• DOI:10.1080/09523360701740299
• Corpus ID: 216151041

‘This Flag Dips for No Earthly King’: The Mysterious Origins of an American Myth

@article{2008ThisFD,
  title={‘This Flag Dips for No Earthly King’: The Mysterious Origins of an American Myth},
  author={},
  journal={The International Journal of the History of Sport},
  year={2008},
  volume={25},
  pages={142 - 162}
}

• Published 1 February 2008
• Education
• The International Journal of the History of Sport

American tradition holds that the US team has never dipped the national flag at the Olympics. A powerful mythology dates this quadrennial display of nationalism to the 1908 London Olympics and claims an unbroken streak of unbowed flags at succeeding Olympic parades. The details of this collective memory, however, do not conform neatly to the historical record. At Olympian opening parades between 1908 and 1936 American teams sometimes dipped and at sometimes refused to dip their flags. Not until 1936, when the US Olympic team used the refusal to dip the Stars and Stripes as an opportunity to signal their discomfort with Adolf Hitler s Nazi regime, did the refusal to dip the flag become a permanent feature of American Olympic custom. The evolution of this flag mythology reveals a great deal about the complex strains of early twentieth-century American nationalism.