Origins: Thanks--and Franks--Giving

[Above: painting of Pueblo Green Corn Ceremony circa 1930 by Opwa Pi (Red Cloud)

The first ceremonial Thanksgivings in North America occurred before history was written on this continent.  Such individual ceremonies were part of daily lives for most if not all Indigenous hunters and gatherers, such as giving thanks to the animal that gave its life to the hunter, or a constant consciousness of sacredness in gathering and crafts like basket-weaving.

It is certain that even in historical times, group ceremonies of thanks in Native tribes included giving thanks for the harvest.  Tribes in the Eastern Woodlands and Southwest in particular celebrated Green Corn Ceremonies or festivals (and many still do.)  

It seems likely that the most famous "first" Thanksgiving in Patuexet (Plymouth), Massachusetts in 1621 (or 1623)  was at least partly inspired by such an event among local Native groups such as the Wampanoags who attended--and reportedly outnumbered the Pilgrim colonists.  Like traditional Green Corn ceremonies, it lasted three days, beginning on June 30.  This cooperative venture was not repeated.  The next harvest was bad, and eventually the Pilgrim fathers slaughtered the same tribal peoples, setting a horrific but often followed precedent.

Other religious ceremonies of thanks to the Christian God had already been held among colonists in Newfoundland (1578), Jamestown, La Florida and a colony in Maine.  The first national day of thanks was declared in 1789 by President George Washington, in gratitude for the Constitution.  It was held that year on November 26.  Other Presidents declared national Thanksgiving days, one year at a time and on various dates, though some Presidents didn't at all. 

Beginning in the first quarter of the 19th century, magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale began a 36 year campaign in favor of an annual and official Thanksgiving Day.  Today's tradition was established by President Abraham Lincoln in October 1863, just weeks before he gave his historic Gettysburg Address. In part he wanted the nation to give thanks but also pray for healing after the Civil War.  He'd already declared a day of thanksgiving for that August, but then made Thanksgiving an annual holiday, to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November. It was only the third annual national holiday to be declared.

But the calendar is a tricky thing: sometimes the last Thursday of the month is the fourth, and sometimes (roughly two time out of seven) it is the fifth Thursday of the month.  It was the fifth Thursday in 1939, and retailers begged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare that year's Thanksgiving for the fourth Thursday, the next-to-last, because they were afraid of a foreshortened Christmas shopping season.  He agreed.

National pandemonium ensued, which only got worse in 1940 when FDR again designated the next-to-last Thursday, which that year was the third.  Republicans in particular derided him, and called it Franksgiving.  Some 16 states declared their own Thanksgiving day to be celebrated on the last Thursday, so there was no longer a national day of thanks.  In 1941, Congress passed a resolution assigning the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving, which FDR signed into law. (Retailers had not shown any appreciable change in sales with the earlier date.) 

 Some states continued to designate the last Thursday, and celebrations were muted during World War II, but by the end of the war, almost all of the nation celebrated on the new Franksgiving of the fourth Thursday. The last holdout was Texas, which did not change its law from the last to the fourth Thursday until 1956. (Then of course there's Canada, which holds its Thanksgiving the second Monday of October.)

Though it is unlikely that the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving included pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes and even today's breeds of turkey, most of the day's food traditions do seem to come from New England.  Recipes for most of the traditional meal are in the first cookbook published in America, in Connecticut in 1796. 

The Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York has been an annual event since 1930.  Coming near the end of the collegiate football season, Thanksgiving has been a tradition for rivalry games. (Hence the Great Turkey Heist at Knox College I participated in, oh long ago.)  The Detroit Lions began scheduling a game on Thanksgiving also in the 1930s. 

It all began with gratitude for nature's sustaining gifts.  But beginning with those first ideologues in New England and Virginia, Americans relationship to nature has been more hostile than grateful. Settlers and their descendants have been busy ruining the land and waters and now even the air for centuries, and we are close to finishing the job. Maybe we can at least acknowledge this with a little grace as we're saying grace, and try to do better.

