For a Revival of Forefathers’ Day
Other than perhaps July 4, Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday. But we’ve been celebrating the former since 1777. The latter is relatively late, a nineteenth century creation codified by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It was the mid-nineteenth century rediscovery of William Bradford’s journal and other accounts that mentioned the 1621 meal that led Alexander Young and Sara Hale to push for a new national holiday honoring the mythological origin of the nation. Until that time, no one knew about the alleged unity banquet, and no one called the settlers of Plymouth “Pilgrims.” The appeal of this new myth in the 1860s is obvious: the story of America became reconciliation, the cessation of hostilities, multiethnic, mutual aid. Harmony, tranquility, bounty, and unity. That became the theme(s). A new holiday for what was, in many ways, a new nation was needed. Even that demonstrates part of the function of Thanksgiving. A family dinner is subject to myriad interpretations, uses, and practices. In a way, Thanksgiving is open to contestation. Virginians, I gather, are passionate about laying claim to the real first Thanksgiving meal.
Of course, days of thanksgiving had been declared regularly throughout American history, usually after a bountiful harvest or a military victory. Bradford had done so in 1623, and the Continental Congress did so in 1777. Establishing a national one with ties to the first settlers of New England, which, as Tocqueville said, shaped the nation, was not a bad idea at all. There’s nothing wrong with Thanksgiving, of course. It’s wholesome, patriotic, family oriented and, in that way, its own act of rebellion in this late republic. We should observe it and feast on the true national bird as God intended. Bald eagles, after all, as Ben Franklin observed, are notoriously of “bad moral character” whereas the turkey is a “bird of courage.” (At least we do not eat rattlesnake.) The fact that turkey was not on the original menu at Plymouth is no matter. The nature of Thanksgiving, as we’ve described, is that it is an open vial into which we can pour the expanse of American custom and sentiment over time. Speaking vials, the proper American way to cook your turkey, by the way, is to electrocute it while still alive with “two glass jars containing as much electrical fire as forty common phials.”
Before Thanksgiving there was Forefathers’ Day, one of the oldest holidays in America. You’ve never celebrated Forefathers’ Day in large part because it was drowned out, except in Plymouth, by Thanksgiving. As we come up on a year of what will hopefully be a period of appropriate and respectful celebration of our nation’s history, it’s time to bring this old, discarded holiday back.
I first encountered a reference to the holiday, established in 1769 by the Old Colony Club (and then the town of Plymouth), in a speech by Henry Cabot Lodge delivered in 1898 for the occasion. As I’ve noted before, no one talks about our Puritan forebears anymore like Lodge did. He modeled how we should speak of our ancestors, and Forefathers’ Day is a day for filial piety.
“[The Puritan] stands out in history as distinctly as a Greek temple on a hilltop against the brightness of the clear twilight sky. It is a stern figure enough, lacking many of the ordinary graces, but it is a manly figure withal, full of strength and force and purpose. He had grave faults, but they were the faults of a strong and not a weak nature, and his virtues were those of a robust man of lofty aims…. We would not barter our descent from him for the pedigree of kings.”
Because of a miscalculation of the transference from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar—only 10 rather than 11 days should have been added—Forefathers’ Day occurs on December 22 to honor the Pilgrim landing. That is, the landing of the shallop, not the Mayflower itself. In other words, Forefathers’ Day is the remembrance of the first boots on the ground, as it were.
Celebration of Forefathers’ Day is appropriately Sabbatarian. If December 22 falls on a Sunday, festivities must be moved to the following Monday. Not the preceding Saturday, mind you. That would threaten Lord’s Day attendance. Though it cannot be observed on a Sunday, Forefathers’ Day is typically accompanied by a commemorative sermon. The American Antiquarian Society has a list of the sermons preached between 1770 and 1865. The 1776 sermon from Samuel West (1731-1807) is a representative example. Or read a mercifully abridged version of this two-hour speech from Daniel Webster given on the occasion 1820. (Lodge’s short biography of Webster published in the Atlantic, back when it was a respectable American magazine, is appropriate reading as well.)
Firing a canon is customary, though rifles or legal explosives will surely do. Then there’s feasting either before or after the reading of a proclamation honoring our Pilgrim forebears. Turkey is not required but succotash and some kind of local foul are appropriate menu items. Clams, oysters, cod, venison, eel, cheese, and apple pie are also options. Native foods are the point. No Chinese takeout or southern barbeque. Many toasts should be given as the party reminisces on the “many and various advantages of our forefathers in the first settlement of this country, and the growth and increase of the same.” A second canon volley at eleven o’clock in the evening, marking the formal end of festivities that began 12 hours before. Parades were a part of early celebrations in which “youths” were known to discharge their side arms with enthusiasm.
