A Vexillic Issue

Most State flags are awful. There, I've said it and I'm not sorry. Even my home State of Louisiana has an awful flag. There are fifty States in the United States, and two-thirds of them have awful flags.

What makes an awful State flag? Well, twenty-nine States have flags that are horribly boring. You can blame the otherwise amazing 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Some bright person decided that the flags of the States should be on display — and promptly discovered that most of the States didn't actually have flags to display. Weirdly, in a nation which is legally and officially a union of sovereign States, most of those States never bothered to adopt a flag until some busybody from Chicago came nosing around.

The solution adopted by most States at the time was to just adopt the flag of the State militia. Those all have a depressing sameness: the State seal on a field of blue (for infantry) or white (for cavalry). A couple of States went wild and chose different background colors (New Jersey, Washington, Delaware), but that didn't really help. Nevada tried to get clever by putting the seal up at the canton (the upper-right corner) but didn't fool anyone.

The big problem with the seal-on-blue/white design is that State seals are terrible graphic elements. They're all horribly busy and fiddly, impossible to make out from a distance. So most State flags reduce to "a multicolored blob on a blue or white field." Five States tried to get around that problem by literally writing the name of the State on the flag. That's not a flag, that's a sign. You paint that on sheet steel and put it up at the border so people know what jurisdiction they're in.

Ranking slightly above the militia flags are a cohort of uninspiring designs, all of them obviously created by committees. This batch includes Iowa, North Carolina, and Missouri with their tricolors marred by fiddly bits; California with another road sign pretending to be a flag; and West Virginia and Wyoming, which just slapped a contrasting border on the basic seal-and-field model. Colorado's is good, though I take away points for putting the State's initial on it. A tricolor of blue, white, and gold would have been better.

Two States have what one might call "near-miss" flags. They are close to being good designs, but the creators couldn't keep from adding just one more thing, thereby shoving them off into mediocrity. Arkansas has a decent, distinctive flag marred by printing the name across the middle. Florida takes a nice strong design (Alabama's, in fact) and sticks another damned seal on it.

Georgia's flag is one of the great "up yours" gestures of recent political history. After some residents, and a great many more non-residents, objected to the use of Confederate battle flag elements in the Georgia State flag, the legislature ditched the old design . . . and adopted a flag which is almost exactly the old national flag of the C.S.A. instead. Southern history buffs were satisfied, as were people who object to Confederate flags but wouldn't know the actual Stars and Bars if it bit them on the nose. All that said, sticking the State seal in the middle of the circle of stars on the Georgia flag makes it too busy, so points off for that. Mississippi also has a strong, if controversial design, but the Confederate battle flag in the canton now looks a little on-the-nose compared to Georgia's subtle trolling.

So which State flags do I like best? Here's my Top Ten:

Number Ten! ARIZONA has a good design, a little busy but certainly distinctive and colorful; it would look good painted on the side of a van.

Number Nine! TENNESSEE is a nice simple design, marred only slightly by the odd vertical blue stripe at the fly.

Number Eight! SOUTH CAROLINA breaks away from the seal-on-field pattern with a simple palmetto tree and moon. It obviously means something to somebody, and it's a complete departure from just rearranging elements of the U.S. flag.

Number Seven! OHIO can boast the only non-rectangular flag, a very jaunty-looking pennant. Even sneaking in the State's initial in the form of a circle doesn't spoil it (and makes a neat visual allusion to the Great Seal's all-seeing Eye).

Number Six! HAWAII's flag is a bit busy, but it has the honor of being an actual former national flag with some real history behind it, so that trumps mere graphics.

Number Five! MARYLAND has the greatest psychedelic eye-thrasher of a State flag ever created, with bonus historical points for being the actual coat of arms of the Calvert family, who founded the colony. If you're going to be busy, no half measures!

Number Four! TEXAS has a great flag, with tons of genuine historical importance riding on it. The design is strong and simple — it's such a good design that Chile used almost exactly the same thing. I think one reason Texans are always quick to consider secession is that they know they've got a killer flag to use as an independent nation.

Number Three! ALABAMA's flag could also be a nation's banner with no alteration. It's such a straightforward design I'm actually surprised no other polity grabbed it long before Alabama was even settled.

Number Two! NEW MEXICO shows how it's done: simple, completely distinctive, and very relevant to the people and history of the State.

But the best State flag of all belongs to . . .

1. ALASKA! It's wonderfully simple, but it throws a nice visual reference to the other boring seal-on-field flags with its blue background, and references the national flag (stars on blue), all with distinctive local relevance. There's even a visual multilingual pun: the stars are the constellation Ursa Major: the Bear. Which in Greek is Arktos, from which the word Arctic is derived. And Alaska, of course, lies on the Arctic Circle. Plus it has bears. The fact that this awesome flag was created by a thirteen-year-old orphan just makes it even cooler.

If you're interested in stories which don't actually involve flags, check out my ebooks Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!