The Mother of Thanksgiving

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Speaker 2 Hey, it's Rund. We know that as we head into the holiday season, there are always a lot of think pieces about what it all means, especially Thanksgiving.

Speaker 2 And when we started looking into it, we found a story we had actually never heard before. We first ran this story last year, and we think it's very timely now.

Speaker 2 We hope you enjoy this through line Thanksgiving tale.

Speaker 3 Our good ancestors were wise,

Speaker 3 even in their mirth.

Speaker 3 We have a standing proof of this in the season they chose for the celebration of our annual festival, the Thanksgiving.

Speaker 3 The funeral-faced month of November is thus made to wear a garland of joy.

Speaker 4 Let me tell you a story of Thanksgiving, the traditional one.

Speaker 4 In 1621, when the English colonists, now known as the Pilgrims, were newcomers to this continent, there was a major feast between the Wampanoags and the English of Plymouth.

Speaker 5 That's a very real event.

Speaker 4 The event that's now called the First Thanksgiving.

Speaker 5 The suggestion is that the two parties got together for this feast out of innate friendship.

Speaker 7 It's this odd little frozen in time fantasy moment of folks getting together and eating, but you don't really know why.

Speaker 4 This is Elizabeth James Perry.

Speaker 7 I'm a member of the Aquino Wampanoag tribe of Gayhead, Martha's Vineyard, and I'm an artist and and I'm an exhibit consultant as well.

Speaker 4 She says that when the English first arrived, they were small in number.

Speaker 7 They were newcomers and they were struggling badly because they weren't necessarily all farmers back where they came from either.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 4 This is David Silverman.

Speaker 5 I'm professor of history at George Washington University.

Speaker 4 And he's also the author of the book.

Speaker 5 This land is their land, the Wampanoag Ideans, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.

Speaker 4 David says, remembering this meeting is just about friendship and gratitude. Actually,

Speaker 5 robs this very real event of all of its historical context.

Speaker 2 Now, let me tell you another Thanksgiving story. This one happens more than 50 years later.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Metacom, a Wampanoag chief, met with Rhode Island's Attorney General.

Speaker 5 What he said was, you know, when my father, a chief named Usa Mequin, met your ancestors, the Plymouth colonists, he was a great man and you were a little child.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But now here we are, 50 plus years later. Now you're the great man and we're the little child.

Speaker 5 And you don't treat us with that kind of respect.

Speaker 5 That's why I'm going to ward.

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

Speaker 5 England is 5 million people.

Speaker 2 It would come to be known as King Philip's War, the name the English colonists gave the Wampanoag Wampanoag chief Medacom.

Speaker 2 But the English show the Wampanoag and their allies very little respect.

Speaker 4 Let's be clear, they kill thousands of them

Speaker 5 and enslave many more and sell them off to the Caribbean and to the Mediterranean.

Speaker 3 The war goes on for nearly three years.

Speaker 2 And the colonists win.

Speaker 2 But a military captain named Benjamin Church isn't finished.

Speaker 5 He orders the head of King Philip, Wampanoag chief Medicom, to be decapitated and his head piped outside of Plymouth Colony, and it stays there for 20 years.

Speaker 5 This is the very site where that feast took place.

Speaker 2 The first Thanksgiving in 1621.

Speaker 5 Afterwards, Plymouth and Massachusetts, they hold a Thanksgiving for their victory over the Native people.

Speaker 7 Tribal nations are such a tiny portion of the population. That's not by accident, and nobody talks about you, except when there's there's a butterball on the table.

Speaker 7 Tomorrow's Thanksgiving.

Speaker 11 Mmm, turkey, and dressing, and pie and cake.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 4 Now, let me tell you a third story of Thanksgiving, one that's very different and that you may have never heard.

Speaker 12 The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty

Speaker 12 and we must rise.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 12 The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

Speaker 4 The country was as divided as it had ever been. War and destruction was everywhere.

Speaker 12 Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves.

Speaker 12 Abraham Lincoln.

Speaker 4 And in this moment, a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale sent President President Abraham Lincoln a letter.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 This subject is to have the day of our annual Thanksgiving made a national and fixed union union festival.

Speaker 4 The reason we celebrate Thanksgiving as we do today is because of this letter from Sarah Josepha Hale. It was her dream, her belief in our need for a national unifying story to bind us together.

Speaker 4 But what is that story? How did it come together? And what does it leave out?

