Freedom from Myth
Some scattered notes and reflections on Thanksgiving
When you search the internet for “thanksgiving painting” or “thanksgiving picture”, one of the top—if not the top—results is Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want.
Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want”
The sixty-year-old portrait is so familiar that it’s frequently parodied or referenced: from major media productions like ABC sitcom Modern Family to the Academy Award-Winning film The Blind Side. The scene was also recreated for a Tony Bennett album cover.
Rockwell, who had been living in Vermont, painted the iconic work from a photograph of his own dinner table. These were his family, his neighbors, and his cook (presenting the turkey) on Thanksgiving Day in 1942. The details are intricate. The massive turkey; the mound of fruit; the ornate salt and pepper shakers; the serving dishes; the silverware; the white creased linen; the joy on every face. What isn’t apparent in this tableau is that, at the time Rockwell began working on the painting, America had been nearly a year into World War 2.
The Thanksgiving dinner picture was first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943, about a year and a half after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and it quickly circulated around the country. The Office of War Information even launched a campaign using the painting on posters and stamps to sell war bonds. Soon enough, the snapshot grew into a national symbol, an embodiment of proud, resilient American values. That bountiful dinner table of a treasured American holiday was a reminder of an idyll, a hope of abundance in a time of war.
—
According to historian David Silverman in his 2019 book This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, the original practice of thanksgiving was a more modest affair than the Butterball bounties of today: “Thanksgiving celebrations had emerged, ironically, out of the English puritan practice of declaring fast days of prayer to mark some special mercy or judgment from God.”
These more traditional and humble thanksgivings were observed in some communities throughout America’s early years but they bore no connection to the legendary famous supper between the indigenous people of Southern New England (the Wampanoags) and the colonists they encountered in 1621. It was nowhere near a nationalistic sentiment, much less a formal holiday linking the two.
In 1863, however, at the behest of activist Sarah Josepha Hale, Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November to be a national day of Thanksgiving. According to Silverman, the motive was simultaneously morale-boosting and politically advantageous; an oversimplified narrative of comity and unity would help paper over the ongoing, aggressive Westward expansion into Indian territory and the bleeding memory of a War fought over slavery. But Hale’s petition made no mention of the Pilgrims or the Indians and neither did Lincoln’s pronouncement.
That part of the story was added by one pastor’s errant recounting of that first “thanksgiving” in a literal footnote; in the decades that followed, that flimsy footnote somehow metastasized into a myth around the nation and the new holiday. By the late 19th century, “the Pilgrim saga also had utility in the nation’s culture wars,” Silverman writes.
“It was no coincidence that authorities began trumpeting the Pilgrims as national founders amid widespread anxiety that the country was being overrun by Catholic and then Jewish immigrants unappreciative of America’s Protestant, democratic origins and unfamiliar with its values… Though Americans eventually assumed that the Thanksgiving holiday and myth had marched together in an unbroken succession since 1621, those traditions were very much products of white Protestants, particularly northerners, asserting their cultural authority over European immigrants and Americans of color in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
Silverman’s five-hundred page tome, however, doesn’t focus on figures like Lincoln or even on contemporary American politics of that era. Sourcing a wealth of documents, artifacts, and oral traditions, most of his work tells the story of the Wampanoag (Wôpanâak) Indians from their perspective, from the 16th century and on. His research centers their stories and, particularly, how they experienced the birth and decimation of a nation.
Wikimedia Commons
The main protagonists of Silverman’s telling are the two principal leaders in Wampanoag history during English colonization: Ousamequin (also known as Massasoit, although that was his title, not his name) and his son Putametacom (whom the English dubbed “King Phillip”). Reading about their stewardship of the Wampanoags during this period of colonization challenges any overly simplistic notions that prioritizes the perspective of the English “settlers”; the Wampanoags were not wilting flowers, brutish savages, or a monolith of the generic “Native Americans”.
The Wampanoag people had sophisticated systems for living off the land in the region known today as New England, of trapping animals and of moving locations based on the season and the need. They also were experienced in far-reaching commerce, the various Wampanoag tribes trading with other peoples and tribes as far north as what is today known as Canada, as far west as the Great Lakes. As with many advanced societies, they had delicate and complex political alliances and rivalries, particularly with their neighbors like the Narragansetts and the Mohawks. Most of all, they weren’t awed by the English upon their arrival to their shores.
Prior to the English landing at Patuxet (what the English called Plymouth), the Wampanoags and other Native American tribes along the Eastern seaboard had a long familiarity with European raiders and marauders who’d been aggressively trying to invade and settle for decades. Sometimes, both parties were able to trade goods for the mutual benefit of each; oftentimes, there was bloodshed.
“The Thanksgiving myth casts the Wampanoags in 1620 as naive primitives, awestruck by the appearance of the Mayflower and its strange passengers,” Silverman explains. “They were nothing of the sort. Their every step was informed by the legacy of the many European ships that had visited their shores and left behind a wave of enslavement, murder, theft, and mourning.”
What was alarming for the Wampanoag people was the timing of the invaders’ arrival. In the preceding years, the Epidemic of 1616-1619 hit the region hard and dramatically weakened their tribes, wiping out thousands of people. At the same time, sensing their weakness, the neighboring Narragansetts seemed to wait in the weeds ready to seize power of their own.
