A strange thing happens when I step outside my home in Park Slope, Brooklyn: I see Maine flags. Maine flags on hats, Maine flags on shirts, Maine flags on bags. I don’t recall if I’ve seen a Maine flag tattoo, but this is Brooklyn—we have every tattoo.
The borough is more than 250 miles from Vacationland and an even greater psychological distance: The wonders of nature are so distant here that, at my daughter’s preschool, they sing “Twinkle Twinkle Traffic Light.” And yet, on a trip to the playground this past weekend, I saw two different parents wearing caps displaying Maine’s original banner: a green pine tree and blue North Star on a buff background.
The weekend before, it was the same.
Maine’s official flag is a navy-blue sheet featuring the state’s seal: a peeved-looking farmer and a dandyish sailor standing astride a shield displaying a moose resting in front of a pine tree, beside the water (what, they couldn’t also fit a can of Moxie?). In 2013, though, Maine couple Chris Korzen and Bethany Field launched an effort to revive the state’s first official flag, used from 1901 through 1909. Anyone who’s been up north since then can attest that their efforts have been wildly successful: The original Maine flag is everywhere, from coastal souvenir shops to the flagpoles of the craggiest old Yankees. The convenience stores in the Portland airport now have entire sections devoted to original Maine flag souvenirs. You can order them on cookies.
“I have described our efforts in the past as having rebranded the entire state of Maine,” Korzen says.
It may sound grandiose, but he’s not wrong. In my neighborhood, Vermont tourism ads play regularly on video boards. For years, New Hampshire hung ads around New York City, practically shouting its tourism slogan: LIVE FREE (the rest is left to the imagination). Maine gets its advertising for free.
At the same time that Mainers have adopted a beloved new flag, Massachusetts has been twisting itself into knots over its symbols. We’ve always known the state’s flag is, aesthetically, lame (I grew up in Newton and still wear my Red Sox cap all around New York, so leave me alone; I’m saying “we”). But in 2020, amid the national racial reckoning that followed George Floyd’s murder, a general consensus formed that the state’s seal and flag—which feature a sword hovering ominously above a Native American figure’s head—are unacceptably offensive. Many of the state’s tribe members had been saying that for decades. It’s just that this time the rest of the state was listening.
Two state commissions later, Massachusetts still does not have a new flag. The latest effort seemed to come to a screeching halt in December when, after nine months of work, the commission revealed three finalists that were…all potentially offensive to Native Americans. One of the proposed flags featured an image of a mayflower—the flower, not the boat, but come on. The goal was to be less offensive, not more. As they say, the commission had one job.
But fear not. On June 25, after more than a half-year hiatus, the Massachusetts Seal, Flag, and Motto Advisory Commission (turns out, the state also needs a new motto) reconvened. In a roughly hourlong meeting, commissioners introduced three additional finalists (none of which seemed to move anyone), rehashed old arguments, and wrestled over whether to start all over again (and whether the law creating the commission even allows them to start all over again). The plan had been to bring both the old and new finalists to public hearings in August, in anticipation of employing professional designers to polish final selections, but by the meeting’s end, that appeared to be up in the air.
“What I’m hearing today is we need to pause and reconsider what’s next,” said Kate Fox, commission cochair and the state’s top tourism official.
So does this commission have a chance?
If people in Massachusetts really want a new flag, we should start by looking north.
Around 2010, Korzen was operating a political nonprofit in Maine and wanted to thank a wealthy donor—someone who happened to be into boats. Korzen knew that Maine was one of just two states, along with Massachusetts, with its own maritime flag. It shows an anchor lying across the base of a pine tree, along with the state’s name and its “Dirigo” motto. But Korzen couldn’t find the flag for sale anywhere. Eventually, he ordered some custom-made.
“It was a cool flag, and I said to my partner, ‘Hey, we should find a way to make these and sell them to people with boats,’” Korzen says. He and Field, who are today separated but remain business partners, launched the Maine Flag Company in 2013. They got some equipment, and Field set about sewing the banners herself. “It was something we did in the kitchen,” Korzen says.
Korzen later took a trip to the state archives, looking for inspiration for other flags. When he came across the original 1901 banner, he gravitated to its simple, lovely design. Korzen says that, for him, the flag is grounding in a world of exploding technology—the star reminds him that there are bigger things out there, while the tree evokes Maine’s connection to nature. “But I don’t think we have to read too much into it,” he says. “There’s just something special about it that gets people on an emotional level.”
“You can tell a far-reaching story with a very simple image,” he adds.
Korzen and Field started off making just a few. “We’re giving prototypes to friends and being like, fly this on your flagpole and see how long it takes to shred,” Field says. Most had never seen the flag before and loved it. Next, the couple made a run of about 30 flags and put up a Facebook ad. The flags sold out pronto.
