Thanksgiving and America BY MELANIE KIRKPATRICK, WRITER AND JOURNALIST, SENIOR FELLOW AT THE HUDSON INSTITUTE
Speech given on Grand Lodge Masonic Day of Thanksgiving and Remembrance October 11, 2019, George Washington Masonic National Memorial, Alexandria, Virginia My subject this evening is Thanksgiving and America. But let me begin with another American holiday: Independence Day. One Fourth of July in the 1980’s, when I was working for Th Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong, I read a tidbit in a local newspaper about the American Day of Independence. Across the United States today, the columnist declared, families are celebrating the birth of their nation by sitting down to turkey dinners with all the trimmings. I had had a good laugh over the writer’s confusion about America’s national holidays. But it also set me to thinking. In some sense, this was a natural error. A non-American could be forgiven for conflating these two home-grown holidays. Both bind Americans to the larger history of our nation. Thanksgiving isn’t a patriotic holiday per se, but it is full of patriotic feeling as we join together to give thanks for our shared blessings as a nation. The best expression of this aspect of Thanksgiving Day comes from a Freemason—Benjamin Franklin. Franklin called Thanksgiving a day “of public Felicity,” a time to express gratitude to God for the “full Enjoyment of Liberty, civil and religious.” Thanksgiving is Americans’ oldest tradition, dating back 1621, when the Pilgrims joined together with Native Americans to celebrate the harvest. The holiday has grown up with the country, and it says a lot about who we Americans are. It reflects our national identity as a grateful, generous, and inclusive people. No matter when our ancestors arrived in American, when we our place at the Thanksgiving table we is part of a continuum that dates back to that harvest feast 398 years ago. The friendly coexistence between the English settlers and the Native Americans would last only a short period before erupting in war. But that original Thanksgiving pointed the way to the diverse, multicultural people we have become. My research into Thanksgiving covers many aspects of the holiday. I learned about Thanksgivings in Virginia, Texas, Maine and Florida that pre-dated the arrival of the Pilgrims. I traced the development of our charitable traditions of caring for the less fortunate on Thanksgiving Day. I looked at how football became part of Thanksgiving rituals. And of course, there’s dinner. I studied the history of Thanksgiving dinner and how it came to pass that on the fourth Thursday of November the vast majority of Americans sit down to the same meal of turkey, cranberries, potatoes and pie. I’d welcome questions on those topics, and more.
8 The Voice of Freemasonry ISSUE 4, 2019
This evening, though, I want to devote my remarks to the aspect of the holiday that Benjamin Franklin particularly admired. That is, Thanksgiving as a time for expressing gratitude for the “full Enjoyment of Liberty” I'll give illustrations from each of the centuries since the First Thanksgiving. First, the Pilgrims. There are two eyewitness accounts of the First Thanksgiving, Yet the word “thanksgiving” doesn’t appear in either of them. If you could travel back in time to 1621, and ask a Pilgrim to define “Thanksgiving Day,” his answer might surprise you. For the Pilgrims, a “day of thanksgiving” wasn’t marked by feasting, family, and fellowship— the happy hallmarks of the holiday we now celebrate. Rather, for the Pilgrims, days of thanksgiving were days of religious observance. The original Thanksgivings were called to express gratitude to God for specific beneficences such as a successful harvest, propitious weather, or a military victory. For the Pilgrims and other early European immigrants to our shores, a “thanksgiving day” was profoundly religious, set aside for prayer and worship. From the Pilgrims’ perspective, their First Thanksgiving in the new world didn’t take place until two years after the event we know as the First Thanksgiving. It was July 1623, and the governor declared a day of thanksgiving in gratitude for a rainfall that ended a drought and saved their harvest. All of the 13 colonies observed religious days of Thanksgiving—and they were the most direct influence on the development of the Thanksgiving holiday. At some point in the 1600’s, each New England colony began to designate annual Thanksgiving days, usually in the autumn around the time of the harvest. These celebrations were deemed “general” thanksgivings. That is, they weren't called for a specific event or blessing, as had previously been the case, but for ordinary, everyday blessings. Connecticut was the first to name a day of general Thanksgiving – in 1639 – and to make it an annual event. This was an important step toward the holiday we know today. Connecticut's decision to call a day of thanksgiving for general blessings was controversial. Opponents argued that celebrating an annual thanksgiving for general blessings rather than for a specific reason would make people take God’s generosity for granted. How-
