Thanksgiving. Melanie Kirkpatrick
the influx of immigrants. In all these events, religious faith played a part. The first act of the first Continental Congress was to declare a national day of giving thanks to God. The first presidential proclamation was George Washington’s call for a day of thanksgiving. In 1863, when the nation was torn asunder by war, Lincoln established the Thanksgiving holiday as a permanent fixture on the American calendar. Congress codified Thanksgiving Day into law in 1941, just days after the United States’ entry into World War II.
In 1937, the historian Samuel Eliot Morison famously wrote that the Pilgrims are the “spiritual ancestors of all Americans whatever their stock, race or creed.”1 Today we live in more fractious times, often tending to focus more on what divides us than on what unites us. In my visit to Newcomers High School in Queens, I set out to discover whether Morison’s sentiment holds true today in the minds of some of America’s newest and youngest arrivals. Their answer was a resounding yes. So, too, say most Americans—at least on Thanksgiving Day.
It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord.
—Psalm 92
I am standing in the grand exhibition hall on the upper level of the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts, admiring a painting titled The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth. The museum’s amiable director, Patrick Browne, is about to give me a reality check.1
The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth is an iconic work of American art. It has appeared countless times in books, calendars, and greeting cards since it was created by Jennie Brownscombe in 1914. Most Americans would recognize it. Every American would know at a glance that its subject is Thanksgiving.
This is the First Thanksgiving as we picture it in our mind’s eye. Pilgrims and Indians are gathered around a long dining table that is set outdoors on a beautiful autumn day. The sun is sparkling off flame-colored maple trees in the background; the placid waters of Plymouth Bay are visible in the distance. As I am silently taking in the painting, Patrick cuts into my thoughts.
The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth is full of historical inaccuracies, he tells me. That is not what it looked like. The Pilgrims wore bright colors—reds, blues, greens, violets—not the sober hues pictured here. The Indians of New England never donned feathered headdresses, as in this painting, which seems to have been inspired by the Plains Indians of the American West. If there had been a table, the Pilgrim women would not have been seated with the men; they would have been busy preparing the food. The First Thanksgiving may not even have taken place in the fall; it could have been late summer, when the harvest would have been gathered. In short, there is not a whole lot that the artist seems to have gotten right about the event other than the fact that it was held outdoors. The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth is an interpretation, Patrick emphasizes, and we can enjoy it as such; but it is not historically accurate.
On that score—interpretation—it seems to me that Brownscombe’s rendering of the First Thanksgiving deserves high marks. The focal point of the painting is an elderly Pilgrim who is saying grace. He is standing behind his seat at the table, head lifted to heaven, eyes closed, hands raised and clasped together in prayer. The artist may have fallen short on the historical details, but she captured the most important aspect of the First Thanksgiving and of every Thanksgiving that has followed: giving thanks.
Downstairs in another gallery are various artifacts that belonged to the Pilgrims. Many of them were brought over on the Mayflower and may have been used at that three-day harvest feast of 1621. These ordinary household items hold at least as much power as Brownscombe’s painting. View them, and the Pilgrims’ story comes to life.
We start with Governor William Bradford’s Bible. It is the 1560 Geneva translation, which the Pilgrims favored as more accurate than the 1611 King James Version used by the Church of England. Most Pilgrim households had a Geneva Bible, and the one on display was printed in London in 1592. One of the Geneva Bible’s most important innovations was to divide the text into verses as well as chapters. Another was to use roman rather than gothic type. How much easier these simple changes must have made it for ordinary readers to follow and understand the words of the Bible.
Bradford’s Bible embodies the entire history of the Pilgrims. This is the volume that accompanied them through their voyages and whose words sustained them through ordeal after ordeal. “You look at it and you think of the fact that when the Pilgrim congregation was gathering together in England, William Bradford was reading this Bible,” Patrick tells me. “When they went to Holland, he was reading this Bible. When they came over on the Mayflower, he was reading this Bible. This is the Bible that was in that primitive little house he built a few blocks over from here. And now it’s right in front of us.”
We move on to examine more Pilgrim belongings: Myles Standish’s sword; Peter Brown’s beer tankard; Constance Hopkins’s beaver hat; and a pair of armless spectacles made of glass, horn, leather, and wood that belonged to an unknown Pilgrim, presumably of middle age, whose eyesight was failing. There is a faded piece of needlework made by Standish’s daughter that is the earliest known American-made sampler. It is long and narrow and embroidered with a pious verse that begins:
Loara Standish is my name
Lord guide my heart that I may do thy will.
We take a look at Myles Standish’s iron cooking pot. It boasts two handles, convenient for lifting it on and off the hearth. In another display case is a large wooden bowl fashioned from burl maple. The bowl was used by the Wampanoag for preparing and serving food. It is one of the few Native American artifacts in the museum’s collection.
We also see the cradle of the first European child to be born in New England. The cradle rocked Peregrine White, son of Susanna and William White. Susanna was pregnant when she and William and their five-year-old son Resolved boarded the Mayflower, and she knew she would need a safe place to lay a newborn infant.
Peregrine was born aboard the Mayflower as it lay at anchor off the tip of Cape Cod. It was late November 1620, a few weeks before a scouting team decided on Plymouth as the location for the Pilgrims’ permanent settlement. Susanna and William chose a name for their son consistent with the circumstances of his birth. The name derives from the Latin word peregrinus, which means wanderer or foreigner, and is the source of the English word pilgrim. Like his fellow Pilgrims, little Peregrine was a stranger in a strange land. By the time of the First Thanksgiving in the late summer or early autumn of 1621, he would have been old enough to crawl.
Susanna White was one of eighteen Pilgrim wives who accompanied their husbands on the Mayflower. Several men left wives behind, planning to send for their families after they were established in America. Only four of the eighteen Mayflower wives survived to the time of the First Thanksgiving. Susanna lived, but her husband, William, died three months after Peregrine’s birth, during the wretched first winter in Plymouth.
All together, only half of the men, women, and children who had sailed on the Mayflower were still alive a year after landing in the New World. Many fell victim to an illness that scholars theorize was a virulent form of influenza. The Pilgrims called it “the great sickness.” Whatever it was, the weak, poorly nourished settlers started falling ill about two weeks after arriving in Plymouth. Most of the sick were crowded into the small common house that the settlers had managed to construct quickly. But not everyone could fit into it, so others were kept aboard the Mayflower, anchored in Plymouth Harbor. Both the ship and the common house were overcrowded, and the illness spread rapidly. The few people who stayed well had to prepare the food, get the water, and care for the sick.
As I examine the artifacts Patrick shows me, I wonder what role