Susanna J. Sturgis   Martha's Vineyard writer and editor
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Thanksgiving Blog

November 23, 2006

Yesterday's Martha's Vineyard Times (published a day early this week because of the holiday) featured a good article by Nis Kildegaard about the history and politics of Thanksgiving. It was based partly on an interview with Nathaniel Philbrick, a Nantucket writer whose book Mayflower was published earlier this year by Viking. Notes Philbrick in his book:

The term Thanksgiving, first applied in the 19th century, was not used by the Pilgrims themselves. For the Pilgrims a thanksgiving was a time of spiritual devotion. Since just about everything the Pilgrims did had religious overtones, there was certainly much about the gathering in the fall of 1621 that would have made it a proper Puritan thanksgiving. But . . . there was also much about the gathering that was similar to a traditional English harvest festival -- a secular celebration that dated back to the Middle Ages in which villagers ate, drank, and played games.

Tobias Vanderhoop, a culture bearer for the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), was quoted in the Times article about Wampanoag tradition:

Whether it's a harvest time, or the time of the solstice, the change of the seasons, traditionally we have had celebrations that involve being thankful and showing appreciation to our Creator for providing crops, or natural things that have grown, or offering thanksgiving at the solstice that the light is going to come back. We have times set aside for thanks all through the year.

Thanksgiving as we know it was proclaimed in October 1863 by Abraham Lincoln. Henceforth the last Thursday in November was to be "a day of Thanksgiving and Praise." What the divided nation was harvesting that year was human lives: some hundred thousand had been lost in the bloody battles at Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and Chancellorsville. In response to what Philbrick calls "the public need for a restorative myth of national origins," Lincoln created Thanksgiving, "a cathartic celebration of nationhood that would have baffled and probably appalled the godly Pilgrims."

How to separate the history from the mythology? I doubt it's possible, or even desirable. No matter how scrupulously we research the history, we're spinning the facts into a story that we need to hear at our particular juncture of place and time. Our ancestors and our descendants find very different tales in pretty much the same facts. People across the ocean, or even across the road, learn different lessons altogether. When the stories collide, considerable havoc often results. And sometimes worse, much worse.

But denying and trying to squelch myths is as shortsighted as refusing to learn from history. (Perhaps they're pretty much the same thing?) Most USians, or so I'm told, believe that the Pilgrims came to the New World, as the Times article puts it, "seeking a place where everyone could worship God in their own way." Did I ever believe that? Maybe so. The Pilgrims came to the New World so that they could worship God their own way. Had the prospects seemed better in England or anywhere else in Europe, would they have undertaken such an extraordinary journey, made such a breathtaking leap of faith? They believed they were acting in accordance with God's will. The natural corollary is that if they were, then all the others weren't. Where God's will is concerned, tolerance is not a virtue. Allowing, never mind encouraging, others to "worship God in their own way" means allowing them to persist in error and perhaps thereby to call down the wrath of God on God's own elect, who should know better than to tolerate that which would not please God. After the first year or two or three, having survived against all odds, those Pilgrims might be forgiven for believing that they were on the right, divine-sanctioned track. Their ordeal might have impressed them both with humility -- how fragile are human beings, how tenuous their grasp on existence -- and with arrogance, because God was so clearly giving them the go-ahead.

Of the Pilgrims' demonstrated intolerance of religious (which is to say "any") dissenters, Philbrick writes:

It seems never to have occurred to the Pilgrims that this was just the kind of intolerant attitude that had forced them to leave England. For them, it was not a question of liberty and freedom -- these concepts, so near and dear to their descendants in the following century, were completely alien to their worldview -- but rather a question of right and wrong.

History is a trickster. History holds up the mirror, and most of us see what we expect to see, or what we find most useful. The Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers weren't as different as all that. The Pilgrims wanted to worship God in their own way; the Founding Fathers wanted to organize a government in their own way. Their "liberty and freedom" was as conditional as that of their Puritan predecessors: it extended only to members of their circle, men of similar circumstances and interests. It did not include Africans, Indians, non-landowners, or women of any kind. The idea that Africans, Indians, non-landowners, and women might be entitled to "liberty and freedom" did occur to some of them, but it was not an idea they thought they could afford to act on. The wrath of God probably did not concern them overmuch, but they must have feared, from 1776 through several ensuing decades, the stillbirth or early failure of the Republic.

And we, their descendants in 2006? Our notions of liberty and freedom seem just as conditional. Dissenting voices at home make us nervous. The "liberty and freedom" we're bent on exporting to the rest of the world seems conditional as well: everyone's free to organize their economy the way we want it organized. We don't call it "God," we call it "the market," but it's supposed to be the source from which all worthwhile blessings flow -- the blessings without which all unbelievers are damned. For their own good we can't allow that, can we?

Makes me wonder just who, or what, this God guy is anyway, and why so many of us want him on our side.

 

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