The flag of Illinois is a state seal on a white field with the state's name printed under it, which by flag-design orthodoxy is two violations in one. Both have good stories. The name is there because of a Navy chief in Vietnam who got tired of nobody recognizing his state's flag. And buried in the seal is one of American heraldry's best grudges: the word "Sovereignty," printed upside down by a secretary of state who lost an argument with the legislature in 1867 and found a way to win it anyway.
Ella Park Lawrence's campaign
Illinois went nearly a century without a flag, and it acquired one through the persistence of Ella Park Lawrence, state regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Starting in 1912, Lawrence lobbied legislators and wrote to every DAR chapter in the state, and in April 1914 she announced a contest with a $25 prize for the best design. Thirty-five entries came back from the chapters. The winner was Lucy Derwent's: the central elements of the 1868 state seal, rendered on a white field.
The General Assembly approved the flag on July 6, 1915. Governor Edward Dunne, unpersuaded or indifferent, neither signed nor vetoed the bill, and it became law without him. Illinois thereby joined the crowd of states whose flags are their seals by other means, though on white rather than the usual blue.
An eagle with an editorial
The emblem deserves a closer look than it usually gets. A bald eagle stands on a boulder in a prairie, the sun rising over water in the distance. The shield in its talons carries thirteen stars and thirteen stripes for the original states. The boulder is inscribed 1818, the year Illinois entered the Union, and 1868, the year the seal took its current form. From the eagle's beak streams a red banner with the motto "State Sovereignty, National Union."
Look again at the banner and the motto reads strangely: "National Union" sits above, and the word "Sovereignty" is upside down. That is Sharon Tyndale's doing. As secretary of state after the Civil War, Tyndale thought a state that had just sent a quarter million men to fight against the doctrine of state sovereignty should not lead its motto with it, and in 1867 he asked the legislature to flip the phrase to "National Union, State Sovereignty." The General Assembly refused. Tasked the next year with redesigning the worn seal, Tyndale obeyed the statute precisely, kept the original words in the original order, and curled the ribbon so that "Sovereignty" stands on its head and "National Union" reads clean. The legislature never made him fix it. When the flag was created in 1915 it inherited the seal's artwork, inverted word and all, and every official Illinois flag since has carried Tyndale's small act of insubordination.
A sailor's request
The flag's one revision came from the mess deck. In the late 1960s, Chief Petty Officer Bruce McDaniel of Waverly, Illinois was serving in Vietnam, where state flags hung on the walls of his mess hall. The other flags got recognized; his kept getting asked about. A white flag with an eagle and no label could have belonged to half a dozen states, and McDaniel wrote home asking that Illinois put its name on its flag.
Representative Jack Walker of Lansing sponsored the bill, the General Assembly passed it, and Governor Richard Ogilvie signed it on September 17, 1969. The updated flag became official on July 1, 1970, with "Illinois" in blue capitals beneath the emblem. The change came with a practical bonus: Florence Hutchison of Greenfield produced a standardized rendering of the seal elements, ending decades of flag makers improvising the eagle's posture and the prairie's foliage. The 1970 Hutchison artwork is the version manufactured today.
The redesign that lost to the incumbent
Illinois recently ran the experiment several states have tried since Utah's 2023 redesign: it asked whether the public wanted something better. The General Assembly created the Illinois Flag Commission in 2023, and an open contest in 2024 drew nearly 5,000 submissions, winnowed to ten finalists featuring the expected vocabulary of stars, stripes, and prairie horizons. Then came the twist. In the public vote held in January and February 2025, the commission included the current flag on the ballot, and it won, taking roughly 43 percent against ten alternatives that split the remainder. The commission reported the result to the legislature, which had the final say, and the 1970 flag stayed put.
It was a result flag reformers found deflating and civics teachers found instructive. The seal-on-white design that the North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey had ranked in the bottom third of North American flags turned out to be the one Illinoisans could actually imagine flying. The eagle, the two dates, the upside-down "Sovereignty," and the name a sailor asked for in 1969 all survived a statewide referendum on their own merits, which is more democratic scrutiny than most state flags have ever faced.
References
[1] Illinois Secretary of State, "State Flag Law (1915)," 100 Most Valuable Documents at the Illinois State Archives. https://www.ilsos.gov/departments/archives/online-exhibits/100-documents/1915-state-flag-law.html
[2] Illinois State Museum, "Illinois State Flag." https://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/symbols/flag.html
[3] Illinois Department of Natural Resources, "Illinois State Flag" information sheet. https://dnr.illinois.gov/content/dam/soi/en/web/dnr/education/documents/ilflaginfosheet.pdf
[4] "Flag and seal of Illinois," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_and_seal_of_Illinois
[5] "Illinois bicentennial: The story behind that quirk-filled state seal," Chicago Sun-Times (2017), on Sharon Tyndale and the inverted "Sovereignty." https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/12/1/18340526/illinois-bicentennial-the-story-behind-that-quirk-filled-state-seal
[6] "Ella Park Lawrence," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Park_Lawrence
[7] Illinois Flag Commission reporting and 2025 public vote results, as covered by Illinois press including Capitol News Illinois.