PETER: I thought it was very, very generous of Ed to introduce the notion of tradition.
ED: I was so disappointed. I was settling in for a really nice fight.
PETER: I thought that was the generous, the wise, and the dignified . . .
ED: Everyone seems surprised that I would take the wise and dignified path.
[laughter]
BRIAN: Surprised and disappointed, Ed.
ED: Well, Brian, if you really want me to provoke, I can rise to that bait, too. I’m going to propose that all of this may not be as straightforward as we’re making it out to be. If it’s only about repetition, then New England’s claim on Thanksgiving Day is a little shaky, too. Because, as far as I understand, not being a historian of New England, it’s not like those Puritans in 1621 kicked off a tradition that their proud New England descendants, said “Yes, let’s honor the Puritans and the Indians doing lunch in an unbroken tradition year after year”. It wasn’t until 1863 that the fourth Thursday of the month was declared a day of National Thanksgiving by the then President.
PETER: That would be Abraham Lincoln.
ED: That’s right, Peter. That’s a good command of my century. Up until then, the various states did have their own official days of Thanksgiving, but they were scattered around here and there, in the various fall months.
PETER: During the Revolution, certain days were set aside to thank God for guidance on the battlefield. George Washington even proclaimed days of Thanksgiving as President.
ED: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re always trying to emphasize that other war was interesting. I’m talking about that other war, the Civil War. It was then that Americans started to celebrate Thanksgiving the way we do now: with pies, potatoes, turkey, and more pies, cranberry sauce, and more turkey, and more pies, and this kind of celebration, it’s largely the work of one woman, a magazine editor named Sarah Hale. She was a widow from New England. In 1820, she became the editor of Godey’s Ladies Book. Despite it’s title, which is pretty ugly, was a hugely popular magazine, and for more than 30 years, she wouldn’t let up. She published editorials, stories and letter writing campaigns, all to convince her readers in the great cause, that ultimately the government would declare Thanksgiving, as the holiday that this young nation needed the most.
“Seventy years ago, there were only about 3 millions of people under our flag. Now it waves its protecting folds from the Atlantic to the Pacific and nearly 30 millions of souls are enjoying it’s blessings. If 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, which guarantees peace, prosperity, progress and perpetuity to our great republic”
ANNE BLUE WILLS: I think she really did believe that she was providing a kind of missing puzzle piece to the nation by recommending the celebration of this festival.
ED: That’s Anne Blue Wills, a religion scholar at Davidson College, who’s written a lot about Sarah Hale. She told me if we want to understand why we do what we do on Thanksgiving, we should forget about the Pilgrims, and look instead at what was going on 200 years later in Sarah Hale’s America.
ANNE BLUE WILLS: She was coming into this position of editing this magazine at a moment when things are still kind of unsettled in the young republic.
ED: When are we talking about?
ANNE BLUE WILLS: This is 1827 when she becomes the editor. There’s a lot of growth, there’s a lot of change, and she was one of the leaders in formulating a pretty strong notion of what women in this new republic were to do, and the way she described it was women are the virtuous heart of the nation, and women preside over the home, and the home is where the American male, who has to go out into the world and strive and make his way and earn a living, he can come home at the end of the day, and be cleansed by his pure and domestic wife from all of the nasty bargains that he’s had to make during the day. Thanksgiving for Hale fits into this gender division of work.
ED: So what you’re saying . . . you’re kind of blowing my mind, here, because what you’re saying is that this didn’t just sort of naturally grow up, it wasn’t just sort of “Hey, look at all these turkeys and all this pie we could eat”, but instead was a very self-conscious strategy to submit the place of women in the household and the society, and at the same time, celebrate America.
ANNE BLUE WILLS: And for her, the patriot fathers who, of course she’s thinking New England context, she’s thinking a kind of cooperation, reinforcement of civil and religious authority, those powers working together to build up a society. I think she wanted to see that kind of cohesion still in the first part of the 19th century.
ED: I take it she didn’t have witches in her vision, right?
ANNE BLUE WILLS: There were no witches, but she did have serious concerns about certain influences in her era. One of her concerns was a growing population of Roman Catholic immigrants from Europe, and she felt like you could incorporate immigrants into the celebration of Thanksgiving, and really teach them what it meant to be an American, and for her, what it meant to be an American was to be a Protestant Christian. There are stories in Godey’s that tell the tale of Catholics who hadn’t celebrated Thanksgiving before, but they get visited by a distant relative who comes out to the country and teaches them how to do Thanksgiving, and they think this is such a wonderful thing. I’m at least going to convert to Thanksgiving, and then it leaves open the possibility that, well they’re on their way.
ED: So was she worried about not only Catholics, but urban growth and industrialization. So this is very much a backward looking, very intentionally invented to be nostalgic.
ANNE BLUE WILLS: So she wants people to go out into the country and that was one of her prescriptions for Thanksgiving is that you go home and in a moment where increasingly people were living away from their birth place, this was . . .
