“A Fake, Pure and Simple”

Abstract

This chapter examines the failed efforts of the Betsy Ross Memorial Association to transfer 239 Arch Street to the federal government and then to the City of Philadelphia. These efforts collapsed due in large part to the opposition of Philadelphia historians William J. Campbell and John Henry Fow, whose public denunciations of the Betsy Ross story as “a fake, pure and simple” drew national attention. It then explores how the public, press, and Claypoole and Ross family descendants rallied around family memory and patriotic myth. Appealing to Americans’ patriotism, the Rossites easily won the war of public sentiment. In the end, the controversy reveals a deeper national conflict over historical authority and demonstrates how emotion, tradition, and spectacle outweighed evidence in shaping American memory and civic commemoration, and how popular belief assured the survival of the Betsy Ross story and the Old Flag House.