Pod Insights Throughline The Mother of Thanksgiving About this episode The Thanksgiving story most of us hear is about friendship and unity. And that's what Sarah Josepha Hale had on her mind when she sat down to write a letter to President Lincoln in 1863, deep into the Civil War. Hale had already spent years campaigning for a national day of thanksgiving, using her platform as editor of one the country's most widely-read magazines and writing elected officials to argue that Americans urgently needed a national story. But she'd gotten nowhere – until now.
Five days after reading her letter, Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. At the time, no one was talking about Pilgrims and Native Americans. But that too would change.
Today on the show: a Thanksgiving story you may not have heard, how it happened, and what it leaves out.
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0:24 Rund Abdelfatah? Hey, it's Rund here. Before the show today, we want to take a minute and say hi, if you're a new listener. I host the show with my co-host, Ramtin Arablouei. We have new episodes every Thursday, and in each one, we reopen a story from the past to try to understand something about the present and how we got here. Throughline is an NPR podcast, which means we're nonprofit, independent, public media. You can support us and get sponsor-free versions of every episode, as well as bonus content, by signing up for NPR Plus at plus.npr.org. And sidebar, shout out to our supporters hearing this right now. And that's it.
1:07 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks for being here and hope you enjoy the show.
1:22 Speaker 02 Our good ancestors were wise, even in their mirth. We have standing proof of this in the season they chose for the celebration of our annual festival, the Thanksgiving. The funeral-faced month of November is thus made to wear a garland of joy.
2:07 Speaker 03 Let me tell you a story of Thanksgiving. The traditional one. In 1621, when the English colonists, now known as the Pilgrims, were newcomers to this continent.
2:20 Speaker 04 There was a major feast between the Wampanoags and the English of Plymouth. That's a very real event.
2:29 Speaker 03 The event that's now called the First Thanksgiving.
2:32 Speaker 04 The suggestion is that the two parties got together for this feast out of innate friendship.
2:38 Speaker 05 It's this odd, little, frozen-in-time fantasy moment of folks getting together and eating, but you don't really know why.
2:48 Speaker 03 This is Elizabeth James Perry.
2:50 Speaker 05 I'm a member of the Aquinawampanoag tribe of Gayhead, Martha's Vineyard, and I'm an artist and I'm an exhibit consultant as well.
2:59 Speaker 03 She says that when the English first arrived, they-
3:02 Speaker 05 Were small in number. They were newcomers and they were struggling badly because they weren't necessarily all farmers back where they came from either.
3:12 Speaker 04 All these Englishmen are trying to do is survive. The Wampanoags outnumber them by a factor of at minimum 20 to 1. So the Wampanoags are the bosses here.
3:26 Speaker 03 This is David Silverman.
3:28 Speaker 04 I'm professor of history at George Washington University.
3:32 Speaker 03 And he's also the author of the book.
3:34 Speaker 04 This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoagadians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.
3:41 Speaker 03 David says remembering this meeting is just about friendship and gratitude. Actually-
3:47 Speaker 04 Robs this very real event of all of its historical context.
4:01 Rund Abdelfatah? Now let me tell you another Thanksgiving story. This one happens more than 50 years later. In June of 1675, the indigenous Wampanoag people of what is now southern New England were on the brink of war with the English colonists of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the descendants of those pilgrims. Metacom, a Wampanoag chief, met with Rhode Island's Attorney General.
4:27 Speaker 04 What he said was, "You know, when my father..."
4:31 Rund Abdelfatah? A chief named Usamiquin.
4:33 Speaker 04 "...met your ancestors..."
4:35 Rund Abdelfatah? The Plymouth colonists.
4:37 Speaker 04 "...he was a great man, and you were a little child. And he gave you land to live on, more land than we the Wampanoags have today. He taught you how to plant, he taught you where to fish. But now here we are, 50-plus years later. Now you're the great man, and we're the little child. And you don't treat us with that kind of respect. That's why I'm going to war."
