The Mother of Thanksgiving

21:38Part 2. One Heart, One Voice. On a farm in Maryland, a group of 22 men, some of them enslaved and some of them not, hide in an attic.

21:57They spend their days reading, writing letters, cleaning their rifles, waiting. Then, on October 16th, 1859, their leader, a white abolitionist named John Brown, gathers them together. He prays with them. Then afterwards, says, Men, get on your arms. We'll proceed to the ferry.

22:36They start a five-mile march towards a Virginia town called Harper's Ferry. They plan to capture the federal armory there and start a massive revolt against slavery.

23:01Within just a couple of hours, John Brown's forces take control of two bridges, the armory and a rifle factory. They take slave owners and armory employees hostage. I have possession now of the United States Armory. And if the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood. Eventually, U.S. Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee arrive. Brown's men are surrounded.

23:41The Marines storm the armory. If you die, you die in a good cause. Several of John Brown's men are killed, including his own son. Those who haven't escaped are captured. Fighting for liberty. John Brown is tried and later hanged. If you must die, die like a man.

24:13even though john brown's raid failed it caused shockwaves in virginia and beyond it amplified the tension between north and south over the question of slavery the following year the country would elect abraham lincoln and soon southern states would start to secede.

24:43If every state should join in Union Thanksgiving on the 24th of this month, would it not be a renewed pledge of love and loyalty to the Constitution of the United States? The same year of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, as the country was barreling towards Civil War. Sarah Josepha Hale had been using her powerful pulpit as editor of one of the country's most read magazines, Godey's Ladies Book, reaching around a million readers from north to south, arguing that Thanksgiving could unite the country. The flag of our country now numbers 32 stars on its crown of blue, and some half-dozen or more additional starlets are shining out of the depths of our wilderness continent.

25:34Sarah Josepha Hale had been on a mission to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. Before the Civil War, it was celebrated by most states across the country. But when and if it was celebrated was decided by the governors of each state. At first, she thought if she could just get the governors all to agree on a date, that would be good enough.

26:00So for years leading up to the Civil War, Godey's Ladies Book ran editorials and recipes and stories about Thanksgiving. And she was making the argument that an annual holiday would be good for everyone. The poor. Let us consecrate the day to benevolence of action by sending good gifts to the poor. The depressed. Wasting despondency cripples the feeble limbs. Prisoners. Even the poor prisoner is cheered in his solitary cell. But she knew the audience of a woman's magazine wouldn't be enough. She had to convince the men in power. She had a huge network and she would handwrite personal letters to governors.

26:50Will you use the influence of your high official status? Congressman. To establish the last Thursday in November. Members of the Senate. As the annual American Thanksgiving. Trying to get their support for her idea of a national holiday. And she did have success. She got many of the governors to agree on a given date, but not all of them. So then she thought that the better idea would be to get the president to proclaim a national day of Thanksgiving. So she made her case again and again. And at first, the response from lawmakers was... We love this idea. But... No, the Constitution won't let us do it.

27:37There were two main objections. They believed it wasn't a federal responsibility. It was a state responsibility. And second, that it was a religious matter. Thanksgiving Day was a religious holiday. And therefore, the president needs to stay out of it. But remember, this was happening during the build-up to the Civil War. So, of course, Thanksgiving did become political.

28:04This theatrical national claptrap of Thanksgiving has aided other causes in setting thousands of pulpits to preaching Christian politics instead of humbly letting the carnal kingdom alone. The Southern governor of Virginia, Henry Wise, wrote back to Sarah Josepha Hale in 1856 after receiving one of her letters about making Thanksgiving a national holiday. And he replied saying that basically it was a damn Yankee holiday, that you had preachers in the North preaching abolitionism, which was political. Some Southerners feared that Thanksgiving could be a Trojan horse for abolitionism. I mean, there were examples of ministers in New England preaching abolitionist messages.

