The original Thanksgiving booster

Posted 8/21/12

REGION — Most Americans know that the first Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims in the fall of 1621, with a feast that was shared with many members of the Wampanoag Tribe of Native …

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The original Thanksgiving booster

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REGION — Most Americans know that the first Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims in the fall of 1621, with a feast that was shared with many members of the Wampanoag Tribe of Native Americans. What’s not as well known is that it did not become a national holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November until many years later.

The person credited with doing the most to advocate that Thanksgiving should become a national holiday celebrated by all states, on the same day of the year, was a writer and editor named Sarah Josepha Hale, who became a widow at a young age, and turned to literature to support her five children.

Hale, who is credited with having written the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” was the “editress” of Godey’s Lady’s Book, an influential Philadelphia magazine, when she wrote her first editorial about Thanksgiving in 1837. At the time the holiday was celebrated in New England and some other states, but not in all states. Hale wrote that Thanksgiving, “might without inconvenience, be observed on the same day of November, say the last Thursday in the month, throughout all New England; and also in our sister states, who have engrafted it upon their social system. It would then have a national character, which would, eventually, induce all the states to join in the commemoration of ‘In-gathering,’ which it celebrates. It is a festival which will never become obsolete, for it cherishes the best affections of the heart.”

In 1846, Hale began a sustained campaign to make the holiday a national one with an editorial about the topic every year, and letters to five presidents. Finally, in 1863 she wrote a letter to President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War, asking him to issue a proclamation for a Day of National Thanksgiving.

He complied, writing, in part, “In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity… order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater 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 defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax 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…

“It has seemed to me fit and proper that [these gifts] 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….”

Hale considered this a great accomplishment; still, however much power a presidential proclamation had at the time, the day was not set in stone. The next president, Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation saying Thanksgiving should be celebrated on the first Thursday in September.

The matter was finally settled completely when the Senate and House of Representatives passed a bill saying that Thanksgiving would be celebrated every year on the fourth Thursday of November, and President Franklin Roosevelt signed the bill into law on November 26, 1941.

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