5:17 Speaker 04 Make ready! Present! Fire!
5:37 Speaker 04 The odds are really stacked. A tribe, they top out at 15,000 people. England is 5 million people.
5:51 Rund Abdelfatah? It would come to be known as King Philip's War. The name the English colonists gave the Wampanoag chief, Medecon.
6:00 Rund Abdelfatah? But the English show the Wampanoag and their allies very little respect.
6:05 Speaker 04 Let's be clear, they kill thousands of them.
6:12 Rund Abdelfatah? And enslave many more.
6:14 Speaker 04 And sell them off to the Caribbean and to the Mediterranean.
6:19 Rund Abdelfatah? The war goes on for nearly three years.
6:40 Rund Abdelfatah? And the colonists win.
6:44 Rund Abdelfatah? But a military captain named Benjamin Church isn't finished.
6:50 Speaker 04 He orders the head of King Philip.
6:54 Rund Abdelfatah? Wampanoag chief Medecon.
6:56 Speaker 04 To be decapitated and his head piked outside of Plymouth Colony. And it stays there for 20 years. This is the very site where that feast took place.
7:07 Rund Abdelfatah? The first Thanksgiving in 1621.
7:10 Speaker 04 Afterwards Plymouth and Massachusetts, they hold the Thanksgiving for their victory over the native people.
7:17 Speaker 05 Tribal nations are such a tiny portion of the population. That's not by accident and nobody talks about you, except when there's a butterball on the table.
7:46 Speaker 06 Tomorrow's Thanksgiving.
7:49 Speaker 07 Mmm, turkey and dressing and pie and cake.
7:55 Speaker 07 Turkey or no turkey, we've still got all the freedoms and privileges the pilgrims gave us. And out of those privileges have come a lot of things. Things the pilgrims never even dreamed of.
8:21 Speaker 03 Now, let me tell you a third story of Thanksgiving. One that's very different and that you may have never heard.
8:29 Speaker 07 The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. Vacation is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise.
8:39 Speaker 03 Nearly two centuries after King Philip's War in 1863, a darkness had set over the Union. The Confederate Army was advancing into Pennsylvania, threatening places like Philadelphia and Baltimore.
8:54 Speaker 07 The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.
9:03 Speaker 03 The country was as divided as it had ever been. War and destruction was everywhere.
9:09 Speaker 07 Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. Abraham Lincoln.
9:21 Speaker 03 And in this moment, a woman named Sarah Joseph Hale sent President Abraham Lincoln a letter.
9:33 Speaker 02 Sir, permit me, as editress of the ladies' book, to request a few minutes of your precious time while laying before you a subject of deep interest to myself and, as I trust, even to the President of our republic of some importance. This subject is to have the day of our annual Thanksgiving made a national and fixed Union festival.
10:09 Speaker 03 The reason we celebrate Thanksgiving as we do today is because of this letter from Sarah Josepha Hale. It was her dream, her belief, and our need for a national unifying story to bind us together. But what is that story? How did it come together? And what does it leave out?
10:33 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.
10:35 Speaker 03 And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. On this episode of Throughline from NPR, the mother of Thanksgiving.
10:51 Speaker 03 Hi, my name is Ginny and I'm from Connecticut. And if you want to be more interesting at parties, you should do what I do and listen to Throughline from NPR.
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12:25 Speaker 03 Part one.
12:28 Speaker 03 Hale's Crusade.
12:42 Rund Abdelfatah? Sarah Josepha Hale was born in New Hampshire in 1788, not too far away from where the pilgrims first landed.
12:52 Speaker 05 She was the daughter of Revolutionary War heroes.
12:57 Rund Abdelfatah? At a time when many women couldn't read, Sarah had access to plenty of education.
13:03 Speaker 05 Thanks to a mother who homeschooled her and a brother who went off to Dartmouth and then came home and taught her everything he knew.
