On Being Tread Upon

Most Americans are familiar with the Gadsden flag, a symbol established in 1775 during the Revolutionary War to galvanize Continental Marines fighting a miserable war with no clear end in sight.

This flag adorns pickup trucks and flies in front of modest homes in vast swaths of the country, but is often (wrongly) cited as a form of hate speech by rootless cosmopolitans.1

There is another historical, rattlesnake-themed symbol from the 18th century, however, that does not receive nearly as much attention. That would be Benjamin Franklin’s “Join, or Die” cartoon, first featured in the The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1754.

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