The invention of Thanksgiving as a national holiday and its subsequent association with the Pilgrims in the twentieth century is a byproduct of two of the most important invented traditions in the US: the creation and celebration of public holidays and a new national and compulsory public education system.149 As described in the
introduction, Marxist historian and social theorist Eric Hobsbawm defines “invented traditions” as a nineteenth-century phenomenon meant to unite citizens under the organization of nation and national history rather than race, class, religion, or state.150
In the growing heterogeneity and modernization of the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, civic elites promoted Thanksgiving to the public as a holiday that sought to establish a core US identity based on Anglo-American, Protestant, and middle- class values.
Since President Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation in 1863, Thanksgiving had celebrated two interrelated units that the later Progressives feared were splintering: nation and family.151
As anthropologist Janet Siskind explains, “Thanksgiving
149 Hobsbawm, "Mass-Producing Traditions," 279-80.
150 Other authors also identify Thanksgiving as an invented tradition. See Baker, Thanksgiving: 102-03;
Pleck, "The Making of the Domestic Occasion," 774; Siskind, "The Invention of Thanksgiving," 169, 82- 83.
151 Pleck, Celebrating the Family: 22-24. Thanksgiving itself was not a nationally recognized annual
holiday until 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln, perhaps responding to Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale’s nearly twenty year campaign for Thanksgiving, issued a proclamation making the last Thursday in
November a national day of Thanksgiving. Along with a second proclamation in 1864, the last Thursday in November began “an unbroken tradition” of observing Thanksgiving as a national holiday until it became an official federal holiday in 1941. The Thanksgiving that emerged after the Civil War inaugurated a
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celebrates and obfuscates the destruction of community, constructing the family and nation as the only bastions against a Hobbesian world, and making the appearance of proper family relations, as demonstrated by full observance of the feast, the requirement and proof of national identity.”152
In this construction of Thanksgiving, “proper family relations” was conflated with “proof of national identity.” That is, Thanksgiving became an invented tradition to celebrate nation as family and family as nation.
Thanksgiving’s association of nation and family was symbolically accomplished through its association with the Pilgrims as the ideal immigrants beginning in the late nineteenth century. As former Director of Research at Plimoth Plantation James W. Baker observes, the first use of the Pilgrims in association with a national Thanksgiving in the late-nineteenth century falsely pointed to a historically linear US origin story based on the landing of the Mayflower and the hardships faced by the Pilgrims in equal, if not greater, proportion to the 1621 autumnal feast. That is, multiple aspects of the Pilgrim narrative, rather than just the 1621 feast, became associated with the Thanksgiving holiday.153 These narratives were part of the national origin story reflected in Daniel
Webster’s 1820 bicentennial oration speech examined in the introduction, which positioned New England as the place of the nation’s founding. Yet it was decades before the celebration of Thanksgiving gave these Puritan formations an annual and national platform on which to be remembered. To civic elites from around the country in the late nineteenth century, reaching back to the Pilgrims and forcing a linear continuity between “then” and “now” provided the best model for national identity in the rapid pace of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. Moreover, by representing the Pilgrims
national ritual that celebrated the nation and family though it still took several decades for the entire nation to celebrate it.
152 Siskind, "The Invention of Thanksgiving," 175.
153 The 1621 feast only became ubiquitous with the holiday in the mid-twentieth century. Baker,
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as the “ideal immigrant” they created a standard by which to judge what they considered as the less desirable immigrants of Southern and Eastern Europe.154
Though the US had seen a steady influx of European immigrants since at least the 1820s, the ethnic, religious, and class makeup of the immigrants arriving after 1880 greatly differed from the previous immigrants.155 Most of the new immigrants were from
Southern and Eastern Europe rather than Northern Europe, marking them as European but not of Anglo-Saxon or, in eugenicist terms, Teutonic descent.156 They were also
poorer, less educated, and lived in poverty around urban and/or industrial centers. They brought with them forms of Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and Eastern Orthodox churches that were less assimilable into the Protestant values of the US nation than previous immigrants who were mostly “evenly divided between Roman Catholics and Protestants” with a “considerable minority of German Jews, articulate rationalists, and religious radicals.”157
The use of the representation of the Pilgrims as the ideal immigrants to these new European immigrants also necessitated a change in representations of Native Americans in relation to the Pilgrims. It has only been since the 1950s that the seventeenth-century Native Americans have been represented ubiquitously as the friendly, helpful neighbors to the Pilgrims in the First Thanksgiving myth. During the first half of the twentieth century, their representations greatly vacillated, including instances where they were an absent presence, talked about but never seen. In the late nineteenth century, Baker even
154 See Siskind, "The Invention of Thanksgiving," 168, 83; Pleck, "The Making of the Domestic Occasion,"
778-84; Appelbaum, Thanksgiving: 221.
