Is that a Turkey?! How Thanksgiving Dinner Nearly Ended Up on the Great Seal of the United States of America

 

“The bald eagle is a bird of bad moral character.  He does not get his living honestly.  He is too lazy to fish for himself.”

Those are the words of legendary, larger-than-life, founding father Benjamin Franklin.  Ben Franklin, both as a scientist and as a statesman, was the most famous and well-respected American in the entire world at the end of the 18th century during the early days of our American republic.  

He, perhaps more than anyone else, is responsible for framing and shaping the laws and ideas that are articulated in the United States Constitution which have endured for nearly two-hundred and fifty years.  He was America’s first diplomat and was instrumental in winning American independence from Great Britain by negotiating international treaties that brought France and Holland into the American Revolution on our side and thereby tipped the balance of power against the British.  Franklin invented bifocals and experimented with electricity and in a very real sense he was also the world’s first truly modern newspaper editor.  

But despite his place in history as a statesman, scientist and champion of American independence, Ben Franklin was definitely no fan of our national bird and the enduring symbol of American freedom--the bald eagle.

The words of Franklin criticizing the bald eagle as both our national bird and symbol of America that are quoted at the beginning of this article are from a letter that he wrote to his daughter, Sarah Franklin Bache, in late June of 1784.

Sarah Franklin Bache

        In that same letter, Franklin goes on to continuously deride the bald eagle as a lazy scavenger while at the same time extolling the virtues of what he considered to be a much more noble and virtuous bird--the turkey.

Of the turkey Franklin says, “[T]he turkey is a much more respectable bird.  A truly original native of America.  A bird of courage.”

While Benjamin Franklin’s criticisms of the bald eagle and his admiration for the wild turkey as a bird indigenous to North America is no great secret--did he really propose that the United States adopt the North American wild turkey as our national bird?  And did he really request that the turkey, that plump delicious bird that we all love to stuff and devour at our Thanksgiving tables, become the focal point of the Great  Seal of the United States?

        On June 20, 1784 congress approved a design for the Great Seal of the United States.  It should be noted here that although, technically, the Presidential Seal of the United States and the Great Seal of the United States are two separate seals, the differences between them are almost indistinguishable to the untrained eye, other than the fact that one says, “The President of the United States of America” while the other forgoes words entirely.  What both seals have in common is that they both prominently feature the bald eagle as the main symbol of the United States of America and are essentially made up of the same image and design.

        The Presidential Seal adorns everything related to the President of the United States from dinner napkins at the White House to the carpet in the Oval Office, while the Great Seal of the United States is used to represent America itself on everything from official documents to treaties with other nations, though both Seals are, ostensibly the same thing.  

Anyway, in June of 1784, Congress finally adopted  a design for the Presidential Seal of the United States (also called the Great Seal of the United States) after 8 years of debate and design!

While American’s were fighting and dying on the battlefields of the American War for Independence in 1776, and George Washington was literally begging Congress to support and raise money for his desperate Continental Army, Congress set about the all important task of designing a national logo, or a Great Seal of the United States of America, in the lofty parlance of the late 18th century.

             This was where Benjamin Franklin first entered the picture.  In 1776 Congress chose Franklin, along with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to each submit a design for a National Seal to be voted on for approval by Congress once submitted.

Well, as it turns out, Franklin’s original idea for a Great Seal of the United States of America did not include a turkey at all.  

Initially, Franklin wanted the Great Seal of the United States to include an image of Moses, the Pharaoh Ramses and that most noble of animals, the snake!  Obviously, Franklin was hearkening back here to the Old Testament and the Book of Exodus, but thinking about this is beginning to make the wild turkey as the enduring symbol of America more and more appealing.

However, before we laugh at wily old Ben Franklin, let’s take a look at the ideas that were submitted for a Great Seal of the United States by our other two contestants: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Jefferson proposed that the Great Seal of the United States include an image of the children of Israel (not sure exactly what he had in mind there!) as well as two mythical Anglo-Saxon figures, think like Beowulf or Thor.  It seems that Jefferson, like Franklin, wanted his design to hearken back to the Old Testament while at the same time...hmm...embracing the bloodshed and violence of Norse Sagas and Anglo-Saxon warrior culture?  Who knows.  You’re guess is as good as mine.

Lastly, we have John Adams, who simply proposed that an image of the mythical character Hercules be used to represent the strength of the United States of America on our Great Seal.  Tragically, of all three of the ideas that were submitted by those three legendary founding fathers to Congress, Adams’ idea is the best, which isn’t saying much because John Adams may have forgotten that he was tasked with designing a Great Seal for the United States of America and not for the nation of Greece.

Luckily for us, and for history, Congress promptly rejected all three of those ideas for a Great Seal in 1776, and for a few years, while we were busy with more important matters like trying to win our independence from Great Britain, Congress reluctantly put the issue of a design for the Great Seal of the United States on the back burner.

However, within a few short years, the argument over a Great Seal would resurface once again.

This time in 1782, with the British having been defeated at Yorktown and American independence nearly won, the need for a Great Seal of the United States became even more urgent.

At the beginning of that year another committee (this time comprised of even more congressional members) came up with a complex design for a Great Seal of the United States that incorporated an eagle, a dove and a whole lot of Latin words.  This initial Great Seal was briefly adopted as the Great Seal of the United States of America, but it faced so much backlash and criticism that it had to be simplified and redesigned.

It was the Secretary of the Continental Congress, little known Charles Thomson of Pennsylvania, who proposed eliminating the dove and prominently featuring the bald eagle as the emblem of the United States, while at the same time simplifying the Great Seal by eliminating many of the latin words and complicated details.

Charles Thomson

Finally, after eight years of proposal and counter-proposal, this simplified design for the Great Seal of the United States of America that we know today which prominently incorporates the bald eagle as the ever enduring symbol of American freedom was approved and adopted by Congress.

Benjamin Franklin was not pleased.  He criticized the bald eagle as a bird.  He said that using such a design which so prominently featured a bird as the symbol of our great nation was patently ridiculous.  He said that the United States would have been better off using a turkey as a symbol of America on our Great Seal.  

Franklin wrote letters deriding the design for the Great Seal.  He criticized the Great Seal of the United States in the press and he argued against it in Congress.  However, even when he had the chance to do so, he never proposed that a turkey actually be used as a symbol to represent the United States of America  on our nation’s Great Seal or anywhere else for that matter.

It seems likely that Franklin may have found many admirable qualities in the American turkey, and he may have even thought it might make a more suitable national bird than did the American bald eagle, or perhaps, as he often did, Franklin was simply speaking tongue-in-cheek when he extolled the virtues of the North American turkey over those of the American bald eagle.

We may never know the whole truth behind this momentous issue, but it seems that a lot of the mythologizing that has occurred over the years comes to us from the wildly popular musical 1776, which portrayed the argument over the design for the Great Seal of the United States of America as having centered around three birds: the turkey, the dove and the bald eagle.

That debate never happened.  And the image of a turkey as the Great Seal of the United States that is used at the beginning of this article was designed by artist Anatole Kovarsky and first appeared in an issue of The New Yorker Magazine back in November of 1962 when that publication (much more adeptly than myself I might add) attempted to tackle many of the historical issues that I just wrote about.

Here the movie 1776 got some of the history wrong, and so did I most probably, but isn’t it fun to think that this year when the President pardons the annual Thanksgiving turkey on the White House lawn as he does every year, that maybe, had Ben Franklin gotten his way, the President might have been both pardoning and eating our national symbol on the same day?