Speaker 2 I'm Randa Abdir Fattah.

Speaker 4 And I'm Ramteen Arab Louis. On this episode of Through Line from NPR,

Speaker 4 the mother of Thanksgiving.

Speaker 13 Hi. My name is Ginny and I'm from Connecticut.
And if you want to be more interested at parties, you should do what I do and listen to Thrulein from NPR.

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Speaker 3 Part 1

Speaker 3 Hale's Crusade

Speaker 2 Sarah Josepha Hale was born in New Hampshire in 1788, not too far away from where the pilgrims first landed.

Speaker 10 She was the daughter of Revolutionary War heroes.

Speaker 2 At a time when many women couldn't read, Sarah had access to plenty of education.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 2 This is Melanie Kirkpatrick.

Speaker 10 I'm a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 2 Melanie also wrote a book called Called Lady Editor, which is a biography of Sarah Josepha Hale.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 10 Sarah really loved to read,

Speaker 10 and she taught herself a lot of things too.

Speaker 2 She wrote poetry, she wrote essays, she was just obsessed with writing.

Speaker 10 She was probably one of the most highly educated women of the first quarter of the 19th century.

Speaker 2 When she was 25, she married a local lawyer named David Hale.

Speaker 3 Very happily, we commenced soon after our marriage a system of study and reading.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 10 Her husband helped her develop her prose style, and he also helped her get poetry published in local newspapers.

Speaker 2 They had a quiet, idyllic marriage for eight years.

Speaker 10 And then he died

Speaker 10 suddenly,

Speaker 10 leaving her with four children and a fifth on the way.

Speaker 2 Her life was crumbling around her.

Speaker 10 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

Speaker 10 that happened to a woman, that her children were parceled off to relatives, and she didn't want to do that.

Speaker 2 Desperate to keep her family together, Hale started a business with her sister-in-law, making hats.

Speaker 3 And she hated it.

Speaker 2 So she poured her energy into writing and publishing prose, poems, and short stories.

Speaker 10 And then she wrote a novel, which was an anti-slavery novel. It came out in 1827.

Speaker 2 The novel was called Northwood: A Tale of New England.

Speaker 3 The southern slaveholder is as absolute in his dominions, or plantation rather, as the Grand Senor.

Speaker 2 This is a passage from the novel describing life on a southern plantation.

Speaker 10 It's the story of a

Speaker 10 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 who don't have any children.

Speaker 10 They're rich and give him lots of benefits that he wouldn't otherwise have.

Speaker 2 And eventually, this main character writes back to his hometown in the North and tells everyone exactly what he saw in the South.

Speaker 3 The change of masters is frequently a terrible evil to the poor slave, and that system must be inhuman and unjust.

Speaker 10 It's clear that the author and the main character believe slavery is wrong.

Speaker 2 Now Sarah also used her main character to argue that the best thing for black Americans would be to return to Africa.

Speaker 2 She believed total separation of the races was the only way out of a system of domination.

Speaker 3 Which subjects man to the occurrence of such an outrage.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 10 It kind of made her reputation among a group of intellectuals in Boston, including one man who was starting up a magazine for women.

Speaker 10 And he asked her out of the blue if she would come to Boston to edit it.

Speaker 2 It was called Ladies Magazine.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 2 And there were some people who doubted that a magazine geared towards women could gain a big following.

Speaker 10 In 1828, when her magazine debuted, half of American women were illiterate.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The magazine was a hit and soon merged with another magazine to become Goti's Ladies Book based in Philadelphia.

Speaker 10 And it was when she became the editor, or she preferred the term editress,

Speaker 10 of Godi's Ladies Book that

Speaker 10 things really took off for her.

Speaker 10 She expanded her focus to culinary things. She also wrote about art and architecture.
She reviewed many books.

Speaker 3 The Ladies Book was the first avowed advocate of the holy cause of women's intellectual progress.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Goaties achieved popular and critical success. Sarah's writing was praised by Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe.

Speaker 3 She became very famous.

Speaker 10 She became a celebrity in 19th century America.

Speaker 10 So much so that there was a phrase, Mrs. Hale said,

Speaker 10 meaning that she was like the arbiter of behavior and housekeeping and education and culinary issues.

Speaker 4 Like almost like,

Speaker 4 I dare say this, but it's given me like Oprah vibes, like Oprah in the 90s vibes.

Speaker 10 Yes, very, very similar.

