The White House 1600 Sessions: Making the Presidential Seal

From podium plaques and flags to the doors of the presidential limo and Air Force One, it is always present: fifty stars encircling an eagle whose talons hold bundles of olive branches and arrows, and around that circle of stars, a band with the words “Seal of the President of the United States.” If you’ve ever wondered where that design came from and how those symbols are made, join Stewart McLaurin, President of the White House Historical Association, on a special tour of The Institute of Heraldry at Fort Belvoir, a U.S. Army installation in Northern Virginia.

The art of heraldry goes back centuries and is usually associated with military groups and nobility. Colors and symbols created a design used as a form of identification. America's Founding Fathers were very cautious about adopting anything closely related to monarchy and the nobility, so there was no standard design based on traditional heraldry representing the Office of the President until the 1940s.

Near the end of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt asked heraldry experts and military personnel to create an official design for the presidential flag, seal, and coat of arms. Unfortunately, President Roosevelt died before the project was completed. Still, President Harry Truman saw it through and, in October 1945, signed an executive order establishing for the very first time a legal definition of the president's coat of arms and seal as used by the president.

In 1948, President Truman did the same with designs for the Office of the Vice President. Those designs, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom, decorations, badges, flags, and other insignia for the U.S. military services and departments throughout the federal government, are created with the assistance of The Institute of Heraldry. And those plaques you see affixed to the podiums behind which the president and vice president speak? Unbelievably, all of those are crafted and painted by hand at the Institute and nowhere else.

In this episode you will hear from Charles Mugno, Director of The Institute of Heraldry; Thomas Casciaro, Chief of the Technical and Production Division at The Institute of Heraldry; as well as Michael Craghead, Exhibit Specialist at The Institute of Heraldry, who has been painting plaques for the president and vice president for over twenty years. We hope you enjoy this special look behind the scenes of the making of the presidential seal.

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