BackStory; American as Pumpkin Pie: A History of Thanksgiving

This is backstory. As we all learned in grade school, life was not easy for the pilgrims. At least there was one thing that they didn't have to worry about that choice between white meat and dark meat. Very often the way Puritans, being Puritans, said thank you to God, was suffer. Therefore, thanksgiving throughout much of the 17th century was a day that these Puritans would fast instead of feast. Today on backstory, the history of America's favorite feast day. Turns out the holiday really got its start 200 years after that famous dinner was squandered. Sarah Hale was a magazine editor and she saw it as a way of not only integrating women into the national calendar but integrating southerners. Thanksgiving from Pilgrims to Pixkin coming up on backstory. Major funding for backstory is provided by the ShiaCon Foundation,

the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guys. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Ballot, here with Peter Owneth. And Ed Ayers is with us. Hey, it's that time of year in America when the holidays start to come fast and furious. 35 years ago Charlie Brown just about summed it up to his sister Sally and his good buddy Linus. We've got another holiday to worry about. It seems Thanksgiving Day is upon us. I haven't even finished eating one my Halloween candy. Sally, Thanksgiving is a very important holiday. I was the first country in the world to make a national holiday to give thanks. Each week on backstory we take a topic from here and now and explore its historical roots.

This week we're getting out the carving knives and taking on Thanksgiving. Like Linus says, it's a very important holiday. But why is it so important? And why did the U.S. declare a national holiday to give thanks? By the end of today's show, we hope to have some answers. You know guys, I know that when it comes to holidays, Thanksgiving is really the big enchilada for historians. I mean, what other holiday do people get out and actually reenact an episode from American history? But I get excited about Thanksgiving for an entirely different reason. First down a gulp, like clock is down to three. They move a man in motion and give it wide to the left side. And he goes in on the reverse for the touchdown. Now, when we were planning today's show, I made it clear how I felt about this to our producers. And as usual, they didn't listen to me. They said I had to do an interview anyway. So I said, all right, you find me someone who values what I value about the holiday. And I'll do your interview.

Peter, Ed, our producers once again came through. I'm Roger Staubach. I was a former quarterback for the United States Naval Academy and also spent 11 years as quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. Roger Staubach, aka Roger the Dodger, aka Captain Comeback, aka one of my favorite football players ever. During those 11 years, when Staubach played for the Cowboys, I probably spent every single Thanksgiving with Roger. You see, for many years, the Cowboys had been one of the two NFL teams to play home games on Thanksgiving Day. It really got started when I first joined the team. The Troy started it and the NFL decided that they were going to have a double header. So Tex Ram, who is our general manager, volunteered and coach Landry told us that we were going to start playing on Thanksgiving. And do you remember when he told you that? Yeah, you're thinking about, you know, usually it takes a few days to heal. And if you get beat up and bruised and after the Sunday game, we had to kind of get back into it immediately to get ready for a Thursday game.

And we took Wednesday off. So really, we only had like two days to put in normally what would be a four-day game plan. Did he ever say anything to you? We're talking about Tom Landry now, the great coach of the Dallas Cowboys. Did he ever say anything to you about Thanksgiving? Did he even notice that it was Thanksgiving, except, of course, the different prep time? No, when he called me the night before, we always called me the night before the game to maybe go over a few things. I literally have the game plan by the phone. And he wouldn't even say, hey, Roger, I just pick up the phone and start talking. He'd say on that, you know, that 16 red flip wing motion, we want to run it differently now. So I just take some notes down and, of course, Thanksgiving is a little bit better because our game plans could get pretty complicated, but he didn't have enough time to complicate them by Thursday. And then you also look at the other guys that are at a little bit of a disadvantage because we have our Thanksgiving day at home. No one really wanted to play on Thanksgiving.

And when text volunteers said it as long as we have it play at home and we do it every year. So you did give thanks for that. Yes, I definitely gave thanks to that. Now, you know that the Cowboys are known as America's team. Do you think that playing on Thanksgiving is part of what makes the Cowboys America's team? Well, I think Brian, I think the exposure that TexRam gave the Cowboys. I think Thanksgiving Day has been a big part of it. You know, you're on national TV and we also are a winning team. Yeah. Whereas Detroit is right there in America's team and they've been playing on Thanksgiving a lot longer than you. But it is. It's part of it. If you're winning in your own TV and people take a liking to you and people either loved the Cowboys or they hated the Cowboys. And that's kind of positive in sports. You're emotionally involved with the team, whether you like them or you don't like them. Sure. And the Cowboys became very popular. And I think Thanksgiving had a lot to do with it. So it became a fun part of my life and we had three kids born in the Navy and two more in Dallas that kind of grew up with the team. So we would wait and have our Thanksgiving.

