Arizona's flag looks like the end of a desert day: thirteen rays of red and gold fanning across the top half like a setting sun, a solid blue field below, and at the center a single star in copper, a color no other American flag uses. It was adopted in February 1917, five years after Arizona became the 48th state, over the silent objection of a governor who refused to sign the bill and never said why. The design started life not as a state symbol at all but as a pennant for a rifle team that was tired of being the only one at the range without a flag.
A rifle team with nothing to fly
Around 1910, the Arizona National Guard sent its rifle team to the national matches at Camp Perry, Ohio, the big annual marksmanship competition where each state's team flew its emblem over its section of the camp. Arizona, still a territory, showed up with nothing. The team captain, Colonel Charles Wilfred Harris, decided that would not happen twice.
Harris worked up a design built around a blue field and a spray of thirteen red and gold rays with a copper star at the center. Accounts of the flag's creation credit several hands beside his. Carl Hayden, soon to be Arizona's first member of the US House of Representatives and eventually the longest-serving senator of his era, is associated with the design's development, and his wife Nan Hayden is reported to have sewn the first state flag. W. R. Stewart of Mesa and his wife Mae also appear in early accounts, with Mae sewing an early rifle-team version. Like a lot of flags with practical origins, it was a group effort with one name attached.
Adopted without a signature
Arizona reached statehood on February 14, 1912, and spent its first five years as a state without an official flag. In February 1917 the Third Arizona Legislature took up a bill to adopt the Harris design. It passed, though not unanimously (sources give the date as February 17 or February 27, 1917, and disagree), and went to Governor Thomas Campbell.
Campbell did nothing. He neither signed nor vetoed the bill, and under Arizona law it became law without his signature. He never publicly explained his reasons, which has left a century of room for speculation: aesthetic objection, political calculation, or simple indifference. Whatever the cause, Arizona is one of the few states whose flag entered the statute books over a governor's silence. The statute fixed the specifications still in force: a four-foot hoist and six-foot fly (a 2:3 ratio), the lower half a blue field, the upper half thirteen alternating rays, and a two-foot copper star at the center.
Reading the rays and the star
Every element of the flag is doing specific work. The thirteen rays, seven red and six gold, are the thirteen original colonies, recast as a sunset because Arizona sat at the western edge of the continental story those colonies began. The red and gold are also the colors of Spain, whose expeditions, most famously Francisco Vazquez de Coronado's in 1540, were the first European ventures into what became Arizona. The blue of the lower field is the same "liberty blue" as the field of the United States flag, and blue and old gold were already Arizona's official state colors before the flag existed. Some accounts add that the blue recalls the Colorado River.
The star is the part everyone remembers. It is rendered in copper, and the reference is economic rather than poetic: Arizona was the largest copper producer in the United States when the flag was adopted, and it still leads the country today. Mining built the towns of Bisbee, Jerome, Globe, and Morenci, and the state's nickname, the Copper State, predates the Grand Canyon State branding. Putting the industry at the exact center of the flag was an accurate statement of what paid Arizona's bills in 1917.
One of America's best flags, by the numbers
When the North American Vexillological Association surveyed its members and the public in 2001 on the design quality of 72 US state, territorial, and Canadian provincial flags, Arizona came 6th with 7.92 out of 10. Only New Mexico, Texas, Quebec, Maryland, and Alaska scored higher. The reasons are the usual virtues: strong geometry, a small palette, no seal, no lettering, and instant recognizability at any size.
The proof is commercial. Arizona's flag is one of the handful of state flags that people voluntarily wear. The rays-and-star motif covers hats, T-shirts, bumper stickers, brewery logos, and the centerfield turf of spring-training ballparks. Designers crop it, recolor it, and drop the star onto silhouettes of the state map, and it survives all of it, which is roughly the definition of a flag that works. A hundred years on, the rifle team's improvisation is the most visible piece of graphic design in the state.
References
[1] "Flag of Arizona," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Arizona
[2] "Arizona State Flag," Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records. https://azlibrary.gov/dazl/almanac/azflag
[3] "National Matches History: Arizona Rifle Team Designs State Flag," Shooting Sports USA (NRA). https://www.ssusa.org/content/national-matches-history-arizona-rifle-team-designs-state-flag/
[4] "Arizona's Flag," State Library of Arizona blog (2022). https://statelibraryofarizona.wordpress.com/2022/02/25/arizonas-flag/
[5] Ted Kaye, "The American State/Provincial Flag Survey," Raven: A Journal of Vexillology, Vol. 8 (2001), NAVA.