Talking Turkey

The history of Thanksgiving "traditions" in light of today's issues

Hello Substackers - I know I’ve been radio silent for a while, but I started a new job with a loooong commute. So while that means less time for reading, it leaves a lot more time for thinking. Thanksgiving is coming up in a few weeks (!!!) and there’s been lots in the news about inflation and the price of turkeys. I’ve also been reading a lot about the early Colonial period for the new job, so put on your comfy pants, you’re in for a long read.

Over the last year, poultry farming in the United States has been particularly hard-hit by avian flu. Combined with regular inflation, turkey prices have gone up 73% in the last year (which you may have noticed at the deli counter). Suggestions for turkey alternatives are making the rounds of the internet. And while I’m all for throwing out old “traditions” that don’t suit us anymore, Thanksgiving probably has more rigidness around the dinner table than nearly any other American holiday. Let’s unpack that, shall we?

The Myth of “The First Thanksgiving”

Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1925; Oil on canvas, 30 x 39 1/8 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts

You’ve probably seen this image floating around the interwebs. It looks very realistic, but it is in reality a 20th century imagined version of what happened. Prayerful Pilgrims gather around a long table outdoors - children stand by their parents, a few Indigenous guys are seated at the end of the tale - more Native people, with one Pilgrim who looks to be translating, sit on the ground in the background. Way in the back, by the log cabin, more Pilgrims bring dishes to the table and a couple of Native people appear to be roasting something - venison? - over an open fire. It’s the myth we all grew up with. Pilgrims came to North America seeking religious freedom. Indians welcomed them with open arms and helped feed them. After a very bad winter, everyone celebrated a successful harvest the following year with a feast of Thanksgiving - giving thanks to God for delivering them from privation. Everyone got along peacefully and American history was all hunky dory from that period on. The Indians gradually went extinct, European immigrants flourished and built our great nation. And since then, every fall, all Americans have celebrated Thanksgiving in remembrance of this momentous event.

*record scratch*

Except that’s not what actually happened. The Pilgrims were religious zealots who were kicked out of England for trying to impose their ideas of theocracy on others, rejecting the Church of England (not to be confused with Puritans, who emigrated later, and while equally zealous, tried to reform the Church of England from within). Known in England as Separatists, for their separation from the Church, the Pilgrims had found religious freedom in the Netherlands (although not theocracy) and were seeking the economic and religious freedom of their own settlement. They originally set sail for New Amsterdam (now New York) as the Dutch colony of New Netherland was tolerant of a variety of religions, including Belgian Walloons, French Huguenots, Jews, Quakers, and Catholics. The bad weather (they arrived in October, 1620) kept them from reaching their destination, so they settled instead in modern-day Plymouth, Massachusetts.

They were generally paranoid about their Indigenous hosts. The Wampanoag were wary of Europeans, having already suffered years of kidnapping, enslavement, and disease at the hands of European sailors. Squanto (Tisquantum) returned home after kidnapping and enslavement by English sailors to find his village destroyed to the person by disease, and some English colonists blown off course inhabiting his home. Saved from abject starvation by digging up stored Native food and seed corn caches (which then deprived the Wampanoag of seed to plant in the spring), they nearly died that first winter, arriving unprepared and without access to an existing colony to rely on.

The actual first thanksgiving - which the Separatists organized as a religious festival - did exist. But it was simply one of many feasts of thanksgiving that could and did occur in Protestant communities around the colonies at all times of year. As late as the early 19th century, feasts of Thanksgiving were declared in spring and summer. And the Wampanoag weren’t exactly “invited” to that first feast.

At the Thanksgiving feast of 1621, the Pilgrims fired their guns into the air in celebration. Alarmed by the noise, Massasoit (his given name was Ousamequin), mustered a group of warriors to investigate. Instead of a raiding party, they found the Pilgrims feasting. Wary of offending the large party of warriors, the Pilgrims invited to join the feast. The Wampanoag supplemented the tables with five deer.

You can read more about what happened to the Wampanoag in David J. Silver’s recent book, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, published in 2020 (Amazon affiliate link).

Most people now know that the “First Thanksgiving” didn’t have most of what’s on our modern tables - although cornmeal, “wildfowl,” and venison were definitely present, the other ingredients are simply guesses based on what was available that first year: turkey, waterfowl like duck and goose, seafood and shellfish, and some long-gone foods like passenger pigeon and now-functionally-extinct American chestnut; and what definitely wasn’t: dairy, wheat, sugar, potatoes, etc. So no pies of any kind, not even pumpkin, no wheat bread or stuffing, no butter, no sweets, and certainly no green bean casserole, which is a 20th century invention.

