Post-Thanksgiving Book History Post

What to do on that long Thanksgiving weekend after you've eaten your fill and watched too much TV? Turn to your books (or collections).

In this case, it's the ex libris, or bookplate: an interesting testimonial to evolving habits of book ownership, and since the late nineteenth century, a profitable and collectible small graphic genre (1, 2) in its own right.

This one was created by the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants (not my ancestors, God knows--though I do know more than one student who can claim membership in that elite club). Founded in 1896, the organization soon decided that it needed an ex libris to accompany donations it made.

An "American Letter" by Charles Dexter Allen of Hartford (Nov. 9, 1897) in the British Journal of the Ex Libris Society announced a competition:

The Society of Mayflower Descendants offers two prizes, one of fifty dollars and the other of twenty dollars, for a book-plate design. The plate is to be 4 1/2 by 3 inches, and the design in the centre should be 2 1/4 by 1 3/8 inches. Above this should be the title, "Society of Mayflower Descendants in Massachusetts," and at the bottom, "Presented by," with space for date and name of donor. The office of the Society is in the Tremont Building, Boston.

--Vol. 7 (1897): 178-79, quotation from 178

The following year, Allen reported on the winners. He began with an apology for his long silence:

So many months have gone by without a communication from the American correspondent, that I feel assured these present lines will be read as a decided novelty, and I am not certain that an introduction is not in order ! But really during the hot and hottest months there seemed little doing in matters of interest to book-plate collectors, though, in fact, discoveries were being made, new plates were being designed and engraved, and the ongo of matters was not wholly interrupted. But with the return of weather that makes one think of the fireside and indoor delights, correspondence is resumed and matters of general interest are passed about from one to another.

He reported on the creation of the smallest bookplate in the world (for a miniature book), and then, not bothering with a transition, launched into an update on the Mayflower contest:

Within a few months a competition for a bookplate was advertised by the Society of Mayflower Descendants in Massachusetts, and at a meeting held last March the first prize, fifty dollars, was awarded to Mr. Charles E. Heil, of Jamaica Plain, and the second, twenty dollars, to Mr. Theodore Brown Hapgood, jun., of Boston. At this meeting the sixty-eight designs submitted in competition were exhibited. The successful design has been printed in black with red capitals, and makes a very showy appearance. The lettering is good, and the pictorial design represents two Puritans, one in the layman's dress and one in the soldier's, standing by the sea-shore. At a little distance rides the Mayflower. Mr. Hapgood's design, printed wholly in black, represents the Puritan and his wife en route to church along the bleak shore, gun on shoulder, and clad in the sombre habiliments of the day. The old-style lettering and ornamentation are very pleasing, and one is impressed with the spirit of the design, which is in complete harmony with the picture and with the traditions the Mayflower Society endeavours to keep alive.

--Journal of the Ex Libris Society, 8 (1898): 171-72; here 172

Heil (1870-1950), a member of the newly founded Boston Society of Arts and Crafts (1897; today, the oldest such organization in the nation) came to be best known for his ornithological painting and has been called a second Audubon. Hapgood (1871-1938), by contrast, devoted more time to the world of book art, from binding design, title pages, and illustrations, to the ex libris (along the way finding time for ecclesiastical vestments and other artistic pursuits).

Below is Heil's winning design, from my small collection. The reddish ink has a metallic cast, which, viewed from some angles, causes it to reflect light. The back is gummed.

Reviewing a bookplate exhibition by the Boston Arts and Crafts Society at Copley Hall in 1899, the journal of the Berlin Ex-libris association called this piece "a very beautiful plate!"

I might quibble with that. Even aside from the generally retrograde aesthetic (the minimal nod to modish art nouveau taste in the left marginal column notwithstanding) and corresponding social-political doctrines, the highlighting of the key initial letters on the left is bizarrely violated by the awkward breaking of the word, "Descendants." It is jarring, conflicts with the supreme principle of legibility.

Still, I am very glad to have this historically significant piece in my collection. I don't have a copy of the second-place design, but one day ... who knows?

Over the River and to Northampton? Did You Know Thanksgiving Poem Author Lived Here?

ICYMI: last month, I posted a short piece on Lydia Maria Child, best known as the author of "Over the River and Through the Wood." Less well known is the fact that she resided in our area as a member of a utopian and abolitionist community, a story preserved and told by the David Ruggles Center in Florence.

Read the rest.

Thanksgiving 2016: Link Dump and From the Vaults

I tend to post something about Thanksgiving every year, so, rather than writing up a long new piece, I'll just share some items in this week's news, along with links to older posts.



