By Stuart Halpern
July 4, 2023
Most Americans celebrating our independence on July 4 are likely unaware that before we were an eagle, we were a beaver, a zebra and a goose.
Shayan Asgharnia
In 1778, a British Tory with artistic flair decided to satirize the rebellious 13 colonies that dared to defy the King. Rendering each colony as a stripe on a zebra, he placed them in geographical order—except for Massachusetts. Home to those rabble-rousing Bostonian tea-partiers, it merited placement on the animal’s rear end.
Supporters of the rebels turned from the zoo to the farm. Some Whig artists depicted the colonies as a cow with its horns being sawed off by one British politician, while another milked it. Other like-minded cartoonists drew the colonies as a goose: Why, they wondered, would the British attack an animal that laid golden eggs, in the form of tax revenue?
Early in the Revolution, some American patriots adopted the white-tailed deer as an emblem of swiftness and freedom, adorning their hats with bucktails and wearing deerskin leggings. Others were partial to the beaver, which had long been used as a symbol of New York and adorned the city’s flag. As Robert Beverly of Virginia noted in 1705, Americans should admire the beaver, who, in building a home, “sees that every one bear his equal share of the burden; while he bites with his teeth, and lashes with his Tail, those that lag behind, and do not lend all their strength.”
Fittingly, Continental six-dollar bills produced in the fall of 1775 rendered America as a very small beaver chewing away at a rather large tree. One writer explained that “the large tree represents the enormous power of Great Britain, which the persevering, stead-working beaver (America) is reducing within proper bounds.”
Following the success of the Revolution, the Continental Congress sought a symbol for the national seal. If, as they teach in business school, a camel is a horse planned by committee, then it’s no wonder that three congressional committees proposed a dove (representing virtue) alongside a warrior in armor (military might), accompanied by an eagle (sovereignty), a harp (harmony), a pillar (fortitude), a rooster (vigilance), two fleurs-de-lis (a token of appreciation for the French assistance in the war), an unfinished pyramid (endurance) and the eye of Providence.
Somehow not making the cut was John Adams’s suggestion of “Hercules, as engraved by Gribelin, in some editions of Lord Shaftesbury’s works. The hero resting on his club. Virtue pointing to her rugged mountain on one hand, and persuading him to ascend.” As the future president regretfully admitted in a letter to his wife, “this is too complicated a group for a seal or medal, and it is not original.”
Also not chosen was the biblically-based suggestion submitted by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson of “Pharoah (sic) sitting in an open Chariot a Crown on his head and a Sword in his hand passing through the divided Waters of the Red Sea in Pursuit of the Israelites: Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Cloud, expressive of the divine Presence and Command beaming on Moses who stands on the Shore and extending his hand over the Sea causes it to overwhelm Pharoah.”
The eagle survived subsequent editorial decisions. Depicted with 13 arrows in one claw and an olive branch with 13 fruits and leaves in the other, adorned with 13 shining stars and bearing a national shield, its beak held the motto E pluribus unum, “out of many, one.”
In a satirical letter in 1784, Franklin complained that the eagle was “a bird of bad moral character; like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy.” If the national symbol had to be a fowl, he joked, it should have been a “much more respectable” one, a true original native of America…a bird of courage [who] would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards.” Franklin meant the turkey.
As historian David Hackett Fischer has written, the eagle’s popularity instantly took flight. Possessing “dignity and grace,” it was “universally admired as a very beautiful bird,” and the sight of its great wings spread aloft “became a powerful image of liberty.”
Even the French liked it. The Marquis de Chastellux, who had fought alongside the Americans, thought it the perfect representation of a country born in the rays of the Enlightenment. Writing to the president of William and Mary College, he observed, “It would seem indeed that the English, in all fields, want only half-liberty. Let the owls and bats flutter about in the murky darkness of a feeble twilight; the American Eagle must be able to fix its eyes upon the sun.”
The eagle even met Franklin’s desire for a native national symbol. The bald eagle was an American bird, long regarded by Native Americans as a symbol of strength and courage. Their war chiefs wore its feathers as a symbol of leadership. The Arbella, the ship that carried John Winthrop and the Puritans to Massachusetts in 1630, had originally been named Eagle and bore one on its figurehead. Many early American preachers evoked the bird as a symbol, quoting the prophet Isaiah: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not be faint.”
Gliding above a nation of freedom, vigor and aspiration, the American eagle survived both British military might and death by committee.
Rabbi Halpern is the senior adviser to the provost and deputy director of the Straus Center at Yeshiva University.
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