The Four Freedoms Flag, or United Nations Honor Flag, is displayed with the Stars and Stripes in this 1943 photos. Its four bars symbolize freedom of speech, of worship, from want and from fear. (John Collier/Library of Congress)

Brooks B. Harding was many things in his life before he found his true calling: designing a flag that was briefly as famous as any banner in the free world. Seventy years ago, you would have seen his flag flying all over Washington. Today, it’s largely forgotten.

Harding was born in 1896 and raised in Humboldt, Neb. He was an aviator, and during World War I, he trained other pilots. After the war, he barnstormed across the Midwest, offering airplane rides and dropping advertising leaflets from his cockpit. Harding switched careers and became a Hollywood casting agent. Then he moved to Gloversville, N.Y., and switched careers again, operating a factory that made “novelty furniture.”

Whatever novelty furniture is, it didn’t hold Harding’s interest, especially not once World War II began. Our way of life was at risk, and Harding wanted to make a contribution. What the Allies needed, he decided, was a flag that all of their citizens could fly, a flag that symbolized their commitment to defeating fascism, a flag that symbolized what they were fighting for.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had urged Americans to fly the flags of each country in what were called the United Nations. This wasn’t today’s international body, but the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and China and those countries that had lined up behind them to fight the Axis powers. The list eventually grew to include 47 countries, and supporting players ranged from important military allies such as Canada and Australia to tiny Haiti and Ethiopia. That was far too many flags to fit on anyone’s pole.

So Harding went to work. He sketched out designs and created fabric examples. He moved his family to Washington and made the rounds of the embassies here, looking for feedback. Most was not encouraging. His early efforts were a clash of symbols and colors.

At the Czechoslovakian Embassy, the first secretary, Vladimir Palic, folded one of Harding’s samples into smaller and smaller squares until just the canton — the top inner corner of the flag — was visible.

Pointing dramatically, Palic announced: “There, Mr. Harding, is your flag!”

It was rather simple: four pillars, bright red on a field of white. But the simplicity made it memorable and underscored its symbolic power. The four vertical bars represented the “Four Freedoms” that FDR had outlined in a 1941 address: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

Harding scrambled to have the flag made. He enlisted a Washington seamstress named Sue Siady to worked overtime to sew what was being called the United Nations Honor Flag or the Four Freedoms Flag. It was first formally displayed in Washington on June 14, 1943, Flag Day. A week later, it was raised at Dumbarton Oaks, the Georgetown estate where, a year later, the seeds of today’s United Nations were planted.

Harding recommended that half-size versions of the flag be flown beneath the Stars and Stripes. He toured the country, promoting his flag and meeting with representatives of the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars and Daughters of the American Revolution. “It is in no way a flag of a super-government,” he reassured people. “Its function is to put a psychological floor under international relations so that those nations and peoples dedicated to the cause of winning the war and maintaining the peace may visually indicate their solidarity of purpose and demonstrate their mutual regard for each other.”

The flag caught on. You’ll spot it in old photos and on newspaper graphics illustrating the Allied advance across Europe. The British even included the design on packets of cigarettes distributed to their soldiers.

Harding must have hoped that, after the war, his flag would be adopted by the United Nations, but the now familiar blue U.N. flag was chosen instead. The Honor Flag became a curious footnote.

Harding stayed in Washington, where he published the World Flag Encyclopedia and lectured on flag history. He established a flag lending library in his rented Sherier Place NW home. He had more than 3,000 to choose from, renting flags out when foreign heads of state visited.

“He had an area downstairs in the basement in which those flags were,” said a son, Brooks Harding Jr., 76. “Then whenever he needed them, he’d take them upstairs and put them in the car and drive them to wherever.”

Brooks Jr. remembers helping his father fill Washington National Cathedral with Union Jacks for Queen Elizabeth’s 1957 visit.

Brooks Harding died in 1959 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, where the snap of fabric in the breeze and the sound of halyard against flagpole is a constant reminder of sacrifice.

Twitter: @johnkelly

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