In March 1849, president Jame Polk created the Department of the Interior to deal with more than a million square miles of suddenly acquired Far West real estate. And 150 years later, we're in the midst of Interior's sesquicentennial. Department seal
endures 150 years
Interior's insignia is the buffalo, that shaggy brute that symbolizes once-abundant, now-scarce American resources. But twasn't always that way.
In fact, in 1917, the National Geographic magazine was doing an article on the flags of the Federal government and discovered that Interior was both flag- and symbol-less. So NatGeo president Gilbert Grosvenor and Interior secretary Franklin Lane had a long lunch and whipped out an Interior flag, featuring the buffalo. It was so cool that Lane also changed the department seal from the your-basic-issue American eagle to the buffalo.
Imagine the flap you'd have today over single-sourcing such a piece of public symbology! Where are the committees, the smoky back rooms, the hammering-down and leavening of creative service in the public trust?
It was too good to last, and in 1923 it went back to the generic eagle, and then back again to the buffalo in 1929. The buffalo made people happy.
Except Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, who "modernized" the insignia in 1968 with what looked like a direct copy of Allstate Insurance's stylized hands. As soon as Udall left, in 1969, the buffalo was immediately restored by successor Walter Hickel.
And there it remains, shaggy and irascible as ever.
By Burl Burlingame, Star-Bulletin
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