It would be after the game and we were, you know, got into a good routine that Thanksgiving was going to be after we beat whoever we were playing on Thanksgiving Day. Well, listen, I want to thank you for taking time to talk to us about a real American tradition. It's been a real honor and pleasure talking to you. Okay, Brian, well, you have a good Thanksgiving. Thank you very much. They appear on television so often that their faces are as familiar to the public as presidents and movie stars. They are the Dallas Cowboys, America's team. Well, guys, I feel I've earned that extra helping a cranberry. What do you think? I just like to lodge a protest. Why does Brian get to talk to Roger Stauback? I think that's because Roger's alive in the 20th century. Oh, okay. All right. Thank you, Peter. So tell me this. We know football is awesome. NFL is awesome. No, I don't like it that much to be honest.

Well, that doesn't matter. I'm talking about America here, Peter. Why does it seem like such a perfect fit for Thanksgiving to have the NFL? Well, because you can sleep between plays. Yeah. Right. I got a theory about that. And that is watching football is both guys vicariously participating in the quintessential American guy activity with semi-religious overtones, but semi-military overtones. Yet they're at home. They've been well fed. They may be snoozing a little bit. They're safely within the home. It's a womb with a view. Okay, but you know what, we're going on and on about being in the household. As I understand it, both high schools and colleges played a lot of football in the late 19th century. And usually, just the way the season worked out, the big game, sometimes the championship game, would be played on Thanksgiving.

Well, that's true. In the 1890s, there were games that would draw 10,000 people, college games, on Thanksgiving Day. So, how do we get to the NFL, this gigantic commercial enterprise, from these high school and college games? And radios, the first answer, I mean, the Detroit Lions started playing on Thanksgiving as part of a gimmick. It was a radio broadcaster who started this in the 1930s. And what did America's commercial enterprises come up with for women and children? The Macy's Thanksgiving parade. Bingo. But when did those begin, Brian? Well, the parades, I think, gimbals to the first parade in the 1920s. And were they sort of coded female and child? Primarily. Yeah. So this is primarily the idea. Then the guys get the football. Yeah. And the guys are being infantilized, too. Because they're recovering some glimmer of their youth. Let's go out and throw the ball around, guys.

Yeah, okay. Go ahead. Make fun of the 20th century. But what did people do in like the early 19th century, Peter? Well, they didn't have Thanksgiving. We'll talk about that one later in the show. Okay, guys. Well, it's time to go to the phones. And I sure hope that Dan Marino is waiting out there to give us a call. Peter, you have a caller lined up for us? I do, Brian. We have Magnus calling from Ithaca, New York. Welcome to backstory. Thank you. I was thinking about this. I wrote a little book, actually, that is called the Thanksgiving Turkey pardon. I wrote about how the American president's pardoned a turkey every November. Just before Thanksgiving, I thought it was on TV. I'm not from the US. And I was just flabbergasted about what was going on here and being an anthropologist. I thought I had to write about it. And I tried to find out as much as I could about it.

And one aspect has changed, actually. Maybe you know about it. You see, it used to be that they took this pardoned turkey. The main one and the backup one. The vice president there wanted to speak out. They took it to this children's petting field, which is in Virginia. I think it is called the frying pan park. And George W. Bush, your president. He made a major change there after my book came out in 2006. Suddenly he announced that they wouldn't go to the frying pan park in Virginia. They would go to Disneyland. Wow. And I was just so curious why Bush would do this. Magnus, you're going to have to help us out on this because you actually know something. Yeah. But it seems to me that Bush is trying to go national with something that would have been a local event around Washington and Virginia. The turkey, in other words, is now a bicostal celebrity. I guess, you know, my own inclination would be to expect some kind of under the table payments. I would think of a large scale conspiracy.