In the news:

• From the Library of Congress: Thanksgiving at the end of World War I, ranging from President Wilson's proclamation ("This year we have special and moving cause to be grateful and to rejoice. God has in His good pleasure given us peace.") to posters.

• From Tablet: Ed Simon, "Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims’ American Jewish Holiday: How the biblical narrative of Exodus helped shape the founders’ idea of a secular nation with liberty for all"

• From New England Historical Society: "New England’s First Thanksgiving – Maine Style:
New England’s first Thanksgiving celebrated by European colonists (the American Indians had harvest celebrations of their own long before) came in 1607 in Popham, Maine."

• From Business Insider: Jeremy Bender, "How Thanksgiving took the place of an awesome military celebration" [British evacuation of New York, 1783]

• From Smithsonian (2011): Lisa Bramen, "Thanksgiving in Literature: Holiday readings from Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Philip Roth and contemporary novels that use Thanksgiving as the backdrop for family dysfunction"

• From Scientific American: Dana Hunter, "The Real Story of Plymouth Rock. Learn about the erratic past of one of America's most famous rocks" [history, mythology, geology]

• From Pilgrim Hall Museum: More Thanksgiving Recipes from America's Past (1671 through World War II) 

• And finally, since half of the seasonal articles about Thanksgiving present manifest untruths and distortions of history, while the other half take as their task the correction of these errors (in the process committing more of their own), former Chief Curator of Plimoth Plantation Jeremy Bangs offers, via History News Network (from 2005):

"The Truth About Thanksgiving Is that the Debunkers Are Wrong."

* * *

From the vaults:


• 2008 The Inevitable Thanksgiving Piece : focusing on food and fable as well as historiography: how the holiday came to assume its familiar form. Among my minor favorites are the mystery of the cranberry (pregnant insects?! wtf?) and Pilgrim drinking habits (a shot and a brew).

• 2009 Thanksgiving Day (Thanksgiving Again): brief piece with focus on historiography--contrasting historical approaches of the focus on material culture and the larger narrative (including the long-term consequences), exemplified by James and Patricia Deetz on the one hand and Nathaniel Philbrick, on the other (with links to a variety of topics, from the date of the holiday to presidential turkey pardons and the relation between poultry and dinosaurs).

• 2010 (a) The Annual Thanksgiving History Buffet: a smorgasbord of topics, starting with foodways (eels and sweet potato) and moving on to the conservative canards about Pilgrims, socialism, and capitalism.

• 2010 (b) Thanksgiving Miscellany: e.g. never rocked to the Turkey Gobbler's Ball? Here's your chance.

• 2010 (c) (I must have been on a roll that year): 13 December 1621: The "Fortune" Sails from Plymouth to England (and why the Pilgrims were neither "socialists" nor "capitalists")

• 2012: 22 December 1620: Pilgrims Land at Plymouth Rock (and post-Thanksgiving postprandial link dump)
• 2014 Post-Thanksgiving Digestif (cheers and fears): Emily Dickinson, historic beverages, the turkey industry, Black Friday and late capitalism


 

October 20, 1880: Death of Lydia Maria Child

Most Americans of all ages are familiar with Lydia Maria Child's work even if they have never heard her name. Her 1844 poem, “Over the River and Through the Wood," is the  anthem of Thanksgiving, popular long before that holiday was even officially established.

Less well known is her long and active career as feminist, abolitionist, and advocate of Native American rights. Still less well known is the fact that she lived here in the Pioneer Valley from 1838 to 1841.

Here is a fragment of one of her letters from my collection.

Of more interest to me than the signature (apart from proof of authorship) is the fragment of the actual letter on the other side of the paper, which tantalizingly alludes to the prospects of women authors in the mid-nineteenth-century literary-journalistic marketplace.

One longs to know who or what is at issue here. Child was well acquainted with the press and competition. She had to earn a living by her pen, but already in the 1830s, her increasingly outspoken abolitionism alienated some of her readers. The National Women's History Museum observes, her radicalism "created an uproar among family friends, who bankrupted Child’s magazine by cutting off their children’s subscriptions to Juvenile Miscellany . . . sales of her work in other areas suffered from the controversy over slavery."

Still, she had a following, and by the time of the Civil War, when this document was gifted to an admirer, opposition to slavery was national policy rather than political eccentricity. The common but barbarous practice of clipping pieces from famous writers' manuscripts and distributing them as souvenirs--or holy relics, like hairs from Peter the Hermit's donkey--drives historians and archivists to distraction, but is as good a proof as any of the new-found status of the author in the nineteenth century.

