Benjamin
Franklin disliked the choice of the bald eagle as the national bird,
and it was in a letter to his daughter, in 1784, that he proposed
putting the turkey in its place. The eagle, Franklin
points out, is “a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his
living honestly. . . . He watches the labor of the fishing hawk; and
when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to
his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle
pursues him, and takes it from him.” Truly, a one-per-cent kind of
bird*. The turkey, however, represented to Franklin the best of bourgeois Philadelphia
values. The turkey is not only a native; “He is besides, though a
little vain and silly, a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to
attack a grenadier of the British guards who should presume to invade
his farm yard with a red coat on.”
He can be a very proud and noble bird with beautiful coloring
or
he can look like these birds . . . the kind we see in our neck o' the woods
and
and
did you know turkeys could fly?!
*perhaps the eagle was the first of the 1 percenters robbing the nests of the 99ers.
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