What could be more American than the Bald Eagle and why does this come up every Thanksgiving?
Every Thanksgiving, I get emails and messages thankful for someone’s intercession in Benjamin Franklin’s Great Seal or national bird choice. Franklin is widely believed to have favored the Wild Turkey over the Bald Eagle on our Great Seal. ‘The turkey‘, they say ‘would have been a terrible choice!’ But Franklin didn’t propose either bird in his Great Seal design and the concept of a ‘national animal’ wasn’t part of public or governmental discourse: in Franklin’s time, wild animals were for hunting, killing, and consumption, not admiring. So why do we associate Ben Franklin with turkeys and, by extension, Thanksgiving?
What’s the deal with Franklin and Turkeys?
In 1784 Franklin wrote a letter to his daughter in which he stated: “For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the Representative of our Country” and went on to impugn its habits and character compared to those of the honest osprey – ‘a diligent bird‘ – and courageous turkey, who ‘tho’ a little vain and silly…would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards‘.
Taken at face value, Franklin was advocating for turkeys in the turkeys-vs-eagles contest. But he was a well-known satirist who used humor, irony, and exaggeration to critique social norms, political issues, and colonial life. If Franklin had wanted a turkey on the Great Seal, he could have included one in his design. Instead, he proposed Moses ‘dividing the Red Sea, and Pharaoh, in his Chariot overwhelmed with the Waters’.
A rendering of the first Great Seal design submitted to Congress, as drawn by Pierre Eugene du Simitiere. They promptly rejected it and formed another committee. Franklin’s concept at left.
So what was Franklin really writing about?
Franklin was annoyed with the Society of the Cincinatti, a hereditary society founded in 1783 for Revolutionary War officers. He was critical of the society’s officers-only policy, hereditary eldest-son membership structure, and lousy organizational seal. The first two were antithetical to the newly formed country’s ideals of liberty and egalitarianism, and the last one was an eagle that looked like a turkey. In this deeper textual reading, Ben Franklin was not complaining about actual eagles and real-life turkeys, or even the Bald Eagle’s presence on the Great Seal. He was instead calling out the Cincinatti officers for their pro-aristocratic stance and comparing aristocrats to the ‘common man’ using eagles, ospreys, and turkeys as stand-ins. It wasn’t about eagles and turkeys, it was about the officers who, in Franklin’s view, turned their backs on the ‘common’ soldiers of the Revolutionary War. Franklin often referred to the ‘common man’ in terms that conveyed respect, practicality, and appreciation.
Why did he choose the Bald Eagle to represent aristocrats? The Bald Eagle had a generally bad reputation with colonists, eagles in general have a long association with heraldic representations of imperial power, and the Cinninatus logo was a Bald Eagle that looked like a turkey. The opportunity was too good for a master satirist to miss!
Would the Wild Turkey have been a bad choice?
Let’s visit an alternate timeline where Franklin was really talking about Bald Eagles and Wild Turkeys. Would the Wild Turkey have been a bad choice for our Great Seal? People who aren’t familiar with Wild Turkeys often consider them silly and even stupid birds: lacking even the basest survival instinct, they’ll drown if they turn their heads skyward in the rain. You’ve heard that one, right? But it isn’t true: Meleagris gallopavo is beautiful, imposing, wily, socially complex, remarkably hardy, a conservation success story, and native to North America. I prefer the high flying Bald Eagle, but the Wild Turkey wouldn’t have been a bad choice. As a turkey fancier pointed out to me, it even has a red, white, and blue head!
Franklin’s letter, private at the time, was eventually published and found its way into public consciousness through a 1962 cover illustration of New Yorker magazine and a 1960’s musical called 1776. ‘1776‘ includes a debate over which bird should symbolize America: John Adams calls for the eagle, Jefferson for the dove, and Franklin for the turkey. I leave you with the song ‘The Egg‘. Happy Thanksgiving to all of you eagle AND turkey fans: we love them (and you) both!
The Raptor Resource Project