Dresses Department

Kayakers floating randomly on the Ohio River and along a family caught in the morning of Saturday Port Heritage coast where more than 200 American flags to ashes in a blue bin, now scorched black by fire.

On Saturday, members of Wheeling Elks Lodge 28 and American Legion Post conducted a flag burning ceremony, an official respectfully and officially "retired" badly worn or damaged United States flag. The ceremony took place in front of an empty auditorium at the port of Wheeling.

Only a few members of the press and three firefighters Wheeling saw that the flags were fed into the truck, which was provided by Allied Waste Services. Firefighters were on hand to keep the flames under control until all the flags have been burned.

There is scant evidence that incidental cues in the environment significantly alter people’s political judgments and behavior in a durable way. We report that a brief exposure to the American flag led to a shift toward Republican beliefs, attitudes, and voting behavior among both Republican and Democratic participants, despite their overwhelming belief that exposure to the flag would not influence their behavior. In Experiment 1, which was conducted online during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, a single exposure to an American flag resulted in a significant increase in participants’ Republican voting intentions, voting behavior, political beliefs, and implicit and explicit attitudes, with some effects lasting 8 months after the exposure to the prime. In Experiment 2, we replicated the findings more than a year into the current Democratic presidential term. These results constitute the first evidence that nonconscious priming effects from exposure to a national flag can bias the citizenry toward one political party and can have considerable durability.

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