155 This is certainly not to say that European immigration to the US before 1880 always went smoothly. The antebellum Know Nothing party specifically developed around anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant views. Noll, The Old Religion in A New World: 123.
156 Eugenicists divided Europe into three races: Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. The eugenicists considered Teutonic, German and English, the best. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People: 855.
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observes that the visual representations of Pilgrims and Indians were actually “characterized by a climate of violence and tension between the New England colonists and the Native Americans.”158
For example, the 1869 image Thanksgiving Day in New
England Two Hundred Years Ago shows a white man running through a door chased by
flying arrows, signifying a Native American attack outside, as a Puritan family sitting to Thanksgiving dinner looks on in shock, fear, and surprise.159 Such depictions coincided
with the expansion of the Western frontier and the frontier skirmishes between Plains Indians and the US military and/or white settlers.
During the nineteenth century when these Thanksgiving images appeared, the US government’s strategy of Native American dispossession had focused primarily on the removal of Native Americans to land further west and/or allotment. Through most of the nineteenth century, allotment was a “recurrent feature of removal treaties” and under it, “certain tribal members would stay behind and, as proprietors of individual parcels of land, become agriculturalists.”160 The US government assumed that the “allottees would
sell their plots [to white buyers] in order to join tribal fellows who had moved west.”161
Thus, it was a legally sanctioned way for “[w]hite traders to recover debts incurred by individual Indians” when those white traders “bought” the Indian land.162 It was also
touted as a fair, but expedient way for white people to acquire more land and still move Native Americans further west.163
158 Baker, Thanksgiving: 108.
159 Ibid., 10-11.
160 Wolfe, "After the Frontier," 17. 161 Ibid., 18.
162 Ibid., 17.
163 Allotment was entirely dependent, however, on the idea that all Native Americans were nomads and not agriculturalists. This of course was a myth used to justify the subjugation and removal of Native Americans by white settlers and speculators. When Native American allottees chose not to sell, though not desirable to white land acquisition, Native Americans were seen as assimilable by the national imaginary and thus ceased to Indians. Ibid., 18-19.
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By the late nineteenth century, however, the option to remove Native Americans further west was quickly running out of western land on which to move them. Moreover, the land the government moved them to was not empty but already occupied by other Native American peoples with different languages and cultures. The mobility of the Plains Indians both in terms of the expanse of lands they occupied nomadically and their ability to fight and/or retreat quickly posed a particular problem to the US government and white travelers moving westward, which resulted in the creation of the reservation system.164 The reservation system delimited the land the Plains Indians could “possess”
and forced them to stay in one, predictable place. This “disappearing” of Native Americans to territories further west and/or to reservations correlated to the development of the spectral Indian in US literature that literary studies scholar Renée Bergland (2000) analyzes as well as representations of the living, but quickly disappearing Noble Savage in the work of such authors as James Fenimore Cooper.165
In the late nineteenth century visual representations of the Pilgrims and Indians, however, the narrative depicted was not one of nostalgia and ghosting but instead surrogated the Pilgrims for the (white) nineteenth-century pioneers moving west, settling on Native American land, and meeting Native resistance. This is not to say that all representations of Native Americans were violent at this time. Many representations remained, nostalgic, spectral, and/or an idealization of the Noble Savage. I argue instead images of colonial violence between the Pilgrims and Native Americans initially positioned the Pilgrims more as settlers than immigrants, which as I explained in the introduction, is an important differentiation to make.
