The Founding Fathers Stole Their Most Patriotic Symbol From the Empires They Were Fighting Against

The bald eagle is everywhere in America. It's on the presidential seal, the dollar bill, the passports, the military insignia, the Supreme Court building. It is, by almost any measure, the defining visual shorthand for American identity. Which makes it slightly awkward that the design was essentially copied from the imperial imagery of Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, and the very European monarchies that the American Revolution was supposed to repudiate.

Photo: Supreme Court building, via images5.alphacoders.com

This is a story about a symbol, a debate, a dead bird, and the irony that nobody seems to want to talk about.

The Committee That Couldn't Agree on Anything

The day after the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence — July 5, 1776 — it appointed a committee to design a national seal for the new United States. The job went to Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. These were not small personalities. Getting them to agree on a lunch order would have been a challenge.

Franklin's proposal was theatrical: a scene depicting the biblical story of Moses parting the Red Sea, with a motto suggesting divine opposition to tyranny. Jefferson countered with imagery from the ancient Israelites wandering in the wilderness. Adams wanted the mythological figure of Hercules choosing between virtue and sloth.

All three proposals were rejected.

The committee handed the problem to a Philadelphia artist named William Barton, who incorporated a spread-winged eagle into a revised design. A lawyer and heraldry enthusiast named Charles Thomson then refined it further. On June 20, 1782, Congress approved the final version: a bald eagle, wings spread, clutching an olive branch in one talon and a bundle of thirteen arrows in the other, with a shield across its chest and the Latin motto E Pluribus Unum scrolled above.

The bald eagle had become the official symbol of the United States of America.

What Franklin Actually Said

The famous story of Benjamin Franklin advocating for the wild turkey is often dismissed as myth or exaggeration, but the source is a genuine letter Franklin wrote to his daughter Sarah in January 1784. He was responding to the design of a badge created for the Society of the Cincinnati, a fraternal organization for Revolutionary War officers, which used an eagle that Franklin thought looked more like a turkey.

His response went further than the badge. Franklin wrote that the bald eagle was "a Bird of bad moral Character" — a scavenger that stole fish from the osprey rather than hunting for itself, and a coward that fled from smaller birds. The wild turkey, by contrast, was "a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America" who was "courageous" and would not hesitate to attack a British Grenadier.

Franklin was being partly satirical. But the underlying concern was real: the bald eagle, in his view, was not a symbol of virtue. It was a symbol of opportunism.

The Roman Problem

Franklin had another objection that he expressed less colorfully but that carries more historical weight: the spread eagle was a profoundly European symbol, soaked in the imagery of the very imperial tradition the Revolution claimed to oppose.

The Roman legions had carried eagle standards — aquilae — since the time of the Roman Republic. The eagle was the emblem of Jupiter, king of the gods, and by extension the emblem of Roman military power and imperial authority. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, that imagery didn't disappear. It migrated into the visual vocabulary of European monarchy.

Charlemagne adopted the eagle for the Frankish Empire in the ninth century. The Holy Roman Empire used a double-headed eagle for centuries. The Habsburgs carried it. The Romanovs carried it. Napoleon, who fancied himself a Roman emperor, revived it explicitly when he crowned himself in 1804 — just twenty-two years after the American seal was finalized.

The spread eagle, in other words, was not a neutral image. It was one of the most recognizable symbols of hierarchical power and imperial dominion in Western history. The Founding Fathers, steeped in classical education and deeply aware of Roman symbolism, would have known this.

Why They Chose It Anyway

The most honest answer is probably: because it looked impressive and it was familiar.

The men designing the Great Seal were working within a visual tradition they had inherited from Europe. They had no purely American symbolic vocabulary to draw from — the continent's Indigenous nations had their own rich iconography, but the Founders were not looking there. They reached for the imagery that communicated strength, sovereignty, and legitimacy to the audiences they needed to impress: European courts, foreign diplomats, and a domestic population that had spent its entire cultural life inside a European framework.

The bald eagle was a pragmatic choice dressed up as a patriotic one. It was native to North America, which gave it a local credential the Roman eagle lacked. But the visual grammar — the spread wings, the frontal pose, the association with divine authority and military power — was borrowed almost wholesale from the imperial tradition they claimed to be rejecting.

The Irony That Stuck

America's founding mythology is built on a specific story: a new nation, born in opposition to monarchy and empire, creating something genuinely unprecedented in the world. That story is powerful and, in important ways, true.

But the symbol chosen to represent that story is one of the oldest emblems of monarchy and empire in Western civilization. Franklin's turkey would have been genuinely original — an American bird for an American nation, with no Old World baggage attached. Instead, the country went with the Roman eagle, repainted and rebranded, and placed it on every official document, every coin, every government building from Maine to California.

The Founding Fathers didn't steal their most patriotic symbol because they were hypocrites. They did it because even people trying to build something entirely new tend to reach for the tools they already know.

Which might be the most American story of all.