1941 Newly plunged into the Second World War, the President of the United States could still take time off to decide when the nation should celebrate its annual day of thanksgiving. This wasn’t the first time that war had turned the thoughts of the country’s leaders in that direction. In the middle of America’s War of Independence the Continental Congress proclaimed Thursday, 18 December to be a day of ‘SOLEMN THANKSGIVING and PRAISE’, and Abraham Lincoln took time off from the Civil War in 1863 to set the day on the last Thursday in November.
Roosevelt settled on the penultimate Thursday of November, a month that sometimes stretches to five. His reason, he said, was to add an extra week to the pre-Christmas shopping spree, thus increasing spending and profits in the most serious depression in the country’s history.
But even that motive tells a story. Whereas in Britain adverts mentioning Christmas begin to dribble out around the middle of September, America keeps its Christmas spending strictly post-Thanksgiving. And Thanksgiving itself is non-commercial: no presents, no decorations (apart from a few paper table favours shaped like pumpkins or Puritans), no hoopla. More even than Christmas, Thanksgiving is the one day in the year when American families, however far apart, try their best to get back together – think Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987). More even than the 4th of July, it is America’s national holiday.
Why? There was nothing very auspiciously national in its beginnings. ‘Our harvest being gotten in’, wrote Plymouth settler Edward Winslow to ‘A loving and old friend’ in the autumn of 1621, ‘our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might … rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors.’
The ‘fowl’ were probably wild turkeys. There is no mention of pumpkins. The ‘fruit of their labors’ amounted to maize or Indian corn and an ‘indifferent’ crop of barley. They invited the natives, too, who after all had shown them how to plant corn by putting a small fish in with each kernel. ‘Many of the Indians [came] amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted.’1
Ever since then, even as immigrants arrived from southern and central Europe, the Far East, and the country’s Spanish-speaking neighbours to the south, the United States has continued to picture its origins in those steeple-hatted, white English men and women sitting down to celebrate their first harvest. How did so much glamour and prestige come to be attached to this tiny movement of peoples to Massachusetts? Because William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Plantation, told the story of the colony’s settlement so as to re-enact the Israelites’ trek to the Promised Land, the very paradigm of the immigrant experience shared by all (see 11 November).
1 Edward Winslow, ‘A Letter Sent From New England to a friend in these parts [i.e. England]’, Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, 1622, Part VI: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/users/deetz/Plymouth/mourt6.html