Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday

7: Pilgrims Are for Kids - Thanksgiving in the Progressive Classroom

£ß Ü¢ W hat Americans actually did on Thanksgiving changed very little after the mid–nineteenth century, except for a decline in church attendance and the introduction of football and, later, parades. Even today, the established sequence of family reunion, dinner, and leisure-time activities (including watching football games) repeats the pattern set in place a century and a half ago. The important developments in the history of the Thanksgiving holiday from the end of the nineteenth century until World War II were more in the way the holiday was presented and perceived rather than any changes in its observation. The adoption of the Pilgrims and harvest symbolism was the primary modification in the way the holiday was understood, but almost as influential was the innovative effort to instruct children in the significance of American history through a cycle of holiday observations, including Thanksgiving. We are now so accustomed to the ubiquity of Thanksgiving stories, plays, and images in classrooms, not to mention mass-produced holiday decorations, greeting cards, and “holiday specials,” that it is hard to imagine a time when Thanksgiving was observed without any of these props. Classroom utilization of holiday iconography, which started about 1890, was so effective that by 1907 Robert Haven Schauffler could preface an anthology of Thanksgiving selections in mock amazement that it had not been done before: “For years the imperative ungratified demand for such a book has almost suggested a dark conspiracy among literary folk,—a conspiracy which the present volume is intended to thwart.”1 Although there actually were earlier Thanksgiving collections, Schauffler’s comment points up how quickly holiday exercises had become essential to grade school education. It was in the classroom that Thanksgiving had its greatest impact at the turn of the twentieth century. Anyone who grew up in the United 7 Pilgrims Are for Kids Thanksgiving in the Progressive Classroom 116 Thanksgiving: The Biography States after 1890 was exposed to an annual sequence of classroom holiday activities through which civic education and American patriotism were inculcated. As each holiday approached, pupils were taught appropriate stories and songs; set to work to cut, paste, and color decorations; and involved in class exercises that pointed up the particular significance of the occasion (figure 24). Holiday observances introduced youngsters to the central themes of American history and, in theory, strengthened their character and prepared them to become loyal citizens. Thanksgiving, with its colonial harvest themes and idyllic images of Pilgrims and Indians feasting together on turkey, was one of the more significant of these cheerful pedagogic events. Also, the inculcation of those Thanksgiving images in generations of schoolchildren was probably a major factor behind the ultimate success of the Pilgrim Thanksgiving iconography. This familiar cycle was not an important part of American education before the end of the nineteenth century. There had been earlier holiday activities for kids and children’s books such as Hamilton’s Red-Letter Days in Applethorpe (1866)2 that explained the basis for holiday observances, but the complete subsumption of the civic calendar into the school curriculum was the result of a new progressive approach to education that paralleled the contemporary impulse to create new holidays for everything from labor and flags to birds and trees. This grammar school adaptation of civic ritual not only exposed students to the lessons of “Americanism” but also turned traditional holiday stories such as that of the Pilgrims into children’s fare. When the turn-of-the-century schoolchildren grew up and began telling their own children about the Pilgrims, they naturally associated the story with their own childhood and consigned it to the category of 24. Thanksgiving school pageant, Obenaus Studios, Albany, N.Y., ca. 1930. Pilgrims Are for Kids 117 nursery tale. Soon the Pilgrims, like Santa Claus, the young George Washington , and the Easter Rabbit, were generally thought of as “kids’ stuff” and not accorded quite the serious adult attention that they had enjoyed earlier. The First Thanksgiving trope institutionalized the significance American society found in the traditional holiday. The emotions that arose from the interplay of ideas communicated in the anthologies, classroom activities, and visual decorations coalesced into a standardized holiday myth for student internalization. However, schoolchildren were only one of the audiences for which the holiday lessons were intended. Children of immigrants or uneducated parents could explain the holiday to their families, for whom Thanksgiving’s nondenominational character, subdued patriotism, and middle-class respectability were...