Indeed, almost everything they, and indeed, most colonists in the first decades of the European invasion, ate was Indigenous to the “New World” - especially corn or maize, which provided the bulk of starchy calories to both Indigenous and Europeans, beans, and squash/pumpkins. None of these foods were available in Europe prior to first contact with North America. Early Europeans also marveled at the abundance of game and seafood. Flocks of passenger pigeons which darkened the skies. Lobsters as long as a person and clams and oysters the size of dinner plates. Sturgeon 20 feet long. Deer, bears, and even beaver were larger than their European counterparts. The American moose, in particular, terrified Europeans. Indigenous people had harvested for thousands of years - the abundance wasn’t by accident. They managed the forests and coastal shellfish banks expertly. Sadly, much of that management know-how was lost or ignored by Europeans and it didn’t take long for that abundance to decline thanks to overharvesting and habitat destruction.

Thanksgiving Food Origins

But why do we even eat turkey at Thanksgiving? Wild turkey is lean and can be tough. But turkeys were plentiful historically and among the largest birds on the continent. In the 19th century, domesticated turkey was easy to raise and was destined for the table in a way that fowl raised for primarily eggs weren’t. Unlike smaller birds, like chickens and ducks, they take longer to reach full size, meaning that they aren’t generally harvested in the spring (like male chickens). Their size also means it’s easy to feed a crowd with one bird - unlike chickens, which were historically much smaller than our modern meat birds bred for their oversized muscles. Turkeys are less fatty than domestic geese, which can be either a blessing or a curse, depending on how you cook them.

At any rate, their availability during harvest season and the fact that they could generally be consumed by a largish family in one sitting (unlike hogs and beef cattle) made them easy to slaughter at a moment’s notice. But like most foods, they weren’t generally associated with Thanksgiving until the latter half of the 19th century. Indeed, thanks to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, they were more popular as a Christmas dish for decades.

You can thank Sarah Josepha Hale for her more than two-decade effort to get the staunchly New England autumnal celebration made into a national holiday - right in the middle of the American Civil War. In her 1827 novel Northwood, Hale describes the typical New England Thanksgiving feast:

The table, covered with a damask cloth, vieing in whiteness, and nearly equalling in texture, the finest imported, though spun, woven, and bleached by Mrs. Romelee’s own hand, was now intended for the whole household, every child having a seat on this occasion, and the more the better, it being considered an honor for a man to sit down to his Thanksgiving supper surrounded by a large family. The provision is always sufficient for a multitude, every farmer in the country being, at this season of the year, plentifully supplied, and every one proud of displaying his abundance and prosperity.

The roasted turkey took precedence on this occasion, being placed at the head of the table; and well did it become its lordly station, sending forth the rich odour of its savoury stuffing, and finely covered with the frost of the basting. At the foot of the board a surloin of beef, flanked on either side by a leg of pork and joint of mutton, seemed placed as a bastion to defend innumerable bowls of gravy and plates of vegetables disposed in that quarter. A goose and pair of ducklings occupied side stations on the table, the middle being graced, as it always is on such occasions, by that rich burgomaster of the provisions, called a chicken pie. This pie, which is wholly formed of the choicest parts of fowls, enriched and seasoned with a profusion of butter and pepper, and covered in an excellent puff paste, is, like the celebrated pumpkin pie, an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving; the size of the pie usually denoting the gratitude of the party who prepares the feast. The one now displayed could never have had many peers. Frankford had seen nothing like it, and collected nothing in description bearing a comparison, excepting the famous pie served up to the witty King Charles II., and containing, instead of the savory chicken, the simple knight. Plates of pickles, preserves, and butter, and all the necessaries for increasing the seasoning of the viands to the demand of each palate, filled the interstices on the table, leaving hardly sufficient room for the plates of the company, a wine glass and two tumblers for each, with a slice of wheat bread lying on one of the inverted tumblers. A side table was literally loaded with the preparations for the second course, placed there to obviate the necessity of leaving the apartment during the repast. Mr. Romelee keeping no domestic, the family were to wait on themselves, or on each other. There was a huge plumb pudding, custards, and pies of every name and description ever known in Yankee land; yet the pumpkin pie occupied the most distinguished niche. There were also several kinds of rich cake, and a variety of sweetmeats and fruits. On the sideboard was ranged a goodly number of decanters and bottles; the former filled with currant wine and the latter with excellent cider and ginger beer, a beverage Mrs. Romelee prided herself on preparing in perfection. There were no foreign wines or ardent spirits, Squire Romelee being a consistent moralist; and while he deprecated the evils an indulgence in their use was bringing on his countrymen, and urged them to correct the pernicious, he practiced what he preached. [spelling and emphasis original]