The Women's History Museum notes, laconically, "She joined her husband during the late 1830s in an agrarian enterprise doomed to fail; like Louisa May Alcott, whose writing supported her father’s family while he experimented with utopian agronomy, Lydia Child soon needed income. In 1841, she moved to New York and edited the weekly National Anti-Slavery Standard . . . ."

This is the story that Steve Strimer of the David Ruggles Center addressed in today's talk at the Amherst History Museum on utopianism in the nineteenth-century Northampton area. Child and her husband David joined abolitionist friends here in an attempt to cultivate sugar beets.

She didn't much enjoy her surroundings:

I never was in a place that I liked less that Northampton, nor have I ever in my life spent so unhappy a year as I spent there. Nature has been lavish of beauty, but the human soul is stagnant there. My strong love of freedom could ill endure the bigotry and intolerance that prevails. (June 9, 1839)

As for the Connecticut Valley, I dislike it more and more, every week I live. If I buy a pound of butter, it is sure to fall short an ounce … Calvinism sits here enthroned, with high ears, blue nose, thin lips, and griping fist. I would I had lived in an age when the gaunt spectre had done his mission. (to Ellis Gray Loring, February 9, 1841)

In the meantime, the Calvinism is long gone, and Child might finally feel at home in the Pioneer Valley.

Post-Thanksgiving Digestif (cheers and fears)

Thanksgiving became a regular national holiday only in 1863 when President Lincoln called upon the nation "to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens." Some of his predecessors had, however, declared individual days of thanks at various times of the year. In the meantime, the autumn holiday was celebrated in New England (the Governor of Massachusetts proclaimed a Thanksgiving in 1816). By the 1840s, the holiday was gaining currency elsewhere in the country.

Indeed, we find it mentioned in some of the earliest letters of Emily Dickinson. As it happens, the weather preceding the holiday in 1847 was much the same as it was here this week (except that then it rained rather than snowed). Writing from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary to her friend Abiah Root in January 1848, she recalled:

We all went home on Wednesday before Thanksgiving & a stormy day it was. . . . The storm did not at all subside that night, but in the morning I was waked by the glorious sun himself, staring full in my face. We went to church in the morning & listened to an excellent sermon from our own minister, Mr Colton. At noon we returned and had a nice dinner, which, you well know cannot be dispensed with on Thanksgiving day.

The combined historical origins of the festival and its institutionalization by Abraham Lincoln long made Thanksgiving a "Yankee holiday," an image that did not dissipate for several decades after the Civil War.

* * *

Cheers!


I subtitled this post "cheers and fears" because, this year, I seemed to detect more stress on the alcoholic beverages that best accompany the Thanksgiving repast--"a nice dinner," as Emily put it--as well as a few stories (maybe everyone is desperate for a new angle) that play up the dark side of the holiday--in jest, to be sure. Maybe it's all in my head, but that's as good an excuse as any.

Although the article explaining how best to pair wine with each Thanksgiving food is a perennial feature of the periodical press (and now online food and beverage sites), it seems that the cocktail is receiving new attention. We have pieces desperately trying to come up with clever new drinks (1, 2). (Turkey bouillon? Puréed potatoes? Dude! Seriously?) And we have pieces that poke fun at those pieces and call for simplicity and common sense (1, 2). Although I always appreciate any good recipe, I have to admit that I (unsurprisingly) incline toward the historical.

We know of course that the Pilgrims and their descendants drank a lot (even or especially at funerals), but theirs were the typical drinks of England and the evolving colonies: beer, wine, and spirits such as rum, or beverages including these as ingredients. (More on that in a coming post.)

For those seeking something more modern but still historical, there is a 1960s drink called the Thanksgiving Special, but it is in essence the same as the "Darb," which dates back to circa 1930 and is thus suitably historical. (1, 2, 3).

Moving a bit further back in time, I'd recommend the "Sangaree" (1, 2), which as Ted Haigh explains, is vaguely related to but not at all the same as "sangria." Traceable to the eighteenth century, when it evidently was a popular item in Caribbean whorehouses, it was made of some blend of alcohol (at first, red wine), water, sugar, and spices; it did not consistently include citrus.  A good modern version uses red wine and cognac.

And next time I give a big party, I'm certainly going to consider mixing up a bowl of USS Richmond Punch, named after a Union Civil War ship (1, 2). Ingredients for this one include rum, cognac, port, Grand Marnier, and champagne. Don't drink and sail (and don't even think about using one of those nine-inch smoothbores) if you've had one of these.