In early 2018, the Bangor Daily News showed up to write about Maine’s old flag becoming new again. The day the story ran, Field happened to be in California. When she woke up, “my phone was just notification after just scrolls of notifications.” That day, they sold more than 100 flags, and it’s been “this snowball effect ever since.”
Soon, people were asking for the flag on hats and clothes. The couple launched a spinoff company, Original Maine, to handle the apparel (though, today, they only make a small portion of the Mount Katahdin–sized pile of Maine flag gear now available across the state). “It’s just a way to identify your people and your community and a shared value,” Field says.
It helped that Maine celebrated its bicentennial two years later, in 2020. COVID initially seemed like a major blow, as the couple had to close the studio-shop they’d opened in Portland. But, Korzen says, “It turned out everybody had a lot of money and was hanging out at home, buying stuff on the Internet. That was when we went through a real, unprecedented period of growth.”
The flag became so popular that, in 2024, Maine put a referendum on the ballot to replace its official flag with something similar to Korzen and Field’s version. The vote failed, in part, the pair believes, because the state chose a silly-looking photorealistic tree design, as opposed to their stylized version (for that reason, they both voted no).
Nevertheless, when you travel around the state, the original Maine flag is everywhere, including on the backs of cars. In 2025, Maine replaced its license plates with versions featuring the tree and star. “People are going to vote with their flag poles,” Korzen says. Original Maine again has a store in downtown Portland, and Korzen and Field say they get reports of sightings from all over the world. “I’m running like four weeks behind in back orders on flags right now,” Korzen says. “The flags just keep coming.”
Ted Kaye is the secretary of the North American Vexillological Association and, for lack of a better description, the nation’s leading flag guy. He’s identified a few key principles to good flag design: A flag should be simple—so simple a child could draw it from memory. It should use just two to three colors, be distinctive, and deploy “meaningful symbolism.” And there should be no lettering or seals. The original Maine flag passes with flying colors (ha, literally). It helped, Kaye says, that the Maine flag got to “skip the politics.” It wasn’t something foisted on anyone by a government committee—its popularity grew organically. Mainers have, effectively, chosen the flag
for themselves.
Massachusetts is a place that does not usually skip the politics. In January 2021, then-Governor Charlie Baker signed a law creating a commission to examine the state’s seal and motto. Curiously, the law commanded the body to “make recommendations for a revised or new” seal and motto, but did not specifically order it to come up with potential options. So in 2023, the commission published a final report that had several useful insights—if no actual designs.
Brian Boyles, the executive director of Mass Humanities, cochaired that first commission and serves on the second. The key question that has emerged, he says, is, “How can you retain a Native presence while being inclusive and responsive to this history and to the state at large?”
“And that is a super hard question.”
Boyles’s first commission administered a survey that found that 65 percent of Native American respondents liked having an indigenous person represented on the state seal. But that group skewed older, and other tribe members objected. Some thought representing a human of any background was problematic, since it inherently excluded other types of humans. Among non-indigenous residents, only about 40 percent thought the Native American figure belonged on the seal. But of course, if you take the figure away, Boyles points out, that brings up the question of whether you’re “erasing Native people and Native history from the state’s most prominent icon.”
Threading that needle would not be easy.
The second commission launched in early 2025, stocked with a diverse array of people—experts in history, Native American heritage and culture, education, tourism, and more—seemingly equipped to do just that. What went wrong? Ostensibly, there were process issues. The state invited the public to submit their own designs, prompting more than 1,150 ideas for new seals, flags, and mottos. (Shoutout to whoever came up with the flag of Governor Maura Healey’s giant head rising like the sun from behind a Dunkin’ Donuts, with a lobster walking out the door, next to someone waving a Pride flag and three bros clinking beers.)
Those submissions were winnowed down to 23 seals, 48 flags, and 32 mottos. Next, commission members scored each, leading to a set of finalists.
But the scoring system weighed design much more heavily than symbolism. And there was no mechanism for tossing out flags that looked nice but could be offensive. So in a meeting last August, the commission unveiled three finalists that looked nice—but could be offensive. There was the mayflower flag, another featuring a ring of turkey feathers (the feather motif could read as offensive), and another with a City on the Hill–inspired design (carrying heavy Colonial overtones).
But if you watch some of the commission’s meetings, it becomes clear that they were paralyzed by a deeper issue: They never figured out how, or whether, to represent Native Americans.
In that August meeting, John “Jim” Peters, the executive director of the state’s Commission on Indian Affairs, advocated simply removing the sword from the existing flag.
Commission member Rhonda Anderson, a longtime activist around Native issues, suggested adding purple to a design, as a nod to wampum.
Elizabeth Solomon, a commission member who serves as treasurer of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, said the current flag had to be changed, but Native Americans still had to be represented. “To move from something that basically the indigenous community found offensive to something that completely ignores the indigenous community is incredibly problematic,” she said. At one point, Boyles tried to prod the commission toward deciding as a group whether there should be “some presence of indigeneity” on the flag.