I just see it as a kickbacks of some sort. It is very commercial about how the turkey pardoning also started. It was promoted, actually, by a Turkey Foreign Association that wanted this as a kind of a promotion for their birds. I risked my case. There you go, Ed. Right as usual. You know, I'd have to say that I find it, I wouldn't say disturbing. But I've always thought about the nation that executes more people than just about anybody, making a big ritual out of pardoning. You know, people get elected for refusal to pardon criminals. Magnus, we're feeling very self-conscious as Americans because this is really silly. And you came from wherever you came from. And where did you come from, I guess? I'm from Sweden. From Sweden. So they do something really stupid and Sweden that you could share with us. They did. There is an interesting point, actually. I thought they got this idea from the American. They must have been watching this on TV. They were trying to instigate a new tradition where our Prime Minister would pardon a Christmas pig

because we eat all that pork for Christmas. And it didn't really take off. But then looking around on the Internet, I noticed that in Virginia, there are people who have launched a campaign to add pigs on the pardoning ritual because they say the first Thanksgiving was in Virginia and they were eating ham and not turkey. So the ultimate irony, Magnus, I mean, the way to market slaughtering more animals is to get the President to pardon your animal. Is that what you're saying? Well, I think these people are saying, this is a website. I think it's called pardon the pig or something like that. But the purpose is to sell more pork. I think they were actually also out to correct the history. They wanted to restore the pig to its rightful place in American history. Not in Virginia. Virginia, yeah. Magnus, thanks for bringing that offering to our Thanksgiving table. Thanks for talking turkey with us, Magnus.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. We're going to take another call now. It's from Robin down in Jacksonville, Florida. Robin, welcome to backstory. Thank you. Have you got a question for us? Yes, I do. What do you consider to be the first Thanksgiving because there's a lot of controversy out there? Well, you know, I'm going to bring it in now because he represents the South. And he's going to make some kind of ersatz claim that this is a Virginia tradition. Am I right? I will rise to the bait. What he's referring to is that we have a recorded instance in 1619, two years before planet plantation was founded, of explicit ceremony of Thanksgiving on the Berkeley plantation in Virginia.

And the fact that they were all subsequently killed took some of the luster from their town. We shouldn't be laughing about this. Listen, I'd like to say this, Ed. I know what happened, but Thanksgiving is something that happens all over the Christian world. Right? And it's the tradition. It's doing it year after year. That's important. And American Thanksgiving began at Plymouth. Yeah, that's true. Oh. Oh, that's a little fun, guys. I thought we were ready to rumble here. You know, and then it grew in New England. And it took decades and decades to get it accepted as a national holiday. Well, I'm going to put in a plug for the Midwest and say that it wasn't until the Detroit Lions started playing football on Thanksgiving in the midnight that it was really Thanksgiving. That it really became an American holiday. Yeah, that's a good point. What do you think about all this, Robin? Well, just to put, I hope you don't have any actual knowledge.

Actually, I have written a book called America's Real First Thanksgiving. Oh, you were just setting the guys up, huh? Yes, I was. And it took place in St. Augustine, Florida. Yes, I'm before it. Robin, I love it. 1565. That's a good one. Okay, tell us about the first American Thanksgiving. Okay, the first Thanksgiving was when Menendez came down to set up a site to protect the treasure fleet for the Spanish Empire. He chose St. Augustine because of its relation to the treasure fleet's path. And he came also to eradicate the French. He came ashore in September. And his first sighting was with the Tamukwa Indians, who were very interested in finding out about the Spanish, because they were kind of hoping they could have some friends to help them with the French. So St. Augustine was founded September 8th,

and there was a Thanksgiving that followed. So tell me, this debate turns on repetition as far as I can tell. Yeah, yeah. Good for you, Frank. Did they repeat it? You know, I honestly have to say, I didn't look that far to see if it was repeated every year. That's your next book, right? The second, third and fourth. Thank you. Yeah. Great title. Yeah. Well, tell me, Seth and Robin, what were they actually celebrating there in St. Augustine? Well, they're survival, right? Well, basically. No, actually they were celebrating their safe passage. That was traditional, as you know, is that they would say always have a Thanksgiving after a long voyage. Yes. Yeah, I said they did it all over the Christian world. You were all over that. Right. If it ever became recognized as the official first Thanksgiving in September 8th was the day, look at the extended shopping holiday we would have. That's a good idea. Great point.

