00:00:00.000Welcome 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.
00:00:24.660Hey everybody, and happy ritual sacrifice with Pi Day to everyone who is celebrating it.
00:00:30.000And if you don't get that joke, go watch the Thanksgiving episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you Philistines.
00:00:35.800Today'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.
00:00:43.660Feel 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.
00:02:21.000i just have you know a couple of questions that's all but that's a topic for a very different
00:02:28.680podcast not just a different episode one day i'll start a scathing pop culture review podcast
00:02:34.260just to be able to have an excuse to mock riverdale but that's not the point of today
00:02:38.360so that grim dark version of illness oppression and death how does that one pass the accuracy
00:02:44.420test as far as the first thanksgiving goes i mean here's the thing it's less wrong in
00:02:50.980some ways, at least in the greater context of how the relationship between the pilgrims and natives
00:02:55.760would end up playing out, but it just skips a few steps between that first successful harvest feast
00:03:01.200and the massacring of the natives. The so-called first Thanksgiving and the relationship between
00:03:05.980the natives and Puritans of Plymouth was neither as friendly as our childhood Thanksgiving pageants
00:03:10.860made it seem, nor as violent and oppressive as our modern understanding of colonialist oppression
00:03:16.060might make it seem. The violence would come, make no mistake, but for one brief moment and place
00:03:21.880in time and geography, cooperation between natives and English colonizers seemed possible
00:03:27.420before the English Puritans completely demolished that opportunity. So what actually happened with
00:03:33.320that first Thanksgiving? Well, first of all, the Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to come to
00:03:37.920that area of the New World. In fact, the area of Plymouth wasn't even named by the Pilgrims.
00:03:42.680In 1616, Captain John Smith, yes, that John Smith, surveyed the area of New England and created a map of the area.
00:03:51.000On that map, he labeled the area of what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, as New Plymouth.
00:03:56.600In a description of New England, Smith endorsed New Plymouth as an excellent good harbor, good land, and no want of anything but industrious people.
00:04:04.880Peter Firstbrook, in his book A Man Most Driven, points out that Smith rather completely ignored
00:04:10.160the fact that there were industrious native people there already, which is definitely fair.
00:04:15.240Colonialist types of this period did that a lot.
00:04:18.080By the way, if you have an interest in Firstbrook's book, a link to it is listed on my website.
00:04:22.460In any case, there had been Europeans coming and going from this area for a while now,
00:04:27.380so the pilgrims were not coming into a vacuum where the natives had no understanding of
00:04:31.620or experience with white people. And so far, that experience had been not great. So the pilgrims
00:04:39.180make landfall at Plymouth on November 11, 1620. And for any of you that have experienced a
00:04:44.460Massachusetts winter, it should be clear why that's a problem. They didn't have an established
00:04:48.900colony, and winter was far colder than they'd been prepared for. Despite this, they began to
00:04:53.660look for a settlement site, because that's kind of the whole point of being there. By mid-December,
00:04:58.220they've settled on an abandoned village which had previously been inhabited by the Patuxet tribe.
00:05:03.260But what will they do when the Patuxet come back? Oh don't worry about that, the Patuxet are basically
00:05:07.820all dead because of an epidemic, probably caused by European diseases. So no one is using this
00:05:12.860village right now. It's free real estate. But even though they had finally chosen a settlement site,
00:05:19.980because they arrived very late in the season, the building of houses was delayed and the colonists
00:05:24.700had to basically spend most of their winter on board the ship. Most of the passengers got sick.
00:05:29.840Many suffered from scurvy, which as a side note is my worst nightmare. I eat vitamin C like it's
00:05:35.580candy. Look up the symptoms of scurvy if you want to also begin mainlining orange juice like it's
00:05:40.380the only thing between you and death. Anyway, 45 of the original 102 colonists end up dying that
00:05:46.740winter, which is a pretty high death toll. After that harrowing winter, the pilgrims would begin
00:05:52.120to build up their settlement in the Massachusetts Bay Area. The Pilgrims wouldn't make contact with
00:05:57.060the local natives until March of 1621, which makes a lot of sense. The natives were like me,
00:06:02.280not going anywhere once it starts to snow unless it's 100% necessary for survival.
