Consider the turkey

Ruth and I were driving recently through the Smoky Mountains and came upon a gaggle of turkeys on the side of the road. A few weeks earlier, the same thing happened while we were on the way to Due West, South Carolina. It makes one wonder what the turkey population might have been 200 years ago, before this area was settled and South Carolina didn't have almost 5 million people.

We are approaching Thanksgiving Day 2015, a day often referred to as turkey day. It is an American tradition that one of the items on the dinner table at Thanksgiving will be turkey. It has been that way since that first Thanksgiving celebrated by the Puritans in New England almost 500 years ago.

President Abraham Lincoln started a new tradition in 1865 when he "pardoned" the White House turkey. Every president since then has had a ceremony at Thanksgiving, during which the White House turkey was pardoned and sent back to the farm. The one exception to that custom might have been during the presidency of Harry Truman back in the 1940s. Truman held the traditional pardoning ceremony but, oddly, no turkeys showed up back on the farm. No one really knows what happened to the White House turkeys during the Truman years. Knowing the reputation of the always practical and pragmatic Truman, I suspect I can make a good guess.

During the formative years of our nation's founding, Benjamin Franklin proposed the turkey as our national bird. He reasoned out that it had fed a high percentage of our settlers and frontiersmen during our early years and deserved such consideration because it was such a consistent source of food. John Adams countered with the eagle as our national bird. Franklin pointed out that the eagle was primarily a scavenger and lived off the carcasses of other animals. Adams responded that the turkey had to be the dumbest bird God every created. Franklin said the eagle had only one thing to recommend it, and that was that Indians liked its feathers. John Adams supposedly ended the conversation with the admonition to Franklin that, "Ben, our national bird just can't be a turkey."

So, when you see the majestic eagle portrayed in our national emblem or on our money, give some credit to the persuasive powers of John Adams, who championed that majestic bird as our national emblem. Had Franklin won that argument, we might have been saluting a turkey.

As Thanksgiving Day approaches, there is one thing we can be sure of, and that is what is on the mind of every youngster. Children always seem to prefer the drumstick, whether it is chicken or turkey, and they know there is no bigger or better drumstick than the one that shows up on your plate in the midst of a traditional turkey-day dinner.