Growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s, at the height of the Cold War, everything we were taught in our classrooms was designed to combat the dreaded communist peril that surrounded us. This was the era of Joe McCarthy and the adoption of “In God we trust” as our nation’s motto to appear on all paper currency (it was already on some coinage). We were well on our way to proving just how different we were from those nasty Soviets.
Part of that indoctrination included the colorfully embroidered story of the valiant Pilgrims persevering against terrible odds that included a sixty-six-day passage on the Mayflower and a brutal winter that saw their population cut in half. The following year (with assistance from the local Native American Wampanoag, Abenaki, and Patuxet tribes) brought a harvest that promised to sustain the growing settlement at Plymouth over the winter. The Pilgrims celebrated the harvest with a three-day festival, which the members of the tribes were kindly invited to attend.
The painting above perfectly encapsulates the myths we were taught that reinforced our belief in American Exceptionalism.
But I don’t recall my teachers telling me about Squanto, a Patuxet tribe member who, along with 23 other members of the Patuxet and Nauset tribes, was kidnapped by English sea captain John Hunt, who hoped to profit by selling them all into slavery in Malaga. Squanto eventually made his way to England and then to the New World as part of an exploratory expedition, before finally returning to what remained of his family. His tribe, the Patuxet, was devastated by a plague which may have been smallpox or tuberculosis, or both.
Nor do I recall my teachers explaining that the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags, assisted by Squanto, formed a 50-year alliance that stands as the lone exception to the European advance across what would become the United States.
None of those details were allowed to mar the image of an America that could have been created in a Disney studio: a fictitious nation built on a desire for religious freedom and settled by well-meaning Pilgrims who wore strange attire and smoked a peace pipe with the friendly tribes whose land they took. And whom they graciously allowed to join their harvest thanksgiving festival—if they remained seated on the ground.
Whatever they are teaching children today, let’s hope it bears a closer resemblance to reality. Historic reality is always more fascinating than highly-pasteurized, ideologically-colored fantasy.
Another example of fascinating reality: Even though the first Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621 and individual colonies and then states, especially those in the Northeast, celebrated an annual day of thanksgiving, there was no federal holiday for more than 200 years. It took one woman who persisted, for 27 years, in asking the federal government to create one.
Born in 1788, a mere seven years after the end of the Revolutionary War, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale lived to see the Civil War fought and won. The daughter of Revolutionary War Captain Gordon Buell and Martha Whittlesay Buell of Newport, New Hampshire, Sarah was home-schooled by her mother and older brother, who was a student at Dartmouth. Lacking formal education, she still became a school teacher, which is what she was doing when she met and then married David Hale, an attorney, in 1813.
Her husband supported her dream of becoming a writer, encouraging her in her efforts. They had five children before he died suddenly, leaving her to support them herself. Her first book of poetry, The Genius of Oblivion, was published with the help of her husband’s Freemason lodge in 1823, a year after David Hale’s death.
But it was her second book, the anti-slavery novel Northwood: Life North and South, that brought her to the attention of the publisher of Boston’s Ladies’ Magazine. Rev. John Lauris Blake asked her to become the editor. She agreed, and served as “editress” from 1827 until 1836 when the publication was purchased by Louis Antoine Godey, who merged it with his own to form Godey's Lady's Book. She served as the editor until her retirement 40 years later, in 1877, at the age of 90. That is not all she did, however,
… Sarah Josepha Hale also published poems, short stories, plays, novels, and a women’s encyclopedia titled Woman’s Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women from the Creation to A.D. 1854, Arranged in Four Eras, with Selections from Female Writers of Every Age. Her 1830 book titled Poems for Our Children contained the popular poem we know today as “Mary had a Little Lamb.”
It is hard today, with our plethora of magazines and e-magazines, to imagine the influence that Godey’s Lady’s Book and its editor had on the American public. It set the tone on not just women’s fashions, but home and family life, and a woman’s place in the world as she advocated for women’s higher education and job opportunities.
Mrs. Hale brought substance to the magazine, and wrote frequently about the notion of “women’s sphere.” In 1846 she stated, “The time of action is now. We have to sow the fields—the harvest is sure. The greatest triumph of this progression is redeeming woman from her inferior position and placing her side by side with man, a help-mate for him in all his pursuits.” Her steadfast devotion of purpose and her unwavering editorial principles regarding social inequalities and the education of American women, made her one of the most important editors of her time. Under Mrs. Hale’s tutelage the magazine flourished, reaching a pre-Civil War circulation of 150,000. Godey and Hale became a force majeure in American publishing and together produced a magazine which today is considered to be among the most important resources of 19th century American life and culture.
