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By Ian Prasad Philbrick | The New York Times
Things have gotten so bad, we are told, that the Thanksgiving table is now a battlefield. Advice columnists, psychologists, therapists, podcasters and philosophers counsel us how to avoid or defuse arguments about politics.
But sparring at (or about) Thanksgiving isn’t new. It is, in fact, a very old tradition — no less American than pumpkin pie. Debates were on the menu even before Congress formally declared the federal holiday in 1941.
Here, from The Times’s archive, is a sample of what we’ve been arguing about.
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1. Thanksgiving itself. In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt moved up the traditional Thanksgiving Day by a week to stimulate holiday shopping and boost the economy. The move prompted a national debate. Retailers were pleased and plenty of Americans didn’t seem to mind. But traditionalists gnashed their teeth. “We here in Plymouth consider the day sacred,” said a local official in the birthplace of the Thanksgiving dinner.
“Who,” asked a letter to the editor published by The Times, “wants a turkey one week thinner?” Some governors proclaimed separate Thanksgivings on the original day, inviting chaos that lasted until, in 1941, Congress standardized the date for the whole country. (Roosevelt, folding, signed the change into law.)
Even some who stood to benefit from Roosevelt’s move mocked it. In early November, a shopkeeper in Kokomo, Ind., put a sign in his store window that read: “Do your shopping now. Who knows, tomorrow may be Christmas.”
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2. American iconography. A Times editorial in 1987 dinged Benjamin Franklin for (apocryphally) proposing the turkey to be the fledgling country’s national symbol. “Who would thrill to a turkey clutching the arrows of war in its right talon and the olive branch of peace in its left?” The Times wrote. “The banners of the Caesars, Charlemagne and Napoleon were emblazoned with eagles.”
Soon, a reader shot back: “That the eagle was the symbol of these mischief makers was precisely why Franklin objected to it.”
3. The Middle East. A Thanksgiving debate may be indirectly responsible for the existence of Israel. Ahead of the 1947 holiday, the United Nations was debating a plan to divide Palestine, a British-administered territory, into two sovereign states — one for Jews, one for Palestinian Arabs. The proposal seemed likely to fail. Arab and Muslim-majority countries opposed it, and much of Europe and Latin America was ambivalent.
But when the U.N.’s American hosts called a Thanksgiving recess, advocates for Israel began a furious lobbying campaign. They won over Haiti, the Philippines, Liberia and France, and the partition plan passed on Saturday. “On what remote, and often irrelevant, factors historical decisions may sometimes depend,” one negotiator later marveled about the holiday’s role. (Ultimately, Arab states rejected partition, and Palestinian statehood is still debated today.)
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4. Gender equality. In 1973, Joyce Slayton Mitchell, a 40-year-old woman from Vermont who worked for the National Organization for Women, urged women to share the burden of prepping Thanksgiving dinner with their families. One year, Mitchell let her daughter carve a turkey cooked by her husband. Her father was having none of it. “He had a fit,” she said. As The Times put it: “Poor grandfather. Instead of a proper New England Thanksgiving, he got his fill of feminism.”
5. Vietnam. In 1965, a youth group in Rye, N.Y., invited high school students to spend the holiday debating sex, underage drinking and the Vietnam War. One boy burned a symbolic draft card, and a blond girl with braces said, “I guess if you really believe the war’s wrong, maybe it’s O.K. to burn it.”
Another boy retorted: “I’d rather be dead and buried than to be that selfish. The draft-card burners ought to be thrown in jail.”
The New York Times
6. Food. The pages of The Times have filled over the years with debate-inducing pieces about whether the food even matters, what should be served, which foods are healthy, which wines to pair and how to speed up the cooking of a turkey.
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