The next time you buy a Ralph Lauren sweater you will be helping, in a kind of way, to restore Old Glory, the 185-year-old US flag that inspired The Star-Spangled Banner national anthem.
Lauren has just handed over $13 million (£9 million) to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where the faded flag is displayed, so that it can have much-needed restoration. The designer stood proudly between the Clintons at the announcement this week with the three-storey-high flag as an enormous backdrop. The ceremony marked the fitting start of Mrs Hillary Clinton's "Save America's Treasures" crusade. For four days she toured historic sites which have been neglected and need a mix of public and private funding to preserve them for the 21st century her husband is always talking about.
The President drew attention to this neglect in his State of the Union speech last January and the need for $50 million in public funds for the projects. Congress has not yet voted the money but Lauren's gift will go a long way towards the $18 million needed to restore Old Glory, provide a new Flag Hall in the museum and produce educational material.
The 30 by 42-foot flag will be cleaned stitch by stitch. The restoration will start in October in a glass-walled laboratory which will allow tourists to watch the process. The flag with its 15 stars and stripes representing the 15 states at the time, was woven from wool bunting by seamstress, Mary Pickersgill, and her 13-year-old daughter, Caroline. The cost in 1813 was $405.
The first official US flag, the Continental or Grand Union flag under which the American rebels besieged the British in Boston in 1776, actually had the Union Jack in the left corner along with 13 red-and-white stripes for the 13 colonies in revolt against the crown. By the next year the Union Jack had been replaced by 13 stars.
The huge flag which flew over Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbour during a British assault in the 1814 war inspired Francis Scott Key, watching from a British warship, to write his poem, The Star-Spangled Banner.
It was later put to music and was played by the army and navy as the US anthem. But it was only in 1931 that Congress made it official.
There is argument over the music to which the poem was set. Some historians claim the tune comes from an Irish melody by Carolan. Others say it is based on the air called Anacreon in Heaven written by a British composer, John Stafford Smith, in 1750.
But everyone agrees that it is hard to sing as it suddenly soars an octave for the colourful fourth line - "And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air / Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there."
Americans who wince at the start of baseball games as enthusiastic soloists belt out the anthem over the public address system often wonder why the more impressive God Bless America is not the anthem.
A former marine wrote an indignant letter to the papers last week asking: "What has happened to patriotism in our country?" He was at a firework display at which the crowd was asked to rise and sing the national anthem. As Mr Joel Lopez of Wheeling, West Virginia, tells it, "The music started and a few muffled voices whispered out the words, `Oh say can you see'. Even fewer finished with `by the dawn's early light' and nearing the halfway point, nobody within earshot could be heard."
Another veteran agreed that more Americans should be singing the national anthem "but The Star-Spangled Banner is truly the hardest song for the average human being to sing that has ever been put together. . .it simply is unsingable".
It also has anti-British sentiments, although how many of the younger generation know that it was the British navy that was doing its best to destroy Fort McHenry and the flag with it?
As President Clinton said at this week's ceremony, "1814 was not a particularly good year for America and the British did burn the White House".
A 15-year renovation of the White House (designed by Irish architect James Hoban, after Leinster House) has just ended and the President said that "we left two of the great stones unpainted to remind people that it only became the White House after the British burned it, and when the burn marks couldn't be scrubbed off, the beautiful stone had to be painted white to cover the memory of what had happened. It's rather nice, actually, to have a couple of the stones unpainted so that we don't completely forget".