The Daily Signal - What the First Thanksgiving Was Like

Episode Date: November 28, 2019

What actually happened at the first Thanksgiving? And how did our memory of it, over the centuries of American history, get tinged with a bit of “fake news”? Today we're re-playing a special Thanksgiving podcast episode. Tracy McKenzie, author of “The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History,” joins us to discuss the holiday. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, November 28th. Happy Thanksgiving. I'm Daniel Davis. A year ago, we had the pleasure of speaking to Tracy McKenzie, a professor of history at Wheaton College and author of the book, The First Thanksgiving. That book is about the real story of the first Thanksgiving that most of us haven't heard about. Dr. McKinsey is a former professor of mine and remains a friend to this day. Here's that interview once again.

So Dr. McKinsey, thank you for calling in. It's my pleasure, Daniel. I'm glad to talk with you. Dr. McKinsey, I think all of us have seen and grown up with those pictures of the pilgrims eating a big, nice turkey Thanksgiving meal, sometimes with the Indians there at Plymouth. Give us the straight scoop here. Are those pictures accurate? Well, I think you know the answer to that, Daniel. The answer is not very. Most of our images of that event really date two to two and a half centuries later. So the late 19th century is when most of those images really begin to crystallize. If I were going to try to very briefly describe for you what I think the setting would have looked like at the time,

it would probably sound to you a lot more like maybe a Fourth of July barbecue or something like that. It would have been outdoors. The pilgrims had almost no furniture to speak of in 1621, so we would imagine them sitting on the ground. they're eating with their hands because they have very few utensils who have been uncommon for them to have really anything much more than a knife. It's certainly not a fork. Those aren't really in use much among common people at that time. So they're sitting on the ground, they're eating with their hands, and they're consuming copious quantities of meat of some kind. The evidence would say lots of waterfowl, which is something that the record does suggest

no specific reference to turkeys with regard to the celebration. But we know from other sources that in the autumn the sky would just grow dark with geese and ducks and swans and herons and cranes, all of which could have been on the menu. But most of the fixings, most of the side dishes that we would expect would not have been there. Sweet potatoes weren't indigenous to the area. There were lots of cranberries but no sugar. So if you wanted to have a really tart side dish, I suppose you could. They wouldn't have had pumpkin pie.

They almost certainly had stewed pumpkin. But they didn't have sugar. They didn't have flour for crust. They didn't have ovens to bake pies in. So that wouldn't have been there either. They also might have had eel. I'll just add that because they bragged very much on the fat and juicy eels available in the area. And with regard to vegetables, their most common vegetables would have been turnips.

maybe cabbages and carrots. So I always say a more authentic Thanksgiving meal, sit on the ground and have turnips and eel. Well, good luck making that catch on. I think I'm okay with our revisions. I'll say we've improved it a little bit. But I think you'd also touched upon other myths that it happened. One of them being, of course, you know, we talk so much about Thanksgiving and religious freedom and the pilgrims coming here for religious freedom.

But I believe your book indicates that the story is, little more complicated than that. That's right, Kate. In fact, when I think about things that we could learn from the pilgrims, the kinds of questions that we could ask that really could lead to life-changing kinds of conversations with them, the question of why the pilgrims came to New England is right at the top of that list. Our common really brief explanation of their motives says that they came to flee religious persecution and to find a place of religious liberty.

and that's sort of 50% right. They certainly wanted to find a new home where they would be able to worship God as they believe that the scripture required them to. But that's not the same thing as saying that they came fleeing religious persecution, or in fact that they lacked religious freedom where they at the time lived. We so often forget the part of the Pilgrim story that takes them from England not to New England, directly, but actually to Holland. So from about 168 to 1620, they're living in Leiden, which was a city of 40-some-oddousand, Forty-Lay-Large, cosmopolitan, pluralistic. And the Pilgrim writers say it's a place where they're actually enjoying considerable religious liberty. And they actually

believe that their congregation spiritually is flourishing. So they're not motivated to leave Holland primarily because of religious persecution. They hope to find a similar kind of religious liberty in North America that they enjoy. What they're talking about in terms of motives for leaving are concerns that have to do with two broad categories. One has to do with the attributes of the surrounding culture, the way that the pilgrim riders describe it. They are characterizing it as a very permissive culture, a culture that is difficult for them as parents trying to raise their children faithfully. They believe that they're losing their children. That's actually the language that they use, that they're losing their

children to the surrounding culture in some ways. And then they also emphasize the economic context. Most of the individuals that left England for Leiden were rural. They were farmers by trade. but in Leiden, they are in this for today, a very industrial kind of city. They're working as weavers, as peace workers, pretty much from dawn to dusk, six days a week, and they're struggling to survive. And so they're hoping to find a new home where life will simply be a little less arduous. The reason I think that's very important is that when we describe the pilgrim story is the story of fleeing persecution, will nod our head admiringly in a sense, but very few of us,