164 Ibid., 28.
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However, two events happened at the turn of the twentieth century that seem to have begun changing the relationship between Native Americans and Pilgrims in the national imaginary: the close of the frontier and the unprecedented influx of Eastern and Southern European immigrants. With the official close of the frontier in 1890, the US government’s strategy of Native American dispossession changed from a focus on removal to one of assimilation.166 Under the Dawes Act of 1887, allotments became one
of the most preferred governmental modes of assimilation.167 Rather than being used in
conjunction with the removal of Native Americans from tribal lands as allotments previously had been, under the Dawes Act they functioned mainly as a means by which individual Native Americans became owners of private property within the reservation system.168
Humanitarians advocated strongly for the act because they “believed that communal landholding was an obstacle to the civilization they wanted the Indians to acquire.”169 By owning private land, humanitarians and politicians hope to break up the
communality of Native American tribes and to emphasize instead individual property ownership, one of the core values of the settler colonial mindset and the “progressive individualism of the American dream.”170 Moreover, reformers hoped that “individually
owned parcels of lands” would provide legal ground to “protect tribal reservations from
166 In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association. In it, he names 1890 as the official close of the Western frontier in the US. His address has been highly influential in the periodization of US—Native American policies and marks the passing of the visible Native American to invisible in cultural memory. Robert M. Utley, The
Indian Frontier, 1846-1890, Revised ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 249-50.
167 Another preferred mode was Indian boarding schools.
168 Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, vol. 1 and 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 666-67. “Indians who did not live on reservations or whose tribe had no reservation could make their selection on any part of the public domain, surveyed or not surveyed, and receive an allotment under the same provisions.” Ibid., 668.
169 Ibid., 669.
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the onslaught of the whites.”171 As settler colonialism studies scholar Patrick Wolfe
observes, however, in the decades following the Act, “Indian numbers rapidly hit the lowest level [government agencies] would ever record” and the “total acreage held by Indians in the United States fell by two thirds.”172
In addition to providing an alternative means of Native elimination and dispossession, the government’s overwhelming emphasis on Native American assimilation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also reflected how the US wished to assimilate its new European immigrants. Wolfe observes that “more direct modes of elimination” for Native Americans, such as removal and death, “would have conflicted with the establishment and legitimation of the rule of law among a diverse and potentially unruly [European] immigrant populace that was still in the making.”173 Thus,
the US government followed two different paths of assimilation: one for Native Americans via allotment and boarding schools and one for immigrants in such things as public education and public holidays. Thus, as these different modes of assimilation were being adopted, representations of the Pilgrims and Native Americans started to get friendlier as the Pilgrims became less associated with settlers, like the pioneers out West, and more with immigrants.
As I discussed in my introduction, representing the Pilgrims as the ideal immigrants belies the settler colonial founding history of the US. Choosing to represent the Pilgrims as peaceful immigrants who could get along with their indigenous neighbors rather than a more violent representation of colonial settlers helped promote the egalitarian and democratic values civic elites hoped to teach the new European immigrants. In the Pilgrims-as-ideal-immigrants narrative, these immigrants could be
171 Prucha, The Great Father, 669.
172 Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native," 400. 173 Wolfe, "After the Frontier," 34.
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worked into the settler component and, eventually, the structural whiteness of the settler- native-slave triad discussed in the introduction. Native Americans’ relationship to the US, however, remained as domestic foreigners. This is one of the ways that Native Americanness is seen in the US as subtractive. Whereas European immigrants could adopt hyphenated identities, Native Americans had to choose between Native or (“never quite white”) American.174
The position of actual and stereotyped Native Americans in the early twentieth century as well as the ways in which they were used in the First Thanksgiving myth demonstrates the double meaning of domestic as both the women’s sphere of the home and the nation as a domestic entity. The cult of domesticity was a nineteenth century derivation of separate spheres ideology. As historian and family studies scholar Elizabeth Pleck explains, it represented a “nineteenth-century ideal of the family” that both reflected and defined (white) middle-class values. The domestic sphere, or the home, represented the space of the (white) wife/mother where “she did the symbolic work of maintaining family feeling along with celebrating certain holidays.” 175
Victorian writers, especially white women, shaped conceptions of women’s labors as “labor[s] of love” rather than work.176
In this conception, women freely chose to uphold the emotional and physical well-being of the household.177 In American studies scholar Amy Kaplan’s
article “Manifest Domesticity,” she analyzes the coterminous development in the nineteenth century of Manifest Destiny and the cult of domesticity. She argues that imagining the nation as the domestic (home) is not merely metaphorical, but was also
