This article really gives the flavor of the quality of hysteria surrounding the early Space Race. People honestly believed that it was of vast strategic importance who landed things on the Moon first. (The Soviet flag, at least in painted form, actually got there before ours did, I believe–few Americans remember that.)

This was months before the first Sputnik.

A dozen years later, US flags on the moon and the US doesn’t own it!
(No one to tax, so what’s the point?)
(If you want to own any of the moon, I think you have to live there at least 6 months and make improvements to the property.)
(How could you make it any worse?)

See this printed a year later:

http://blog.modernmechanix.com.....-the-moon/

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Stannous The flags on the moon now are supported from the top and the side.
I guess it doesn’t show in the illustration.
I wonder if that was mentioned in the “Letters to the Editor” in a later issue.

When I was last in Europe I picked up a bunch of souvenirs of Apollo 11 pretty cheap. I had never really thought about it but learned that the rest of the world really kind of resented our sticking an American flag up there.
Sure, we built and paid for it but it the rest of the world saw it as a human accomplishment, not just an American one.