00:06:07.700Samoset, an Abenaki chief who spoke some English, is the first of the native tribes to make contact
00:06:12.580with the colonists. Samoset gives them the rundown of all the local important leaders of the region,
00:06:17.360including the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, Massasoit. If you listened to episode 7,
00:06:22.180that name should be a little bit familiar to you. The Wampanoag tribe, under the leadership of
00:06:26.720Massasoit, is where Roger Williams goes to stay after being banished from the Massachusetts Bay
00:06:31.240Colony. At the very least, we know that Williams had maintained friendly relationships with the
00:06:36.000Wampanoag well into the 1630s. Samoset agrees to arrange a meeting with Massasoit, which will begin
00:06:41.840a mutually beneficial trade agreement between the two groups, as well as a treaty in which both
00:06:46.560groups would provide aid for the other when they were in conflict, like a very small 17th century
00:06:51.780version of NAFTA and NATO. The Pilgrims had arrived at a great time to make friends with
00:06:56.720the Wampanoag. The tribe had been hard hit by the 1617 epidemic, which had probably been smallpox,
00:07:02.720and they were at war with the Narragansett tribe when the Pilgrims arrived. This means that the
00:07:07.040Wampanoag were open to alliance with the newcomers who had weapons and resources that the Wampanoag
00:07:11.960needed, and vice versa. A great deal of this would be helped along by a former member of the Patuxet
00:07:17.580tribe, you know, the one that was 90% wiped out, named Tisquantum, better known to American school
00:07:23.080children as Squanto. William Bradford described Squanto as a special instrument sent of God in
00:07:29.140his book of Plymouth Plantation. Squanto's interactions with Europeans prior to this
00:07:34.020hadn't given him the best first impression of colonists and explorers, and it starts far before
00:07:39.000his meetings with the pilgrims. Six years before the Mayflower arrived, a slave trader captured
00:07:44.120Squanto along with several others of his tribe and sold them into slavery. While he was gone
00:07:49.360from his tribe, illness wiped out about 90% of the coastal tribes, hitting his own tribe especially
00:07:54.880hard. Eventually, he would escape and make his way back to his home around 1619, only to find it
00:08:00.780deserted. Nothing greeted him but the bones of his fellow tribesmen. He realized he was the sole
00:08:05.900survivor of his village. The illness had spread so quickly that many local tribes never had time
00:08:10.820to bury their dead. Though the Wampanoag were not his tribe, Squanto was taken in by them,
00:08:15.920likely as a captive or servant rather than a full member of the tribe. Due to his English-speaking
00:08:20.920abilities, which he had learned during the period in which he was enslaved, Massasoit used him as
00:08:25.560a translator for his interactions with the pilgrims, and Squanto established himself as a
00:08:30.080key resource for the pilgrims at Plymouth, teaching them how to survive and negotiating between the
00:08:34.560native tribes and the colonists. He also assisted in the construction of the Treaty of Peace between
00:08:39.380the settlers and the Wampanoag tribe, which heavily favored the English, to be honest.
00:08:44.040Squanto soon moved to the settlement and helped the newcomers learn to farm efficiently in the
00:08:48.000native way, which, yes, did include using fish to fertilize the soil. Our elementary school
00:08:53.220teachers didn't lead us astray with that one. And this leads us to the actual first Thanksgiving at
00:08:58.640Plymouth. What do we actually know about this feast that is supposed to have occurred sometime
00:09:02.960in the autumn of 1621. It turns out, not much, actually. There's very little detail in the
00:09:09.880written records, because no one at the time really ascribed much importance to the event as far as
00:09:14.760their written records were concerned. Holding a feast around harvest time wasn't very unusual.
