American flag

The American flag frames both patriotic spectacle and national mourning, yet its repeated appearances place those ceremonies beside the suffering and political conflict they cannot resolve. From a flag-lined street to the covering draped over an unidentified soldier’s coffin, it signifies a country making claims about its unity while the narrative keeps individual lives and dissent in view.

Public Display and Political Conflict

On Lower Broadway, flags streak the street red, white, and blue as clerks, stenographers, and officeboys gather along the pavements. Police motorcycles hold the route clear, and a military band plays “Keep the Home Fires Burning.” The summer scene appears jubilant, but Ben Compton experiences its patriotism as a rebuke: he reminds himself that the crowd belongs to the society sending him to prison. The flag’s public presence thus stands beside his isolation, making patriotic celebration inseparable from the state’s punishment of dissent.

The flag appears again at Morris Stein’s law office, draped over the door to Stein’s private room. There, Ben is introduced to Stevens Warner, who has served a year in prison for refusing to register. The setting connects the national emblem not only to public ceremony but also to the legal and political consequences faced by men resisting wartime demands. Its placement does not erase that conflict; it sharpens the contrast between the flag’s claim to represent the country and the punishment imposed in its name.

The Flag and the Unknown Dead

At the Arlington burial, the flag is draped over the coffin of an American soldier whose identity has not been established. The official resolution describes the body as that of a member of the American Expeditionary Forces killed in the war, but the narrative emphasizes how little can be known about the person beneath the covering. In the crowded morgue at Châlons-sur-Marne, the selected pine box is one among many; the remains offer no dependable personal identification. The flag gives the burial a national identity where the body itself cannot supply a name.

The ceremony is deliberately solemn: silence, tears, songs, prayer, muffled drums, and soft music take the place of applause. President Harding offers an impersonal tribute, and the coffin is carried home aboard a battleship and placed in a sarcophagus in the Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. With the flag over it, the unnamed dead man becomes a focus for national mourning. Yet the narrative’s attention to the unidentified remains resists allowing the ceremonial symbol to make the lost individual fully knowable.

National Memory and Its Contradictions

The burial’s closing images join the flag to official honors and public feeling. Harding prays; diplomats, generals, admirals, politicians, and society guests stand solemnly; the bugler plays taps, and three volleys ring out. Medals from several countries are pinned where the soldier’s chest ought to have been, while flowers include a bouquet of poppies brought by Woodrow Wilson. The ceremony gathers state, military, and international recognition around a body whose personal identity remains unknown.

The narrative calls the flag beautiful and sad at once. That doubleness is central to its function: the emblem can organize shared grief, but it also risks smoothing distinct lives into a single national story. The novel places the decorated, unnamed coffin beside the varied work and experience associated with John Doe, preserving the gap between the ceremonial figure and the many possible ordinary people contained within that name. The flag therefore marks both the power of public remembrance and the individuality that remembrance cannot recover.