So, when the English first invaded Patuxet, having already pillaged some Wampanoag graves for treasures along Cape Cod, sachem/chief Ousamequin, reached out to the English not out of kindness, but cautiously, after heated debate, out of desperate survivalism and expediency. They knew the English could be powerful and useful allies despite a familiarity with their aggression and harsh tactics.
“The early history of the Wampanoags and Plymouth took place against this dark background of mourning, suspicion, desperation, and fear,” Silverman writes early on in his book. “It is the most basic element missing from the Thanksgiving myth.”
—
Despite being hailed by some critics as one of his most famous works, Rockwell, in his later years, later expressed some regret over Freedom from Want. “The Europeans sort of resented it,” Rockwell said. “Because it wasn’t freedom from want, it was overabundance, the table was so loaded down with food.”
Moreover, when the painting made its debut in the Saturday Evening Post, it was accompanied by an essay by Filipino novelist and labor activist Carlos Bulosan. Bulosan was raised in the Philippines during the archipelago’s American Colonial Period of the early 20th century; he moved to Seattle when he was 17.
“If you want to know what we are, look upon the farms or upon the hard pavements of the city,” Bulosan begins his essay. “You usually see us working or waiting for work, and you think you know us, but our outward guise is more deceptive than our history.”
“We march on, though sometimes strange moods fill our children. Our march toward security and peace is the march of freedom -- the freedom that we should like to become a living part of. It is the dignity of the individual to live in a society of free men, where the spirit of understanding and belief exist; of understanding that all men [sic] are equal; that all men [sic], whatever their color, race, religion or estate, should be given equal opportunity to serve themselves and each other according to their needs and abilities.
“…it is only when we have plenty to eat… that we begin to understand what freedom means. To us, freedom is not an intangible thing. When we have enough to eat, then we are healthy enough to enjoy what we eat. Then we have the time and ability to read and think and discuss things. Then we are not merely living but also becoming a creative part of life. It is only then that we become a growing part of democracy.”
—
After reading Silverman’s book, several articles about Norman Rockwell’s famous portrait, and Bulosan’s essay, I thought of the passage from Genesis that Juliet cited last week. It’s one of my favorites. After all, there are both personal and societal implications of asking the question:
Who gets to be seen? Whose stories get to be told?
Thanksgiving at our house consisted of my immediate family and family friends, a mob of Chinese immigrants of the Greater Boston Area who had few, if any, blood relatives nearby. We used paper plates, plastic cutlery, and off-brand Tupperware. We’d dish up dinner around a potluck of noodles, stir-fried vegetables and meats, dumplings, and a disposable aluminum pan of pre-carved, soy-basted turkey and rice stuffing set on our kitchen counter. In later years, my mother would bring home pies from her hospital’s cafeteria.
We didn’t eat around a table. Kids were relegated to another room where there was an Xbox. The parents would sit around the living room TV on the big sectional and gab in Mandarin. Football was on sometimes; just as often, it was karaoke—the kind with the cheesy stock video of meadows and moody Europeans. It wasn’t Rockwellian. It wouldn’t be commemorated in a work of art or put on a stamp. Our community used the excuse to get together and that was good enough.
At the same time, I grew up in Burlington, Massachusetts, a mere hour away from the town of Plymouth. In elementary school, as many other grade-school kids did in our area, I took a field trip there to the “living museum” that was then called Plymouth Plantation (it was recently renamed Plimoth Patuxet to honor the Wampanoag name for that land). As a kid, I asked no questions about the white-washed history that I was taught about that “first” Thanksgiving and the early colonizers—that the English settled a new land allegedly in search of religious freedom and the local Indians helped them survive. Though my formal education may have been deficient, as I got older, I had also done little to redress my ignorance and that responsibility was my own.
I have no grand takeaways to share on this Thanksgiving Eve. I recommend no simple instructions on what anyone else is supposed to do regarding uncomfortable truths about the holiday. Not that those recommendations don’t exist; but that there are simply better emissaries than myself for that. You should find them.
Though Silverman’s book is long, I found it to be insightful, humbling, and worth the effort. It is filled with so much more interesting history that I wouldn’t have done justice to try to squeeze in here; the New Yorker’s review of This Land is Their Land is what convinced me to pick it up. Also, for what it’s worth, this is a list of books by contemporary indigenous authors I’ve either read this year or plan to read in the next few months:
There There by Tommy Orange | Novel and finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction about Native peoples living in urban spaces and the challenges they face
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer | Nonfiction work about indigenous ecological knowledge outside of more traditionally scientific methodologies
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich | Novel and winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction about a community’s effort to fight policies aimed to assimilate indigenous tribes
Native by Kaitlin Curtice | Memoir of a woman who is both Christian and a member of Potawatomi Nation
Unsettling Truths by Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah | Historical account and theological exploration of the Doctrine of Discovery and the influence of Christian theology on colonization by two pastors
For my part, I have a humbled spirit. I do think if God sees the Hagars, the marginalized and the displaced, the hungry and the thirsty, the stranger and the naked, the sick and the imprisoned, then it’s incumbent on me to see them too, to hear stories that aren’t just my own and, to ultimately, act upon them.
It is also a good reminder for me to remember to pray, as the Puritans did on those original thanksgivings, for mercy for what I fail to do and with gratitude for the grace I can never earn.