Abe Lincoln, cross-dressing and the American way: The real history of Thanksgiving

[DonViejo]

What we think of as Thanksgiving really started in the 19th century, with some rituals that might surprise you

JARRET RUMINSKI

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But how did Thanksgiving get so darn popular? Well, Thanksgiving’s popularity as an American national holiday has deep roots in the 19th century and the tradition of the “domestic occasion” that became a fixture in American middle-class culture during that period. In her fantastic article “The Making of the Domestic Occasion: The History of Thanksgiving in the United States,” historian Elizabeth Pleck defines the “domestic occasion” as “a family gathering held in the home which paid homage to the ideal of the ‘affectionate family.’” Usually, the ideal “affectionate family” was a nuclear one, but domestic occasions could also be a “gathering of extended kin” that included neighbors and even strangers. Pleck calls the domestic occasion a “culturally dominant form,” which is academic speak for a tradition that began with the middle class but became widespread throughout society by the 20th century.

Many are familiar with the historical first Thanksgiving, held in 1621 by the New England Pilgrims and their Wampanoag Indian neighbors. That story, for better or worse, is a part of American history that has been mythologized and embellished over the centuries. But it’s the rise of the domestic occasion in the 19th century, rather than the so-called First Thanksgiving, that best explains the holiday’s continued reverence in American life. While Thanksgiving had long been a regional tradition in New England, the earliest attempts to make it a national holiday stemmed from the Civil War era. Around 1846, Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s magazine, began sending out mass letters to government officials that encouraged a “Great American Festival” of Thanksgiving. Hale hoped that such a unifying holiday would help avert the Civil War. She was disappointed in that respect, but when the war came, Hale’s lobbying for the holiday helped convince President Abraham Lincoln to declare a national day of Thanksgiving in November of 1863.

Thanksgiving helped ease the types of social and economic dislocations that defined American society in the mid-19th century by establishing an occasion for formal “family homecoming.” The domestic occasion of Thanksgiving helped create, however fleetingly, a nostalgic re-creation of a supposedly simpler past rooted in the countryside and the warmth of kith and kin. This ritual proved especially attractive to Americans living in an era when, as Pleck notes, “the growth of commerce, industry, and urban life created a radical break between past and present, a gap that could be bridged by threshold reunions at the family manse.” Thanksgiving provided a day of refuge for Americans caught up in the chaos of the dynamic, urbanizing, mid-19th century market economy and the bloodshed of the Civil War.

By celebrating Thanksgiving via the simple display of old-time domestic ideals like cooking and family togetherness, Americans also celebrated the “blessings of American nationhood.” Abraham Lincoln, in this respect, was the patron saint of Thanksgiving. Pleck writes that Lincoln viewed Thanksgiving as “the time for a grateful nation to praise God for blessings bestowed, for the many years of ‘peace and prosperity,’ for the growth in national wealth, power, and population, ‘as no other nation has ever grown.’” Americans adopted Lincoln’s view, turning Thanksgiving into a general celebration of national prosperity. This aspect of the holiday only grew in importance and continues into the 21st century, when ever more elaborately larded family dinner tables serve as gluttony-inviting altars to America’s national prosperity and abundance. Indeed, modern Americans, like true world conquerors, celebrate their abundance by eating in abundance.

The poorer classes, who lacked the upper middle class’s access to abundant domestic gaiety, had their own decidedly rowdy Thanksgiving traditions that dated back to the 18th century. As Pleck describes, in the 1780s, groups of lower-class, cross-dressing men known as the Fantastics began masquerading in the streets of New York and Pennsylvania and roaming from door to door insulting, threatening and demanding treats from their more well-off neighbors. More annoying than dangerous, the Fantastics’ shenanigans eventually inspired the middle classes to create their own version of more-contained Thanksgiving Day rowdiness: the football game. In 1876, the student-run Intercollegiate Football Association held its first championship game on Thanksgiving Day, beginning a tradition of football on the holiday that rapidly spread to high schools, college campuses and, eventually, to pro football leagues. Middle-class Americans made the Fantastics’ Thanksgiving traditions of rowdiness and misrule safe for domestic, bourgeois consumption by containing it within the confines of pigskin competition.

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full article:
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/28/abe_lincoln_cross_dressing_and_the_american_way_the_real_history_of_thanksgiving/

[iemitsu]

1. Interesting, thanks for posting.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

2. I love historical reading like this!!

Thank you soooo much!