Throughline - The Mother of Thanksgiving

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

The Thanksgiving story most of us hear is about friendship and unity. And that's what Sarah Josepha Hale had on her mind when she sat down to write a letter to President Lincoln in 1863, deep into the Civil War. Hale had already spent years campaigning for a national day of thanksgiving, using her platform as editor of one the country's most widely-read magazines and writing elected officials to argue that Americans urgently needed a national story. But she'd gotten nowhere – until now.Five days after reading her letter, Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. At the time, no one was talking about Pilgrims and Native Americans. But that too would change.Today on the show: a Thanksgiving story you may not have heard, how it happened, and what it leaves out.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at autographcollection.com. Hey, it's Rand here. Before the show today, we want to take a minute and say hi if you're a new listener. I host the show with my co-host Ramtin Adablui. We have new episodes every Thursday, and in each one we reopen a story from the past to

try to understand something about the present and how we got here. ThruLine is an NPR podcast, which means we're nonprofit, independent, public media. You can support us and get sponsor-free versions of every episode, as well as bonus content, by signing up for NPR Plus at plus.npr.org. And sidebar, shout out to our supporters hearing this right now. And that's it. Thanks for being here, and hope you enjoy the show. Our good ancestors were wise,

even in their mirth. We have a standing proof of this in the season they chose for the celebration of our annual festival, the Thanksgiving. The funeral-faced month of November is thus made to wear a garland of joy. Let me tell you a story of Thanksgiving, the traditional one. In 1621, when the English colonists, now known as the Pilgrims, were newcomers to this continent, there was a major feast between the Wampanoags and the English of Plymouth. That's a very real event.

The event that's now called the First Thanksgiving. The suggestion is that the two parties got together for this feast out of innate friendship. It's this odd little frozen-in-time fantasy moment of folks getting together and eating, but you don't really know why. This is Elizabeth James Perry. I'm a member of the Aquino-Wampanoag tribe of Gay Head, Marthas Vineyard, and I'm an artist and I'm an exhibit consultant as well. She says that when the English first arrived, they...

...were small in number, they were newcomers, and they were struggling badly because they weren't necessarily all farmers back where they came from either. All these Englishmen are trying to do is survive. The Wampanoags outnumber them by a factor of at minimum 20 to 1. So the Wampanoags are the bosses here. This is David Silverman. I'm professor of history at George Washington

University. And he's also the author of the book. This land is their land, the Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony and the troubled history of Thanksgiving. David says remembering this meeting is just about friendship and gratitude. Actually, Rob's is very real event of all of its historical context. Now let me tell you another Thanksgiving story. This one happens more than 50 years later. In June of 1675, the indigenous Wampanoag people of what is now southern New England were on the brink of war with the English colonists of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the descendants of those pilgrims. Metacom, a Wampanoag chief, met with Rhode Island's attorney general. — What he said was, you know, when my father—

— A chief named Usa Mequin— — met your ancestors— — the Plymouth colonists— — he was a great man, and you were a little child. And he gave you land to live on, more land than we the Wampanoags have today. He taught you how to plant. He taught you where to fish. But now here we are,

50 plus years later. Now you're the great man and we're the little child. And you don't treat us with that kind of respect. That's why I'm going to war. The odds are really stacked. A tribe, they top out at 15,000 people. England is 5 million people." It would come to be known as King Philip's War, the name the English colonists gave the Wampanoag chief, Metacom. But the English show the Wampanoag and their allies very little respect. Let's be clear, they kill thousands of them. And enslave many more. And sell them off to the Caribbean and to the Mediterranean.

The war goes on for nearly three years. And the colonists win. But a military captain named Benjamin Church isn't finished. He orders the head of King Philip, Wampanoag Chief Metacom, to be decapitated and his head piked outside of Plymouth Colony, and it stays there for 20 years. This is the very site where that feast took place. The first Thanksgiving in 1621. Afterwards, Plymouth and Massachusetts, they hold the Thanksgiving for their victory over the Native people.

