What's in a Flag? Part I
Chicagoans have a unique relationship with their city's flag. It's pretty common here to deck out yourself, your pet, and your home in the red, white, and light blue. But how many people know what those colors and shapes mean? In a recent* survey of highly intelligent people,** only 2% of respondents*** could correctly identify all the symbols on the Chicago flag.
When I ask my students to examine cultural artifacts – flags, public art, popular music – I always ask them two questions.
First, what story does the object tell?****
So, to answer that question, here's my list of the first five of the top ten things you should know about the Chicago flag:
1. The flag was designed in 1917.
Mayor William Thompson appointed a flag-design commission in 1915. They had an open competition for the best design and received over a thousand entries. Wallace de Groot Cecil Rice, a Canadian-born poet and journalist with the Tribune made the rules for judging the entries. Lo and behold, Rice’s own design was ultimately selected by the committee as the winner.
2. The three white stripes one the flag represent the original three divisions of the city: north, west, and south.
In 1837, the North Division of the city was bounded by the Chicago River on the south and west, Lake Michigan on the east, and North Avenue on the north (duh). The West Division was everything west of the river, as far as Wood Street. The city’s south division was everything south and east of the river (including today’s Loop) and extended to 22nd Street. Although even in 1837 there were six different wards in the city, the three main divisions functioned as political units for many purposes. For instance, policemen, street commissioners, and tax collectors operated not by ward, but by division for many years.
3. The two light blue stripes represent bodies of water that are important to Chicago.
Given that the three land divisions are based largely on the presence of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, you’d think that would explain the two blue stripes. But not quite. The top one actually represents Lake Michigan and the North branch of the river. The bottom one represents the South branch of the river and the Illinois and Michigan Canal. The lake, the river, and the canal were all integral to the nineteenth-century settling and growth of Chicago.
4. The original flag only had two red stars.
The original two stars represented the 1871 fire, which destroyed most of the city, and the World’s Fair of 1893, which for many Chicagoans represented the city’s ultimate triumph over the devastation of the fire. The third and fourth stars were added in 1933. On the current flag, the 1933 additions are the stars furthest to the left and furthest to the right.
5. The left-most star represents Fort Dearborn.
The fort was built in 1803 by the U.S. Army, destroyed in 1812 by British/Canadian forces, rebuilt in 1816, and de-commissioned in 1837.
Of course, the American military was far from the first settlers in the area. The Miami, Sauk and Fox, and Potawatomi nations had used the area we now know as Chicago as a meeting and trade place prior to the arrival of Europeans. Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette, the seventeenth-century French explorers, are generally considered the first Europeans to have been in Chicago. They didn’t stay, but their map-making informed other Europeans that traveling through Chicago was the easiest and almost entirely water-born route between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, via the Mississippi. Therefore, from the late eighteenth century until the 1830s, Chicago was a center of trade and hosted a small settlement of mostly French and Native American people, who lived and worked together peacefully. Around the turn of the century, the American government decided that the nation needed a western military post. Hence, Fort Dearborn was created.
So that covers the stripes and one star. Tune in next week to learn about the other three stars and their six points each…
* “Recent” should be interpreted as “constructed by yours truly and completely unscientific.”
** “Intelligent people,” meaning, a handful of my facebook friends who were bored enough at work to click on the link to my survey monkey.
*** Out of an enormous sample, I can assure you.
**** For the second question, see next week's post - what a cliff hanger!
