Exhibition Review

	The Star-Spangled Banner dwarfs a soldier in this photograph taken at the Boston Navy Yard on June 21, 1873. It is the first known photograph of the flag. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

"THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER PRESERVATION PROJECT. . . made possible by major support from POLO RALPH LAUREN," proclaim the large banners above the entrances to the National Museum of American History (NMAH) in Washington, D.C. (The "POLO" lettering is second in size only to the "STAR-SPANGLED" lettering.) Attendees view the preservation of the flag that Francis Scott Key saw over Fort McHenry "by the dawn's early light." The exhibition takes up one large room divided by a fifty-foot-long glass wall; the conservation laboratory is on one side of the wall and features a table large enough to hold the 1,020-square-foot banner. From 10:00 A.M. until 4:30 P.M. visitors on the other side of the glass wall can watch the preservation crew work on the flag. Conservators work on the flag from a mobile platform that spans the width of the flag and can hold seven workers at once. The laboratory is ventilated by thick blue hoses hanging from the ceiling that provide careful climate control. The visitors' side of the room includes photos (one of the banner draped outside the Smithsonian Castle), examples of flag texture, and a sound recording of John Stafford Smith's "Anacreon in Heaven," to which Key's poem was later set.	1
The flag that Ralph Lauren contributed $10 million to preserve flew over Fort McHenry the morning after British bombardment during the War of 1812 failed to capture the fort. Although taken down on the evening of September 13, 1814, and replaced with a smaller storm flag, the large flag was returned the next morning where it was seen by Francis Scott Key from a ship in Baltimore Harbor at about 7 A.M. Key's poem about his relief at seeing the flag still flying over the fort has since 1931 been the national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner," that sports fans sing before the Village People's "YMCA."	2
Although it was cut down some time after the war for relics to decorate the graves of fallen soldiers, the still-gigantic flag, with its fifteen stars and fifteen stripes, now measures 30 feet by 34 feet. The great size was fairly typical for nineteenth-century garrison flags, which were designed to fly on ninety-foot flagpoles. The grandson of Lt. Col. George Armistead, the American commander of Fort McHenry during the war, donated it to the Smithsonian in 1912. The Smithsonian originally displayed the flag, one of the museum's most popular exhibits, in the Art and Industries Building, the second of its buildings constructed on the National Mall. Hidden during World War II, the flag was moved to the new National Museum of American History (then known as the National Museum of History and Technology) in December 1963.	. . .