Tomorrow Is Thanksgiving

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I used to think that history is what it was. Period. But I now realize that I was wrong:

History is what it IS, period.

What do I mean about that?

Well, let’s take Thanksgiving. We were all taught as wee tots that Thanksgiving was about Pilgrim and Indian friends going out in the woods and slaughtering birds together (kind of a Dick Cheney hunting trip, in other words).

Somewhere along the line, the Mayflower Compact and Pocahontas somehow figure into the narrative, in half-recounted memory. For most of us, Thanksgiving is the annual national holiday wherein families by the millions endure countless metal detectors to gather together, eat the putative bird killed by said Pilgrim-Americans and Native Amerinds — to use a now forgotten, but once-fashionably Pee Cee label — to watch mediocre professional football; to renew ancient grievances and reopen old psychic wounds. This is our modern Thanksgiving.

Pee Cee is real in our society. But then, it has always been real in our society.

We have always HAD a First Amendment, but what that First Amendment constitutes has changed in our minds over the years. You could not yell Fire! in a crowded theater, famously. But ofttimes you could not swear, curse, blaspheme or otherwise speak “bad” words in public without going to jail.

There have always been subjects considered taboo, but, as they have changed, each era sees history through the myopic lens of its own particular moment, sometimes thinking themselves obviously superior to the earlier times, and other times thinking that it was an age of heroes and heroettes and mighty-thewed, two fisted writers.

Well, we forget that they had limitations in their way of thinking that we don’t share.

To them, it would be a miracle that I could write this on a keyboard and send it to Australia, where someone I “knew” and often conversed with in virtual “real time” could write me an answer.

To them, air conditioning would be akin to heaven. Even the Kings and Emperors had to endure the heat and the cold just like everyone else. Had to lose their teeth at an early age. Had to accept the speed of the horse as the World Speed Record.

It took an Englishman of Queen Victoria’s age the same amount of time to get from Rome to London as it had taken the Roman Emperor Hadrian to get from Rome to London centuries earlier. No one knew what the weather would ever be.

The reason that Jefferson had such a problematic relationship with his slaves is the same reason that Washington and Franklin didn’t attack the British fleet with death lasers. Americans would eventually end slavery — if you don’t count the conditions of the illegal worker in this country (almost exactly at the level of a Roman slave. )

But we fight in the NOW for what was the THEN. And it goes back and forth.

The conservative historians were routed from the universities in late sixties and early seventies. Now David Horowitz and Boards of Regents everywhere are trying to return the favor. Columbus Day was a celebration of WASPs coming to America. Now it’s a horrific reminder of the Indian Genocide. At some point between these two data points, Columbus Day was a celebration of Italian Americans coming from Italy to America in many large cities.

Go figure.

Each age has its own astigmatism. Our age, for instance, has been obsessed with “panty raids” of history, poking around in the underwear drawers of everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Helen of Troy, looking for incriminating Polaroids™ or, better yet, video tapes.

Other ages had theirs. The recent national experience of Ken Burns’ “The War” — a documentary series on PBS about the Second World War — was World War II seen through the eyes of Vietnam and Gulf War veterans. When John Wayne made the bizarrely anachronistic “The Green Berets,” Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War Two, had only three years to live.

Now, we learn that movie star Murphy was suffering from and lobbying for the diagnosis and treatment of what we now call “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.” In all the ages of man before us, it was called “Battle Fatigue” or “Shell Shock,” etcetera. We see it differently, because we are at a different vantage point on the mountain and can, theoretically, see more. Otherwise it’s OBVIOUS that Washington and Franklin erred when they DIDN’T use their death lasers against Howe’s British Fleet.

History is not at all what it was. They saw it VERY differently. Usage of Biblical passages was common because it was the one book that EVERYBODY HAD READ. But, as the Civil War showed us, widely different interpretations as to the “rightness” or the “wrongness” of human slavery itself was justified by the most eminent of theologians on BOTH sides, in the loftiest, grandest and most splendoriferous manner imaginable.

Had Burnside USED his death lasers at Antietam, instead of getting hung up on that stream for four hours, the war might have ended sooner, and we’d all be speaking Southern today. Oh. Wait.