Tribal nations are such a tiny portion of the population. That's not by accident and nobody talks about you except when there's a butterball on the table. Tomorrow's Thanksgiving! Mmm, turkey and dressing and pie and cake. Turkey or no turkey, we've still got all the freedoms and privileges the Pilgrims gave us. And out of those privileges have come a lot of things. Things the Pilgrims never even dreamed of. Now, let me tell you a third story of Thanksgiving, one that's very different, and that you may have never heard. The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. one that's very different and that you may have never heard.

Nearly two centuries after King Philip's war in 1863, a darkness had set over the Union. The Confederate army was advancing into Pennsylvania, threatening places like Philadelphia and Baltimore. The fiery trial through which we pass will light a star in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. The country was as divided as it had ever been. War and destruction was everywhere. Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. Abraham Lincoln. And in this moment, a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale sent President Abraham Lincoln a letter. Sir, permit me as the editor of the Ladies' Book to request a few minutes of your precious time while laying before you a subject of deep interest to myself and, as I trust, even

to the President of our Republic of some importance. This subject is to have the president of our republic of some importance. This subject is to have the day of our annual Thanksgiving made a national and fixed union festival. The reason we celebrate Thanksgiving as we do today is because of this letter from Sarah Josepha Hale. It was her dream, her belief, and our need for a national unifying story to bind us together. But what is that story? How did it come together? And what does it leave out?

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This week on our podcast, Here and Now, Anytime, have you had a frustrating conversation about politics with someone you disagree with lately? Most Americans have, according to a Pew survey from before the election. So I'm going to guess that number has only gone up. We're kicking off a series on finding common ground called Conversations Across the Divide. Listen now on Hear and Now Anytime, wherever you get your podcasts. here in New York that move up and down. That's on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Part One, Hales Crusade. Sarah Josepha Hale was born in New Hampshire in 1788, not too far away from where the Pilgrims first landed.

She was the daughter of revolutionary war heroes. At a time when many women couldn't read, Sarah had access to plenty of education. Thanks to a mother who homeschooled her and a brother who went off to Dartmouth and then came home and taught her everything he knew. This is Melanie Kirkpatrick. I'm a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. Melanie also wrote a book called... Called Lady Editor.

Which is a biography of Sarah Josepha Hale. I owe my early predilection for literary pursuits to the teaching and example of my mother. She possessed a mind clear as rock water and a most happy talent of communicating knowledge. Sarah really loved to read, and she taught herself a lot of things, too. She wrote poetry, she wrote essays. She was just obsessed with writing. She was probably one of the most highly educated women of the first quarter of the 19th century. When she was 25, she married a local lawyer named David Hale.

Very happily. We commenced soon after our marriage a system of study and reading. It seemed the aim of my husband to enlighten my reason, strengthen my judgment, and give me confidence in my own powers of mind, which he estimated much higher than I. Her husband helped her develop her prose style, and he also helped her get poetry published in local newspapers. They had a quiet, idyllic marriage for eight years. And then he died.

Suddenly. Leaving her with four children and a fifth on the way. Her life was crumbling around her. They were relatively well off, but they didn't have any savings. So here was Mrs. Hale, nearly penniless. And the tradition of the time was when that happened to a woman, that her children were parceled off to relatives and she didn't want to do that. Desperate to keep her family together, Hale started a business with her sister-in-law making hats. And she hated it. So she poured her energy into writing and publishing.

Pros, poems, and short stories. And then she wrote a novel, which was an anti-slavery novel. It came out in 1827. The novel was called Northwood, A Tale of New England. called Northwood, a tale of New England. The Southern slaveholder is as absolute in his dominions, or plantation rather, as the Grand Senior. This is a passage from the novel describing life on a Southern plantation. It's the story of a boy from a hometown that seems very similar to the one she grew up in whose parents effectively give him to relatives in the south who don't have any children.

They're rich and give him lots of benefits that he wouldn't otherwise have. And eventually this main character writes back to his hometown in the North and tells everyone exactly what he saw in the South. The change of masters is frequently a terrible evil to the poor slave. And that system must be inhuman and unjust. It's clear that the author and the main character believe slavery is wrong. Now Sarah also used her main character to argue that the best thing for black Americans would be to return to Africa.

