By Rich Lowry
Thursday, November 25, 2021
Thomas Jefferson is on the outs. Columbus
Day is a shadow of its former self. And Thanksgiving, perhaps most
consequently, is under pressure. If this most American holiday is ever
downgraded from its honored place on the national calendar, it will speak of a
profound change in our self-definition.
Thanksgiving dates from before the establishment of the
American nation-state and harkens back to our original settlers. Although the
official holiday was formally established by the government and is marked by
our presidents, it has acquired its layers of meaning through religious faith,
informal culinary and social customs, and a centuries-old vein of tradition.
It is part of the warp and woof of America, older than
the Constitution and deeply rooted in family and hearth.
After their brutal first winter in the New World, the
Pilgrims, of course, shared a feast with Wampanoag Indians in 1621. It wasn’t
quite the picture-perfect gathering depicted in the famous, anachronistic
Jennie Brownscombe painting of 1914 (complete with what looks like a
golden-brown Butterball turkey at the end of the table), but notable all the
same.
Their meal was different from ours, with seafood and
venison occupying an important place. They also certainly ate birds. One of the
participants, Edward Winslow, wrote a letter describing how the “harvest being
gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might rejoice
together.” Turkey wasn’t necessarily on the menu, although the Plymouth Colony
governor, William Bradford, made a reference in his journal to the “great store
of wild turkeys, of which they took many.”
Technically, the Pilgrims’ celebration was a harvest
feast, rather than what they would have understood as a day of thanksgiving,
which would have involved fasting and supplications to God. In time, the New
England colonies established annual general thanksgiving days not occasioned by
any particular event, although they, too, were solemn occasions. From these
sources, as Melanie Kirkpatrick explains in her excellent book on the holiday,
Thanksgiving as we know it arose.
It is a thread that runs throughout American history. In
1778, the Continental Congress designated December 30 “to be observed as a day
of public thanksgiving and praise.” George Washington made the first
presidential proclamation in 1789, urging gratitude “for the signal and
manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we
experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war.”
In 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared a national day of
Thanksgiving — designating it as the last Thursday of November — and every
president has done the same since with occasional deviations regarding the day.
Even the connection to football stretches back to a
Princeton–Yale game in 1873, which became an annual tradition in New
York City. Long before the Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys made playing on
Thanksgiving one of their signatures, colleges and high schools scheduled
rivalry games for the day.
The holiday is linked in the American imagination — and
in fact — with the gathering of family and with warmth and plenty. The widely
reproduced George Durrie lithograph from 1867, Home to Thanksgiving,
depicts a couple returning to a snow-covered farm for the holiday and getting
greeted by an older couple at the door of the house, welcoming them back home.
The even more famous Norman Rockwell painting from 80 years later, Freedom
from Want, might as well be the continuation of the Durrie scene, now
indoors. An elderly couple serves a big, juicy bird to a beaming family around
the table.
For most Americans, the day still functions as the great
19th-century promoter of the holiday, Sarah Josepha Hale, hoped it would. “Such
social rejoicings,” she wrote in 1857, “tend greatly to expand the generous
feelings of our nature, and strengthen the bond of union that binds us brothers
and sisters in that true sympathy of American patriotism.”
If that ever stops being so, we will be a different
country and poorer for it.
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