Bitchy History - November 23, 2023


Thanksgiving： ＂It’s a sham, but it’s a sham with yams. It’s a yam sham!＂


Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

179.09

Word count

4,020

Sentence count

143

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Welcome to Bitchy History, the irreverent history podcast that would like to remind you that while history is always inherently political, history should never be politicized. 0.69
00:00:24.600 Hey everybody, and happy ritual sacrifice with Pi Day to everyone who is celebrating it. 0.94
00:00:30.000 And if you don't get that joke, go watch the Thanksgiving episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you Philistines. 0.98
00:00:35.740 Today's episode is actually an old one that I've re-edited from slightly earlier this year on the history of the so-called first Thanksgiving. 0.64
00:00:43.520 Feel free to listen to the episode in the midst of your family Thanksgiving gathering and report back to me about how many people get mad.
00:00:50.460 Now, on to the history. 0.58
00:00:52.560 Welcome to episode 9 of Bitchy History, where we will finally talk about the history of the quote-unquote first Thanksgiving.
00:00:59.160 and I put heavy emphasis on the quotes here because it was neither the first celebratory
00:01:04.300 meal of gratitude between Europeans and natives and by European standards it also wasn't a
00:01:10.000 Thanksgiving at all but we'll get into how the modern day view of this event came about later
00:01:14.560 in this episode. As I mentioned in episode 7 when I first introduced the concept of the Puritans
00:01:19.940 and their journey to America to this show, most of us grew up with a very child-friendly view of
00:01:25.400 the first thanksgiving squanto helped the pilgrims grow their crops and in return the pilgrims expressed
00:01:30.420 their gratitude by extending an invitation to squanto's tribe to join their festivities on the
00:01:34.940 first thanksgiving nope sorry it didn't happen that way and as we got older some of us learned
00:01:42.900 a much darker version of the story about the pilgrims and the natives we learned of murder
00:01:47.280 and war and oppression and that became the grim dark version of the first thanksgiving
00:01:52.060 Kind of like what would happen if you set the writing team from Riverdale loose on Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving special.
00:01:57.820 But seriously though, how did Archie Comics go from this
00:02:01.480 to this
00:02:21.520 I just have, you know, a couple of questions, that's all.
00:02:26.840 But that's a topic for a very different podcast, not just a different episode.
00:02:30.960 One day, I'll start a scathing pop culture review podcast
00:02:34.220 just to be able to have an excuse to mock Riverdale, but that's not the point of today.
00:02:38.860 So that grim, dark version of illness, oppression, and death,
00:02:42.540 how does that one pass the accuracy test as far as the first Thanksgiving goes?
00:02:46.620 i mean here's the thing it's less wrong in some ways at least in the greater context of how the
00:02:53.800 relationship between the pilgrims and natives would end up playing out but it just skips a
00:02:58.420 few steps between that first successful harvest feast and the massacring of the natives the so
00:03:03.480 called first thanksgiving and the relationship between the natives and puritans of plymouth
00:03:07.560 was neither as friendly as our childhood thanksgiving pageants made it seem nor as
00:03:12.580 violent and oppressive as our modern understanding of colonialist oppression might make it seem.
00:03:17.600 The violence would come, make no mistake, but for one brief moment and place in time and geography,
00:03:23.840 cooperation between natives and English colonizers seemed possible before the English Puritans
00:03:29.000 completely demolished that opportunity. So what actually happened with that first Thanksgiving?
00:03:34.680 Well, first of all, the Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to come to that area of the New
00:03:38.800 world. In fact, the area of Plymouth wasn't even named by the Pilgrims. In 1616, Captain John Smith,
00:03:45.320 yes, that John Smith, surveyed the area of New England and created a map of the area. On that
00:03:51.260 map, he labeled the area of what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts as New Plymouth. In a description of
00:03:57.360 New England, Smith endorsed New Plymouth as an excellent good harbor, good land, and no want of
00:04:02.480 anything but industrious people. Peter Firstbrook, in his book A Man Most Driven, points out that
00:04:08.040 Smith rather completely ignored the fact that there were industrious native people there already,
00:04:13.580 which is definitely fair. Colonialist types of this period did that a lot. By the way, 1.00
00:04:18.500 if you have an interest in First Brook's book, a link to it is listed on my website.
