If your New Year’s resolution is to stop obsessively reading post-election analyses, then perhaps you would welcome another way of understanding these United States. What do Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia have in common? Not much, if you glance at a voting map, but in a sense all seven have been red for some time: they share the same state bird, the northern cardinal. Forget the crumbling blue wall and consider this white one instead: eleven states—Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wisconsin—all celebrate the white-tailed deer as their state animal or, in some cases, their state mammal. An even larger swath of common ground has held since the nineteen-eighties, when states began declaring milk to be their official drink—some twenty do so today, including not only Wisconsin and New York but also others with far weaker ties to the dairy industry, from as far south as Louisiana to as far west as Oregon.
These sorts of ceremonial designations began more than a century ago, as an attempt, ironically, to identify what’s distinctive about each state. Every state has a flag, of course, and also a motto. My home state, Maryland, manages to have the best of the former (despite the occasional cringing by tasteless outsiders) and the worst of the latter (“fatti maschii, parole femine,” or “manly deeds, womanly words”). The flags mostly came first, their designs emerging from the seals of Colonial documents, family crests of early settlers, and the uniforms of early militias. Like the American flag, these flags changed over time, with early state banners updated, sometimes subtly and sometimes magnificently, after wars, demographic shifts, and political movements—see Mississippi’s recent move from rebel stars and blocky bars to magnolia-blossom beauty.
But the proliferation of state symbols beyond mottos and flags is a more modern phenomenon. According to most legislative historians, the origins of these symbols can be traced back to a “Board of Lady Managers” authorized by Congress for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Realizing that it would be impossible to agree upon a single national flower, the ladies decided that every state and territory should instead select its own flower for weaving into a wreath, which would then serve as a national garland. Women’s groups around the country began making their choices, and, in the decades that followed, states codified their selections and added others: the sagebrush of Nevada, the Cherokee rose of Georgia, the sego lily of Utah.
Soon enough, legislators started recognizing, Rodgers and Hammerstein-style, more and more of their constituents’ favorite things: trees, dogs, butterflies, amphibians, minerals, even dinosaurs. Iowa has the fewest symbols of any state, only four, whereas Texas—surprise, surprise—has the most: seventy and counting. To get into the double digits, you have to expand your definition of a crowd-pleaser. California has a state lichen, while Alabama has a state Bible. Arizona has a state firearm (the Colt Single Action revolver) and a state neckwear (the bola tie). Arkansas, as if channelling Charles Portis himself, has a state cooking vessel (the Dutch oven). Connecticut has both a state hero and a state heroine, though the Revolutionary spy Nathan Hale, with his one life to lose for our country, has achieved more fame than the school teacher Prudence Crandall, with her integrated classroom. And Louisiana not only has a state doughnut, the beignet, but also a state meat pie: the Natchitoches meat pie, which looks like an empanada and sounds like “Nak-uh-tush,” as in the Caddo-speaking confederacy that once flourished along the Red River.
It was a culinary choice that first got me interested in state symbols. Years ago, one of my sisters sent me an e-mail. “The Smith Island Cake is set to become the Maryland State Dessert,” her note read. “Beyond it being a cake, it’s representative of the Chesapeake Bay’s rich history.” I had enjoyed many delightful visits to Smith Island—a small dot of land floating in the middle of America’s largest estuary, accessible only by boat and home to just two hundred or so full-time residents—and had eaten many delectable Smith Island crab cakes, but I’d never even heard of a Smith Island Cake. I was travelling at the time, and, when I tried to look into it, the Internet had surprisingly little to say about the cake. According to the official Maryland code, “Traditionally, the cake consists of eight to ten layers of yellow cake with chocolate frosting between each layer and slathered over the whole. However, many variations have evolved, both in the flavors for frosting and the cake itself.”
Traditions can take hold quickly, obviously, but traditionally on the Eastern Shore they require a few generations to qualify. Yet as best as I could tell there was barely any mention of the cake before the good men and women of the state legislature got involved. When I returned home, my mother, a rural letter carrier, told me that she’d been delivering the cakes for years, always from the same bakery on Smith Island, elaborately packaged so that the chocolate icing didn’t melt and the slivers of yellow cake, sometimes as thin as a crêpe, didn’t go stale. She didn’t have a recipe and didn’t know how old the cakes were, but she did inform me that they were delicious. Intrigued, I contacted the Maryland Room of my local library to ask if they had any archival material on the dessert, and one of the helpful volunteers wrote back with a version of my own experience: “We did some research and did not find much about the cake except a few articles, very vague on the origin.” Rereading our exchange, I can detect a mutual suspicion already taking shape. “Despite talk then of it being as old as the island itself,” I wrote back, “I can’t find anything earlier than a 1994 cookbook.”