28:57That Virginia governor was correct that the anti-slavery movement was very closely connected to religion. Needless to say, Virginia didn't celebrate Thanksgiving that year. But Sarah Josepha Hale didn't necessarily believe Thanksgiving would end slavery. She thought it could prevent a civil war. Such social rejoicings 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. Hale seemed to genuinely believe that if Americans could just get together on Thanksgiving and get back in touch with the founding values of this country, they could resolve their differences.

29:44But despite all her efforts, Thanksgiving didn't become a national holiday. And beginning in 1860, 11 southern states seceded. The Confederacy formed. The Civil War began.

30:191863 was a hard year for Abraham Lincoln. Tens of thousands of people had already died in the Civil War. The Confederate Army had notched a couple of major victories. And in June of that year, the Confederate General Robert E. Lee began invading the Union State of Pennsylvania.

30:46One battle would help turn the tide of the war. Over the course of three days in July, tens of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers fought on a field in Pennsylvania, near a town called Gettysburg. There were more than 50 ,000 casualties. But in the end, the Union beat the Confederate army back, and they retreated to the South, where they would lose the war. Gettysburg was considered a major turning point and victory for the North. And this is where Sarah Josepha Hale comes back in our story. So finally, in 1863, she wrote to Lincoln. Sir, permit me, as editress of the lady's book, to request a few minutes of your precious time.

31:39Just five days after reading Hale's letter, Lincoln agreed and issued a proclamation, making Thanksgiving a national holiday.

31:55I 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. Abraham Lincoln. He asked Americans to come together with one heart and one voice. And he was again talking about Northerners and Southerners stopping the war and moving toward peace and reunification. Thanksgiving would be celebrated in local hospitals where soldiers were recovering from their wounds. They would be served turkey, goose, ham, chicken pie, cranberry sauce, and sweet potatoes.

32:45It energized people in the North. It was the message, come on, we just have to keep at it. We're going to win this war. And the Union did win. In 1865, the Confederates surrendered and Lincoln was assassinated. It was Lincoln's decision in 1863 that started the tradition of a national Thanksgiving that continues to this day. Sarah Josepha Hale's years of persistence had paid off. Let us see to it that on this one day there shall be no family or individual within the compass of our means to help who shall not have some portion prepared and some reason to join in the general Thanksgiving. Coming up, after the Thanksgiving holiday is established, the Thanksgiving myth takes hold.

33:47Hello, I am Zico, and I am from Rockville, Maryland, and you are listening to ThruLine from NPR.

34:00Part 3. The Thanksgiving Myth.

34:24I do not arise to spread before you the fame of a noted warrior. There are many who are said to be honorable warriors, who think it no crime to wreck their vengeance upon whole nations and communities, until the fields are covered with blood and and the river is turned into purple fountains. While a loud response is heard floating through the air from the 10 ,000 Indian children and orphans who are left to mourn the honorable acts of a few civilized men.

34:59William Apis lifts his eyes up from his speech. More than a thousand auditorium seats rise in a circle around him. Apis stares into the audience. A sea of white northerners stares back. It's 1836, 25 years before the start of the Civil War, more than two centuries after the Wampanoag leader, Usa Mequin, and the pilgrims in Plymouth shared a meal and signed a peace treaty. And William Apis, a Pequot minister and orator, is spelling out for a theater full of Bostonians what happened next. How the pilgrims came to the Wampanoags for help. How the Wampanoags gave them venison and sold them corn. And for all this, they were denounced as being savages by those who received all these acts of kindness.

35:53Northeasterners know about the cruelties happening against Native Americans in other parts of the country. The trail of tears. The violence on the Great Plains. But they aren't used to seeing themselves as part of the problem. The epicenter for criticism of the United States' violent approach to subjugating Native people is New England. This is historian David Silverman. If you want a critique of the evils of the United States in the 19th century, it is almost always going to come out of Boston. In the 19th century, the criticism of U.S. Indian affairs coming out of New England is very, very sharp.