00:09:19.800This was a typical thing done by most farming communities. The starvation and death of the
00:09:24.480previous winter would have made a feast celebrating their good fortune even more appealing at this
00:09:29.280point. Here's what the surviving written record of the Plymouth colony says about this first
00:09:33.980Thanksgiving. William Bradford writes in Of Plymouth Plantation, they began now to gather
00:09:39.660in the small harvest they had and to prepare their houses for the winter, being well recovered in
00:09:44.300health and strength and plentifully provisioned. For while some had been thus employed in affairs
00:09:48.820away from home, others were occupied in fishing for cod, bass, and other fish, of which they had
00:09:53.500caught a good quantity, every family having their portion. All the summer there was no want, and now
00:09:58.800as winter approached wild fowl began to arrive of which there were plenty when they came here first
00:10:03.560though afterwards they became more scarce as well as wild fowl they got abundance of wild
00:10:08.720turkeys besides venison etc each person had about a peck of meal a week or now since harvest indian
00:10:15.620corn in that proportion and afterward many wrote at length about their plenty to their friends in
00:10:20.180england not feigned but true reports edward winslow and william bradford also penned a book called
00:10:26.620Mort's Relation, Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth, which tells a similar story.
00:10:31.820Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling that so we might,
00:10:36.480after a more special manner, rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors.
00:10:41.080They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with little help besides, served the company
00:10:45.880almost a week, at which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms. Many of
00:10:51.300the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest, their greatest king Massasoit, with some
00:10:55.760ninety men who for three days we entertained and feasted and they went out and killed five deer
00:11:00.920which they brought the plantation and bestowed on our governor and although it not always so
00:11:06.260plentiful as it was at this time with us yet by the goodness of god we are so far from want that
00:11:11.420we often wish you partakers of our plenty and in new england's memorial by nathaniel morton
00:11:17.000there's an even more brief mention of the event being now well recovered in respect of health as
00:11:22.720hath been said, they began to fit up their buildings against winter and received in their
00:11:26.980first harvest and had great plenty of fowl and fish to their great refreshing. And that's it.
00:11:32.460Nothing of note, really. Just a standard harvest meal, which probably only got a mention because
00:11:37.020it was the first successful crop and would mean that the coming winter would not be nearly as
00:11:41.200harsh as the first one the pilgrims had lived through. It's not exactly the makings of a story
00:11:45.740so grand that it needs to be a national holiday that students reenact in schools every November.
00:11:51.280And in fact, only one version of this story even mentions the attendance of the native tribes.
00:11:56.120The other two just make vague mentions of a plentiful harvest which would see them through the winter.
00:12:01.140Some readings of these historical documents have even led people to doubt that the tribes were actually invited to this party at all.
00:12:07.660In Mort's relation, it seems to indicate that the exercising of arms, i.e. shooting guns into the air in celebration,
00:12:14.380which honestly is the most American part of this whole story in many ways,
00:12:18.100was the thing that led Massasoit to bring 90 of his men to the defense of his allies because he
00:12:23.640believed that they were under attack. Once they arrived and saw it was a party, they killed some
00:12:28.000deer and essentially invited themselves to the celebration. And this wasn't even the first time
00:12:32.780that it happened. The Wampanoag were very sociable neighbors, a fact which had previously caused much
00:12:37.720dismay to the pilgrims because they hadn't had the food or supplies to host the frequent number of
00:12:42.720times that the natives had just dropped by for tea without so much as a call to warn them that
00:12:46.980they were on their way over, which is also mentioned in Mort's relation prior to the harvest.
00:12:52.080Winslow wrote, but whereas his people come very often and very many together unto us,
00:12:57.720bringing for the most part their wives and children with them, they were welcome. Yet we
00:13:02.240being but strangers as yet at New Plymouth, and not knowing how our corn might prosper,
00:13:06.740we could no longer give them such entertainment as we had done and as we desired still to do.
00:13:12.900Unfortunately, these friendly relations and peace between the natives and Pilgrims would not last,
00:13:17.960which is where the darker part of the story begins to take shape.
00:13:21.040The alliance between the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims would function relatively well for a few decades,
00:13:25.880with both sides working to defend each other against the French and other local tribes.
00:13:30.640But by the time that Massasoit's son, Metacomet, also known to the English as King Philip,
00:13:35.540had inherited leadership of the tribe, relations had begun to fray.
00:13:39.260King Philip began using tribal alliances to coordinate efforts to push European colonists out of the New England area.
00:13:46.440Many 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.
00:13:55.620A final spark ignited the conflict when a converted native man named John Sassaman, who had served as an interpreter to the New England colonists, was ambushed and assassinated.