All’s fair in love and tourism, and I don’t mean to cast aspersions on the resident chefs of Smith Island. The baker credited with first recording the recipe for the Smith Island Cake, Frances Kitching, was a truly remarkable woman, who began cooking for her family when she was eight years old and did everything she could to preserve the culture of her community—not only of the watermen who hauled tons of oysters, crabs, and fish out of the Tangier Sound but of the generations of women who kept them fed. Kitching’s first cookbook came out in 1981, but she added the cake to a later edition, explaining to her co-author that it had been made for decades. Far be it from me to suggest otherwise, even if the archives couldn’t confirm that fact. As for Kitching, she died five years before the state honored her confection, but a handful of bakeries on her native island still ship the cakes anywhere in the country.
Who can begrudge the legislators who hoped to put Smith Island on the map? “Florida has the Key-lime pie, Massachusetts has the Boston cream pie, and, hopefully, Maryland will have the Smith Island Cake,” one of the island’s delegates in the state house said at the time. “This is a source of revenue for them and a source of pride.” Also, as it turns out, a source of tall tales. In the years since the cake became our state dessert, I’ve heard that its frosting was made from fudge instead of buttercream so that it could last longer at sea, and that the cake itself was originally only four layers but soon doubled and then tripled as women battled to outdo one another, in a kind of Great Bay Bake-Off.
As the saga of the Smith Island Cake suggests, state symbols both educate residents about history and heritage—a boon to elementary-school teachers—and entice tourists and travellers, a gift to local businesses. Years ago, for instance, my wife and I were driving through Kentucky when we stopped for lunch in the city of Horse Cave. Taking a tour of the cave for which the city is named, we were informed by our guide that Kentucky’s state fossil is the brachiopod. This was surprising, not only because it’s easy to forget that almost all of the South was underwater for much of the Paleozoic Era but because who has ever heard of a state fossil?
Most states, it turns out. Official state fossils started popping up in the nineteen-sixties. Colorado, California, and Indiana all went for charismatic megafauna: the stegosaurus, the sabre-toothed cat, and the mastodon, respectively. But North Dakota, in a remarkable show of restraint, went for something only a paleontologist could love: shipworm-bored petrified wood. In 1967, the same year that Nebraska selected a state rock (prairie agate) and a state gemstone (blue chalcedony), it also chose the woolly mammoth as its state fossil. Lawmakers who didn’t support the effort were threatened with having their names swapped in instead.
Opposition to state symbols isn’t common, but it comes in two distinct forms: the particular and the procedural. In the process of choosing specific symbols, legislators sometimes have spirited debates, and constituencies sometimes rise up to advocate for rival candidates—say, one song over another, as in New Jersey, which, to the dismay of “Born to Run” fans, still lacks a state song, or one molecule over another, as in Texas, where Texaphyrin, invented by University of Texas at Austin professors, has vied against the buckyball, discovered by professors at Rice University. These objections can come down to mere taste or partisan loyalty, but they can also be moral, political, or even financial in nature. When Ohio tried to designate the sugar cookie as its official cookie, margarine partisans got mad about the inclusion of butter in the recipe; Kool-Aid, which was invented in the Cornhusker State, is its official state soft drink, much to the chagrin of Nebraska dentists.
As for procedural objections, these inevitably appear whenever new symbols are proposed or approved, provoking a spate of doesn’t-the-state-have-anything-better-to-do letters that fill the pages of local papers. Like the naming of post offices, these legislative actions are declared frivolous and time-consuming, a waste of taxpayer dollars, distractions from the real work of government. Perhaps the most infamous version of this opposition came a decade or so ago, when a group of New Hampshire schoolchildren tried to persuade their representatives to make the red-tailed hawk the state’s official raptor, leading a campaign that was soon branded “Live Free and Fly.” Hoping to broaden the palette of the state’s various symbols—purple lilac, white birch, purple finch, white-tailed deer—the students at Lincoln H. Akerman School helped draft H.B. 373, then travelled to Concord to watch legislators debate the bill.
