org. “Yet for more than a century, it has been an established part of American education. Among the general public, it shows no signs of going away.”

There was a woman from Philadelphia named Elizabeth Griscom, who, in 1773, while apprenticed to an upholsterer, married Samuel Ross, who also worked in the shop. Sometime before March 1775 Samuel opened a small upholstery shop in the city. But Samuel, who joined a local militia after the war broke out in spring 1775, died less than a year, later, supposedly from injuries he received from an explosion at a munitions warehouse.

The newly widowed Betsy continued to work as seamstress and her work included making flags for the Pennsylvania Navy and, much later, American flags for a variety of customers, including the U.S. Arsenal on the Schuylkill River. There is, however, no record that she made the first American flag.

In fact, it wasn’t until 1777 that the Continental Congress passed a cryptic resolution specifying that “the flag of the thirteen United States be 13 stripes alternate red and white, that the union be 13 stars, white in a blue field representing a new constellation.” (Most historians now believe that Francis Hopkinson, a member of the Continental Congress, came up with the now iconic design of 13 red and white stripes and 13 white stars in a circle against a blue background.

So how is it that Betsy Ross became so entangled with the first American flag that the U.S. Post Office Department would immortalize her in a stamp?

The first public mention of her role didn’t come until 1870, when her grandson, William Canby made it in a paper delivered at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Relying only on stories he was told by his grandmother and other older relatives, he claimed that in 1776 the three gentlemen pictured on the stamp entered her shop. She recognized Ross, who was her deceased husband’s uncle, and Washington, who had visited her shop before.

The men told her the Continental Congress had empowered them to prepare a flag and they showed her a conceptual design. She supposedly suggested several improvements, including changing the proposed six-pointed stars to five-pointed ones. The three men worried this would be too hard. According to Canby, “‘Nothing easier’ was her prompt reply, and folding a piece of paper in the proper manner, with one clip of her ready scissors she quickly displayed to their astonished vision the five pointed star.” Supposedly she then made a prototype flag; the committee liked it so much that Ross provided an advance payment for materials; Congress approved it; and Betsy Ross became a flag maker for the fledgling nation.

Although many historians have doubted the tale since it was first told, it somehow captured the public’s imagination and was widely accepted by 1876, when Philadelphia hosted the Centennial Exposition, the first world’s fair held in the United States. The depth of the public’s continued fascination is quite amazing. Before the pandemic, for example, about 250,000 people a year would visit her house in Philadelphia, which made it the city’s third most popular tourist attraction (trailing only Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.)

Even more tellingly, according to Ulrich, is an experiment first developed in the late 1980s by Michael Frisch, a history professor at the University of Buffalo. At the start of the semester, Frisch asked students in his introductory US history course to write down the first ten names that came to their minds when he gave them the prompt, “American history from the beginning to the Civil War.” Not surprisingly, they usually listed George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and other national heroes.

Frisch then asked them to do the same thing again, this time excluding “presidents, generals, and statesmen.” Betsy Ross was almost always the most commonly cited name. Ulrich got the same result with her students in the 1990s when she was teaching at the University of New Hampshire. According to Ulrich, Frisch believed the test showed that “Betsy Ross endures because of her association with our ‘most inclusive symbol of national identity,’ the flag. If George Washington is the father of the country ‘then surely Betsy Ross exists symbolically as the mother, who gives birth to our collective symbol.”

But Ulrich also warned “whether she can sustain her fame for another century is uncertain.” She explained that in 2004, when she gave Frisch’s test to 200 Harvard students, “their responses to the first question were almost exactly the same as in New Hampshire ten years before, but when I gave them the second question, there was an audible gasp in the room….A few quickly wrote, ‘Mrs. Washington,’ ‘Mrs. Lincoln,’ and ‘Mrs. Adams,’ but there were a lot of blanks on these papers. In the end Paul Revere came in first and Betsy Ross dropped to seventh, though the answers were so scattered, it is hard to determine significance. The debunkers may be winning, though so far there appears to be nothing to take Betsy’s place.”

It will be interesting to see if Ross’ stellar reputation endures, particularly in this time when we are revisiting so many of the nation’s origin stories and reconsidering so many of our once-iconic heroes.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.