that a colleague’s insistence on wearing a swastika cap was evidence of harassment.) Other symbols suggest the fluidity and ambiguity of meaning-and the underground, almost in-group messaging symbols can send. (It would likely not be difficult for, say, a Jewish worker to convince the E.E.O.C. The shift in the swastika’s meaning is, in some ways, an outlier: there’s no disputing its ugly symbolism today. directive agrees, “It is clear that the Gadsden Flag originated in the Revolutionary War in a non-racial context.” “The origins of ‘Don’t Tread On Me,’ ” Leepson summarizes, “were completely, one hundred percent anti-British, and pro-revolution.” Indeed, that E.E.O.C. Gadsden’s venomous remix, for a flag used by Continental sailors, depicted the reassembled rattler as a righteous threat to trampling imperialism.
Among other borrowers, Paul Revere put the snake in a seventeen-seventies newspaper nameplate. In 1751, Franklin made the satirical suggestion that the colonies might repay the Crown for shipping convicts to America by distributing rattlesnakes around England, “particularly in the Gardens of the Prime Ministers, the Lords of Trade and Members of Parliament for to them we are most particularly obliged.” Later, in what may be America’s first-ever political cartoon, Franklin published the famous “Join or Die” image, which depicts the American colonies as segments of a snake.
The snake, it turns out, was something of a Colonial-era meme, evidently originated by Benjamin Franklin. His was by far the coolest, with its menacing rattler and provocative slogan. Neither endured like the design of Christopher Gadsden, a Charleston-born brigadier general in the Continental Army. The Gadsden flag is one of at least three kinds of flags created by independence-minded colonists in the run-up to the Revolutionary War, according to the writer and historian Marc Leepson, the author of “Flag: An American Biography.” Liberty flags featured that word on a variety of backdrops the Pine Tree flag floated the slogan “An Appeal To Heaven” over a depiction of a pine tree. And this reflects a deeper question, one that’s actually pretty compelling: How do we decide what the Gadsden flag, or indeed any symbol, really means? It’s also been appropriated to promote U.S. In recent years, the Gadsden flag has become a favorite among Tea Party enthusiasts, Second Amendment zealots-really anyone who gets riled up by the idea of government overreach. But however cooked up the notion that there was some kind of federal crackdown on the design, the controversy does point to something real. (which whipped up a dedicated page to correct misreporting around “the Gadsden Flag case”) had merely told the Postal Service, in long-winded legal terms, to look into the complaint. There was no such definitive “ruling,” from the Obama Administration or anyone else.
Observers of a particular ideological bent reacted with alarm or outrage: “ Is the Gadsden Flag Racist?,” “ Government Ruling: Wearing ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ Gadsden Flag Can Be Racist & ‘Racial Harassment,’ ” “ Obama Administration: ‘Don't Tread on Me’ Clothes Are Racist,” and so on. School of Law, brought this to the public’s attention through the Volokh Conspiracy, his legal-affairs blog on the Washington Post’ s Web site. Eugene Volokh, a professor at the U.C.L.A.
But, this summer, that decision was reversed by the E.E.O.C., which, after some procedural back-and-forth, ordered the agency to investigate the matter. The Postal Service dismissed the complaint. How do we decide what the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, or indeed any symbol, really means? Photograph by Drew Angerer / The New York Times / Redux