WASHINGTON — Flag-printed shirts have overtaken actual flags as the most common display of the national flag, according to figures released Wednesday by the Continental Census Bureau, which counted 3.4 shirts in circulation for every flag flown from a pole, porch, or pickup truck.
The finding comes from the bureau’s first Patriotic Textile Survey, a door-to-door count conducted over 14 months by 2,200 enumerators who were instructed to record every flag and every garment depicting one. The survey placed the number of flag shirts nationwide at 40 million, against roughly 11.8 million flags.
“We expected the shirts to be competitive, but we did not expect them to pull away like this,” said Lorraine Haskett, the bureau’s deputy director for household enumeration. “The shirts are now the primary flag. The flags are, statistically speaking, a backup.”
The survey also found that the shirts are increasing faster than they can be counted. Enumerators in 14 states reported returning to a household for a scheduled recount and finding more flag shirts in a dresser drawer than had been in it that morning, a phenomenon the bureau has formally classified as “drawer growth.” In 212 counties, the count of flag shirts exceeded the count of residents, shirts, and drawers combined, a result Haskett said the bureau’s methodology “fully supports.”
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said the figures confirmed what he had been saying since before the survey began.
“A flag is something you salute. A shirt is something you can salute while wearing it,” Brickhouse said by phone from what he described as a car wash. “It’s twice the patriotism for the same amount of standing there. It’s just common sense. You can’t wear a pole.”
In response to the findings, the bureau has drafted voluntary guidance for the care of flag shirts. The draft states that a flag shirt should never touch the ground, should not be worn after dark without illumination, and should not be used to wipe barbecue sauce from the hands, which the bureau found is its primary use. When a flag shirt becomes too worn to display, the guidance recommends that it be retired with dignity by being worn to mow the lawn for another nine years.
The National Association of Flagpole Manufacturers called the report “devastating” for an industry that has spent two centuries building poles for a product consumers have decided to wear on their torsos.
“We are exploring a pole that goes through the shirt,” said the association’s president, Curtis Embry. “We are also exploring a shirt that goes up the pole. We are exploring a lot of things right now.”
The household with the highest concentration of flag shirts in the nation, located in rural Missouri, was found to contain 340 flag shirts and no flag. Its residents told enumerators they had been meaning to put one up but had not had anything to wear to the hardware store.
Haskett said the bureau would begin its next count in the spring, this time of flag-themed shorts, which preliminary estimates suggest have already outnumbered legs.
Glenn Whitacre filed this report by phone from Gate C22 of an airport he has been asked not to name.