She believed total separation of the races was the only way out of a system of domination. Which subjects man to the occurrence of such an outrage. Even though she'd never been to the South herself, Sarah's portrayal of life there struck a nerve with readers. Northwood was a big hit, and one of the first anti-slavery novels of its kind. It kind of made her reputation among a group of intellectuals in Boston, including one

man who was starting up a magazine for women. And he asked her out of the blue if she would come to Boston to edit it. It was called very difficult decision for her because she would have to leave four of her children behind. She took the baby with her. Also she was chastised by people for thinking that she could maintain her family, make enough money to maintain her family. It was wrong to go off and become a professional.

And there were some people who doubted that a magazine geared towards women could gain a big following. In 1828, when her magazine debuted, half of American women were illiterate. But Sarah didn't let any of that get in her way. She moved to Boston and accepted the job at Ladies Magazine, and her gamble paid off. The magazine was a hit, and soon merged with another magazine to become Godi's Ladies Book, based in Philadelphia.

And it was when she became the editor, or she preferred the term, editress, of Godi's Ladies Book that things really took off for her. She expanded her focus to culinary things. She also wrote about art and architecture. She reviewed many books. The ladies book was the first avowed advocate of the holy cause of women's intellectual progress. It has been the pioneer in the wonderful change of public sentiment, respecting female

education and the employment of female talent in educating the young. Godis achieved popular and critical success. Sarah's writing was praised by Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe. She became very famous. She became a celebrity in 19th century America. So much so that there was a phrase, Mrs. Hale says, meaning that she was like the arbiter of behavior and housekeeping and education and culinary issues. Like almost like, I dare say this,

but it's given me like Oprah vibes, like Oprah in the 90s vibes. Yes, very, very similar. She really connected with people and she had a fabulous sense of what was important and what wasn't important. Sarah used her platform to push for the things she believed in. She supported women's education, though not women's suffrage. She opposed slavery and thought free black people

should be repatriated to Africa. And she had a vision for creating a united national culture. She thought that the revolution had united the American colonies politically, but not culturally, and that the new country needed to develop its own culture and the new country needed its own stories. They needed something to coalesce around.

And for Sarah, there was no better day to coalesce around than her favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. holiday, Thanksgiving. Everything that contributes to bind us in one vast empire together, to quicken the sympathy that makes us feel from the icy north to the sunny south that we are one family, each a member of a great and free nation, not merely the unit of a remote locality, is worthy of being cherished. Thanksgiving in the early to mid-1800s was mostly celebrated in northern states and generally on different days. It was not a national holiday, and Sarah wanted to change that. She thought that if we could all come together and celebrate on the same day, that would help to bring Americans together.

There is a deep moral influence in these periodical seasons of rejoicing, in which a whole community participates. They bring out, and together as it were, the best sympathies of our nature. And as the Civil War approached, she also had the hope that it would force all war. We believe our Thanksgiving Day, if fixed and perpetuated, will be a great and sanctifying promoter of this national spirit. Coming up, Sarah takes her appeal all the way to the top.

My name is Flitson Des Ravines from Silver Spring, Maryland, and you're listening to The Rue Line from NPR. The reason why I love The Rue Line is because it really does illuminate and also debunk a lot of myths in American history that we once thought to be true. Part two, one heart, one voice. On a farm in Maryland, a group of 22 men, some of them enslaved and some of them not, hide in an attic. What's good y'all, it's Gene Dembe from CodeSwitch. On CodeSwitch we

are deeply curious about race and identity and the way it shows up in the news headlines or interpersonal lives. With the wide range of voices in front of and behind the mic we see how race shows up all over the place. So come rock with us on the CodeSw podcast, only from NPR. Arguments happen. And our body's automatic response to conflict doesn't always help. We may start to feel anxious or angry, making it even more difficult for us to see eye to eye. Over time, that becomes contempt. And contempt is a very destructive interpersonal process.