13:11 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Melanie Kirkpatrick.
13:13 Speaker 05 I'm a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.
13:18 Rund Abdelfatah? Melanie also wrote a book called
13:20 Speaker 05 Called Lady Editor.
13:21 Rund Abdelfatah? Which is a biography of Sarah Josepha Hale.
13:25 Speaker 02 I owe my early predilection for literary pursuits to the teaching and example of my mother. She possessed a mind clear as rock water and a most happy talent of communicating knowledge.
13:38 Speaker 05 Sarah really loved to read and she taught herself a lot of things, too.
13:45 Rund Abdelfatah? She wrote poetry, she wrote essays. She was just obsessed with writing.
13:51 Speaker 05 She was probably one of the most highly educated women of the first quarter of the 19th century.
13:59 Rund Abdelfatah? When she was 25, she married a local lawyer named David Hale.
14:03 Speaker 05 Very happily.
14:05 Speaker 02 We commenced soon after our marriage a system of study and reading. It seemed the aim of my husband to enlighten my reason, strengthen my judgment, and give me confidence in my own powers of mind, which he estimated much higher than I.
14:21 Speaker 05 Her husband helped her develop her prose style and he also helped her get poetry published in local newspapers.
14:29 Rund Abdelfatah? They had a quiet, idyllic marriage for eight years.
14:33 Speaker 05 And then he died.
14:37 Speaker 05 Suddenly.
14:41 Speaker 05 Leaving her with four children and a fifth on the way.
14:47 Rund Abdelfatah? Her life was crumbling around her.
14:50 Speaker 05 They were relatively well off, but they didn't have any savings. So here was Mrs. Hale, nearly penniless. And the tradition of the time was when that happened to a woman, that her children were parceled off to relatives. And she didn't want to do that.
15:11 Rund Abdelfatah? Desperate to keep her family together, Hale started a business with her sister-in-law, making hats.
15:17 Speaker 05 And she hated it.
15:18 Rund Abdelfatah? So she poured her energy into writing and publishing, prose, poems, and short stories.
15:24 Speaker 05 And then she wrote a novel, which was an anti-slavery novel. It came out in 1827.
15:31 Rund Abdelfatah? The novel was called "Northwood: A Tale of New England."
15:41 Speaker 02 The southern slaveholder is as absolute in his dominions, or plantation, rather, as the grand seigneur.
15:49 Rund Abdelfatah? This is a passage from the novel describing life on a southern plantation.
15:54 Speaker 05 It's the story of a boy from a hometown that seems very similar to the one she grew up in, whose parents effectively give him to relatives in the South who don't have any children. They're rich and give him lots of benefits that he wouldn't otherwise have.
16:13 Rund Abdelfatah? And eventually, this main character writes back to his hometown in the North and tells everyone exactly what he saw in the South.
16:22 Speaker 02 The change of masters is frequently a terrible evil to the poor slave. And that system must be inhuman and unjust.
16:31 Speaker 05 It's clear that the author and the main character believe slavery is wrong.
16:39 Rund Abdelfatah? Now Sarah also used her main character to argue that the best thing for Black Americans would be to return to Africa. She believed total separation of the races was the only way out of a system of domination.
16:53 Speaker 02 Which subjects man to the occurrence of such an outrage.
17:01 Rund Abdelfatah? Even though she'd never been to the South herself, Sarah's portrayal of life there struck a nerve with readers. "Northwood" was a big hit and one of the first anti-slavery novels of its kind.
17:14 Speaker 05 It kind of made her reputation among a group of intellectuals in Boston, including one man who was starting up a magazine for women. And he asked her out of the blue if she would come to Boston to edit it.
17:30 Rund Abdelfatah? It was called Ladies Magazine.
17:37 Speaker 05 It was a very difficult decision for her because she would have to leave four of her children behind. She took the baby with her. Also, she was chastised by people for thinking that she could maintain her family, make enough money to maintain her family. It was wrong to go off and become a professional.
