How To Make An American Flag

We've all heard the story about Betsy Ross stitching together the first American flag. But like George Washington and the cherry tree, it's probably just a myth; historians don't know for sure who came up with the design. The 1777 Flag Resolution that adopted the Stars and Stripes established no standard scheme, writes Woden Teachout in her new book, Capture the Flag, and variations flourished: stars in rows or stars in circles; stars with six points or stars with five; stripes of red and white, or blue and red, or red, white and blue. What the flag looked like didn't matter as much as what it communicated: a body politic.

I got to thinking about flags and their meanings last week when my friend David Mahfouda unveiled his latest American flag. There have been three of them. The first was lost, the second was destroyed by a frenzied crowd. Now the third has just been unfurled. It is enormous: 65 by 130 feet—about a third of the length of a football field. Mahfouda's flag began as a political project, and it still is, in a way. But now, he also says it simply means "home." The story of his flag, like the story of the American flag, is always evolving.

Mahfouda first decided to make a flag in 2006. At first he thought of using white cloth, like a truce flag, and hanging it from the Brooklyn Bridge. As a graduate student in engineering and product architecture at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., he had spent a lot of time on bridges. "I was really taken with them," he told me, "and I had the idea to unroll a bolt of fabric from the bridge, like a sculpture." Bridges in New York were potential terrorist targets. September 11 was on Mahfouda's mind, too. The attacks had changed the skyline by an act of destruction. What if, he wondered, you could alter the skyline not with an act of war but with something that felt constructive? And what about using an American flag?

Dropping a huge flag from a bridge at the risk of arrest is not out of character for Mahfouda, 27. An art major in college, he has done several public art projects, and he's also participated in several protests. Mahfouda has a strong build and a soft voice, and gentleness, despite his size, is usually the first thing that people comment on when they meet him. I first got to know him in a seminar in college. He was an anomaly: a recruited lacrosse player from Long Island who read poetry and was one of the kindest people I have ever encountered.

To make the flag, Mahfouda called in a favor from a friend, Jane Van Cleef, who came down from Maine to help. They and a few others spent a weekend furiously sewing. They planned to drop it over the bridge on Sept. 12, 2006—the day after the memorials and remembrance. It was a day, Mahfouda thought, to consider "what we can control." On Sept. 11, they carried it to Central Park, to continue working. By the end of the day, they were drained, and they weren't done. Taking it to the bridge didn't seem possible. But something else seemed to be happening with the flag. Kids started playing with it. The flag was "an object they were able to touch, and walk on and walk under," Mahfouda says. "That seemed good."

His mother, Leah, was troubled at first by the sight of watching kids run all over the flag. "It was not the way I had been brought up to treat the flag," she says. But watching the children's enthusiasm changed her mind. "They don't mean disrespect." People would stop by to watch, and touch it, and help carry it. One man came over and said, "This is a statement of personal patriotism." He sat down, took a needle, and began to sew.

When the flag was finished, Mahfouda brought it to his parents' house. At one point, he and his father took it onto the roof and wrapped their house in it. People lined up in the street to see it. Sometimes he would take it out into the park or to the beach with friends and play with it, always taking a little time to repair the tears and fix the seams. For a while he left it outside, locked in a cart, so that it could be used more often, and so that other people might start using it, as well. The flag was a public object, after all. But when he came back from a trip in September 2008, the flag was missing; no one knew what happend to it. He dug through large trash containers looking for it, but it never surfaced. "I felt pretty lost without it," he said.