role that Thanksgiving has played in many aspects of American life in the four centuries since the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people feasted together for three days in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts.
It was late summer or early autumn in 1621 when the Pilgrims who had survived their first winter in the New World sat down with their Wampanoag neighbors to share food and fellowship. The friendly coexistence between the English settlers and the Native Americans would last only a few decades longer. But that original Thanksgiving pointed the way to the diverse, multicultural people we have become.
In telling the history of Thanksgiving, I have taken my cue from the young immigrants I interviewed at Newcomers High School. Like my conversation with those enthusiastic newcomers, this book ranges widely, venturing into the realms of religion, hospitality, economics, philanthropy, culture, and politics, as well as food. It is not arranged chronologically. Rather, it weaves and bobs among the centuries to recount little-known stories about Thanksgiving that I hope will shed light on the meaning of America’s favorite holiday and how it reflects and reinforces values most Americans share.
Thanksgiving is at the heart of the American experience. It is intertwined with seminal moments in our history—the arrival of the early European settlers, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the westward expansion, the influx of immigrants. In all these events, religious faith played a part. The first act of the first Continental Congress was to declare a national day of giving thanks to God. The first presidential proclamation was George Washington’s call for a day of thanksgiving. In 1863, when the nation was torn asunder by war, Lincoln established the Thanksgiving holiday as a permanent fixture on the American calendar. Congress codified Thanksgiving Day into law in 1941, just days after the United States’ entry into World War II.
In 1937, the historian Samuel Eliot Morison famously wrote that the Pilgrims are the “spiritual ancestors of all Americans whatever their stock, race or creed.”1 Today we live in more fractious times, often tending to focus more on what divides us than on what unites us. In my visit to Newcomers High School in Queens, I set out to discover whether Morison’s sentiment holds true today in the minds of some of America’s newest and youngest arrivals. Their answer was a resounding yes. So, too, say most Americans—at least on Thanksgiving Day.
It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord.
—Psalm 92
I am standing in the grand exhibition hall on the upper level of the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts, admiring a painting titled The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth. The museum’s amiable director, Patrick Browne, is about to give me a reality check.1
The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth is an iconic work of American art. It has appeared countless times in books, calendars, and greeting cards since it was created by Jennie Brownscombe in 1914. Most Americans would recognize it. Every American would know at a glance that its subject is Thanksgiving.
This is the First Thanksgiving as we picture it in our mind’s eye. Pilgrims and Indians are gathered around a long dining table that is set outdoors on a beautiful autumn day. The sun is sparkling off flame-colored maple trees in the background; the placid waters of Plymouth Bay are visible in the distance. As I am silently taking in the painting, Patrick cuts into my thoughts.
The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth is full of historical inaccuracies, he tells me. That is not what it looked like. The Pilgrims wore bright colors—reds, blues, greens, violets—not the sober hues pictured here. The Indians of New England never donned feathered headdresses, as in this painting, which seems to have been inspired by the Plains Indians of the American West. If there had been a table, the Pilgrim women would not have been seated with the men; they would have been busy preparing the food. The First Thanksgiving may not even have taken place in the fall; it could have been late summer, when the harvest would have been gathered. In short, there is not a whole lot that the artist seems to have gotten right about the event other than the fact that it was held outdoors. The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth is an interpretation, Patrick emphasizes, and we can enjoy it as such; but it is not historically accurate.
On that score—interpretation—it seems to me that Brownscombe’s rendering of the First Thanksgiving deserves high marks. The focal point of the painting is an elderly Pilgrim who is saying grace. He is standing behind his seat at the table, head lifted to heaven, eyes closed, hands raised and clasped together in prayer. The artist may have fallen short on the historical details, but she captured the most important aspect of the First Thanksgiving and of every Thanksgiving that has followed: giving thanks.
Downstairs in another gallery are various artifacts that belonged to the Pilgrims. Many of them were brought over on the Mayflower and may have been used at that three-day harvest feast of 1621. These ordinary household items hold at least as much power as Brownscombe’s painting. View them, and the Pilgrims’ story comes to life.
We start with Governor William Bradford’s Bible. It is the 1560 Geneva translation, which the Pilgrims favored as more accurate than the 1611 King James Version used by the Church of England. Most Pilgrim households had a Geneva Bible, and the one on display was printed in London in 1592. One of the Geneva Bible’s most important innovations was to divide the text into verses as well as chapters. Another was to use roman rather than gothic type. How much easier these simple changes must have made it for ordinary readers to follow and understand the words of the Bible.
Bradford’s Bible embodies the entire history of the Pilgrims. This is the volume that accompanied them through their voyages and whose words sustained them through ordeal after ordeal. “You look at it and you think of the fact that when the Pilgrim congregation was gathering together in England, William Bradford was reading this Bible,” Patrick tells me. “When they went to Holland, he was reading this Bible. When they came over on the Mayflower, he was reading this Bible. This is the Bible that was in that primitive little house he built a few blocks over from here. And now it’s right in front of us.”
We move on to examine more Pilgrim belongings: Myles Standish’s sword; Peter Brown’s beer tankard; Constance Hopkins’s beaver hat; and a pair of armless spectacles made of glass, horn, leather, and wood that belonged to an unknown Pilgrim, presumably of middle age, whose eyesight was failing. There is a faded piece of needlework made by Standish’s daughter that is the earliest known American-made sampler. It is long and narrow and embroidered with a pious verse that begins:
Loara Standish is my name
Lord guide my heart that I may do thy will.
We take a look at Myles Standish’s iron cooking pot. It boasts two handles, convenient for lifting it on and off the hearth. In another display case is a large wooden bowl fashioned from burl maple. The bowl was used by the Wampanoag for preparing and serving food. It is one of the few Native American artifacts in the museum’s collection.
We also see the cradle of the first European child to be born in New England. The cradle rocked Peregrine White, son of Susanna and William White. Susanna was pregnant when she and William and their five-year-old son Resolved boarded the Mayflower, and she knew she would need a safe place to lay a newborn infant.
Peregrine was born aboard the Mayflower as it lay at anchor off the tip