Hear how science can help us reframe and make the most of our conversations on the shortwave podcast from NPR. The election is over, but the story is just beginning. Listen to Here and Now Anytime. We're talking to everyone, Democrats, Republicans, independents, covering the political stories that matter to you and your community. And we promise to bring you stories outside Washington too. That's on Here and Now, Anytime, wherever you listen to podcasts.

They spend their days reading, writing letters, cleaning their rifles, waiting. reading, writing letters, cleaning their rifles, waiting. Then on October 16th, 1859, their leader, a white abolitionist named John Brown, gathers them together. He prays with them. Then afterwards says, men get on your arms. We'll proceed to the ferry. They start a five-mile march towards a Virginia town called Harpers Ferry. They plan to capture the federal armory there and start a massive revolt against slavery. Within just a couple of hours, John Brown's forces take control of two bridges, the armory and a rifle factory.

They take slave owners and armory employees hostage. I have possession now of the United States armory. And if the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood. Eventually, US Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee arrive. Brown's men are surrounded. The Marines storm the armory. If you die, you die in a good cause.

Several of John Brown's men are killed, including his own son. Those who haven't escaped are captured. Fighting for liberty. John Brown is tried and later hanged. If you must die, die like a man. Even though John Brown's raid failed, it caused shockwaves in Virginia and beyond. It amplified the tension between North and South over the question of slavery. The following year, the country would elect Abraham Lincoln. And soon, southern states would start to secede. If every state should join in Union Thanksgiving on the 24th of this month, would it not be

a renewed pledge of love and loyalty to the Constitution of the United States? The same year of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry as the country was barreling towards civil war, Sarah Josepha Hale had been using her powerful pulpit as editor of one of the country's most read magazines, Godey's Ladies Book, reaching around a million readers from north to south, arguing that Thanksgiving could unite the country. The flag of our country now numbers 32 stars on its crown of blue,

and some half dozen or more additional starlets are shining out of the depths of our wilderness continent. Sarah Josepha Hale had been on a mission to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. Before the Civil War, it was celebrated by most states across the country, but when and if it was celebrated was decided by the governors of each state. At first, she thought if she could just get the governors all to agree on a date, that would be good enough. So for years leading up to the Civil War, Godi's ladies' book ran editorials and

recipes and stories about Thanksgiving. And she was making the argument that an annual holiday would be good for everyone. The poor… Let us consecrate the day to benevolence of action by sending good gifts to the poor. The depressed… Wasting despondency cripples the feeble limbs. Prisoners. Even the poor prisoner is cheered in his solitary cell.

But she knew the audience of a woman's magazine wouldn't be enough. She had to convince the men in power. She had a huge network and she would handwrite personal letters to governors. Will you use the influence of your high official status, congressmen, to establish the last Thursday in November, members of the Senate as the annual American Thanksgiving, trying to get their support for her idea of a national holiday. And she did have success. She got many of the governors to agree on a given date, but not all of them.

So then she thought that the better idea would be to get the president to proclaim a national day of Thanksgiving. So she made her case again and again. And at first, the response from lawmakers was We love this idea. But No, the Constitution won't let us do it. There were two main objections. They believed it wasn't a federal responsibility, it was a state responsibility.

And second, that it was a religious matter. Thanksgiving Day was a religious holiday and therefore the president needs to stay out of it. But remember, this was happening during the buildup to the Civil War. So of course, Thanksgiving did become political. This theatrical national claptrap of Thanksgiving has aided other causes in setting thousands of pulpits to preaching Christian politics instead of humbly letting the carnal kingdom alone. The Southern governor of Virginia, Henry Wise, wrote back to Sarah Josepha Hale in 1856 after receiving one of her letters about making Thanksgiving a national holiday. And he replied saying that basically it was a damned Yankee holiday that you had preachers in the North preaching abolitionism,

which was political. Some Southerners feared that Thanksgiving could be a Trojan horse for abolitionism. I mean, there were examples of ministers in New England preaching abolitionist messages. That Virginia governor was correct that the anti-slavery movement was very closely connected to religion. Needless to say, Virginia didn't celebrate Thanksgiving that year. But Sarah Josepha Hale didn't necessarily believe Thanksgiving would end slavery. She thought it could prevent a civil war. Such social rejoicings tend greatly to expand the generous feelings of our nature and strengthen the bond of union that binds us brothers and sisters in that true sympathy of American patriotism.