Other than another chance to eat, drink, and experiment in pyrotechnics, what does Forefathers’ Day add to the American calendar? Rather than the meal of 1621, Forefathers’ Day centers the covenant of 1620, “undertaken for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith,” and it centers the men who entered it and crossed the Atlantic to establish a new polity for their posterity. As Thomas Jefferson insisted in his Summary View of British Rights in America, no help, either from the Indians or Britain, was involved in this expression of, as he would have it, English courage and fortitude. It was not a kumbaya moment, but rather one of daring and endurance, and only attributable to particular men, Englishmen who talked like this:
“May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity.’ Let them therefore praise the Lord because He is good: and His mercies endure forever.’ ‘Yea, let them which have been redeemed of the Lord, shew how He hath delivered them from the hand of the oppressor. When they wandered in the desert wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before the Lord His lovingkindness and His wonderful works before the sons of men.”
Bradford’s is some of the most beautiful American prose. I recommend reading it at this year’s Forefathers’ party. (Get the Samuel Eliot Morrison edition, and read his Builders of the Bay Colony and The Puritan Pronaos, if you can find them.)
There was always an element of defiance and chauvinism in Forefathers’ Day. Early accounts of the holiday feature colonial pride in the face of mounting pressure from the home government unto conformity and consolidation. What the day represents for our time is a protest against the creedal, propositional gobbledygook that still captivates even respected people like Gordon Wood. (The late Robert Middlekauff was better anyway.) It reminds us that there was a definitive beginning to our nation accomplished by a particular people and that we are, in turn, particular. It’s just like any nation only different: it’s ours, and we are a people, not an idea. We are not gratitude or unity or freedom. We are descendants—at least mythical, covenantal descendants—of our forefathers.
Machiavelli and Rousseau both spoke of the significance of founders—Moses, Lycurgus, Romulus— and their ability to shape nations. Indeed, a nation forgets itself when it departs from their modes and orders. It becomes something different entirely. Our first founders are rarely remembered nor connection to them prioritized. We must remedy this great forgetting if we are to recover a sense of ourselves—any continuity—in our moment of tumult where seemingly the whole world is laying claim to American identity. Charity and unity through embrace of and participation in particularity, that is the formula we should apply to Americanism.
This particularity is our Anglo-Protestant beginnings. This is what old and new Americans must embrace: the religion, language, virtue, and ambitions of their forefathers, whether natural or adoptive. Forefathers’ Day is a celebration of founding heroes, and a rejection of hyphenated identities. It’s a reminder of what we’re all supposed to assimilate to. As Lodge put it (very much in the spirit of his good friend, Teddy Roosevelt),
“Let everyman honor and love the land of his birth and the race from which he springs and keep their memory green. It is a pious and honorable duty. But let us have done with British-Americans and Irish-Americans and German-Americans, and so on, and all be Americans—nothing more and nothing less. If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives.”
Robert Louis Wilken has written elegantly about how culture is formed through space (art and architecture), language, and time (i.e., the calendar). I am not advocating for canceling Thanksgiving. I’m saying we should flood the zone with inescapably American holidays, ones that directly confront the creedal, propositional thesis imposed on American identity over the past century. Let a thousand flowers bloom. As we approach the 250th anniversary of our second founding, we should be thinking creatively about how to emphasize and celebrate American heritage.
Whereas Thanksgiving is about platitudes (e.g., gratitude)—good platitudes, to be sure—Forefathers’ Day is about men, heroes, a moment of conquest, a true founding less prone to reinterpretation by egalitarian enthusiasms. Forefathers’ Day is explicitly national in the traditional sense in its recognition of our patria, of national origins and lineage, of our heritage as fixed in time, not open to ideological musings adopted through malleable public sentiment.
America has always been generous, charitable, and welcoming. For this model of charity to continue unmolested, a point of historical reference, of assimilation and love, must be established. Forefathers’ Day helps, if in a small way, to do that. Several attempts were made in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to establish Forefathers’ Day as a national holiday, not as a replacement of but rather a compliment to Thanksgiving. If any administration would entertain a Forefathers’ Day proposal again, it’s the current one.
Image: Landing of the Pilgrims by Michele Felice Cornè (1805). Wikimedia Commons.