In addition to her day job, Sarah Hale was a fervent advocate of preserving symbols of American history, and of helping women to help themselves:
In 1833, Sarah established the Seaman’s Aid Society in Boston’s North End to provide employment for the wives of sailors as seamstresses and a place for them to sell their work. The Society also opened a Mariners House in the North End as a sailors’ boarding house, and developed an industrial school for seamen’s daughters and a day nursery. A proud patriot, Sarah campaigned for the preservation of Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home in Virginia, along with her Bunker Hill Monument project which she funded through a massive seven-day fair at Boston’s Faneuil Hall in 1840.
Interestingly, as strongly as she supported so many other progressive causes including the founding of Vassar College, she never did support a woman’s right to vote. Instead, she favored the use of feminine wiles to sway male votes. In 1856, in support of higher education, she wrote:
“The companion of man should be able thoroughly to sympathize with him and her intellect should be as well developed as his. We do not believe in the mental inequality of the sexes, we believe that the man and the woman have each a work to do, for which they are specially qualified, and in which they are called to excel. Though the work is not the same, it is equally noble, and demands an equal exercise of capacity.”
Her longest campaign may have been to create a national holiday of thanksgiving. In 1837, when she first began writing about this national holiday, several states in the Northeast had all declared thanksgiving holidays, but the custom was unheard of in the South. And even among the states that did have a day of thanksgiving, there was no uniformity of dates. Sarah Hale felt that the nation would be stronger for shared holidays, and at the time the only two national holidays were Washington’s birthday and Independence Day. So she began her long campaign, in the name of national unity, to have the federal government make an annual event of thanksgiving which:
“… might, without inconvenience, be observed on the same day of November, say the last Thursday in the month, throughout all New England; and also in our sister states, who have engrafted it upon their social system. It would then have a national character, which would, eventually, induce all the states to join in the commemoration of “In-gathering,” which it celebrates. It is a festival which will never become obsolete, for it cherishes the best affections of the heart – the social and domestic ties. It calls together the dispersed members of the family circle, and brings plenty, joy and gladness to the dwellings of the poor and lowly.”
In addition to her editorials in the Godey’s Lady’s Book, she wrote letters. She wrote to governors, senators, representatives, and presidents, (five of them). Her requests were either ignored or declined outright. In an 1859 editorial, clearly aware of the tensions threatening to tear apart the union she so dearly loved, she wrote:
“We are already spread and mingled over the Union. Each year, by bringing us oftener together, releases us from the estrangement and coolness consequent on distance and political alienations; each year multiplies our ties of relationship and friendship. How can we hate ourMississippi brother-in-law? and who is a better fellow than our wife’s uncle from St. Louis? If Maine itself be a great way off, and almost nowhere, on the contrary, a dozen splendid fellows hail from Kennebec County, and your wife is a down-Easter.”
By 1860 the tensions had increased, and so had Sarah Hale’s urging in Godey’s:
“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.
We have sought to reawaken and increase this sympathy, believing that the fine filaments of the affections are stronger than laws to keep the Union of our States sacred in the hearts of our people... We believe our Thanksgiving Day, if fixed and perpetuated, will be a great and sanctifying promoter of this national spirit.”
And finally, after 27 years, in the middle of a bloody civil war, her persistence paid off and President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national holiday of Thanksgiving to be held on the fourth Thursday of November, 1863. Included in the proclamation, which may have been written by Secretary of State William Seward, are the words:
… commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans. mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union.
One would think that having achieved her purpose of creating a national holiday she would end her campaign. But no. This woman of persistence was not yet ready to rest on her laurels—although she does modestly acknowledge them:
“In our endeavors, which have been continued for many years, to secure the recognition of one day throughout the land as the Day of public Thanksgiving, we are conscious of not having in any manner gone beyond the proper limits of the sphere which we have prescribed for the Lady’s Book. It is the peculiar happiness of Thanksgiving Day that nothing political mingles in its observance. It is in its very nature a religious and domestic holiday. It belongs to the altar and the hearth, at which woman should ever be present; and the women of our country should take this day under their peculiar charge, and sanctify it to acts of piety, charity, and domestic love.”
She decided that the only way to protect her beloved holiday was to have Congress write it into law so that no future president could ignore the holiday. Sadly, that was not to happen in her lifetime. She passed away on April 30, 1879, at 90 years of age.
In 1941, Congress finally passed a law setting the federal holiday of Thanksgiving Day as the fourth Thursday of November. This followed a 1939 attempt by President Roosevelt to give the Christmas shopping season a boost by declaring Thanksgiving a week earlier. It did not go over well.
Today, the single day of Thanksgiving has morphed into a day of feasting and football followed by the most amazing spectacle of human greed ever witnessed as the Christmas shopping season is formally opened on Black Friday.
But at least there is one day when families struggle to put aside personal and political differences and join in a festival of Thanksgiving. And for that we can thank a single woman who was repeatedly told “no”—and nevertheless, persisted.