How the Bald Eagle Became America's National Symbol

On this episode of Our American Stories, the bald eagle has appeared on America's Great Seal, coins, flags, and official emblems for more than two centuries. But the bird's journey to becoming the nation's symbol was anything but straightforward. The Founding Fathers couldn't agree on a design for the Great Seal, and after the bald eagle was finally chosen, Americans spent generations hunting and poisoning the very bird they celebrated.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack E. Davis, author of The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America's Bird, shares the remarkable story of how the bald eagle became America's national symbol, why Benjamin Franklin disliked it, and how one of the greatest wildlife recoveries in American history brought the species back from the brink.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people coming to you from where the West begins in
Fort Worth, Texas. Up next, the story of how a
bird Benjamin Franklin once said was a bad moral character
ended up as our national symbol. You to tell the

(00:31):
story of the bald Eagle is Jack E. Davis, a
Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Bald Eagle, The Improbable
Journey of America's Bird. You'll also be hearing from our
Hillsdale intern Nate Gallagher. Let's get into the story.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
So the bald legal is truly an all American bird
when you think about it, a bird that is charismatic
and its behavior and its appearance, and so it was
always a stunning site when a bald eagle crossed the sky.

(01:09):
So in seventeen seventy six, within a few hours after
Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, Congress organized a committee
to devise or to create design a Great Seal of
the United States. The three members of the committee were
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Stellar cast right,

(01:33):
really the principal architects of American independence, so you think
be no brainer for them to come up with a
seal that would be acceptable. They failed miserably.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
The design proposed by these three American all Stars featured
ladies Liberty and Justice flanking and all seeing eye of
God surrounding them in a ring where the initials of
each state inside a small shield. Enclosed by Liberty and
the Eye of God was a shield with insignia from
each of the six nations that, according to the artist
of the seal, Pierre Eugene Desimitier, had peopled the colonies,

(02:10):
including insignia from other countries on your own national seal.
Was a strange choice and likely one of the many
reasons Congress disapproved of the design.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
The Congress immediately rejected their design, and another committee was formed.
It failed. A third committee was formed, it failed, and
finally Charles Thompson, who was the Secretary of Congress, said,
you know, we're about to go sign a peace tree.
We need a great seal to stamp on it. So
he came up with the design. He could look outside

(02:43):
his windows in Philadelphia, where Congress held his sessions in
those days, and see bald eagles. They were quite common
around around Philadelphia along the Delaware River, and they were
practically an everyday site. And he's the one who we
don't know why exactly. He didn't leave a record why
he chose the bald eagle, but he's the one who

(03:04):
came up the idea to put the bald eagle on
the Great Seal of the United States. And Congress loved it.
The bald egle has this distinctive look. It's easy to
capture its image, and as a bird that as a
species as endemic to North America, and an image that

(03:26):
really has the sense of power and strength behind it,
it made sense that Americans would like it. But also
the bald eagle in its life itself represents freedom and
liberty and independence. Those were qualities that Americans associated not

(03:46):
just with their country, but with themselves. And so you
have this free, independent bird of courage and strength. It
was just ideal. Even though I'm Ericans loved the bald
eagle image, early on, they loathed the species itself, the
living bird behind it. They treated the bald eagle as

(04:10):
a predator. But they were accused there was this meant
that they were a jeopardy to American husbandry, to farmers,
and to livestock farmers, and to people who raised chickens
in their backyards, And so it was regarded as a
civic duty to shoot and kill a bald eagle, and
thousands of them were shot and killed throughout the nineteenth century.

(04:35):
So by the late nineteenth century, bald eagles had all
but disappeared from the eastern seabird stage. And then in
nineteen forty five DDT went on the open market. It
was available to anybody to buy.

Speaker 4 (04:50):
It begins with the warborn development of DDT. This diabolical
weapon of modern science saved millions of humans but killed
billions of insects. This newly discovered purse has at long
last in the upper hand in our age old struggle.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
We ended up blanketing the lower forty eight states to
beat the bugs, if you will. We've beaten the Japanese,
We'd beaten the Germans. Now it was time to beat
the bugs. And so by the nineteen fifties, bird population,
songbird populations, raptor populations were noticeably declining, and the bal
legal population reached its nadea in nineteen sixty three. A

(05:30):
census was conducted that year of the bald legal population
across the lower forty eight states, and there were fewer
than five hundred nesting pairs. Now, let's put that in perspective.
When Converse adopted the Great Seal of the United States
of seventeen eighty two, the estimated baal legal population in
North America was five hundred thousand. We redeemed ourselves later

(05:55):
in the century by calling for its protection, and in
nineteen seventy two to the Environmental Protection Agency banned the
sale of DDT, but also Congress in that same year
passed one of the most important conservation acts in US history,
and that was the Clean Water Act. Through the nineteen eighties,

(06:15):
nineties and on into the twenty first century, we brought
all these bays and values and sounds and lakes and
rivers that were on the verge of ecological collapse around
the country back to Teeming Love. And today the bald
legal population in North America is estimated to be five

(06:35):
hundred thousand, the same as it was in seventeen eighty two.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Nate Gallagher, and also a special thanks
to Jackie Davis. He's a pulling Serprise winning author and
the author of The Bald Eagle, The Probable Journey of
America's Bird, And my goodness, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin couldn't
get the deal done. Three times. They were rejected by
Congress with the Seal of the United States, and it

(07:03):
took Charles Thompson, the Secretary of Commerce, to get it done.
But my goodness, we learned something special about this bird.
Both loved is his symbol, but hate it as a predator.
Thanks to the EPA, the Clean Water Act, and our
own laws to protect this bird, we now have as
many as when we had in our nation's founding, the
story of America's symbol, the Bald Eagle. Here on our

(07:27):
American Stories, Liehabib here, and I'd like to encourage you
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(07:48):
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