  The natural world is the source of all life, including our big and dubious brains. The rest of nature would be grateful if we'd start using them wisely. "It is an error to say that we have 'conquered nature,'" FDR said in 1935, in the midst of an ecological crisis called the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression caused largely by wanton exploitation and destruction of land, forests and waters.  "We must, rather, start to shape our lives in a more harmonious relationship with nature."

Lots of other things are associated with family gatherings on Thanksgiving these days.  Those retailers have largely absorbed the holiday, with their extended pre-Christmas sales. Dispersal of families has meant travel has gone far beyond over the river and through the woods, and now involves the added tension of the busiest air travel time of the year. Thanksgiving also begins the holiday season when people measure themselves against a Norman Rockwell ideal, and find there are angry words, sulks, disappointment, bewilderments and tears as well as the occasional radiant smiles and gratitude.

Whether gratitude is part of the mix anymore is perhaps a matter of personal choice.  This year we may be thankful that things are not worse than they are, which may well itself become a Thanksgiving tradition.  

Busby Berkeley, Historian

 Busby Berkeley is both famous and notorious for his extravagant dance numbers in movies from the 1930s through the 1950s.  But at least in one instance, two of his musical numbers reflected the times and now attest to their history, though audiences today may not fully understand what they are about.

 “If you want to understand the key to Busby Berkeley’s choreography,” said Berkeley biographer Terry Thomas in a TCM documentary, “you have to consider the military.”

 In 1917, the 22 year-old Berkeley was drafted into the U.S. Army.  By the time he arrived in France as a field artillery lieutenant, the fighting was nearly over and American troops had little to do.  So he was tasked with marching and drilling them, and in the course of inventing new formations and maneuvers, he essentially invented the style that was to characterize the work of his career.  Except instead of just male soldiers, he had armies of beautiful young women, and a camera that found both large geometric patterns and the intimacies of faces and other elements of anatomy.

 After successfully bringing this style to Broadway (minus the camera), Berkeley was drafted by Hollywood.  He soon wound up at Warner Brothers for a series of movies that would revive both musical films and the studio’s fortunes.  He started with two of his most famous, back to back, both made and released in the depths of the Great Depression.

 The first was 42^nd Street, released in 1933.  Warners organized a big publicity campaign involving a train loaded with studio stars touring cities, culminating in the film’s premiere in Washington, D.C.  Jack Warner, head of the studio, was a fervent FDR backer, and he timed the 42^nd Street opening to Roosevelt’s Inauguration. 

42^nd Street was a big hit and a critical success.  It set the template for the series of Warners musicals that starred Berkeley’s choreography: a backstage story about mounting a show, then the featured numbers presented as the opening night.  The music by Harry Warren (with Al Dubin’s lyrics) was innovative in that it included a mix of styles, especially jazz influences.  But it wasn’t a complete break: there were plenty of soporific love melodies.

 Back in Hollywood immediately afterward, Berkeley worked on musical number for the next Warners musical, Gold Diggers of 1933. The story had been the basis for a play and a couple of movies with “Gold Diggers” in the title (and there would be more.)  Directed by Melvyn Le Roy, it was released later that year, and again, it was a major hit.

 Apart from the insipid and cringe-worthy numbers were two that spoke directly to the audience about elements of the Great Depression they had just experienced, and that would continue to affect their lives.

 We’re In The Money

 

The first was the now iconic presentation of the song, “We’re in the Money,” featuring a very young Ginger Rogers belting the tune (and singing part of it in Pig Latin crossed with jive) while seemingly wearing nothing but strategically placed coins (although some shots reveal she was wearing a body stocking.)

 The song is usually interpreted as wishful thinking about post-Depression prosperity, but it has a much more specific meaning that audiences in 1933 would understand.