00:14:04.660A jury of colonists and Indian elders convicted and executed three Wampanoag men for his murder.
00:14:10.800War was officially declared in 1675 by the New England colonies, leading to a bloody and devastating war for both sides.
00:14:18.320In an article published in the Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Montclair State University professor Robert Cray said that the death toll could have been up to 30% of the English population and half of the Native Americans in New England.
00:14:30.020And while that's hardly the end of this tale, it's a good place to stop for the purposes of this part of the episode.
00:14:36.300Now it's time to move on to the question that's been burning in all your minds since I read those terribly lackluster Bradford and Winslow writings about the Harvest Feast.
00:14:45.000Or at least I assume this question has been burning in your minds.
00:14:49.980That question being, how did three paragraphs of we had a great harvest and ate a big meal get turned into a national holiday,
00:14:57.080which is part of a nationalistic mythology of America's past.
00:15:01.060First, I think it's important to explain what I meant at the beginning of the episode
00:15:04.400when I said that this was not actually a Thanksgiving by the standards of the pilgrims.
00:15:09.180A Thanksgiving would have included fasting and prayer and would have been religious in nature.
00:15:13.660The events in 1621 were celebratory, not necessarily religious.
00:15:17.820This was a party, a harvest feast which had little to do with religion,
00:15:21.360at least as far as anything with the pilgrims had little to do with religion.
00:15:25.540Later, actual thanksgivings involving religious prayer and fasting to give thanks to God would
00:15:30.640be recorded by the colonists, notably in 1637 and 1676, both of which occurred after bloody
00:15:37.560victories in which they defeated natives in battle, such as the end of King Philip's war in 1676,
00:15:43.080which involved the Plymouth men mounting the head of Metacomet, or King Philip, above their town on
00:15:48.720a pike where it remained for two decades, while his dismembered and unburied body decomposed.
00:15:54.680Understandably, that makes for a less heartwarming story for children to perform pageants about at school.
00:15:59.920We also know that this wasn't the first time that a friendly feast was celebrated between European colonists and native tribes.
00:16:05.560For instance, in 1565, nearly 60 years before the Plymouth Feast,
00:16:10.240a Spanish fleet came ashore and planted a cross on the beach to christen the new settlement of St. Augustine in what is now Florida.
00:16:16.960To celebrate the arrival, 800 Spanish settlers shared a feast with the native tribe.
00:16:21.620I mean, look, European colonists and explorers had been arriving in the New World since 1492.
00:16:27.740It beggars belief that anyone could think that it wasn't until 1621 that some of them bothered to sit down and have a meal with each other.
00:16:35.380The colonists weren't usually nice to the natives, but there had been semi-friendly relations from time to time between Columbus and the Mayflower.
00:16:42.820So this was neither the first feast nor an actual Thanksgiving.
00:16:46.180But how did we get from the truth to what we learn in our November lessons in second grade?
00:16:51.000On October 3rd, 1789, George Washington issued his Thanksgiving proclamation,
00:16:55.780designating for the people of the United States a day of public Thanksgiving
00:16:59.240to be held on Thursday, the 26th day of November,
00:17:02.700marking the first national celebration of the holiday.
00:17:05.960In 1841, the Reverend Alexander Young explicitly linked three things in his book
00:17:10.620Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth.
00:17:13.400The 1621 Rejoicing, the tradition of autumn harvest festivals,
00:17:17.580and the name Thanksgiving in a one-line footnote.
00:17:21.340The line, this was the first Thanksgiving, the great festival of New England.
00:17:25.840But we would not have an actual official national holiday for Thanksgiving until 1863
00:17:30.660when President Abraham Lincoln called for an annual celebration to be held on the final Thursday of November.
00:17:36.560And it wasn't until this post-Civil War period that we began to see what we would now consider to be
00:17:41.640modern Thanksgiving rituals beginning to take shape.
00:17:45.100For instance, football and Thanksgiving.
00:17:47.500Thirteen years after the institution of the national holiday,
00:17:50.340the first football game played on Thanksgiving
00:17:52.340was the Intercollegiate Football Association Championship in 1876.
