The Road To Grandmother's House

__"The Making of the Domestic Occasion: The History of Thanksgiving in the United States" by Elizabeth Pleck, in The Journal of Social History (Summer 1999) Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, Pa. 15213.__

On Thanksgiving Day 1880, dozens of drunken youths careened through the streets of Philadelphia, wearing makeshift masks and women’s clothing, just as Thanksgiving "Fantastics" had been doing for generations. They were followed by eager groups of younger boys who donned rags and knocked at the doors of the well-to-do, demanding treats. Beginning with this drunken workingclass carnival, Pleck, a professor of history at the University of Illinois, traces Thanksgiving’s progression toward the sedate domestic occasion it is today.

Thanksgiving didn’t become a peaceful familial feast by accident, Pleck argues. While it had bona fide historical origins— starting, of course, with the Pilgrims’ 1621 meal with their Wampanoag neighbors, and later, the issuance of ad hoc proclamations of a national day of thanksgiving by Presidents Washington, Adams, and Madison—Pleck contends that the holiday was "invented and reinvented" over a period of almost two centuries by a series of politicians, social reformers, and ordinary citizens. Among them was Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine. Beginning in the 1840s, she conducted a campaign to spread Thanksgiving, hoping that a unifying holiday would help avert a civil war. Partly in response to her efforts, President Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a legal holiday in 1863. Even so, it continued to be little celebrated outside New England.

That changed during the Industrial Revolution, when Thanksgiving was readily adopted by those who wished to restore the morality and simplicity of a previous age. It became a holiday of homecoming for the newly mobile younger generation, a time of reunion and renewal. Despite this gradual familialization, however, Thanksgiving would only become an exclusively domesticated occasion in the 1910s, says Pleck. Amid the labor strikes and general unrest of the period, unruliness of any sort came to seem threatening to the middle and upper classes. Public tolerance of the Fantastics’ rowdy parades declined and the ritual disappeared.

As immigrants streamed into the United States, the holiday took another turn. Progressive social workers and teachers, anxious about the immigrant tide, portrayed Thanksgiving "as a day when all Americans could feel they belonged to the nation." Schoolteachers filled their classrooms with pictures of Pilgrims and turkeys, painting a rosy picture of the Pilgrims as the very first immigrants—historical figures with whom any recent arrival could identify.

Only one element was missing from Thanksgiving as it is today—football. Though collegians had played the game on turkey day since the 1880s (as the upperclass counterpart to Fantastic parades), football did not become a central part of the holiday until the advent of radio broadcasting in the 1920s. This, for Pleck, was the last feather on the old Pilgrim turkey, for it carved out a masculine niche in what had become a feminine domestic festival, cementing Thanksgiving’s place in American life and lore.