Cheers!


As for fears:

At Slate, legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick uses the famed White House holiday ritual to poke fun at the fuss over the recent White House executive action: Obama’s Thanksgiving Amnesty: Will the president’s turkey pardon start a wave of unauthorized poultry immigration?

With minds that must have been moving along in the same groove, the folks over at Destination America TV came up with a special on "When Turkeys Attack":

There's nowhere to run and nowhere to hide when predator becomes prey. Our nation's turkey population has grown from 300,000 to a staggering 7 million in only 70 years. It's become an epidemic that will ruffle anyone's feathers! Fearless, intelligent and territorial, turkeys are taking over, terrorizing unsuspecting, innocent townspeople all over the country. In this one-hour Thanksgiving special, we'll see personal video of turkey attacks and hear from the surviving victims.

Damned immigrants. It's actually pretty funny.

By contrast, here's what turkeys fear:

(This one is from The American Hysterical Society. Hat tip to my friends at the American Association for State and Local History [AASLH] discussion group.)

* * *

Here's what I fear: The ever greater encroachment of coercive commercialism upon our holidays.

It's not about some naive and idealistic lament for lost purity. Any historian should know better than that. Commerce and culture have long been intertwined. (Don't forget that Johannes Gutenberg began his entrepreneurial career hoping to make a killing by selling "holy mirrors" to pilgrims.) To portray the problem as one of corporate "greed," as is typically the case, is also misguided: that is to psychologize the problem and cast it in moralizing rather than structural terms.

There are two problems: the cultural and the ethical.

When I was a senior in college applying for various scholarships, I was asked in one interview in a swanky Chicago highrise, "What do you think of 'the attenuation of periodicity'?" Since I had to devote most of my relatively unsophisticated Midwestern brainpower to figuring out just what the hell the question even meant, I suppose my answer was not very good. (Spoiler: I did not get the scholarship.) Nowadays I could probably give a better answer. I teach my students that premodern times in Europe were characterized by dramatic swings of activity and temperament: we speak of the wild fluctuations of "feast and fast." Modern rhythms, by contrast, are much more flattened: we have few holidays and work most of the time (even the weekend is a relatively recent development). The advent of 24/7 service and shopping, though a benefit in many ways, has only accentuated this tendency.

As anyone of a certain age can tell you: it used to be that one did not see Christmas decorations and other signs of the holiday or its marketing until Advent, or at least, after Thanksgiving. Nowadays, it seems, they appear ever earlier. Beginning on Halloween, the Hallmark Channel (not that it is a measure of anything but itself) replaces its regular programs with Christmas programs.That's nearly two months of this tedious treacle.

Again, it's not only about commerce, as such, but about losing our sense of time. When the entire period from October through New Year's becomes one long and increasingly undifferentiated marketing season, we lose our sense of the distinctiveness of the holidays that define it, and perhaps of the seasons themselves. The purpose of holidays is, after all, to mark differences in time.

As for the ethical: as one who grew up in a region in which some combination of blue laws and custom kept almost all stores closed on Sundays, I am glad that we have moved beyond that particularistic religious restriction on citizens' activity in a secular republic (though--fun facts to know and tell--you still can't buy alcohol in Minnesota or a car in Wisconsin on a Sunday). Personally, I therefore also have little sympathy for European handwringing that the end of anachronistic store-closing laws endangers mom-and-pop stores (Germans call them Tante-Erna-Läden). Ironic, of course, to see supposed leftists defending capitalists. (1) There are more consumers than small capitalists, and when both partners in a marriage have to work, being able to shop in the evening or on Saturday afternoon is a de facto necessity. (2) The logic of the economic system, as the German socialists pointed out more than a century ago, is that the small owners will go under anyway. They will survive only to the extent that they can offer a distinctive benefit or value.

Conservatives love to trumpet that supposedly salvific Pilgrim switch from socialism to capitalism: As if the insane desire to buy more stuff on "Black Friday" (even the Brits--who don't celebrate Thanksgiving--have succumbed to the mania: with predictable results) were not bad enough, an increasing number of enterprises (not only large chains) are now opening on Thanksgiving day itself: which is to say, requiring the workers to show up rather than celebrate the holiday with friends and family. Staples, for example, decided to open its stores at 6:00 p.m.--as Adam Vaccaro of the Boston Globe quipped, "(because nothing says “Merry Christmas” like office supplies!)." In Massachusetts, our surviving blue laws keep the stores themselves closed, but the staff of the corporate headquarters still had to report for work.

Somehow, I do not think that this is what our "Pilgrim Forefathers" had in mind.

