Who really made the 50 star U.S. flag?

1. The legal decision: the executive order that made the flag official

The formal, legally binding act that established the current 50‑star arrangement was President Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10834, dated August 21, 1959, which promulgated the design to be used after Hawaii’s admission and directed when the flag would be first flown officially ^[1]. That order was the culmination of a government design process: a committee including Cabinet officers and the Commission on Fine Arts reviewed proposals and submitted recommendations to the President ^[1].

2. What the archives and process show: many proposals, committee preference

Government records from the Eisenhower Library make clear that more than one official route produced candidate designs — the Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury and the Commission on Fine Arts were charged with proposing new designs, several designs were formally submitted to the President, and the President himself expressed a layout preference during briefings ^[1]. The historical record notes that “at least three, and probably more,” submitted designs were identical to the present 50‑star pattern and those designs now reside in the Eisenhower Presidential Archives — evidence that multiple people arrived at similar arrangements independently ^[3].

3. The Heft narrative: a compelling local legend with lots of support in popular sources

A widely told story holds that Robert G. “Bob” Heft, a Lancaster, Ohio high‑school student, created a 50‑star flag as a class project in 1958, mailed and telephoned Washington repeatedly, and was later invited to the White House when the 50‑star design was adopted; his tale appears in StoryCorps, local histories, museum markers, and flag organizations that recount his sewing the flag, receiving a B‑ on the project, and later having his grade changed after federal acceptance ^{[4] [5] [6] [7]}. State and local resolutions and memorials also have publicly honored Heft as the designer ^{[3] [6]}.

4. The counterclaim: scholarship and encyclopedic caveats

Authoritative summaries and encyclopedic entries explicitly caution that the flag was not the work of a single individual and that the Heft origin story is a popular myth; Wikipedia notes an investigative article by Alec Nevala‑Lee that debunked the Heft claim and emphasizes that the 50‑star arrangement emerged from a broader design process rather than sole authorship ^[2]. Those sources also point to the government’s catalog of submitted designs and the committee selection, underscoring institutional authorship rather than a lone teenager’s creation ^{[1] [2]}.

5. Reconciling the two threads: popular credit vs. official provenance

The best-supported factual account is this: the 50‑star flag became official through executive action and committee recommendation, and archive holdings show multiple submitted designs matching the final pattern — so the “who” in legal and procedural terms is the federal selection process and the President ^{[1] [3]}. At the same time, Heft’s personal narrative is well documented in oral histories and local commemorations, and several public sources continue to attribute the popular story to him even as scholarly scrutiny questions whether his specific handmade flag directly became the official pattern ^{[4] [5] [7] [2]}.

6. What can’t be concluded from the assembled reporting

Available materials in this collection do not provide a definitive paper trail proving that Heft’s physical flag or formal submission was the single decisive source used by the design committee; government files confirm multiple identical designs in the archives and an institutional adoption process, but do not unequivocally ascribe sole authorship to one individual ^{[1] [3]}. Investigative work cited by encyclopedic entries casts doubt on the Heft origin claim, but the full text of that investigation is not supplied here for direct citation ^[2].