We love to think we know. We even love to think we know of a Benjamin Franklin counter-proposal nominating a different species. We are so wrong.
The United States adopted the bison as its national mammal in 2016. Before that, it made the oak the national tree and the rose the national flower. But the United States has never done what every state of the union has done: adopt a designated feathered representative. The national bird is, officially, nonexistent. Every reader right now is thinking or saying out loud—shouting even—What?! Of course the U.S. has a national bird. It’s the bald eagle! Even U.S. government websites make that claim.
Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey displayed on the Great Seal and as a national symbol. Everybody knows that too. Or did he? Any American familiar with the least bit of bald eagle trivia seems to know about Franklin’s legendary displeasure over the bald eagle’s reigning status and his desire to appoint the turkey in its place. The basis for this alleged preference lies in his taking exception to the obnoxious penchant of bald eagles for stealing fish from ospreys.
Franklin was on a tear when he mentioned the organization’s insignia in the letter to his daughter. His ranting about democratic values and elitism pivoted him into a summary assessment of the bird on the Great Seal. “For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is “a bird of bad moral character” who “does not get his living honestly.” The species that purportedly suffered the bald’s crimes the most was the industrious osprey, a.k.a.
Nor could he control his duplicity. On July 4, 1789, the year in which the U.S. Constitution went into force, the Society of the Cincinnati elected Franklin an honorary member, an honor he accepted. Nor did he object when the French referred to Franklin the foreign diplomat as the “Eagle of the West.” In his experiments generating electricity using Leyden jars, he once wired up a turkey, “about ten pounds weight,” to see whether electrocution would kill it. It did.
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