milwaukeeflag.com
Four People's Flag Finalists
With any luck the latest push to overhaul Milwaukee’s flag will end where every previous effort has: with the public seeing the proposed alternative, shrugging and moving on. We’ve been through this before. Every five or 10 years, Milwaukee is reminded it has a flag (a rather eccentric one) and pressed to abandon it by somebody who assures us they can do better. But so far nobody has yet to follow through with a replacement flag worth rallying behind.
This latest campaign looks like the anti-flag movement’s best shot at breaking that cycle. Spring-boarding off a widely shared TED Talk mocking the city’s current flag, The People’s Flag of Milwaukee initiative has shown impressive organization. It’s run by some bright minds and supported by some very prominent local organizations (including Local First Milwaukee, Radio Milwaukee and Greater Together). The initiative has drawn approving press from just about every media outlet in the city, in part by offering them a readymade angle no outlet could resist: an open call to the public to vote for their favorite flag submission. Never mind that it’s unclear whether the campaign will abide by the results of that vote (the process is murky), the impression is that everybody has a voice. It’ll be a true people’s flag.
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People’s Flag launched with the goal of creating an unofficial alternate Milwaukee flag—because nothing symbolizes unity like a city with two competing flags—but they’ve since made it clear this is a backdoor campaign to replace the real flag. And though the Milwaukee Common Council has long tuned out talk of changing the flag, this time there are signs it’s at least open to considering the idea. For his part, Mayor Tom Barrett hasn’t endorsed formally replacing the flag, but he’s basking in the group’s halo of publicity. He’ll announce the campaign’s winning flag on Tuesday, June 14, Flag Day.
So the People’s Flag movement has some real momentum. Yet looking at the five finalists this well-oiled campaign has arrived at, whittled down from a pool of more than a thousand submissions, it’s hard to imagine any of them generating any real excitement. They’re all… well, flags, a predictable hodgepodge of stars, circles and blues meant to symbolize the lake. Most of them are tastefully done, and a couple of them are pretty sharp. None are going to inspire a surge of civic pride that helps forever actualizes the city, inspiring it to live up to its full potential. No flag could.
That’s not a knock against the designers behind these finalists. They came up with exactly the kind of professional, unobjectionable designs the People’s Flag initiative was hoping for. From the beginning the campaign was less about capturing the city’s diverse heritage (something no flag could possibly do better than the one we already have) than it was about making Milwaukee’s flag compliant with the Principles of Good Flag Design, a sort of sacred designer’s code that we as a city are supposed to be ashamed of not living up to. The campaign is obsessed with these rules. It repeats them like scripture. The five principles of good flag design are even the first thing on the group’s website, listed like commandments: a Good Flag must be simple; a Good Flag must not use lettering or seals; a Good Flag must only use two or three basic colors, etc.
And those are the widely agreed upon tenets. But they’re also a recipe for creating a flag that looks exactly like every other nondescript flag from a city you couldn’t identify. Yes, Milwaukee’s flag violates these rules. It’s from 1954; it predates those rules. It predates Roman Mars’ TED Talk, and Roman Mars himself, just as it predates Ted Kaye’s seminal work Good Flag, Bad Flag (what, you’ve never read it? For shame). Vexillology didn’t exist when the flag was created.
And that’s part of what’s wonderful about the flag. It’s historic, a piece of history that also happens to capture our history. We now live in a world where no new flag could conceivably get away with violating the suddenly sacred design rules that ensure a pedestrian flag-by-numbers. But our flag is interesting, an earnest celebration of the city’s history, culture and accomplishments. And we’re allowed to have an interesting flag because it’s grandfathered in. We have a flag that, for all its quirks, is unmistakably Milwaukee. Why would we want to give that up so we can replace it with a flag that could just as easily fly over Racine, Sheboygan or Kenosha, or any of the thousands of other cities that happen to be on a lake?
Here’s my bias: I love the current flag. It’s uplifting and openhearted and fun to stare at. It's like a time capsule lovingly passed down from our ancestors, and it makes me feel connected to the past. But I’m also not a big fan of changing flags on principle. Since all designs date themselves, we’re better off keeping the charmingly dated design we're lucky to have now. (Could you imagine how gaudy the flag would look if it had been overhauled in the ’70s, as some residents attempted back then?) People’s Flag supporters often cite examples of flags from other cities that are better used than Milwaukee’s, like D.C.’s and Chicago’s—beautiful flags, both. But those flags are 78 and 99 years old, respectively. Those designs were preserved and protected. A flag can’t become a symbol of civic pride if it’s overhauled every generation.
Talk to People’s Flag supporters long enough and you’ll also hear another common refrain, one that justifies the suddenly urgent need to replace the flag: Now that the city is on an upswing, they say, it deserves a symbol of pride. Even ignoring the hubris and Millennial exceptionalism that load that argument—and honestly, I can’t—there’s a far easier way to show off our local pride, one that doesn’t require obliterating a 62-year-old chunk of Milwaukee history: Simply embrace the flag we have now.
Crazy idea, right? Rather than overreacting to some comments from a TED Talk in a panicked display of our city’s inferiority complex, why not assert our individuality by proudly flying the flag we inherited? And given how the flag has been underused for decades, there’s no better time for us to reclaim it. In doing so, the flag could become a symbol not only of our city’s past, but also of this moment in time, and of our shared optimism about the city’s future. That’s the great thing about flags. They can take on new meaning, if you leave them be.