It's especially ironic, given that historical Thanksgivings were occasions whose very nature precluded the carrying on of ordinary activity. That's what I meant about time. The first such national proclamation, by the Continental Congress, in 1777, included the injunction to refrain not only from frivolous entertainments, but also from "servile labor."

So, no, the ethical issue is not mere "greed": it's not even clear that opening on Thanksgiving is profitable, as such, but the logic of competition pushes stores to stay open, and that in turn inexorably attracts more shoppers. In the process, workers are forced to give up one of the few universally observed national holidays; many federal holidays are marked only by public institutions, banks, and the like, rather than retailers. (Airports and related travel facilities may be a different matter, though it's a myth that Thanksgiving is the busiest travel day of the year.) As one analyst put it, retailers have created a "Catch-22" for themselves: "the more they do this Thanksgiving shopping thing, the more people will think it's normal, and then the retailers will have to open even if it's not profitable." And the workers will work and we will shop, and once again, we will have lost something of that precious feel of time--and rest.


Thanksgiving vs. "Franksgiving"

Of course, the seeds were planted long ago. In 1939, November had five Thursdays, and that seemed to mean a reduced Christmas shopping season, which, as NPR tells us, "worried large retailers who lobbied FDR to move up Thanskgiving. He did." Then, as now, presidential executive action was controversial: Republican Alf Landon denounced the President as a "Hitler." Many others simply mocked and sulked. And so, states where the progressives were in control celebrated the holiday on November 23, while conservative states rejected what came to be called "Franksgiving" and stuck with November 30. (a video here; can't embed it, for some reason).

Increasing numbers of people are now actively resisting the consumer binge of Black Friday. And then there's "Cyber Monday." Slate tells us it's "the dumbest fake holiday of the year," while Mashable, tongue-in-cheek, lauds its superiority to Black Friday. Still, we all need to buy things sometime, and the convenience and benefits of the online marketplace are not to be underestimated. But how do you know whether you really need something--or someone else really needs that gift?  Here's a handy flowchart, courtesy of Callie Enlow at Good magazine:

full image and story

Choose wisely.


[updates: correct edit posted; link added]

Thanksgiving History: From the Vaults

Nothing new this year.

For that matter, I suppose, I never have anything truly new to say about Thanksgiving: just my occasional musings based on old histories or new coverage in the media.

But that's the point, I suppose: Thanksgiving is the quintessential and universal American holiday. To be sure, July 4th is the official national holiday, but although it is far older, its rituals and practices are more variable: we celebrate in our mulitfarious ways, from barbecues to nothing in particular. By contrast, "The Thanksgiving dinner" (whatever its varied constituents) is the national norm and in that sense unique as a means of celebration transcending cultures, ethnicities, and faiths (taking into account of course, some modern resistance to the traditional political-historical narrative: 1, 2 ).

Because I've already posted a good many times on this favorite American holiday, I thought I would content myself with offering an overview of those earlier posts rather than introducing a new theme this year.

In addition, I'll upload the collected images to the tumblr for better viewing. [Update: okay, didn't happen. That's life, too.]

Amuse yourselves as best you can. Wishing all a pleasant holiday feast and extended weekend.



• 2008 The Inevitable Thanksgiving Piece : focusing on food and fable as well as historiography: how the holiday came to assume its familiar form. Among my minor favorites are the mystery of the cranberry (pregnant insects?! wtf?) and Pilgrim drinking habits (a shot and a brew).

• 2009 Thanksgiving Day (Thanksgiving Again): brief piece with focus on historiography--contrasting historical approaches of the focus on material culture and the larger narrative (including the long-term consequences), exemplified by James and Patricia Deetz on the one hand and Nathaniel Philbrick, on the other (with links to a variety of topics, from the date of the holiday to presidential turkey pardons and the relation between poultry and dinosaurs).

• 2010 (a) The Annual Thanksgiving History Buffet: a smorgasbord of topics, starting with foodways (eels and sweet potato) and moving on to the conservative canards about Pilgrims, socialism, and capitalism.

• 2010 (b) Thanksgiving Miscellany: e.g. never rocked to the Turkey Gobbler's Ball? Here's your chance.

• 2010 (c) (I must have been on a roll that year): 13 December 1621: The "Fortune" Sails from Plymouth to England (and why the Pilgrims were neither "socialists" nor "capitalists")

Conservatives in recent years have for some reason decided to make much of a supposed contrast between the early failures of the Pilgrims under what is termed a "socialist" arrangement vs. their great successes once they abandoned this Obama-avant-la-lettre policy and threw themselves into the sluttish welcoming arms of free-market capitalism.

