In the corridors of academia and the newsrooms of the regime media, it is fashionable these days to denigrate our national celebration of Thanksgiving.
Barnard College may have started the barrage of hate with its 2013 message to students before the holiday, “Happy Turkey Week. Thanksgiving is complicated. We urge you not to forget that this holiday commemorates genocide and American imperialism.” Six years later the New Yorker weighed in with an assertion that the holiday was created to glorify “white Pilgrim founders” as a way of diverting attention from “the brutality of Jim Crow” and downplaying “the foundational role of slavery.” Also marginalizing immigrants and promoting eugenics! How it did this is never explained, especially since it was Abraham Lincoln who codified the Thanksgiving holiday after a 17-year letter-writing campaign by Sarah Josepha Hale, the nation’s first female magazine editor and author of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” But hey, anything to feed to myth that Americans are innately racist. Not to be outdone, in 2020 MSNBC’s Jason Johnson called the day “Colonizer Christmas.”
Given the Far Left’s insistence on viewing the founders as white imperialists no matter what their accomplishments, it is perhaps not surprising they are defaming a holiday that celebrated cross-cultural cooperation. True, that first Thanksgiving dinner was unusual — most encounters between whites and Natives in the 17th Century were violent. Also true: the history of white America’s destruction of Indian land and welfare is horrific, none more than the Long Trail of Tears that President Andrew Jackson unleashed to drive Natives from their homes in Oklahoma so white settlers could claim it. But instead of celebrating this rare moment of bridging differences, critics calling themselves progressives (maybe we should start calling them out as regressives) seek to recast the holiday as evidence of white racism.
In fact, it might be more accurate to call the first Thanksgiving meal, celebrated in southern New England in 1621, an example of Native American political savvy.
The Wampanoag Indians had been decimated by diseases introduced by European explorers in 1616. By the time the Mayflower landed in 1620, historians estimate that three-fourths of the Wampanoags had been killed. Their western rivals, the Narragansett, were little affected by the epidemic. So the Wampanoags sought and won a military alliance with these new Europeans who had come bearing arms. As the “starving time” of the Pilgrims’ first winter passed, the Wampanoags taught the new Europeans to plant and care for native crops, to hunt and fish local wildlife. After their first successful harvest, the Europeans borrowed their own Harvest Home customs — three days of non-stop feasting and drinking, sporting events (not yet the NFL) and shooting off muskets — and invited the man one settler called the Indians’ “greatest king, Massosoit,” to “rejoice together” over “the fruits of our labours.”
It was not until the Civil War, that wrenching conflict that would outlaw the blight of slavery, that the holiday assumed an even weightier message of gratitude. Giving thanks was a principle shared by Pilgrims, Christians, and abolitionists. In declaring a national day of Thanksgiving in 1963, President Lincoln said he hoped it would “heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.”
All nations have a foundational story, a shared narrative meant to use history to teach national aspirations and community values. The Thanksgiving harvest fest of 1621 serves as a reminder of what can happen when diverse peoples work together. In 1675, Massosoit’s son, Metacomet, wrote that the Wampanoags were like a father to “the little child” of Plymouth, but that once they became “adults,” the Europeans drove the Indians into landlessness and subordination. By 1835, William Apess, a Pequot preacher, charged betrayal, blaming settlers for his people’s impoverishment. He urged whites to remember the Christianity they had preached.
These days, we are a country divided. Some dissent from the idea we are a nation “under God.” Others claim the First Amendment for themselves alone. Thanksgiving reminds us of what we have in common — gratitude for our country and its principles, for its bounty and its beauty. Even now, with inflation crippling the travel plans and shortening the dinner menus of many Americans, we are reassured by this shared custom of giving thanks for family, faith and country.
Former NBA star Enes Kanter Freedom said the other day that he was raised in Turkey to hate Americans. Arriving here at 17 years old to play basketball, he was invited to a Thanksgiving dinner. He was so terrified, given the awful things he had heard about Americans, that he told a friend if he wasn’t back in two hours, to call the police. Of course, he was enchanted by a nation giving thanks for the blessings of life.
Recently a group of Afghan immigrants gathered as a community to celebrate the holiday, served with turkey and lentils. Even the Washington Post, often dismissive of our patriotic customs, acknowledged that to these newcomers, “Thanksgiving is part of becoming an American, and one of the better parts, especially compared to what can be a desperate hunt for work or a frustrating quest to learn the language.”
That is who we are. We are a nation of immigrants gathering every year to honor the country that gave us freedom of speech, a right to worship our God and defend our homes — that is the legacy of our founders, of those who fought to end slavery, of those with the intuition to understand that giving thanks heals the soul.
Enjoy the day. Go Lions.
Happy Thanksgiving! God Bless America!