Flag of Missouri

How to read it

Section 10.020 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri (from RSMo 1939, amended 1957) fixes the flag: a rectangle seven units high to twelve long, with three horizontal stripes of equal width, red at the top and blue at the bottom. In the centre a blue band forms a circle around the coat of arms in its legal colours on a white ground. The band is one-fourteenth of the flag’s height wide, the circle’s diameter is one-third of the flag’s length, and 24 five-pointed stars are set at equal distances in the band. The original copy of the design is kept by the Secretary of State. Missouri adopted the flag on 22 March 1913; it was designed by Marie Elizabeth Watkins Oliver, wife of the former state senator R. B. Oliver. The Secretary of State reads the arms in the centre of the national colours as Missouri’s independence as a state and its place in the Union, and as the state’s position at the geographical centre of the nation.

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The coat of arms piece by piece

Section 10.060 describes the arms, and the Secretary of State explains them. The shield is divided down the middle. On the left as you look at it is Missouri’s side: a grizzly bear on red, under a blue band with a silver crescent. The crescent is Missouri when the seal was made, a state of small population and wealth that would grow like the new moon, and the “second son”, the second state formed out of the Louisiana Territory. On the right are the arms of the United States, whose eagle holds arrows and olive branches for the federal powers of war and peace. Around the shield is a band reading UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL. Two grizzlies support the shield, for the state’s strength and its citizens’ bravery, standing on a scroll with the motto “Salus populi suprema lex esto”, “The welfare of the people shall be the supreme law”, above the Roman numerals MDCCCXX, for 1820. Over the helmet, for state sovereignty, rises a large star among 23 smaller ones, for the 24th state, out of a cloud that stands for Missouri’s difficulties in becoming a state. The arms are those of the state seal.

Telling it from the Dutch flag

The flag of the Netherlands has the same red, white and blue horizontal stripes in the same order, a flag that had flown on every sea for a century by 1790, the French presidency notes. Missouri’s adds the ring of stars and the coat of arms in the white.