Why Turkey? And Other Thanksgiving Traditions Explained

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Speaker 8 Most people have heard the school book version of the origins of Thanksgiving, but the history of the holiday is far more complicated than it's usually depicted.

Speaker 7 In this episode, we sit down with an expert on the origins of the tradition to discuss its evolution and some of the controversies that have surrounded it over the decades.

Speaker 7 I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. This is a Thanksgiving week edition of Morning Wire.

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Speaker 7 Joining us now to discuss the history of Thanksgiving and some of the past controversies surrounding it is Melanie Kirkpatrick, author of Thanksgiving, The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience, and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Speaker 7 Melanie, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 1 It's great to be with you.

Speaker 7 Look, there's been a lot of controversy actually around Thanksgiving. Let's start at the very beginning.
We've heard all the simplified versions of this, but how did the tradition actually originate?

Speaker 1 Well, you know, Thanksgiving actually goes back

Speaker 1 to before the pilgrims, as I learned when I was researching my book. And many of the European explorers who came to this continent called Days of Thanksgiving.

Speaker 1 And of course, the original Thanksgivings were called by Native American populations. But to answer your question, the pilgrims had,

Speaker 1 after their first harvest, they gathered

Speaker 1 their people together and called a day of thanksgiving.

Speaker 1 And I'll point out that this is kind of, it's very wonderful when you consider that half of the pilgrims had died between the arrival of the pilgrims and the day of Thanksgiving.

Speaker 1 But nonetheless, they gave thanks for the blessings of the harvest and for being together.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, Native Americans joined them. There were about 90 Native Americans who joined them, and they celebrated for three days.
So, so far, so good. We know all of that

Speaker 1 thanks to

Speaker 1 two

Speaker 1 articles, two commentaries by two of the pilgrims. But then

Speaker 1 a lot of the other stuff we traditionally associate with the pilgrims is not necessarily true.

Speaker 1 There is a famous painting of the first Thanksgiving showing the pilgrims having a meal outside. That's true.
But if you look at the other items in the painting, you know, not so true.

Speaker 1 For example, the pilgrims are all dressed in dark colors.

Speaker 1 And in truth, in fact, they wore bright colors, which, of course, goes against what we all learned in kindergarten about how the pilgrims dressed.

Speaker 1 And similarly, the Native Americans who were there were depicted as wearing elaborate headdresses, like you'd see in the Plains Indians. But

Speaker 1 that wasn't true either. They wore maybe one or two feathers.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 then also the food, of course. We don't know exactly what was eaten.

Speaker 1 One of the pilgrims mentions the great store of wild turkey that was available. So they probably had turkey.
We know they had venison because

Speaker 1 the Indians brought as a gift a bunch of deer that they had killed. So that was a standard feature of Thanksgiving Day up through the 19th, parts of the 19th century, actually.

Speaker 1 Though I think we'd be hard-pressed to find people eating venison on Thanksgiving Day today.

Speaker 7 Right. And some reason the turkey really stuck.
Why do you think that is?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 there were lots of wild turkeys in New England, as there are today.

Speaker 1 I just saw a flock of turkeys out my window the other day. I live in Connecticut.

Speaker 1 So they were easy to find and also they were

Speaker 1 by the, oh gosh, end of the 18th, early 19th, they were domesticated. They were special.
But in New England in the 19th century, the central feature of the meal was chicken pot pie.

Speaker 1 And I know people in New England whose families still have that tradition of having chicken pot pie

Speaker 1 around the time of the holiday, not necessarily on Thanksgiving Day.

Speaker 1 And as the settlers, American settlers, as they went west and through the Middle West and then all the way to the Pacific, brought their own food traditions with them. So you find beef

Speaker 1 being eaten on Thanksgiving instead of turkey. And as settlers from other places came to this country, they brought their own traditions with them: lasagna and

Speaker 1 stir-fries, things that, and curries.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it is an evil, it's still evolving. The meal is still evolving.

Speaker 7 Now, eventually this became an official holiday. When and why was Thanksgiving actually recognized as an official national holiday?

Speaker 1 This is an interesting story. The

Speaker 1 early settlers in New England fixed the dates of their Thanksgivings community by community or church by church. And then the governor of the New England colony would name a date.

Speaker 1 And as the years went by, colony by colony or state by state, the governor would name a date. And people didn't celebrate on the same day.
You had a situation where

Speaker 1 one state could celebrate, you know, maybe at the end of September, and yet another state would be celebrating in November or December.

Speaker 1 So it was very ad hoc and sometimes the governor decided not to call a Thanksgiving at all.

Speaker 1 But then along came Sarah Josepha Hale who was the editor of Goti's Ladies magazine, the most popular, the most widely read magazine of the early part of the 19th century.

Speaker 1 And she was from New Hampshire and she adored the Thanksgiving holiday. And she decided to try to make it national.
She saw it as

Speaker 1 part of American culture, part of our heritage. She tried to persuade presidents of the United States to name a Thanksgiving Day.

Speaker 1 They wouldn't because they said that the Constitution didn't give them that power, and that's a whole nother story.

Speaker 1 But she used the power of her magazine to write about Thanksgiving and encourage governors to coordinate the date so that they would have the same date as the Civil War was approaching. She

Speaker 1 intensified her campaign and in 1863 she wrote to Lincoln asking him to name a date when the whole country could celebrate. He did

Speaker 1 and in 1863 was the first date that at least part of the country, the North, the Union, celebrated on one date. And since then, after Lincoln's death, every president since Lincoln has named

Speaker 1 a day, an official date of Thanksgiving. Interestingly, it wasn't until 1941 that Thanksgiving became official.

Speaker 1 Congress passed a resolution naming the fourth Thursday of November the date of Thanksgiving, and President Franklin Roosevelt signed it into law.

