Reflections on Thanksgiving (2023)
I loved Thanksgiving growing up. I loved the time away from school, the beautiful four-day weekend. I loved being with my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. I loved some of the best food of the year. I loved the time of year. I loved making decorations for it at school. The Pilgrims story appealed to me and gave the time a history that somehow belonged to it. Somehow it also connected me to “America” and contributed to grounding me, giving me roots as an “American.” But the deepest connection was to my family.
Later as a student I was interested in the Puritans as a culture, and envied them in a way their fundamentalism, the coherence of their worldview – they had answers to the question “Why?” that few of us today have. I confess I admired their many real virtues. I still do. I read the speeches and letters of Lincoln, whom I greatly admired not only for getting us through the Civil War and freeing the slaves but also for proclaiming Thanksgiving a national holiday. I somehow connected my love of Lincoln to my love of Jefferson – the value of human equality, of agrarianism, of a republic based on a broad distribution of wealth and land ownership. This, of course, both connected to westward expansion, though I was only vaguely aware of this connection. The problem with all these figures was a kind of meaning-blindness to those (wrongly) conceived of as essentially unlike themselves.
What I was looking for was roots. Christianity did not go deep enough in me to give me this sense of belonging without the nationalist narrative accompanying it. I viewed the texts of the founders and Lincoln almost as scripture; people like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Lincoln as national saints. I remember going to the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials as a boy and it felt like being in church. The whole postwar experience of being the good guys, first against Nazi Germany – bad guys to be sure, even though there were many good Germans who also suffered under that regime – and then against Communism. It was like living in a rather beautiful myth in which my love of family was integrated with a love of a political community. I am sure this lovely myth was not only part of me. I think I strongly disliked the radicals of the 60’s for trying to trash that part of my world.
During my first semester at college, I discovered another saint – Socrates. It was not so much the philosophy or the arguments, but the person Socrates and his devotion to truth. “The unexamined life is unworthy of a human being.” That struck a deep chord in me. As did later this passage of the young Friedrich Nietzsche: “Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.” Two souls lived within my breast: one strove for peace of soul and happiness – and wanted to stay at all costs in that uplifting and comforting mythical world; the other could only stay in that world if it were true. There is something else I might have learned from my religion, but which I did learn from Plato and Socrates: that I loved the Good, and that part of the Good was the search for truth wherever it leads.
Not that I have been very good at it. The desire for peace of soul and happiness is strong in me. I escape whenever I can into fictional worlds where I can experience this; The Lord of the Rings, for example. But the Lord knows I have struggled for truth in history, even in the end at the cost of that mythical world that gave my life a lot of the meaning it had. And though the Lord knows how hard I tried to keep truth away from that myth, and was actually brilliant at doing so, eventually I had to face it. It was a complicated process, but I will only list the truths that drove me out of my little constructed, mythological paradise – which was quite real to me.
Note: I am not interesting in judging people who lived in a different time and place. I probably wouldn't have been different. We also have moral blinders, just different ones. I am interested in how the past becomes myth in the service of a present narrative that blinds people to who we are and where we should be going - of to truthful disagreements about these question.
A Celebration of National Unity
It was a unity that was built on the exclusion of the native peoples - not so much as a conscious policy; it was so taken-for-granted, so deeply ingrained that "they" were not "us", and that there could be no community between us unless they "assimilated," that it did not need to be said or defended, no more than giving children names rather than numbers needs to be defended.
The connection between Thanksgiving as an agrarian celebration of the harvest and the Pilgrims was largely the imaginative child of one Sarah Josepha Hale, a prominent American writer and editor. Hale, author of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb," was an advocate for a national day of Thanksgiving to help unite the country during the Civil War. She wrote editorials and letters to political leaders, including President Abraham Lincoln, urging them to support the idea of a national Thanksgiving. In 1863, President Lincoln responded to Hale's request and issued a proclamation officially designating the last Thursday of November as a national day of thanksgiving. This proclamation acknowledged the blessings of the past year, even during the challenging times of the Civil War, and encouraged Americans to give thanks for their many blessings. Hale had long been fascinated with the Pilgrims' story and saw it as a foundational narrative that embodied the spirit of gratitude and unity. She often wrote about the Pilgrims and their supposed "First Thanksgiving" in her efforts to promote the holiday. Thus a beautiful vision replaced history, a vision of harmony between the new settlers (migrants really) and the people whose homeland they settled on – the natives teaching the settlers how to survive, the settlers helping the natives with their superior craft, celebrating together to give thanks to God. Her influence, combined with President Lincoln's proclamation, contributed to the establishment of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.
