Betsy Ross Goes to Public School and Gets a Makeover for the Chicago World’s Fair, 1891–1893

Abstract

This chapter explores Betsy Ross’s emergence in the early 1890s as a national icon of patriotism and American womanhood. Responding to unprecedented immigration, labor unrest, and fears about the nation’s future, educational reformers, veterans’ organizations, hereditary societies, and popular media promoted a reverent “cult of the flag” in the nation’s public schools and used flag rituals, a new Pledge of Allegiance, classroom exercises, Betsy Ross, and historical homilies to Americanize immigrant children. It explains how Charles Weisgerber’s painting The Birth of Our Nation’s Flag, first displayed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, gave the Betsy Ross story powerful visual form. It also explores how Flag Day celebrations and the Schoolhouse Flag movement transformed Amelia Mund’s dilapidated Philadelphia tobacco shop at 239 Arch Street into a sacred national site dedicated to the birth of the Stars and Stripes.