36:36As part of that positioning, New Englanders style their region as free of the national sins of violent Indian affairs and slavery, neither of which is true. As early as 1769, New Englanders began celebrating what they called Forefather's Day on December 22nd, the anniversary of the day the Pilgrims made landfall at Plymouth Rock. They were honoring what New Englanders were building up as a foundational moment in the American story. But already in 1836, William Apis was poking holes in that story. Let the children of the pilgrims blush. Let the day be dark. Let it be forgotten in your celebration, in your speeches, and by the burying of the rock that your fathers first put their foot upon.

37:29For the 22nd of December and the 4th of July are days of mourning and not of joy.

37:39You'll notice that Apis does not name-check Thanksgiving. And that's because in 1836, most Americans didn't know about the mythical meeting between the Wampanoags and the pilgrims. They didn't have an image in their head of everyone getting together around a big turkey and holding hands. That story wasn't part of American lore. Yet. When does the element of this sort of friendship and handshaking between the native people and the European settlers emerge as the story of Thanksgiving? In the 1840s, a minister in New England publishes one of the two primary sources that documents that feast between the Wampanoags and the Plymouth colonists.

38:26And to that primary source account, he adds a footnote. And the footnote read, this was the first Thanksgiving. Wow. Now, as far as we can tell up to that point, no one is talking about friendly Indians and pilgrims during celebrations of Thanksgiving in the 1600s, 1700s, or even early 1800s. But with that footnote, the myth starts to grow over time. It then really takes hold in American society after Abraham Lincoln declares Thanksgiving to be a national holiday during the Civil War.

39:07Lincoln's 1863 proclamation meant that Americans got into the habit of celebrating Thanksgiving every year on the same day. But the first national Thanksgivings in the wake of the Civil War were Rocky. Sarah Josepha Hale, as editor of the widely popular Godey's Ladies Book magazine, dedicated a lot of real estate to her Thanksgiving columns, selling Southern women on the holiday. When joining in prayers for the same blessings and in thanksgivings for the same good gifts of the season, can Americans feel otherwise than as brethren whose interests are united, whose aims should be to ennoble their common country, whose lives, liberties, and fortunes are safe only under the same glorious flag.

39:55But while Sarah Josepha Hale kept writing about a holiday that revolved around pie, family, and faith, outside Godey's ladies' book, Thanksgiving was starting to take on a life of its own. The holiday was amassing new spokespeople, and by the late 1800s and early 1900s, those people were increasingly looking to the rediscovered story about the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims for inspiration.

40:34In 1912, a painter named Jean-Léon Jérôme Farris finished one of the most famous works of his career. An oil painting called The First Thanksgiving. The mythologized Thanksgiving. The one most of us were taught in school. Pilgrims and Indians making friends. In the painting, a group of white English settlers stands around a table. To their left, a group of Native Americans are sitting on the ground next to the family dog. They're not wearing traditional Wampanoag clothing, but instead what Ferris imagined they would wear, feather headdresses and decorative beads. An English settler, a woman, holds a tray of food in front of a native man.

41:22He reaches for a loaf of bread. To have Europeans sitting at a table and native people sitting on the ground is designed to accentuate that the English are civilized and that the natives are savage. And that's a basic binary that has shaped white Americans' views of themselves and of indigenous people really for 400 years. By the early 1900s, acting out that fantasy had become part of the curriculum at many schools. There are black and white photos all over from the early 20th century. You know, you'll see the kids in plain feathered headdresses and these pilgrim costumes which have these obscenely large buckles on every conceivable article of clothing.

42:14It's a whitewash of the bloodiness of the ruthlessness of colonialism.

42:29Around the time where this myth that we've been talking about so hard has started to take hold about Thanksgiving, what were the lives of actual descendants of those people from the 1600s, the Wampanoag people? What were their lives like in the early 1900s? I can talk about my family. This is Aquinnah Wampanoag artist and educator Elizabeth James Perry. My great-grandmother was a widow, and so her life was very much about taking care of her family as a sole provider. This was all happening during a period of upheaval for the Wampanoags in Martha's Vineyard. They had persisted despite the U.S. government's aggressive policy of Indian removal in the 1830s, when many Native people were forced off their land and moved west.

