The Mother of Thanksgiving

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. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:24Rund 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.

• 1:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thanks for being here and hope you enjoy the show.

• 1:22Speaker 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.

• 2:07Speaker 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.

• 2:20Speaker 04

  There was a major feast between the Wampanoags and the English of Plymouth. That's a very real event.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  The event that's now called the First Thanksgiving.

• 2:32Speaker 04

  The suggestion is that the two parties got together for this feast out of innate friendship.

• 2:38Speaker 05

  It's this odd, little, frozen-in-time fantasy moment of folks getting together and eating, but you don't really know why.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  This is Elizabeth James Perry.

• 2:50Speaker 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.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  She says that when the English first arrived, they-

• 3:02Speaker 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.

• 3:12Speaker 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.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  This is David Silverman.

• 3:28Speaker 04

  I'm professor of history at George Washington University.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  And he's also the author of the book.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoagadians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  David says remembering this meeting is just about friendship and gratitude. Actually-

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Robs this very real event of all of its historical context.

• 4:01Rund 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.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  What he said was, "You know, when my father..."

• 4:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  A chief named Usamiquin.

• 4:33Speaker 04

  "...met your ancestors..."

• 4:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Plymouth colonists.

• 4:37Speaker 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."

• 5:17Speaker 04

  Make ready! Present! Fire!

• 5:37Speaker 04

  The odds are really stacked. A tribe, they top out at 15,000 people. England is 5 million people.

• 5:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  It would come to be known as King Philip's War. The name the English colonists gave the Wampanoag chief, Medecon.

• 6:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  But the English show the Wampanoag and their allies very little respect.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  Let's be clear, they kill thousands of them.

• 6:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  And enslave many more.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  And sell them off to the Caribbean and to the Mediterranean.

• 6:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  The war goes on for nearly three years.

• 6:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  And the colonists win.

• 6:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  But a military captain named Benjamin Church isn't finished.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  He orders the head of King Philip.

• 6:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Wampanoag chief Medecon.

• 6:56Speaker 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.

• 7:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  The first Thanksgiving in 1621.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  Afterwards Plymouth and Massachusetts, they hold the Thanksgiving for their victory over the native people.

• 7:17Speaker 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.

• 7:46Speaker 06

  Tomorrow's Thanksgiving.

• 7:49Speaker 07

  Mmm, turkey and dressing and pie and cake.

• 7:55Speaker 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.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Now, let me tell you a third story of Thanksgiving. One that's very different and that you may have never heard.

• 8:29Speaker 07

  The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. Vacation is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise.

• 8:39Speaker 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.

• 8:54Speaker 07

  The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  The country was as divided as it had ever been. War and destruction was everywhere.

• 9:09Speaker 07

  Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. Abraham Lincoln.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  And in this moment, a woman named Sarah Joseph Hale sent President Abraham Lincoln a letter.

• 9:33Speaker 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.

• 10:09Speaker 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?

• 10:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. On this episode of Throughline from NPR, the mother of Thanksgiving.

• 10:51Speaker 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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• 11:46Speaker 00

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• 12:25Speaker 03

  Part one.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Hale's Crusade.

• 12:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sarah Josepha Hale was born in New Hampshire in 1788, not too far away from where the pilgrims first landed.

• 12:52Speaker 05

  She was the daughter of Revolutionary War heroes.

• 12:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  At a time when many women couldn't read, Sarah had access to plenty of education.

• 13:03Speaker 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.

• 13:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Melanie Kirkpatrick.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  I'm a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

• 13:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Melanie also wrote a book called

• 13:20Speaker 05

  Called Lady Editor.

• 13:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Which is a biography of Sarah Josepha Hale.

• 13:25Speaker 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.

• 13:38Speaker 05

  Sarah really loved to read and she taught herself a lot of things, too.

• 13:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  She wrote poetry, she wrote essays. She was just obsessed with writing.

• 13:51Speaker 05

  She was probably one of the most highly educated women of the first quarter of the 19th century.

• 13:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  When she was 25, she married a local lawyer named David Hale.

• 14:03Speaker 05

  Very happily.

• 14:05Speaker 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.

• 14:21Speaker 05

  Her husband helped her develop her prose style and he also helped her get poetry published in local newspapers.

• 14:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  They had a quiet, idyllic marriage for eight years.

• 14:33Speaker 05

  And then he died.

• 14:37Speaker 05

  Suddenly.

• 14:41Speaker 05

  Leaving her with four children and a fifth on the way.

• 14:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  Her life was crumbling around her.

• 14:50Speaker 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.

• 15:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Desperate to keep her family together, Hale started a business with her sister-in-law, making hats.

• 15:17Speaker 05

  And she hated it.

