Today on Something You Should Know, a special holiday bonus episode.
With Thanksgiving fast approaching, you probably think you know the story of the first Thanksgiving.
Pilgrims, Native Americans, a big turkey dinner, everyone getting along.
Well, not exactly.
The story is a lot more complicated and a lot more interesting.
The food was different, the reason for the feast wasn't what you think, and even the meaning of Thanksgiving has changed over time.
So what really happened at that first Thanksgiving?
So one of the things that we know that happens is that each of them that's the Pilgrims on the one hand and the Natives on the other hand each of them seem pretty eager to trade with the other.
So that initial moment is not a moment of enormous suspicion.
It seems more a moment of, hey, what can you do for me?
We'll dig into all of that right after this.
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Something you should know.
Fascinating intel.
The world's top experts.
And practical advice you can use in your life.
Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
So you're about to discover a lot of interesting intel about Thanksgiving that I bet you didn't know.
And you're going to learn how some of the common beliefs about the first Thanksgiving just aren't true and how some of the things you think happened then never happened.
Hi and welcome to this special holiday bonus episode of Something You Should Know.
And we start with an interesting fact.
And that is that Thanksgiving led to the invention and popularity...
In 1953 an employee of the Swanson Food Company overestimated the number of frozen turkeys the company should order for Thanksgiving.
And the company was left with 260 tons of extra turkey.
What do you do with 260 tons of frozen turkey?
Well...
Salesman Jerry Thomas came up with a brilliant idea to create and sell individual turkey dinners complete with cornbread dressing, gravy peas and sweet potatoes on reheatable trays, just like airline meals.
Each pre-made feast cost a total of 98 cents.
By the end of 1954 a year later Swanson had sold 10 million frozen turkey meals and the TV dinner industry was bored.
And that is something you should know.
Today, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November.
Why?
Well, in 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared that Thanksgiving be celebrated on the last Thursday of November.
And there it stayed.
But in 1933, November was a five-Thursday month.
So retailers asked President Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving up a week to help get an early start on the Christmas shopping season.
He declined.
But in 1939, November once again had five Thursdays in it.
And this time, President Roosevelt agreed to change it to the fourth Thursday of November.
There was a lot of controversy about it.
Many people thought he was just bowing to pressure from retailers, which I guess he was.
And some states kept their Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November.
Then, in 1941, Congress passed a law making the fourth Thursday of November the holiday of Thanksgiving.
And it has stayed there ever since.
But what about the first Thanksgiving?
We all heard stories in school about how the pilgrims and the Indians got together to give thanks and they had dinner together.
But how much of that story is true?
How much of it is a myth?
And what really did happen back then?
And how has the celebration evolved from then to now?
Here with some insight into that is Peter Mancall.
He is a professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California and he focuses on early America.
Hi, Professor.
Welcome, and happy Thanksgiving.
Thank you very much for having me.
So the story we all heard in elementary school about the Indians and the pilgrims and they get together.
Is that generally what happened at the first Thanksgiving?
Well, we know from some of the documents that in the autumn of 1621, the pilgrims and their nearby native neighbors, Wampanoags, got together for an autumn celebration that, according to one of the documents, lasted about three days, and they sort of sat and shared food and feasted together.
The documentary record is not particularly thick on this, but we do have two observations for something that happened in 1621, and then we have a somewhat more detailed account of what happened in 1623.
But I think we can be fairly certain that they did get together.
It had been a terrible winter for the pilgrims.
They'd arrived in 1620.
About half of the pilgrims didn't even survive that first winter.
They suffered from scurvy and malnutrition, and so when they got to the autumn of 1621, that first harvest time, it was really a time of great celebration, because I think it signaled to many of them that, though they believed they would survive, they certainly hoped that God would take care of them.
Here was real proof that they would be able to make it in New England.
So what was the nature of the relationship between these European settlers, the pilgrims and the people who were already here, the Native American people?
How did they interact, or did they interact much?
What was the nature of this?
So we know that other Europeans had been in this part of the Atlantic coast before the Pilgrims arrived.
The Pilgrims arrived in late 1620.
So we know, for example, that the French explorer Champlain had been in the area, And we know that Captain John Smith, who we associate more famously with James Town, early Virginia, we know that he had been there.
They had both described the area.
So knowledge of the area had circulated, including some knowledge of the native peoples of the coast.
And so when we get to the pilgrims arriving in 1620, we want sort of, as you know, many people want to look at this holiday and say well, this is, you know, this sort of first dramatic moment.
But in fact there had been a history that led up to it and that history had told the English had told the Pilgrims what the natives were like and had benefited the Pilgrims because they arrived in a place where there had been a very productive economy, where there had been cleared fields, where corn was growing, where people had sort of mastered the local environment.
But on a day-to-day basis, I mean, what was this relationship like?
Was it?
You know we're working together as one.
Or you guys stay over there and we'll be over here, or let's go get a beer together.
How did they interact?
What's the nature of this relationship?
So the relationship between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags, or with the nearby Massachusetts Indians, was not sort of hi, how are you?