The “first” modern Thanksgiving was a crossbred religious/political event created by the Lincoln Administration in an October 3, 1863 proclamation. According to Abraham Lincoln Online:

According to an April 1, 1864, letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln’s secretaries, this document was written by Secretary of State William Seward, and the original was in his handwriting. On October 3, 1863, fellow Cabinet member Gideon Welles recorded in his diary that he complimented Seward on his work. A year later the manuscript was sold to benefit Union troops.

And it is a cracker-jack piece of work. There had been a movement towards a fixed day of “Thanksgiving” in the North throughout the Civil War. In 1863, most especially, since that had been the summer of Vicksburg, Gettysburg and — with an almost eerie prescience — almost ON that first “Thanksgiving,” the decisive battles of Chattanooga (Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain) would be fought, from November 23rd to 25th, 1863, permanently reversing the fortunes of the South. From there it was on to Atlanta, and Sherman, famously, to the sea.

The last Thursday in November in 1863 was November 26th. The day after the battles of Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. In 1864, the “last Thursday in November” — as it is proclaimed by the OFFICE of the President (ghost-written by Seward in the fall, but not by folly) — falls on November 24th.

The war had turned, and the Lincoln Administration set the modern date upon which the Detroit Lions would play a humiliating game in the morning, and then the Dallas Cowboys’ “metoo” game in the afternoon. (The afternoon game would sometimes be interesting.)

History is not — and never can be — what it WAS.

History can only be what it IS. We can, at best and have an obligation TO try and remember that we wear blinders, too, and will be seen to be as ignorant or as fabulous by the future as we see the past.

So we see Thanksgiving differently than they did. Perhaps, for a moment, we can try to see what they saw when Thanksgiving first became our national Holiday, the only holiday contained within Sagittarius* (Christmas strikes in dour Capricorn, which ought to be prima facie evidence that astrology is a bunch of hooey).

[* Nov 22, 2007 -- 08:50 PST: Sun enters Sagittarius.
Dec 21, 2007 -- 22:08 PST: Sun enters Capricorn (Winter Solstice)]

Here was what “Abraham Lincoln” said, replete with biblical references, on October 3rd, 1863, and NOT 1864, as the Weekly Standard columnist so weirdly implies in the popular essay “Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving — Of Puritans, prayer, and the Capitol dome“:

Thanksgiving was celebrated intermittently after that until Lincoln declared a national Thanksgiving Day on the fourth Thursday of November, 1864, and this time the holiday stuck.

Lincoln’s devoutness grew throughout his life; when he spoke of God, he never spoke pro forma. In his message proclaiming that November 1864 Thanksgiving, he said that the Lord “has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war.” And he prayed for the “blessings of Peace, Union and Harmony throughout the land, which it has pleased him to assign as a dwelling-place for ourselves and for our posterity throughout all generations.” The Biblical language is typical of Lincoln. Like many Puritan-minded Americans, he thought of his country as a new promised land.

Thanksgiving has been celebrated annually ever since. But the day of thanksgiving Lincoln proposed in his last public speech that final April of his life was a bonus, over and above the annual observance.

Good grief. Even when Abraham Lincoln was actually William Seward? Astonishing that Lincoln’s devoutness could so inspire Seward’s hand. I wonder if that would be pro forma?

This is the seduction of trying to make history conform to one’s ends. It is one thing to find an historical example that buttresses one’s own view. It is another to slant an historical event to force it to conform to that selfsame personal view. And yet, it happens all the time. David Gelernter is an idiot here, true: but he is not alone in his idiocracy by a long shot. (Or, colloquially by “a fur piece” but we shall leave Michelle Malkin out of today’s discussion).

The Lincoln message is magnificent in its own way, and does not have anything whatsoever to do with the 2005 political spin that the Weekly Standard (11/28/2005, Volume 011, Issue 11) was using it for — i.e.:

We are fighting a different war today. Like the Civil War, it began for reasons of self-interest and self-defense–fair grounds for war. Today we see a larger goal: to liberate Iraq; to fight tyranny and spread democracy. The casualties of Iraq are minute relative to those of the Civil War, though the grief caused by each is just as great; and the Iraq war is proving (like the Civil War) to be longer and harder than we ever imagined [No comment on the double entendre here. -- HW] . Do we have the resolve and steady purpose and high ideals and guts we had then?

David Gelernter is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. His book on Americanism is due to be published next year by Doubleday.

