Blessing Your Habitually Insensible Hearts
Four hundred and three years ago, pilgrims from England were struggling to survive the harsh New England wildlands into which they, the first European settlers in the future US, had landed a year earlier. Fortunately, local Indians welcomed them and taught them how to survive at a conclave and feast we now celebrate as Thanksgiving. We honor this moment by teaching our children how to sketch turkeys by tracing their hands on notepaper, and draw from it the lessons of humility, thankfulness, and cross-racial brotherhood.
This is the story I learned in the 1970s, and nearly every word of it is hogwash. (Even the hand-turkey offers at best an impressionistic rendering of the bonafide fowl.) I remember being absolutely shocked to learn in college that the Mayflower did not bring the first “settlers”—they were colonists—to North America: they had been there the better part of a century and in fact forty years earlier, England had claimed Newfoundland as a territory of the Crown. The “Indians” of the tale were the Wampanoag nation, one of several peoples in New England at the time, and the meeting was more armistice than feast of fellowship.
Basically everything we understand about Thanksgiving is a carefully reconstructed parable that describes a reality we want to live in, not one that actually happened. The power of a story, in other words, is vastly more influential than history. As a writer, this is both exciting and disturbing news.
Before we return to the pilgrims, however, let us consider the circumstances that led Abraham Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday in the midst of the Civil War, 242 years after the initiating event.
His proclamation is quite a document. In it he doesn’t even gesture to the feast in the forest, nor the Wampanoag, nor even the pilgrims. It is both a religious proclamation and a political one clearly sparked by the gravity of war. He begins by noting the bounties of heaven showered on mortals from on high, adding:
“To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.”
To those godless dullards who cannot appreciate the bounties, Lincoln goes on to enumerate them in much the way modern presidents present their accomplishments in their States of the Union. Finally, he returns to the matter at hand:
“They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”
Lincoln concludes with an exhortation to knock off all this war nonsense, though admittedly at this point in the war it feels mostly pro forma. It’s hard not to wonder why a U.S. president took this moment to sanctify Thanksgiving as a national holiday. One obvious answer, that a gesture of reconciliation in the middle or a Civil War is just smart politics, is not entirely correct. Many forces both for and against were pushing the issue of Thanksgiving into national spotlight.
The “pro” camp had roots in New England, which was seeing its national influence wane. The region was central to the White abolitionist movement, and that alienated them from the rest of the country, who saw them as weird religious fanatics who were into women’s suffrage and teetotaling, and other aberrant ideas. Communities there had long celebrated various “thanksgivings” (though these were Christian holidays of fasting and reflection) and they thought a national holiday would burnish their place in history.
Echoes of those themes were revived in the 20th century, and I suspect the Kumbaya lessons of my youth emerged from a new racial consciousness coming out of the civil rights era. The Plymouth pilgrims could be recast in a way that created a very positive national myth. Instead of acknowledging the earlier, slave-owning Jamestown colonists, Thanksgiving creates the happy, kindergarten-ready story of a small and powerless group of Christians who sought their freedom from the oppressions of a brutal state religion. They were welcomed by native Americans and became their partners, and Thanksgiving honors all this wholesomeness.
Of course, the arrival of this batch of English colonists was part of a multi-continental disaster for native peoples. They brought disease and war, both of which they visited on the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and other nations in the region. They were hardly the post-enlightenment ecumenicalists who were happy to live and let live—the Plymouth colony saw natives as less than humans who needed conversion ASAP. (This fact casts Lincoln’s words in a different light.) If you’d like more on that early history, this is a nice overview.
With all of that rather dark history, it’s reasonable to argue that we should trash Thanksgiving as the catastrophe it was for native peoples.That would be one option. Instead, I think there’s much to preserve in my favorite holiday. We should acknowledge the history and the way the current story we tell whitewashing it. But the basic message I was taught, which was actually one of humility and thankfulness and brotherhood, is awesome. Especially in the U.S., where so much of our history and national identity is wrapped up in our bloody martial history, the myth of Thanksgiving is a welcome departure. It celebrates a peace that never was, but it celebrates peace.
And, if we wanted to really rework the story, we could use the Mayflower’s arrival as an entirely different metaphor, one of longing for something better, and I don’t mean God. The Mayflower and Speedwell weren’t shooting to land at Plymouth Rock, but that’s where they found themselves in 1620, when they noticed stores of beer were running low. They hastily drew up some documents that legitimized landing in what they would dub “New” England, and dropped anchor.
The story, in this telling, is one of a people desperately searching … for beer. Since the original story was almost entirely an invention, we could add a bit about how those early pilgrims flourished because of the beer* they shared with their friends, the Wampanoag. After all, Ben Franklin said that thing about beer that one time,** so it all fits together. Who among us, my fellow citizens, could not get behind this story?
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! Go Packers!
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* They couldn’t grow barley there and so planted cider trees to meet their alcoholic needs instead.
** He didn’t.