So one of the things that we know that happens is that each of them that's the Pilgrims on the one hand and the Natives on the other hand each of them seem pretty eager to trade with the other.
So that initial moment, you know, 1620, 1621, is not a moment of enormous suspicion.
It seems more a moment of sort of, hey, what can you do?
Sort of, hey, what can you do for me?
They greet each other as a source of possible new opportunity.
Not oh, I need to be worried about you nor hey, let's go sit down and hang out, because we're friends.
It's in this middle ground.
I mean, we have to remember that they can't speak to each other particularly easily.
There is a language barrier that becomes reduced over time as people learn to communicate.
But at this point, it's still pretty intense.
And so people are still sort of figuring things out.
And a number of the documents that survive from the period sort of show us this, this you know how do we reach out.
Well, they, this is the English word, right?
Well, they showed some interest in this thing that we had, you know, glass beads or axe, or metal axes.
And we that is the English you know said well, we're starving and we would really like to eat some of their corn.
And so I think we see people who are trying to establish relations, And one of the things that we also need to remember is that we tend, it's our natural tendency, to sort of put them in this broad category of Wampanoags or other Agamben-speaking peoples on the one hand, and English you know, on the other.
But in fact there's a lot of individuals going back and forth and very soon, within a few years, in the 1620s, one group of the English breaks off from the others and has very extensive relations with these Indians in the area.
And so, you know, there are some who are absolutely embracing, let's get together.
But at that very first moment, I think it's really a sense of sort of, well, what can you do for me?
I'm still a little nervous about things.
And did they call them Indians?
Yes, in the documents, some of the English often refer to them as Indians.
It's a word that dates back, it's 100 years old by then.
In some of the documents, we see them using the more characteristic word, which is American.
I mean that word Americans starts as a European reference to Native Americans that are the occupants of this newly named place that the Europeans call America.
But by the time we get to the pilgrims, they're using the word Indians.
The Thanksgiving three-day celebration was one of the two groups clearly the host, or was it just a kind of a potluck celebration?
Let's all just get together?
Or what was the nature of this celebration?
So according to the documentary evidence, the documentary is very fragmentary.
We have one letter from one of the pilgrims, and then we have a somewhat more detailed count of an event two years later.
It is basically the pilgrims celebrating the bringing in of their corn, celebrating their first harvest.
That is, they'd learned corn. from the Algonquians, from the Wampanoags, how to grow corn.
And so they start to feast, and in this brief document they basically say we invited our neighbors to come by and Massasoit, who's the local leader, and approximately 90 others of his people who are Wampanoags.
We invited them to come and they stayed for three days and during those three days we feasted on venison and fowl, as well as corn, and we presume that that fowl was turkey and that's why turkey gets integrated into sort of the myth of the earliest Thanksgiving.
Yeah, there sure seems to be a lot of myth in this story that we've all heard over the years.
I'm talking with Peter Mancall.
He is a professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California and an expert on early America, and we're talking about the story of Thanksgiving.
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So Peter, I think...
We all have a better understanding from your explanation.
We all understand the first Thanksgiving better.
What about the second Thanksgiving?
They don't have regular Thanksgivings.
I mean.
So this is one of the features where sort of American history and American myths sort of depart.
So in 1621, we have this meal.
In 1623, according to his sort of definitive history, or most of the definitive history of the region, Governor Bradford writes that they had another meal and this one he actually calls, he actually says and there was, we gave thanks.
This was a meal of thanksgiving.
There were days of giving thanks to God, to the pilgrims, thanking their God.
That would happen sporadically, in part because the pilgrims who go to New Plymouth in 1620, followed by the Puritans who go to Massachusetts Bay starting in 1630.
They tended to see the world as the unfolding of a divine plan.
They were what we call providentialists.
They believed in predestination.
And so everything that happened as they wrote about it was sort of you know, this is what had been intended.
And so they would thank God when good things happened, and they would thank God when unfortunate things happened, because it was in their nature to sort of acknowledge what they saw was this divine power over them.
Thanksgiving as a holiday doesn't really begin to come in in any grander sense until during the Revolutionary War, when the revolutionaries at some point celebrate something, say well, we should have a day of Thanksgiving.
And then it sort of becomes sort of a sporadic idea and then it finally only becomes a national holiday during the Civil War in 1863.
You know a very different context from what was going on in early colonial New England.
So there was the first Thanksgiving, the three-day celebration of people.
Then there was pretty much a break.
I mean, it didn't become any kind of annual anything for quite some time.
It was a one-time event, and then life went on as life went on.
What we know is that in 1621, the Wampanoags, on the one hand, and the Pilgrims, on the other hand, got together for a three-day celebration.
And we know that two years later in his history, Bradford writes of a day, another harvest sort of festival or meal in which they give thanks, although he doesn't talk about hosting native neighbors during that.
He then doesn't really write about it again and he writes the definitive history which stretches from the founding of New Plymouth in 1620 to about 1650, when he stops writing.
So for those first 30 years, we have just these two mentions of it.
