ABSTRACT
The American flag played a very minor role in the political, or even in the decorative, life of the United States until the Civil War. The original effort to outlaw flag desecration especially flourished between about 1895 and 1910, a time of rapidly increasing immigration and industrialization. Aside from the far greater general display of the flag as compared to the antebellum era, the flag's new popularity was mostly manifested by its increasing use by the emerging advertising industry as the nation modernized. Physically waving the flag in 1896 symbolically replaced "waving the bloody shirt", the post-Civil War Republican tradition of linking the Democrats with the disloyalty of secession. According to flag protection movement spokesmen, the flag stood only for the purest of motives and actions. The perceived political abuse of the flag in the 1896 presidential campaign and a series of resultant incidents in which the flag was physically assaulted gave a major new impetus to the movement.