And in this tough economy, this might be the year to do that. Yes. Robin, thanks for this new insight. You've opened our minds. Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I was very, very generous of Ed to introduce the notion of tradition. I was so disappointed. I was settling in for a really nice fight. I thought that was the generous and the wise and the dignified. Everybody seemed surprised that I would ever take the wise and dignified and happy, you know? Surprised and disappointed Ed. Well, Capri, if you really want me to provoke, I mean, you know, I can rise to that bait too. So I'm going to propose that all of this may not be as straightforward as we're making it out to be. I mean, if it's only about repetition, then New England's claim on Thanksgiving Day is a little shaky too, because as far as I understand, not being a historian with New England, it's not like those Puritans in 1621 kicked off a tradition that their proud New England descendants said, yes,

let's honor the Puritans and Indians doing lunch. In an unbroken tradition year after year. And it wasn't until 1863 that the fourth Thursday of the month was declared a day of national Thanksgiving by the then president. That would be Abraham Lincoln. That's right, Peter, good command of my century. Now, up till then, the various states did have their own official days of Thanksgiving, but they were scattered around here and there in the various fall months. And during the revolution, certain days were set aside to thank God for guidance on the battlefield, George Washington even proclaimed days of Thanksgiving as president. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're always trying to emphasize that other war was interesting, but I'm talking about the real war, the civil war. It was then that Americans started to celebrate Thanksgiving the way we do now, with pies and potatoes and turkey and more pies and cranberry sauce and more turkey and more pies. And this kind of celebration, well, it's largely the work of one woman, a magazine editor named Sarah Hale.

And she was a widow from New England. And in the 1820s, she became the editor of Goody's Ladies book, despite its title, which always thought was pretty ugly, was a hugely popular magazine. And for more than 30 years, she wouldn't let up. She published editorials and stories and letter writing campaigns all to convince her readers in the great cause that ultimately the government would declare Thanksgiving as the holiday that this young nation needed the most. 70 years ago, there were only about three millions of people under our flag. Now it waves its protecting folds from the Atlantic to the Pacific and nearly 30 millions of souls are enjoying its blessings. If every state should join in union Thanksgiving on the 24th of this month, would it not be a renewed pledge of love and loyalty to the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees peace, prosperity, progress and perpetuity to our great republic?

I think she really did believe that she was providing a kind of missing puzzle piece to the nation by recommending the celebration of this festival. That's Am Blue Will, a religious scholar at Davidson College, who's written a lot about Sarah Hale. And she told me that if we want to understand why we do what we do on Thanksgiving, we should forget about the pilgrims and look instead of what was going on 200 years later in Sarah Hale's America. She was coming into this position of editing this magazine at a moment when things are still kind of unsettled in the young republic. When are we talking about? This is 1827 when she becomes the editor. There's a lot of growth, there's a lot of change. And she was one of the leaders in formulating a pretty strong notion of what women in this new republic were to do. And the way she described it was women are the virtuous heart of the nation and women preside over the home.

And the home is where the American male who has to go out into the world and strive and make his way and earn a living. He can come home at the end of the day and be cleansed by his pure and domestic wife from all of the kind of nasty bargains that he's had to make during the day. So Thanksgiving for Hale fits into this gender division of work. So what are you saying? You're kind of blowing my mind here because what you're saying is that this didn't just sort of naturally grow up. It wasn't just sort of, hey, look at all these turkeys and all this pie we could eat. But instead was a very self-conscious strategy to submit the place of women in the household in this society. And at the same time, celebrate America.

Yeah, and for her, the, you know, Patriot fathers who, of course she's thinking New England context. So she's thinking, you know, a kind of cooperation, reinforcement of civil and religious authority, those powers working together to build up a society. I think she wanted to see that kind of cohesion still in the first part of the 19th century. Just without the witches. Right. I think she didn't have witches in her vision. There were, there were no witches, but she did have serious concerns about certain influences in her era. And one of her concerns was a growing population of Roman Catholic immigrants from Europe. And she felt like you could incorporate immigrants into the celebration of Thanksgiving and really teach them what it meant to be an American. And for her, what it meant to be an American was to be a Protestant Christian.

And to be able to see the histories in Goaties, the tell the tale of Catholics who hadn't celebrated Thanksgiving before, but, you know, they get visited by a distant relative who comes out to the country. And teaches them how to do Thanksgiving. And they think, oh, this is such a wonderful thing. I'm going to have a Protestantism. I'm at least going to convert to Thanksgiving. And then, you know, it leaves open the possibility that well, you know, they're on their way. They're on their way to, yes, exactly. So was she worried about sort of not only Catholics, but urban growth and industrialization and all that sort of stuff. So this is very much a backward looking, I mean, very intentionally invented to be nostalgic. Yeah. So she wants people to go out into the country. And that was one of her prescriptions for Thanksgiving is that you go home. And in a moment where increasingly people were living away from their birthplace. So she wanted us to go over the river and through the woods.