ED: So she wanted to go over the river and through the woods . . .
ANNE BLUE WILLS: She did. She really wanted people to experience the rural purity and natural beauty and blessing of the country. So you would have a roasted bird, or you would have a chicken pie, or you would have gourds and squash, and things that, to her, represented harvest bounty, and you would have a lot of it.
ED: And so she’s in many ways ahead of her time, this sort of a localist strategies of our own time.
ANNE BLUE WILLS: Kind of, except that she wanted everybody to be a New England localist. She wanted everybody everywhere to pretend like they were enjoying a Thanksgiving harvest feast in New England.
ED: Did she have a regional proponent to this. Did she want this to be adopted by the South, which I’m sure, did not live up to her standards.
ANNE BLUE WILLS: She wants this holiday to be celebrated everywhere. It becomes particularly acute mid-century when things are falling apart. There are stories in Godey’s and these successor publications, like Ladies Home Journal at the end of the 19th century. There are stories that are focused on the Southern experience of Thanksgiving, and again, it’s a lot like the stories of the Catholic experience of Thanksgiving, that once you try it, you can’t have just one Thanksgiving, you’re going to want to do it every year. She saw it as a way of not only, as I said before, integrating women into the national calendar, but integrating Southerners into the national calendar.
ED: So, Anne, with all this creation of Thanksgiving in the early 19th century, what would the pilgrims actually think of that holiday if they had been able to drop in on Sarah Hale’s house?
ANNE BLUE WILLS: Oh, well, I think they would have been overwhelmed with the bounty and I guess the word “fussiness” is in my head. There’s a lot of, in her instructions to her readers in the magazine, there’s a lot of detail about how to decorate and time tables for preparation, but probably the strangest thing would be that they would have seen this as a kind of presumptive act to have a day, once a year, where you were thankful. As good Calvinists, they didn’t want to appear presumptuous about God’s mercy, and so, they kind of took everything day by day, and if there seemed to be an occasion for Thanksgiving, they would declare a day of Thanksgiving; and if there seemed to be a day when they needed to take stock, they would declare a day of fasting and repentance. Their anthropology was such, the theology was such that God did whatever God did out of just grace and mercy. God didn’t do anything on behalf of humans because humans deserved it. Humans really didn’t deserve much of anything.
ED: So thanking God was a really pretty pretentious thing to do because he wasn’t doing it for you anyway, right?
ANNE BLUE WILLS: Well, I don’t think they would have begrudged her gratitude. They would have said that, “Yes, exactly, you should be grateful”, but you should also be attuned to the fact that God not only cares for you and lifts you up for God’s own purposes, but God can punish you and chasten you again for God’s own purposes. So just to focus on the Thanksgiving part without having maybe another day that was to be the national day of repentance, would have struck them as funny. Not in a haha way, but in an odd, probably, sinful way.
ED: Maybe blasphemous.
ANNE BLUE WILLS: Yes.
ED: So you’re willing to say that the pilgrims. . .
ANNE BLUE WILLS: Yes, blasphemous.
ED: That’s a pretty radical statement, that’s the kind we like to have here on BackStory. So, I’m very grateful for you joining us here today.
ANNE BLUE WILLS: Well, it’s been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.
ED: Anne Blue Wills is an assistant professor of religion at Davidson College. You can find her article about Sarah Hale on our website… as well as an audio slide show we made that features images of Hale and her magazine. It’s all at backstoryradio dot org.
Pretty interesting, huh, guys?
BRIAN: That was great. Here’s my thought: Even though these gigantic blockbuster holidays are all about the things that we were not, right, so we’re totally divided, we’re fighting a Civil War, so we come up with a holiday that kind of imposes this New England fantasy of sorts on the entire nation, or at least, presumes that the entire nation is one thing.
PETER: Brian, it seems to me the important thing is that this is a soft and domesticated version of the harder talk that came from many preachers in the north about how the Constitution needed to be amended so that there’d be a provision that this was a Christian nation inserted in the Constitution under Jesus Christ, and Lincoln resisted that. His formulations mitigated it, domesticated it, and I think hit the proper object was to evoke what was at stake for all Americans, and if you’re going to give thanks, it would be for the very possibility of thanks in the future. That is, having holidays like this.
ED: It’s a perfect American holiday, because it’s civil religion, it’s the idea of religion without any specific focus of it, right. He could not, of course, foresee just the millions and millions of immigrants who would be coming from so many places all over the world, but to have devised a holiday in which everybody could feel included.
PETER: Including all those foreigners who are fighting for the Union at that very moment.
ED: That right, but I’m still curious about something: What was the original Thanksgiving like. If it’s not Sarah Hale’s fantasy, what’s this deal with Squanto and the Wamponoag Indians, the big festival. Was that a fantasy too?
PETER: Well, no, there’s some basis for it, but think about it as a harvest festival, which is very traditional; don’t think about it as Thanksgiving.