I love flags.
Betsy Ross designed one for our country but that is not the only one you might want to celebrate on Flag Day this Saturday, June 14. How about the yellow one with the snake? My favorite.
Or it was until someone waved it above a crowd at our nation’s Capital on Jan. 6 2021. Waving it that day corrupted its symbolism and stole its glory.
I want my flag back. The pole from which it flies is not meant for bashing police officers. The image and the words on its golden panel are not an emblem for a desperate politician who wants to be king.
The flag, bright and appealing, features a coiled Eastern Timber rattlesnake and the words ”Don’t Tread on Me.” You may think that the flag represents your victimhood and that like the snake, you will rise up and bite those who are stepping on you, but let’s decode this symbolism a bit.
The Eastern Timber Rattler is endangered because of habitat encroachment and wisely hibernates in the wintertime because it cannot control its temperature. Its rattle is a last resort response to a threat, a warning, a form of free speech. But although a pit viper can inject venom into prey, the Timber Rattler is not aggressive and would not strike a human when threatened, if fleeing or hiding were at all possible. Such a retiring reptile is not an apt symbol for violent protests.
The flag arrived in the Age of Enlightenment, when Thomas Paine was writing about the “rights of man,” as such nascent ideas were just gaining traction. Designed by Christopher Gadsden and promoted by Benjamin Franklin in the years leading up to the American Revolution, during the colonists’ struggle to separate from King George’s Britain. The serpent represented the colonies coiled at a crucial birth-of-the-first-ever-big-power-democracy moment.
In an earlier flag design, Franklin carved the serpent into segments, each representing one of the American colonies. Not a single person, but a whole colony; a collection of people of all kinds.
In other words, that snake that is not supposed to be tread upon, is not just you. It’s any of us. It’s all of us. Don’t tread on any of us.
The Gadsden became an objection to taxation without representation. The “without representation” part is key. The flag was born of the struggle to separate from a monarchy that ruled subjects, not citizens. Subjects were required to pay taxes to governments in which they had no choice and no voice. The flag inspired those faced with the challenge of organizing a democracy in which ordinary people could vote for the leaders of their governments. But those that carried the Gadsden in the 18th century didn’t just wave a flag around—they arduously built a government where the votes of ordinary people like you and me count, and they also constructed protections for speech so we could have a voice. That “we” is you and me. Not you versus me. Are you beginning to get it now?
In the late 18th century, after the Constitution came into force in 1789, and after many colony governments had ratified state constitutions, many of us were still excluded from the electoral process. Indigenous people, women, those who were enslaved and men without property struggled to gain enfranchisement. For white women the struggle to vote extended into the 20th century and for African-American men and women this struggle is sadly extending well into the 21st. You could argue that all American elections were stolen before half the population had the right to vote.
But it is African-Americans who should have the honor of carrying the Gadsden and to enlarge its meaning as an authentic symbol. African-Americans labored to build our country in an unspeakably cruel economy without any compensation. Since emancipation they have paid their taxes even as voting has been violently suppressed in Black communities for a century and a half.
African-Americans could liberate such a symbol from the constraints of its original masting in a slave market, and its popularity as an unfortunate and murky meme of white supremacy, to reclaim it as a longstanding objection to taxation without representation. This elegant flag could revert to its early republican symbolism and we could fly it alongside Old Betsy. We are not quite there yet. We have more talking to do.
Christine Wade is the author of “Seven Locks “(Simon & Schuster) a novel about the Revolutionary War in the Hudson River Valley.
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