She did. She did. She really wanted people to experience the rural purity and natural beauty and blessing of the country. So you would have, you know, a roasted bird or you would have a chicken pie or you would have gourds and squash and things that to her represented harvest bounty. And you would have a lot of it. And so she's many ways ahead of her time, the sort of localist strategies of our own time, right? Kind of except that she wanted everybody to be a New England localist. She wanted everybody everywhere to pretend like they were enjoying a Thanksgiving harvest feast in New England. Did she have a regional component to this? Is she wanted this to be adopted by the south where she, I'm sure, did not live up to her standards? She wants this holiday to be celebrated everywhere.

And it becomes particularly acute mid-century when things are falling apart. So there are stories in Goaties and in these successor publications like Ladies Home Journal at the end of the 19th century. There are stories that are focused on the southern experience of Thanksgiving. And again, it's a lot like the stories of the Catholic experience of Thanksgiving that once you try it, you know, you can't have just one Thanksgiving. You're going to want to do it every year. And she saw it as a way of not only, as I said before, integrating women into the national calendar, but integrating southerners into the national calendar. So Anne, with all this creation of Thanksgiving in the early 19th century, what would the pilgrims actually think of that holiday if they've been able to drop in on Sarah Hale's house? Oh, well, I think they would have been overwhelmed with the bounty. And I guess the word fussiness is in my head.

There's a lot of, in her instructions to her readers in the magazine, there's a lot of detail about how to decorate and, you know, time tables for preparation. But probably the strangest thing would be that they would have seen this as a kind of presumptive act to have a day once a year where you were thankful. And if they were good Calvinists, they didn't want to appear presumptuous about God's mercy. And so, you know, they kind of took everything day by day. And if there seemed to be an occasion for Thanksgiving, they would declare a day of Thanksgiving. And if there seemed to be a day when they needed to take stock, they would declare a day of fasting and repentance. And their anthropology was such, and their theology was such that, you know, God did whatever God did out of just grace and mercy. God didn't do anything on behalf of humans because humans deserved it.

Humans really didn't deserve much of anything. So, thinking God was really pretty pretentious thing to do because He wasn't doing it for you anyway, right? Well, I don't think they would have begrudged her gratitude. They would have said, yes, exactly. You should be grateful. But you should also be attuned to the fact that God not only cares for you and lifts you up for God's own purposes, but God can punish you and chase on you again for God's own purposes. So, just to focus on the Thanksgiving part without having maybe another day that was to be the national day of penitence would have struck them as funny. Not in a ha ha way, but in an odd and probably sinful way. Maybe in blasphemous. Yes. So, you willing to go that far? We're willing to say that the pilgrims had blasphemous. But that's pretty radical statement, just a kind that we like to have here on Backstories. So, I'm very grateful for you joining us here today.

Well, it's been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. And Blue Will's is a professor of religion at Davidson College. You can find our article about Sarah Hale on her website, as well as a slideshow we made that features images of Hale and her magazine. It's all at backstoryradio.org. Pretty interesting, huh, guys? That was great. Yeah, I enjoyed it. Here's my thought. You know, these gigantic blockbuster holidays are all about the things that we were not, right? So, we're totally divided. We're fighting a civil war. So, we come up with a holiday that kind of imposes this new England fantasy of sorts on the entire nation, or at least presumes that the entire nation is one thing. It seems to me the important thing is that this is a soft and domesticated version of the harder talk that came from many preachers in the North about how the Constitution needed to be amended. So, that there'd be a provision that this was a Christian nation inserted in the Constitution under Jesus Christ. And Lincoln resisted that.

His formulation mitigated it, domesticated it, and I think hit the proper object, which was to evoke what was at stake for all Americans. And if you were going to give thanks, it would be for the very possibility of thanks in the future that is having holidays like this. Yeah. It's a perfect American holiday because it's civic religion. It's the idea of religion without any specific focus of it, right? You know, he could not of course foresee just the millions and millions of immigrants who would be coming from so many places all over the world, but to have devised a holiday in which everybody could feel included. Including all those foreigners who were fighting for the union. Right. Yeah. No, that's great, but I'm still curious about something. I mean, what was the original Thanksgiving like? I mean, if it's not Sarah Hale's fantasy, what's this deal with Squanto and the Wampanoag Indians, the big festival? I mean, was that a fantasy too?

Well, no, there's some basis for it, but think about it as a harvest festival, which is very traditional. Don't think about it as Thanksgiving. My baby, baby. My mama's cooking. Jam my life. My mama. I like your dance. I like to sing. I like to do my cage and ring. But what I like the best is mama's cooking more than all the red. Mama's cooking starts out high. She puts a crawfish in her pie. She makes her room so dark and sweet. A lot of you have already posted questions and comments on our website, backstoryradio.org.