• 15:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  So she poured her energy into writing and publishing, prose, poems, and short stories.

• 15:24Speaker 05

  And then she wrote a novel, which was an anti-slavery novel. It came out in 1827.

• 15:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  The novel was called "Northwood: A Tale of New England."

• 15:41Speaker 02

  The southern slaveholder is as absolute in his dominions, or plantation, rather, as the grand seigneur.

• 15:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is a passage from the novel describing life on a southern plantation.

• 15:54Speaker 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.

• 16:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  And eventually, this main character writes back to his hometown in the North and tells everyone exactly what he saw in the South.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  The change of masters is frequently a terrible evil to the poor slave. And that system must be inhuman and unjust.

• 16:31Speaker 05

  It's clear that the author and the main character believe slavery is wrong.

• 16:39Rund 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.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Which subjects man to the occurrence of such an outrage.

• 17:01Rund 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.

• 17:14Speaker 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.

• 17:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was called Ladies Magazine.

• 17:37Speaker 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.

• 17:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  And there were some people who doubted that a magazine geared towards women could gain a big following.

• 18:04Speaker 05

  In 1828, when her magazine debuted, half of American women were illiterate.

• 18:11Rund 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.

• 18:32Speaker 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.

• 18:46Speaker 05

  She expanded her focus to culinary things.

• 18:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  She also wrote about-

• 18:52Speaker 05

  Art and architecture. She reviewed many books.

• 18:57Speaker 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.

• 19:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  Gode's achieves popular and critical success. Sarah's writing was praised by Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe.

• 19:25Speaker 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.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Like, almost like, I dare say this, but it's giving me like Oprah vibes, like Oprah in the 90s vibes.

• 19:57Speaker 05

  Yes, very, very similar.

• 20:02Speaker 05

  She really connected with people and she had a fabulous sense of what was important and what wasn't important.

• 20:10Rund 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.

• 20:29Speaker 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.

• 20:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  And for Sarah, there was no better day to coalesce around than her favorite holiday, Thanksgiving.

• 20:59Speaker 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.

• 21:24Rund 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.

• 21:37Speaker 05

  She thought that if we could all come together and celebrate on the same day, that would help to bring Americans together.

• 21:49Speaker 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.

• 22:02Speaker 05

  And as the Civil War approached, she also had the hope that it would forestall war.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  We believe our Thanksgiving Day, if fixed and perpetuated, will be a great and sanctifying promoter of this national spirit.

• 22:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, Sarah takes her appeal all the way to the top.

• 22:36Rund 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.

• 22:55Speaker 00

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• 22:59Rund 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.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Sometimes dreams really contain the secret that we need to overcome difficulties, get unstuck, see a different way, and move forward.

• 23:17Rund 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.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Confidence is your ability to see yourself as a flawed individual. Yes. And still hold yourself in high regard. It's the ability to live with your imperfection that makes you confident. Watch or listen to that wildcard conversation on the NPR app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 24:02Speaker 03

  Part two. One heart, one voice.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  On a farm in Maryland, a group of 22 men, some of them enslaved and some of them not, hide in an attic.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  They spend their days reading, writing letters, cleaning their rifles, waiting.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Then, on October 16th, 1859, their leader, a white abolitionist named John Brown, gathers them together. He prays with them, then afterwards says,

• 24:42Speaker 04

  Men, get on your arms. We will proceed to the ferry.

• 25:01Speaker 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.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Within just a couple of hours, John Brown's forces take control of two bridges, the armory and a rifle factory.

• 25:37Speaker 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.

• 26:05Speaker 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.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  If you must die,

• 26:31Speaker 03

  die like a man.

• 26:37Speaker 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.

• 27:08Speaker 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?

• 27:19Speaker 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.

• 27:42Speaker 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.

• 27:58Speaker 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.

• 28:13Speaker 05

  At first, she thought if she could just get the governors all to agree on a date, that would be good enough.

• 28:24Speaker 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.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Let us consecrate the day to benevolence of action by sending good gifts to the poor.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  The depressed.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Wasting despondency cripples the feeble limbs.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Prisoners.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Even the poor prisoner is cheered in his solitary cell.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  But she knew the audience of a women's magazine wouldn't be enough. She had to convince the men in power.

• 29:05Speaker 05

  She had a huge network and she would handwrite personal letters to governors.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Will you use the influence of your high official status?

• 29:17Speaker 05

  Congressmen.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  To establish the last Thursday in November.

• 29:21Speaker 05

  Members of the Senate.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  As the annual American Thanksgiving.

• 29:26Speaker 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.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  So she made her case again and again. And at first, the response from lawmakers was...

• 29:56Speaker 05

  We love this idea.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  But?