Speaker 10 She really connected with people and she had a fabulous sense of what was important and what wasn't important.

Speaker 2 Sarah used her platform to push for the things she believed in. She supported women's education, though not women's suffrage.

Speaker 2 She opposed slavery and thought free black people should be repatriated to Africa. And she had a vision for creating a united national culture.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 They needed something to coalesce around.

Speaker 2 And for Sarah, there was no better day to coalesce around than her favorite holiday, Thanksgiving.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 10 She thought that if we could all come together and celebrate on the same day, that would help to bring Americans together.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 10 And as the Civil War approached, she also had the hope that it would forestall war.

Speaker 3 We believe our Thanksgiving Day, if fixed and perpetuated, will be a great and sanctifying promoter of this national spirit.

Speaker 2 Coming up, Sarah takes her appeal all the way to the top.

Speaker 2 My name is Frinston Deseravines from Silver Spring, Maryland, and you're listening to Thru Line from NPR.

Speaker 2 The reason why I love Thru Line 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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Speaker 3 Part 2:

Speaker 3 One Heart, One Voice

Speaker 4 On a farm in Maryland, a group of 22 men, some of them enslaved and some of them not, hide in an attic.

Speaker 4 They spend their days reading, writing letters, cleaning their rifles, waiting.

Speaker 4 Then, on October 16th, 1859, their leader, a white abolitionist named John Brown, gathers them together. He He prays with them, then afterwards says, Men, get on your arms.
We'll proceed to the ferry.

Speaker 4 They start a five-mile march towards a Virginia town called Harper's Ferry. They plan to capture the federal armory there and start a massive revolt against slavery.

Speaker 4 Within just a couple of hours, John Brown's forces take control of two bridges, the armory and a rifle factory.

Speaker 4 They take slave owners and armory employees hostage.

Speaker 4 I have possession now of the United States Armory. And if the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood.

Speaker 4 Eventually, U.S. Marines led by Colonel Robert E.
Lee arrive. Brown's men are surrounded.

Speaker 4 The Marines storm the Armory.

Speaker 4 If you die, you die in a good cause.

Speaker 4 Several of John Brown's men are killed, including his own son. Those who haven't escaped are captured.

Speaker 5 Fighting for liberty.

Speaker 4 John Brown is tried and later hanged.

Speaker 1 If you must die,

Speaker 14 die like a man.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 The following year, the country would elect Abraham Lincoln, and soon, southern states would start to secede.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 4 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, Goti's Ladies Book, reaching around a million readers from north to south, arguing that Thanksgiving could unite the country.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 Sarah Josepha Hale had been on a mission to make Thanksgiving a national holiday.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 10 At first, she thought if she could just get the governors all to agree on a date, that would be good enough.

Speaker 4 So, for years leading up to the Civil War, Goti's Ladies Book ran editorials and recipes and stories about Thanksgiving.

Speaker 4 And she was making the argument that an annual holiday would be good for everyone.

Speaker 3 The poor.

Speaker 3 Let us consecrate the day to benevolence of action by sending good gifts to the poor.

Speaker 4 The depressed.

Speaker 3 Wasting despondency cripples the feeble limbs.

Speaker 4 Prisoners.

Speaker 3 Even the poor prisoner is cheered in his solitary cell.

Speaker 4 But she knew the audience of a woman's magazine wouldn't be enough. She had to convince the men in power.

Speaker 10 She had a huge network and she would handwrite personal letters to governors.

Speaker 3 Will you use the influence of your high official status? Congressman to establish the last Thursday in November. Members of the Senate as the annual American Thanksgiving.

Speaker 10 Trying to get their support for her idea of a national holiday.

Speaker 10 And she did have success. She got many of the governors to agree on a given date, but not all of them.

Speaker 10 So then she thought that the better idea would be to get the president to proclaim a National Day of Thanksgiving.

Speaker 4 So she made her case again and again. And at first, the response from lawmakers was, we love this idea, but.

Speaker 10 No, the Constitution won't let us do it.

Speaker 4 There were two main objections.

Speaker 10 They believed it wasn't a federal responsibility. It was a state responsibility.
And second, that it was a religious matter.

Speaker 10 Thanksgiving Day was a religious holiday, and therefore the president needs to stay out of it.

