50-star flag rises over Fort McHenry; Hawaii's star joins the banner at last
Hawaii had been a state for almost eleven months, and the flag still had only 49 stars. On July 4, 1960, the new 50-star flag flew for the first time at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland, the site that had inspired "The Star-Spangled Banner." President Eisenhower had ordered the design the previous August, the moment Hawaii's admission became official. The pattern that unfurled that morning has not changed since.
The 50-star flag has now outlasted every one of the 26 prior versions, flying longer than the 48-star flag's 47-year run and far longer than Betsy Ross's 13-star original. A design settled in 1960, born from a public contest that drew more than 3,000 submissions, became the only flag most living Americans have ever known.
QHow many people submitted flag designs before the government picked the final pattern?
More than 3,000 ordinary citizens mailed in their own arrangements of stars and stripes, hoping the committee would pick theirs. The judges were not a single office but a mixed panel drawing on the Armed Forces, the Interior Department, the State Department, and the Commission on Fine Arts. Out of that flood of amateur cartography came the now-familiar staggered rows of fifty stars, a design so ordinary-looking today that it is easy to forget it once had 3,000 competitors.
QWhy did Eisenhower sign two separate flag executive orders less than eight months apart?
Alaska's statehood forced Executive Order 10798 on January 3, 1959, locking in a 49-star flag. Then Hawaii was admitted just seven months later, on August 21, 1959, and Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10834 that same day, already redesigning a flag that had barely been printed. The 49-star flag turned out to be one of the shortest-lived versions in American history, a placeholder between two admissions.
QWhat did Fort McHenry have to do with the changeover between the 49-star and 50-star flags?
Fort McHenry, the site that inspired the Star-Spangled Banner, flew the 49-star flag on Independence Day 1959 and the 50-star flag on Independence Day 1960, one year apart, marking the exact turnover in miniature at a single historic site. Two consecutive Fourth of Julys at the same fort, two different flags, a full year of overlap while the nation waited on the new design.