This is not my field, but one doesn't need to be a specialist--only to understand historical perspective and use of evidence--in order to see that this is bunk. As any historian worth his or her salt (a valuable commodity in Colonial days) can tell you, the whole notion of a struggle between "socialism" and "capitalism" in seventeenth-century America is unhistorical nonsense. And what is more, the Pilgrims and their descendants--before and after the supposed great transformation--intruded in the lives of citizens in a way that would be anathema to modern socialists and libertarians alike. Myth busted. QED.

• 2012 From the Vaults: Thanksgiving Retrospective (socialists, eels, eating pregnant insects, a shot and a brew, more): a less (an abbreviated version of what you have here).

Enjoy.

22 December 1620: Pilgrims Land at Plymouth Rock (and post-Thanksgiving postprandial link dump)

Well, that's the traditional date, anyway: not necessarily the correct one, and to complicate matters, they were in any case of course still using the Julian ("Old Style") rather than the Gregorian calendar, adopted in Catholic states in 1582 but introduced in Britain and its colonies only in 1752 (don't ask).


A traditional image of the arrival of the Pilgrims.

"The First Landing of the Pilgrims, 1620"

 (enlarge)

Charles Lucy (1814-73), "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in America, a.d., 1620" (1848): 

here rendered in an engraving by T. Phillibrown (New York: Martin, Johnson & Co., 1856)

Lucy's painting has so many historical inaccuracies that it's hard to know where to begin—so I won't. From the costumes, to the numbers and types of persons depicted, and the arrival on Plymouth Rock, it's all just so wrong.

Only sixteen persons—six crew, 10 passengers—disembarked that day, and all were male. Historians thus reject the tradition according to which thirteen-year-old Mary Chilton was the first to do so. And the dog in the picture? Close, but no cigar. Records indicate that two representatives of the noble species—a mastiff and a spaniel—indeed made the trip aboard the "Mayflower" but were involved in the explorations of the coast only after this now-famous landing.  It is by moreover by no means certain that the "Pilgrims" (who did not call themselves such; they used the term only in the generic sense of the word, for the uppercase appellation did not arise until the 1790s) landed at the site now designated as "Plymouth Rock." No contemporaneous document mentions the (or even a) rock; that derives from third-hand testimony over a century later. And indeed, no one paid much attention to the "Rock" until the eve of the Revolution, when it began a peripatetic career (more like the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert than a pilgrimage): moved around the town, divided into pieces, and eventually returned, at least in part, to the shore, and graced (?) with a late 19th-century classical architectural umbrella).

About the only thing Lucy got close to right (besides the fact of a landing on the Massachusetts shore) was the color of the clothing. As the painting shows far more clearly than the engraving, he did not depict the Pilgrims clad only in black. Probate inventories show that the Pilgrims had generous and varied wardrobes and had no objection to colored or even decorated clothing. They often favored what were called "sad" colors—meaning deep hues, and not, as a modern reader might erroneously conclude, black and gray. The men here wear shades of brown and russet, and the women, in particular, are depicted as wearing various shades of red and green.

Okay, I guess I just did begin, but I'll stop. Instead, a retrospective smorgasbord of Thanksgiving stories from around the Web.

Thanksgiving link dump

• The usual and obligatory seasonal debunkery (not bad as a popularization) from Buzzfeed

• CNN Thanksgiving by the numbers: lots of them having to do with turkeys: how long it takes to raise, defrost and cook them, how much of one makes a good serving . . . more

• Literature:

-Langston Hughes (not one of his greats)

-New Yorker

• Bad Thanksgiving advice columns

• Bad time having Bob Dylan over the Thanksgiving


• Food:

-Stars' recipes (what did Marilyn Monroe make?)

-William Shatner in Deep-Fryer PSA warning (truly bizarre)


-Two (count 'em!) pieces on the turkey genome:
  -Genome of your turkey
  -Pass the Turkey Genome: Researchers are using genomics to breed a better Thanksgiving bird

-Why we don't eat turkey eggs

-Where your turkey comes from (map)

-Western Massachusetts Turkey Farms

-Don't Forget The Music: A Well-Seasoned Thanksgiving Soundtrack, from NPR

-White House menu

-Dining alone



• A miscellany from the Library of Congress:

-Washington's Proclamation of October 3, 1789


-Other Thankgiving  proclamations

 -Vintage photos from LOC (via Mental Floss)