17:58 Rund Abdelfatah? And there were some people who doubted that a magazine geared towards women could gain a big following.
18:04 Speaker 05 In 1828, when her magazine debuted, half of American women were illiterate.
18:11 Rund Abdelfatah? But Sarah didn't let any of that get in her way. She moved to Boston and accepted the job at Ladies Magazine. And her gamble paid off. The magazine was a hit and soon merged with another magazine to become "Godey's Ladies Book," based in Philadelphia.
18:32 Speaker 05 And it was when she became the editor, or she preferred the term "editress," of "Godey's Ladies Book" that things really took off for her.
18:46 Speaker 05 She expanded her focus to culinary things.
18:50 Rund Abdelfatah? She also wrote about-
18:52 Speaker 05 Art and architecture. She reviewed many books.
18:57 Speaker 02 "The Ladies Book" was the first avowed advocate of the holy cause of women's intellectual progress. It has been the pioneer in the wonderful change of public sentiment respecting female education and the employment of female talent in educating the young.
19:16 Rund Abdelfatah? Gode's achieves popular and critical success. Sarah's writing was praised by Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe.
19:25 Speaker 05 She became very famous. She became a celebrity in 19th century America. So much so that there was a phrase, Mrs. Hale says, meaning that she was like the arbiter of behavior and housekeeping and education and culinary issues.
19:50 Speaker 03 Like, almost like, I dare say this, but it's giving me like Oprah vibes, like Oprah in the 90s vibes.
19:57 Speaker 05 Yes, very, very similar.
20:02 Speaker 05 She really connected with people and she had a fabulous sense of what was important and what wasn't important.
20:10 Rund Abdelfatah? Sarah used her platform to push for the things she believed in. She supported women's education, though not women's suffrage. She opposed slavery and thought free black people should be repatriated to Africa. And she had a vision for creating a united national culture.
20:29 Speaker 05 She thought that the revolution had united the American colonies, politically, but not culturally, and that the new country needed to develop its own culture. And the new country needed its own stories. They needed something to coalesce around.
20:48 Rund Abdelfatah? And for Sarah, there was no better day to coalesce around than her favorite holiday, Thanksgiving.
20:59 Speaker 02 Everything that contributes to bind us in one vast empire together, to quicken the sympathy that makes us feel from the icy north to the sunny south that we are one family, each a member of a great and free nation, not merely the unit of a remote locality, is worthy of being cherished.
21:24 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanksgiving in the early to mid 1800s was mostly celebrated in northern states and generally on different days. It was not a national holiday, and Sarah wanted to change that.
21:37 Speaker 05 She thought that if we could all come together and celebrate on the same day, that would help to bring Americans together.
21:49 Speaker 02 There is a deep moral influence in these periodical seasons of rejoicing, in which a whole community participates. They bring out, and together, as it were, the best sympathies of our nature.
22:02 Speaker 05 And as the Civil War approached, she also had the hope that it would forestall war.
22:10 Speaker 02 We believe our Thanksgiving Day, if fixed and perpetuated, will be a great and sanctifying promoter of this national spirit.
22:23 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, Sarah takes her appeal all the way to the top.
22:36 Rund Abdelfatah? My name is Winston Desrevins from Silver Spring, Maryland, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. The reason why I love Throughline is because it really does illuminate and also debunk a lot of myths in American history that we once thought to be true.
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22:59 Rund Abdelfatah? On a new episode of Your Turn with Alison Aubrey, two dream analysts explain the power of dreams as a guide for self-exploration.
23:08 Speaker 00 Sometimes dreams really contain the secret that we need to overcome difficulties, get unstuck, see a different way, and move forward.
23:17 Rund Abdelfatah? All this and more on Your Turn, available on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. On NPR's Wild Card podcast, Esther Perel says confidence isn't about thinking you're perfect.