00:04:22.680 In any case, there had been Europeans coming and going from this area for a while now,
00:04:27.060 so the pilgrims were not coming into a vacuum where the natives had no understanding of or
00:04:31.760 experience with white people, and so far that experience had been not great.
00:04:38.040 So the Pilgrims make landfall at Plymouth on November 11, 1620, and for any of you that have 0.75
00:04:43.620 experienced a Massachusetts winter, it should be clear why that's a problem. They didn't have an
00:04:48.460 established colony, and winter was far colder than they'd been prepared for. Despite this,
00:04:53.040 they begin to look for a settlement site, because that's kind of the whole point of being there.
00:04:57.480 By mid-December, they've settled on an abandoned village which had previously been inhabited by
00:05:01.880 the Patuxet tribe. But what will they do when the Patuxet come back? Oh, don't worry about that. 0.77
00:05:06.600 the Patuxet are basically all dead because of an epidemic, probably caused by European diseases.
00:05:11.700 So no one is using this village right now. It's free real estate.
00:05:17.080 But even though they had finally chosen a settlement site, because they arrived very
00:05:21.120 late in the season, the building of houses was delayed, and the colonists had to basically
00:05:25.360 spend most of their winter on board the ship. Most of the passengers got sick. Many suffered
00:05:30.340 from scurvy, which as a side note, is my worst nightmare. I eat vitamin C like it's candy.
00:05:35.860 Look up the symptoms of scurvy if you want to also begin mainlining orange juice like it's the only thing between you and death.
00:05:42.520 Anyway, 45 of the original 102 colonists end up dying that winter, which is a pretty high death toll.
00:05:49.700 After that harrowing winter, the pilgrims would begin to build up their settlement in the Massachusetts Bay Area.
00:05:55.400 The pilgrims wouldn't make contact with the local natives until March of 1621, which makes a lot of sense.
00:06:00.680 The natives were like me, not going anywhere once it starts to snow unless it's 100% necessary for
00:06:06.680 survival. Samoset, an Abenaki chief who spoke some English, is the first of the native tribes to make
00:06:12.140 contact with the colonists. Samoset gives them the rundown of all the local important leaders of the
00:06:17.020 region, including the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, Massasoit. If you listened to episode 7, that name
00:06:22.600 should be a little bit familiar to you. The Wampanoag tribe, under the leadership of Massasoit, is where
00:06:27.820 Roger Williams goes to stay after being banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. At the very
00:06:32.540 least, we know that Williams had maintained friendly relationships with the Wampanoag well
00:06:36.820 into the 1630s. Samoset agrees to arrange a meeting with Massasoit, which will begin a
00:06:41.960 mutually beneficial trade agreement between the two groups, as well as a treaty in which both
00:06:46.520 groups would provide aid for the other when they were in conflict, like a very small 17th century
00:06:51.720 version of NAFTA and NATO. The Pilgrims had arrived at a great time to make friends with
00:06:56.680 the Wampanoag. The tribe had been hard hit by the 1617 epidemic, which had probably been smallpox,
00:07:02.700 and they were at war with the Narragansett tribe when the pilgrims arrived. This means that the
00:07:07.000 Wampanoag were open to alliance with the newcomers, who had weapons and resources that the Wampanoag
00:07:11.920 needed, and vice versa. A great deal of this would be helped along by a former member of the Patuxet
00:07:17.520 tribe, you know, the one that was 90% wiped out, named Tisquantum, better known to American school
00:07:23.020 children as Squanto. William Bradford described Squanto as a special instrument sent of God in
00:07:29.100 his book of Plymouth Plantation. Squanto's interactions with Europeans prior to this
00:07:33.960 hadn't given him the best first impression of colonists and explorers, and it starts far before
00:07:38.960 his meetings with the pilgrims. Six years before the Mayflower arrived, a slave trader captured
00:07:44.060 Squanto along with several others of his tribe and sold them into slavery. While he was gone from
