Heck Of A Guy

The Obligatory But Nonetheless Almost Kinda Interesting Civics Lesson and PsychoPolitical Tutorial

In my sacred quest for the perfect McHenry County Seal,¹ I’ve run across an especially telling bit of Illinois historical lore, which, according to the intensive, extensive, and, most importantly, inexpensive survey commissioned by the Heck of a Guy blog, is unknown to 100% of the adult citizens of this state.²

I attribute this appalling gap in the Not-Quite-Trivial Regional Factoid Database, Historical Category, Political Subcategory to an inexplicable lacuna in Springfield’s³ otherwise highly maintained provincial chauvinism. How else can one explain the fact that a student can attend 12 years of classes in accredited Illinois educational facilities and meet all requirements for graduation without being involuntarily subjected to a state history course analogous to the one inflicted on me for no other reason than the coincidence that 9 of the 18 months my family lived in the hectic and cosmopolitan urban center of Tulsa, Oklahoma before coming to our senses and returning to our previous home in southwest Missouri were the same 9 months that constituted my ninth grade school year, which happened to be the academic period the Oklahoma legislature had reserved for its young’uns to learn about the past glories of the Sooner State.

As a result of that geographical aberration in my family’s otherwise unbroken all-Missouri all the time streak extending back at least three generations, I learned a plethora of facts and concepts about Oklahoma, of which I remember four:

1. The state flower of Oklahoma is the mistletoe, which is actually a parasite.

   

2. The state song of Oklahoma is indeed the title song of the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein Broadway musical which shares the same name.
3. The capitol building in Oklahoma City is the only US capitol with oil wells on its grounds⁴
   
4. Construction costs for that same capitol building, the one with the oil wells, exhausted the allotted funding, which precluded building the planned traditional dome.⁵

Today’s post concerns the Illinois equivalent of the Oklahoma capitol building being accessorized with oil wells rather than a dome. And even those Illinois inhabitants who have already digested this tidbit will find it worth their review and somber reflection; for those of us discovering this anecdotes for the first time, well, it’s a hoot.

A Brief Demi-Digression On The Link Between The McHenry County Seal and The Post Civil War Realignment of States Rights Vis-a-vis Federalism

Ongoing readers may recall that the current McHenry Country seal has been described as a virtual doppelganger of The Great Seal of the State of Illinois.

In the graphic below, the Illinois State Seal resides between two versions of the McHenry County Seal which feature the same major elements but differ significantly in coloration and relative size of some of the components. The legend below each of the McHenry County Seal versions identifies its source. It appears that a county sustaining several versions of its seal is common. Different county departments may use different versions and often large versions of the seal (e.g., used as ornamentation on a courthouse wall or to identify county vehicles) demonstrate details excluded from smaller seals used on documents. A frequently cited goal of county seal redesign projects, in fact, is

Both the State and County Seals depict the sun rising behind an American Eagle perched on a rock, holding the shield of the United States in its claws. ⁶

Our primary interest, however, is another shared element. Both seals display, written on a banner held in the eagle’s mouth, the motto of the State of Illinois:
State Sovereignty, National Union

The Twisted Subtext of The Great Seal Of Illinois

There is something a tad odd about that motto on the state seal – in addition to it sounding like the name of a bank after one too many mergers and being inscribed on a banner that is clenched in a bird’s beak.

In January 1867, Secretary of State Sharon Tyndale lobbied Senator Allen C. Fuller to sponsor a bill authorizing a new seal. One of the changes Tyndale promoted was rearranging the words on the seal from “State Sovereignty, National Union” to “National Union, State Sovereignty.” The significance of this notion is apparent when placed in the context of the then just completed Civil War.

The Illinois Senate amended the bill that contained Tyndale’s revision, restoring the motto’s original phrasing before passing it into law on March 7, 1867.

So far, this is a standard Civics 101 anecdote about the will of the majority determining the law of the land. What makes it an Illinois Civics lesson is Tyndale’s response.

