The Dangerous Eagle

Historians have traditionally seen Thanksgiving as a holiday used to promote Americanization and unity. By everyone participating in the same rituals on the same day, Thanksgiving has a decidedly optimistic tenor. The shared experience on a uniquely American holiday was often seen as a great unifier, and this was especially true in the early twentieth century. Margaret Weinberger writes: “reformers saw Thanksgiving, along with other holidays, as vehicles for inculcating American culture in immigrant children and providing feelings of nationalism.” 1 Matthew Dennis agrees when he writes that following the Civil War “a depoliticized Thanksgiving served perfectly as a rite of reunion, and the American holiday achieved unprecedented national stature, particularly because it continued to be prescribed and promoted by newspapers and women’s magazines…” 2

Yet looking at the violence displayed in these two cards, are we hearing whispers of unity and inclusion? Not really. These cards instead reveal another way of looking at Thanksgiving. The patriotic overtones seen on so many Thanksgiving postcards could also be used to promote an exclusionary vision of Thanksgiving, one exclusive to a certain group of Americans.

Postcards weren’t the only place where the warrior-like instincts of the bald eagle were emphasized. In his 1904 The American Natural History, William Hornaday, Director of the New York Zoological Park, wrote of the eagle: “with a brow to threaten or command, he is beloved by at least seventy-two million people who will rise as one whenever he is really in need of defenders.” 3Threaten, command, rise as one—these words link the eagle to a violent persona. On postcards, turning the American symbol of the bald eagle into a stalker, killer, and eater of a turkey, the eagle could be made into a symbolic substitute for a powerful aggressive nation. But aggressive against whom?

Putting the dangerous eagle in context

We know postcards circulated in disproportionate amounts through communities of Germans and those with German heritage. (See the research) These postcards grew in popularity at a time when Germans were anxious about their place within the hierarchy of white races in America. In his perceptively titled book Becoming Old Stock, Russell Kazal argues that Germans were extended an “invitation” throughout the early twentieth century to join in a core of old Europe lineages that could serve as the true American race and as an antipode to the new immigrants coming from Southern and Eastern Europe. 4

But a trickle of these new immigrants were starting to appear in the native, Teutonic, and Anglo-Saxon rural domain of New England and the upper Midwest. This put Germans in particular on the defensive, lest their invitation to “old stock” be revoked (the anti-German backlash at the onset of America’s entry into WWI in 1917 was several years removed from the postcard fad’s rise and fall).

With a brow to threaten or command, he is beloved by at least seventy-two million people...

If the dangerous eagle needed a victim, then that victim could be loaded up with symbolism as well. As a notoriously weaker, dumber bird, lower on the evolutionary chain than the eagle, the turkey was also a logical substitute for anything (or anyone) deemed inferior to the virtuous and victorious national bird. New immigrants fit this construction of symbolic hierarchy perfectly. The eagle motif of staged violence could be filled with whatever anxiety our nervous postcard viewer might wish to see. That such an outlet existed at all is another reminder that Thanksgiving was not always the inclusive, consensus-building holiday we sometimes dream it to be.

Last Whisper

Back to Gallery

Next Whisper