One answer involves history. The Gadsden flag is one of at least three kinds of flags created by independence-minded colonists in the run-up to the Revolutionary War, according to the writer and historian Marc Leepson, the author of “Flag: An American Biography.” Liberty flags featured that word on a variety of backdrops; the Pine Tree flag floated the slogan “An Appeal To Heaven” over a depiction of a pine tree. Neither endured like the design of Christopher Gadsden, a Charleston-born brigadier general in the Continental Army. His was by far the coolest, with its menacing rattler and provocative slogan.
The snake, it turns out, was something of a Colonial-era meme, evidently originated by Benjamin Franklin. In 1751, Franklin made the satirical suggestion that the colonies might repay the Crown for shipping convicts to America by distributing rattlesnakes around England, “particularly in the Gardens of the Prime Ministers, the Lords of Trade and Members of Parliament; for to them we are most particularly obliged.” Later, in what may be America’s first-ever political cartoon, Franklin published the famous “Join or Die” image, which depicts the American colonies as segments of a snake. Among other borrowers, Paul Revere put the snake in a seventeen-seventies newspaper nameplate. Gadsden’s venomous remix, for a flag used by Continental sailors, depicted the reassembled rattler as a righteous threat to trampling imperialism. “The origins of ‘Don’t Tread On Me,’ ” Leepson summarizes, “were completely, one hundred percent anti-British, and pro-revolution.” Indeed, that E.E.O.C. directive agrees, “It is clear that the Gadsden Flag originated in the Revolutionary War in a non-racial context.”
And yet, no symbolic meaning is locked in time. 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. 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. But the Nazi regime’s black, white, and red treatment, and its association with anti-Semitism, violence, aggression, hatred, and death, obliterated the design’s earlier meaning in the West and beyond.