It has been a widely recognized symbol of anguish since the country’s founding, when sailors turned the American flag upside down to signal that their ships were sinking, catching fire or trapped in ice.
But over time, the inverted American flag became a symbol brandished most frequently by protesters across the political spectrum to signal that they believed the nation itself was in grave danger.
After President Joe Biden won the 2020 elections, supporters of the former president donald trump rallied around the inverted flag, displaying it in their homes, in their cars and on social media to show that they believed Trump’s lie that the election was stolen. Some began doing so even before the votes were counted.
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Now the practice has erupted into national debate after The New York Times reported Thursday that it had recently obtained images of an inverted flag flown outside the Alexandria, Virginia, home of Justice Samuel Alito in January 2021. At the time , the Supreme Court was still debating whether to hear a 2020 election case.
Alito said in an email to the Times that he “had no involvement in the raising of the flag.”
“It was briefly put up by Ms. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs,” he wrote, referring to his wife, Martha-Ann.
Hoisting an inverted flag was once a cry for help at sea.
Before it became an emblem of political protest, flying a nation’s flag upside down was one of the only ways sailors could call for help.
The practice appears to have originated in the British Isles in the 17th century, probably during the Anglo-Dutch wars, according to the North American Vexillological Association, a group dedicated to the study of flags.
Ted Kaye, secretary of the association, said he has seen 18th-century engravings of the American flag flying upside down on lifeboats and on ice-bound New England whaling ships. “It was the easiest way to signal distress without having any special flag,” Kaye said, “and distress is the most urgent signal anyone could want to send from a ship.”
This meaning was reflected in the U.S. Flag Code, an official set of guidelines for the flag, first published in the 1920s. It says: “The flag should never be flown with the union lowered, except as a sign of extreme distress in cases of extreme danger to life or property.”
The convention lasted decades. In 1974, a 67-year-old clam digger named Julius Novickis raised the flag upside down after suffering a stroke on a barren island off Long Island’s Nassau County and successfully summoned a police helicopter.
It has been used to protest slavery and the Vietnam War.
The inverted flag also has a long history as a political emblem.
In 1854, Henry David Thoreau gave a scathing speech against slavery while standing under an upside-down American flag on a stage with Sojourner Truth and William Lloyd Garrison, who held a copy of the Constitution and set fire to boos and groans from the audience, according to “Henry David Thoreau: A Life”, by Laura Dassow Walls.
In the 1960s and 1970s, protesters carried the flag upside down as a symbol of opposition to the Vietnam War, said Marc Leepson, author of “Flag: An American Biography.” Some place upside-down flag stamps on their letters, sending a more subtle anti-war message, he said.
Sometimes a negative reaction occurred.
In his first campaign for Congress in 1972, John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran turned anti-war activist who became a Democratic Massachusetts senator, presidential candidate and secretary of state, was heavily attacked for publishing a book, “ The New Soldier,” with a cover that showed a group of bearded veterans holding the American flag upside down.
Kerry’s campaign for Congress tried to explain the flag’s position as an international distress signal. He lost that election.
Robert Justin Goldstein, professor emeritus of political science at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, said that before the Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that burning the American flag was protected by the First Amendment, some Americans were prosecuted for flipping the flag. upside down.
It was considered desecration of the flag, he said.
In more recent years, the inverted flag has been displayed by Tea Party activists who opposed the re-election of President Barack Obama and by protesters who demonstrated after Michael Brown, a teenager, was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson. , Missouri, in 2014. In 2020, an Associated Press photo of a protester carrying an upside-down U.S. flag next to a burning building in Minneapolis circulated widely, capturing the fire and fury in that city following the murder of George Floyd in the hands of police officers.
It is now associated with the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, which denies Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020.
In 2020, the inverted flag became more firmly established as an emblem of Trump supporters who denied the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, said Alex Newhouse, a researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“It’s very, very common in MAGA communities and QAnon communities,” he said. “It caught on among the hardcore MAGA people in the ‘Stop the Steal’ ecosystem in 2020.”
Matthew Guterl, professor of Africana Studies and American Studies at Brown University, said that flying the flag upside down “seems to have become part of our hyperpartisan symbolic environment, especially on the right, where it symbolizes the impending death of the nation and an appeal to arms.”
Other symbols include thin blue line flags, a pro-police symbol and a Punisher skull, based on the comic book vigilante, he said.
“I’m sure if a Navy skiff hung its flag upside down, anyone who saw it would assume calamity and come running to help,” he said in an email. “But the meaning of things is also complicated. Once the flag becomes associated with the right-wing call to arms, it is likely to stick for a long time.”
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