What's Past is Prologue: Thanksgiving in times of national trouble

The "What's Past is Prologue" series, an homage to William Shakespeare's "The Tempest," looks at events of the past that seem to reoccur later with remarkable similarities. Frank Nickell of the Kellerman Foundation for Historic Preservation, previously a longtime faculty member at Southeast Missouri State University, is primary historian for these articles, which will be carried intermittently in the Southeast Missourian.

This is the fifth in the series.

Most of us know the Thanksgiving holiday dates to the time of the Pilgrims and Puritans in the early 17th century.

Frank Nickell of the Kellerman Foundation for Historic Preservation in Cape Girardeau

The most familiar precedent for the holiday — and there remains a dispute to this day about its initial founding — dates to 1621. The Pilgrims of Plymouth, Massachusetts, in that year celebrated a good harvest with Native Americans who had helped the settlers with scarce resources survive the previous winter by giving them food.

Nickell, the retired Southeast Missouri State University historian who taught at SEMO for more than four decades, thinks of Thanksgiving as his favorite holiday.

"I become emotional recalling Thanksgiving in my youth in Illinois. We had so many members of our family come so far to be together to enjoy turkey and goose meat and pie — and it was really special," he said.

Enter the presidents

America's first chief executive, George Washington, proclaimed the first nationwide Thanksgiving celebration in the young nation Nov. 26, 1789, to be "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God."

The Revolutionary War had ended six years before, in 1783, as signatories to the Treaty of Paris formally concluded the end of hostilities between England and the former colonies.

The exact date for Thanksgiving was observed on different dates in the U.S. depending on the state of residence right up until the middle of Abraham Lincoln's presidency.

In 1863, Lincoln's Union Army was in the midst of the War Between the States.

"In the spring of 1863, the war was going very badly for the North as the Union had lost the humiliating Battle of Chancellorsville," said Nickell, who taught Civil War history during his tenure at SEMO.

Criticism of Lincoln's handling of the war had reached a fever pitch, he added, but the tide began to turn in the summer.

To wit: the Battle of Gettysburg, the three bloodiest days of the entire conflict, in early July ended as a Union victory.

The rhetoric of the 16th president's proclamation establishing the final Thursday of November for Thanksgiving was influenced by the fierce battles with the South and by the growing conviction the United States would remain united.

"With humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, (we) fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation," read Lincoln's proclamation dated Oct. 3, 1863 — three months to the day after Pickett's Charge, the disastrous Confederate offensive effectively ending the Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, battle, a key Civil War turning point.

On Dec. 26, 1941, nearly three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt penned his name to a joint resolution of Congress establishing the national Thanksgiving Day on the fourth Thursday in November, where it remains today.

On November 5, 1963, less than three weeks before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy set Nov. 28 of that year as America's Thanksgiving date. The youngest person ever elected president would not live to see it. The nation observed a subdued holiday around the Thanksgiving table as it mourned JFK's sudden and violent death six days before.

"Tragedy and the Thanksgiving holiday have a connection in my mind, and I think also in American history," Nickell said.

Nickell was in graduate school at the University of New Mexico (UNM) at Albuquerque when he spotted Kennedy riding in an open car driving very slowly along Central Avenue — also known as Route 66 — which comes through the state's largest city.

"I had seen Kennedy in 1960 when he was campaigning and I remember waving at him and him waving back," Nickell said.

Three years later, Nickell was pursuing his Ph.D. at UNM and witnessed a very different scene along the same street.

"People were openly sobbing after news of (Kennedy's) death," the venerable historian remembered, adding Thanksgiving 1963 was a somber and silent time.

"It was so quiet that day. We were just in shock."