Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Benjamin Franklin And The Stars And Stripes WE are confronted with a most perplexing and alluring problem when we attempt to discover the sources of inspiration for the Stars and Stripes as we see it to-day. Historians who approach the subject with confidence, come to conclusions that differ. Some of them, of the school of Parson Weems, are emphatic in their belief that the coat-of-arms of the Washington family, with its stars and horizontal stripes, or bars, gave the idea of the design for the Flag. This is a pretty conceit, that meets with a sharp rebuff in the personality of the Father of his Country. The man who fled precipitately from the room in Independence Hall when John Adams proposed him as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, would have made impossible any effort to perpetuate his family crest in his country's emblem. Washington said, much to the point, "We take the stars from Heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity representing liberty." It has been suggested, and the suggestion is seconded by one or two investigators, that the Grand Union Flag may have been formed by placing six whitestrips of cloth across the red ensign of Great Britain. This hint at the possible method of fashioning this flag late in 1775, is strengthened by Washington's poetic analysis of Old Glory, especially in his words, "the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes." Two logical steps in procedure readily come to mind. First, the spreading a red British ensign, with its crosses in the Union, on a table and laying six strips of white cloth across the red field, to obtain the thirteen stripes, seven red and six white. The result gives us t...