00:17:57.480The game and the holiday became so connected that by 1893,
00:18:01.080the New York Herald called Thanksgiving the official holiday for watching football.
00:18:05.300The NFL played its first game on Thanksgiving in 1920.
00:18:09.120For those of you that care, it was Yale versus Princeton.
00:18:13.560I hate that I know this fact because I hate football.
00:18:16.880Don't come for me about this, because you will not convince me to like this sport,
00:18:20.720and it will be a waste of time for both of us.
00:18:23.140I just think it's rather odd that a nation that prides itself on its virility
00:18:26.700should feel compelled to strap on 40 pounds of protective gear just in order to play rugby.
00:18:32.380Then there's another Thanksgiving tradition, pardoning the turkey,
00:18:35.680which is an extremely weird tradition no matter how you look at it, to be honest.
00:18:39.620It's often stated that President Lincoln's 1863 clemency to a turkey
00:18:44.000recorded in an 1865 dispatch by a White House reporter, was the origin for the pardoning
00:18:49.380ceremony. A few other instances of this would pop up during the Kennedy, Nixon, and Carter
00:18:54.420presidencies, but it wouldn't be until 1981 that the practice would become the norm under President
00:18:59.480Reagan. The turkey ceremony also became a source of satire and humor for reporters.
00:19:05.240The tradition of a harmonious Pilgrim Wampanoag feast would come in the 19th century as well,
00:19:10.200alongside a desperate attempt to find an acceptable national creation tale.
00:19:15.080Carla Pastana, in her 1993 article, The Quaker Executions as Myth in History, puts it this way.
00:19:21.460The pilgrims who established the inconsequential settlement of Plymouth Plantation
00:19:25.540won pride of place in the national creation tale during the 19th century,
00:19:29.760primarily because they were not implicated in the acts of religious persecution
00:19:33.440and could be admired as uncompromised advocates of liberty.
00:19:36.820The more significant Puritans of Massachusetts Bay left a more conflicted legacy, one that Americans grapple with to this day.
00:19:44.860Because, as you'll remember from Episode 7, Puritans were hypocrites who actually weren't big on religious freedom at all, or any freedom for that matter,
00:19:53.240which presented a major problem to the nationalistic identity of America as a country founded on the ideology of liberty.
00:20:00.560In the article, Monumental Mobility, The Memory Work of Massasoit,
00:20:04.320the authors point out that the holiday myth of the first Thanksgiving
00:20:07.260began to spread as anti-immigration sentiments in the late 19th century
00:20:11.200were looking for a hero to present as the perfect national founders,
00:20:15.520and they found the pilgrims to be the perfect archetype for their mythology.
00:20:19.100White, Protestant, democratic, and blessed with an American character
00:20:22.660that was centered on family, work, individualism, freedom, and faith.
00:20:26.740I would personally argue that that is a terrible interpretation of everything the Pilgrims and
00:20:31.840Puritans stood for. But when it's propaganda, facts don't matter. And it was propaganda,
00:20:37.600plain and simple. But if you've made it through nine episodes of this show,
00:20:41.020that shouldn't exactly be a big surprise by now. And that's it for this week's episode.
00:20:46.280Thank you so much for showing up to listen in on the history of the first Thanksgiving again.
00:20:51.940Next week, I will be back with that long awaited episode on the Satanic Panic. And yes,
00:20:56.420I know I've been promising that episode since like mid-October uh I'm just kind of struggling
00:21:02.460to get the narrative on this one just right because it's a lot to cover and I don't want
00:21:08.580to cover every part of the satanic panic um so I'm kind of just trying to figure out which bits
00:21:13.720I actually do want to cover this has been an absolutely hellish semester for me and it has
00:21:19.140just really been difficult to sit down and get podcast stuff done while struggling with everything
00:21:24.900that's happening this semester at my job. Next semester, I will be going back to more of a
00:21:29.680normal schedule and teaching classes that I more or less already have my entire curriculum created
00:21:35.100for. So that's going to make my life a lot easier. So please look forward to more regular episodes
00:21:41.800in the coming new year, definitely. But I will still have a few episodes coming out
00:21:46.680throughout December as well. Don't worry about that. You are going to get some holiday episodes.