The Myths of Thanksgiving

How the Pilgrims became the Fathers of America and what was lost in the embrace of that story.

“If how we tell history is one of the ways we shape our present and our future, we can do no better than to rethink the myth of the first Thanksgiving.” David J. Silverman, This is Their Land:The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and Troubled History of Thanksgiving

An image, long submerged in that ocean of forgetting, has been following me all week. It is of a picture of me, ten years old, long brown braids draped over my shoulders and a bemused look on my plump Irish face. It is 1955. I am wearing a rag tag assembly of old, oversized clothes, a plaid shirt, a straw hat. I have a basket over one arm.  It is Thanksgiving morning and my younger sister and I are about to walk up and down the concrete sidewalks that edge the tree lined streets of my working class neighborhood on the South Shore of Long Island and beg.  Some people will give us candy, some will give us money.

I had no idea then, nor do I now, why on that day when only the word abundance could describe what would be piled on platters and heaped into steaming bowls, I would be sent forth to beg. It was a custom that would die out in a few years and be replaced by Halloween, a holiday when I would more comfortably dress as a ghoul and roam the streets in the dark and chant “trick or treat” to the delight of neighbors who opened the door to the local goblins. This was All Souls Day, and we were coming back from the dead to remind people that spirits roam the universe, that there is something eternal and mysterious about life.  This I understood.

A quick search, not in the woods but in the black and white landscape of search engines and web links, brought me to a completely cut-off part of my own immigrant history.

For my Irish parents, who grew up in Brooklyn, this day, I discovered, had another name in addition to Thanksgiving: it was called Ragamuffin Day.  When they were kids in the 1920’s and 30’s bands of kids dressed as ragamuffins roamed the city streets begging for food or cash and making rowdy merriment. When the Irish moved to Long Island in the great swoosh called upward mobility, they took this tradition with them.  But they soon gave it up.

Where did this custom come from?  There’s not much I could find to answer that. But I wonder, what was lost when we abandoned our “good clothes” and our good manners and in the act of begging we humbly acknowledged our mutual needs for connection and care?

Google “myths of Thanksgiving” and it will take you to this discussion in the Smithsonian Magazine with Professor David Silverman, a historian at George Washington University. In the piece he discusses his recent book, This Land is Their Land. Unable to wait for a hard copy, I quickly downloaded it on my Kindle and to my surprise it is here that I found some clues to the disappearance of Ragamuffin Day!

Silverman tells us that until the late 1700’s there was no custom which celebrated the “founding of America” and replicated the great turkey dinner between the Pilgrims and sixty Wampanoag’s. But in 1767, a group of Pilgrim descendants who lived in Plymouth “felt like their cultural authority was slipping away as New England became less relevant within the colonies and the early republic... So, they started to plant the seeds of this idea that the Pilgrims were the fathers of America.” He goes on:

The idea that the dinner between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags (in 1621) was the “first Thanksgiving, the great festival of New England” soon became widely accepted.  Then, to foster spirit and unity, Lincoln declared it a holiday during the Civil War.

It gained purchase in the late 19th century, when there was an enormous amount of anxiety and agitation over immigration. The white Protestant stock of the United States was widely unhappy about the influx of European Catholics and Jews and wanted to assert its cultural authority over these newcomers. How better to do that than to create this national founding myth around the Pilgrims and the Indians inviting them to take over the land?

What’s more, during Reconstruction, that Thanksgiving myth allowed New Englanders to create this idea that bloodless colonialism in their region was the origin of the country, having nothing to do with the Indian Wars and slavery. Americans could feel good about their colonial past without having to confront the really dark characteristics of it.

So is that where Ragamuffin Day went? Is that how the culture and scars of genocide my people brought to this country almost two hundred years ago were subsumed into the story of what it means to be a brave, freedom loving American; how I became an American imbued with all the notions of being chosen and exceptional and on the side of freedom?  Is this what assimilation looks like?

In a place where Irish Need Not Apply signs were plastered in storefronts, where our own history of famine and landlessness made us desperate to belong, were we not eager to embrace the myth of the first Thanksgiving which bestowed blessings and entitlement and privilege on all those (white) people allowed to sit at the table? No more ragamuffining for us!!

The foundational myth of the first Thanksgiving goes something like this: faced with religious persecution in England, the Pilgrims, who had a covenant with God, braved high seas and great uncertainty to cross the ocean in order to find freedom.  When they arrived at the tip of Cape Cod in the dark of December, 1620, the land appeared uninhabited, but soon Natives appeared from the top of the dunes. They welcomed the newcomers and taught them to plant corn and beans and gave them seeds. Grateful for their help which enabled them to survive the harsh winter, the English invited them to a great feast which lasted for three days.

Nowhere in this tale is the fact that fifty-five years hence these same colonists would wage one of the most bloody wars in history against these men with whom they shared this dinner and, in waging that war, they would, almost, decimate the same people who saved them.  Nowhere is it recognized that King James attributed “to Gods great goodness and bounty towards us” the epidemic which weakened the Indigenous peoples’ ability to resist their settlements.

In their voyage to America, the Pilgrims compared themselves to the Israelites in the Old Testament of the Bible.  The Israelites, also known as Hebrews or Jews, were God’s chosen people. …. Like the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, the Pilgrims had left what they saw as an oppressive, degraded situation in Europe, in which they could not worship freely, in order to create a new life in America.  They were God’s people, and America was their promised land.

The Pilgrims believed they had made a covenant with God: in exchange for land and protection, they would abide by the laws of their religion. This covenant was written into the Mayflower Compact which was stamped with a seal designed in England before they journey.  It shows an almost naked Native holding a bow and arrow and inscribed with this plea, “Come over and help us.”

The story of the covenant and its influence on settler colonialism, is masterfully set out in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. 

Was Ragamuffin Day my Irish ancestors’ last stand: Our rowdy reaction to the descendants of the Pilgrims who wanted to claim cultural superiority over my inferior Irish roots?

In wishing to assimilate, to belong, how have I embraced this founding story about being a chosen people in a covenant with God that entitles me, with nothing required but my white skin, to vast swaths of land and the notion that people different from me need rescue?

This Thanksgiving I will walk humbly on the path of my own displaced, disappeared roots. I will ask forgiveness from the spirits roaming in the forest for having been blind to them for so long.  I will banish my assumptions about being a separate, special, chosen, being entitled to a boundless harvest that magically appears on the groaning table with no thought to where it came from, who harvested it, what needs to be replenished for the next harvest to grow.

And this Thanksgiving I will come to the table in ragamuffin clothes and make great noisy merriment.

Beware a knock on your door!

I will close with this quote, sent by a reader, from Robin Wall Kimmerer:

"Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share. Give thanks for what you have been given. Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken. Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever."

*Note: This morning the headlines are filled with the surprising news out of Egypt and COP27 that at the very last moment rich countries all over the world agreed to create a fund to support poor nations who are experiencing the devastation of the already too warm climate. Finally, a little sharing.