Returning to Thanksgiving

A fter the armistice that ended the First World War, the hungry and weary citizens of Chateau Thierry, France, slowly began to rebuild their town. Amid the devastation and suffering, they nonetheless took time to write a memorandum for the American people. Chateau Thierry sent the message as a “testimony to the gratitude and fraternal sympathy” they felt for the “great republic” and for its soldiers who had liberated them. Amid ruin and meager material possessions, one small French town felt gratitude for a republic 3,000 miles away, which most of them never had and never would visit.

Gratitude for the United States is hard to come by these days. Intellectually, it’s quite en vogue in fact to argue that the United States is a particularly pernicious polity. As various original sins are presented as the foundations for the American republic, it’s not hard to understand how Americans, particularly younger Americans, might think the world would have been better off had the union never existed. But gratitude and thanksgiving for the United States and constitutional liberty have been important aspects of American civil, cultural, and social life since the beginning of the republic.

George Washington declared in 1789 that it was “the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor.” He recommended “to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God,” especially His affording them an opportunity peaceably to “establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”

In 1863, during the darkest days of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln saw gratitude as not a mere momentary necessity in response to a momentary blessing, but a repetitive necessity to maintain the American republic. As Lincoln had earlier articulated in his Lyceum address, Americans had been blessed with “a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us.” The Civil War was making it possible for all Americans to be “legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings.” Creating a republic devoted to ordered human liberty, argued Lincoln, had been the task of the Founding generations. The task of “gratitude to our fathers” would lead to “justice to ourselves.” “Duty to posterity” and love for humanity, in general, required Americans to maintain true liberty bequeathed by the Constitution.

Thanksgiving began as a northern holiday, but after the Civil War it slowly made its way south. Black Americans quickly picked up the holiday as well. Benjamin Arnette, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, encouraged black Americans on Thanksgiving Day 1876 to “love their country, and look not on the sins of the past,” but instead prepare to fight for their rights, “meet the demands of the age, and satisfy the duties of the hour.”

By the 20th century, Thanksgiving had transformed from a holiday devoted to federal military victories to a day for all Americans of all races and religions to commemorate. Late 19th-century politicians increasingly pivoted their Thanksgiving proclamations away from a Puritan or Calvinist-sounding religious tone toward nonsectarian ones offering thanks to God for natural human blessings such as family, bountiful harvests, civil liberties, and general prosperity. Accordingly, Catholics and Jews began celebrating American Thanksgiving while retaining aspects of their heritage. But the awareness that these blessings were maintained by the American republic and a virtuous citizenry was never lost.

Thanksgiving’s popularity lay in the widespread acceptance that the United States, despite its flaws, still offered more freedom than any other country. Indeed, gratitude to God for the religious liberty we enjoy in a flourishing pluralistic society built on constitutional freedoms was not partisan, nor was it perceived to be racially exclusive. Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Thanksgiving proclamation rejoiced “in the fact that, while we have maintained separate institutions of church and state over our 200 years of freedom, we have at the same time preserved reverence for spiritual beliefs. Although we are a pluralistic society, the giving of thanks can be a true bond of unity among our people.” Americans united “in gratitude for our Nation’s peace and prosperity when so many in this world have neither.”

Today, Americans remain among the most prosperous and free people in the world. Generations of Americans preceding us endured far worse circumstances and witnessed far worse injustices, all the while believing that their country was worthy of their gratitude and that thanksgiving was a necessary posture toward God and their fellow man. Counting the blessings we receive from our country — instead of enumerating her sins — would certainly help our own time relearn and maintain the blessings of liberty that so many seem so willing to give up.