PEOPLE die for flags and kill for them. But until Whitney Smith, nobody studied them properly. He coined (aged 17) the name for the discipline, from vexillum, Latin for a military standard, and it consumed, fired and shaped his life. Flags, he wrote in one of his 27 vexillological books, “are employed to honour and dishonour, warn and encourage, threaten and promise, exalt and condemn, commemorate and deny”. They “remind and incite and defy...the child in school, the soldier, the voter, the enemy, the ally and the stranger”.

Flags of a kind date back at least 5,000 years—he liked to cite an ancient Iranian one, made from copper. But their modern significance, he argued (and who would contradict him?), started with the 16th-century Dutch revolt against Spain. For the first time it was not a state or monarch being symbolised, but a people, a language, a culture and a cause.

They mark landings (the moon) and victories, too. The American conquest of the Japanese island of Iwo Jima was a fine example. As he explained to People magazine: “Six guys putting their lives on the line to put a stick in the ground with a piece of cloth on top. The president didn’t tell them to do that. They did it instinctively.”

Dropping out of academic life at the age of 30 to become the world’s first and only full-time vexillologist, Mr Smith became, he happily admitted, a “monomaniac”. He took no holidays, worked seven days a week, eschewed television for a single radio, living alone after both his marriages ended in divorce. The Flag Research Centre, which he founded in 1962, was based in his 16-room house in Winchester, Massachusetts, crammed with 11,000 books on flags—more than in the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Harvard University and the British Museum combined, he reckoned. It also contained a huge card-catalogue and (in dehumidified storage), 4,000 flags. The Corpus Vexillorum Mundi, as he called it, involved the collection, presentation and description of every national flag that has ever flown.

He could never recall a time when he was not interested in the subject. As a six-year-old, he fumed about haphazard and inaccurate information, such as flag books which ignored small countries. At 11, he was trying to find out why giant Greenland was seemingly flagless. Other kids thought he was weird. But who cared about that when, at 13, you could feel yourself to be “literally the only person in the Western world who knew what the flag of Bhutan looked like”.

His aim, abundantly achieved, was to know everything there was to know about flags, from design to provenance, and the rules about where, how, when and why they should be hoisted. His grasp of history, geography and foreign languages helped. Fluent in Latin, Russian and French, he cracked multilingual jokes which hopped between those and other tongues. In English, he created and standardised specialist vocabulary—such as “civil ensign” for the flag flown by a privately owned vessel. His books, with titles such as “Flags Through the Ages and Across the World”, sold 300,000 copies. The hundreds of subscribers to his bimonthly Flag Bulletin (which he founded as a 21-year-old) ranged from protocol chiefs in foreign ministries to an international network of fellow-obsessives.

Lore and law

He preferred studying flags to waving them. Though he revered the Stars and Stripes—America’s “civil religion”, he called it—he abhorred sentiment and fanaticism alike. A circle of just 13 stars in the “canton” (top left-hand corner) would be more elegant, easier to manufacture, and fairer on unstarred territories such as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. He thought the Pledge of Allegiance could do with rephrasing, too.

America’s repeated attempts to criminalise flag desecration appalled him; they were selective (nobody cared about the flag’s abuse for commercial purposes) and contradicted the freedom for which the star-spangled banner stood. Its significance was in Americans’ hearts and spirits, not the fabric. The people owned it, not the state; however deplorably, they could do what they wished with their own property. He gave evidence in defence of a teenager sentenced to six months hard labour for sewing the American flag to the seat of his trousers (the prosecution finally failed in 1974).

From guardians of diplomatic protocol to citizens bemused by etiquette, people sought his expertise. Was it all right to embed the American flag in a cake of ice as a set-piece for a banquet? Not illegal, but also not really tasteful or proper, he replied. New flags, he said, were too often cliched, cluttered and meaningless. Americans, he complained, were literalists, who “don’t know how to communicate in symbols except in the baldest of ways”. Plain white designs, with a tiny, dull emblem like a town seal, aroused his particular ire.

Instead, flags should be attractive, memorable and politically significant. He was particularly proud of his design for the former British colony of Guyana, with its red diamond (for steadfastness), gold arrowhead (Amerindians and mineral wealth) and green background (verdure). There was, he said proudly, “none other like it”. That was true of him, too.