Speaker 7 Why did Thursday end up being the day where it should be celebrated? It's kind of odd to me.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 I guess in part it was because other days were taken. You know,

Speaker 1 Friday was sometimes a fast day. Sunday was a day of worship.
So,

Speaker 1 you know, but that's,

Speaker 1 I don't know. I couldn't find out.

Speaker 1 I can tell you, though, why it's

Speaker 1 the date that we celebrate today.

Speaker 1 It was the date that George Washington proclaimed

Speaker 1 in 1789. It was the first presidential proclamation, and he named Thursday.
Again, I don't know why it was Thursday, but ever since then, Thursday has been the most popular date for Thanksgiving.

Speaker 1 Abraham Lincoln chose Thursday in keeping with Washington's tradition.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so today it's a Thursday.

Speaker 7 Now, FDR, you mentioned him. There's also the Franksgiving controversy.
Can you tell us about that? What happened there?

Speaker 1 Well, Franksgiving, and some of our older

Speaker 1 watchers may remember this.

Speaker 1 In 1939,

Speaker 1 Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, decided that he would change the date of Thanksgiving. And he made it a week earlier than tradition,

Speaker 1 saying that he had a very dubious economic theory. He said that

Speaker 1 if we celebrated Thanksgiving a week earlier, then people would have more time, more days to go shopping, and the country's economy would improve.

Speaker 7 So Black Friday motivated the decision.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 This was before Black Friday, right.

Speaker 1 But in 1939,

Speaker 1 we were in the Great Depression and Americans didn't have the money to go shopping. So this was a big flop.
And finally, in 1941,

Speaker 1 he changed, he admitted defeat. And that's when Congress stepped in and

Speaker 1 passed a resolution naming the fourth Thursday as Thanksgiving. But interestingly,

Speaker 1 when Roosevelt did this in 1939, it caused an uproar in America. It was front page news, and people were offended by this, that the president was interfering with what they saw as the traditional

Speaker 1 date of Thanksgiving.

Speaker 1 So, with the result that half of the country kept with Roosevelt's date, which was, I think, the 23rd of November, and the other half of the country went with a traditional date, which in their minds was the last Thursday of the month, and that was the 30th of November.

Speaker 7 That sounds like a very American response right there. It also just goes to show we take tradition very seriously.
It actually matters culturally. It's something we can unite behind.

Speaker 1 This was, in retrospect, you can kind of laugh at it because

Speaker 1 the group of Americans who seemed to be among the most upset by this were football fans.

Speaker 1 And by then, a lot of American colleges, many of them, maybe most of them, had their final championship game of the season on Thanksgiving Day. So they were upset.

Speaker 1 And that led to calendar makers also being upset because, of course, calendars were designed for a year in advance.

Speaker 1 And they were losing a lot of money if they couldn't sell those calendars with the wrong date of Thanksgiving.

Speaker 7 I'm glad you brought up football there. I wanted to actually ask you about that.
What is the connection between football and Thanksgiving?

Speaker 7 Is it just that the holiday week provides an opportunity for more people to travel to games? Or is it just happenstance in terms of timing for the football season?

Speaker 1 It was a tradition that grew

Speaker 1 starting in around the 1870s, 1880s. Football, actually, the first football games took place in, I think, the late 1860s between Rutgers and Princeton.

Speaker 1 And then there was a college championship game that was played in New York City, and New Yorkers really got into it. It was played on Thanksgiving Day.

Speaker 1 And that tradition, and New York sets the scene, you know, sets the trend.

Speaker 1 And other cities followed suit. And high schools and community groups would

Speaker 1 have a,

Speaker 1 by the 1890s, there was a tradition of having games on Thanksgiving morning. And the guys would go off to the games, and the women would stay home and make dinner.

Speaker 1 And everybody would reconvene in the afternoon and celebrate Thanksgiving.

Speaker 7 Oh, that actually surprises me. So from the very beginning of football, it's been connected to Thanksgiving.
I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 Well, not quite always.

Speaker 1 There were probably a couple of decades before that connection was made. But yes, it's been a very close connection.
And

Speaker 1 you see it especially

Speaker 1 in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, where it was a strong tradition. Today we don't have that tradition, but

Speaker 1 now a lot of places have races on Thanksgiving morning and call them turkey trots.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I've definitely taken part in my share of those. So final question.
What does Thanksgiving mean to the nation in today's modern world?

Speaker 7 Do you think the meaning has changed or does it retain its traditional value in terms of communities and the society at large?

Speaker 1 I think the value has shifted somewhat.

Speaker 1 It's not as religious a holiday as it used to be.

Speaker 1 For the first couple of hundred years, people went to church on Thanksgiving morning, too, before they went to football. But we don't see that as much.

Speaker 1 It's still religious in the sense that if a family is going to say grace before a meal,

Speaker 1 it'll be on Thanksgiving, I believe. But the values of generosity to the poor, for example, have long been associated with Thanksgiving.
The earliest example I found of that was, I think, 1624.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 today,

Speaker 1 people participate in helping, making sure that

Speaker 1 the military gets a good Thanksgiving dinner and

Speaker 1 prisoners and people who have a hard time affording the meal. It's,

Speaker 1 and I think maybe the

Speaker 1 saddest image in American culture is somebody who has no place to go on Thanksgiving Day. It's a day that's associated with

Speaker 1 family and friendship.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and good food, like you mentioned. Melanie, thank you so much for joining.
It's a total delight here. We appreciate you bringing us your insights on this holiday.

Speaker 1 Well, I enjoyed speaking with you, and I wish you and all of your viewers a very happy Thanksgiving.

Speaker 7 That was Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Melanie Kirkpatrick, author of Thanksgiving, The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience. And this has been a Thanksgiving Week edition of Morningwire.

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