Er, WHOOPS! That’s another pitfall of history: that which seemed so self-evidently true can rapidly come to look foolish, in retrospect.

A late friend of mine — a talented science fiction writer Paul Bond — observed to me in 1976 that nobody ever didn’t like the Beatles … THEN. They might have hated the Beatles when they came out, but nobody REMEMBERED that, or would admit it, which eventually became REMEMBERING that they liked the Beatles. History was rewritten retroactively.

That’s one of the reasons that I pay close attention to the immediate reports about events, and usually note HOW UTTERLY WRONG those first reports generally turn out to be. We have no collective sense, nor, in most cases, any INDIVIDUAL sense of living IN history.

We rewrite history in the most self-congratulatory manner — to ourselves and for our beliefs, e.g. That HORRIBLE Thomas Jefferson, sleeping with a slave, a teen-aged girl, etcetera, etcetera.

And that is history’s trap: to use it as justification and not as the wisdom of those who came before … the traps NOT to fall into, one of them being to misuse history to justify disastrous and predictable policies.

Like Iraq. (And the rationalization of a “preemptive war” — which is historically and personally insupportable.)

Why Jefferson didn’t use death lasers on the Barbary Pirates is left, bizarrely, an open question, as a result.

So, in a sense, we all HAVE to be a little partisan about history. It can never be “just” what it was. It always has to be what it IS, to us, right now, in THIS moment. Here is what Seward’s pen laid down in 1863, and it meant something different to them, then, but it is still a remarkable summation of what the world looked like to the North in the autumn of that turning point year, 1863 (I am going to provide them with modern paragraphs). Note the astonishing economic insight about the war, one that is never discussed in history books:

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. [emphasis added -- HW]

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.*

[Note: Nothing pro forma about the preceding paragraph. -- HW]

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln

William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

[The digital photos of the actual proclamation from the National Archives are HERE: Page 1 . Page 2 . Page 3 ]

So there we go. Except, not so fast. There’s another chapter to the story. According to History dot com’s “This Day In History” for Nov 26:

November 26, 1941
FDR establishes modern Thanksgiving holiday

… Thanksgiving became an annual custom throughout New England in the 17th century, and in 1777 the Continental Congress declared the first national American Thanksgiving following the Patriot victory at Saratoga. In 1789, President George Washington became the first president to proclaim a Thanksgiving holiday, when, at the request of Congress, he proclaimed November 26, a Tuesday, as a day of national thanksgiving for the U.S. Constitution. However, it was not until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving to fall on the last Thursday of November, that the modern holiday was celebrated nationally.

With a few deviations, Lincoln’s precedent was followed annually by every subsequent president–until 1939. In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt departed from tradition by declaring November 23, the next to last Thursday that year, as Thanksgiving Day. Considerable controversy surrounded this deviation, and some Americans refused to honor Roosevelt’s declaration. For the next two years, Roosevelt repeated the unpopular proclamation, but on November 26, 1941,* [less than two weeks before Pearl Harbor -- HW] he admitted his mistake and signed a bill into law officially making the fourth Thursday in November the national holiday of Thanksgiving Day.

The same day, ironically, that fell, in 1863, on November 26.

So, yes, I was wrong. History is, in a sense, an ongoing battle of interpretations, and we should be very careful about accepting the view that events in the past are fixed. They are not: In fact, they move around all the time.

The “failure” of the Grant Administration (which even has scandals attributed to it, like the Crédit Mobilier scandal, that didn’t occur DURING Grant’s 1869-1877 presidency) was more the result of the loss, by Union historians, of a battle of pens about post Civil War history. Grant has been needlessly and shamefully slurred for far too long. Because the battle for the WHAT of history has been lost. Not because of anything that General Grant did.*

[* Grant was, during the same period denigrated as a general. Noted military strategist Richard M. Nixon certainly bought into it:

When Richard Nixon told Eisenhower in 1956 that it was common knowledge Stonewall Jackson was the greatest Civil War general, followed by Lee, Eisenhower interrupted him:

“I wouldn’t say that, Dick. In fact I think it’s not a very reasoned opinion. You forget that Grant captured three armies intact, moved and coordinated his forces in a way that baffles military logic yet succeeded and he concluded the war one year after being entrusted with that aim. I’d say that was one hell of a piece of soldiering extending over a period of four years, the same time we were in the last war.”