And we've invited some of you to join us on the phone. Next up, we have a caller from our nation's capital, Washington, D.C. It's Rose. Welcome to backstory. Well, first of all, you mentioned that I was from Washington, D.C. And as a Virginia Indian woman, I'm calling in from Aton Akameek. And in our original language, the region you're in now is Algonquin speaking territory. Aton Akameek is the name that we have for this nation that we reside in. And Aton Akameek means our fertile country giving thanks to God for making things in nature to support life. That's better than the United States of America. Rose, this is terrific. What do you think? What do your people think about the notion of Thanksgiving? Which has of course been associated with pilgrims and celebrating their survival? It all depends on what hat I'm wearing.

All right. Well, what hat are you wearing today, Rose? Well, the 31 years I was an educator in D.C. Public Schools and also a curriculum writer. And we have official topic and the stories that we have to use to sort of have one mind in the educational sphere of things. And we have this image in our head of Dar serious pilgrims commemorating the first Thanksgiving, and yet when we introduce the concept of what really happened with the Wampanoag people, our north-eastern cousins, and how at that time of commemoration, the pilgrim militia trotted out their muskets and were putting on a nice show of arms, to show everybody how bad they were, and everybody was half drunk. And I wasn't unusual to see ladies read Petticoat speaking out here and there. So we tried to emphasize piety and diligence for our students,

but we also temper it with enjoying life, being thankful for what you have and cherishing your family members that have survived another year. So Rose, you are aware of many hats, at least two that we've heard about. I wonder if in your own life and your own thinking about Thanksgiving, you haven't actually combined the hats into one hybrid. And do you think that both notions of Thanksgiving have certain validity, and that they might enrich the other? True, true. And you know, this came in handy for me years ago when I had an unfortunate incident in London, England. I attended the American Church in London, and there was a big Thanksgiving commemorative service, decided over by Dr. George Carrey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Dr. Carrey read the Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1623,

issued by Governor William Bradford, a Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, and they referred to my ancestors as savages. You know, they were so thankful that they had been spared the ravages of the savages. And it was a very chilling moment for me, and I tried to maintain my composure, but tears rolled down my cheeks, and it was a reminder to me that as a Native American, sometimes I'm made at home to feel that I'm a stranger in my homeland. It just really brought home how we have different points of views and different histories in this country, but we have to work as one if we're going to survive. Well, Rose, that's a very powerful stuff, and it does speak to what the day is all about, I think. And we're very thankful for your phone call.

Thank you very much, Rose. Thank you. Rose's call reminds us of all the ways that Native people and settlers have looked at the same object, but seeing totally different things. And Thanksgiving is a great example of that. Peter, I think it's finally time for dinner. We've finally arrived at the point in the show when we actually get to look at that original harvest festival back in 1621. Why don't you go ahead and set up this last interview? Well, Jimmy McWilliams is a colonial historian down at Texas State University in San Marcos, and he told me that the birds and critters and roots and berries that the Indians would have brought to the Thanksgiving table, the very things we think of today as classic Thanksgiving cuisine. Well, these foods would not only have struck the English as exotic, they would have struck them as downright nasty. It wasn't an unusual to eat squirrel, and this was something I think that they would have probably not been thrilled to eat. In venison, they certainly would have been familiar to eat, but it's also important to keep in mind that the venison in North America would have tasted very different.

And I think, you know, the other emphasis would be on corn, and a lot of things that had to be forged. And I want to also stress, it wasn't the taste necessarily, it would have bothered them, but it was the manner in which these foods were acquired, because the emphasis for the English was to acquire their food through traditional English methods, that stressed sort of a human control of the environment that they felt the Native Americans didn't properly have. I wonder about hunting. Since, of course, game parks were kept in England where the Aristos could bag a deer, didn't they usually eat it? Sure. What happened to those deer? Yeah, it was certainly hunting in England, and the context is what really matters. I mean, the context was a leisure, it was a sport, it was something you did in the off hours. Sure, you ate it, but these Aristos also had access when they wanted it to domesticated beef. And, you know, the Puritans arrived in the New World with a set of very stringent cultural expectations.