I don’t want to offer a detailed history of the Pilgrims – or “separatists” as they thought of themselves – and their dealings with the Pequot branch of the Wampanoag, the people who were there long before they arrived. I will only mention some background and highlights that underpin my judgment here.
Ideological Preparation in Christian Nationalism
The Puritans were fanatically anti-Catholic, but one Papal degree was so obvious that it occasioned no disagreement from the protestants – the Papal Bull of 1452 proclaiming what became known as the doctrine of discovery, authorizing Christian kingdoms to “…invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans…to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery and to take away all their possessions and property.” King James I, head of the Church of England, issued the New England Charter (1620):
We have been further given certainly to knowe, that within these late Yeares there hath by God's Visitation reigned a wonderfull Plague, together with many horrible Slaugthers, and Murthers, committed amoungst the Sauages and brutish People there, heertofore inhabiting, in a Manner to the utter Destruction, Deuastacion, and Depopulacion of that whole Territorye, so that there is not left for many Leagues together in a Manner, any that doe claime or challenge any Kind of Interests therein, nor any other Superiour Lord or Souveraigne to make Claime "hereunto, whereby We in our Judgment are persuaded and satisfied that the appointed Time is come in which Almighty God in his great Goodness and Bountie towards Us and our People, hath thought fitt and determined, that those large and goodly Territoryes, deserted as it were by their naturall Inhabitants, should be possessed and enjoyed by such of our Subjects and People as heertofore have and hereafter shall by his Mercie and Favour, and by his Powerfull Arme, be directed and conducted thither.
As a child, I always got the feeling that Plymouth Rock and the surrounding area was empty and wild. The Pilgrims tamed it, civilized it. It was inhabited of course. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop declared in good Lockean fashion that the land was legally a “vacuum” because the Indians had not “subdued” the land. The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” They had God on their side, of course. The Pequot War (1636) was fought largely by massacres – massacres (together with smallpox) can destroy the enemies will to fight with less risk than open battle, and the Puritans were not professional soldiers. The Indians were superior woodsmen so the settlers resorted to deception as well.
The ideology of “the promised land” in the Old Testament served as the conceptual paradigm for the Pilgrims (and others). The land covenant was stated in Deuteronomy 30:
See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; In that I command thee this day to love the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that thou mayest live and multiply: and the LORD thy God shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest to possess it. But if thine heart turn away, so that thou wilt not hear, but shalt be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them; I denounce unto you this day, that ye shall surely perish, and that ye shall not prolong your days upon the land, whither thou passest over Jordan to go to possess it.
In appropriating this narrative, John Winthrop in his famous “City on the Hill” sermon – taken from Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount”, which I think did not call for the genocide of one’s constructed enemies – cites this passage, making one key alteration. In Winthrop’s sermon, those entering the promised land do not pass over a river but a “vast sea” (the Atlantic Ocean).
The promised land was, moreover, not empty. How to think about the native population? Deuteronomy was clear on that:
But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee: That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the LORD your God.
If God approves of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and our faith requires us to follow blindly any command of God, and if one believes as did these Calvinists that Good was nothing but what God wills – such that if God willed us to hate our fellow man that would be good – then no pangs of conscience need arise from the cruel events that followed.
Granted: if you look at history, you can find evidence of everything. You can find evidence of people who were vicious, manipulative, and genocidal, and you can find people who dealt respectfully with natives. There are examples where Puritans and Indian people got along – they had to get along because they both needed each other. It was certainly not a naive or simple people welcoming the English with open arms. As Francis Jennings in The Invasion of America, admittedly a somewhat polemical historian, portrays it: as the English presence in New England became more established, they were less reliant on Native American people and less respectful of them: for example, dispossessing them through the manipulation of land deeds. Looking at their actions in the Pequot War and King Philip’s War, there’s a lot of evidence to support the perspective that when the Puritans had to power to take American Indian lands, they did so with utter ruthlessness. The ripe fruit of this tree in the end was clear: genocide and ethnic cleansing. Same result wherever you look. Promised lands for one side mean genocide for the other. After one massacre the theologian Dr. Cotton Mather wrote: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.” Mostly women and children. After such victorious massacres, the Puritans were want to celebrate “Thanksgiving,” leading to the view popular among many native Americans today that such occasions were the original “Thanksgiving.” Whether or not this is true, I can’t judge, but it does seem to capture what was in the hearts of many Puritans, as expressed by Mather.
No doubt there were atrocities on both sides. The logic of massacre was preferred to ruinous open battle. The land was scarce and the logic of a culture based on wealth in property could not coexist with a culture based on leaving the land unsubdued. Add to that religious bigotry of a sort we cannot really imagine today. In the end, of the estimated 10 million native habitants only about 1 million remained, and they dwindled rapidly. Today there are about 3000 Pequot people, up from 21 in 1972.