00:07:49.500 his tribe, illness wiped out about 90% of the coastal tribes, hitting his own tribe especially
00:07:54.840 hard. Eventually, he would escape and make his way back to his home around 1619, only to find it
00:08:00.740 deserted. Nothing greeted him but the bones of his fellow tribesmen. He realized he was the sole
00:08:05.860 survivor of his village. The illness had spread so quickly that many local tribes never had time
00:08:10.760 to bury their dead. Though the Wampanoag were not his tribe, Squanto was taken in by them, likely as
00:08:16.380 a captive or servant rather than a full member of the tribe. Due to his English-speaking abilities,
00:08:21.480 which he had learned during the period in which he was enslaved, Massasoit used him as a translator
00:08:26.060 for his interactions with the pilgrims, and Squanto established himself as a key resource for the
00:08:31.020 pilgrims at Plymouth, teaching them how to survive and negotiating between the native tribes and the
00:08:35.520 colonists. He also assisted in the construction of the Treaty of Peace between the settlers and
00:08:40.100 the Wampanoag tribe, which heavily favored the English, to be honest. Squanto soon moved to the
00:08:45.200 settlement and help the newcomers learn to farm efficiently in the native way, which, yes, did
00:08:49.860 include using fish to fertilize the soil. Our elementary school teachers didn't lead us astray
00:08:54.460 with that one. And this leads us to the actual first Thanksgiving at Plymouth. What do we actually
00:09:00.300 know about this feast that is supposed to have occurred sometime in the autumn of 1621? It turns
00:09:05.660 out, not much, actually. There's very little detail in the written records, because no one at the time
00:09:11.800 really ascribed much importance to the event as far as their written records were concerned.
00:09:16.620 Holding a feast around harvest time wasn't very unusual. This was a typical thing done by most
00:09:21.740 farming communities. The starvation and death of the previous winter would have made a feast
00:09:26.300 celebrating their good fortune even more appealing at this point. Here's what the surviving written
00:09:31.300 record of the Plymouth colony says about this first Thanksgiving. William Bradford writes in
00:09:36.580 Of Plymouth Plantation,
00:09:37.860 they began now to gather in the small harvest they had and to prepare their houses for the winter
00:09:42.680 being well recovered in health and strength and plentifully provisioned for while some had been
00:09:47.600 thus employed in affairs away from home others were occupied in fishing for cod bass and other
00:09:52.360 fish of which they had caught a good quantity every family having their portion all the summer
00:09:57.380 there was no want and now as winter approached wild fowl began to arrive of which there were
00:10:02.000 plenty when they came here first though afterwards they became more scarce as well as wild fowl they
00:10:07.600 got abundance of wild turkeys besides venison etc each person had about a peck of meal a week
00:10:13.300 or now since harvest indian corn in that proportion and afterward many wrote at length
00:10:18.700 about their plenty to their friends in england not feigned but true reports edward winslow and
00:10:24.320 william bradford also penned a book called mort's relation journal of the plantation at plymouth
00:10:29.560 which tells a similar story our harvest being gotten in our governor sent four men on fowling
00:10:35.360 that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit
00:10:40.000 of our labors they four in one day killed as much fowl as with little help besides served the company
00:10:45.820 almost a week at which time amongst other recreations we exercised our arms many of the 0.95
00:10:51.360 indians coming amongst us and amongst the rest their greatest king massasoit with some 90 men
00:10:56.440 who for three days we entertained and feasted and they went out and killed five deer which they
00:11:01.400 brought the plantation and bestowed on our governor and although it not always so plentiful as it was
00:11:07.220 at this time with us yet by the goodness of god we are so far from want that we often wish you
00:11:12.300 partakers of our plenty and in new england's memorial by nathaniel morton there's an even