Speaker 4 But remember, this was happening during the buildup to the Civil War. So of course, Thanksgiving did become political.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 10 And he replied, saying that basically it was a damn Yankee holiday, that you had preachers in the North preaching abolitionism, which was political.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 4 But Sarah Josepha Hale didn't necessarily believe Thanksgiving would end slavery. She thought it could prevent a civil war.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But despite all her efforts, Thanksgiving didn't become a national holiday. And beginning in 1860, 11 southern states seceded.
The Confederacy formed.

Speaker 4 The Civil War

Speaker 4 began.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And in June of that year, the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, began invading the Union state of Pennsylvania.

Speaker 4 One battle would help turn the tide of the war.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 lose the war.

Speaker 4 Gettysburg was considered a major turning point and victory for the North. And this is where Sarah Josepha Hale comes back in our story.

Speaker 3 So finally, in 1863, she wrote to Lincoln, Sir, permit me as editress of the Lady's Book to request a few minutes of your precious time.

Speaker 10 Just five days after reading Hale's letter, Lincoln agreed and issued a proclamation.

Speaker 4 Making Thanksgiving a national holiday.

Speaker 12 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 sojourning in foreign lands to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of Thanksgiving.

Speaker 12 Abraham Lincoln.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 4 And the Union did win. In 1865, the Confederates surrendered, and Lincoln was assassinated.

Speaker 10 It was Lincoln's decision in 1863 that started the tradition of a national Thanksgiving that continues to this day.

Speaker 4 Sarah Josepha Hale's years of persistence had paid off.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 Coming up, after the Thanksgiving holiday is established, the Thanksgiving myth takes hold.

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Speaker 10 Part 3:

Speaker 10 The Thanksgiving Myth.

Speaker 18 I do not arise to spread before you the fame of a noted warrior.

Speaker 18 There are many who are said to be honorable warriors who think it no crime to wreck their vengeance upon whole nations and communities until the fields are covered with blood and the rivers turned into purple fountains.

Speaker 18 While a loud response is heard floating through the air from the 10,000 Indian children and orphans who are left to mourn the honorable acts of a few civilized men.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's 1836, 25 years before the start of the Civil War, more than two centuries after the Wampanoag leader, Usa Miquin and the Pilgrims in Plymouth shared a meal and signed a peace treaty.

Speaker 2 And William Apis, a Pequot minister and orator, is spelling out for a theater full of Bostonians what happened next.

Speaker 2 How the pilgrims came to the Wampanoags for help, how the Wampanoags gave them venison and sold them corn.

Speaker 18 And for all this, they were denounced as being savages by those who received all these acts of kindness.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But they aren't used to seeing themselves as part of the problem.

Speaker 5 The epicenter for criticism of the United States violent approach to subjugating Native people is New England.

Speaker 2 This is historian David Silverman.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 In the 19th century, the criticism of U.S. Indian affairs coming out of New England is very, very sharp.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 2 As early as 1769, New Englanders began celebrating what they called Forefathers Day on December 22nd, the anniversary of the day the pilgrims made landfall at Plymouth Rock.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 For the 22nd of December and the 4th of July are days of mourning and not of joy.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And to that primary source account, he adds a footnote. And the footnote read, this was the first Thanksgiving.
Wow.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But with that footnote, the myth starts to grow over time.

Speaker 5 It then really takes hold in American society after Abraham Lincoln declares Thanksgiving to be a national holiday during the Civil War.

Speaker 4 Lincoln's 1863 proclamation meant that Americans got into the habit of celebrating Thanksgiving every year on the same day.

Speaker 4 But the first national Thanksgivings in the wake of the Civil War were rocky.

Speaker 4 Sarah Josepha Hale, as editor of the widely popular Goty's Ladies book magazine, dedicated a lot of real estate to her Thanksgiving columns, Selling Southern Women on the Holiday.

Speaker 3 When joining in prayers for the same blessings and in Thanksgivings for the same good gifts of the season.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 4 But while Sarah Josepha Hale kept writing about a holiday that revolved around pie, family, and faith, Outside Godi's ladies' book, Thanksgiving was starting to take on a life of its own.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 In 1912, a painter named Jean-Leon Jerome Ferris finished one of the most famous works of his career, an oil painting called the First Thanksgiving.

Speaker 5 The mythologized Thanksgiving.

Speaker 4 The one most of us were taught in school.

Speaker 5 Pilgrims and Indians making friends.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They're not wearing traditional Wampanoag clothing, but instead what Ferris imagined they would wear: feather headdresses and decorative beads.