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24:02 Speaker 03 Part two. One heart, one voice.
24:09 Speaker 03 On a farm in Maryland, a group of 22 men, some of them enslaved and some of them not, hide in an attic.
24:21 Speaker 03 They spend their days reading, writing letters, cleaning their rifles, waiting.
24:29 Speaker 03 Then, on October 16th, 1859, their leader, a white abolitionist named John Brown, gathers them together. He prays with them, then afterwards says,
24:42 Speaker 04 Men, get on your arms. We will proceed to the ferry.
25:01 Speaker 03 They start a five-mile march towards a Virginia town called Harpers Ferry. They plan to capture the federal armory there and start a massive revolt against slavery.
25:26 Speaker 03 Within just a couple of hours, John Brown's forces take control of two bridges, the armory and a rifle factory.
25:37 Speaker 03 They take slave owners and armory employees hostage. I have possession now of the United States Armory. And if the city- If missions interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood. Eventually, US Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee arrive. Brown's men are surrounded.
26:05 Speaker 03 The 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.
26:27 Speaker 03 If you must die,
26:31 Speaker 03 die like a man.
26:37 Speaker 03 Even 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.
27:08 Speaker 02 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?
27:19 Speaker 03 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.
27:42 Speaker 02 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.
27:58 Speaker 03 Sarah 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.
28:13 Speaker 05 At first, she thought if she could just get the governors all to agree on a date, that would be good enough.
28:24 Speaker 03 So 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.
28:39 Speaker 02 Let us consecrate the day to benevolence of action by sending good gifts to the poor.
28:45 Speaker 03 The depressed.
28:47 Speaker 02 Wasting despondency cripples the feeble limbs.
28:50 Speaker 03 Prisoners.
28:51 Speaker 02 Even the poor prisoner is cheered in his solitary cell.
28:57 Speaker 03 But she knew the audience of a women's magazine wouldn't be enough. She had to convince the men in power.
29:05 Speaker 05 She had a huge network and she would handwrite personal letters to governors.
29:14 Speaker 02 Will you use the influence of your high official status?
29:17 Speaker 05 Congressmen.
29:18 Speaker 02 To establish the last Thursday in November.
29:21 Speaker 05 Members of the Senate.
29:23 Speaker 02 As the annual American Thanksgiving.
29:26 Speaker 05 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.
29:50 Speaker 03 So she made her case again and again. And at first, the response from lawmakers was...
29:56 Speaker 05 We love this idea.
29:57 Speaker 03 But?
29:58 Speaker 05 No, the Constitution won't let us do it.
30:01 Speaker 03 There were two main objections.
30:03 Speaker 05 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.
30:17 Speaker 03 But remember, this was happening during the buildup to the Civil War. So of course, Thanksgiving did become political.
30:28 Speaker 04 This 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.
30:47 Speaker 03 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.
30:59 Speaker 05 And he replied saying that, basically, it was a damned Yankee holiday, that you had preachers in the North preaching abolitionism, which was political.
31:10 Speaker 03 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.
31:21 Speaker 05 That 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.
31:34 Speaker 03 But Sarah Josepha Hale didn't necessarily believe Thanksgiving would end slavery. She thought it could prevent a civil war.
31:43 Speaker 02 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.
31:56 Speaker 03 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. But 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.
32:43 Speaker 03 1863 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.
33:10 Speaker 03 One 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 Joseph Hale comes back in our story. So finally, in 1860...
33:54 Speaker 05 1863, she wrote to Lincoln.
33:57 Speaker 02 "Sir, permit me, as editress of the ladies' book, to request a few minutes of your precious time."
34:03 Speaker 03 Just five days after reading Hale's letter.
34:06 Speaker 05 Lincoln agreed and issued a proclamation.
34:10 Speaker 03 Making Thanksgiving a national holiday.
34:19 Speaker 07 "I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourned in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November. Next, as the day of Thanksgiving."