at least in the United States, can wholly relate to what we think we're describing. But the pilgrim's concerns, at least the ones that they're emphasizing, are actually much more mundane, and I think much more relatable. They're talking about the cares of the world that are weighing them down. And I think it makes their story immediately totally pertinent and relevant to us. Well, Dr. McKenzie, something else that you discuss in your book, which comes down the line after they've left Holland and head to America, is the Mayflower Compact. And, of course, a lot of us, a lot of Americans remember the Mayflower Compact as a seminal

document, if not in our government, at least in our historical memory and sense of identity. Can you flesh out what the Mayflower Compact was and how should we remember it? Great question, Daniel. I can tell you just really quickly what it was and then we might debate on how we should remember it. But the Mayflower Compact is a kind of covenant. That's the term that they would have used, that the free adult males on the Mayflower, are ultimately going to sign off on after they have arrived off the coast of Massachusetts and more or less identified a place that they're going to make a permanent home for themselves. They have been blown off course.

This is a pretty familiar part of the story. They've landed significantly farther north than they had anticipated. And that's significant because where they've actually ended up is beyond the northern-more, excuse me, northernmost boundary of the Virginia Company's domain, which was a joint stock corporation that had been chartered by James I, and had given the pilgrim group a kind of permission and authority to settle within their boundaries. So arriving off the coast of Cape Cod, they're really, in a sense, outside the boundaries of authority of existing English presence there. And in a certain sense, operating in a kind of state of nature, almost, if you want to think of it that way.

And so in agreeing to a covenant to basically arrive jointly at laws that they will mutually pledge to submit to, they are establishing a kind of framework for self-government. That, however, though, I think is a little misleading, at least in the way that we remember it, because you're right that we tend to remember the Mayflower Compact as one of those founding documents of the American story. And I think in so doing, we tend to impute values to the pilgrims in the 1620s that they would not have held. The Mayfair Compact actually begins with a kind of pledge of submission to the king. and if anything, it is at least as much an assertion of the divine right of the British monarch as it is to some sort of natural right to self-government. The pilgrims, what we know from later on in their experience in Plymouth, they don't hold a lot of the political values that we today often impute to them.

They certainly weren't democratic. They were absolutely hierarchical in their political values. They tended to identify certain elites among their midst that they believed were sort of naturally endowed with qualities that qualified them to lead and others to follow. And they saw that as a kind of obligation. So one of the first laws passed in 1627 in Plymouth makes it illegal for someone who is, chosen governor to decline. If you declined, you had been hit with an enormous fine. They don't have adult male suffrage, or at least not universal adult male suffrage, and they are very hierarchical. So I think the temptation, I think, will be for us to

imagine the pilgrims of sort of proto-democrats that envision the future to be pretty much what we now take for granted. So we've talked a lot about some of our misunderstandings or historical revisions of Thanksgiving. Could you talk a bit about how did sort of this modern myth of Thanksgiving get created in the United States? And even if not historically accurate, what was the sentiments driving it? Great question, Kate. You know, historical traditions evolve often in very sort of haphazard ways. And often there will be a number of variables there at play in. and developing the kinds of historical memories that we have. One of the things I think is so fascinating about the evolution of the Thanksgiving holiday

is the relationship between that holiday and memory of the pilgrims. It's a really tenuous kind of relationship. The main source that we have about the Plymouth Colony was the history that their longtime Governor William Bradford wrote, which he called of Plymouth Plantation. a Plymouth plantation in manuscript form disappeared for a period of well over a century. It was probably passed around and then gradually sort of vanished from view. It's actually rediscovered in the middle of the 1800s, so more than two centuries later,

in the Library of the Bishop of London. And it's brought back to the United States with great fanfare in the 1850s. but by that time, it was already the case that in New England there had developed this regular pattern of celebrating fall thanksgivings. Often there would be days of humiliation and fasting in the spring when the planting was finished asking God's blessing on the growing crop. Then they'd have a day of Thanksgiving in the fall after the harvest. And that was very much a regional tradition. As late as a Civil War, Thanksgiving was primarily celebrated in New England and an area settled by New England migrants. Most Southerners, for example, with nothing to do with Thanksgiving. They associated it with phariseical, self-righteous Yankees, and they just didn't observe it. Conversely, New England tended not to celebrate Christmas. The pilgrims very famously didn't celebrate Christmas. They said there's no place in that authorizes the celebration of Jesus' birth. There's no scripture that tells us when it occurred.