 Upon taking office in March 1933, FDR first of all had to deal with the banking crisis, to keep money in circulation.  Deposits were guaranteed for the first time. Besides new jobs and relief programs, his administration bolstered the economy with price supports for farmers, a minimum wage for workers and uniform rules for businesses. 

But money was still too tight for economic growth, so FDR essentially took the country off dependence on gold as the backing for currency: the so-called Gold Standard.  Everyone knew about this because everyone in the country was required to turn in their gold coins (which came in various denominations) in exchange for paper money or silver, including silver dollars.  Going off the gold standard meant that the federal government could increase the money supply, and it did.  And that’s what “We’re In the Money” is about.

 It’s right there in the first verse:

 Gone are my blues and gone are my tears/

I've got good news to shout in your ears/

The long lost Dollar has come back to the fold/
With silver you can turn your dreams to gold, oh/

We're in the money/
We're in the money/
We've got a lot of what it takes to get along...

It’s been suggested that in this black and white movie, Ginger Rogers and the chorus girls, as well as the set itself, featured gold coins.  But the point is that they aren’t: the coins feature a caricature of the face on the silver dollar.  Those are the silver coins that represent the new flow of money resulting from FDR’s policies (“with silver you can turn your dreams to gold.”)  All of this would have been instantly clear to the 1933 audience.

 Remember My Forgotten Man

 A more poignant and equally specific reference is made in the last big production number, “Remember My Forgotten Man.”  The Depression is not a subtext: it is the text, and is dramatized.  There’s the obvious reference to FDR’s  “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” from a 1932 radio address.  But as Joan Blondell continues to sing about her specific forgotten man, he turns out to be a veteran of World War I. 

  The number features a solo by Etta Moten (who also dubbed part of Blondell’s singing), a distinguished Black singer whose Gospel background emphases the bluesy spiritual feel of this elegy.  

Again, the feeling was even more specific to the times, for the plight of World War I vets had been dramatized for all the country to see just the previous spring and summer of 1932.

 In the spring, thousands of American World War I veterans gathered in Washington, D.C. to petition Congress to pay them the war bonus they’d been promised for 1945, because they were in desperate straits.  They remained there in makeshift encampments, many with their families, through the summer, continuing to lobby Congress.  The press covered the story extensively, dubbing them the Bonus Army.

 The veterans organized themselves into units, led by officers.  In contrast to the armed forces in both world wars, their units and their camps were racially integrated.

 Things were at an impasse in late July, with Congress failing to provide the bonus and with President Hoover opposed to it. It was then that a police officer trying to clear away a crowd from the entrance to the Treasury Department panicked and shot a veteran dead.  Hoover called out the Army to settle things down.  Instead, General Douglas MacArthur decided to make war on the Bonus Army.

 MacArthur, with his officers including Major Dwight D. Eisenhower and Major George Patton, deployed tanks and tear gas, routing the veterans and burning down their camps with gasoline. (This was probably the first time tear gas was used by Americans on other Americans.)

  Patton led a cavalry charge with drawn sabers against unarmed men, women and children.  In a deadly irony pointed out by historian William Manchester, among those that Patton’s forces attacked was a World War I veteran decorated for saving the life of Patton himself. 

 Many of the veterans were literally run out of town, in trucks that took them west to Ohio and beyond.  Though newspaper stories of the day tended to support the government line that the Army had thwarted dangerous criminals and radicals, many Americans knew men who were there. Hoover never recovered his political reputation.  If he’d had any chance of winning the election that fall, it probably ended with his administration’s treatment of the Bonus Army. 

All of this could not have escaped the attention of that era’s veterans, like Busby Berkeley.  But the Bonus Army had also inspired a great deal of sympathy and support among the people who would be watching this movie. When they saw and heard “Remember My Forgotten Man,” they would likely remember the Bonus Army.  Even in this dubious context, this song was as close to a memorial that it would get.