34:35 Speaker 07 Abraham Lincoln.
34:38 Speaker 05 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.
34:56 Speaker 03 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.
35:09 Speaker 05 It 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."
35:17 Speaker 03 And the Union did win. In 1865, the Confederates surrendered, and Lincoln was assassinated.
35:26 Speaker 05 It was Lincoln's decision in 1863 that started the tradition of a national Thanksgiving that continues to this day.
35:37 Speaker 03 Sarah Joseph Hale's years of persistence had paid off.
35:42 Speaker 02 "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."
35:57 Speaker 03 Coming up, after the Thanksgiving holiday is established, the Thanksgiving myth takes hold.
36:11 Speaker 06 Hello, I am Zico and I am from Rockville, Maryland. And you are listening to Throughline from NPR.
36:21 Rund Abdelfatah? Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. The number one issue in America right now is the economy, whether it's the high price of gas, a potential AI bubble, or the unsteady job market. At NPR's The Indicator, we've got you covered. Understand the economy in 10 minutes or less each day. Listen to The Indicator from Planet Money on the NPR app or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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37:11 Speaker 04 Get the best gifts out there, in store or at REI.com.
37:19 Speaker 04 Part Three: The Thanksgiving Myth.
37:42 Speaker 04 I 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 wreak their vengeance upon whole nations and communities until the fields are covered with blood and the rivers turned into purple fountains.
38:03 Speaker 04 While a loud response is heard floating through the air from the 10,000 Indian children and orphans,
38:09 Rund Abdelfatah? Left to mourn the honorable acts of a few civilized men.
38:17 Rund Abdelfatah? William 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.
38:33 Rund Abdelfatah? It's 1836, 25 years before the start of the Civil War, more than two centuries after the Wampanoag leader, Usamiquin, 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?
39:03 Speaker 04 And for all this, they were denounced as being savages by those who received all these acts of kindness.
39:10 Rund Abdelfatah? Northeasterners 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.
39:25 Speaker 04 The epicenter for criticism of the United States' violent approach to subjugating Native people is New England.
39:35 Rund Abdelfatah? This is historian David Silverman.
39:38 Speaker 04 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.
39:47 Speaker 04 In the 19th century, the criticism of US Indian affairs coming out of New England is very, very sharp. As 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.
40:09 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
40:35 Speaker 04 "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. For the 22nd of December and the 4th of July are days of mourning and not of joy."
40:58 Rund Abdelfatah? You'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.
41:22 Speaker 03 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?
41:33 Speaker 04 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. And to that primary source account, he adds a footnote. And the footnote read, "This was the first Thanksgiving."
41:53 Speaker 03 Wow.
41:54 Speaker 04 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.
42:25 Speaker 03 Lincoln'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.
42:51 Speaker 02 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?
43:13 Speaker 03 But 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.
43:53 Speaker 03 In 1912, a painter named Jean-Lion Jerome Ferris finished one of the most famous works of his career, an oil painting called "The First Thanksgiving".
44:04 Speaker 04 The mythologized Thanksgiving.
44:07 Speaker 03 The one most of us were taught in school.
44:09 Speaker 04 Pilgrims and Indians making friends.
44:14 Speaker 03 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.
44:35 Speaker 03 An English settler, a woman, holds a tray of food in front of a native man. He reaches for a loaf of bread.
44:43 Speaker 04 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.
45:09 Speaker 03 By the early 1900s, acting out that fantasy had become part of the curriculum at many schools.
45:17 Speaker 04 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. It's a whitewash of the bloodiness of the ruthlessness of colonialism.
45:46 Speaker 03 Around 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?
46:02 Speaker 05 I can talk about my family.
46:05 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Aquina Wampanoag artist and educator Elizabeth James Perry.
46:10 Speaker 05 My great-grandmother was a widow. And so her life was very much about taking care of her family as a sole provider.
