On Betsy Ross and the Making of America by Marla R Miller
By Jane Holwerda
Hey, Radio Readers. I’m Jane Holwerda in Dodge City Ks. Earlier this summer I promised my book shelves would be dusted by now. I made it only as far as the Americana section when I surrendered to my more natural state of sitting with cat on lap and book in hand. So be it. What better way to commemorate the 250th year of our nation than by reading about it?
Marla R Miller’s Betsy Ross and the Making of America, at some 450 pages, is a definitive if daunting work, but well worth a reader’s commitment. No, Ross likely did not create the first American flag, though Miller suggests it’s plausible she influenced George Washington’s choice of the 5-point over the 6-point star (more efficient and economical given that each piece would be hand-cut then hand-sewn). But it’s not certain that Ross ever met or spoke with Washington. As a teen, she was apprenticed as an upholsterer then successfully managed similar businesses through war, tariffs and embargoes, economic and familial crises, and the emergence of industrial machines which eventually supplanted much of the hand-made labor of her various occupations. Twice a revolutionary war widow then married a third time, Ross lived to her 80s, a great-grandmother with failed eyesight. She was a third generation American, her Quaker grandfather Griscom having immigrated to Jersey in the late 1600s.
These are facts supported by various records of church, business, and government.To fill gaps in documentary records, Miller’s generous contextualization of social history supports theories about Betsy Ross’s life. Miller densely details protocols of Quaker communitarianism, especially for marriage and divorce, pacifism and war, care of the ill and indigent. Miller also details the roles of privateers and pirates to provide goods such as silks, bunting and thread used by upholsterers like Betsy Ross, in their exhaustive work of outfitting the homes of the colonial wealthy. Upholsterers built bedframes and stuffed mattresses with horsehair or feathers, made pillows and bolsters, blankets, bed ruffles, linens, draperies, rugs, furniture covers, sofas and cushions, and decorative tassels.As demands for such goods and services dropped, Betsy Ross became a maker and seller of military colors and standards, and then through the early 1800s, a military contractor of garrison and regimental flags. But the making of the Star Spangled Banner is credited to Baltimore flag makers Rebecca Young and Mary Pickersgill.
For this absorbing and solidly researched social history, Marla Miller, a professor of history at U Mass-Amherst, is credited for appropriately situating Betsy Ross as an historical veracity, a patriot who lived through dramatic changes in economics, governance, and means of production.I rather feel that Miller for this bio and Ross for her life stand as role models for our times.
And for trivia night? Betsy Ross is most accurately named Elizabeth Griscom Ross Ashburn Claypoole.
I’m Jane Holwerda for Radio Readers Summer Read on High Plains Radio.
