Wisconsin's flag says exactly where it is from, in white block capitals, which is either its greatest failure or its most honest feature depending on whom you ask. Beneath the lettering is a coat of arms that compresses the state's nineteenth-century economy into a shield: plowing, mining, manufacturing, shipping, with a sailor and a miner holding the whole thing up and a badger keeping watch on top. The flag went through three distinct rounds of lawmaking, in 1863, 1913, and 1979, and the last of them, the one that added the name and date, is the round everybody argues about.
A flag for the regiments
Wisconsin got its flag the way several northern states did: soldiers asked for one. When the Civil War began, Wisconsin regiments wanted a state color to carry alongside the national flag, and in 1863 the legislature obliged with Joint Resolution 4, prescribing a blue banner with the state's coat of arms. Nobody thought of it as civic decoration; it was military equipment, meant for the battlefields where units from Wisconsin, including the famous Iron Brigade, were fighting.
After the war the flag faded into administrative vagueness. The 1863 resolution had force only as a resolution, renderings of the arms drifted, and for fifty years the state had no clean statutory answer to what its flag actually was. The 1913 legislature fixed that, writing into Chapter 1 of the statutes that the state flag was the coat of arms of Wisconsin on a field of royal blue, displayed the same on both sides. That description held, unchanged in its essentials, for most of the century.
Reading the arms
The coat of arms is a catalog of work. The shield's four quarters hold a plow for agriculture, a crossed pick and shovel for mining, an arm and hammer for manufacturing, and an anchor for navigation, the Great Lakes trade that built Milwaukee. At the shield's center sits a small version of the United States arms with the motto "E Pluribus Unum," the Union loyalty of a state then at war made explicit.
The supporters are a sailor with a coil of rope and a miner, sometimes described in the statutes as a yeoman, resting on his pick: labor on water and labor on land. Above the shield, on a wreath, crouches a badger. The nickname came before the animal's official honors; it was hung on the lead miners of the 1820s and 1830s who wintered in hillside dugouts, living like badgers, and the state eventually embraced the insult. Below the shield sit a cornucopia, for plenty, and a pyramid of thirteen lead ingots, for the mineral wealth that drew settlers to the southwest corner of the territory and for the original thirteen states. Over everything, on a scroll, runs the one-word motto adopted in 1851: "Forward."
Adding the name
The 1913 flag had a problem that only got worse as photography, television, and public displays multiplied: at any distance it was a dark blue rectangle with an indistinct gold blob, which also describes the flags of roughly twenty other states. Legislators heard about the confusion from citizens who could not pick their own flag out of a display.
The 1979 legislature responded by amending the statute to add "WISCONSIN" in white capital letters above the coat of arms and "1848," the year of statehood, below it. The revised flag took effect on May 1, 1981. The change did what it was designed to do, in the bluntest way available. Where other states redesigned, Wisconsin labeled.
The case against, and for
Flag design orthodoxy holds that a flag needing its name written on it has failed as a flag, and Wisconsin became the standard exhibit. In the North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey of 72 US and Canadian flags, Wisconsin's placed 65th, in the bottom eight, dinged for complexity and for the lettering. Redesign proposals have circulated in Madison over the years, but none has come close to passing.
The defense is practical. The flag is now identifiable, which the 1913 version was not, and the arms reward the close viewer with more state history than most flags attempt: the lead rush, the lake trade, the Civil War loyalty, the badger. The 2:3 flag flies over the Capitol in Madison and may be trimmed with yellow knotted fringe under the statute. No designer would draw it today, but it is a precise record of how three different legislatures, in 1863, 1913, and 1979, each answered the question of what a flag is for.
References
[1] "Flag of Wisconsin," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Wisconsin
[2] Wisconsin Statutes § 1.08, "State flag." https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/1/08
[3] "Wisconsin State Flag," Wisconsin Blue Book 1989-1990, Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau.
[4] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State and Provincial Flags Survey." https://nava.org