I don’t pretend to have done a history here. I have merely given the crude sketch of that history to point to it. I have done so to contrast it to the beautiful myth I grew up with and that enriched my Thanksgivings.
The Subtext of Manifest Destiny in Thanksgiving
The Thanksgiving myth that Sarah Josepha Hale made popular did not restrict itself to an idealized version of the Pilgrims. It more or less explicitly was part of the Manifest Destiny version of American history. I recall being moved by songs like “My Country Tis of Thee” (1832):
My country, 'tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty,
of thee I sing:
land where my fathers died,
land of the pilgrims' pride,
from every mountainside
let freedom ring!
And “America the Beautiful” (1892):
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
The Pilgrims, it is clear to me now, didn’t care about religious freedom. They came here to separate themselves from the religious situation in Great Britain during the reign of King James, and to establish a theocracy that would make the Ayatollahs of Iran proud. Pike’s Peak, up until about the time Katherine Bates wrote the lyrics, was called “Sun Mountain” by the Ute people that lived there, though it also played an important role in the culture of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and other peoples. Bates could enjoy the inspiring view from Pike’s Peak since the several Ute branches had been destroyed or consolidated as they were pushed off their wide-ranging lands into reservations in the Uintah Basin of eastern Utah. “Confirm thy soul in self-control” indeed! It takes away part of my childhood and part of my relation to my country to know this – not at all pleasant the feeling that all this I once thought of as my homeland was someone’s else’s homeland and they were simply killed or removed from it.
Manifest Destiny – the idea that white Americans were divinely ordained to settle the entire continent of North America – is a promised land doctrine. The ideology of Manifest Destiny inspired a variety of measures designed to remove or destroy the native population. As a part of this was the idea that the native populations – lacking the full capacity to relate meaningfully with the land and other human beings, as the racist view went – had no home on the land but like animals merely occupied it. This was enshrined in constitutional law in 1823, with Judge Marshall writing the opinion. Marshall focuses on the manner in which each European power took land from the indigenous occupants. Synthesizing the law of colonizing powers, Marshall traces the outlines of the "discovery doctrine"—namely, that a European power gains radical title (also known as sovereignty) to the land it discovers. As a corollary, the "discovering" power gains the exclusive right to extinguish the "right of occupancy" of the Indigenous occupants, which otherwise survived the assumption of sovereignty. This was the legal entitlement to dispossession and Manifest Destiny. (There were other cases that elaborated on this decision and expanded it.)
When I was a boy we went to the Smoky Mountains on vacation. There was a certain tourist attraction, a train ride with a steam locomotive. While we were on the train, the train was attacked by wild Indians – part of the fun. Realistic wood and mettle rifles were handed out and we shot at the Indians through the open windows. It was exciting. Then an Indian boarded the train and entered our compartment with a raised tomahawk. I was terrified! I don’t remember anything after that. That was in the late 1960’s. That’s how I and my culture viewed the natives. No need to feel guilty that the Cherokee – whose homeland we were in – were forcibly removed and marched to Oklahoma on that “Trail of Tears”. In fact, I am sure that no one on that train had ever heard of the Trail of Tears.
Myth and History
What I am trying to reflect on here is the Thanksgiving myth that I found so pleasing and what really happened – and how that should affect the meaning of the myth and indeed Thanksgiving. Over time, the Pilgrims' story became ingrained in the American Thanksgiving tradition – and blended in with the story of Manifest Destiny. Part of what we are to be thankful for is that God gave us (white folk) this whole continent to tame, to make a garden of. Through education, literature, and popular culture, the narrative of the Pilgrims and Native Americans coming together for a harvest feast has become a central theme associated with the holiday – and is seen as the beginning of the receiving of the gift of the whole continent, “from sea to shining sea.” While the historical accuracy of certain details may be debated, the story of the Pilgrims has become a myth and a symbol of gratitude, community, and the coming together of diverse groups in the American Thanksgiving tradition.
At this point, I hear the cry: more WOKE history trying to get people to hate America or expressing a masochistic or narcissistic self-hatred of one’s own people. I get that response. I loved Thanksgiving. It rooted me. It connected my love of family with my love of my country and the land. Nor am I interested in judging people who lived long ago. I am interesting in truth and the present.
History and myth make bad bedfellows. Historians who prop up myths are mythmakers (or propagandists) and not historians. Sometimes historical portrayals are indeed myths, designed not to understand but to comfort, console, make happy, and establish a pleasing identity. Since it is so terrifying to be an individual and, more positively, since we all need roots, the instinct to identify yourself with some self-gratifying, sentimentalized version of history is powerful.
