Thanksgiving 2019

Despite the fact that it was only in 1863 that President Lincoln issued a presidential proclamation making Thanksgiving into an annual national holiday to be celebrated on the third Thursday of November, the holiday itself is much older and many presidents, starting with President Washington in 1789, had earlier on proclaimed national festivals of thanksgiving on a year-to-year basis. Nor was this a new idea even in George Washington’s day: as everyone who ever attended an American elementary school knows, the first Thanksgiving was observed in 1621 by the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts. But the story as taught to children in our country masks the two crucial details which, more than paradoxically, are precisely the ones that we should be brining to the fore today and which have the ability, I think, to grant the festival ultimate meaning for Americans today.

In 1621, the Pilgrims were not having an easy time of it. The Plymouth Colony had only been established one single year earlier. But life here in these future United States was wholly unlike what the Pilgrims knew from England and by 1621 it was apparently clear to almost all that the newcomers were unlikely to survive at all, let alone to thrive, in the New World unless they found a way successfully to adapt to their new environment. For a while they looked only within their only ranks for the help they so desperately needed. And then a native man named Squanto, a member of the Patuxet tribe native to what is now eastern Massachusetts, stepped onto the stage to teach the newcomers what they needed to know. He taught them how to catch eel, for one thing. He taught them how to deal with winter weather conditions that was far more harsh than what they knew from back home. And, most crucially of all, he taught them how to grow corn.

Squanto, having learned English the hard way (he had earlier been enslaved in England and had managed to escape and travel back home), then went on to become the Pilgrims’ interpreter and, more crucially, to serve as a liaison between them and King Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoag tribe that had displaced the Patuxets as the leaders of the local indigenes. (The Patuxet tribe is believed to have died out from some sort of epidemic while Squanto was in England, thus making Squanto himself the last of the Patuxets.) And it was this fledgling relationship that led to the king donating large gifts of food to the fledgling colony of Europeans, which act of generosity and largesse led in turn to the 1621 feast of thanksgiving that became enshrined in American lore as the first Thanksgiving of all.

It wasn’t exactly like our holiday. For one thing, it lasted for three days. For another, turkey was only one small item on the menu, which (as preserved by Governor Bradford himself in his book On Plymouth Plantation, which I read years ago and can recommend as fascinating and engaging even today) consisted of cod, eels, bass, clams, lobster, mussels, duck, geese, swans, turkey, venison, berries, squash, pumpkin, peas, beans, and corn.

Eventually the custom of recreating that feast caught on even among non-English communities in the New World. The Dutch of New Netherlands, for example, proclaimed a first Thanksgiving feast just a few decades later in 1644, then intermittently until 1674 when New Netherlands stopped existing after the entire colony was ceded to the British in the Treaty of Westminster.

But somehow a key element in the story managed to be forgotten: that this was not a meal prepared by the Pilgrims to give thanks for the bounty of the land on which they had settled, but a meal intended to express their thanks both to Squanto, their volunteer ambassador to King Massasoit, and to Massasoit himself, the native monarch who saved them from almost certain extinction.

We tend to think of Thanksgiving as a time to be grateful for all the good in our lives. That is surely a noble sentiment, but how much more meaningful would the holiday be if we were also to allow our celebratory mood to bring to the fore a sense of deep beholdenness to the native people who created the context for one of the first European settlements to survive more than a single year in their newly chosen homeland. Would King Massasoit have behaved differently had he somehow been granted some sort of prescient understanding of the degree to which European settlement in North America was going to bring about the near annihilation of native life in his place and if he could have been allowed somehow to see—even if just in his mind’s eye—the instances of wholesale slaughter and deportation that were going to characterize relations between the descendants of the newly arrived settlers and the native people already on the ground here in North America? I’ll leave that question unanswered, but will suggest that Thanksgiving should be a time for all of us to ponder the detail that the most famous of all settler encampments, the Plymouth Plantation itself, only survived because the native people they found in place when they arrived reached out to them kindly, magnanimously, and generously. For most of us, Thanksgiving is mostly about gratitude; my suggestion is that it also be about hospitality, charity, and kindness to strangers.

But what of the Pilgrims themselves? Their story too is almost always mistold, its “real” lesson thus either obfuscated slightly or totally.

Plymouth Plantation was founded in 1620—only Jamestown was older—and its independent existence ended in 1691 when it was included in the newly formed Massachusetts Bay Colony. But the Pilgrims themselves have somehow managed to live on in our national imagination as icons of religious freedom. Indeed, most Americans connect the Pilgrims’ journey to the New World with their quest for religious freedom and imagine that that specific virtue—the natural right of all to worship in accordance with the dictates of their own consciences—was what the Pilgrims must surely have been the most thankful for as they sat down to their eels and berries.

Here too, however, the story line matches reality only vaguely. The Pilgrims belonged to a very strict Protestant sect that followed John Calvin’s teaching that God offers redemption solely to those ready to embrace the specific version of Christianity preached by Calvin himself, whereas the rest of the human race was imagined to exist merely to experience God’s wrath for their sins. Calvin’s theology was less simple than I’ve just made it sound, but the bottom line is that the Pilgrims, driven from their homeland by relentless persecution, responded to their own past by embracing a set of beliefs that denied religious freedom to anyone not precisely like them. So as we gather at our groaning boards on Thanksgiving, it should be to reject, not celebrate, the Pilgrims’ own understanding of religious freedom as something deserved solely by them themselves and substitute for it a sense of religious freedom far more akin to the kind enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Freedom of religion is not an ancient value. Indeed, the notion that there is virtue in permitting even the smallest and least popular spiritual disciplines to flourish would have struck most in older times as somewhere between peculiar and wholly unacceptable. Although there were some precedents to the kind of spiritual freedom enshrined in the Bill of Rights—and in unexpected places and times like, for example, India in the third century BCE—our Founding Fathers were basically staking out new territory when they forbade the government from establishing a state religion or from erecting any untoward barrier to religious worship in any legitimate mode at all. For that, we should be eternally grateful. And we should enjoy Thanksgiving, therefore, by emphasizing the fine and noble idea of religious freedom not as the Pilgrims understood it but as we ourselves do.

And those are my twin suggestions for Thanksgiving this year: that we think back to old King Massasoit and ponder how the future of the American nation once depended on the unearned hospitality showed by a native leader to newcomers in search of refuge from persecution and that we think back to the harsh legacy of the original beneficiaries of the benevolence shown them by the king of the Wampanoags and ponder how challenging it truly is to be in favor of religious freedom not only for oneself and one’s own faith group but for all citizens…including those whose spiritual beliefs are unfamiliar or even totally unrelated to our own.