I mean, they wanted to be the city on the hill, and the last thing they wanted to do was to, kind of, quote, unquote, devolve into, you know, quote, unquote, the savage state. So you had to go on and actually hunt for your food, you know, if you had to dive into the woods out of necessity rather than for leisure purposes. Well, this could easily be interpreted as a sign of cultural weakness or decline. And I think these settlers, when they looked at the Wampanoaks, grabbing their arrows or grabbing their guns and running off into the woods, for most of the day, they thought, well, wow, they're incredibly lazy. They should be hunting crops. And instead, you know, it is their women who are working in the fields. Let's talk about corn a little bit. Corn has got enormous cultural significance. Yeah, so the English, you know, the Puritans, when they arrived in New England, of course, were very familiar with corn. Generally, it was feed for farm animals in England. So, you know, the Puritans show up and, of course, they find that the Native Americans are growing it as more or less than one of their staple foods. You know, that was jarring in and of itself. And I think, you know, this is an observation on the part of the Puritans that we really need to pay attention to,

because a lot of times, as we try to explain, the failure of Native Americans in English to create any sort of biracial society, you know, a lot of times we just immediately look to race. But, you know, I think if you look at the example of corn, I think there's a case to be made that it was, you know, agricultural practices and food that played a really important role in creating basic cultural differences, or at least the perception of basic cultural differences. There's one more point to this that connected point is not only the corn itself that I think influenced the way the English looked at the Native Americans, but it was also the way that they grew the corn. Native Americans had this agricultural method where they would clear a plot of land by girdling trees and burning the soil. The trees would die and fall. The ash in the soil would sort of work itself deeper into the top soil. And then they would just throw the seed in. And they would throw corn seed beans and squash. And these crops would grow up together. And it was a remarkable arrangement, because the corn provided this natural bean pull, and the beans would warm their way up the corn, and the corn leaves would provide shade for the squash, and it was a kind of botanical orgy. But, you know, the Indians, of course, this worked. It was incredibly productive. It was not particularly labor intensive. If weeds came in, they let the weeds come in.

And, you know, here you have this sort of black charred land with trees all over the place in these crops, sort of crawling all over each other in the English again. Look, look at that. And they said, what a disaster. Where are the fences? Where are the nice lined furrows? Where's the land with that weeds growing on it? So the English, as you described them, were incredibly anal. They erected this monoculture. They separated things. They were great at distinctions. What's a fence anyway? But a way of making a distinction. Whereas Indians seem to be promiscuous, and they mix things together, and how could they be a civilized people? You're right. I mean, that was the perception, but there clearly was a sense initially anyway, that the Native Americans could be incorporated and assimilated into English society. And interestingly, one of the basic ways that some of these puritans began to assimilate Native Americans was to give them cattle to domesticate. And I think that is an important reminder of just how culturally significant the act of controlling animals was to the English.

I mean, if we could just get the Indians to control their animals, well, then that's half the battle. Right. And get the guys out of the woods and back into the fields, doing the proper man's work, which is having a miserable old time plowing up the earth. Well, the advantage there was huge. You're absolutely right. You pull them out of the woods, and suddenly this land becomes available in some ways. You can then acquire it, and you won't have Native Americans hunting through. That's convenient, isn't it? Yeah. So when and how did bagging deer and other wildlife become something essential to our ruggedly individualistic way of life? And when did people overcome the notion that eating trash food was a bad thing to do? Well, I think this sort of cultural emphasis on the frontier and on hunting as being a sign of self-sufficiency. That became a positive cultural image when the burden of trying to emulate the English was lifted shortly after the American Revolution. The American Revolution really changed the dynamics fundamentally, I think, because it created this imperative that you have to kind of redefine out your culture.

We cannot emulate the English. Of course, people did, but I think as the nation expanded west, as people moved to the frontier, there were these new expectations that could instead of being looked down upon could now be praised. And then somehow pointed to as a source of an American identity. So it's a bit of an irony that the dependency on hunting that they criticized say in the 17th century and the early 19th century actually became an element of what it meant to be an American. Well-made food, country, cuisine, Jimmy, you've given us some fascinating insights into one of the key moments in American cultural calendar Thanksgiving, and we're grateful to you. Oh, this is fine. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you so much. Jimmy McWilliams teaches us American history at Texas State University San Marcos. He's the author of a Revolution in Eating, published by Columbia University Press in 2005. Peter, it's interesting that from the very beginning, some English kind of dug the Indian way of doing things, right? I mean, they always had to worry that some English were going to say, hey, I kind of like the food snaking up and intertwining about it.