43:17But by the 1860s and 70s, the state government in Massachusetts had gotten involved and was dividing up the tribe's land into taxable allotments. That effectively made it much more difficult for people like Elizabeth's great-grandmother to continue to afford living there. But they found ways to make it work. And when you're a tribe for thousands of years, just because some guy goes, oh, you're not, it doesn't mean you stop. You know, it's not a switch. Elizabeth's community passed down their own stories. Stories about their history with white settlers. And also about things that had actually happened to them.

43:57Adventures and misadventures. Funny childhood memories. Unbelievable. Ship locked in ice. Using your crazy gay head navigation skills to walk across the ice because you remember a community in this direction carrying the captain's wife who had to come on the voyage for some odd reason. You know, that's just like, I think the underpinning was, here we are, these survivors, strong senses of humor, full of hope, also holding onto these stories of, hey, you know what? Everybody jokes about us, but we've got some serious skills. That's why we're here today. it wasn't about get a load of this turkey you know it just turkey wasn't new for us cranberries weren't new I don't know what to say New England wasn't new I mean we kind of like yeah I mean we're kind of from here yeah

45:14For many of us, Thanksgiving is a pretty straightforward holiday. It's really fun and easy to enjoy the food, the friends and family, the lazy afternoon watching football. But beneath the surface of all of this is a question about how we choose to remember our history and define ourselves as a country. History is not about trying to make people feel guilty or ashamed, patriotic or unpatriotic. It's designed to capture a complex past in all of its complexity. National celebrations are another kettle of fish. They are designed to cultivate unity. There will never be unity around complex historical subjects.

45:59They're too complex. Whether it is the inaccurate, rosy-colored view of the first Thanksgiving in 1621, or using the day as a vessel for national unity, what we are thankful for is a choice. A choice with consequences. These national holidays, they remind us of what it means to be an American, number one. And then they also give us a chance to celebrate our nation. I should say there are critics of Thanksgiving, people who won't celebrate it because they wrongly think that it is celebrating the destruction of Native culture. I can't disagree with that more strongly. I think it is a time of celebration of people of different cultures coming together.

46:55I think it's true that most adults don't give pilgrims and Indians much of a thought. But that's part of the point. The point is that we're indoctrinated with this idea as children, and then we're never asked to revisit it as we become more mature and capable of complex thought. I would prefer to see Thanksgiving continue without invoking pilgrims and Indians at all. I don't trust any ritual to capture complexities of any sort, never mind violent complexities that strike at the heart of the desire to have the United States be a beacon of light in the world. That is asking too much.

47:59As for Sarah Josepha Hale, she had her mind made up that Thanksgiving could bring the U.S. together. And she lived long enough to see it take hold. Hale spent the rest of her life making sure Thanksgiving would outlive her. And before she died, in April 1879, she had one last word to say about Thanksgiving and her own legacy in the magazine she dedicated much of her life to. This idea was very near to my heart, for I believe that this celebration would be a bond of union throughout our country, as well as a source of happiness in the homes of the people.

48:57That's it for this week's show. I'm Randab Dufetaf. I'm Ramteen Adabloui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and... Sarah Wyman. Devin Kadiyama. Casey Miner.

49:20Thank you to Nina Buchowski, Puneet Matiwala, Johannes Durgey, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. Voice over work in this episode was done by Sarah Wyman, Ryan Escalas, Devin Katiyama, Mark Smith, and Sam Yellowhorse Kessler. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. It was mixed by Maggie Luthar. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And we've got a favor to ask. We know there are a lot of great NPR shows out there. And we all know who's the best. Wink, wink. NPR is celebrating the best podcast of the year.

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