Dulles, who was present, remarked that Nixon said nothing in response!

General Eisenhower also stated that Grant’s memoirs were the best military memoirs ever written. [Note: scroll down below Teddy Roosevelt's assessment. -- HW]

History is an inherently partisan pursuit. We have to actively seek out truths in it, and refuse to capitulate to the easy and convenient interpretation: we have to be as honest about history as we can bear to be honest with ourselves ABOUT ourselves. Both are tough, but history is easier.

The Grant Administration was popular and effective*, and he was the only American president to serve two consecutive terms between Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson (Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, if you count presidents who served their entire 8 years). But facts THEN and facts NOW have proven disappointingly malleable. Thus, the hammer of history must ever be at the ready to stand for a reasonable interpretation of the “facts” of history.

[* “Grant pushed hard for the ratification of the 15th Amendment, crushed the Ku Klux Klan, and held the devoted support of Frederick Douglass. His crusade for union during Reconstruction became more determined with each passing year. Additionally, he became more partisan; he associated the Democratic Party with systematic attempts to destroy the rights of blacks. As Grant put it, ‘I am a Republican because I am an American, and because I believe the first duty of an American—the paramount duty—is to save the results of the war’.”]

It is dangerous to blindly accept a new “spin.” Witness the famed battle of the Alamo, which always somehow manages to omit that a big reason, if not THE biggest reason for the Texans’ rebellion against Mexico was because Mexico had OUTLAWED slavery, and the white “Texians” didn’t cotton to that.

If history has taught us anything, it’s that “history” can be used to justify the most horrifying atrocities ever dreamt in the minds of Womankind throughout herstory.

Which is why “P.C.” is far more than a mere syntactical debate, a grammarians’ disagreement. It gets to the fundamental base of our political consensus. (And remember, to this very day, Abraham Lincoln is reviled in neoconfederate circles as a communist, a homosexual, et al.)

So, it is not only important but even mandatory to “have a side” in the language wars. Are we OK with “Islamofascism”? With “Death Tax”? With “Chairperson,” or “Current Era” and “Before Current Era”? These are not trivial matters.

(Indeed, the “CE/BCE” versus “AD/BC” strikes to the very heart of how we index history!)

Here’s an interesting quote from a non-American for Thanksgiving, but something to think about nonetheless. It’s from an essay by Will Durant, entitled “What is Wisdom?”

“May my son study history,” said Napoleon, “for it is the only true philosophy, the only true psychology;” thereby we learn both the nature and the possibilities of man. The past is not dead; it is the sum of the factors operating in the present. The present is the past rolled up into a moment for action; the past is the present unraveled in history for our understanding.

Therefore invite the great men of the past into your homes. Put their works or lives on your shelves as books, their architecture, sculpture, and painting on your walls as pictures; let them play their music for you. Attune your ears to Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy. Make room in your rooms for Confucius, Buddha, Plato, Euripides, Lucretius, Christ, Seneca, Montaigne, Marcus Aurelius, Heloise, Shakespeare, Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Gibbon, Goethe, Shelley, Keats, Heine, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spengler, Anatole France, Albert Schweitzer. Let these men be your comrades, your bedfellows; give them half an hour each day; slowly they will share in remaking you to perspective, tolerance, wisdom, and a more avid love of a deepened life.

Don’t think of these men as dead; they will be alive hundreds of years after I shall be dead. They live in a magic City of God, peopled by all the geniuses — the great statesmen, poets, artists, philosophers, women, lovers, saints — whom humanity keeps alive in its memory.

Plato is there, leading his students through geometry to philosophy; Spinoza is there, polishing his lenses, inhaling dust and exhaling wisdom; Goethe is there, thirsting like Faust for knowledge and loveliness, and falling in love at seventy-three; Mendelssohn is there, teaching Goethe to savor Beethoven; Shelley is there, with peanuts in one pocket and raisins in the other and content with them as a well-balanced meal; they are all there in that amazing treasure house of our race, that veritable Fort Knox of wisdom and beauty; patiently there they wait for you.

Be bold, young lovers of wisdom, and enter with open hands and minds the City of God.

Oh, and Bush pardoned some turkeys (other than Scooter Libby. That one’s still ahead).

Courage.

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