00:11:17.720 more brief mention of the event being now well recovered in respect of health as hath been said
00:11:23.480 they began to fit up their buildings against winter and received in their first harvest and
00:11:27.880 had great plenty of fowl and fish to their great refreshing. And that's it. Nothing of note really,
00:11:33.560 just a standard harvest meal, which probably only got a mention because it was the first successful
00:11:38.180 crop and would mean that the coming winter would not be nearly as harsh as the first one the
00:11:42.280 pilgrims had lived through. It's not exactly the makings of a story so grand that it needs to be a
00:11:47.160 national holiday that students reenact in schools every November. And in fact, only one version of
00:11:53.100 this story even mentions the attendance of the native tribes. The other two just make vague
00:11:57.760 mentions of a plentiful harvest which would see them through the winter. Some readings of these
00:12:02.000 historical documents have even led people to doubt that the tribes were actually invited to this
00:12:06.420 party at all. In Mort's relation, it seems to indicate that the exercising of arms, i.e. shooting
00:12:12.400 guns into the air in celebration, which honestly is the most American part of this whole story in
00:12:17.480 many ways, was the thing that led Massasoit to bring 90 of his men to the defense of his allies.
00:12:23.100 because he believed that they were under attack.
00:12:25.400 Once they arrived and saw it was a party,
00:12:27.340 they killed some deer
00:12:28.260 and essentially invited themselves to the celebration.
00:12:31.380 And this wasn't even the first time that it happened.
00:12:33.560 The Wampanoag were very sociable neighbors,
00:12:35.860 a fact which had previously caused much dismay to the pilgrims
00:12:38.760 because they hadn't had the food or supplies
00:12:41.040 to host the frequent number of times
00:12:43.080 that the natives had just dropped by for tea
00:12:45.100 without so much as a call to warn them
00:12:46.820 that they were on their way over,
00:12:48.420 which is also mentioned in Wart's relation
00:12:50.440 prior to the harvest.
00:12:52.040 Winslow wrote,
00:12:53.100 Unfortunately, these friendly relations and peace between the natives and pilgrims would not last,
00:13:17.600 which is where the darker part of the story begins to take shape. 0.53
00:13:20.620 The alliance between the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims would function relatively well for a few decades,
00:13:26.220 with both sides working to defend each other against the French and other local tribes.
00:13:30.520 But by the time that Massasoit's son, Metacomet, also known to the English as King Philip,
00:13:35.580 had inherited leadership of the tribe, relations had begun to fray.
00:13:39.680 King Philip began using tribal alliances to coordinate efforts to push European colonists out of the New England area.
00:13:45.860 Many of the native tribes in the region wanted to push out the colonists following conflicts over land use and diminished hunting as a consequence of the expanding European settlements.
00:13:55.600 A final spark ignited the conflict when a converted native man named John Sassamon, who had served as an interpreter to the New England colonists, was ambushed and assassinated.
00:14:05.100 A jury of colonists and Indian elders convicted and executed three Wampanoag men for his murder.
00:14:10.740 War was officially declared in 1675 by the New England colonies,
00:14:14.620 leading to a bloody and devastating war for both sides.
00:14:18.200 In an article published in the Historical Journal of Massachusetts,
00:14:21.360 Montclair State University professor Robert Cray said that the death toll
00:14:25.180 could have been up to 30% of the English population and half of the Native Americans in New England.
00:14:30.520 And while that's hardly the end of this tale,
00:14:32.580 it's a good place to stop for the purposes of this part of the episode.
00:14:36.160 Now it's time to move on to the question that's been burning in all your minds
00:14:39.700 since I read those terribly lackluster Bradford and Winslow writings about the Harvest Feast.
00:14:44.980 Or at least I assume this question has been burning in your minds.
00:14:47.880 Otherwise, why are you still here?
