The Anti-Thanksgiving Activism Dividing America Is Rooted In Ungratefulness

Not all Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. Indeed, corporate media have eagerly reported on the so-called “National Day of Mourning,” during which liberal activists and indigenous peoples “remember the suffering inflicted in the 1620s” and mourn “the struggles that Indigenous people continue to face today,” according to CNN. A few years ago, Salon published an article on millennials “growing weary about our collective celebration of Thanksgiving.” The author of a 2020 Vogue article declared “This year, however, I’m finally choosing not to be thankful, too.”

It’s not surprising that such protests are gaining in popularity among young Americans. An entire generation of Americans has been catechized in anti-racist political activism, their consciences malformed to constantly scrutinize every aspect of our culture for signs, however tenuous, of bigotry, colonialism, patriarchy, or white supremacy. Thanksgiving, young activists assess, seems guilty of all of the above, and thus must be defamed, dismantled, and replaced, much as innumerable other symbols of national unity have already been toppled. But is the activist narrative about Thanksgiving accurate? And if we repurpose or jettison the holidays that most effectively communicate our national identity and civil religion, what will replace it?

A Holiday of Gratitude

We typically think of Thanksgiving as a commemoration of a meal 401 years ago between recently-arrived English settlers and indigenous peoples in what is now New England. That 1621 event marked the Pilgrims’ first autumn harvest, as English settlers reaped the bounty of crops planted with the help of their Native American neighbors. And it truly was an exercise in true neighborly charity: colonists may have been outnumbered by more than two to one by the Native Americans in attendance, including a local chief, Massasoit.

Yet it was not until the Civil War that the event became an officially recognized national holiday. Before the war, a New England woman named Sarah Josepha Hale — author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” — lobbied state and federal officials to create a fixed, national day of thanks on the last Thursday of November. Hale believed that such a holiday might help ease rising tensions and divisions between northerners and southerners.

On October 3, 1863, a few months after the Battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation: “I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, …to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving.” Lincoln’s emphasis was expressly focused on gratitude towards God. He wrote:

“And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him …, 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 Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of