Iowa's flag reads at a distance as a French tricolor with company: three vertical stripes of blue, white, and red, the white one noticeably wider, with a bald eagle spread across the center carrying the state motto on blue streamers and IOWA printed in red beneath. It is one of the few American state flags whose design was proven in the field before it was ever adopted. Flags sewn to this pattern went to France with Iowa's World War I regiments in 1917 and 1918, four years before the legislature in Des Moines got around to making the design official.
A request from the Mexican border
Iowa entered the Union in 1846 and then did without a flag for three quarters of a century. This was not an oversight so much as a position. A strand of opinion in the state held that the Stars and Stripes was flag enough for any loyal American state, and that a separate banner smacked of the sectionalism the Civil War had been fought over. By 1917, Iowa was one of only three states without one.
What changed minds was a practical embarrassment. In 1916, Iowa National Guard units were deployed to the Mexican border during the crisis with Pancho Villa. Camped alongside regiments from other states, each with its own colors, the Iowans had nothing to mark their tents or their lines. Guardsmen wrote home suggesting that a state banner would be useful for designating their units. The Daughters of the American Revolution took up the cause, and the society's state flag committee turned to one of its own members for a design.
Gebhardt's tricolor
Dixie Cornell Gebhardt of Knoxville, Iowa, was in her fifties when she sketched the flag in 1917. She thought carefully about the objection that had kept Iowa flagless: her design, she said, should not detract from the national flag but sit beside it. She chose the blue, white, and red of the French tricolor, a reference to the century when Iowa was French territory, part of the Louisiana country France sold to the United States in 1803. Then she made the design unmistakably American. On the wide white center stripe she placed a bald eagle, wings spread, carrying in its beak blue streamers lettered with the state motto: "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain." The motto came from the Great Seal of Iowa, adopted in 1847. Below the eagle, IOWA in red capitals.
She assigned the colors meanings of her own: blue for loyalty, justice, and truth; white for purity; red for courage. The DAR flag committee approved the design in May 1917, and the Iowa State Council for National Defense accepted it on May 11 of that year. The United States had entered World War I the month before, and flags made to Gebhardt's design were presented to Iowa regiments and followed them to Europe.
Four more years of argument
Official adoption lagged well behind actual use. The old worry that a state flag was somehow un-American did not disappear just because the design existed, and the question kicked around the legislature after the war ended. The advocates' answer was in the design itself: a flag built around an eagle and a motto about liberty was hard to paint as disloyal, and by 1921 it had already flown with Iowa troops in a world war.
The 39th General Assembly passed House File 398, and Governor Nathan E. Kendall signed it on March 29, 1921. Iowa was among the last states to adopt an official flag. The law survives today as section 1B.1 of the Iowa Code, which specifies "three vertical stripes of blue, white, and red, the blue stripe being nearest the staff and the white stripe being in the center." The statute describes the eagle, the streamers, and the lettering, but sets no proportions for the flag as a whole, so manufacturers have some latitude.
Reading the flag
The layout does most of the talking. Blue at the hoist, red at the fly, and a white field in the middle wide enough to carry the eagle and its full 45-character motto legibly. The eagle is drawn naturalistically rather than heraldically, closer to the bird on the Great Seal of the United States than to a stylized emblem, and the streamers trail from its beak in a double curve.
The French echo is real but easy to overstate. The Des Moines Register has noted that the flag hearkens back to Iowa's years as French territory, with both flags running blue, white, and red from left to right, and Gebhardt herself pointed to that history. But the proportions are different, and no one who has seen the eagle mistakes the two. Gebhardt's own account emphasized Iowa's layered past: land held by France and Spain, purchased by the United States, settled and admitted as a free state in 1846.
How it has fared
The flag has never been redesigned. What Kendall signed in 1921 is what flies today, which puts Iowa in a minority among states, many of which have tinkered with their flags repeatedly. In the North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey of state and provincial flags, Iowa placed 42nd of 72 with a score of 4.72 out of 10. Vexillologists tend to dock it for the lettering, since a flag that needs its own name printed on it is conceding something, but it escapes the "state seal on a blue bedsheet" category that fills the bottom of that survey.
Gebhardt is remembered in Iowa as the state's Betsy Ross. A historical marker in Knoxville marks her home town's claim as the birthplace of the flag, and the original 1917 drawing survives in the collections of the State Historical Society of Iowa. She died in 1955, having lived to see her wartime expedient become a permanent fixture over the capitol.
References
[1] Iowa Code § 1B.1, "Specifications of state flag." https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/code/1B.1.pdf
[2] Wikipedia, "Flag of Iowa." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Iowa
[3] Our Iowa Heritage, "Dixie C. Gebhardt: Iowa's Own Betsy Ross." https://ouriowaheritage.com/the-state-flag-of-iowa/
[4] Historical Marker Database, "Dixie Cornell Gebhardt" (Knoxville, Iowa). https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=188161
[5] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State/Provincial Flag Survey." https://nava.org/digital-library/design/surveys/2001-State-Provincial-Flag-Survey.pdf