And they saw it as an invention that the Catholic Church had basically created. And so you have this really interesting pattern in which the South celebrates Christmas and the North celebrates Thanksgiving and never the two shall meet. The first time that he really would say that Thanksgiving becomes a national holiday is during the American Civil War. And that would not have been realized at the time we see it more. from hindsight. But Abraham Lincoln in 1863 issues a proclamation in the fall, making the fourth Thursday in November of that year a day of national Thanksgiving. And he primarily means it as a day of Thanksgiving for the way that God was aiding northern armies in the war against

the South. And that also doesn't endear Southerners to a Thanksgiving holiday. It's really the late 19th century. It's really the 1880s, 1890s before Thanksgiving is broadly celebrated around the United States. And I joke, but also sort of mean it seriously, that one of the things that ultimately reconciles Southerners to Thanksgiving is the development of football. And by the 1890s, the national championship game for what is the forerunner, the NCAA, was being held annually in New York City on Thanksgiving Day. And well before 1900, the tradition of having football games on Thanksgiving Day is sweeping across the country, and Southerners find out that the holiday isn't that bad

after all. Oh, that's such an interesting evolution there. And, of course, looking at Thanksgiving just in the last hundred years, how it's, you know, you've had the introduction of Black Friday and the shopping and all of that leading up to Christmas. Macy's Parade. Macy's Parade, yes. So, Dr. Kinsey, this is so interesting. I'm just curious, what would you say about remembering Thanksgiving?

Today, it's, you know, I think a lot of us would be very surprised to learn that the founding era was not an era in which Thanksgiving was a public tradition. When we remember Thanksgiving, almost 400 years ago now, at the beginning. beginning of the new world. How should we remember Thanksgiving and how can we rightly honor the pilgrims who came here and how can we celebrate Thanksgiving in a way that is right? That's a good question. And one that even now I'm still, I guess, working through myself. But I do have a few thoughts. For all of the work, that as a historian do and sort of scraping away the kinds of myths that have developed over the years, I find that the true story is actually more interesting and more inspiring than the

myths that we have developed over time. I do find a great deal about the Pilgrim story really admirable. When you stop and think about the venture that they were part of the great personal toll that it had inflicted on them. When you think about that celebration, it was a celebration predominantly of widowers and orphans. There had been 18 wives on the Mayflower, 14 of whom had died in the first winter. And so most of the married couples now were separated by death. large numbers of the children now had lost parents. There were some children present who had lost all parents and siblings. It was an overwhelmingly single now male gathering and also a young gathering

in that about half of the group was teenagers or younger. And so to have any kind of celebration in that context, I think is a real tribute to a kind of steadfast faith that, that I totally admire. The other thing that I always think of personally about the pilgrims at this time and other times in the year is just the sense of identity that they themselves have. It's a tragic thing in a sense that we have lost the weight of the term that they used for themselves or that William Bradford used in describing them this concept of pilgrim.

So it means nothing to us except a kind of. of label for the passengers of the Mayflower. But when Bradford calls them pilgrims, he's actually writing about their departure from Leiden. And he knew, and they knew, that many of them would likely die in undertaking, that the chances of seeing loved ones that they were saying goodbye to were slim. And Bradford says that they were deeply moved, that their tears flowed like water. But he says that they looked up to the heavens and they comforted their spirits because

they knew that they were pilgrims, by which he meant they recognized that their hope ultimately was not in their immediate prosperity. It was not in any kind of bounty that they might encounter in a new world. Their hope was ultimately in God's sovereign love and care for them and the promise of eternity. And that's just a vision of that idea of pilgrimage that I think we've entirely lost. And so one of the things I try to do and I challenge others to do is just to tell ourselves, to remind us that we are pilgrims. And that sense, in that sense, we're sort of bound together with them if we cling to that same sense of identity. So much to think about there. One little bit less serious question. I believe you also mentioned the contra to all the picture

books I read as a child and costumes in school plays, the pilgrims did not wear black with huge white collars. Can you, what did they actually wear? Yeah, they didn't wear black, and they didn't wear those incredibly high hats, and they didn't wear enormous buckles on every sort of appendage. Yeah, again, that's another example of how in our mind's eye we have an image of the pilgrims that pretty much dates to the late 19th century. Here we can speak with. a little bit of confidence because the pilgrims among many things were amazing record keepers. And so even as early as the late 1620s, we begin to have surviving records of their wills. And one of the things that happened when someone would die, of course, is that they would

typically make a list of all their property that was to be divided among heirs. And in the early 17th century, one of the most valuable kinds of property people have is clothing. And so they would list their clothing and actually talk about it in some detail. So the pilgrims loved bright, bold colors. And so that's another thing, I suppose, when we're imagining them sitting on the ground eating with their hands. Let's imagine them wearing orange and red and yellow, not black. They weren't wearing buckles because they actually disliked any kind of. kind of adornment like that. The women didn't wear jewelry of any kind and so forth. They

wouldn't have had that, but lots of bright colors. In fact, the will for William Bradford, the inventory of his estate shows that he had a red vest and a purple cape, among other things. So these folks would have been pretty striking, I think, in their fashion sense, if nothing else. That's remarkable. Are you looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues? Sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. In the agenda, you will learn what issues Heritage Scholars on Capitol Hill are working on, what position conservatives are taking, and links to our in-depth research.

The agenda also provides information on important events happening here at Heritage that you can watch online, as well as media interviews from our experts. Sign up for the agenda on heritage.org today. We'll leave it there for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast, brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify, and please leave us a review or rating on iTunes to give us any feedback. Have a happy Thanksgiving. We'll see you tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation.

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