Hale seemed to genuinely believe that if Americans could just get together on Thanksgiving and get back in touch with the founding values of this country, they could resolve their differences. But despite all her efforts, Thanksgiving didn't become a national holiday. And beginning in 1860, 11 southern states seceded. The Confederacy formed. The Civil War... began.

1863 was a hard year for Abraham Lincoln. Tens of thousands of people had already died in the Civil War. The Confederate army had notched a couple of major victories. And in June of that year, the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, began invading the Union State of Pennsylvania. One battle would help turn the tide of the war. Over the course of three days in July, tens of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers fought on a field in Pennsylvania near a town called Gettysburg. There were more than 50,000 casualties, but in the end, the Union beat the Confederate army back and they retreated to the south

where they would lose the war. Gettysburg was considered a major turning point and victory for the North. And this is where Sarah Josepha Hale comes back in our story. So finally, in 1863, she wrote to Lincoln, Sir, permit me as editor of the ladies book to request a few minutes of your precious time. Just five days after reading Hale's letter, Lincoln agreed and issued a proclamation, making Thanksgiving a national holiday. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also

those who are at sea and those who have subjured in and formed lands to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November, next as a day of Thanksgiving. Abraham Lincoln. He asked Americans to come together with one heart and one voice. And he was again talking about northerners and southerners stopping the war and moving toward peace and reunification.

Thanksgiving would be celebrated in local hospitals where soldiers were recovering from their wounds. They would be served turkey, goose, ham, chicken pie, cranberry sauce, and sweet potatoes. It energized people in the North. It was the message, come on, we just have to keep at it. We're going to win this war. And the Union did win. In 1865, the Confederates surrendered and Lincoln was assassinated. It was Lincoln's decision in 1863 that started the tradition of a national Thanksgiving that continues to this day. Sarah Josepha Hale's years of persistence had paid off.

Let us see to it that on this one day there shall be no family or individual within the compass of our means to help Who shall not have some portion prepared and some reason to join in the general Thanksgiving Coming up after the Thanksgiving holiday is established the Thanksgiving myth takes hold. Hello, I am Zico, and I am from Rockville, Maryland, and you are listening to Through Line from NPR. On the TED Radio Hour, on December 24th, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will touch the Sun. The spacecraft will hit Solar Probe will touch the Sun.

The spacecraft will hit the closest approach ever to the Sun. Astrophysicist Noor Awafi leads the mission. We will be making history. To this day, it's still like magic to me. Ideas about the Sun. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR. Radio Hour podcast from NPR. I do not arise to spread before you the fame of a noted warrior. There are many who are said to be honorable warriors, who think it no crime to wreck their vengeance upon whole nations and communities, until the fields are covered with blood and

the rivers turned into purple fountains. While a loud response is heard floating through the air from the 10,000 Indian children and orphans who are left to mourn the honorable acts of a few civilized men. William Apis lifts his eyes up from his speech. More than a thousand auditorium seats rise in a circle around him. Apis stares into the audience. A sea of white northerners stares back. It's 1836, 25 years before the start of the Civil War, more than two centuries after

the Wampanoag leader, Usa Meekwin, and the Pilgrims in Plymouth shared a meal and signed a peace treaty. And William Apis, a Pequot minister and orator, is spelling out for a theater full of Bostonians what happened next. How the Pilgrims came to the Wampanoags for help, how the Wampanoags gave them venison and sold them corn. And for all this, they were denounced as being savages by those who received all these acts of kindness.

Northeasterners know about the cruelties happening against Native Americans in other parts of the country. The Trail of Tears. The violence on the Great Plains. But they aren't used to seeing themselves as part of the problem. The epicenter for criticism of the United States' violent approach to subjugating Native people is New England. This is historian David Silverman.

