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A Federal Office Where Heraldry of Yore Is Only Yesterday

A painter at the Institute of Heraldry, Michael Craghead, at work near seals designed by the institute, which is an office within the Army.Credit...David Scull for The New York Times

FORT BELVOIR, Va. — "A wives' tale," scoffed one official. "An urban myth," said another.

They would know. The officials were from the Institute of Heraldry, the government's chief guardian of insignia and heraldic tradition, and they were dismissing an oft-repeated canard about the presidential seal.

According to legend, the eagle in the seal faced the arrow-holding talon in times of war and switched its stern gaze toward the olive branch in times of peace.

The eagle's glare did indeed get reversed — just once, by President Harry S. Truman in 1945. But only, it turns out, to correct the grievous heraldic error that President Rutherford B. Hayes had made 65 years before, when he designed the first seal to adorn White House invitations.

"In point of fact, the viewer's left is the dexter side, the honorable side on any shield," said Joe Spollen, head sculptor at the heraldry institute, which among its other duties nurtures rules and terminology from the Middle Ages. "The sinister side, on the viewer's right, is the less honorable."

And so Truman, after learning the truth from the director of the heraldry office at the time, switched the gaze from sinister to dexter, where it remains today.

The Institute of Heraldry, located for historical reasons within the Army, has a budget of $2.3 million and 24 employees, including four well-schooled "heraldic designers." But the handiwork of this little office has had an outsize influence on the public face of the military and the government.

All plaques bearing presidential or vice-presidential seals, as seen on news conference lecterns and the bulkhead of Air Force One, are hand-sculpted and painted here.

The institute, conjoining modern images with ancient traditions, designs the shoulder insignia unique to every military unit and supervises their production. It designs military medals, with the Iraq Campaign Medal being one of the latest. It also, together with the captains, designs a custom coat of arms for every new ship in the Navy.

Though civilian agencies are not required to hire the institute's services, many consult it when they need a new seal for their doors and stationery.

"People rally around these symbols," said Charles V. Mugno, a retired Marine officer who heads the institute. "Each seal carries the strengths and identity of an institution."

Every new sub-office of the bureaucracy, it seems, needs its own emblem. So when the Pentagon recently created an obscure civilian agency called the Test Resource Management Center, which evaluates range and test facilities for the military, the heraldry institute was ready and able.

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Nearing completion on a presidential seal.Credit...David Scull for The New York Times

As the institute describes the final design, three crossed arrows signify the new center's three areas of responsibility: oversight of facilities, strategic planning and reviewing of budgets. A chevron of white and green is crisscrossed with grid lines, to evoke "a graph and the measurement of resources."

"America has a funny relationship with heraldry," said Francois Velde, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago who is an amateur expert and maintains the heraldica.org Web site.

The Constitution expressly forbids the government to grant titles of nobility, but nearly half the signers of the Declaration of Independence had family coats of arms, Mr. Velde noted.

"The association of heraldry with aristocracy is really inaccurate," he said. "It's a system of identification for people and institutions, not just nobles and knights."

The intricate rules governing symbols and colors emerged rather suddenly in 12th-century Europe, Mr. Velde said, and spread quickly.

In the United States, European-style coats of arms, with lions and Latin, have been especially popular with universities, but several presidents were also "armigerous," as the American Heraldry Society describes them, including Washington and both Roosevelts.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower called on the heraldry office to invent his — featuring an anvil, a crest of five stars and the motto "Peace Through Understanding" — because he needed family arms in order to receive the Order of the Elephant from the Kingdom of Denmark.

The founding fathers wasted no time in devising a distinctly American seal. In 1782, years before the Constitution, Congress adopted the same two-sided Great Seal visible on every dollar bill today, describing it in full-fledged heraldic argot. On the front side is the familiar eagle, "holding in its dexter talon an olive branch, and in his sinister a bundle of 13 arrows," and in his beak a scroll inscribed "E pluribus unum." On the reverse side, "a pyramid unfinished" and "in the zenith an eye in a triangle, surrounded by a glory, proper."

From the beginning, the Great Seal's eagle faced the dexter talon; why President Hayes switched directions for his similar-looking presidential emblem is lost to the ages.

Mr. Mugno, the institute director, had been a student of military heraldry and said he got a thrill at the outset of the Iraq war, while he was still in the Marines and working in the Pentagon, when his proposal for the campaign medal was used on the reverse side.

The front of the medal, given to all who serve in Iraq, is a map of the country surrounded by palm wreaths. The back, drawing on Mr. Mugno's idea, features the Statue of Freedom from atop the Capitol and two scimitars with their blades arcing downward — a deliberate inversion, Mr. Mugno said, of a giant arch of crossed swords that Saddam Hussein had built in honor of himself in Baghdad.

When he heard that the institute directorship was coming open, Mr. Mugno said, he could not resist applying, even though it meant he had to retire from his beloved Marines. He has a dream for this office, he said, which could play a far more systematic role in overseeing the nation's insignia.

"Should there be a National Institute of Heraldry?" he asked. "One office overseeing the symbolism of the country and setting the standards?"

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