MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic The Search for Identity Arthur J. Pulos Published on: Apr 22, 2021 License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic The Search for Identity The expansive future is our arena. We are entering on its untrodden space with the truth of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts, and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past We are the nation of human progress and who will, what can, set limits on our onward march? … The far-reaching, the boundless future, will be the era of American greatness.… New York State Representative John Louis O’Sullivan, 1780s ([123], 8) As one of the first groups of Europeans to seek to establish an independent nation, the Americans were anxious to confirm their identity. Now that they had cast themselves adrift from their heritage, some warned that this unprecedented social odyssey would not be able to survive without an antiquity to be revered, defended, and transmitted. Some expressed a fear that the new republic may have been born impotent and that only by some form of divine intervention would it be able to achieve a sustaining vitality. Others found comfort in a conviction that a uniquely American philosophy was emerging that promised that the past was irrelevant to the new nation. They argued that the Americans did not need ancestors because they themselves were ancestors, thus echoing John Locke’s statement that “in the beginning all the world was America.” ([57], 319) The citizens of the young republic thus declared themselves independent of national origins and obliged to place their faith in individual conscience set against new challenges. In what was to become a strong New England movement a few years later, the American Transcendentalists counted on the presence of the Divine in each person as a source of truth and a guide to action. The new citizens therefore sanctified every incident as a substitute for European antiquity. The landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, the first Thanksgiving, the Boston Tea Party, and other events were hallowed as sacred moments of the new nation. Shrines were erected at the bridge where the embattled farmers fired “the shot heard ‘round the world,” on the hill where the barricaded patriots were ordered not to fire “until you see the whites of their eyes,” and in the woods where George Washington prayed for divine guidance. In compensation for the loss of their European roots, the disenfranchised colonists hastened to embrace every symbol that would help them create an instant history of their own. From Benjamin Franklin’s political cartoons to the ancient political and architectural forms that were adopted, every distinctly American aesthetic abstraction was cherished. These symbols still permeate the communal and decorative arts of the United States. 2 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic The Search for Identity Every product that had figured in the struggle for independence acquired an historic patina and was destined to become a model for countless reproductions in the future. The silver bowl that Paul Revere made on the eve of the Revolution for the Sons of Liberty in honor of the 92 patriots who voted not to rescind their letter urging the other colonies to unite against the British is the most honored relic of the time. The Windsor chairs and the silver inkstand that were used in the signing of the Declaration of Independence are displayed proudly in Independence Hall. Even Franklin’s glasses, Washington’s surveying instruments, and Jefferson’s drawing tools have become venerated relics of the American political saints. In what must have been the first corporate identity program ever undertaken in the country, the leaders of the young republic ordered the design and development of heraldry and instruments and monuments of state. They resolved that a national banner be sewn, that a seal be devised, that coinage be struck in the Roman decimal system, and that the fashionable orders of ancient Greece be adopted for official architecture. For designers these acts mark the origin of style employed with deliberate intent to define and project the philosophy and ideals of a client. Two of the symbols, the flag and the Great Seal, clearly illustrate the two ends of the spectrum of corporate identity—the flag as a natural product of inevitable evolution and the seal as the result of deliberate invention. This popular newspaper heading, devised by Benjamin Franklin in 1754 to urge the English colonies to unite against the French, was revised in 1776—this time against the British. Harper’s Monthly, December 1875. 3 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic The Search for Identity A second editorial cartoon by Franklin, drawn in 1774 and depicting, in his words, “the Colonies (that is, Brittania’s limbs) being severed from her….” Harper’s Monthly, July 1875.Images 4 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic The Search for Identity The Sons of Liberty Bowl (of which countless reproductions have been marketed as patriotic tributes to the Revolution), fashioned by Paul Revere, Jr., in 1768. Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift by subscription and Francis Bartlett Fund. 5 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic The Search for Identity The first legislative action on record establishing the national flag was taken in June 1777, when the Continental Congress “resolved that the flag of the thirteen United 6 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic The Search for Identity States be thirteen stripes alternate red and white, that the union be thirteen stars, white on a blue field, representing a new constellation.” Despite the popular stories of the roles of George Washington and Betsy Ross in the development of the flag, the facts are that its general design was a natural extension of preceding English flags. Only the origin of the decision to substitute stars for the combined crosses of Saint George and Saint Andrew seems to be lost in history. The ancient sign of Saint George (a red cross on a white field) had served as the banner of the English from the fourteenth century until 1606, when King James I, by royal proclamation, ordered that it be united with Scotland’s sign of Saint Andrew (a white diagonal cross on a blue field) as evidence of an alliance of the two kingdoms. The King’s Colors, as it was called, was ordered to be displayed from the maintops of the king’s own ships. (Since other English ships were still permitted to carry Saint George’s red cross, it is quite likely that the Mayflower displayed that banner when she landed the Pilgrims at Plymouth.) In 1707, after ratifying the complete union of England and Scotland, Parliament ordered that the two crosses should be cojoined in the upper inner corner (the union) of a crimson banner. This new flag was commonly known as the Union flag. The Union flag was used in America with other local banners until the colonies separated from the mother country. When George Washington arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in July 1775 after the battle of Bunker Hill, this Union flag was flown over his camp, still acknowledging (at least as far as the British believed) allegiance to England. It was during this encampment that the Continental Congress decided that the troops raised by the several colonies to oppose the English should henceforth serve as the combined forces of “the United Colonies of North America.” In October 1775, when the Continental Congress authorized the establishment of the first Federal Navy, there was still no national flag for the 17 ships to sail under. However, by the end of the year a committee including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Lynch, and Benjamin Harrison recommended that the crimson field of the English Union flag be changed to “thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, emblematic of the union of the thirteen colonies.” ([72], 218) This Grand Union flag, still bearing the English and Scottish crosses in the union, was raised for the first time in January 1776 over Washington’s camp at Cambridge. The British, and perhaps even most of the Americans, did not realize yet that the new flag was symbolic of the struggle for complete independence that was to come. By the middle of the year it was flown (in Washington’s presence) at the reading of the Declaration of Independence in New York. After that, Washington had it flown over his fortifications and headquarters. 7 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic The Search for Identity The Grand Union was the national flag of the Americans in September 1776, when Congress ordered the words “United States” be employed “where heretofore the words ‘United Colonies’ had been used.” Despite the Congressional resolution of 1777 establishing the stars and stripes, there is no evidence that General Washington or the armies of the United States ever used the new flag until 1783, after the Revolutionary War was over. The first flag of the United States with 13 stripes and 13 stars was flown until 1795, when they both were increased to 15 in recognition of the addition of the new states of Vermont and Kentucky to the Union. In 1815, as other states joined the Union, a commission recommended that the stripes be reduced to the original 13 and that a new star be added in the future in honor of each new state that joined the Union.