The modern Thanksgiving script includes expressions of gratitude for our many blessings; and that is certainly very good (albeit while eating too much—the underside of a life of abundance.)  Thanksgiving has also unfortunately become a time to perpetuate some bad history.  The celebration of the first harvest that is introduced to American school children as they make their paper Pilgrim hats and Indian headdresses masks the truth.  The earliest encounter between the newcomers and the natives was theft, and the long-term policy was annihilation.  More damaging, however, is the loss of the deeper experience of self-reflection that the first Thanksgivings were meant to inspire.

Because Thanksgiving has turned into a secular national holiday with a focus on celebrating the good life, our presidents naturally want to participate.  They take part in the silliness of pardoning one of the forty-five million turkeys that are killed for Thanksgiving.  It might be best to leave unexplored what that scene reveals about the American character.  It is more interesting to look at the proclamations that are dutifully issued by the presidents on Thanksgiving Day.   The statements from Barack Obama in 2016 and Donald Trump in 2017, when compared to the earliest presidential proclamations, expose how removed Americans are today from the original spirit of this national holiday.

Before listing the many things for which Americans should be thankful, both Obama and Trump began their proclamations with the standard trope about the first feast in Plymouth.  Obama went further than Trump with the historical revisionism by claiming that what brought the Pilgrims and Wampanoag tribe together was “the power of faith, love, gratitude, and optimism.”[1]  Forget that it was starvation for the former and hope for a military alliance for the latter.  Both Obama and Trump managed to get some important American history glaringly wrong. Obama claimed that our history “teaches us that the American instinct has never been to seek isolation in opposite corners; it is to find strength in our common creed and forge unity from our great diversity.”[2]  Any student of American history knows that a spirit of isolationism dominated American foreign policy from George Washington’s “no foreign entanglements” to the Monroe Doctrine to the delayed entry into World War I and II.  His statement that Americans have always celebrated diversity glosses over America’s long history of nativism.  But I digress.

Trump’s major error had to do with the history of the Thanksgiving holiday.  He stated that after the first celebration over four-hundred years ago, for “the next two centuries, many individual colonies and states, primarily in the Northeast, carried on the tradition of fall Thanksgiving festivities.  But each state celebrated it on a different day, and sometime on an occasional basis.  It was not until 1863 that the holiday was celebrated on one day, nationwide….President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that the country would set aside one day to remember its many blessings.”[3]  Not true.  First of all, days of thanks that were frequent in Calvinist New England–with the emphasis on repenting sins, prayer, and fasting–were far from festive celebrations.  Secondly, Washington, Adams, and Madison all proclaimed national days of thanksgiving (Jefferson believed that such proclamations were an uncalled-for government intrusion into religious life.)  Most important, if we look at these earliest proclamations the emphasis was on character building through prayer and repentance, not thanking; and none of them connected Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims and the Indians.

Washington proclaimed that a public day of prayer would be held on Thursday, November 26, 1789 in order to give thanks to God for peace and prosperity.  The American people, however, needed to do more than just be thankful. Thanksgiving Day was a sincerely Christian day.  The forgiveness of sins with the promise to be better was the central experience.  Washington wrote that the American people should “beseech [God] to pardon our national and other transgressions to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually—to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed  To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue.”[4]

John Adams issued two proclamations for a national day of thanksgiving in 1798 and again in 1799.  In 1798 Adams expressed with his typically tangled and endless sentences that May 9^th should be designated “as a day of Solemn Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer” when we acknowledge before God “the manifold Sins and Transgressions with which we are justly chargeable as Individuals and as a Nation; beseeching him, at the same time, of his infinite Grace, through the Redeemer of the World, freely to remit all our Offences, and to incline us, by his Holy Spirit, to that sincere Repentance and Reformation which may afford us reason to hope for his inestimable Favour and Heavenly Benediction…”  In addition to praying for continued economic prosperity, Americans must pray “that the principles of Genuine Piety and Sound Morality may influence the Minds and govern the Lives of every description of our Citizens.”[5]

Due perhaps to his growing problems both foreign and domestic, Adams appeared to be in a darker mood in 1799 when he proclaimed that a day in April would be set aside for all Americans to “call to mind our numerous offences against the most High GOD, confess them before him with the sincerest penitence, implore his pardoning mercy… for our past transgressions.”  In Adams’s worldview, there was very little to be thankful for; we needed to stop being so very bad!  Americans needed God’s help to “arrest the progress of that impiety and licentiousness in principle and practice, so offensive to himself and so ruinous to mankind.”[6] 

Lincoln’s Proclamation of 1863 was the most succinct and to the point.  It was meant to direct the people’s attention to blessings that were “of so extraordinary a nature” that it would soften the heart of those who do not tend to recognize the hand of God in all things.  It was nothing short of a miracle that in 1863 Americans had anything to be thankful for at all.  Despite the fact of the nation being engaged in a civil war, the nation was expanding and prospering.  God must be thanked “for such singular deliverances and blessings,” yet we should express profound and humble repentance “for our national perverseness and disobedience.”[7]

That might be a good line for Trump to begin his 2018 Thanksgiving Proclamation.

[1] “Presidential Proclamation — Thanksgiving Day, 2016,” The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, last modified November 23, 2016, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/11/23/presidential-proclamation-thanksgiving-day-2016

[2] Ibid.

[3] “President Donald J. Trump Proclaims Thursday, November 23, 2017, as a National Day of Thanksgiving,” The White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/president-donald-j-trump-proclaims-thursday-november-23-2017-national-day-thanksgiving/

[4] “Thanksgiving Proclamation, 3 October 1789,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-04-02-0091. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 4, 8 September 1789 – 15 January 1790, ed. Dorothy Twohig. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993, pp. 131–132.]

[5] “Proclamation Proclaiming a Fast-Day, 23 March 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-2386.

[6] “Fast Day Proclamation, 6 March 1799,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3372.

[7] “Proclamation of Thanksgiving,” Abraham Lincoln Online, National Archives, accessed November 17, 2018, http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/thanks.htm