00:14:49.960 That question being, how did three paragraphs of
00:14:53.120 we had a great harvest and ate a big meal get turned into a national holiday,
00:14:57.220 which is part of a nationalistic mythology of America's past?
00:15:00.860 First, I think it's important to explain what I meant at the beginning of the episode
00:15:04.380 when I said that this was not actually a Thanksgiving by the standards of the pilgrims.
00:15:08.660 A Thanksgiving would have included fasting and prayer and would have been religious in nature.
00:15:13.620 The events in 1621 were celebratory, not necessarily religious.
00:15:17.760 This was a party, a harvest feast which had little to do with religion,
00:15:21.320 at least as far as anything with the pilgrims had little to do with religion.
00:15:25.420 Later, actual thanksgivings involving religious prayer and fasting to give thanks to God would be recorded by the colonists,
00:15:32.360 notably in 1637 and 1676,
00:15:35.260 both of which occurred after bloody victories in which they defeated natives in battle,
00:15:40.280 such as the end of King Philip's War in 1676,
00:15:43.320 which involved the Plymouth men mounting the head of Metacomet, or King Philip,
00:15:47.680 above their town on a pike where it remained for two decades,
00:15:51.120 while his dismembered and unburied body decomposed.
00:15:54.640 Understandably, that makes for a less heartwarming story for children to perform pageants about at school.
00:15:59.860 We also know that this wasn't the first time that a friendly feast was celebrated
00:16:03.240 between European colonists and native tribes. For instance, in 1565, nearly 60 years before the
00:16:09.200 Plymouth Feast, a Spanish fleet came ashore and planted a cross on the beach to christen the new
00:16:14.000 settlement of St. Augustine in what is now Florida. To celebrate the arrival, 800 Spanish
00:16:19.420 settlers shared a feast with the native tribe. I mean, look, European colonists and explorers
00:16:24.300 had been arriving in the New World since 1492. It beggars belief that anyone could think that it
00:16:30.060 wasn't until 1621 that some of them bothered to sit down and have a meal with each other.
00:16:35.340 The colonists weren't usually nice to the natives, but there had been semi-friendly relations from
00:16:39.940 time to time between Columbus and the Mayflower. So this was neither the first feast nor an actual
00:16:45.340 Thanksgiving, but how did we get from the truth to what we learn in our November lessons in second
00:16:49.860 grade? On October 3rd, 1789, George Washington issued his Thanksgiving proclamation, designating
00:16:56.240 for the people of the United States a day of public Thanksgiving to be held on Thursday the
00:17:00.820 26th day of November, marking the first national celebration of the holiday. In 1841, the Reverend
00:17:07.420 Alexander Young explicitly linked three things in his book Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the
00:17:12.500 Colony of Plymouth. The 1621 Rejoicing, the tradition of autumn harvest festivals, and the
00:17:18.280 name Thanksgiving in a one-line footnote. The line, this was the first Thanksgiving, the great festival
00:17:24.580 of New England. But we would not have an actual official national holiday for Thanksgiving until
00:17:29.740 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln called for an annual celebration to be held on the final
00:17:35.000 Thursday of November. And it wasn't until this post-Civil War period that we began to see what
00:17:40.180 we would now consider to be modern Thanksgiving rituals beginning to take shape. For instance,
00:17:45.840 football and Thanksgiving. Thirteen years after the institution of the national holiday, the first
00:17:50.700 football game played on Thanksgiving was the Intercollegiate Football Association
00:17:54.680 Championship in 1876. The game and the holiday became so connected that by 1893, the New York
00:18:01.460 Herald called Thanksgiving the official holiday for watching football. The NFL played its first
00:18:06.640 game on Thanksgiving in 1920. For those of you that care, it was Yale versus Princeton. Yale
00:18:12.280 won two to zero. I hate that I know this fact because I hate football. Don't come for me about
00:18:17.960 this because you will not convince me to like this sport and it will be a waste of time for both of
