Who Invented Thanksgiving?
The untold story behind America's favorite fall holiday.
The first Thanksgiving happened in 1621, after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts the year before. After a harsh year, they finally got to enjoy an abundant harvest. They invited a few native people to enjoy a historic turkey feast. This myth is told to every American schoolchild, but the truth is much more ambiguous. No one really knows whether the Pilgrims actually ate turkey, invited the Indians, or even described their feast as a Thanksgiving at all.
The Pilgrims
Little is actually known about this formative American holiday. The only extant evidence comes from a Pilgrim named Edward Winslow. The Pilgrims were a separatist sect of Puritans. They were strict religious zealots, who refused to even celebrate Christmas and Easter because those holidays were not expressly found in the Bible. Today, many people picture Puritans as uptight killjoys. But the real Puritans were much more vivacious than commonly imagined. They were known to have drank beer. Like many frontier cultures, the Pilgrims saw community as essential for their very survival. The colony was immediately placed under communal rules, forcing settlers to surrender their private supplies for the common good. It stayed that way for years, and was crucial for their survival during the harsh year preceding the First Thanksgiving. But more importantly, they relied on the benevolence of their Indian neighbors. Grain brought from Europe failed to grow in the sandy soil of Plymouth. So the Wampanoag taught the Pilgrims how to grow native corn. But the Pilgrims did not regard their Indian allies as true equals. They seized much of the Native land in eastern Massachusetts. When the English arrived in their family units, the Indians saw them as new members of a communal settlement. But the English had a strong tradition of private ownership of property, in contrast to that of the Indians.
First Thanksgiving
In the autumn of 1621, the Pilgrims rejoiced at their successful harvest. According to the Winslow letter, they sent four hunters to shoot some fowl to eat. These birds are assumed to be turkey, but this is not proven by the written historical record. It could have been duck or partridge, but probably some sort of poultry. The Winslow letter mentions nothing about cranberries or pumpkins. At the First Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims probably ate cod, bass, lobsters, onions, corn, some type of bread, salt, arugula, and fresh spinach. After the meal, many men celebrated with games, singing and dancing. The Pilgrims displayed their military might by firing off their muskets and cannons, alarming the neighboring Wampanoag. 90 armed Indians marched to Plymouth, outnumbering the Pilgrims two to one. But the two sides quickly put down their weapons, and enjoyed a hearty feast together. The Indians contributed to the meal by supplying a main course of five deer. The Pilgrims and the Indians probably did not eat pumpkin pie, as they was little access to sugar or flour. But the Indians did teach their European friends how to grow pumpkins. According to American tradition, turkey was consumed at the First Thanksgiving. In English custom, a celebration had to have a status main dish, usually fowl or game. The largest and most luxurious birds in the New World was the turkey. Writing a letter to his daughter in 1784, Ben Franklin jokingly proposed the turkey to replace the bald eagle as America’s national symbol. Facetiously mocking the eagle as a symbol of European aristocracy, Franklin praised the turkey for its New World simplicity. He accused eagles of being dishonest, lazy, and of bad moral character. In contrast, he saw the turkey as a bird of courage.