Speaker 4 An English settler, a woman, holds a tray of food in front of a Native man. He reaches for a loaf of bread.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And that's a basic binary that has shaped white Americans' views of themselves and of Indigenous people

Speaker 5 really for 400 years.

Speaker 4 By the early 1900s, acting out that fantasy had become part of the curriculum at many schools.

Speaker 5 There are black and white photos all over from the early 20th century.

Speaker 5 You know, and you'll see the kids in plains feathered headdresses and these pilgrim costumes, costumes, which have these obscenely large buckles on every conceivable article of clothing.

Speaker 5 It's a whitewash of the bloodiness of the ruthlessness of colonialism.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 What were their lives like in the early 1900s?

Speaker 2 I can talk about my family. This is a Quinna Wampanoag artist and educator, Elizabeth James Perry.

Speaker 7 My great-grandmother was a widow, and so her life was very much about taking care of her family as a sole provider.

Speaker 2 This was all happening during a period of upheaval for the Wampanoags in Martha's Vineyard. They had persisted despite the U.S.

Speaker 2 government's aggressive policy of Indian removal in the 1830s, when many Native people were forced off their land and moved west.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 You know, it's not a switch.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Adventures and misadventures, funny childhood memories. Unbelievable.

Speaker 7 Ship locked in ice, using your crazy gayhead navigation skills to walk across the ice because you remember a community in this direction.

Speaker 6 Carrying the captain's wife who had to come on the voyage for some odd reason.

Speaker 7 You know, that's just like, I think the underpinning was

Speaker 7 here. We are these survivors,

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 It wasn't about

Speaker 7 get a load of this turkey. You know, it just turkey wasn't new for us.

Speaker 3 Cranberries weren't new.

Speaker 3 I don't know what to say.

Speaker 6 New England wasn't new. I mean, we kind of like, yeah, I mean.

Speaker 4 You're like, we're kind of from here.

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 5 History is not about trying to make people feel guilty or ashamed, patriotic or unpatriotic. It's designed to capture a complex past in all of its complexity.

Speaker 5 National celebrations are another kettle of fish. They are designed to cultivate unity.
There will never be unity around complex historical subjects. They're too complex.

Speaker 2 Whether it is the inaccurate, rosy-color view of the first Thanksgiving in 1621, or using the day as a vessel for national unity. What we are thankful for is a choice, a choice with consequences.

Speaker 10 These national holidays, they remind us of what it means to be an American, number one.

Speaker 10 And then

Speaker 10 they also give us a chance to celebrate our nation.

Speaker 10 I should say there are critics of Thanksgiving, people who won't celebrate it because they wrongly think

Speaker 10 that it is celebrating the destruction of Native culture. I can't disagree with that more strongly.
I think it is a time of celebration of people of different cultures coming together.

Speaker 5 I think it's true that most adults don't give pilgrims and Indians much of a thought.

Speaker 5 But that's part of the point. The point is that we're indoctrinated with this idea as children, and then we're never asked to revisit it as we become more mature and capable of complex thought.

Speaker 5 I would prefer to see Thanksgiving continue without invoking pilgrims and Indians at all. I don't trust any ritual

Speaker 5 to capture

Speaker 5 complexities of any sort, never mind violent complexities that strike at the heart of the desire to have the United States be a beacon of light in the world. That is asking too much.

Speaker 4 As for Sarah Josepha Hale, she had her mind made up that Thanksgiving could bring the U.S. together, and she lived long enough to see it take hold.

Speaker 4 Hill spent the rest of her life making sure Thanksgiving would outlive her.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 This idea was very near to my heart, for I believed 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.

Speaker 2 That's it for this week's show. I'm Randad Bilfettah.

Speaker 4 I'm Ramteen Arab Louis, and you've been listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 2 This episode was produced by me and me and Sarah Wyman.

Speaker 5 Devin Katiyama.

Speaker 8 Casey Miner.

Speaker 13 Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane.

Speaker 3 Anya Steinberg.

Speaker 2 Lina Mohammed. Christina Kim.

Speaker 3 Irene Naguchi.

Speaker 2 Thank you to Nina Buchowski, Kunit Matiwala, Johannes Durgi, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

Speaker 4 Voiceover work in this episode was done by Sarah Wyman, Ryan Escalas, Devin Katiyama, Mark Smith, and Sam Yellowhorse Kessler. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

Speaker 4 It was mixed by Maggie Luthar.

Speaker 2 Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvy, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

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