South Dakota's flag is a state seal wearing a sunburst. The sky blue field and the ring of golden rays are the flag's own contribution; everything inside them belongs to the state seal of 1889, and everything around them is text. It took three legislatures most of a century to arrive at this arrangement: a two-sided flag in 1909, a cost-driven consolidation in 1963, and a nickname swap in 1992. Each step made practical sense. The sum is a flag that design surveys rank near the very bottom, in a state that has twice declined to reconsider it.
A sun and a seal, back to back
The flag began, as several state flags did, with someone noticing there wasn't one. State senator Ernest May raised the question with Doane Robinson, the superintendent of the state's Department of History and the man who would later conceive Mount Rushmore. Robinson suggested a design theme of sunshine, and the execution fell to Ida Anding, a young woman on the staff in Pierre, who produced the artwork for a two-sided flag. The front carried a blazing golden sun on sky blue, with SOUTH DAKOTA arched above and THE SUNSHINE STATE below. The reverse carried the state seal. The legislature adopted it in 1909.
Anding is better remembered under her married name, Ida McNeil, as the voice and owner of Pierre radio station KGFX, and she kept a proprietary eye on her flag for the rest of her life.
The seal on the back was the standard nineteenth-century inventory of a hopeful economy: a farmer at his plow, grazing cattle, a steamboat working a river, a smelting furnace and mill, wooded hills behind, all under the motto "Under God the People Rule" and the statehood date of 1889.
The 1963 consolidation
Two-sided flags are handsome and ruinous to produce. Each one is two flags stitched back to back; South Dakota's cost about $75 in materials by the early 1960s, serious money for a flag, and the thin silk had a habit of letting each side's design ghost through the other. In 1963, state representative William Sahr introduced House Bill 503 to collapse the flag to a single face, setting the state seal inside the sun so that neither original element was lost, exactly.
McNeil opposed the change, arguing that burying the seal in the sun stripped the flag of its individuality. She had a point: the 1909 flag's front, a plain sun on blue, was the most distinctive thing South Dakota ever flew. The bill was signed into law on March 11, 1963, and the sun became a frame.
Sunshine out, Rushmore in
The 1963 flag still called South Dakota The Sunshine State, a nickname with an obvious problem: Florida owned it in the public mind. After the state formally adopted The Mount Rushmore State as its nickname, representative Gordon Pederson sponsored the matching flag change, and in 1992 the lettering was revised. No other element moved. The result is the current flag: sky blue field, golden sun, navy-on-white seal, and two arcs of gold sans-serif capitals reading SOUTH DAKOTA and THE MOUNT RUSHMORE STATE.
The revision created a small absurdity that redesign advocates enjoy pointing out. The flag now advertises Mount Rushmore in words while showing a steamboat and a smelting furnace in pictures. The four most recognizable faces in American sculpture, carved into the state's own Black Hills at Robinson's instigation, appear nowhere on it.
The current specifications are otherwise conventional: a 3:5 field of sky blue, the seal rendered in navy on a white disc, the sun's rays serrated in gold around it, and an optional gold fringe on three sides for flags displayed indoors. The sun is the one element with a straightforward local meaning. South Dakota gets an enormous amount of sunshine, on the plains in summer and glaring off snow in winter, and the sun theme was Robinson's original suggestion back in 1909, the single idea that has survived every revision since.
The redesign that keeps not happening
By the standards of flag design, South Dakota's checks nearly every box marked avoid: a complex seal, fine detail invisible at distance, and its name written on it twice over, counting the nickname. In the North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey of 72 state and provincial flags, it finished fifth from last.
Attempts to do something about it have died quietly. In 2012, representative Bernie Hunhoff proposed a commission to consider a new design, with artwork by the Spearfish artist Dick Termes offered as a starting point. The bill was amended, then deferred to the "41st legislative day" of a 40-day session, the South Dakota legislature's polite way of killing a bill. In 2024 a similar commission bill met the identical fate. The flag that three practical decisions built remains exactly as the 1992 revision left it, sunshine framing a seal, Rushmore present in name only.
References
[1] "Flag of South Dakota," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_South_Dakota
[2] "State Seal and Symbols," South Dakota Secretary of State. https://sdsos.gov/general-information/about-state-south-dakota/state-seal-symbols.aspx
[3] "South Dakota's State Flag," South Dakota Historical Society Foundation. https://www.sdhsf.org/news_events/history_articles.html/title/june-2013-south-dakota-s-state-flag
[4] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State/Provincial Flags Survey."
[5] "Flag of South Dakota," Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/flag-of-South-Dakota