Going to try to catch a flight to AZ tomorrow to spend part of Thanksgiving weekend with the relatives. I have a few words to add to this post I wrote several years ago on Thanksgiving. On Facebook I was reminded that George Washington himself issued a proclamation of a general thanksgiving. Bill Kauffman remarks on the reaction of other early presidents to this idea.
Yesterday my class watched the movie version of Who's that Stepping on Plymouth Rock? A bit of Yankee triumphalism, focused on the significance of the Pilgrims' arrival in Massachusetts, though the New England Calvinism had been replaced by a secularized ethos. Why should Virginians remember the Pilgrims instead of those who had come to Jamestown? History should first of all be the story of one's forefathers and leading men of one's people, not of some other group's forefathers. Why shouldn't Virginians commemorate the first thanksgiving celebration in the colony instead? Alas, many have been influenced by the nationalist myth which maintains that America is just one people, even though this is not sustainable, especially as non-white immigrants enter the country and do not assimilate except superficially.
While I watched the video I wondered how quickly the Calvinists of Massachusetts were overrun and supplanted by subsequent waves of immigrants in the two centuries following the landing at Plymouth Rock. (Or am I getting my Massachussetts history wrong?) How many of the newcomers identified with the Calvinists and their religious ideals? How many were actually assimilated into the cohesive communities that pre-existed their arrival, and how many of these Calvinist enclaves remained after the Revolution? (Let's keep the Calvinist culture and identity separate from the Yankee culture and identity, even though the second may be derivative from the first? What's a decent history of Massachusetts/New England that examines the shifts in [elite] culture?)
Again, a comparison between the American colonies and the Greek colonies of the classical world may yield some causes of why the American "experiment" was bound to fail. Did Greek colonies welcome Greeks from cities other than the mother city, or was did further influxes of settlers primarily come from the mother city? Were they automatically granted citizenship? And did they maintain the culture and identity of the mother city, or was it a pan-Hellenic identity first and foremost? What links were maintained with the mother city?
What pockets of community and culture existed before the Revolution and survived? And how much of Uhmerican atomism can be traced to the cultural fragmentation that existed within the original colonies (as opposed to a cultural tendency towards excessive mobility)?
I still think that Thanksgiving should be kept local and linked explicitly with a harvest, rather than being a part of the nationalist/unitarian mythos.
I have not yet watched the extended cut of The New World.
Related:
America's Historic Triangle
Historic Jamestowne Museum
Thanksgiving Homily, Catholic Style
The Proletarian Mind
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