Flag of Nebraska

What the flag shows

The flag is simple in layout: the Great Seal in gold and silver, centered on a field of national blue. All the detail is in the seal, which dates from 1867.

• A steamboat going up the Missouri River.
• A blacksmith with hammer and anvil, standing for the mechanic arts.
• A settler’s cabin with sheaves of wheat and stalks of growing corn, standing for agriculture.
• A railroad train heading west toward the Rocky Mountains.
• The motto, “Equality Before the Law,” across the top of the circle.
• The rim, which reads “Great Seal of the State of Nebraska, March 1st, 1867,” the date of statehood.

Before the flag

For more than half a century after statehood, Nebraska had no official flag, and there was confusion about what it looked like. The 1915 Nebraska Blue Book described an unofficial state flag with the seal on a yellow field, and National Geographic repeated that description in its flags issue of October 1917.

In 1921, at the urging of the Nebraska Daughters of the American Revolution, Representative George A. Williams of Fairmont introduced a bill for a commission to redesign the 1867 seal and put the new seal on a state banner. Bertram Goodhue, the architect of the new Capitol, drew a more symbolic seal, but the effort did not produce a flag.

The 1925 banner

The flag’s leading advocate was Florence Hazen Miller of Crete, who persuaded Representative J. Lloyd McMaster to introduce House Roll 67 in 1925. A Senate committee amended the bill to use Goodhue’s seal, but the amendment was dropped, the Senate passed the bill 32 to 0, and Governor Adam McMullen approved it on April 2, 1925. The law created a state banner and barred using it as a business advertisement or trademark.

Crete celebrated first. When the law took effect, one second after midnight on July 1, 1925, a small banner with an embroidered seal was raised there. The official flag was first shown publicly at a New Year’s celebration at the State Capitol on January 1, 1926. The first banner made to the official design cost $100 from the National Permanent Decoration Company of Mason City, Iowa, and History Nebraska reported that it was still hanging in the secretary of state’s office in 2012.

From banner to flag

In 1963 a bill by Senator Eugene Mahoney of Omaha named the banner the “official state flag” and allowed it to be flown wherever and whenever the US flag is flown.

Attempts at change

Mahoney himself later proposed a study of a new design. His 1972 resolution led to newspaper polls, and the Omaha World-Herald’s ballot came back 2,091 to 342 against changing the flag. In 2017 Senator Burke Harr of Omaha proposed a task force to design a new flag for the state’s 150th anniversary, but a legislative committee voted the idea down.

Rules for the flag

Nebraska law says the flag may never be used as a business advertisement or trademark, in whole or as part of a design, and forbids any insult to it; breaking that rule is a misdemeanor. The law itself does not require permission to display the flag, which it says may be flown on the same occasions as the flag of the United States. The secretary of state, who keeps the Great Seal, takes a stricter line: because the seal is the flag’s centerpiece, the office applies its seal policy to the flag too, giving written permission only for official state business and for education and refusing commercial and political uses. Nebraska has no official pledge or salute to its flag.