The commission did not reach a clear answer.
At the June meeting, the commission unveiled additional finalists selected with a revamped scoring system that weighed symbolism more heavily. None of the flags solved the issue of Native American representation, either. One of the new seal finalists was the state’s current version, stripped of the sword above the Native figure’s head—which reopened the same debates the commissioners had already had.
“There is not complete consensus among indigenous communities about how the flag should be changed or not,” Solomon said.
The truth is, there is no easy answer. History is complicated. We venerate the Founding Fathers but also need to wrestle with how they benefited from slavery. We celebrate the Revolution but also must acknowledge how the country it led to has treated Native Americans. That goes back to, you know, the Mayflower.
Flags simply are not capable of squaring all that. A bedsheet can’t carry the weight of history.
That isn’t just my view. It’s also Kaye’s. “The flag should represent everyone, not each one,” he says. The point of a flag, he says, “is just to remember that it’s Massachusetts, not to have it be the ultimate repository of the values and history and culture and heritage of the place.”
He points to the most iconic state flags. Texas: a star and a couple of stripes. California: a bear. South Carolina: a palmetto tree.
In Field’s view, flags aren’t supposed to be read like high school English books, with all their symbolism decoded. They are signs onto which people project themselves. That, she says, is what happened in Maine: “I’ve had people tell me, ‘When I look at that pine tree and star flag, I just think about this lake house I went to, and then the serene morning, and the sunrise, and this loon, and just the quiet.’”
Other states have redesigned their flags to account for offensive imagery, including Mississippi and Minnesota. But no other place has tried so hard to reckon with its history within the new banner’s four corners. “Massachusetts should hold itself to a higher standard,” says Boyles, who believes there should be some Native acknowledgment. “We can’t keep telling ourselves this is the bastion of progress and then compromise every time a challenge comes up to the narrative.”
Boyles and his fellow commissioners argue that there needs to be greater appreciation for the history and contributions of Native Americans in Massachusetts, and they are, of course, right. But pulling off that acknowledgment on a flag is all but impossible in practice. For starters, there’s no agreement on which symbolism to use. Beyond that, highlighting one group on the flag raises questions about why others were omitted. No matter what you do, feelings are going to get hurt. People will be offended. One of the new finalists introduced in June was so crowded with symbols—waves, mountains, a lighthouse, a star, what appeared to be a Native-inspired pattern, a large iced Dunkin’—that it felt almost meaningless. (Okay, there was no large iced Dunkin’.) The most practical solution is making a flag that everyone can see themselves in, even if it doesn’t explicitly call them out.
The thing is, a state commission is extremely unlikely to produce that flag. Even if commissioners somehow overcame their indecision, flag-design-by-politics is exceedingly difficult to pull off with wide buy-in. In 2024, Minnesota unveiled a lovely new flag…that Republican leaders railed against and several cities and towns now refuse to fly. (And yes, Republicans in Massachusetts have already identified changing the flag as a potential wedge issue.)
In their recent meeting, one thing the commissioners did agree on is that the rollout of new symbols for the state needs to be accompanied by a robust public education program on the history of Massachusetts’ indigenous communities.
“You’re not going to get an education from an image,” Solomon said.
And that really is the point.
The commission plans to keep trying. The next step is for its educational subcommittee to “further develop the educational context surrounding the symbolism and representation in the proposed designs” in anticipation of public hearings on the finalists, according to a state spokesperson. Boyles, for his part, believes the committee can succeed. Maybe. But the better path forward is the one Maine took—not through politics, but around it.
Korzen, a Rhode Island native who attended college and grad school in Massachusetts, believes that the state, in its own archives, already has “a fantastic flag.” From 1908 through 1971, our current flag had a reverse side: a blue shield featuring a green pine tree on a white field.
Seeing potential for a replay of Maine, Korzen recently launched a website devoted to “the pine and shield,” as he’s calling it. He says he’s not bothered by double-dipping on pines; after all, it’s long been a symbol of New England, and Maine used to be part of Massachusetts. Korzen plans to start advertising more aggressively soon and put the flag on apparel.
“We’ve sold a bunch of these already, and without really trying,” he says.
The Massachusetts pine flag, frankly, is not as good as the Maine version. Kaye points out that the green-on-blue colors don’t really pop; he says some tweaks are needed. Maybe somebody else will come up with a better idea—that happened in Milwaukee, where, a decade ago, a private group launched a design contest that led to a new unofficial “people’s flag” that’s now ubiquitous in the city.
As Korzen might say, people will vote with their flagpoles. And with their T-shirts and hats and, if the design is good enough, maybe even their tattoos.
This story first appeared in the print edition of the August 2026 issue, with the headline, “Why Can’t We Make a Good Flag?”
