You may have heard part of the story of the first Thanksgiving. But, according to a northern Illinois historian, you likely haven’t heard the whole story.
If you attended primary school in the U.S., you probably heard the traditional first Thanksgiving story … that native people and European pilgrims sat down together for a large feast and got along just fine for the most part.
“If you go farther down the road, there are various proclamations – sometimes by presidents, such as George Washington or John Adams -- for days of thanksgiving, or days of thanksgiving and prayer,” Jim Schmidt, a Northern Illinois University history professor, said.
But those proclamations weren’t for just one specific day of the year.
Sarah Josepha Hale – who was the editor for the magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book – was mostly responsible for Thanksgiving becoming a yearly tradition. She tried to campaign for a single Thanksgiving Day with multiple presidents.
Schmidt says Hale ended up pitching the idea to Lincoln as a way to unite the country after the Battle of Gettysburg.
“So it’s actually not meant to be simply, you know, ‘Let’s all eat a lot,’” Schmidt said. “It’s really meant to be, in Lincoln’s original proclamation, a kind of day of reflection.”
Not only that, but Schmidt says the day became a way to create a national identity … or, as he calls it, an “origin story.”
For example, Schmidt says the Spanish were in America long before the English made their way across the Atlantic. He even says a more accurate representation of the American experience around that time period could be the first boatload of slaves to arrive in Jamestown.
“To choose this story, and especially to act like this was, you know, the Indians and the pilgrims getting together and having a good time and that sort of portrays everything that happened … cuts out a whole lot of what actually happened,” Schmidt said.
Like, Schmidt says, more than 300 years of warfare between natives and European migrants … despite occasional cooperation for survival on the colonists’ end.
So the story of the first Thanksgiving you might’ve heard when you were a child might not be completely false, since a first Thanksgiving feast did happen. But, Schmidt says, context is everything.
THE EARLY COLONISTS: REFUGEES?
There’s a meme circulating social media that shows a Native American saying to a colonist they're not accepting refugees. That came after several governors in the United States said they don't want their states to accept Syrian refugees after the Paris attacks.
Schmidt says the pilgrim parallel to current events is correct:
“Yes, they are refugees, but they are refugees who want to set up a religiously perfect society,” Schmid said. “And that’s why they want to leave.”
Schmidt says it doesn't necessarily mean the colonists were forced out of England due to religious oppression. He says the Puritans voluntarily headed west because they thought they were right in their beliefs.
WHAT DID PLYMOUTH ROCK PILGRIMS EAT ON THE FIRST THANKSGIVING?
Historical documents show the original Thanksgiving feast lasted several days. Based on those records, we know venison definitely was part of the meal, and the colonists made bread and porridge out of corn.
It’s unclear if turkey was served at the first Thanksgiving meal … but it wasn’t completely out of the question, since turkeys were pretty common in the area.
The Smithsonian reports that early colonists did make pies, but they were meat pies. There was no pumpkin pie on the table.
And there were no mashed potatoes at the time; white potatoes, which originated from South America, hadn’t made their way up yet. Neither did sweet potatoes from the Caribbean.
FOOTBALL ON THANKSGIVING
The activity of watching football during the Thanksgiving holiday may trace back farther than you think.
Football has been a part of Thanksgiving since 1876, when the Intercollegiate Football Association scheduled its first championship game on the holiday. That’s according to an article in the Journal of Social History.
The article says the Chicago Tribune estimated two decades later about ten-thousand high school and college teams and clubs were playing football on Thanksgiving Day.
The holiday initially was intended to be a religious observance, so the idea of having a football game on Thanksgiving was controversial from the beginning.
