Thanksgiving: Who's on First

Thanksgiving: Who's on First

By Jeremy Lott

Before entering our mandatory food comas this year, we pause to reflect on the curious fact that several historical societies regard the official Plymouth Plantation Thanksgiving story as a bit of Massachusetts pro-Pilgrim propaganda.
These local history buffs are not anti-Thanksgiving -- not even anti-Pilgrim necessarily. They point out that the first of the two feasts, held in October 1621 and then July 1623, was more of a harvest feast than an official cycle of fasting and gorging and thanksgiving to God.
The boosters tend to make these points and then slyly slip it in there that their very own favored Thanksgiving(s) occurred first.
When and where were these tentative turkey days, these rival First Thanksgivings? So glad that you asked...
"The very first Thanksgiving occurred in Virginia." Full marks to the Commonwealth of Virginia's website for not letting Massachusetts have those beloved holiday tourism dollars without a fight.
"Each year," explains VirginiaBot, "visitors are invited to join in the festivities at the Virginia Thanksgiving Festival hosted by Berkeley Plantation, site of the very first Thanksgiving in 1619. Enjoy this day dedicated to history and food, and including house tours of the beloved 1726 Berkeley Plantation manor house."
National Geographic reminds us the Commonwealth may have an even earlier claim. The Jamestown colonists were mightily thankful and held a feast in 1610, "when the arrival of a food-laden ship ended a brutal famine." Yet that still may not be early enough to win the Thanksgiving revisionist no-prize.
In 1607, a short-lived English settlement in Maine made landfall on August 18 and had a Thanksgiving celebration the very next day. Though these colonists had a reputation for being "riffraff and scoundrels," wrote the late Christian Science Monitor columnist John Gould, "when ordered to attend church services, they went."
These men "devoutly took part in a Christian service of thanksgiving, followed by a feast of thanksgiving cooked on the shore. ...The first thanksgiving dinner in the New World was Maine lobster with steamed mussels and boiled dried peas. Some of the men found pearls in the mussels."
"No Indians attended," wrote Gould. He speculated, "Squanto might have come if he'd been invited, as he lived at the Indian village of Pemaquid, just a moccasin step upstream." Instead, he would have to wait a few years for a different Thanksgiving celebration.
Robyn Gioia is the schoolteacher responsible for, "firing the next shot across the Mayflower's bow," according to USA Today. Gioia wrote America's REAL First Thanksgiving: St. Augustine Florida, September 8, 1565, a title which gets us most of the way there, explanation-wise.
"What does REAL mean?" asked reporter Craig Wilson. "Well, [Gioia's] not talking turkey and cranberry sauce. She's talking a Spanish explorer who landed here on September 8, 1565, and celebrated a feast of thanksgiving with Timucua Indians. They dined on bean soup."
Texas Governor Rick Perry has weighed in to the Thanksgiving debate, claiming first-in-nation status for his own state. According to the Texas Legislative Reference Library, "the first Thanksgiving celebration in the United States took place in 1598 near El Paso."
The Library explains that an expedition "led by Spanish explorer Don Juan de Onate journeyed from Mexico and, after months of arduous travel, arrived at the Rio Grande near what is now San Elizario. The exploration party and the indigenous people celebrated their accomplishments with a feast and Catholic ceremonies -- 23 years before the Pilgrims held their famous dinner at Plymouth Rock."
Texas has an even earlier claim that predates Florida's Thanksgiving, which it curiously refuses to press. "In 1541 Spaniard Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and his troops celebrated a 'Thanksgiving' while searching for New World gold in what's now the Texas Panhandle," reports National Geographic.
Robert Malkin is a trolley driver and tour guide in St. Augustine, Florida. He enjoys pointing out the town's storied history, yet he doesn't mention the town's first Thanksgiving, so USA Today asks him about it. "Well, it's very arguable. I also don't think they called it Thanksgiving. You can't even call it Thanksgiving if it's not even English. Thanksgiving is an English word," he says.
That sort of answer raises St. Augustine Historical Society director Susan Parker's hackles. "There's a tradition of diminishing the Catholic presence of our early history," Parker complains.
Parker blames a reflexive "Protestant twist" in American historiography for the fact that Florida, or possibly Texas, are not acknowledged for their first Thanksgivings. They just don't have Mass appeal.
The trolley driver has half a point with his notion of Thanksgiving as an English thing, though it's narrower than that. The Catholic Church had created a calendar chock full of feast days and holy days of obligation. Protestants thought this approach un-Biblical and wasteful and tried to blot most of the holidays off the calendar. Puritans were even anti-Christmas.
Yet people want and need holidays, it turns out. So the Reformers proposed most church holidays be replaced by specially declared days of fasting and days of thanksgiving. Whether this applied to the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving(s) is arguable, but the idea is not, and it played a prominent role in American history.
