Minnesota Makes a Mockery of the ‘Great State-Flag Awakening’

One of the first pieces I wrote for National Review after coming aboard in early 2023 was in praise of “the great state-flag awakening.” The elegant redesign of Utah’s and Mississippi’s state flags inspired me to suggest that a few other states could benefit by reconceptualizing their banners. But Minnesota’s foray into this project has compelled me to rethink my support for the whole enterprise.

Following a contentious, four-month-long process during which the State Emblems Redesign Commission pored over 2,000 public submissions, the committee settled on one of which they “overwhelmingly approved.” This is what they came up with:

What in the world is that supposed to be? It looks like the national banner of a small, fictional Caribbean country you have to liberate from a caudillo in a first-person shooter. It’s the ensign a rebel army would hoist above the burnt-out husk of a battle-scarred parliament building. It’s the flag equivalent of Greendale Community College’s mascot, the Greendale Human Being — an anodyne expression of nothing in particular. It conveys only that the state it is supposed to represent is unremarkable.

Minnesotans should be furious. The flag observes only the most tenuous connections to the state’s history and symbols. The ungainly eight-pointed star in the flag’s inverted triangular chevron is supposed to be evocative of Polaris, the star from which the “North Star State” derives its nickname. But there’s little evidence of any eight-pointed stars in the history of the state’s symbology. Stars have long been a feature of Minnesota’s state flags and even alternative banners such as the “North Star Flag.” And yet, those have featured five-pointed stars evocative of the American flag and the Minnesota National Guard’s emblem, which dates back to 1933. The eight-pointed variant is a recent vintage. It found its way onto the redesigned flag adopted by the city of Duluth in 2019. Adopting Duluth’s artistic tastes statewide is deference to newness for newness’s sake.

The cobalt blue and turquoise fields — both of which reject conventional heraldic aesthetics altogether — are meant to “symbolize Minnesota’s vast and distinct waterways,” according to CBS News. The commission’s chairman, Luis Fitch, said in what he admitted was a guess (“I’m not a historian”) that the flag paid homage to the American Indians who likely settled in Minnesota because it’s where the source of the Mississippi River is located. “So, the way I’m looking at it right now, why do I see the Mississippi River pointing up to the North Star?” he added. “And that’s it. For me, that’s the story.” So, the flag is symbolic of a made-up story about Native Americans? That’s what you’re predicating your state’s vexillology on?

Quite unlike the understated simplicity of the Beehive State’s new emblem or Mississippi’s stately magnolia, Minnesota’s new flag is ostentatious in its effort to break from the state’s past. And that’s what I missed in my endorsement of the whole state-flag-redesigning project. In hindsight, it was a lapse in judgment to assume that this effort would be managed by state-level officials for whom continuity is a virtue. I should have guessed that this, like everything else, would be consumed by the faddish effort to break down the old and durable so that it might be replaced with monuments to ourselves.

So, I suppose I will have to learn to live with the 19th-century farmers, the plows, the sailing ships, and the disembodied horses’ heads. If this enterprise is going to devolve into yet another postmodernist exercise in imbuing abstract patterns with false meaning, count me out.

Update: A reader informs me that the eight-pointed star on the new Minnesota flag also appears in the state capitol’s rotunda. Although the commission did not dwell on this reference, and the star has made few historic appearances in the state’s emblems, as discussed above, it can claim some provenance from that – even if only retroactively.