Nebraska's flag has a distinction no other state flag can claim: it once flew upside down over its own state capitol for ten days, and nobody noticed. The 2017 episode became the standard opening for every argument about the flag since, because it captures the design problem exactly. The flag is the state seal, rendered in gold and silver on a blue field, and a landscape engraving with a ribbon of small text looks much the same either way up, especially at the top of a pole in Lincoln.
The seal of 1867
The seal came first, adopted by the first state legislature in 1867, and it is a period landscape of everything Nebraska hoped to be. In the foreground a blacksmith works at his anvil, for the mechanic arts. A settler's cabin and sheaves of wheat cover agriculture. A steamboat paddles up the Missouri River, the state's eastern border and its first highway. A train steams west toward the Rocky Mountains on the horizon, a fresh image in 1867, the year the Union Pacific was building across Nebraska on its way to the golden spike.
Above it all, on a banner, the state motto: "Equality Before the Law." Around the rim runs "Great Seal of the State of Nebraska, March 1st, 1867," the date President Andrew Johnson proclaimed statehood over his own earlier veto.
A flag by mail order
For 58 years after statehood, Nebraska had no flag at all. The gap became awkward in the 1920s, when organizations in Washington, D.C. began requesting state flags for national displays and Nebraska had nothing to send. Florence Hazen Miller, a Daughters of the American Revolution member from Crete, took up the cause and pressed the legislature to act.
In 1925, Representative J. Lloyd McMaster of Lancaster County introduced House Roll 67, adopting the Great Seal in gold and silver on national blue as the state's official banner. The House passed it 92 to 4. The same session considered and rejected an alternative: Bertram Goodhue, the architect then building Nebraska's extraordinary state capitol tower, had drawn a modernized version of the seal, and the legislature turned it down in favor of the literal 1867 engraving. Flag historians have sighed about that vote ever since.
One more oddity: the 1925 law said "banner," not "flag," and nobody corrected the wording for decades. Nebraska did not officially designate its banner as the state flag until 1963, which makes it one of the last states in the Union to have an official flag at all.
Second to last
When the North American Vexillological Association surveyed 72 U.S. state, territorial, and Canadian provincial flags in 2001, Nebraska finished 71st. The only flag rated worse was Georgia's short-lived 2001 design, which crammed five historical flags onto one banner and was replaced within two years. Among flags still flying, Nebraska's scored the lowest of all.
The criticisms are the standard case against seal-on-blue flags, which describe about half of American state flags: imagery drawn for a wax seal rather than fabric, text that cannot be read in the wind, and a blue field identical to twenty other states'. Nebraska's version compounds it by rendering everything in gold and silver monochrome, so even the seal's landscape reads as a single metallic disc from any distance.
Ted Kaye's short NAVA handbook "Good Flag, Bad Flag," the closest thing American flag design has to a rulebook, asks for simplicity, meaningful symbolism, few colors, no lettering, and distinctiveness. Nebraska's flag misses on four of the five. The symbolism, at least, is genuinely Nebraskan; the trouble is that a blacksmith, a cabin, a steamboat, and a train shrink to specks at the size of a coin, which is what a flag emblem becomes at a hundred feet.
The upside-down decade
Redesign attempts have a consistent record: 1972, failed; 2002, failed; 2017, failed. The 2017 effort had the best story behind it. That year, State Senator Burke Harr of Omaha noted that the flag had flown upside down over the capitol for ten days earlier in the year without a single report, and introduced a bill to create a redesign task force. An inverted flag is traditionally a distress signal; Nebraska's was simply invisible. NPR covered the episode and gathered citizen proposals, most of them built on the state's actual visual assets, the Platte River, the Sandhills, the goldenrod, the meadowlark. The bill went nowhere.
Since then, the successful redesigns in Utah, Mississippi, and Minnesota have periodically revived the conversation in Lincoln, so far without a bill to show for it. Nebraska's flag remains what it has been since 1925: the 1867 seal, in gold and silver, on blue, right side up on the days someone checks.
References
[1] History Nebraska, "The State Flag and the Great Seal," Nebraska History (2016). https://history.nebraska.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/NH2016FlagSeal.pdf
[2] NPR, "Some Say Nebraska's Flag Stinks, and They've Got Ideas to Fix It" (August 31, 2017). https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/31/543459388/photos-some-think-nebraskas-flag-sucks-so-they-came-up-with-alternatives
[3] Wikipedia, "Flag of Nebraska." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Nebraska
[4] Britannica, "Flag of Nebraska." https://www.britannica.com/topic/flag-of-Nebraska
[5] History Nebraska, "State Flag." https://history.nebraska.gov/publications_section/state-flag/
[6] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State and Provincial Flags Survey." https://nava.org