• 29:58Speaker 05

  No, the Constitution won't let us do it.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  There were two main objections.

• 30:03Speaker 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.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  But remember, this was happening during the buildup to the Civil War. So of course, Thanksgiving did become political.

• 30:28Speaker 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.

• 30:47Speaker 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.

• 30:59Speaker 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.

• 31:10Speaker 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.

• 31:21Speaker 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.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  But Sarah Josepha Hale didn't necessarily believe Thanksgiving would end slavery. She thought it could prevent a civil war.

• 31:43Speaker 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.

• 31:56Speaker 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.

• 32:43Speaker 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.

• 33:10Speaker 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...

• 33:54Speaker 05

  1863, she wrote to Lincoln.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  "Sir, permit me, as editress of the ladies' book, to request a few minutes of your precious time."

• 34:03Speaker 03

  Just five days after reading Hale's letter.

• 34:06Speaker 05

  Lincoln agreed and issued a proclamation.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Making Thanksgiving a national holiday.

• 34:19Speaker 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."

• 34:35Speaker 07

  Abraham Lincoln.

• 34:38Speaker 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.

• 34:56Speaker 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.

• 35:09Speaker 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."

• 35:17Speaker 03

  And the Union did win. In 1865, the Confederates surrendered, and Lincoln was assassinated.

• 35:26Speaker 05

  It was Lincoln's decision in 1863 that started the tradition of a national Thanksgiving that continues to this day.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Sarah Joseph Hale's years of persistence had paid off.

• 35:42Speaker 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."

• 35:57Speaker 03

  Coming up, after the Thanksgiving holiday is established, the Thanksgiving myth takes hold.

• 36:11Speaker 06

  Hello, I am Zico and I am from Rockville, Maryland. And you are listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 36:21Rund Abdelfatah?

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• 36:49Rund Abdelfatah?

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• 37:11Speaker 04

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• 37:19Speaker 04

  Part Three: The Thanksgiving Myth.

• 37:42Speaker 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.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  While a loud response is heard floating through the air from the 10,000 Indian children and orphans,

• 38:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Left to mourn the honorable acts of a few civilized men.

• 38:17Rund 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.

• 38:33Rund 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?

• 39:03Speaker 04

  And for all this, they were denounced as being savages by those who received all these acts of kindness.

• 39:10Rund 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.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  The epicenter for criticism of the United States' violent approach to subjugating Native people is New England.

• 39:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is historian David Silverman.

• 39:38Speaker 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.

• 39:47Speaker 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.

• 40:09Rund 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.

• 40:35Speaker 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."

• 40:58Rund 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.

• 41:22Speaker 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?

• 41:33Speaker 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."

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 41:54Speaker 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.

• 42:25Speaker 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.

• 42:51Speaker 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?

• 43:13Speaker 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.

• 43:53Speaker 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".

• 44:04Speaker 04

  The mythologized Thanksgiving.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  The one most of us were taught in school.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  Pilgrims and Indians making friends.

• 44:14Speaker 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.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  An English settler, a woman, holds a tray of food in front of a native man. He reaches for a loaf of bread.

• 44:43Speaker 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.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  By the early 1900s, acting out that fantasy had become part of the curriculum at many schools.

• 45:17Speaker 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.

• 45:46Speaker 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?

• 46:02Speaker 05

  I can talk about my family.

• 46:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Aquina Wampanoag artist and educator Elizabeth James Perry.

• 46:10Speaker 05

  My great-grandmother was a widow. And so her life was very much about taking care of her family as a sole provider.

• 46:19Rund 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.

• 46:56Speaker 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.

• 47:04Rund 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.

• 47:19Speaker 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.

• 48:04Speaker 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.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  You're like, we're kind of from here.

• 48:14Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 48:32Speaker 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.

• 48:55Speaker 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.

• 49:19Rund 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.

• 49:35Speaker 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.

• 50:13Speaker 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

• 50:55Speaker 04

  del deseo de que Estados Unidos sea un espejo de luz en el mundo. Eso es pedir demasiado.

• 51:17Speaker 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.

• 51:32Rund 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.

• 51:45Speaker 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.

• 52:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdurkhatah.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 52:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  And me and?

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Sarah Wyman.

• 52:29Speaker 07

  Devin Katayama. Casey Minor.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Lina Mohamed. Christina Kim.

• 52:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  Irene Noguchi. Thank you to Nina Bocowski, Punid Matiwalah, Johannes Stergi, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

• 52:46Speaker 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.

• 53:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes?

• 53:07Speaker 07

  Navid Marvi.

• 53:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Cho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani.

• 53:15Rund 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.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  Thanks for listening.

• 53:53Speaker 03

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