The bald eagle, the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell — these are so deeply embedded in American identity that it's easy to forget they were chosen. Someone sat in a room and argued for each of them. Several of those arguments got pretty ugly.
Here's how America actually ended up with the symbols it has.
The Bald Eagle: A Fight That Lasted Six Years
The bald eagle wasn't anybody's first choice. When the Continental Congress commissioned a Great Seal for the new United States on July 4, 1776 — the same day it adopted the Declaration of Independence — Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were assigned to design one.
Their first proposal included Moses parting the Red Sea. Also Hercules. Also the children of Israel in the wilderness. It was, to put it gently, a lot.
Congress rejected it. A second committee tried in 1780 — still no eagle. A third committee tried in 1782 and also failed. Finally, Charles Thomson, the Secretary of Congress, took the job, simplified the various drafts, and placed an American bald eagle at the center. Congress approved it on June 20, 1782 — six years after the Declaration.
Franklin famously complained about the choice in an 1784 letter to his daughter, calling the eagle "a Bird of bad moral Character" and suggesting the wild turkey would have been a more appropriate national bird. The letter was private and the turkey was never actually proposed. But the myth that Franklin campaigned for the turkey as national bird persists to this day.
Honestly, the turkey myth is one of my least favorite things about American history class. Teachers keep repeating it and it just isn't true.
The American Flag: The 50-Star Version Is a Teenager's Homework
The American flag has had 27 official designs as new states joined the Union. Most were designed by committee or by government officials.
The current 50-star version was not.
When Hawaii was admitted in 1959, the U.S. government needed a new flag design adding a 50th star. Thousands of designs were submitted. The winning version came from Robert G. Heft, a 17-year-old high school student in Lancaster, Ohio, who had sewn his design on his mother's kitchen table as a history class project.
His teacher gave him a B-minus and told him he'd get a better grade if Congress approved it. Congress did. The teacher changed the grade to an A.
Heft was only 17 when he made the flag we all still use. That's three years older than I am right now. I don't know what to do with that.
The Heft flag has now been the official U.S. flag since July 4, 1960 — longer than any previous version, and longer than every pre-1960 flag combined.
The Statue of Liberty: A French Abolitionist's Idea
The Statue of Liberty was conceived by a French jurist and abolitionist named Édouard de Laboulaye in 1865 — not as a generic celebration of American freedom, but specifically to commemorate two things: the 100th anniversary of American independence, and the Union's victory in the Civil War that had just ended slavery.
The "Liberty Enlightening the World" was supposed to arrive in 1876, the centennial year. It didn't. Fundraising stalled repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. The statue finally arrived in 1885 and was dedicated in 1886 — ten years late.
The poem that made the statue famous — Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus," with its "Give me your tired, your poor" — was written in 1883 to raise pedestal money. It wasn't mounted on the pedestal until 1903, twenty years after it was written and sixteen years after Lazarus's death.
That's the statue's best-kept secret: the meaning most Americans associate with it — a welcome to immigrants — was retrofitted onto a monument originally conceived to celebrate republican liberty and the end of slavery. Both meanings are real. They just didn't arrive together.
The Liberty Bell: Cracked on the First Ring
The Liberty Bell was commissioned in 1752 from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London for the Pennsylvania State House — now Independence Hall. It arrived in Philadelphia and cracked the first time it was rung.
Two local foundrymen, John Pass and John Stow, melted it down and recast it twice in 1753, adding more copper to strengthen the alloy. The bell we know today is their third attempt. The famous jagged crack visible on the bell now came much later — from a failed repair attempt in the 1840s, after the bell had already developed a hairline fracture.
The name "Liberty Bell" also isn't original. The bell was just called "the State House bell" for most of its life. It only became the Liberty Bell in the 1830s, when abolitionists adopted it as a symbol of the fight to end slavery. The inscription about proclaiming liberty "unto all the inhabitants" suddenly meant something very specific.
The word "Pennsylvania" on the bell is misspelled — "Pensylvania," with one "n." That spelling was acceptable in 1752, but it looks like an error today.
The National Anthem Took 117 Years
Francis Scott Key wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner" in September 1814, watching the British bombardment of Fort McHenry from a ship in Baltimore Harbor. The poem was set to the tune of a British drinking song called "To Anacreon in Heaven."
It was popular almost immediately. The Army and Navy adopted it as the official song for ceremonial use in the late 1800s. But Congress did not officially designate it as the national anthem until March 3, 1931 — 117 years after Key wrote it. President Herbert Hoover signed the bill.
Several other songs had competed. "America the Beautiful," "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," "Hail Columbia," and "Yankee Doodle" were all proposed at various points. Congress argued for years that "The Star-Spangled Banner" was too hard to sing (fair), too martial (also fair), and based on a British melody (also fair). It won anyway.
The Symbols That Almost Were
The wild turkey never became national bird, but it came closer than you might think — a 2024 congressional resolution formally designating the bald eagle as the national bird noted that it had never actually been codified before, just assumed.
The rattlesnake was proposed as a national symbol during the Revolution. "Don't Tread on Me" flags with coiled rattlesnakes flew from Continental Navy ships. The rattlesnake didn't make the final cut, but it survives in the Gadsden flag today.
The bison almost didn't make it onto the nickel. When sculptor James Earle Fraser designed the Buffalo Nickel in 1913, he wanted a distinctly American animal. The model for the bison on his coin was a specific animal named Black Diamond, who lived at the Central Park Zoo.
The pattern across all of them is the same: America's symbols were not handed down from on high. They were argued over, voted on, redesigned, retrofitted, and — in the case of the flag — chosen from a 17-year-old's class project. That's probably the most American thing about them.