46:19 Rund Abdelfatah? This was all happening during a period of upheaval for the Wampanoags in Martha's Vineyard. They had persisted despite the US government's aggressive policy of Indian removal in the 1830s, when many native people were forced off their land and moved west. But 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.
46:56 Speaker 05 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.
47:04 Rund Abdelfatah? 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. Adventures and misadventures, funny childhood memories.
47:19 Speaker 05 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 on to 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.
48:04 Speaker 05 Cranberries were new. I don't know what to say. New England wasn't new. I mean, we kind of like, yeah, I mean.
48:12 Speaker 03 You're like, we're kind of from here.
48:14 Speaker 05 Yes.
48:32 Speaker 03 For 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.
48:55 Speaker 04 La historia no se trata de tratar de hacer que la gente se sienta culpable o avergonzada, patriota o no patriota. Se diseña capturar un pasado complejo y toda su complejidad. Las celebraciones nacionales son otro jardín de peces. Se diseña cultivar la unidad. Nunca habrá unidad alrededor de temas históricos complejos. Son demasiado complejos.
49:19 Rund Abdelfatah? Ya sea la visión rojida de la primera Navidad en 1621, o usar el día como vaso de unidad nacional, lo que estamos agradecidos es una elección. Una elección con consecuencias.
49:35 Speaker 02 Estas vacaciones nacionales nos recuerdan lo que significa ser una estadounidense número uno. Y luego nos dan la oportunidad de celebrar nuestra nación. Debo decir que hay críticos de la Navidad. Personas que no celebrarán porque malo piensan que está celebrando la destrucción de la cultura nata. No puedo estar de acuerdo con eso más fuerte. Creo que es un momento de celebración de personas de diferentes culturas que se unen.
50:13 Speaker 04 Creo que es verdad que la mayoría de los adultos no dan mucho de las pilgrines y los indios. Pero eso es parte del punto. El punto es que estamos adoctrinados con esta idea como niños y luego nunca nos preguntan volver a visitarlo mientras nos volvemos más maduros y capaces de pensar complejo. Prefiero ver la Navidad continuar sin invocar pilgrines y indios en absoluto. No confío en ningún ritual para capturar complejidades de cualquier tipo. Nunca se olvide las complejidades violentas que atacan el corazón
50:55 Speaker 04 del deseo de que Estados Unidos sea un espejo de luz en el mundo. Eso es pedir demasiado.
51:17 Speaker 03 As for Sarah Josepha Hale, she had her mind made up that Thanksgiving could bring the US together. And she lived long enough to see it take hold. Hale spent the rest of her life making sure Thanksgiving would outlive her.
51:32 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
51:45 Speaker 02 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.
52:15 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdurkhatah.
52:19 Speaker 03 I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
52:24 Rund Abdelfatah? This episode was produced by me.
52:26 Speaker 03 And me and?
52:28 Speaker 02 Sarah Wyman.
52:29 Speaker 07 Devin Katayama. Casey Minor.
52:31 Speaker 02 Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Lina Mohamed. Christina Kim.
52:37 Rund Abdelfatah? Irene Noguchi. Thank you to Nina Bocowski, Punid Matiwalah, Johannes Stergi, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.
52:46 Speaker 03 Voiceover work in this episode was done by Sarah Wyman, Ryan Ascalas, Devin Katayama, Mark Smith, and Sam Yellowhorse Kessler. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. It was mixed by Maggie Luthar.
53:02 Rund Abdelfatah? Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes?
53:07 Speaker 07 Navid Marvi.
53:09 Rund Abdelfatah? Cho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani.
53:15 Rund Abdelfatah? We would love to hear from you. Send us a voicemail to 872-588-8805 and leave your name, where you're from, and say the line, "You're listening to Throughline from NPR." And tell us what you think of the show. We might even feature your voicemail in a future episode. That number again is 872-588-8805.
53:41 Speaker 03 Thanks for listening.
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