Iowa State Colors | Blue White Red

The Iowa state flag's creation was prompted directly by World War I. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, American families sought to send their state flags to Iowa soldiers serving in France — only to discover that Iowa had no flag to send. Iowa National Guardsmen stationed along the Mexican border had made repeated requests for a state banner, and Iowa was embarrassingly represented by an unofficial flag at Continental Hall in Washington while other states displayed their official flags. Dixie Cornell Gebhardt, a resident of Knoxville, Iowa, and a member of the Iowa Daughters of the American Revolution, responded to guardsmen's appeals by designing a flag that was approved by the Iowa DAR flag committee in May 1917 and presented to the Iowa State Council for Defense on May 11, 1917. Iowa Governor William Lloyd Harding formally accepted the flag on behalf of the state on March 19, 1918, though legislative adoption was delayed until 1921. Iowa's governor called Gebhardt 'Iowa's Betsy Ross' in recognition of her contribution, and the accompanying principles are continued on Iowa's state motto page.

The decision to base Iowa's flag on the French Tricolor was made deliberately and with historical intent. A member of the DAR flag committee suggested that Iowa's role in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 should be indicated by the addition of the French red, white, and blue, and this idea was officially adopted into the flag's design. The Iowa Territory had been part of the French colonial system under the name La Louisiane for over a century, first explored by French expedition leaders Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet in 1673, claimed for France by Robert de La Salle in 1682, and governed under the French colonial flag until 1763 — making the French Tricolor a historically accurate representation of Iowa's pre-American heritage. Napoleon Bonaparte's secret reacquisition of Louisiana from Spain in 1800 and its subsequent sale to the United States in 1803 for $15 million makes Iowa's flag one of the few American state flags to encode a specific diplomatic transaction into its color palette.

Dixie Cornell Gebhardt specified blue as representing loyalty, justice, and truth — traditional heraldic values that connect Iowa's blue to the broader American patriotic tradition while also referencing the blue of the French Tricolor. Blue's position on the hoist side of the Iowa flag — the most heraldically prominent position, nearest the flagpole — gives it visual priority in the flag's design hierarchy. Iowa's association with loyalty was established during the Civil War, in which the state contributed approximately 76,000 soldiers to the Union Army — a number representing nearly 14 percent of Iowa's total population in 1860, one of the highest per capita military participation rates of any Union state. The deep navy blue of Iowa's flag connects this Civil War loyalty directly to the color tradition that French Louisiana established on the same landscape 200 years earlier.

White occupies the central and widest stripe of the Iowa flag, a position that makes it the dominant visual element and the literal canvas on which the flag's symbolic content — the eagle, the motto ribbon, and the state name — is displayed. Gebhardt described white as representing purity, a traditional heraldic value she connected to Iowa's self-image as a state of honest agricultural labor and civic integrity. White also resonates geographically with Iowa's landscape: the state experiences heavy winter snowfall that blankets its 35.7 million acres of farmland — the largest proportion of any US state dedicated to agriculture — in a white expanse that is among the most visually dramatic seasonal transformations in the American Midwest. Iowa's agriculture, producing corn, soybeans, pork, and eggs in quantities that consistently rank it among the national leaders, is the economic foundation of the state and the cultural core of its identity.

Red on the Iowa flag carries its most emotionally specific meaning through Dixie Cornell Gebhardt's own documentation: she described the red 'IOWA' lettering on the white central stripe as representing the Iowa soldier's commitment written 'in blood on the white page of history' — a direct and viscerally patriotic reference to the World War I context in which the flag was designed. This specific imagery, connecting the red of the state name to the sacrifice of Iowa's soldiers, is one of the most emotionally direct color symbolism statements in any US state flag tradition. Red appears both as the fly stripe of the tricolor and as the color of the state name, giving it two distinct visual roles that reinforce the theme of courageous civic sacrifice from different positions within the flag's design.