174 Tuck and Yang, "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor," 12.
175 Pleck, Celebrating the Family: 16. 176 Ibid., 24.
177 The cult of domesticity as an ideal was predominantly available only to white middle- or upper-class women and often invisibilized the economic necessity of labor among working-class, women of color, and/or immigrant women. Ibid., 16-17.
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evidence of the scope of women’s influence outside the more traditionally understood women’s sphere in the nineteenth century. Specifically, she argues that “domesticity is more mobile and less stabilizing; it travels in contradictory circuits both to expand and contract the boundaries of home and nation and to produce shifting conceptions of the foreign.”178 In making this argument, Kaplan expands the traditional meaning of
domesticity in separate spheres ideology and the cult of domesticity to include women’s influence on the imperialist expansion and protection of the domestic, both home and nation, against (racialized) foreign influences.
While many gender studies scholars writing before and after Kaplan (and Pleck) have problematized separate spheres ideology as eliding the “lived experience” of women, I take from this article the ways in which (the cult of) domesticity was idealized in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century as well as the ways in which it was recycled into children’s toys and early education.179 As performance scholar Robin
Bernstein observes, “[f]ragmentary images or gestures often linger, altered yet recognizable, in the culture of childhood after they have receded or even disappeared from adult culture.”180 Things—nursery rhymes, stories, clothing, images—that began in
the province of adulthood in a given period and later transformed into the domain of
178 Amy Kaplan, "Manifest Domesticity," American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 583.
179 Anthropologist Deborah L. Rotman’s article “Separate Spheres? Beyond the Dichotomies of Domesticity” is one example of more recent scholarship that troubles the strict dichotomy imposed by assigning masculine and feminine to the public and private spheres, respectively. She observes in both her literature review and the evidence for her article that the “lived experiences of women and men…were more dynamic than this rigid dichotomy suggests.” Similarly, literary studies scholars Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher explain in the introduction to their anthology No More Separate Spheres!: A Next
Wave American Studies Reader that the purpose of the book is to “dismantle” the underpinnings and
assumptions of separate spheres ideology. Deborah L. Rotman, "Separate Spheres?: Beyond the Dichotomies of Domesticity," Current Anthropology 47, no. 4 (2006): 666; Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, "Introduction," in No More Separate Spheres!: A Next Wave American Studies Reader, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 8.
180 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University, 2011), 7.
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children often retain while making invisible the adult values of the culture that first created those things.181 In the case of Thanksgiving plays in the early twentieth century, I
argue, the idea of manifest domesticity was one of the main concepts recirculated into the children’s sphere.
The concept of “manifest domesticity” complicates an easy identification of who qualifies as “foreign” and “domestic” in US discourse and the national imaginary. Because the racial identity of the US nation was imagined as Anglo-Saxon and Protestant in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and arguably still is), people of color could never be fully incorporated into the US domestic nation even with citizenship. This left them in a murky spot between foreign and domestic. Kaplan argues that the overlapping languages of Manifest Destiny, foreign policy, and domesticity in the nineteenth century “heightened the fraught and contingent nature of the boundary between the domestic and the foreign, a boundary that breaks down around questions of the racial identity of the nation as home.”182 Here again, civic elites could incorporate
European immigrants into the domestic nation represented by the proto-American Pilgrims-as-ideal-immigrants by juxtaposing the Pilgrims against the Native American elements of the story.
Despite their indigeneity to the North American continent, Native Americans