December 15, 1967: Floyd Turner's Flag-Burning Follies

Which would you rather burn: the flag, or the Constitution?

On the date in focus, that question hung heavily over the King County Superior Courthouse, where a certain Floyd Turner was convicted of flag desecration. Turner was a young and classically bohemian drifter who first arrived in Seattle during the 1962 World's Fair, seeking work and claiming towards that end to have been a Doukhobor, a member of a Russian Christian sect notorious for burning down their own houses and fomenting public nudity. Finding work fleeting, he soon fell in with local anarchists, and under their sway he became a frequent fixture at local antiwar protests, to which he often added a distinctly al fresco flavor.

Turner's travails began on May 12, 1967, when he attended a party at the brand-new Central Area Motivation Project (CAMP). A neighbor called the police and reported seeing two men igniting a miniature American flag, and 12 days later Turner was charged with flag desecration under Washington State's 1919 Uniform Flag Law, which prohibited the public mutilation of official flags.

The Dec. 15 trial was Turner's second, the first occurring on July 2.

There, credible witnesses testified that Turner was not the culprit, and local anarchist Stan Iverson willingly confessed that he had held the lighter that lit the flag. The judge was unpersuaded, declaring that "anarchists cannot tell right from wrong and cannot be trusted." Turner was sentenced to six months in jail and bail was set at $3,000. The local ACLU won a new trial, scheduled for December. Despite a strong defense, Turner was again found guilty. The ACLU appealed the case to the state supreme court, which reversed the conviction on Sept. 3, 1970, arguing that Turner's alleged burning of an American flag "was done, if done at all, without any intent to degrade, desecrate, defile or cast contempt upon it."

Turner's last documented public appearance occurred in the early 1970s at the U District Street Fair, where he stood barefoot on a large block of ice, waiting for it to melt. Today, George W. Bush, despite several documented instances of signing his autograph on miniature US flags, in clear violation of the United States Flag Code (as well as repeatedly engaging in unsolicited scatological, if not pyromaniacal, intercourse with the US Constitution), remains at large, apparently unaccountable and unimpeachable. Have you no sense of decency, America?

Sources: Walt Crowley, "Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle" (University of Washington Press, 1995); HistoryLink.org.