What a description! Note the combined reinforcement of self-sufficiency (the Romelee’s weave their own cloth and make their own alcohol, in addition to producing everything else on the table) and moralism (a type of temperance). This is the Thanksgiving that Hale would spend years of letter-writing, editorializing, and advocating for: incredible abundance, from the groaning board to the huge family, Christian morality, and emphasis on self-sufficiency (no servants in the Romelee household, only daughters), ignoring the cheap or free land (formerly occupied by Indigenous people) and inexpensive sugar fueled by slavery. Slavery is mentioned in the book, but only to moralize on how the Southern states should abolish slavery, despite the fact that Massachusetts had only abolished slavery forty years earlier, in 1783, and New York the same year Northwood was published.

Although the turkey “takes precedence,” the meal also includes an incredible amount of meat, including beef sirloin, an entire leg of pork and joint (leg) of mutton, two ducks, a goose, and what appears to be a huge chicken pie, which in the period was pieces of bone-in chicken baked in a buttery gravy inside a pie crust. Nary a vegetable in sight as we think of with our “traditional” chicken pot pie. Indeed, vegetables are almost entirely absent from the description, as was common in the early part of the 19th century. They were undoubtedly present, but compared to the meat and sweets are not worth mentioning.

While subsequent iterations of the Thanksgiving meal were pared down to turkey with cranberry sauce, sage stuffing, some side vegetables (mashed potatoes, turnips, creamed onions, creamed spinach, squash casserole, sweet potato casserole, corn, green beans, etc. are all staples), and pumpkin pie (sometimes accompanied by apple or pecan pie). Turkey, corn, squash and pumpkin, potatoes, and beans are all Indigenous to the Americas, and all grow well in New England’s harsh climate.

Nationalizing Thanksgiving

So how did New England’s traditions get imposed on the rest of the country? Again, Sarah Josepha Hale. She convinced Abraham Lincoln to make it a national holiday, as New England domestic emigrants had spread the tradition to the northern territories. Lincoln, looking for a reason to bring the nation (i.e. the Union) together in the midst of the Civil War, agreed. Post-war, it served as a way to establish an American (read, White Yankee) identity. The Pilgrims magically became all our “forefathers,” not just those of English descent. Christianity and New England foodways were also imposed on the rest of the nation, much to the consternation of former Confederates, who refused to participate for decades.

New England and Christian supremacy (along with white supremacy) are the undercurrent through most of American life in the latter half of the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, although few people like to admit it. Colonial revivals in the 1910s, 1930s & ‘40s, and 1970s reinforced the propaganda. The foodways around Thanksgiving play a big role in that. Foods developed by Indigenous people are rebranded as “American,” and when they say that they mean White, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon America.

It’s no wonder many Indigenous people consider Thanksgiving a Day of Mourning.

It’s tough to disconnect Thanksgiving from its propagandic roots. Some people don’t bother. Others try to decolonize their Thanksgiving dinners. For most people these days, Thanksgiving is pretty disconnected from the Pilgrims, and is more about bringing family and friends together and stuffing themselves silly than anything else. I think it’s important to understand the real history, to recognize how intimately our foodways are connected to the skilled Indigenous agriculturalists of our collective past, and to acknowledge that most of our “traditions” in the United States are propaganda designed to promote white supremacy, Christian supremacy, and colonialism. We can reject those “traditions” without guilt, including, if you don’t like it, want to avoid participating in the American industrial meat system, or just don’t have the money, the turkey.

Adam Grant @AdamMGrant

Too many people spend their lives being dutiful descendants instead of good ancestors. The responsibility of each generation is not to please their predecessors. It's to improve things for their offspring. It's more important to make your children proud than your parents proud.

This tweet by Adam Grant has made the rounds over the last year, and I think it’s a particularly apt one. There’s not much we as individuals can do to heal the deep wounds left by our Colonial ancestors, other than recognize the history and talk about it. But we can think about future generations. Don’t burden them with gluey canned bean casseroles and dry turkey (unless you like things that way) any more than you would racism and patriarchy. Spending time with family and friends is way more important than a single day or a single meal. Eat what you love, with those you love. Be thankful for what you have, but never stop trying to make things better for the future. And for goodness sakes, let’s stop caring about what older generations sought to impose on us.

---