To appreciate the Tyndale Tweak, one must comprehend his starting point. The graphic below shows the three Seals of Illinois, including its Territorial Seal, that preceded the currently used, Tyndale-designed Illinois State Seal.

All of the Illinois State Seals used since the first official version in 1839 have contained the state motto. Note the display of the motto in the first and second State Seals (i.e., the seal in the middle and the seal on the right in the graphic). To compensate for the poor print quality,⁷ the graphic below displays the motto’s text on gray banners that approximate the positioning of the motto on those seals.

While following the letter of the legislature’s decree regarding the wording, Tyndale shifted the banner’s placement on the seal. “State Sovereignty” is certainly first on the banner, reading from left to right. Nonetheless, it is distinctly less prominent than “National Union.”

Further, the word “Sovereignty” in “State Sovereignty” is upside down and backwards, as though the banner had twisted and the observer were reading the back of the banner rather than the front.

Tyndale’s manipulation, of course, sent a powerful message, one that has echoed through the governmental halls of this state, its cities and counties, and, indeed, the entire country to this very day – and that message is

While one may debate the relative impact of the passive aggressive snit manifested in the Great Seal of the State of Illinois versus, say, the counterintuitive quality of Oklahoma’s selection of a parasite as its official state flower, one can hardly deny that the seal’s text display is one gloriously impressive chunk of governmental perversity.

Consequently, it seems peculiar that the County Board promotes changing the current McHenry County Seal, which, like the Illinois State Seal, has embedded within it this historically significant, weirdness-enhancing artifact, avowedly because it is “boring,” especially given that a prime element in the proposed replacement is apparently a fish splashing in the water. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a good fish as much as the next guy. It’s just that I don’t usually think of local, everyday fish, per se, as exciting – or even slyly provocative. Thinking of fish in the generic sense, in fact, makes me feel – well, … bored.

I dunno. Maybe it’s a prehistoric fish that has two heads … or is sanctioned to drive in next year’s NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series … or tells jokes … or demonstrates a sense of irony. Now, that would be one interesting fish.\

1. See the following:
   Sealed With A Dis
   The Great Seal Of McHenry County Not Great Enough
   McHenry County Eye Candy
   McHenry County Seal Makeover Makes The News
   Baseball, Hot Dogs, Community College, and County Seals

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2. The survey has a calculated margin of error of plus or minus 50% at a 50% level of confidence; subjects were selected, if not randomly then certainly haphazardly, from those who who met the criteria of calling me while I was trying to write this post and appearing to be the sort of people who would be adult citizens of Illinois. The total N of the survey = 1.↩
3. This would be Springfield, Illinois, the state’s capitol rather than, say, Springfield, Missouri, the city where my mother shops for items not available in Cassville and the site of the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners (AKA “where mobsters go to die” a la John Gotti) or cartoonland Springfield, the home of the Simpsons↩
4. I even recall that at one time there were 24 oil wells operating around the capitol, a fact I just confirmed at The (Oklahoma City) Journal Record, Jul 26, 2001.↩
5. The dome was added in 2002, which, as it turns out, was a year or two after I completed my Oklahoma state history course↩
6. Also on the Illinois Seal are two dates: “1818,” which is the year Illinois entered the Union as the 21st state, and “1868,” which is the year this design became the official state seal. (Is anyone else thinking that displaying this date strikes a certain narcissistic, self-congratulatory note on the part of the Seal?) As far as I can determine, the McHenry County Seal does not include either 1868 or 1818 but does carry the date “June 1837″ with the month and year dramatically separated by the word, “Illinois,” along the circumference of the seal. While I have not been able to confirm the significance of the date, I suspect it may be the official date of the County’s founding or incorporation or otherwise officially organized as a county although McHenry County was first formed in 1836 from portions of Cook and LaSalle Counties; or, in keeping with the self-referential State Seal, it may be the date the seal itself was officially sanctioned.↩
7. These are the best images of the seals I could find and are significantly better than most I discovered on the net.↩