If you want a critique of the evils of the United States in the 19th century, it is almost always going to come out of Boston. In the 19th century, the criticism of US Indian affairs coming out of New England is very, very sharp. As part of that positioning, New Englanders style their region as free of the national sins of violent Indian affairs

and slavery, neither of which is true. As early as 1769, New Englanders began celebrating what they called Forefathers Day on December 22nd, the anniversary of the day the Pilgrims made landfall at Plymouth Rock. They were honoring what New Englanders were building up as a foundational moment in the American story.

But already in 1836, William Apis was poking holes in that story. Let the children of the Pilgrims blush, let the day be dark, let it be forgotten in your celebration, in your speeches, and by the burying of the rock that your fathers first put their foot upon. For the 22nd of December and the 4th of July are days of mourning and not of joy. You'll notice that Apis does not name-check Thanksgiving. And that's because in 1836, most Americans didn't know about the mythical meeting between

the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims. They didn't have an image in their head of everyone getting together around a big turkey and holding hands. That story wasn't part of American lore yet. When does the element of this sort of friendship and handshaking between the native people and the European settlers emerge as the story of Thanksgiving? In the 1840s, a minister in New England publishes one of the two primary sources that documents

that feast between the Wampanoags and the Plymouth colonists. And to that primary source account, he adds a footnote. And the footnote read, this was the first Thanksgiving. Wow. Now, as far as we can tell, up to that point, no one is talking about friendly Indians and pilgrims during celebrations of Thanksgiving in the 1600s, 1700s, or even early 1800s. But with that footnote, the myth starts to grow over time. It then really takes hold in American society after Abraham Lincoln declares Thanksgiving to be a national holiday during the Civil War.

Lincoln's 1863 proclamation meant that Americans got into the habit of celebrating Thanksgiving every year on the same day. But the first national thanksgivings in the wake of the Civil War were rocky. Sarah Josepha Hale, as editor of the widely popular Godey's Ladies Book magazine, dedicated a lot of real estate to her Thanksgiving columns, selling Southern women on the holiday. When joining in prayers for the same blessings and in thanksgivings for the same good gifts of the season. Can Americans feel otherwise than as brethren, whose interests are united, whose aims should be to ennoble their common country, whose lives, liberties, and fortunes are safe only under the same glorious flag?

But while Sarah Josepha Hale kept writing about a holiday that revolved around pie, family, and faith, outside Godi's ladies' book, Thanksgiving was starting to take on a life of its own. The holiday was amassing new spokespeople, and by the late 1800s and early 1900s, those people were increasingly looking to the rediscovered story about the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims for inspiration. In 1912, a painter named Jean-Léon Jérôme Farris finished one of the most famous works of his career, an oil painting called the First Thanksgiving.

The mythologized Thanksgiving. The one most of us were taught in school. Pilgrims and Indians making friends. In the painting, a group of white English settlers stands around a table. To their left, a group of Native Americans are sitting on the ground, next to the family dog. They're not wearing traditional Wampanoag clothing, but instead what Ferris imagined they would wear, feather headdresses and decorative beads.

An English settler, a woman, holds a tray of food in front of a native man. He reaches for a loaf of bread. To have Europeans sitting at a table and native people sitting on the ground is designed to accentuate that the English are civilized and that the natives are savage. And that's a basic binary that has shaped white Americans' views of themselves and of indigenous people really for 400 years. By the early 1900s, acting out that fantasy had become part of the curriculum at many schools.

There are black and white photos all over from the early 20th century. You know, you'll see the kids in plain feathered headdresses and these pilgrim costumes which have these obscenely large buckles on every conceivable article of clothing. It's a whitewash of the bloodiness of the ruthlessness of colonialism. Around the time where this myth that we've been talking about so hard has started to take hold about Thanksgiving, what were the lives of actual descendants of those people from the 1600s, the Wampanoag people?

