"That's It." Connecting the Philadelphia Eagles and “America’s best known symbol.”

Eagles. It’s kind of the perfect nickname for a football team based in Philadelphia. The story behind how the Eagles came to be called the Eagles is well known, but as the team gets ready to compete in Super Bowl LVII, the story of how they got their name and the story of the man who created the symbol that inspired it bear closer examination.

The Eagles were co-founded in 1933 by de Benneville "Bert" Bell, the blue-blooded scion of a well-connected Philadelphia family. Bell was a football man to the core, from birth. His father, John C. Bell, played football at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880s and later became one of the founding organizers of the NCAA. Bert Bell was the starting quarterback for Penn’s football squad in the years prior to World War I, and he later coached at Penn and Temple. He is credited with being the father of the NFL draft. His football life culminated with his tenure as the National Football League’s second Commissioner, from 1946 until he passed away while attending an Eagles Pittsburgh Steelers game at Franklin Field in his native city in 1959.

His wife, Frances Upton Bell, figures prominently in the team’s genesis. A popular star of stage and screen, she put up $2,500 so that Bell and his former teammate and fellow assistant coach at Penn, James “Lud” Wray, could purchase the NFL’s franchise rights to the Philadelphia area, which were up for grabs following  the demise of Philly’s previous NFL entry, the Frankford Yellow Jackets. They folded in 1931, hamstrung by both the Great Depression and Pennsylvania’s Blue Laws, which made it a crime to play baseball or football on Sundays. Leveraging his many connections, Bell successfully lobbied the Commonwealth to change the law, and the team received the first permit to play Sunday games in Philly.

The Eagles’ founding coincided with the launch of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), a New Deal initiative established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help buttress the nation's economic recovery during the Great Depression. According to the United States National Archives, “The administration was empowered to make voluntary agreements dealing with hours of work, rates of pay, and the fixing of prices…More than 500 codes of fair practice were adopted for the various industries. Patriotic appeals were made to the public, and firms were asked to display the Blue Eagle, an emblem signifying NRA participation.” The logo was introduced on July 17, 1933, a few weeks before Philadelphia’s new NFL team was officially named “Eagles,” and it soon became ubiquitous—it was eventually applied to some 70 million pieces of printed matter by the federal government. The “recovery eagle” was called “America’s best known symbol” and it was displayed by businesses all across the nation.

In 2019, Upton Bell, son of Bert and Frances Upton Bell, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that his parents went to Philadelphia’s City Hall to commence the process of extracting the failed Yellow Jackets out of bankruptcy. The article continues:

“After leaving City Hall, Bell spotted a National Recovery Act placard on a Center City window. The blue eagle at its center, symbolizing the nation’s resolve to overcome the Depression, struck him as an apt name for a new football team. “He asked my mother what she thought,” said Upton Bell. “She said, `That’s it.’”

(A side note: In February 1971 Upton Bell, then 33 years old, was tapped to become the general manager of the NFL’s Bay State Patriots, who were previously known as the Boston Patriots. The Bay State appellation proved to be immediately unpopular, with some calling the team the “BS Patriots.” Bell was among those who were instrumental in changing the name once again, less than a month after his arrival, to the New England Patriots.)

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The National Recovery Administration’s eagle symbol has Philadelphia ties that go beyond that of the football team. The logo was created by graphic artist Charles T. Coiner, who lived in Mechanicsville, Pa., in Bucks County, and worked for Philadelphia-based N. W. Ayer & Son advertising agency. A series of fifty designs, created by fourteen different artists, had been submitted to the federal government before Coiner was summoned to Washington, D.C.—he sketched the logo out while on a flight to the nation’s capital and and pitched two options to National Recovery Administration head General Hugh S. Johnson.

Coiner wrote a piece for the September 1933 edition of Advertising Arts magazine, entitled “Art for Government’s Sake.” He described showing his sketches to Johnson upon his arrival:

When the design was completed, the General looked at it, and simply said, “That’s it.”

Which, coincidentally, were the same two words that Frances Upton Bell uttered in affirming the name of Philadelphia’s new NFL team..

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The story of Coiner’s flight to Washington was splashed all across the news during the summer and fall of 1933. “Charles T. Coiner (of) Philadelphia may be not be the best known artist in the country, but his latest effort is probably being viewed by more people than any work in current art history,” read one account. Another noted that Coiner painted landscapes in his spare time, “but his great masterpiece, so far as the nation is concerned, is the recovery eagle.” Coiner later became the first American to receive the Art Director's Award of Distinction. He served as a trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was chairman of the Philadelphia College of Art and was inducted into the Art Director's Hall of Fame and the Philadelphia Advertising Hall of Fame.

The United States Supreme Court nullified the National Industrial Recovery Act in May, 1935, and all those blue eagles faded into history. That same year, the Philadelphia Eagles, who had been wearing uniforms of azure blue and yellow (the same colors as the city flag of Philadelphia,) rolled out a set of green uniforms. Eighty eight years later, the Eagles will be clad in green as they take the field for in Super Bowl LVII  in Phoenix—that’s it.