But wait, there’s more!
In a column earlier this week, I wrote about how a Texas school district has banned a lesson on the Virginia state flag because it includes nudity. I used that as the opportunity to write about the history of Virginia’s state seal (the image on our flag that features said nudity) and the flag itself.
My main source material was a 1911 report by the Virginia State Library. That prompted an email from Thomas Moncure Jr., a retired senior assistant attorney general who in 2019 authored an article in the Northern Neck of Virginia Historical Magazine that contained additional information.
Among the highlights:
The father of our Virginia state flag is former President John Tyler. When Virginia seceded from the Union, Tyler sided with the Confederacy. He also felt Virginia needed something to fly. “It is a remarkable fact that there never was a Virginia flag,” he said, according to Moncure’s account. He proposed the easiest solution possible: Slap the Virginia seal on some cloth and call it a flag. Tyler also proposed the dark blue color still in use. Our beloved Virginia flag is a product of the Confederacy and the only former U.S. president who sided with the secessionists. We’ve taken his name off a community college but still fly his handiwork every day.
As noted in my earlier column, that flag did not include a bare breast, because Virtus — that’s her official name, although sometimes she’s simply Virtue — remained clothed until the early 1900s when Secretary of the Commonwealth D.Q. Eggleston, a lawyer from Charlotte County, ordered her exposed to make her gender clear.
Moncure’s report goes on to detail a 1930 legislative commission that was empaneled to standardize the state seal, because there were conflicting versions in use. This is one of those situations that brings to mind William Faulkner’s famous quote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That’s because the commission turned to a famed New York sculptor, Charles Keck, whose work remains with us today, although some of it is in storage because it’s proven controversial.
Keck’s selection was controversial then, too. Del. Daniel Coleman complained to Gov. John Pollard: “I am sorry that a Virginian could not have been found who was capable of making this design instead of a New Yorker who is not familiar with our History and Traditions.”
Keck’s new design for the state seal prompted controversy as well, Moncure writes. Among them: “How far should the fallen Tyrant’s crown be from his head? What length should Virtue’s chiton [her garment] be and should her sword be held in a more warlike manner?”
Everyone’s a critic.
Pollard wrote Keck: “I have been having great trouble meeting criticisms of the alleged imperfections in the Seal but hope that I have ironed them all out for the time being.” Keep in mind that all this was during the Great Depression, but, you know, having a good state seal is important.
Moncure, who studied the records related to the seal, writes that “the one objection notably absent from Gov. Pollard’s executive records is to Virtue’s exposed left breast.” At the time, the so-called Hays Code was in force and strictly regulated movie content. Showing too much (female) skin was definitely a violation. In Virginia, though, a topless woman on a state flag wasn’t nearly as controversial as how that woman held her sword or how far away the tyrant’s crown had fallen.
One aspect of the state seal (and therefore the state flag) went unresolved for nearly two decades: What color should the background be? The choices were white or cream. In 1948, Gov. William Tuck chose white.
As for the sculptor Keck, who designed the modern seal, he was not exactly as unfamiliar with the “History and Traditions” of Virginia as that unhappy Norfolk legislator thought. Keck was one of the most prominent sculptors of his day. By the time he was selected for the work on the Virginia seal, he’d already sculpted a statue of George Washington that the United States had presented to Argentina (and which still stands in Buenos Aires). He’d sculpted the famous “Lifting the Veil of Ignorance” statue of Franklin County-born Booker T. Washington that stands at Tuskegee University in Alabama. He’d sculpted Patrick Henry for the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in New York.
Keck had also designed two statues for Charlottesville: one of the Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and another of the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Both have since been taken down, Jackson for his Confederate connections, Lewis and Clark because of what some considered a submissive portrayal of the Shoshone guide Sacajawea. Another of Keck’s works in Virginia still stands, though: “The Listening Post” — sometimes called “The Doughboy” — statue of a World War I soldier on Monument Terrace in Lynchburg.
We still see his work, indirectly, every time we see someone fly the Virginia flag.
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