Thanksgiving, a Celebration of Inequality
For decades, Gilded Age populists and secularist crusaders criticized the holiday’s gospel of abundance.
"A Thanksgiving Reminder," one of several of the illustrator Watson Heston's anti-Thanksgiving cartoons from the late 1800 (Center for Research Libraries)
LEIGH ERIC SCHMIDT
NOV 22, 2016
For over a decade, Fox News has made it a talking point that Christmas is under siege from liberals. Bill O’Reilly has promoted the meme with almost singular relish, but the notion that secularists are conspiring to suppress Christmas has become a recurrent battle cry on the right. A wan expression of seasonal greetings—say, a tossed-off “Happy Holidays” in place of “Merry Christmas”—has become an apocalyptic sign of the end of Christian America. Indeed, the war on Christmas is among the liberal plots that President-elect Donald Trump has explicitly pledged to foil.
Christmas, though, has long been beleaguered as a religious holiday. The Puritans found it such a mix of bacchanalian paganism and Catholic ritualism that they tried to erase it entirely from the Protestant calendar. One of the most effective evangelists of the early republic, the Methodist Francis Asbury, simply despaired of redeeming the holiday’s drunken excess: “Christmas day,” he lamented in 1805, “is the worst in the whole year on which to preach Christ.” No wonder that most 19th-century liberals and freethinkers did not worry very much about the need to secularize Christmas: The holiday season belonged to them at least as much as to churchgoers, what with the street revelry, the store-window Santas, the mistletoe, the feasting, the shopping and gift-giving.
Thanksgiving, however, was another matter. To secularists, that holiday, sanctified by the story of the Pilgrims and by solemn invocations of divine blessing, was definitely worth fighting over. As one freethought editorial proclaimed in 1889, “We hope to live long enough to see a purely human thanksgiving day, with no hint of God in it, with no religious meaning ascribed to it.”
The debate over what tone presidents should set with their Thanksgiving proclamations was as old as the nation itself. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had famously split over the issuing of such civic religious pronouncements during their presidencies (Adams assented; Jefferson refused). But the conflict escalated during and after the Civil War, as the holiday was promoted as a national rite of reconciliation and patriotic concord. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln had proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving in language replete with religious allusion, imagining the Union under the “the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God” and imploring “the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/11/thanksgiving-a-celebration-of-inequality/508346/