From the Library: Flag Day in Wartime

Posted in From the Library, Photography on June 14 2012, by Matt Newman

Happy Flag Day, everyone! Today marks the 235th anniversary of our star-spangled banner’s adoption, recognized each year on the 14th of June with a quiet “hurrah!” before the Fourth of July fireworks. And nearly a century ago, this was a momentous day at the Garden.

Our own flags were first raised on a sunny Saturday in 1917, and while it was during the height of World War I, Bronx residents still took the time to gather in celebration. In the midst of so much grim news from Europe, NYBG staff had pulled together to keep spirits high; the raising of three flag poles gifted to us on June 16 of that year (it’s easier on the weekend) gave the Garden an excuse to party–with parades, poetry, and at least a few swords.

It’s not often that something so simple as a flag raising gets its own marching band treatment these days, but hey, John Philip Sousa was a much bigger deal back then. The gifts–from one Edward D. Adams, NYBG board member–were met with a crowd of several hundred local school children, three separate Boy Scout troops (and their band), then Bronx Borough President Douglas Mathewson, and many more.

For the Boy Scouts in particular, whose founding in 1908 had them approaching their ten-year anniversary, it must have been worthwhile practice for their own ceremonies.

The first two flag poles–still standing today–were placed just outside the Library Building. An attending Boy Scout went about raising each banner while a local judge recited “The City Flag” by John Erskine. “School children then danced upon the front lawn,” reads the account in The Journal of the New York Botanical Garden, “including a rainbow dance and a sword dance, which were very attractive.” I can’t even venture a guess on what a rainbow dance is, nor what goes into the choreography of a sword dance, but it all sounds rather avant garde for local Bronx kids.

After a marching parade across the bridge and the raising of the flag on the third pole, located just outside the once-standing Garden mansion, the crowd stood for a speech on wartime patriotism. The children, meanwhile, sat and ate ice cream on the grass while none other than Dr. Nathaniel Lord Britton himself–the Garden’s founder–chatted with them over how best to maintain their local parks.

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The snapshot painted by the story is quaint, even a little charming, but it’s the actual photographs captured that day that make it neat. I personally connect with the timeless facade of the Library Building that I walk into each day that I come to work, nearly unchanged from then until now. Then I see the period dresses and suits, and the tiny tulip trees that are today so dominant on either side of the Allée, and the sense that I’m peering through a rift in time is right there.

Digging through the archives always seems to turn up little gems from bygone phases in the Garden’s history. Thanks goes to Paul Silverman of the Library for uncovering this one.

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1917 Flag Day poster image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.