The Flag Goes By

This is the poem America sang on Independence Day before it had pop stars. Bennett's 'Hats Off, The Flag Goes By' is a rallying cry in three stanzas, a celebration of red, white, and blue that moved generations of Americans to stand a little straighter when the parade passed. First published in The Youth's Companion in 1898, it became the unofficial anthem of the Fourth of July, recited in schoolrooms and declaimed by a young E.E. Cummings at his Harvard class inauguration. The poem swells with brass-band energy, paying tribute to the flag as it processes through American streets. It captures that particular American feeling: gratitude for liberty made visible, for a nation that chose to be free and keeps choosing, every summer, in backyards from sea to shining sea. For readers who believe patriotism can be poetry, who remember learning this in elementary school and never quite forgot it.