Letters: Thanksgiving history more than turkey

I love Thanksgiving because it brings families together. Yet, as someone who also loves history, I’m troubled by how the holiday’s familiar myth replaces a complicated past with a comforting national story. It recalls the newspaper editor’s observation at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The national Thanksgiving observances proclaimed by President George Washington in 1789 and President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 did not commemorate English Pilgrims and Native Wampanoag people awkwardly sharing a meal in 1621. Lincoln’s National Day of Thanksgiving called for prayer for the nation’s survival and for healing from the Civil War. The largely fabricated — though partly true — story of the 1621 gathering became a marketing tool in the late nineteenth century to mitigate the racist government attacks on Native American culture.

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