Pre-1976 Politics

This is the official seal used during the Nixon Administration. It is made of wood and is 13 1/2 inches in diameter. I obtained it from a collector who got it from the Nixon Presidential Library.

The presidential seal is the official coat of arms of the presidency and appears on the official presidential flag. The complete history of the seal is uncertain, but the current design can be traced back to 1850. Millard Fillmore was president and he proposed a design with elements vaguely similar to today’s seal.

In 1877 President Rutherford B. Hayes made additional changes and that design is considered the precursor to the modern presidential seal.

When Harry Truman became president in 1945, he started to make changes in the government. Those changes included a redesign of the presidential seal. When Truman took office, the seal included the president’s coat of arms, an eagle, a ring of stars and the words “Seal of the President of the United States”. The eagle’s right talon is clutching an olive branch, signifying peace, and in the left talon are arrows, representing war. The eagle’s head was facing towards the side with the arrows. Since the country had just been through a war, the president wanted to make the eagle’s head face the olive branch instead of the arrows. The changes were made and, with the addition of more stars when states joined the Union, it evolved into the design in use today.

A description of the seal from the White House website explains that the eagle’s right talon clutches an olive branch with thirteen olives and thirteen leaves to represent peace. The left talon clutches arrows which represents the need sometimes to go to war to protect the nation. The eagle holds a ribbon bearing the words “E Pluribus Unum”, the motto of the U.S., which means “out of many, one” (the thirteen olives and thirteen leaves represent the original thirteen colonies).

A shield in front of the eagle has thirteen red and white stripes, again representing the colonies, with a blue bar above, representing a unity of colonies into one nation and Congress, which makes laws for all. Above the eagle is a “glory Or” or halo of gold. In it are thirteen white clouds, thirteen white stars and many tiny stars. The fifty stars on a field of deep blue circle the eagle and represent the fifty states. The words “Seal of the President of the United States” surround the seal on a tan field.