State Seals, Ranked

Ugly designs! Ill-conceived concepts! Blunt force nationalism! We are so back.

Did any of you have to learn “Fifty Nifty United States” as a child?

This song has had a chokehold on me for decades. My idle mind will occasionally locate it for no reason and I’ll start singing it to myself while cooking dinner or brushing my teeth, and I assume that will continue to happen until I die. The clip above fails to capture what it was actually like to be a 3rd grader scream-singing this song with about 20 other 3rd graders, but you get the idea.

Anyway, there’s a line in “Fifty Nifty” that goes like this: “Each individual state / contributes a quality that is great!” That’s debatable, but it’s a line I’ve thought about every time I’ve done one of these state rankings (if you’re new here, we’ve got songs, birds, license plates, and more to discover in the archives). And I thought about it while doing our first state list in nearly three years: state seals.

Before you ask: no, not the cute sea kind of seals, but the round emblems with weird symbols kind of seals.

Our mission here is simple: While each individual state might contribute a quality that is great, each individual state has not contributed a great seal to the canon, and it’s time we separate the wheat from the chaff.

As always, a note on process: For this list, I’ve ranked the 50 states, Washington D.C., and the five inhabited territories of the United States (Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and American Samoa). Many—too many!—of these are adaptations or carbon copies of state flags and I had initially planned on getting into a nuanced ranking which involved subtracting points for states that use the same thing for both the seal and the flag, but honestly that overwhelmed me very quickly and I decided to skip it. I’ll just say that those states are lame!! Also, from what I can tell, seals generally predate flags so in retrospect I should have dinged flags that took seals when I ranked them. Oh well! That knowledge actually would not have changed most of my my top 10 picks.

Also, it’s too much to get into here, but if you’re curious, there are some very cool historical seals and even cooler Native nations seals (I also lost my goddamn mind at the discovery of the Navajo Nation flag which I’m stunned to have ever seen before. A total knockout of a flag design),

I have to give some co-writing credit here to my husband, Tony. Many of the jokes within this ranking are his. All images are from Wikimedia Commons. Okay, let’s seal the dang deal!!

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56. Alabama

First alphabetically and first on our list. I love primary colors as much as the next ‘90s child, but this ain’t it. Also, putting the words “Great Seal” on your seal isn’t fooling anyone.

55. Colorado

You know what, I apologize to Alabama. This is the worst seal. It looks like it would be in a set of faux governmental insignias for a child to play with, or like a masonic/occult seal designed by a boardroom of the biggest losers you’ve ever met.

54. Mississippi

You’re not the president, grow up.

53. Utah

Same note, but at least they tried a little with the beehive.

52. Oklahoma

Painful to look at and full of American propaganda. Pass.

51. Illinois

This one has a similar upsetting and chaotic sense of composition, though I do sort of love the styling on the eagle’s head.

50. Connecticut

I’m stumped by this one!! Feels like they had about 12 minutes to design it. Does Connecticut have anything to do with grapes? This is one of only two seals that uses an oval shape, and the other one does it much, much better. Consider yourself teased!