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Page 2 The stakes were high enough that the governor made a highly unusual appearance on the floor of the house to argue for the new flag. In the end, the vote in favor of adopting Alexander's design was relatively close: 94--82 in the Georgia House of Representatives on January 24, and 34--22 in the Senate six days later. Those who weren't part of Barnes's coalition were surprised by how swiftly the vote was executed. "It was the old sneak attack," House Republican Leader Lynn Westmoreland told the Associated Press. Governor Barnes made the new flag official in a private signing at 9:30 a.m. on January 31. A handmade version was raised at the capitol later that morning, in a quiet, unpublicized ceremony. "Nothing's ever been passed that fast in Georgia," Doug Alexander told me after the GMA ceremony. "Not even a resolution in favor of motherhood would pass that quickly." From a design point of view, the new Georgia flag is a perfect reflection of the political compromises that led to its approval. As the elder Alexander put it, "There's nothing original in that flag--it's just an assemblage." During deliberations, legislators proposed amendments that wound up as visible elements on the flag. "People have complained that this design is too complicated," Alexander said. "And it got complicated because of the politics. That line 'In God We Trust'--that was added by the house in an amendment. When that happened, I said to one of the legislators, 'This flag's getting awfully cluttered.' He said, 'Adding that line got us five votes.' And I said, 'Well, I guess it belongs on there.'" That afternoon, I telephoned Tyrone Brooks, a black state representative from Atlanta who has been sponsoring a bill to change the Georgia flag every year since 1983. I asked him what the Confederate flag represents to him. "It stands for the annihilation of my people," he said. "That's what we see when we see it, just like when a Jewish person sees a swastika." Early on, the reaction to Brooks's bill was, as he put it, "very, very hostile. People were saying, 'You are trying to take our heritage away from us. We will never change it--no, no, no.'" In 1994 Brooks and civil rights leaders demonstrated at the Super Bowl, in Atlanta. When the game returned to the city in 2000, according to Brooks, "We said that we would wait one more year only. We told the state of Georgia that if the general assembly did not change the flag in 2001, we would launch a major boycott. And at that point, we began to see some major change in the business community. South Carolina was obviously on the radar screen--everybody could see that it had been embarrassed internationally and was still hurting." Given Atlanta's status as the economic capital of the New South, he added, a boycott "would have devastated the state of Georgia even more." And even racially intolerant members of Georgia's business community, Brooks said, "would rather have this compromise than face economic boycotts and sit-ins. The loss of money was really the flag that flew in many eyes. They didn't see red, white, and blue or black and white--they saw green leaving the state. That's the reason so many people in the business community got on board." Two days later, I was in Jackson, Mississippi, for a breakfast meeting with a man named Clay Moss. Moss is 41 years old and wears his hair in a military-style buzz cut. He has a full-time job as a Baptist minister, but is also a self-trained expert on flag design and serves as the vice president of the Confederate States Vexillological Association. (Vexillology is the study of flags, named after the Latin word vexillum.) We met at Frank's, a restaurant a couple of blocks from the state capitol with red-checked tablecloths and hanging ferns. A small framed sign on the wall next to our table read, "We Will Serve the Lord." Just as I was about to take my first bite from a plate of scrambled eggs, biscuits, and grits, Moss stopped me. "Mind if I bless the food real quick?" he asked. Moss is Alexander's Mississippi counterpart: chief designer of that state's new flag, the one that lost the statewide referendum. Before we got around to discussing the vote, he had a few things to say about Alexander's design. "The Georgia flag has been the object of tremendous ridicule in the flag world," Moss said. Indeed the North American Vexillological Association just published the results of a survey ranking all the state flags. New Mexico and Texas topped the list; Georgia's new flag came in dead last. Voters called it "hideous" and "desolating." "It's not a good design," Moss said. "It's too cluttered. And one of the tiredest things you can do in flag design is put some kind of emblem on a blue background. Half the state flags out there do that. It's nondistinctive, uninspiring, unimaginative, and at any great distance you can't tell one from the other." He was getting a little worked up, waving his fork in the air. "And all that writing! I mean, if you have to write something down on a flag, something went wrong somewhere." Moss took out a five-page booklet he'd written called "Ordinary Folks' Guide for Good Flag Design," in which he had divided the 50 state flags into 6 categories, from the best designed (labeled Category One) to the worst (Category Six). It's important to remember, Moss told me as he flipped through the booklet, that the whole point of a flag as an object is to be seen in battle or on a distant pole, making clear symbolism its most important design feature. "I'll tell you what a good flag is," Moss said. "Simple. Distinctive. Functional. Recognizable at a distance. And any child can draw it accurately from memory." There were 11 state flags in Category One. Moss said that a few more nearly qualified for that honor and with small changes--a bigger star here, smaller lettering there--could move up. For other flags he had nothing but ridicule. "Okay, take Wisconsin," Moss said. "Clearly some people in Wisconsin said, 'Our flag looks way too much like Maine's.' They said, 'I know what we'll do, we'll write our name on top of our flag in big ole letters.' Instead of coming up with a new design that made sense, they just put their name on there." He was right--the flag is unattractive, and the word Wisconsin, spelled out in ungainly capital letters above the state seal, dominated the design. Moss wore a sour look. "It really chaps me to see something like this." Last year Mississippi governor Ronnie Musgrove assembled a 17-member special commission to look into the possibility of a new flag. Former governor William Winter was named chairman, and Moss was brought in as design consultant. The long-standing Mississippi flag features the Confederate cross in the upper left-hand corner, an area called the canton. The rest of the flag is a simple tricolor, with horizontal bands of blue, white, and red. Winter and the commission wanted a new design that was as close as possible to the old one, to reduce the impact of the change in a place that--perhaps more than any other Southern state--holds its traditions dear. "And the easiest way to do that," Moss said, "was to change just the canton, replacing the Confederate emblem with something else." The something else they eventually settled on was an arrangement of 20 white stars in two concentric circles against a blue background with one larger star in the middle."The first day I met with Governor Winter," Moss said, "he asked me to draw some possibilities using just the canton. We tried the state seal, and also the magnolia flower, and then the stars. It quickly became apparent that the seal and the magnolia weren't going to look right, so we concentrated on the stars, tweaking and modifying them quite a bit." Moss took the batch of sketches he'd worked on with Winter and turned them into a formal design. "I did it on PowerPoint," he said. "I don't have CorelDRAW or the fancier stuff. I just gave the stars their dimensions and worked on the aesthetic balance." Like many of the people I talked to in Mississippi, Moss doesn't think any new design could have defeated the old flag, which took 494,223 of the 765,951 votes cast in April. (Almost everyone I interviewed in Georgia agreed that if Alexander's design had been put up for a vote there, it too would have lost to the existing flag, if perhaps by a closer margin.) Mississippi voters were most interested in voting against the idea of change, Moss said. "The old flag was going to carry the day no matter what. Just look at the numbers. If the margin had been 51 percent to 49, I might be worried about how I could have improved the design a little bit. But it absolutely didn't matter." |