Nietzsche wrote as a young student: if you seek peace of soul and happiness, believe; if you seek truth, inquire. Many people despair of truth. Truth is difficult in history: we can’t take a train back into the past to compare our portrayals to what really happened. The nihilism implied in the widespread thought that “history is written by the victors” has a debilitating effect on our minds and spirits, especially when combined with Orwell’s understanding of totalitarianism: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." These discussions degenerate into accepting the version of history that props up whichever side you are on, in despair of the truth. This contributes to history being a mere propaganda tool in a war to prove that one is righteous and the other is corrupt. So yes, this history I am considering here is used for the more or less conscious purpose of making people hate America – their idea of America – and feel guilty. People react against that by romanticizing history into myth.
But if you love something enough, you cannot be content with propaganda or myth. If I betray my wife and keep it secret from her in order to maintain what is now an illusion of a perfect marriage, I become complicit in myth-making of a sort. I have become like the director of the Truman Show (the movie) and my wife like Truman. Perhaps I tell myself that I maintain the illusion to keep her “happy.” But I know the truth, know that she is objectively not happy. And know that I am largely an illusion to her. What does love require? If I love her, I will tell her the truth. I will make our marriage real. We will suffer together. But after the betrayal, this is the only way to reconcile and move forward. Living a lie is a form of death. And the same reasoning applies to the love of country.
Or imagine the victim of a rape – say a slave raped by a master who was well-respected in the white community. She would be in a situation in which no one of the dominant class believed her, and wouldn’t care much even if they did. This denial of truth compounds the violence and evil of the rape exponentially. The same if one part of a society has been violated by the other, and in the official narrative that violence is not acknowledged at all and/or is demeaned – that group has been made invisible, and excluded from the nation.
And as we see today, truth in history is not really more difficult than truth in the present. Forty percent of the country believes the most wicked lies of Trump rather than critically question the roots of their passion, of their ‘identity,’ which is typically constructed on the hatred of some other ‘identity.’ If you love your country, you must love truth. Allowing your country to wallow in delusions of greatness and moral purity is not an expression of love. You must understand, unsentimentally, impersonally almost, history. Truth and truth alone brings all people together, makes the descendants of people – not saints, not noble savages, but imperfect people like you and me – visible. Makes us visible and real as a country. Makes us able to think and act with lucidity about the consequences. Grounds a common memory on which alone community can be based. No more lies grounding an illusory existence. No more idolatry or consoling myths – more accurately, public rationalizations.
Myth is of course radically different from history. When it becomes religious, myth is something you believe through thick and thin. Your identity depends on it. Without faith in it, your entire self-image crumbles. I know from personal experience that this is painful. Having to suffer the way truth compromised my mythical images of the Pilgrims, of Jefferson, and of Lincoln was like being told that Santa did not exist or losing a false image that I previously had believed was God – the God of American-Christian nationalism.
The White myth of America, however, does not have the same status as, for example, “Jesus died on the cross.” For someone to ask a Christian for evidence or to cite a book of history proving this would be to misunderstand the role this belief plays in the life of a Christian. It is true that I can’t draw a clear line between treating something like Thanksgiving history and the crucifixion of Jesus – to treat something as history is already to demythologize it or to take out of the space for religious belief. But I will say that even in religious terms to understand Thanksgiving as a myth or part of a religion makes an idol of a (white) nation, and so in Christian terms a grave sin. It translates white Americans into God’s chosen people. That might promote a kind of uplifting of the ego, an elevating self-righteousness. It can give meaning to people’s lives and can even inspire great sacrifice (as well as great evil). But all those uplifting feelings are grounded in the sin of idolatry – of self, of an idea of nation. (This is a major source of MAGA’s power. It is largely the content of “Make American Great Again.”)
Conclusion
The myth, as myths often do, expresses a truth in ideal form. That is the way it should have been – not the way it was, but the way it should have been. And so it still has meaning for me. I feel the grief involved in a terrible lost opportunity. The myth is now an occasion for mourning, and there is no way to remove mourning from Thanksgiving now for me. Do I like this? No. Do I want to use this to prop up my Ego my feeling self-righteous and making other people feel guilty? No. I know what gets lost through my mourning. I think of my ancestors celebrating the harvest – which had a real meaning before agribusiness drove the farmers away as surely as the forces of “progress” – capitalism - drove away the natives. Indeed, as Wendell Berry taught, we should see the destruction of the farming communities in the same way we see the destruction of the peoples that were there before the farmers.
What remains besides that is family. I remember my grandparents and parents – indeed all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. I remember the wonderful food. I remember the feeling of belonging and of being loved. I remember the blessings that were always said and the importance of gratitude. But it’s past time to let go of the myth.