-Thanksgiving and football


• And of course, one could not conclude without Art Buchwald's famous attempt to explain Thanksgiving to our French friends (yes, the "Jour de Merci Donnant")

Art Buchwald, Why We Eat Turkey

* * *

This year's previous Thanksgiving stories:

• From the Vaults: Thanksgiving Retrospective (socialists, eels, eating pregnant insects, a shot and a brew, more)

• Those Darned Illegal Immigrants (the Pilgrims)
 
• Pardon Me! Another Thanksgiving Piece

From the Vaults: Thanksgiving Retrospective (socialists, eels, eating pregnant insects, a shot and a brew, more)

Most years, I've offered some little posts about Thanksgiving and history. This year, rather than scribbling together a new one, I'll just offer a roundup of past musings and amusements.

• from 2010: "13 December 1621: The 'Fortune' Sails from Plymouth to England (and why the Pilgrims were neither 'socialists' nor 'capitalists')"

• from 2010: "Thanksgiving Miscellany": mini link dump of music, food, activities

•  from 2010: "The Annual Thanksgiving History Buffet": What's for dinner: eels and sweet potatoes. And were the Pilgrims dangerous socialists? Come on!

• from 2009: "Thanksgiving Day": brief note on teaching students about Thanksgiving, and how to contextualize the original event in the larger flow of Colonial history. Plus: links! on holiday traditions, myth and fact.

• from 2008: "The Inevitable Thanksgiving Piece": food, facts, myths. "The only demonstrably present meats . . .were 'ducks, geese, and venison.'" What Europeans called cranberries were pregnant insects. A shot and a brew: Pilgrims and Native Americans drank a lot and fired guns (not recommended today).


[this one somehow got put back in the drafts folder]

13 December 1621: The "Fortune" Sails from Plymouth to England (and why the Pilgrims were neither "socialists" nor "capitalists")

As MassMoments tells the story:

On this day in 1621, the ship Fortune set sail from Plymouth Colony. The arrival of the vessel two weeks earlier — sent by the English investors who had funded the Mayflower colonists— should have been a cause for celebration. But for the Pilgrims, Fortune was poorly named. The ship brought 35 new settlers, but...

It's an important story in its own right, because it tells us what happened after that fabled "first Thanksgiving," and it indicates how difficult the lives of the settlers remained. But it's especially interesting this year because it helps to debunk the trending right-wing myth about the Pilgrims' economic philosophy.

As I noted in the Thanksgiving post: to believe the Tea Party movement and a host of like-minded critics, the Pilgrims began as idealistic (or was it: dogmatic?) "socialists," who agreed to share burdens and benefits equally, starved, saw the error of their ways, and then finally adopted a "capitalist" model based on private property and incentives. Voilà: problem solved, nation prospers, there's still a Massachusetts, in which I can live today. Whew.

There was a lot going on in that corner of Massachusetts in the early seventeenth century, but the character of the various groups and individuals in the Colony and the contractual terms that governed their relations to one another, the sponsoring body, and the homeland go a long way toward explaining the situation in simple historical terms.

As MassMoments reminds us, the Pilgrims first sought refuge in the Netherlands, and then, when dissatisfied with conditions there, decided to venture across the ocean, a move they had never originally contemplated:

But funding an overseas voyage and establishing a colony would be expensive. There were, however, a number of wealthy gentlemen, merchants, and craftsmen in London who believed that there was money to be made from exploiting America's natural resources. What they needed was a base for gathering and shipping furs, timber, fish, and other trade goods. A group of about 70 of these speculators, whom the Separatists called Adventurers, put up the money to transport and provision the colonists; in return, the colonists, or Planters, agreed to live communally, to work for the company, and to ship goods back to England for a period of seven years to repay their debt.

After several aborted attempts, the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620. It was bound for the area around Manhattan in the northernmost part what was then Virginia. No one knows whether the ship was blown off course or purposely headed to a location out of the jurisdiction of the Anglican Church, which was established in Virginia. In any case, the Mayflower anchored in Provincetown harbor on November11th. Some of the non-Separatists on board objected that since they had not gone to Virginia, as planned, they were not bound by their work contracts and needed to take orders from no one. After debating the issue, the group agreed "that we should combine together in one body, and to submit to such government and governours, as we should by common consent make and choose." All free adult male passengers signed the historic Mayflower Compact, the first document in the Americas to embrace the democratic principle of majority rule.

