A Flag, a Legend Maker, and a Candidate

Last June, I wrote a post commemorating Flag Day.  I illustrted it with this photo of Jeff McQueen, whose American Revolution flag became the ubiquitous banner of the tea party movement.  Seen everywhere, captured on hundreds of news photos and TV reports, it has become a symbol of the Second American Revolution.  Tonight on my radio program, Jeff drops by to tell us where we’ll next see this flag.  Also joining us — Florida gubernatorial candidate Peter Allen, who is running as an Independent against Republican Rick Scott and Democrat Alex Sink.

On a cold clear night last April in Erie, Pennsylvania, an evening when the stars shined brightly and you could see your breath, Jeffrey Allan McQueen of Rochester, Michigan strolled through the throng of Americans gathered for a tea party at the town center gazebo.  Over his shoulder he carried a bundle of colorful patriotic banners he called the Second Revolution flags.

McQueen had been following the Tea Party Express on its national tour.  We kept running into each other at the various events, and on that night I invited him to join me on a park bench to tell my radio show listeners  the story of how he came to be selling stylized revolutionary flags.

The banner features the familiar red and white stripes, the field of blue bears a design reminiscent of the colonial era. Thirteen stars encircle a Roman Numeral II.

I carried the banner at several rallies, and I can say with certainty that they were a camera magnet. (Click to enlarge photo at right which appeared in the Syracuse Post Standard and the one at left which appeared in the Boston Globe.)

His flags can be seen at almost every tea party. They have become a recognized symbol of the grassroots movement.  The Second Revolution banner will soon be featured in a video with Thomas Paine (Bob Basso).   SHOWTIME’s series “Weeds” shot an episode with the flag last Friday. A photo of the flag illustrated a recent edition of Mark Alexander’s essay “A Time to Fight”  in the Patriot Post.

Yesterday (Sunday), Jeff’s flags were featured in a Boston Globe piece titled “Flag Daze”.

The standard American flag may be the paramount symbol of our country, but it’s not the only flag we’ve known, nor is it the oldest. Flag Day itself, June 14, secretly commemorates the flag’s complicated history — it wasn’t until 1777 that the Continental Congress wrote down a description of what the flag should be. In the meantime, the Colonists had been fighting the British under whatever banner happened to be handy: regimental flags, homemade insignia, green, blue, what-have-you.

[…]

Some Tea Party participants prefer to use something other than the symbols of the past. Photographs of Scott Brown’s victory party at the Park Plaza captured rows of people waving an unorthodox flag: a Betsy Ross design, but with a big white Roman numeral “II” in the middle of the ring of stars.

This one is new, a flag deliberately designed last year to invoke American Revolution, the Sequel. “It’s kind of like ‘Rocky,’ ‘Rocky II,’ ‘Rocky III’,” said Jeff McQueen, who designed the flags.

McQueen, who lives in Rochester, Mich., said he joined the Tea Party after getting laid off from a job marketing automobile exterior mirrors overseas. He thought about flying an American flag upside down at rallies — a signal of nautical distress that some Tea Party members use to show political distress — but he thought it would seem disrespectful to veterans. He considered the Gadsden flag, he said, but it seemed a “symbol of anger.” Also, the Gadsden flags he saw were made in China.

Instead, he came up with his own design, and ordered a batch from a company in Humble, Texas. Since then, he said, he’s gone through more than 10,000 flags, filling orders from all 50 states.

For the Brown campaign, he packed a bunch of his Flags of the Second American Revolution in his 2008 Bullitt Ford Mustang and drove east. At the Park Plaza, he said, he scavenged a press pass and used it to get into the hall, where he handed out his flags to people in the front row, where the cameras would catch them.

“As we learned with ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ there are certain symbols that resonate with us,” McQueen said. Some people took the numerals to be the Twin Towers; other people thought they represented the Second Amendment.

“Everybody kind of saw in this symbol what they wanted to see in this symbol,” McQueen said.

McQueen told our listeners the significance is twofold: The thirteen stars represent the Last Supper when a foundation of love was laid for all mankind. The number also represents the original colonies and how they formed a foundation of liberty based on God’s laws. The numeral II represents the Second Revolution of the United States.

Show producer Dave “ThirdWaveDave” Logan and  the Second Revolution flag.

The American-made flags are $20.  $19.95 if you order them, plus shipping charge. They’re already attached to a wooden dowel, perfect for Tea Party rallies.  Find out more by hitting Jeff’s site at USRevolution2.com

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Video provided by Project Shining City