ABSTRACT
In his highly acclaimed and much celebrated book on the life of the 33rd President of the United States, titled Truman, historian David McCullough recounts President Harry S. Truman’s presentation of a new presidential flag and seal at a special White House ceremony on an autumn morning in 1945. “’This new flag faces the eagle toward the staff, which is looking to the front all the time … , and also has [the eagle] looking at the olive branch for peace, instead of the arrows for war,’” he said to the members of the Washington press corps assembled before him. Truman, who had assumed the presidency earlier that year after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wanted to redirect the attention of the war-weary nation and the world from the recently-concluded military conflicts in the Atlantic and Pacific to a new world order in which America’s formidable power would be associated with a “nation both on the march and dedicated to peace.”1 The redesign of the flag and seal had been the first since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.
