Newer World

Posts Tagged ‘Thanksgiving’

Norman Rockwell's Thanksgiving

Almighty and gracious Father, we give you thanks for the fruits of the earth in their season and for the labors of those who harvest them. Make us, we pray, faithful stewards of your great bounty, for the provision of our necessities and the relief of all who are in need, to the glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

— Book of Common Prayer

George Washington

A reader asked us to publish this in today’s paper, something I had planned to do anyway, but we ended up not having room for it. But there’s always room on the Web. — Randy Patrick, managing editor, The Winchester Sun.

President George Washington issued the following proclamation in New York, on Oct. 3, 1789 proclaiming Thanksgiving a national holiday.

By the President of the United States of America, a Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor — and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.
Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be — That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks — for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation — 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 — for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed — for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted — for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.
And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions — to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually — to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed — to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord — To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us —and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.
Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

Go: Washington

"The First Thanksgiving" by Jennie Branscombe in the Pilgrim Hall museum, Plymouth, Mass.

Book seeks to expose
Thanksgiving ‘myth’

By Randy Patrick/The Winchester Sun

Maybe Myles Standish wasn’t such a stand-up guy after all.
Perhaps the Puritans weren’t so pure — at least by Southern Baptist standards.
And maybe, instead of being a gesture of political correctness, inviting the Indians to  dinner was just politics as usual.
That’s what Godfrey Hodgson would have you believe about the American legend of the Pilgrims and their Thanksgiving.
But keep in mind, he’s a bloody Brit.

First-grade history

The story of the First Thanksgiving is one American schoolchildren know by heart.
They can tell you that in 1620, the Pilgrims sailed for America on the Mayflower to gain religious freedom from a tyrannical king. That winter, they landed on Plymouth Rock, and established the first settlement in New England.
The Indians, led by Squanto, befriended the Pilgrims, taught them how to fertilize corn with dead fish and saved them from starving. Later, to show their gratitude, the Pilgrims had a big meal and invited the Indians to join them as they feasted on turkey and cranberry sauce and offered prayers to Providence for their good fortune.
Since then, we have celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday on or about the last Thursday in November.
That’s the short and sweet version.
But what if almost everything we think we know about the First Thanksgiving is wrong?

Moral minority

In his book, “A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving,” Hodgson makes a convincing argument that the feast recorded in 1621 by Edward Winslow and others wasn’t a Puritan thanksgiving at all, but “a harvest-home celebration, of the kind familiar from centuries of observance in rural England, interrupted by a force of Indians …”
In the first place, Hodgson says, the Separatists (they weren’t called Pilgrims) showed their gratitude to God not by feasting, but by fasting.
Being radical Protestants, they didn’t celebrate holy days (i.e.  holidays) such as Christmas and Easter, because they considered them superstitious relics of Catholicism.
Being English, however, they did celebrate the secular Medieval harvest festival, which involved eating, drinking beer and wine, and playing games.
Days of thanksgiving, like days of humiliation (repentance), were held irregularly and involved solemn worship without Sunday “dinner on the grounds.”
These wanderers (or “pilgrims”) were, after all, Presbyterians, not Pentecostals. They were called Separatists because they wanted to separate themselves from the Anglicans, though they were willing to deceive King James by swearing their fealty to the beliefs of the Established Church in exchange for being granted a colony.
These troublesome schismatists had been run out of their parish of Scrooby in England and ended up in liberal Amsterdam, where some of the women learned to dress provocatively. “Later, there were frank charges of sexual misconduct,” Hodgson wrote.
Finally, as much for economic as religious reasons, they left the Netherlands for Virginia, and because navigation wasn’t then what it is now, ended up in Massachusetts.

First impressions

By the time of the feast, probably in late September or early October of 1621, the English settlers of Plymouth had already had hostile encounters with Indians.
The Indians had good cause to resent the English, who stole from them, kidnapped them and sold them into slavery.
These Indians were no strangers to the white men. Englishmen had been coming ashore ever since John Cabot claimed Newfoundland for King Henry VII in 1497.
By 1620, when the Pilgrims arrived, “thousands of European sailors were accustomed to spending the summers fishing on the Grand Banks and along the shores of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Maine,” Hodgson wrote.
One rogue, Capt. Thomas Hunt, made a tidy profit catching Indians and selling them to the Spanish. In fact, Squanto had been one of Hunt’s captives and somehow escaped from Spain and England and made his  way back to the Land of Opportunity, where he became employed as a translator of English for the Wampanoag chief Massasoit.

Standish tall (not)

One of the meanest of the English was their military commander, Myles Standish. He was no Pilgrim himself, but had been hired as a soldier of fortune.
“Small of stature — he was known as ‘Captain Shrimp’ — he had red hair and a dangerous temper,” Hodgson wrote. “He thought nothing of cutting off an Indian’s head if he thought it was the right thing to do.” He was, however, a “brave and committed” member of the party who served the Pilgrims well in his job.

