Flag Day 2027

What Flag Day is

Flag Day marks June 14, 1777, the day the Second Continental Congress adopted the first national flag, resovling that it have thirteen stripes, altarnate red and white, and thirteen white stars in a blue field representing a new constellation. Despite its patriotic weight, Flag Day is a national observance, not a federal holiday. The president proclaims it each year under Title 36 of the U.S. Code, but no one gets the day off: post offices, banks, the stock market, schools and government offices all keep normal hours - pennsylvania is the exception in statute, listing June 14 as a state legal holiday, though even there state offices stay open.

Why June 14

The date is fixed to the anniversary of the Flag Resolution of 1777 and never moves, so Flag Day falls on a different weekday each year. There is no observed-date shift because nothing closes. The week containing June 14 is designated National Flag Week, when the president urges Americans to display the flag, and June 14 is also the anniversary the U.S. Army celebrates as its birthday, dating to the army's creation on June 14, 1775.

A schoolteacher's forty-year campaign

Flag Day owes its existance largely to Bernard J. Cigrand, a nineteen-year-old teacher at the Stony Hill School in Waubeka, Wisconsin, who in 1885 had his students write essays on the flag to mark the anniversary of its adoption. Cigrand, later a dentist in Illinois, spent decades writting articles and giving speeches urging a national flag anniversary, earning the title Father of Flag Day, others pushed in parallel: New York schools held flag exercises in the late 1880s, and in 1893 Elizabeth Duane Gillespie, a great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, persuaded Philadelphia to require the flag on public buildings on June 14. President Woodrow Wilson issued the proclamation that first established June 14 as national Flag Day in 1916, during the patriotic surge before American entry into World War I. Congress made it permanent in an act signed by President Harry S. Truman on August 3, 1949. Pennsylvania had already gone further, making June 14 a legal state holiday in 1937, the first and only state to do so.

How the day is observed

Observance is voluntary and local. Homes, businesses and government buildings fly the flag; some towns stage parades, with two of the oldest annual events in Fairfield, Washington, and Appleton, Wisconsin, and one of the largest in Troy, New York. Civic groups such as the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars hold flag-retirement ceremonies, in which worn flags are burned with dignity as the U.S. Flag Code recommends. Schools still in session use the day for lessons on flag history and etiquette, and naturalization ceremonies are often scheduled for the date.

Flag Day and the Flag Code

The day is a natural occasion for flag etiquette: display from sunrise to sunset unless the flag is illuminated at night, never let it touch the ground, and retire a worn flag respectfully. These rules come from the Flag Code, which is advisory for civilians and carries no penalties, a point often misunderstood.