As I do on most mornings, I walked to the post office recently. The U.S. flag was at half-staff, and I didn’t know why. I do try to keep up on the news, and I felt certain that if some prominent person had died, I would have heard about it.
But I hadn’t heard of any such event. Nor had a friend whom I talked to a few days later. He and his wife had just spent several days deep in Mesa Verde away from the news, and on their drive home, “we saw the flag at half-mast at the Mancos Post Office, and then at Hesperus, too.” He mentioned something about their groundless hopes that this had something to do with Dick Cheney, which I passed over, just in case some federal snoop was eavesdropping, and asked me if I knew why the flag had been at half-staff.
So I decided to find out. Since 1962, May 15 has been Peace Officers Memorial Day, to honor those who were killed or injured in the line of duty, and the American flag should be flown at half-staff then, unless it coincides with Armed Forces Day, which is the third Saturday in May, when it should fly at full height.
Other half-staff days are Korean War Veterans Armistice Day, July 27, and National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, Dec. 7.
“Half-staff,” by the way, is the proper term for flags on land. “Half-mast” applies to ships, which have masts. Even though we commonly say “flagpole” rather than “flag staff,” we don’t fly the flag at “half-pole.”
As for Memorial Day tomorrow, the flag is supposed to fly at half-staff until noon, then be raised to full-staff.
Now the deeper question: How, why and when did this tradition of a half-staff flag as a symbol of mourning originate?
I guessed that it began as a naval practice, because flags were used for communication at sea, and to this day some high-ranking mariners are “flag officers.” My usual quick sources – Encyclopedia Brittanica, the World Almanac and Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable – were silent, except to note that it is a custom in many countries, not just ours.
I trust books a lot more than I trust anything on the Internet, but there was no place else to look. I found that in 1952, probably on account of the death of King George VI, the royal office asked the British Board of Admiralty for information on the origin of the custom.
Archivist Peter Kemp responded that “The earliest record we have of lowering a flag to signify a death was an occasion in 1612, when the Master of [the ship] ‘Heart’s Ease,’ William Hall, was murdered by Eskimos while taking part in an expedition in search of the North West Passage.” The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1627 reference to “half-mast,” but it took a while for the tradition to form.
Kemp wrote that after the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660, ships of the Royal Navy flew flags at half-mast on Jan. 30 to commemorate the anniversary of the execution of King Charles I in 1649, “and it is from this custom that, so far as we can trace, the present practice … has evolved.”
That explanation seems sensible, and the practice has evolved to include other dates. We might further this custom by adding another half-staff day: Dec. 15 was proclaimed Bill of Rights Day in 1941 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the first 10 amendments to the federal constitution. They have a rather quaint and seditious sound in these times, as in “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated” or “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law.”
Daily I receive press releases from the ruling political party about how a majority of Americans really support the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detentions and the collection of their telephone records. If that is indeed so, then it seems only fair to hold a half-staff day to mourn the death of our Bill of Rights.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
