A little over three decades ago, I was celebrating Thanksgiving with my extended family and a close friend at my older brother’s house in Boise, Idaho. There were several conversations going on simultaneously as we dove into our feast. My maternal grandmother—slowly going blind and deaf—was patient through the conversation. As it turns out, however innocently, we were ignoring her—a fact she made known when, reaching her breaking point, she loudly yelled: “Pass the pepper!” We all immediately ended our own conversations, put down our knives and forks, found the pepper for grandma, and then all burst out laughing.
Grandma laughed too.
The memory has stayed with me ever since. I loved my grandmother dearly. Not only was she a devout Roman Catholic (who taught me much about the faith), she was also wonderfully stoic and wise. (She was also the best cook I’ve ever met.) But her uncharacteristic outburst at Thanksgiving revealed a side to her that I sometimes forgot: her incredible audacity. It was a quiet and sagacious audacity, but an audacity, nonetheless.
Born in 1911, she was the oldest daughter in a family of seventeen children, many of whom she helped raise on a western Kansas farm. Though a third-generation Russian German, she didn’t speak English until she was in her thirties, and she referred to the local grocery store (owned by a black woman) as “English.” She survived the Dust Bowl as well as the Great Depression, picking beets with the migrant workers in eastern Colorado. It was a rough but bountiful life, and she died while saying the Lord’s Prayer in July 2003. Her whole life was built on audacity.
But her spirit is nothing new to America—audacity has been a part of the American people before they even came to her shores. When the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock in November 1620, that audacity was on full display. Frustrated to the breaking point with the confused, chaotic, and sometimes violent Protestant life in England and Holland, they took it upon themselves to create their own community in the wilderness across the sea. Miles upon miles off course, they landed in the “northern parts of Virginia.” Only there was no Virginia yet. Undeterred by the stormy Atlantic, the audacious men of the Mayflower drew up an audacious covenant, the Plymouth Combination, also known as the “Mayflower Compact.”
This document is the foundational document of American history. Some folks speak of a 1619 Project, but I would prefer a 1620 Project. Invoking God and King James I, the Mayflower Pilgrims wrote that they would
solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.
This document—like the Declaration of Independence—demands frequent re-reading, if only to remind us that men and women can be free and can order their own lives without the interference of their “betters.” To be audacious is to be bold in the face of authority, but this particularly Christian bravery sought to harmonize obedience to the one true source of authority with self-governance. And what makes this truly special is that these were ordinary men.
And, of course, the following year—a harrowing one for the few survivors—the Pilgrims famously met with their Native American allies to give thanks. Of the 102 passengers, half died before that meal. What could be more wonderful or audacious than thanking our God for all he has given us, even in the midst of our sorrows?
To be sure, the history of Thanksgiving is anything but simple, and there are a variety of claims to the first Thanksgiving—some in Florida, some in Canada, some in New Mexico. In that time, turning to God in thanks was the norm rather than the exception. Since those first Thanksgivings, numerous American presidents and military leaders have declared days of thanks and praise, and days of fasting and sorrow.
Though George Washington declared a day of thanksgiving in 1789, it did not become an annual American holiday until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. An executive order in 1863 nationalized that New England Pilgrim dinner of 1621.
Such a focus on that particular Thanksgiving makes sense historically and politically. Only nine years old in 1863, the Republican party was still in its infancy. Its base of support—and, hence, Lincoln’s and much of the Union’s base of support—were descended from New England Puritan stock, either living in New England or having migrated west through the Great Lakes. Indeed, one can trace the Republican party votes almost exactly to the migration patterns of New Englanders into the West.
Lincoln’s executive order symbolically tied the new nation to the “good” natives who had freely offered hospitality to the suffering Protestants trying to exist in a harsh new world. After all, Lincoln’s Thanksgiving address came a month before the Gettysburg Address proclaimed the nation was to undergo “a new birth of freedom.” Lincoln wrote in that grim October of 1863:
I . . . invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, 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. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, 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, tranquility, and union.
Like the first Thanksgiving, Lincoln’s call to gratitude came amidst intense suffering. The co-mingling of suffering and gratitude is a paradox, but one familiar to the Christian. It’s a combination essential to American audacity, and present in each Thanksgiving. It might be a long jump from that first Pilgrim Thanksgiving to the Thanksgiving my grandmother yelled for the pepper, but I give thanks for them all: the Pilgrims, the Indians, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and my grandmother.
Bradley J. Birzer is Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and Professor of History, Hillsdale College. He is the author of the award-winning Russell Kirk: American Conservative.
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Image by Thomas Nast, in the public domain. Image cropped.
