The Thanksgiving Story You Never Learned in School

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. So much of our Thanksgiving stereotypes and traditions are not rooted in historical reality. Yet the reality is much more colorful and much richer. Here to tell the story is Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister, the Brain Food Show podcast. Also contributing to this story is the late, great historian David McCullough. Let’s take a listen.

00:00:50
Speaker 2: Today, we’re looking at the common myth that the Pilgrims wore black and white clothing with buckles, and top hats. The myth that they dressed like this stems from a popular claith clothing style in England in the late seventeenth century, which carried over to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists’ depictions of the Pilgrims. So what did the Pilgrims actually wear? Historical records of Pilgrims’ clothing, such as the passenger lists of the Mayflower, wills, which included descriptions of clothing, and other such records. Painting very different picture than the late seventeenth-century artists depicted. For starters, the Pilgrims didn’t wear buckled hats, nor did they wear buckles on their shoes or their waists. Buckles were expensive and just not in fashion at the time. They simply wore the much cheaper leather laces to tie up their shoes and hold up their pants. Buckles later became very popular in England for their expense and as a fashion statement. Those who were too poor to afford buckles wore laces similar to the Pilgrims. They also didn’t only wear black and white; the Pilgrims’ common garb was very colorful, as was the fashion at the time. They only wore predominantly black and gray clothing on Sundays. The rest of the time, they wore more heavily dyed clothing in many different colors. For one example, a pilgrim by the name of Brewster left his clothing in his will to someone, which was described as one blue cloth suit, green draws, a violet cloth coat, black silk stockings, sky-blue garters, red grow grain suit, red waistcoat, tawny-colored suit with silver buttons. Another myth surrounding the Pilgrims is that they would have probably died in the first winter had the Native Americans not taught them various agricultural tips and tricks. In fact, the Pilgrims didn’t come so unprepared. They had a contract with various merchants who would come regularly to bring them supplies of food, clothing, etc., for a term no less than seven years while they established their colony. They were also well versed in hunting and farming techniques from Europe. When the Pilgrims left, they were quite well aware of the colonies that had tried to settle in America and failed. Thus, they took appropriate steps to avoid this happening to them. This all brings us to the most pervasive myth of all concerning the Pilgrims: that they celebrated the first Thanksgiving in America and invited the Native Americans to join in. The Pilgrims did not celebrate the first Thanksgiving in America. In fact, the particular Pilgrim event that is often cited as the first Thanksgiving wasn’t even the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving. They had several before then at various times, and none of them were an annual thing. These days weren’t simply a particular time when they had something significant to thank God about, so they would set aside a day.

00:03:37
Speaker 1: To do so.

00:03:39
Speaker 2: Around the time the Pilgrims came to America in 1620, it was common in England and many parts of Europe to frequently set aside days for giving thanks to God. In the New World, where life was harsh in the beginning, there were numerous opportunities to hold such days of thanks. For example, anytime a particularly good crop would come in, anytime a drought would end, anytime a particularly harsh winter was survived, anytime a group managed to repel an attack by Native Americans, anytime they ship supply arrived safely from Europe, et cetera. This sort of practice remained fairly common up until the time around when Thanksgiving became a national holiday. Most of these celebrations bore little resemblance to what we think of as Thanksgiving. Indeed, even the particular Thanksgiving day that the Pilgrims celebrated sometime between September and early October of 1961, bore little resemblance to what it is depicted as now. So who actually celebrated the first Thanksgiving in America? Nobody knows for sure, knowing to how common these days of thanks were in the New World. This December 4, 1619, when thirty-eight settlers landed on James River on a ship called the Margaret, about twenty miles from Jamestown. Their charter required that the day of landing be set aside as a day of Thanksgiving, both on that first date and every year after. This tradition died out due to the Indian Massacre of 1612, where many of the settlers were killed and most of the rest fled to Jamestown. Okay. So, the Pilgrims, they were not the first, but they invited the Native Americans to their 1621 party, right? In truth, from the only two firsthand passages that directly described the event in question—a letter from Edward Winslow in December of 1621 and William Bradford’s passage in Of Plymouth Plantation—it would appear the party was held with no such invite. We do know the Native Americans stopped by at random times, probably attracted by all the noisy games like shooting contests, and some that stopped by were allowed to participate. That, as for specifically thinking to invite them to take part in the event, there’s no such record nor any real indication of this. So why is the Pilgrim Thanksgiving that happened in the autumn of 1621 often considered the first Thanksgiving? And why do we have all these myths surrounding the 1621 event? This is largely thanks to Sarah Joseph for Hale, author of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and one of the most influential women in American history. She was particularly enamored with this Pilgrim event that she had read about in a passage by William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation, as well as the particular Thanksgiving tradition which was somewhat common in New England at the time. She tirelessly campaigned for over twenty years to have Thanksgiving become a national holiday with a set date, and was ultimately successful. Through her highly circulated editorials, she was largely responsible for much of why we view the Pilgrim 1621 Thanksgiving how we do, and was also largely responsible for many of the traditions that we now tend to attribute to that Thanksgiving. For example, things like the tradition of eating turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. They were all popularized by her, and it is extremely unlikely that the Pilgrims ate any of those things during their little 1621 party.

00:07:00
Speaker 1: Job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister, the Brain Food Show podcast. And Our American Stories runs those stories about Thanksgiving all day, Thanksgiving Day, every year. And you can go to our website and find them: “The Myths of Thanksgiving.” Here are Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day, please set out to tell the stories of Americans past and present, from small towns to big cities, and from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and make a donation to keep the stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com.