At first, the state’s Environment and Agriculture Committee seemed stuck on whether the common red-tailed hawk should be chosen over the peregrine falcon, an endangered species. But, when H.B. 373 went before the full House of Representatives, the students listened as lawmakers pilloried their proposal. New Hampshire’s lower chamber has four hundred people, nearly double the second-largest state legislature in the country, so there were plenty of representatives willing to take potshots at the hawk and belittle the children who wanted to honor it. “If we keep bringing more of these bills, and bills, and bills forward,” one legislator bemoaned, “we’ll be picking a state hot dog next.” Another said, “We already have a state bird. Do we need a state raptor? Isn’t that a bird?” Still another piled on: “So are we going to have flightless birds, waterfowl, pet birds, garden birds, wild birds? How many of these bills do we need to have?” The hearing swung from thoughtless to scandalous when one representative suggested that the murderous hawk was a better mascot for Planned Parenthood than for New Hampshire.
It took another four years for the red-tailed hawk to get its due, but the backlash against those legislators was so severe that the efforts of other soon-to-be voters around the country have been much more celebrated. Schoolchildren have been the source of some truly superlative symbols, including New York’s state muffin (apple), Texas’s state snack (tortilla chips and salsa), and, perhaps most adorably, Massachusetts’s state children’s book (“Make Way for Ducklings”). Earlier this year, elementary-school students at the Prairie School of DuPage, in Wheaton, Illinois, shepherded the Calvatia gigantea to Springfield, making the giant puffball Illinois’s official state mushroom. Months after the students first found the fungus at their school, they watched Governor J. B. Pritzker sign their bill into law.
Despite what critics say about the real work of government, this is part of the reason state symbols have flourished: they help teach children how government operates, drawing them into the legislative process with uncontroversial proposals that might well prepare them for more contentious debates and worthier causes. These symbols not only promote state pride—why else would Texas honor everything from an epic poem to a domino game?—they expose the public to the minutiae of lawmaking, from draft bills to committee hearings, floor debates to conference committees, and then, finally, to signatures or vetoes. Far from being a waste of legislative resources, they allow us to exercise our democratic muscles.
But these symbols are also, and chiefly, a celebration of the wonderfully bonkers range of things that constitute this beautifully large and strange nation. I didn’t know until I started keeping a list that two states have an official carnivorous plant—the same one, since both Carolinas celebrate the Venus flytrap, the flesh-eating species found in nitrogen-poor pockets along their coastal plains. Or that one state, New Mexico, has a state question, recognized in 1996: “Red or green?” (This honors the experience of restaurant-goers choosing their chile, not reckless drivers at stoplights.) Relatedly, last year, the state became the first to declare an official aroma: green chiles roasting in the fall. Earlier this year, Hawaii became the first state to have an official hand gesture: the shaka.
As should be clear by now, I am very much in favor of state symbols—the more, the merrier—but I do not approve of equivocation in official designation. Some states refuse to settle on a single symbol, trying to have it two, sometimes even more, ways. Occasionally, this is done in the name of a good cause. Last year, for example, Delaware tossed out the golden retriever and named rescue dogs as their state dog, following Georgia, which recognizes “adoptable dogs,” and joining the likes of California, Colorado, Illinois, and Tennessee, which have all named rescue cats and dogs their official state pets. Mostly, though, this is just the worst kind of politicking: a failure to pick. Texas selected the bluebonnet as its state flower, in 1901, but it was a particular species of the plant, and in the past seventy years legislators have recognized five other bluebonnet species as well. California has not one but four official state nuts: the almond, the pecan, the pistachio, and the walnut. Not to be beat, Oklahoma declared a state meal, trying to squeeze a whole smorgasbord into a single symbol, with three meats, five vegetables, two forms of bread, and two desserts.
But, really, why cavil? It’s nice to be able to take pride in our country, and to let these wacky, sometimes tacky symbols be a way of getting to know our neighbors. Next year, for instance, I’m hoping to make it down South for Alabama’s official outdoor drama, “The Miracle Worker,” staged every summer at Helen Keller’s homeplace, in Tuscumbia, and then up North for the annual fall celebration of Vermont’s state vegetable, the gilfeather turnip. Heaven knows there are plenty of worrisome official state developments right now, so why not raise a glass—of milk, Kool-Aid, coffee, cranberry juice, Conecuh Ridge Whiskey, water (what’s wrong with you, Indiana?), or Moxie (thank you, Maine)—to our diversity and unity, however symbolic it might be. ♦