Holiday tradition
The First Thanksgiving of 1621 was not regarded as a holiday at the time. It was not until another 200 years that anyone cared about it at all. Edward Winslow’s letter was lost, and it was not discovered until the 19th century. Only then did Americans start connecting it to an existing folk tradition of Thanksgiving. The real origin of Thanksgiving lies in the ritual fasting of European Christians, who introduced their ascetic practice to the New World over a century before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Christians spent the day in church praying, rather than engaging in any actually fun activities. But over time, the Christian holiday of Thanksgiving evolved into a celebration of the harvest season at the end of each year. The fall or early winter became an opportunity to praise God’s providence and mercy. But going into the early 19th century, Thanksgiving was still an informal celebration without any national significance. The date varied, and its observance was largely restricted to the region of New England. One woman, named Sarah Josepha Hale, was almost singlehandedly responsible for transforming Thanksgiving into a national American holiday. As the Martha Stewart of her day, Hale was determined to teach Americans to celebrate and refine their cultural traditions. She was the editor of America’s most popular women’s magazine, called Godey’s Lady’s Book. Leading up to the Civil War, she urged the creation of this national holiday in 1846. She was aware of the growing tensions between North and South, and wanted to bring the nation together. For two decades, she petitioned governors, senators, and even presidents. She wanted Thanksgiving to be a national holiday, set on the fourth Thursday of November. Thursday was not an arbitrary day of the week. In Hale’s day, it was the time when a local minister would deliver his midweek sermon. The fourth Thursday was chosen in homage to George Washington’s thanksgiving proclamation in 1789. It was the beginning of a long American tradition of politicians, the community, and pastors declaring national days of thanksgiving whenever it felt appropriate. But Washington’s proclamation was the first of its kind to apply to the national level. The date Washington chose was November 26, the last Thursday of the month. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the Thanksgiving traditions of New England spread westward. It was bitterly resented by the slaveholding South, which denounced the holiday for its New English origins. On October 3, 1863, President Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national and annual day of gratitude. This was the true birth of Thanksgiving as a nationwide celebration, although it did not become a legal holiday for another 80 years. Since the 19th century, traveling has become a major part of Thanksgiving celebrations. Prior to that time, it was rare for Americans to travel more than 50 miles from their homes, usually by foot or horseback. But that changed with the advent of railroads, and later cars, which made it easier for Americans to travel for the holidays. In November of 1939, President Roosevelt began to urge Congress to declare Thanksgiving as a federal holiday. To stimulate the economy during the Great Depression, Roosevelt moved the date of Thanksgiving a week earlier. This created a lot of confusion. Finally, in 1941, Congress settled the issue by officially fixing the date to the fourth Thursday of November.
Macy’s Day Parade
The famous Macy’s Day Parade is a quintessentially American institution. The two-and-a-half mile march through the streets of Manhattan has been around for 90 years. More than 9,000 participants entertain three and a half million spectators on the parade route, and another 50 million watching TV at home. 4,000 of those participants are volunteers. Macy’s did not invent the famous Parade. It was invented by a rival department store chain, Gimbels. Gimbels staged the first Thanksgiving Parade in Philadelphia in 1920. In 1924, Macy’s attempted to outshine its competitor with a parade of its own in New York. According to legend, many of the workers at Macy’s were proud immigrants who loved America and its freedoms. They requested a parade to celebrate the coming of the Christmas shopping season. Volunteers released their helium balloons up into the air, disappearing. Fixed with leaks, it was assumed the balloons would stay in the air for four or five days. There is footage of these balloons being released from Herald Square down to 34th Street. But in 1932, the fun almost proved fatal. One of the balloons nearly caused a passing airplane to crash. It was the last time that the balloons would be released in the air without strings. In 1942, Jack Strauss of Macy’s donated that year’s balloons to a rubber drive for America’s war effort in World War Two. For countless American soldiers since the Greatest Generation, Thanksgiving became a beloved holiday that represented their homeland. Today, the larger-than-life balloons remain the most beloved part of the Macy’s Parade.
Football frenzy
In modern American households, Thanksgiving family dinners are often accompanied by a weekend of high school, college, and professional football. The NFL’s Thanksgiving Games have attracted as high as 38 million views, which translates into annual revenues of over $3.7 billion. Thanksgiving football had its roots in the century-long rivalry between two Ivy League titans, Princeton and Yale. In 1876, they played the first-ever Thanksgiving football game. At the time, football was still a new game. The end of the season took place around the time of Thanksgiving. So promoters immediately saw the potential of staging an end-of-season game around the holidays to conclude the year. By the 1890s, the Ivy League Thanksgiving Game was America’s most preeminent athletic event. The teams clashed each year at the Polo Grounds in New York, drawing 40,000 fans. Other colleges, clubs, and high schools imitated the Ivy League football teams. By the turn of the 20th century, there were 120,000 players in 5,000 Thanksgiving Day Games across the nation. In 1934, the Detroit Lions played the Chicago Bears on Thanksgiving, the first such NFL seasonal game to be broadcast.
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