By Rich Lowry
Thursday, November 26, 2020
We live in a time of heedless iconoclasm, and so one of
the country’s oldest traditions is under assault.
Thanksgiving is increasingly portrayed as, at best, based
on falsehoods and, at worst, a whitewash of genocide against Native Americans.
The New York Times ran a piece the other day
titled, “The Thanksgiving Myth Gets a Deeper Look This Year,” bristling with
hostility toward the day of gratitude and noting that “the holiday arrives in
the midst of a national struggle over racial justice.” (The paper is admirably
consistent — a couple of years ago it ran an article headlined, “Everything You
Learned About Thanksgiving Is Wrong.”)
When Arkansas senator Tom Cotton slammed the Times
piece, as well as the newspaper’s stilted and dishonest 1619 Project, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning architect of that venture, Nikole Hannah-Jones, replied
with incredulity. “Imagine calling the 1619 Project debunked in order to defend
a childish Thanksgiving myth,” she tweeted.
Childish myth? It’s true that debunkers can score some
easy points.
The term “Pilgrims” wasn’t popularized until later. They
didn’t wear dour clothes. They didn’t consider their iconic gathering in 1621 a
formal thanksgiving, which would have been given over to solemn religious
observances. And so on.
But the basic contours of the holiday are recognizable in
that long-ago event. The settlers who had arrived in the Mayflower in 1620, and
survived a brutal winter that killed half of them, feasted, enjoyed games, and
marveled at the material abundance of their new home.
One of them, Edward Winslow, wrote a friend that “our
harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we
might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruits
of our labors.” He noted that “among other Recreations, we exercised our Arms.”
He concluded, “although it be not always so plentiful, as it was at this time
with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often
wish you partakers of our plenty.”
It’s not inconceivable that they ate turkeys. Plymouth
governor William Bradford wrote of that autumn, “besides waterfowl there was a
great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many.”
And they celebrated, as we’ve all always learned, with
friendly Indians. Edward Winslow recorded “many of the Indians coming amongst
us” and “for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and
killed five Deer.”
Tribes in the region had been devastated by disease after
contact with Europeans, but easily could have eliminated the settlement.
Instead, the leader of the Wampanoag forged an agreement with them, with an eye
to a potential ally against the rival Narragansetts.
Finally, the legendary Squanto did indeed provide
essential assistance. He belonged to the Patuxet band that had lived in the
Plymouth area and had been completely wiped out by the epidemic.
Finding his people gone (he had been kidnapped by an
Englishman and sold into slavery in Spain before escaping), he joined with the
Pilgrims and taught them indispensable skills, including how to plant corn.
Bradford called him “a special instrument sent of God.” He was a translator,
guide, and, importantly, the chief envoy between the Pilgrims and neighboring
tribes.
The peace with the Wampanoag lasted about 50 years. It’s
a mistake to read future conflict back into the 1621 feast, a moment of comity
and hopefulness.
As Melanie Kirkpatrick explains in her history of the
holiday, New England colonies eventually established annual general
thanksgiving days. Thanksgiving as we know it arose from these days and the
memory of the 1621 event, with layers of tradition added over time (the formal
date in late November, the cuisine, the association with football, etc.).
If we didn’t have such a day — to stop and express
gratitude to our Creator, to be thankful for the abundance of this great land,
to gather with friends and family — we really would have to invent it.
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