No RSVP required

Different tribes in New England were often at war with one another, and when the Wampanoags visited the English, they were interested in making them their allies against the Narragansetts and Massachusetts. When about 100 Wampanoag warriors showed up uninvited at the Pilgrims’ festival with freshly killed deer as a gesture of goodwill, they were angling for a treaty with the Anglo-Saxon tribe.
“It was,” Hodgson said, “a kind of backwoods diplomatic encounter.”
The Indians were friendly enough, but the feeling didn’t last. Within a generation, Massasoit’s son, King Philip, united the tribes against the English, who were depleting the natural resources and spreading diseases like syphilis and smallpox, which decimated the native population. The English won King Philip’s War, and had Phil beheaded and quartered to underscore their point.

Big bird

But I digress.
When the Indians dropped in on the feast in 1621, they brought food, according to accounts by leaders like Edward Winslow and William Bradford. But it’s unlikely turkey was on the menu, Hodgson said, because the eastern shore of Massachusetts was one of the few places in the country where the bird was seldom seen. In any event, the cumbersome matchlock guns they used (which fired by lighting a fuse), was no match for the wicked-fast and wily fowl.
They probably ate a stew consisting of venison, raccoon and beaver, with beans, squash and Jerusalem artichokes thrown in, says Hodgson, and they may have roasted some ducks and fish.
I’m skeptical of Hodgson’s argument about the turkeys, however, because in his book, “Mayflower,” published the same year as Hodgson’s (2006), Nathaniel Philbrick quotes Bradford as saying there was a “good store of wild turkeys,” which the Pilgrims liked to hunt in the winter, when they could track them in the snow.
One thing’s for sure: If the Pilgrims did encounter a turkey, they would know what it was because the Spanish had introduced the American species to Europe by way of the Ottomon Empire (thus the name “Turkey”) in the time of the conquistadors. By the 1620s, it was a familiar dish on the English table.
As for the pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce, Hodgson says, the English colonists didn’t have sugar until decades later.

Little rock

One of the fictions shattered (literally), is that of Plymouth Rock.
“Of all the patriotic myth that has become encrusted on the genuine heroism of these brave and godly men, the cult of Plymouth Rock is the most implausible,” Hodgson wrote.
The Mayflower didn’t land on a rock. If it had, it would have splintered. The ship’s hull was too deep to bring it ashore. It remained more than a mile from the coast while the Pilgrims came by boat to Clark’s Island in Duxbury Bay, not Plymouth Harbor, where the Rock still stands “under a pompous temple in the best 1895 beaux arts manner …” Hodgson says.
The small oval boulder was split in two when it was moved in 1774. Its “legend can be traced back only to the memory of a certain John Faunce,” a Plymouth congregation elder who identified the rock in 1741, when he was in his 90s, said Hodgson.

Better red than …

Over time, the story of the Pilgrims has been imbued with patriotic notions of  independence and rugged individualism. Notwithstanding the pious proclamations of Washington and Lincoln, and the rich poetry of Whitman, however, the Pilgrims were not Americans in the modern sense. They were loyal subjects of the king who wanted to rid themselves of the Church of England, but not of their English nationality.
And in contrast to the later image of New Englanders as fiercely self-sufficient Yankee capitalists, the Pilgrims were, at first, communists. Like the early Christians, they held their property in common and provided “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” — which may have been necessary for their survival.
The Pilgrims leaders’ attitude toward property is reflected in a sermon preached by Robert Cushman on Dec. 21, 1621 on the text from First Corinthians 10:24: “Let no man seek his own: But every man another’s wealth.”
But communism didn’t work any better in the 17th century than it did in the 20th, and it wasn’t until the leaders allowed each family to own its own property and provide for its own needs that the colony began to prosper, according to Hodgson.

Invention of tradition

Like Parson Weems’ tale of the young George Washington and his father’s cherry tree, the story of the First Thanksgiving is, Hodgson said, one of the “pious fictions of the American political religion.” It is an example, he noted, of what a group of British historians in the 1980s, called “the invention of tradition.”
While it may be a fiction, however, it is not fraudulent, he said. It is a tale that has been shaped into a “powerful and virtuous symbol.”
“One can deconstruct the idea of Thanksgiving as much as one likes,” Hodgson wrote. “It remains, not a hymn to battle or violence, not a festival of national pride and superiority, but a domestic celebration of gratitude, humility and inclusiveness. These are not qualities for which anyone need apologize.”
Indeed. Whether or not it started out that way, we have transformed Thanksgiving into a celebration of all that is good about America — a country where faith, family and generosity of spirit matter.
It is the best of all holidays.

Randy Patrick is the managing editor of The Winchester Sun. Contact him at rpatrick@winchestersun.com.