During what later became known as the Albany Congress, representatives from seven colonies – Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island – were going to meet to discuss the French threat and work on a treaty with the Iroquois Confederacy.
Benjamin Franklin's warning to the British colonies in America: "Join or Die.". A severed snake image, in two pieces, had first appeared in a 1685 book in France accompanied by the words “se rejoindre ou mourir” (will join or die). As the Albany Congress approached, Franklin was concerned about a recent military loss to the French and he was clearly pondering a colonial alliance to confront more French aggression.
“Many more French are expected from Canada,” he wrote. 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. In a 1996 article in The British Library Journal, Karen Severud Cook reviewed the brief, but interesting, historical interpretations of the cartoon.
The emblem reappeared in colonial newspapers during the Stamp Act crisis.
Telling stories from three “founding” periods in American history, renowned constitutional scholars join host Jeffrey Rosen. Franklin published the image with a specific political objective in mind. This association with racial hatred, and the flag’s historic roots as an emblem of a would-be government that embraced slavery, has long made the flag offensive to many. In retrospect, that may not have been the wisest move.
Franklin’s campaign of persuasion got a boost when the severed snake cartoon was soon reprinted by more than half a dozen other colonial newspapers. The Postal Service dismissed the complaint. FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness.
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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? Eugene Volokh, a professor at the U.C.L.A. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. But even though “Join or Die” failed to accomplish its real purpose, it may have had a much larger unintended impact. Other symbols suggest the fluidity and ambiguity of meaning—and the underground, almost in-group messaging symbols can send.
In 1774, Paul Revere used a version of it in the masthead of The Massachusetts Spy newspaper, as did several other colonial newspapers that promoted the developing rebellion against British rule.
At the risk of proving Godwin’s law (which holds that all online debates work their way to some invocation of Nazis), consider the swastika. Sometimes, in fact, they are its source. Gadsden’s venomous remix, for a flag used by Continental sailors, depicted the reassembled rattler as a righteous threat to trampling imperialism. The “Join or Die” cartoon also wasn’t the first political cartoon he had published; Franklin had done another cartoon for a pamphlet in 1747. He didn’t achieve that goal, but the image was so powerful and persuasive that it took on a life of its own. But the tactic of using a viral image to persuade people goes back to long before the existence of the Internet or Facebook. And Franklin might also have been inspired by rattlesnake images drawn by nature historian Mark Catesby. Hartvigsen says the version of that flag that we’re familiar with today was originally used by Confederate war veterans’ groups and the like, and was then embraced by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists. The “Join, or Die” illustration was first published in 1754 by Benjamin Franklin as a political cartoon for the Pennsylvania Gazette, an early American newspaper. The cartoon is a representation of all of the British Colonies in a cut-up segmented rattlesnake, which Franklin described as …
The shift in the swastika’s meaning is, in some ways, an outlier: there’s no disputing its ugly symbolism today.
Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Your California Privacy Rights. (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.
directive agrees, “It is clear that the Gadsden Flag originated in the Revolutionary War in a non-racial context.”.
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A symbol of well-being associated with Buddhists for thousands of years, it was used by commercial brands and even occasionally adorned U.S. and British military aircraft before the Second World War.