00:18:22.460 us. I just think it's rather odd that a nation that prides itself on its virility should feel
00:18:27.320 compelled to strap on 40 pounds of protective gear just in order to play rugby. Then there's
00:18:32.960 another Thanksgiving tradition, pardoning the turkey, which is an extremely weird tradition
00:18:37.340 no matter how you look at it to be honest. It's often stated that President Lincoln's 1863
00:18:42.700 clemency to a turkey recorded in an 1865 dispatch by a White House reporter was the origin for the
00:18:48.940 pardoning ceremony. A few other instances of this would pop up during the Kennedy, Nixon, and Carter
00:18:54.360 presidencies, but it wouldn't be until 1981 that the practice would become the norm under President
00:18:59.420 Reagan. The turkey ceremony also became a source of satire and humor for reporters. The tradition
00:19:05.700 of a harmonious pilgrim Wampanoag feast would come in the 19th century as well, alongside a
00:19:11.200 desperate attempt to find an acceptable national creation tale. Carla Pastana, in her 1993 article,
00:19:17.640 The Quaker Executions as Myth in History, puts it this way, the pilgrims who established the
00:19:23.000 inconsequential settlement of Plymouth Plantation won pride of place in the national creation tale
00:19:27.980 during the 19th century, primarily because they were not implicated in the acts of religious
00:19:32.820 persecution and could be admired as uncompromised advocates of liberty. The more significant Puritans
00:19:38.680 of Massachusetts Bay left a more conflicted legacy, one that Americans grapple with to this
00:19:43.740 day. Because as you'll remember from episode 7, Puritans were hypocrites who actually weren't big 0.95
00:19:49.640 on religious freedom at all, or any freedom for that matter, which presented a major problem to 0.83
00:19:55.020 the nationalistic identity of America as a country founded on the ideology of liberty.
00:20:00.500 In the article Monumental Mobility, The Memory Work of Massasoit, the authors point out that
00:20:05.420 the holiday myth of the first Thanksgiving began to spread as anti-immigration sentiments in the
00:20:10.160 late 19th century were looking for a hero to present as the perfect national founders. And
00:20:15.640 they found the Pilgrims to be the perfect archetype for their mythology. White, Protestant, 0.98
00:20:20.400 democratic, and blessed with an American character that was centered on family, work, individualism,
00:20:25.760 freedom, and faith. I would personally argue that that is a terrible interpretation of everything
00:20:30.820 the pilgrims and puritans stood for but when it's propaganda facts don't matter and it was
00:20:36.640 propaganda plain and simple but if you've made it through nine episodes of this show that shouldn't
00:20:41.600 exactly be a big surprise by now and that's it for this week's episode thank you so much for
00:20:47.280 showing up to listen in on the history of the first thanksgiving again uh next week i will be
00:20:53.020 back with that long-awaited episode on the satanic panic and yes i know i've been promising that
00:20:57.640 episodes since like mid-October uh I'm just kind of struggling to get the narrative on this one
00:21:03.940 just right because it's a lot to cover and I don't want to cover every part of the satanic panic
00:21:10.940 um so I'm kind of just trying to figure out which bits I actually do want to cover
00:21:14.980 this has been an absolutely hellish semester for me and it has just really been difficult to sit
00:21:20.920 down and get podcast stuff done while struggling with everything that's happening this semester at
00:21:26.600 my job. Next semester, I will be going back to more of a normal schedule and teaching classes
00:21:31.920 that I more or less already have my entire curriculum created for. So that's going to make
00:21:36.680 my life a lot easier. So please look forward to more regular episodes in the coming new year,
00:21:43.940 definitely. But I will still have a few episodes coming out throughout December as well. Don't
00:21:48.720 worry about that. You are going to get some some holiday episodes. So I will see you back here next
00:21:54.840 week for the satanic panic ooh scary and you guys have a great thanksgiving or enjoy you know having
00:22:02.280 a giant fight with your in-laws about the episode that you just listened to either way it'll be fun
00:22:07.900 right
00:22:24.840 You