WHAT EVENTS TODAY bring out more than 50,000 people in our city? Certainly Seafair parades and hydro races. Pro football and soccer, too.

On Independence Day 1920, a Central Labor Council-sponsored Pageant of Democracy at Woodland Park hit that mark.

From downtown, celebrants paraded to today’s North Seattle zoo site, where patriotic re-enactments featured actors from 19 cultures, from Indigenous to Greek, with nighttime fireworks at nearby Green Lake.

The afternoon spectacle was intentionally over the top, given the recent flu pandemic and end of World War I, plus tensions lingering from the 1919 Seattle General Strike. One element was ubiquitous — the U.S. flag.

“From downtown buildings, myriad American flags fluttered in the breeze while the crowds that lined the streets and parks wore knots and ribbons of the national colors,” reported the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

This weekend, as the country reaches 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, the Museum of History & Industry opens an ambitious, layered, flag-focused exhibit, “For Which It Stands,” aptly referencing the Pledge of Allegiance.

“There’s pride, and there’s protest, and there’s reverence, and there’s belonging, and honoring sacrifice, and carrying forward America’s ideals, all these different ways that people have used the flag,” says Mikala Woodward, the museum’s curator of exhibits and engagement. “We want to give people that range to think about and put themselves into it.”

Examples in the exhibit abound:

● A flag from “The Boys in the Boat” U.S. men’s crew that triumphed at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.

● A photo of a mother holding the burial flag of her son, a Japanese American Nisei soldier who died in Europe during World War II while relatives were incarcerated in America. “It’s about expressing loyalty and sacrifice to the nation,” Woodward says, “even when it’s mistreating you and your family.”

● A flag borrowed from the volunteer Oso Fire Department uncovered in the catastrophic 2014 landslide in Snohomish County. “It became this symbol of hope and the community coming together to keep looking and finding people and heal and carry on.”

● A flag flown upside down in the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) zone in 2020, with spray-painted words “love” and “rage.”

The exhibit includes places for reflection and interaction. It asks visitors to finish the sentence: “I pledge allegiance to …” The hope is to spur universal introspection.

“It makes you feel different if you’re carrying a flag,” Woodward says. “You think about how you’re representing something, you’re expressing something, you’re connecting yourself to a place or a group or a statement and what it really means to you.”