The Power of Gratitude and History

Thanksgiving 2024

In some respects, Thanksgiving is a countercultural holiday in 2024.

Especially in elite cultural circles, grievance—not gratitude—is the quintessential source of legitimization. James Davison Hunter explored in his recent book Democracy and Solidarity how toxic this process of legitimacy-through-grievance can be. It encourages a cultivation of resentment and a suspicion of other people. It also speaks to the fracturing of the public square: rather than addressing the common good, we nurse our own peculiar ills. Grievance focuses on harms, while gratitude points toward some good.

Compounding this psychology of grievance, denigrating our American cultural inheritance remains a powerful signaling mechanism within elite culture. Dismissing the United States as essentially tainted may weaken the social compact—but at least it shows those at the commanding heights that you’re on the “right” side. Thus, deconstructions of Thanksgiving as somehow “problematic” have become de rigueur during this season.

So as a bit of counterprogramming, I’ll link to one of my favorite essays: a long piece I wrote for National Review in November 2020 on the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower. I looked what the National Monument to the Forefathers in Plymouth, Massachusetts can teach us about history and the complexities of the American experiment.

Here’s an excerpt:

As the past year attests, historical narratives can themselves be contested. Emphasizing 1607, 1619, 1620, 1776, or 1787 as a year of “founding” has significant intellectual consequences. Even if one avoids a narrative of history that ignores either the vices or virtues of a national past, the question of how best to balance the two will remain, continuing to provoke controversy. And, as the Pilgrim monument illustrates, historical commemoration can act as a vehicle for advancing certain substantive claims.

Still, it’s possible to see in the voyage of the Mayflower a lesson in pluralism and compromise. Pilgrim separatists and “strangers” — those who did not subscribe to separatist theology — both sailed on that ship. They had to come together for the Plymouth Colony to have a chance of being successful, and even then needed help from the Native Americans. The establishment of Plymouth was a perilous enterprise. About half the Pilgrims died before the first Thanksgiving in 1621. In the Mayflower Compact, stranger and separatist both pledged to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic” and to “frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony.” From its very beginnings, the Plymouth commonwealth was a body politic built from heterogeneity.

Even as proponents of the Pilgrims-as-founders thesis appealed to the specificity of New England, they also offered the Pilgrims as more capacious forefathers. In a letter promoting Billings’s design for the monument, Edward Everett argued that the work would signal “the co-operation of the descendants of the Pilgrims in every part of the Country and of all who are now in the enjoyment of the goodly heritage for which . . . we are so largely indebted to the Pilgrim Fathers.” The “goodly heritage” of the Pilgrim experiment embraces both the Pilgrims’ direct descendants and those who have other lineages. Salmon P. Chase, for instance, offered the Pilgrims as prefiguring the pioneers heading westward: “There was in 1788 to be seen wending its way from among the hills of Berkshire towards the setting sun a train of rude wagons, in which, as in the Mayflower of 1620, were garnered the destinies of the mighty West.” Many since then have seen in the voyage of the Mayflower an anticipation of the waves of immigration that have perpetually changed the United States — of sojourners setting out for a new land. (There is, of course, a crucial difference between immigrant and Pilgrim; immigrants seek to join an existing political order, while the Pilgrims sought to found a new one. But such blurriness is not uncommon in historical allusions.)

The Monument to the Forefathers is meant to offer a presentation of the goods within Everett’s “goodly heritage.” This is not to deny the legacy of pain, cruelty, and wickedness also found within that heritage. The arrival of the English led to conflict between native tribes and European settlers. The story of the American republic includes the enslavement of both Native Americans and Africans, expropriation of land, and mass slaughter. And while 19th-century proponents of pluralism might have appealed to the Pilgrim narrative, the Pilgrims themselves were not particularly devoted pluralists; to take just one example, Plymouth Colony imposed restrictions on Quakers and Native Americans. Even as devoted an advocate of the Pilgrim-founding thesis as Webster could not deny the dark parts of American history: His 1820 speech on the Pilgrims also lamented the “contamination” of the slave trade. Hagiographic history, he implied, cannot entirely obscure the “smoke of the furnaces where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs.”

If history often does play a legitimating role in a pluralistic society, attention to it can at once recognize its wrongs and offer a more inclusive account of the body politic. Both separatist Pilgrim and stranger, slave and slave-owner, played a role in building the American republic — and we Americans have inherited their wrongs along with the nobler parts of their legacy. Especially in a society as multiethnic as ours, questions of identity often intertwine with those of history. Celebrating the nation’s “goodly heritage” could be a way to create a bond across identities. Perhaps the leading advocate for a national Thanksgiving holiday, the influential editor Sarah Josepha Hale, argued that a festival of common gratitude and fellowship could be a way of unifying the country. As she wrote to Lincoln in the fall of 1863, months before he established the federal holiday, Thanksgiving could be a “National and fixed Union Festival.”

Ultimately, this appeal to historical founding was not enough to forestall conflict. It was not invocations of the Pilgrims or memory’s chords alone that saved the Union; it also took the blood spilled in the fields of Antietam, Vicksburg, and Gettysburg. Convictions — that the Union was worth preserving, that slavery must be extirpated — played a central role, but flesh and force were required to actualize them. The sacrifices the war demanded were justified not only by appeals to abstract procedure, but also by appeals to substantive commitments and duties. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” written by Julia Ward Howe’s electric pen, echoes with the lines, “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free / While God is marching on.”

You can also check out this James Panero essay on Plymouth Rock in the New Criterion from around the same time period.

This Thanksgiving, let’s rise to the challenge of gratitude.