It has been a widely recognized symbol of distress since the country’s founding, when sailors turned the American flag upside down to signal that their ships were sinking, on fire or stuck in ice.
But over time, the inverted American flag became a symbol that protesters from across the political spectrum increasingly waved to signal their belief that the nation itself was in grave danger.
After President Joe Biden won the 2020 elections, supporters of the former president Donald Trump gathered around the upside-down flag and displayed it in their homes, on their cars and on social media to show that they believed Trump’s lie that the election was stolen. Some started doing so before the votes were even counted.
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Now the practice has entered the national conversation after The New York Times reported Thursday that it had recently obtained images of an inverted flag flying outside the Alexandria, Virginia, home of Justice Samuel Alito in January 2021. the Supreme Court was still grappling with whether to hear a 2020 election case.
Alito said in an email to the Times that he had “no involvement whatsoever in raising the flag.”
“It was briefly posted by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of offensive and personally insulting language on yard signs,” he wrote, referring to his wife, Martha-Ann.
Flying an inverted flag was once a call for help at sea.
Before it became an emblem of political protest, flying a country’s flag upside down was one of the few ways sailors could call for help.
According to the North American Vexillological Association, a group dedicated to the study of flags, the practice appears to have originated in the British Isles in the 17th century, probably during the Anglo-Dutch Wars.
Ted Kaye, the association’s secretary, said he had seen 18th-century carvings of the American flag flying upside down on lifeboats and on New England whalers stuck in the ice. “It was the easiest way to signal distress without needing a special flag,” Kaye said, “and distress is the most urgent signal you would want to send from a ship.”
That meaning was reflected in the American Flag Code, an official set of guidelines for the flag, first published in the 1920s. It reads: “The flag should never be displayed when the union is down, except as a signal of great distress in cases of extreme danger to life or property.”
The treaty lasted for decades. In 1974, a 67-year-old clam digger named Julius Novickis flew the upside-down flag after suffering a stroke on an arid island off Nassau County, Long Island, 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 delivered a scathing anti-slavery speech while standing under an upside-down American flag on a stage with Sojourner Truth and William Lloyd Garrison, who held up a copy of the Constitution and set it on fire, to cheers and groans from the audience, according to “Henry David Thoreau: A Life,” by Laura Dassow Walls.
In the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrators wore the flag upside down as a symbol of opposition to the Vietnam War, says Marc Leepson, author of “Flag: An American Biography.” Some put flag stamps upside down on their letters, sending a more subtle anti-war message, he said.
Sometimes there was a backlash.
In his first campaign for Congress in 1972, John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran turned antiwar activist and later a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, presidential candidate and secretary of state, was bitterly attacked for publishing a book, “The New Soldier.” with a cover showing a group of bearded veterans holding the American flag upside down.
Kerry’s congressional campaign 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 under the First Amendment, some Americans were prosecuted for turning the flag upside down had put.
It was considered desecration of the flag, he said.
In more recent years, the inverted flag has been displayed by Tea Party activists opposing President Barack Obama’s re-election and by demonstrators demonstrating after Michael Brown, a teenager, was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. In 2020, an Associated Press photo circulated of a protester holding an American flag upside down next to a burning building in Minneapolis, capturing the fire and anger in that city after the killing of George Floyd by police officers.
It is now associated with the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, which denies Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat.
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 common in MAGA communities and QAnon communities,” he said. “It caught on among hardcore MAGA people in the ‘Stop the Steal’ ecosystem in 2020.”
Matthew Guterl, professor of Africana Studies and American Studies at Brown University, said flying the flag upside down “seems to have become part of our highly partisan symbolic environment, especially on the right, where it symbolizes the impending death of the nation and a call to arms.”
Other symbols include flags with thin blue lines, a pro-police symbol and a Punisher skull, based on the comic book vigilante, he said.
“I am sure that if a Navy skiff were to hang its flag upside down, anyone who saw it would assume a disaster was about to happen and would come running to help,” he said in an email. “But the meaning of things is also sticky. Once the flag becomes associated with the right’s call to arms, it will likely last for a long time.”
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