Only thanks to the help of Native Americans did they survive in the new land, but the margin was narrow, and they still expected help from home:

But when Fortune sailed into Plymouth harbor on November 10th, it brought only more mouths to feed. While the Planters were grateful for the additional workers, they were dismayed to discover that the men had been sent without provisions. The ship did not even carry food to sustain the crew on the return trip. The Adventurers also sent a letter castigating the Planters for the fact that the Mayflower had arrived in England with an empty hold and demanding that the Fortune return immediately filled with valuable goods.

The colonists complied. For the next six years, they sent sizable shipments, especially of furs, back to England. But the goods yielded far less profit than the Adventurers had anticipated, and as the seven-year mark approached, the colonists were still in debt. Finally, 27 of them pooled their personal resources and paid off the debt. Once free of the requirement to live communally and hold all property in common, the original settlers divided the land into private grants. The era of the "Old Comers" was over. 

So much for the morality tale or conversion narrative propagated by the right-wing ideologues.  News flash: there was no socialism in seventeenth-century New England to abandon.  To begin with, as James and Patricia Deetz point out, the Pilgrims "bridled at this arrangement [for holding property in common], and it had not been resolved in a satisfactory fashion at the time of their departure" (35). In any case, the Pilgrims had yoked their fate to a classical mercantilist undertaking rather than a proto-Bolshevist one.  Scholars still debate the precise place of mercantilism in the history of economic development, but although it was a certainly a commercial undertaking that generated merchant capital, it was not based on a "capitalist mode of production" in the strict sense. Indeed, as Karl Polanyi says, to the extent that mercantilism "thought of markets in a way exactly contrary to market economy" and was more concerned with regulation than commercialization, "there was no difference between mercantilists and feudalists."  So, not only was the original arrangement with the Virginia Company not "socialist":  it would be fairer to say that we are looking back to the sixteenth century then ahead to the nineteenth.  For that matter, even after the dissolution of the agreement, life in the colony was no laissez-faire paradise.

As Eugene Aubrey Stanton observes,

It would seem as it nothing was beyond the concern of the courts—elections, weights and measures, land grants, permits for ordinaries, excuses from military service, public and private purchases and other transactions, the levying of taxes and troops, fines for absence from church meetings, the recording of apprentice and servant indentures, divorce, regulation of prices and wages, the laying out of streets, the reaction against Quakers, and of course criminal trials.

Constant state meddling in all public and private affairs? Wage and price controls? Hardly the Tea Party's cup of tea, one would think.  Remember, these are the people who just got the rather timid health care package that they label "ObamaCare" provisionally declared unconstitutional. (Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett warned that, as a result of the mandate to purchase health insurance, "Americans will be demoted from citizens to subjects."  more: 1, 2 ).

On both sides of the caesura of 1627, then, the Pilgrims lived lives far removed from anything resembling modern laissez-faire capitalism, which lay over the horizon, and did not really exist even in England itself.  Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of the their evolving social and economic arrangements, to pretend that any of this had anything to do with "capitalism" versus "socialism" is either ignorant or disingenuous.  Face it, that argument is a turkey.


Resource

The Plymouth Colony Archive Project

Thanksgiving Miscellany

A little post-prandial link dump, for inclusion of Thanksgiving-related stories that I did not manage to fit into my longer piece.

For your dining and relaxing entertainment, the Library of Congress offered two old songs, George W. Morgan's "National Thanksgiving Hymn," dedicated to President Rutherford B. Hayes, and James Blyler's "The Turkey Gobbler's Ball," from the Ziegeld Follies of 1911 (not a Thanksgiving piece, but obviously, thematically appropriate).  As a visual treat, LC provides a poster for the 1895 Thanksgiving issue of The Chapbook.

And because, as we have seen, gratitude toward soldiers, past and present, is emerging as a strong theme of Thanksgiving, the LC also offers a sample of the testimony collected in conjunction with the Veterans History Project (VHP), a continuation of the many efforts it promoted in association with Veterans' Day.   Video here.

Meanwhile, the folks over at NPR's new classical music blog, "Deceptive Cadence," noting (in the e-mail teaser) that "Opera is often about romance and revenge, but even lovers and scoundrels have to eat," offers up a "A Bel Canto Banquet: The Thanksgiving Culinary Classical Quiz." Visitors to the site listen to an audio clip and then drag its emblem onto the visual representation of the appropriate food group.

You can enjoy all of these pursuits from your own home, or your computer, wherever you may be.  But if you're in our area, namely the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, you may wish to visit Historic Deerfield on Saturday the 27th for the "Season of Thanks" program. All day, the re-enactors of the "Society of the 17th Century" will demonstrate English crafts and folkways from the Pilgrim era in the historic Hall Tavern (included in price of general admission).