In the spring of 1751, Benjamin Franklin was feeling proper narked (ticked off) by the British habit of putting some of its criminals on ships and sending them to the Colonies.
“Our Mother knows what is best for us,” Franklin wrote, in a satirical editorial he published May 9, 1751, in his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette. “What is a little Housebreaking, Shoplifting, or Highway Robbing . . . compar’d with this Improvement and Well Peopling of the Colonies!”
His solution, his “Scheme,” was to return the favor by paying Colonists a bounty for every live rattlesnake they captured, which could then be transported back across the Atlantic.
“I would propose to have them carefully distributed … particularly in the Gardens of the Prime Ministers, the Lords of Trade and Members of Parliament, for to them we are most particularly obliged,” Franklin said, using a common pseudonym, “Americanus.”
In these polarizing times, it’s hard not to appreciate Franklin’s obvious glee at the prospect of sending snakes into the manicured gardens of his political enemies.
Several of my neighbors here in East Bay Township have recently started flying the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, and while I thought I understood its meaning, I went looking for Franklin’s actual words, and their relationship to the flag, to make sure.
In 1754, Franklin’s anger was temporarily re-directed at the French, and their aggression with England, that was spreading, proxy-style, through large swaths of North America.
Franklin believed that Colonial unity and working in tandem with Britain was going to be required to defeat the French — which today sounds a lot like a version of, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
France, aligned with its Indigenous allies — Lenape, Shawnee, Wyandot, Chippewa and Mississauga — had achieved a recent military victory, which Franklin learned about from a young Virginian officer, Maj. George Washington.
Franklin expressed the urgent need for alliances by publishing a political cartoon, which showed a snake divided into eight parts representing the then-eight Colonies, its body twisting above an imperative: “Join or Die.”
By 1775, there were 13 Colonies, the snake had become ubiquitous on flags, buttons and paper money, but it was two military men — Col. Christopher Gadsden and Commodore Esek Hopkins — who are credited with putting an American timber rattler and the phrase “Don’t Tread On Me,” on yellow material and flying it over ships during the Revolutionary War.
It was a rallying cry, it was defiance against intrusive authority, a gauntlet raised for freedom.
In more recent times, however, the flag is associated with far-right causes, and is often opposed by civil rights groups and progressives, who point to photographs of rioters flying it during the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Col. Gadsden was a slave owner (so were Benjamin Franklin and George Washington) and the flag is viewed by many Black Americans as racially offensive, a disturbing symbol of white nationalism and racist ideology.
Some Indigenous communities have said its message is hypocritical, as tribal rights were, and are, regularly tread upon.
A neighbor who flies the Stars and Stripes, but not the Don’t Tread On Me flag, described the yellow flag’s shift in meaning like this: “It’s as if the snake of defiance is now eating its own toxic tail.”
Our government (or at least parts of it) doesn’t see it that way.
A dozen U.S. states (not Michigan) now offer “Don’t Tread On Me” specialty license plates, even while, in 2016, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled a postal worker’s Gadsden flag cap might constitute race-based harassment and should be investigated.
The EEOC stopped short of labeling the flag a racist symbol, and another federal government office, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has a Don’t Tread On Me page on its website, celebrating it — and the rattlesnake — as iconic parts of American history.
I wondered what the history books say about the flag, and went looking for information at the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute, a nonprofit devoted to civil discourse and civic engagement.
The results of their recent study on the challenges faced by educators was sobering: “Teachers now approach subjects like elections, the economy, or civil rights with caution if at all.”
Ignoring the more disturbing facts about our collective past because we’re uncomfortable facing them, does not mean they didn’t happen. Or that they aren’t happening still.
After researching the bright yellow flag, I wondered whether my neighbors knew its history, so I knocked on a door to ask, but no one answered.
I wonder if they’d continue to fly it if they did.