John Gurda

Special to USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

This one could end badly. Here we are in 2020, nearly five years after the start of efforts to update Milwaukee’s civic flag, and we’re no closer to an official replacement than we were at the beginning. Even though a solid alternative has emerged, local officials have decided to look for another design, raising the very real possibility that Milwaukee could end up with three flags to salute.

Yes, it’s only a flag, but symbols are important. In a city with more pressing issues to address, the arguments over our official symbol have been, to put it kindly, an unfortunate distraction.

How did we get to the present impasse? To recap briefly, there was long-simmering dissatisfaction with the flag Milwaukee adopted in 1954: a dog’s breakfast of vanished landmarks and casual stereotypes that include County Stadium, an Indian chief, smokestacks, a Christian cross, and a gargantuan gear. In one ranking of America’s municipal flags, Milwaukee’s came in 147th out of 150.

Local graphic designer Steve Kodis decided to do something about it. Declaring that “A great city deserves a great flag,” he launched a campaign to bring civic design into the 21st century. Working with Greater Together, a nonprofit group committed to increasing racial diversity in Milwaukee’s creative industry, Kodis’ team met with anyone and everyone to generate ideas for a new flag. The result was more than 1,000 designs submitted by well over 500 individuals — a groundswell by any measure.

I was one of five volunteer panelists enlisted to narrow the field to a manageable number. With no preconceptions and no previous connections, we spent an entire spring Saturday in 2016 looking over the possibilities, finally whittling them down to five. The discussions were spirited, but our choices, in the end, were unanimous.

The finalists were unveiled in a City Hall ceremony and then submitted to an online vote. More than 6,000 responses were tallied — a greater turnout than in some aldermanic races — and the winner, announced on Flag Day (June 14) in 2016, was “Sunrise over the Lake,” by Robert Lenz. His design features a pleasing blend of colors (blue, gold, white) and symbols (three rivers, three founders) organized around the theme of a new day.

That, I thought, would be that. The Common Council would recognize the manifold shortcomings of the 1954 flag, replace it with “Sunrise over the Lake,” and we could all rally around a new civic symbol.

That’s not what happened. In July 2018, more than two years after “Sunrise” appeared on the horizon, Milwaukee’s Common Council declined to make the flag official, punting the issue to the Milwaukee Arts Board. The Arts Board kicked it back to the council a few months later with a recommendation to basically start over. The city issued a Request for Information (RFI) from potential designers last fall and is evaluating the responses.

“Sunrise over the Lake,” in the meantime, took on a life of its own. Without a dime in advertising, it quickly became the “People’s Flag,” a ubiquitous design that appears on T-shirts, beer cans, magazine covers, Brewers merchandise, coffee mugs, bicycles and, of course, flagpoles. There are five People’s Flags flying within two blocks of my home in Bay View. The public response has demonstrated just how hungry Milwaukeeans are for a graphic symbol they can call their own.

The flag’s champions (see milwaukeeflag.com) have made it ridiculously easy to use the design. It resides firmly in the public domain, available for anyone to use in any way imaginable. The organizers of the effort receive no compensation, and all profits from merchandise sales support Greater Together’s diversity efforts.

And so we have a flag conceived in civic pride that has earned public acceptance but official rejection. Why the dissonance? Some critics contend that the selection process wasn’t inclusive enough. Others sensed racial overtones when advocates described the white in the flag’s sunrise as the color of unity. (In the visual arts world, white, like sunlight, does contain all the colors of the spectrum, but the reaction was understandable.) Still others ignore the breadth of its popularity and dismiss “Sunrise over the Lake” as a hipster’s flag, a sort of private label for millennial creatives — the polar opposite of what was intended.

At the root of the flag flap, I believe, is the fact that some influential Milwaukeeans simply don’t like the design. Too generic, they say, or too corporate, or too much like Reno’s. (Milwaukee’s flag actually came first.) I understand that people of goodwill and even good taste can disagree. To be completely honest, my own first choice among the five finalists was the “M” star, a series of cleverly interlocked “M”s that formed a quilt-block star set in a field of blue. After “Sunrise” took the popular vote, however, I gladly closed ranks with the majority, and I’ve since become a staunch advocate of the winning design. “Sunrise” is simple, bold and memorable, which is really all you want or need in a civic symbol.

Boiled down to its basics, a flag is nothing more (or less) than a pattern of shapes and colors rendered in two dimensions. It’s not the symbolism of the shapes or the artiness of the design that matter but the emotional response of the viewer. Does it have the power to inspire a sense of ownership?

Chicago’s flag is a great example. One of urban America’s most successful designs, it features a row of four red stars centered on five alternating stripes of white and blue. I’ll bet not one Chicagoan in a thousand could tell you what those stars mean. (If you must know, they represent four major events in the city’s history: the establishment of Fort Dearborn in 1803, the Great Fire of 1871, and the world’s fairs of 1893 and 1933.) Does it matter? Not a bit, and that’s the point. Simple, bold, and memorable, the design itself has become a touchstone of civic identity, emblazoned on police cars, clothing and human bodies; there’s an entire website devoted to tattoos of the Chicago flag.

I haven’t seen tattoos yet, but the People’s Flag has won similar acceptance in Milwaukee. Some businesses would kill for the recognition the flag has earned, and yet my friends on the Common Council want to start over. To make matters worse, all the criticism of the old (and still official) flag has rallied a hardy group of hip traditionalists who like its retro look. We could indeed end up with three flags: the 1954 hodgepodge, “Sunrise over the Lake” and a Common Council-approved design to be named later.

That would be not only counterproductive but embarrassing. With so much else on its agenda, does the council really want to fight a flag war? In a city that already has plenty of divisions, do they really want to create one more?

What’s astonishing is that our legislative leaders seem to think the People’s Flag is somehow going to disappear when they anoint another design. The simple fact is that the flag is already an established brand, and no amount of aldermanic second-guessing is going to change that fact.

If they can’t endorse the flag, one reasonable course is open: Do nothing. The city’s Request for Information generated a grand total of two responses. Why not let the do-over die a natural death and allow the People’s Flag to fly or falter on its own?

My stronger preference would be a more constructive response. By default if not declaration, “Sunrise over the Lake” has become Milwaukee’s flag. No banner in our city’s long history has been so thoroughly tested and so widely accepted. The sooner our leaders acknowledge and endorse that fact, the sooner we’ll be able to end the rancor and walk toward the new day behind a flag we all can salute.

John Gurda writes a column on local history for the Ideas Lab on the first Sunday of every month. Email: mail@johngurda.com