What were their lives like in the early 1900s? I can talk about my family. This is Aquinnah Wampanoag artist and educator Elizabeth James Perry. My great grandmother was a widow, and so her life was very much about taking care of her family as a sole provider. This was all happening during a period of upheaval for the Wampanoags in Martha's Vineyard. They had persisted despite the U.S. government's aggressive policy of Indian removal in the 1830s, when many Native people were forced off their land and moved west.

But by the 1860s and 70s, the state government in Massachusetts had gotten involved and was dividing up the tribe's land into taxable allotments. That effectively made it much more difficult for people like Elizabeth's great-grandmother to continue to afford living there. But they found ways to make it work.

And when you're a tribe for thousands of years, just because some guy goes, oh, you're not, it doesn't mean you stop. You know, it's not a switch. Elizabeth's community passed down their own stories, stories about their history with white settlers and also about things that had actually happened to them. Adventures and misadventures, funny childhood memories. Unbelievable. Ship locked in ice, using your crazy gay head navigation skills to walk across

the ice because you remember a community in this direction carrying the captain's wife who had to come on the voyage for some odd reason. You know, that's just like, I think the underpinning was, here we are, these survivors, strong senses of humor, full of hope, also holding onto these stories of, hey, you know what, everybody jokes about us, but we've got some serious skills, that's why we're here today. It wasn't about get a lot of

this turkey. You know, it just turkey wasn't new for us. Cranberry weren't new. I don't know what to say. New England wasn't new. I mean, we kind of like, yeah, I mean, really, we're kind of from here. You're like, we're kind of from here. Yeah, it's... For many of us, Thanksgiving is a pretty straightforward holiday. It's really fun and easy to enjoy the food, the friends and family, the lazy afternoon, watching football. But beneath the surface of all of this is a question about how we choose to remember our history and define ourselves as a country. History is not about trying to make people feel guilty or ashamed, patriotic or unpatriotic.

It's designed to capture a complex past and all of its complexity. National celebrations are another kettle of fish. They are designed to cultivate unity. There will never be unity around complex historical subjects. They're too complex. Whether it is the inaccurate, rosy-colored view of the first Thanksgiving in 1621, or using the day as a vessel for national unity, what we are thankful for is a choice.

A choice with consequences. These national holidays, they remind us of what it means to be an American number one. And then they also give us a chance to celebrate our nation. I should say there are critics of Thanksgiving, people who won't celebrate it because they wrongly think that it is celebrating the destruction of Native culture. I can't disagree with that more strongly. I think it is a time of celebration of people of different cultures coming together. I think it's true that most adults don't give pilgrims and Indians much of a thought. But that's part of the point.

The point is that we're indoctrinated with this idea as children and then we're never asked to revisit it as we become more mature and capable of complex thought. I would prefer to see Thanksgiving continue without invoking pilgrims and Indians at all. I don't trust any ritual to capture complexities of any sort, never mind violent complexities that strike at the heart of the desire to have the United States be a beacon of light in the world. As for Sarah Josepha Hale, she had her mind made up that Thanksgiving could bring the

U.S. together, and she lived long enough to see it take hold. Hale spent the rest of her life making sure Thanksgiving would outlive her. And before she died, in April 1879, she had one last word to say about Thanksgiving and her own legacy, in the magazine she dedicated much of her life to. This idea was very near to my heart, for I believe that this celebration would be a bond of union throughout our country, as well as a source of happiness in the homes of the people. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui, and you've been listening to Thru Line from NPR.

This episode was produced by me. And me and Sarah Wyman. Devin Kadiyama. Casey Miner. Lauren Tewoo. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Lina Muhammad.

Christina Kim. Irene Noguchi. Thank you to Nina Puchowski, Puneet Matiwala, Johannes Dergi, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. Voice over work in this episode was done by Sarah Wyman, Ryan Ascales, Devin Katiyama, Mark Smith, and Sam Yellowhorse-Kessler. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voeckel. It was mixed by Maggie Luthor. Music for this episode was composed

by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. We would love to hear from you. Send us a voicemail to 872-588-8805 and leave your name, where you're from, and say the line, you're listening to Throughline from NPR. And tell us what you think of the show. We might even feature your voicemail in a future episode. That number again is 872-588-8805.

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