The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
For more than 11 years, a Gadsden Flag, a yellow banner with a coiled rattlesnake and the motto “Don’t Tread on Me,” hung on the wall of my Olympia Press House office.
It came down recently as I vacated the office. It won’t go back up anywhere. After the assault on the U.S. Capitol, I’m packing it away.
The flag sometimes showed up in the background for Facebook Live events or Skype interviews in the office, and visitors sometimes asked if I had acquired it at a Tea Party gathering.
But the flag is a family memento that predates the Tea Party by several decades. It was purchased by my father in the late 1980s, when he and some neighbors were fighting an effort to expand the runways at the nearby St. Louis Airport, which would wipe out the homes in the neighborhood where I grew up.
Benjamin Franklin first proposed the rattlesnake and the motto for the American Colonies, where the residents, like rattlesnakes, were apt to mind their own business but can get nasty when stepped on or threatened. The flag’s design dates to the start of the American Revolution and has been popular as a symbol of protest over the centuries.
When my father died about 15 years ago, the flag was among the things the family sorted. My siblings didn’t want it, so I took the flag, which stayed in a box for a few years. When I moved to Olympia in 2009, the box was unpacked and I took it to the office and hung it up, partly as a reminder of my father and partly because there was a big, empty wall that was badly in need of painting that the state, as the Press House landlord, wasn’t going to do.
Sometimes when people asked if I was a member of the Tea Party or some other right-wing group, I’d explain the flag’s history. Other times I’d just laugh and point out they usually consider me part of the liberal media.
My granddaughter Kendall liked it because her favorite color is yellow, although she wasn’t crazy about the snake. It was pulled off the wall but left behind when the office was burglarized last summer, and put back up because the wall still hasn’t been painted.
So the Gadsden Flag in general, and mine in particular, had a noble history that has been wiped out by an ignoble present.
On Jan. 6, people carrying the Gadsden Flag and other banners stormed the U.S. Capitol, rampaged through the hallways, vandalized the seat of American democracy, interrupted a constitutional process to certify the will of the nation’s voters, stole things and threatened to do violence to a Republican vice president and a Democratic speaker of the House. Five were killed, including a Capitol police officer, and others were injured.
Along with the Confederate Stars and Bars, which was also paraded through the Capitol — something the Confederate Army never accomplished during the Civil War — the Gadsden Flag is now a symbol of insurrection and sedition.
I have argued with relatives who live in the South that displaying the Confederate flag in public is wrong, full stop.
The argument they are honoring a heritage of upholding state’s rights doesn’t cut it when the main right those states were upholding was the ability of people with one skin color to own people with another skin color.
The connotation of the Gadsden Flag has slowly evolved also in recent years. I’ve seen it at gun-rights rallies at the Washington Capitol. It was prominent at a Proud Boys demonstration at The Evergreen State College and at recent protests of the state’s restrictions to slow the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whatever one thinks of those events, they fell (mostly) within the bounds of the First Amendment right to “peaceably assemble for redress of grievances.” But on Jan. 6, people with the Gadsden Flag didn’t just cross that line. They obliterated the line and carried the flag into the abyss.
So my father’s Gadsden flag is being put away. Maybe for good, or maybe until my grandchildren come across it in a box and ask where it came from.
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