As general and as president, George Washington called for national days of Thanksgiving to God. According to the Mt. Vernon estate website, President Washington observed the first truly national American Thanksgiving on November 26, 1789 "by attending services at St. Paul's Chapel in New York City," -- the country's temporary capital -- "and by donating beer and food to imprisoned debtors in the city."
In the middle of his country's rancorous Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln looked to George Washington's example. The sixteenth president declared a national and perpetual day of Thanksgiving to God, to be held on the fourth Thursday of November.
In spite of the war, Lincoln observed, the skies had been "healthful" and the fields "fruitful." And to these bounties "which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added," Lincoln argued, "which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God."
In some ways, Lincoln was only recognizing a holiday that many Americans were already celebrating. He had already declared a few local Thanksgivings and folks in much of the country had started writing about and celebrating the First Thanksgiving at Plymouth.
As an added bonus, the story had in it many attractive elements for someone trying to bind the country back together: particularly the Indians and the Pilgrims coming together, putting their great differences aside, sitting down at the table of brotherhood, and rendering themselves temporarily peaceful through gluttony.
In response to pressure from struggling retailers, President Franklin Roosevelt tried to bump Thanksgiving up a week in 1939, to the third Thursday in November. This move, explains About.com, proved wildly unpopular: "Atlantic City's mayor derogatorily called November 23 'Franksgiving.'"
Many people refused to go along. As a result, "The country became split on which Thanksgiving they should observe." Initially, only 23 states followed FDR's lead. This created so many scheduling headaches that Congress eventually rebuffed the president, restoring Lincoln's and Washington's original fourth Thanksgiving in November date.
Most Americans know that every year a president undertakes the cheesy ceremony of pardoning a turkey. What they probably don't know is that he pardons two of them: the official Thanksgiving Turkey and an alternate, in case something should happen to the First Gobbler.
The second turkey represents the vice president. As presidential traditions go, this one is about as harmless and diverting as anything we could ever conceive. Plus it has the potential to take some feathers out of the politicians, by designating as their fowl representatives a couple of turkeys.
Still, it might be best, just this once, to extend the pardoning power to the Vice President. Just imagine watching the speech Joe Biden would deliver if given this august responsibility.
That presidentially pardoned turkey is a goner, sadly.
National Journal recently ran the article, "Soon, President Obama Will Pardon a Thanksgiving Turkey. Then, It Will Die." The Journal pointed out that all eight turkeys Barack Obama had pardoned to date had died. In fact, "Only one turkey pardoned by the president has lived to see a second Thanksgiving."
George W. Bush's turkeys didn't fare better. Bush sent pardoned gobblers to a Virginia farm to live out their days. Asked for comment about the pardonees' longevity, the farmer unsentimentally said "we usually just find 'em and they're dead."
Domestic turkeys "are so fat that without human intervention, [they] would go extinct." The Journal explained that is true because the orotund birds are "physically incapable" of reproducing without human intervention.
The modern Thanksgiving dinner is "remarkably consistent in its elements: the turkey, the stuffing, the sweet potatoes, the cranberry sauce," says Yankee Magazine. In fact, "Barring ethical, health, or religious objections, it is pretty much the same meal for everyone, across latitudes and longitudes, and through the years of their lives. We stick with the basics and simply change the seasonings."
The best argument for a more syncretistic approach to Thanksgiving is the food. Imagine a truly inclusive Thanksgiving with lobster and mussels and bean soup and perhaps some Tex-Mex. It would beat the heck out of most boring American turkey day dinners.
But even a more authentic Pilgrim Thanksgiving would be a major improvement. Yankee says in that alleged First Feast, "venison was a major ingredient, as well as fowl, but that likely included pheasants, geese, and duck" moreso than dread dry turkeys.
Other likely ingredients include onions and herbs, cranberries, currants, watercress, walnuts, chestnuts, beechnuts, sunchokes, shellfish, beans, pumpkins, squashes and corn "served in the form of bread or porridge."
We'd say more on this score but the Pavlovian reflex is threatening to short out the keyboard.
Our neighbor on the 49th has its own Thanksgiving. It's held over a month earlier than the American holiday because weather in late November in the Great White North can make travel treacherous. Who knew?

Jeremy Lott is an editor of Rare and author, most recently, of William F. Buckley.