One by him and one by another colonial observer.
We don't know whether we should fill in the silence and say, well, they did this twice.
Maybe they were having these sort of things every day.
I mean, every year.
And there's certainly no annual holiday.
I mean, the idea of an annual holiday wasn't really the way they thought about things.
So how do we read that silence?
I read it as a historian to say, well, they did these things in the early 1620s.
And knowing they did things, they very likely you know sort of had celebrations each time they brought in a harvest.
But did they have a three-day feast and did it involve their native neighbors?
That seems less likely.
So you said that around the Revolutionary War, which would have been more than a hundred years after the first Thanksgiving, there were again celebrations of Thanksgiving.
Now, were the celebrations of Thanksgiving during the Revolutionary War.
Were they linked to and did they reference back to the first Thanksgiving, the pilgrims, or were they celebrations of Thanksgiving to give thanks for what was going on right then?
When the people that become Americans and call themselves Americans, that is, people who become residents of states in the late 18th century, decide to have days of Thanksgiving that had nothing to do with what had happened in the early colonial period.
It's not linked to a harvest celebration, it's not linked to sitting down with native peoples.
It's really.
We have endured this terrible moment.
We have come through, we have survived.
Let us give thanks to God.
Let's have a day of thanksgiving.
Let's have a day of public acknowledgement of God.
And then the celebrations that started in the Civil War.
Were they again linked to the pilgrims or the Revolutionary War celebration, or were they giving thanks for what was going on in the moment?
The holiday, when it becomes a holiday in the middle of the 19th century, in the middle of the Civil War, is really a result of people coping with an extraordinary catastrophe, you know, the worst warfare that, as far as we know, we've ever seen in much of North America.
I mean the idea there—it's a campaign— to get Lincoln to go along with it, you know, is sort of like we should pause and we should give thanks to God for everything that we have.
It has nothing really to do in any obvious sense with what happened in early colonial New England, although invariably there were people who are sort of looking back and thinking well, once upon a time, in what was then sort of the myths of the past, you know, there were people and they came and they gave thanks to God and we should do the same thing.
But it's not really the same motivation for a holiday.
So if you were to put this on a timeline, there are four events on this timeline.
There's the original first Thanksgiving in the 1600s with the pilgrims.
Then there's a revolutionary war.
After the war, Thanksgiving to give thanks for what they've been through.
And then there's the Civil War Thanksgiving celebrations, which was more to do about what they've been through during the Civil War.
But today's Thanksgiving celebration pretty much ignores the Civil War and the Revolutionary War and is really a celebration in remembrance of, or in honor of, that very first Thanksgiving back in the 1600s.
That is correct.
I mean, there are people who have studied the history of Thanksgiving and the official history of Thanksgiving.
And it is really our modern holiday as a legal event.
You know, there's a day that there's no mail, a day that there's no school.
I mean, that comes from the 19th century.
You know, it's an interesting question why we celebrate holidays in the ways that we do it.
I mean, even if we could imagine a scenario where the people who campaigned for having a holiday to mark this, even if we could imagine a scenario that said we should do this because there was a similar event back in the early 1620s, even if someone made that the argument for a holiday, there's no reason it would necessarily stick.
I mean, people celebrate holidays for various reasons and they have various meanings to us.
And holidays change over time.
Well, you're right.
It is a little strange that we celebrate a holiday that commemorates an event that is pretty fuzzy in the history books as to exactly what happened.
Other than you know, we gave thanks.
Nevertheless, Thanksgiving is an important American holiday.
People like Thanksgiving.
It seems to be a holiday, as it's come to be celebrated, in which we, that is collectively, want to reach back, and they want to reach back to this particular moment in the early 1620s.
They want to reach back to this moment of people getting along.
They want to reach back to a moment of celebration.
By the time Thanksgiving becomes a national holiday, you know there had been terrible things that happened to Native peoples across what becomes the United States.
And I think in the modern telling of Thanksgiving A lot of Americans would rather sort of think about the comforting myth of wait we all could get along.
It sort of plays into the way that we think about holidays.
We want to go back to a simple sort of an urtext of the American experience and we romanticize that.
And what better way to romanticize that than these brief documents from the 1620s, which people seem to be getting along.
Well, there's been a lot in this discussion of things I haven't heard before, particularly about the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and just an interesting take on Thanksgiving and how it got started and why it is the way it is.
Peter Mancall has been my guest.
He is a professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California.
Thank you, Professor.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Here's an interesting statistic.
68 of Americans dislike at least some of the traditional Thanksgiving dishes that are served at Thanksgiving dinner.
Things like canned cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, even turkey itself.
This is according to a 2019 Instacart survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults.
Interestingly, most of those adults said they still eat those dishes in honor of the tradition.
But times are changing.
30% of Thanksgiving dinner hosts have served something other than turkey as the main course.
In fact, pork is the second most popular option.
And that is something you should know.
I hope you've enjoyed this special holiday bonus episode of Something You Should Know, and that you and your family have a great Thanksgiving.
I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