Many people who were captured in Indian raids didn't want to be repatriated. There wasn't any waste labor, but you could also say that what that represents in terms of food and its availability is a kind of feast or famine culture among Native Americans. You didn't wait for one day. You'd saved up stuff after the harvest. Of course, there were long periods during the winter when Native Americans had to live without, but when it was there, man, you just went for it. So the idea of regulating caloric intake is part of that whole anal business of English culture. But so what you're saying, Peter, is that Thanksgiving is like fences that it's a way of containing and controlling time as well as space. Oh, that's a great point. And I would say just to use your image, it's kind of a decorated ornamental fence. I mean, we, we guss it up to make us feel good about it, making it special, but it is just that it's a fence. It's a marker. It's on the calendar.

It's a way we organize our lives. And though we think we're overeating, it's a way of regulating eating because, of course, every day is not Thanksgiving. Peter, I understand we got one more phone call. Who's it going to be? Well, we have Marty calling from Naperville, Illinois. Marty, welcome to backstory. Hi, how are you? Well, good. And we're thankful to have you on the line. What do you have for us? I was wondering has eating turkey in particular been an important way to emphasize patriotism during times of increased immigration? Wow. Well, that had lots of different. I thought I was with you. Yeah. Yeah, it's a meaty question. Well, here's my turkey immigrant thought, Marty. It is true that big city bosses whose positions often relied on massive turnout from recently naturalized immigrants to put them in office, they did deliver turkeys to the wards to people who were hurting.

This is late 19th century, early 20th century. But why it had to be a turkey instead of a ham? I don't know. Don't you say big, they're family size foul, right? I mean, a chicken wouldn't do it. It does strike me that turkey, I'm guessing, does not violate a lot of provisions of various religious traditions about... I agree. That is good. Marty, we really got to know it because part of our job here at Backstory is to interrogate people who have the good fortune to call us. Why do you care about this? What are turkeys to you? Well, I work for a turkey company. And we have... And are you trying to expand your market with immigrants? Well, actually, we do have a better all turkey talk line. We have a Spanish website. We've got a Spanish talker. I'm not one of them. I'm not one of them. This is the Butterball phone in. What is it called again? Butterball turkey talk line. But we get calls from all over the world.

So what do people want to know when they call you, Marty? Well, it depends on what we could have before Thanksgiving. Right now, I'm talking to you from Butterball University. We work there too. What do you do? I think I'm kidding. So what do people want to know? At the beginning, people want to know how much to buy, so they need quantity information. And then it goes to how do I follow the turkey? Where do I store it until I'm ready to cook it? How do I cook the turkey? And then Thanksgiving Day, it's... How do I scrape it off the side? How do I thought and cook it? Now, what we hear in the background is that the turkey hotline in action? Well, it is, actually. So cool. Since this radio described the scene at Butterball University for us. Well, it's one big large room, painted blue and white with big posters on the walls, giving approximate falling times. Depending on the size of the turkey and whether it's on the refrigerator or in the tub of water, we have another large chart for approximate roasting times and a 325 oven.

There are 55 women here, all talking at once. And are there no women with people not have confidence in a male Butterball University grad? No, no, because that person would have as much knowledge as the rest of us. We would love a guy to apply. So, you know, but you don't have any guys. Marty, Marty, let me ask you, what do you pay? Because the pay here at Backstory really sucks. Fairway. Well, that's to have higher ranking professors there. We have some women with PhDs. All right. No, it's a university, Peter. Will you pay attention? Okay. But you have to have a kind of a food background. Most of people have at least a home at degree summer dietician. But I do have a question. Since we are a history show, I need to know, are there pictures of Indians and pilgrims there in the Butterball University? No, pictures of turkeys. I just think it would be so spiffy and so historically contextualized if you have some pictures of the first Thanksgiving around there.

I think also an insert right next to the giblets to BackstoryRadio.org as people unpack to their turkey. Well, Marty, thanks a lot for calling. Oh, you're welcome. Thanks so much for being there. I appreciate it. Bye-bye. That was a great Thanksgiving holiday. Well, that unfortunately is all the time we have today. But as always, the conversation continues online. Step away from that stove. And when you do, come join us online. We want to know what role history plays in your Thanksgiving festivities. I'm really hungry, but I do have enough energy, let's say, that's at BackstoryRadio.org. Have a happy turkey day, and don't be a stranger. Today's episode of Backstory was produced by Tony Field, Rachel Quinby, and Katherine Moore. Backstory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by the ShiaCon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, for humanities and the environment, and by history channel, history made every day. Brian Ballot is Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and the Dorothy Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Peter Onaf is Professor of History Emeritus at UVA, and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Backstory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.