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David N. Mayer

Celebrating Thanksgiving (Reprise)

(The following is a slightly revised and updated version of an essay I posted two years ago.) 

            Thanksgiving Day is second only to Independence Day in being the most American of holidays.  And it’s becoming one of my favorite holidays:  Not only does it provide a welcome break from Fall semester classes as well as an opportunity to spend time with family and friends, but it’s also an apt opportunity for Americans to celebrate the blessings of capitalism. 

            Yes, you read that right:  contrary to prevailing orthodoxies (whether the traditional view or the new “politically correct” view of Thanksgiving), the holiday – properly considered – is really a celebration of Americans’ prosperity, the material abundance that can be produced at such a scale only in a free, capitalist society like the United States.  That’s why the holiday is so truly an American one. 

            Philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand summed it up quite nicely in an essay she wrote in The Ayn Rand Letter in the early 1970s: 

“Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday.  In spite of its religious form (giving thanks to God for a good harvest), its essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production.  It is a producers’ holiday.  The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.  Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America’s pride – just as it is the pride of American parents that their children need never know starvation.”

(“Cashing in on Hunger,” ARL, III, 23, 1, reprinted in The Ayn Rand Lexicon 497 (Harry Binswanger ed., New York 1986)). 

            The traditional view of Thanksgiving – which goes back to its historical origins as a legal holiday, first observed in 17^th-century Puritan Massachusetts and then made a national observance by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War – is that it is properly an occasion for essentially religious devotion, to give thanks to God for our blessings, which are seen by people of faith as acts of divine providence.    

            That traditional view incorporates a myth – the myth of the “First Thanksgiving,” presumably celebrated by the Pilgrim settlers at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621 – which the modern “politically correct” view of Thanksgiving attempts to counter.  Tourists learn this “p.c.” revised view when they visit “Plimouth Plantation,” the modern reconstruction of the Pilgrim settlement (complete not only with the 17^th-century spelling of the colony’s name but also well-trained actors who recreate the actual historical persons who lived at the colony in the 1620s).  As the museum exhibits (and the actor-guides) explain, the Pilgrim settlers indeed held a big feast in 1621 – a three-day celebration (including hunting and athletic games) which included the local Native Americans, the Wampanoags, without whose help the English settlers could not have survived their difficult first winter.  That celebration, however, was not the Thanksgiving feast of legend; and when the Pilgrims did observe a Thanksgiving, properly speaking, it was a sober day of religious observance, held pursuant to a proclamation by Governor William Bradford on November 29, 1623.  

            More Thanksgiving myths are bashed in the newly published book A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving (PublicAffairs Books, 2006), by British author Godfrey Hodgson.  Hodgson tells us that turkey couldn’t have been served because the Pilgrims’ heavy matchlock muskets simply were no match for the few wild turkeys inhabiting eastern Massachusetts at that time.  And it was, he tells us, the Wampanoags who produced the main course for the 1621 feast – which was venison. 

            Both the traditional view and the historically-revised, “politically correct” view of Thanksgiving, however, miss a critical part of the true historical story:  the vital economics lesson that the Pilgrim settlers at Plymouth learned.   Their first year in the colony was so disastrous – with the colonists barely surviving death by starvation – largely because of the communist economic system they had attempted, as a utopian experiment.  The Pilgrim settlers had decided to hold the land as their common community property and also to share in common the harvests they produced on the land.  As Fred Foldvary, an economist at Santa Clara University, has noted in his essay “Thanksgiving Day – The True Story,” this communist system was a failure.  “The men were not eager to work in the fields, since if they worked hard, they would have to share the added produce with everyone else.”  After two years of poor harvests under this system, they change it to a system based on individual enterprise:  although the land was still owned in common, each family was allotted a portion and could keep whatever they grew.  “Their new incentive-based economic system was great success,” Professor Foldvary notes, in explaining the reason for the thanksgiving observance in 1623.  The Pilgrims had learned a great economics lesson, “a lesson that so impressed them that they commemorated it every year thereafter” – and “a bitter lesson [that] would be learned all over again by the people of the Soviet Union and other command economies, where socialism and communalism of production failed again.”  It’s a lesson that modern-day Americans especially ought not to forget, as we continue to embrace socialistic public-policy schemes while the rest of the world (including, ironically, many of the former Soviet bloc societies) are realizing the virtues of free enterprise and capitalism. 

            Neither do the two dominant views of Thanksgiving really reflect the reality of the holiday as it is observed by the majority of Americans today.  The holiday has become secularized – and rightly so, for it is not some supernatural entity called “God” that has made possible our material prosperity, but rather it has been Americans themselves, through their hard work and their right choices.  Production requires certain underlying conditions, among them a legal system that protects private property and the freedom of productive individuals to use their property to create wealth and to keep the fruits of their productive work.  The material results of over three centuries of capitalism in America include many of the things that modern Americans associate with the Thanksgiving holiday:  driving to friends’ or relatives’ homes in the comfort of a sporty car; enjoying a lavish meal of roasted turkey stuffed with our favorite dressing, with cranberry sauce on the side, and an array of rich desserts, including the traditional pumpkin pie; watching football games on TV, preferably digital cable broadcasts viewed in high definition on a widescreen TV, and perhaps followed by the latest movies out on DVD or a video game on one of the new Sony PS3 or Nintendo Wii systems; cigar afficiandos puffing away in the privacy of their own, or their family’s or friends’ homes (a freedom, thankfully, not yet taken away by the anti-tobacco Nazis); and even taking a glass of Alka-Selzer for the heartburn and/or gas that inevitably follows from gastronomic over-indulgence at the Thanksgiving dinner.  For all these wonderful little things, we have our own capitalist economy to thank. 

Let’s Have a Rematch! 

            The Bullshit Championship Series (BCS) title game scheduled for January 8 should be canceled this year; it’s unnecessary, superfluous, and redundant.  The whole purpose of the BCS, presumably, was to ensure that the No.1 and No. 2 teams in college football played each other, to determine on the field (rather than in the polls) the undisputed national champion.  And that game was played last Saturday, when No.1 Ohio State defeated No. 2 Michigan, 42-39, winning the Big Ten title and, by rights, the national championship.   It was one of the best, if not the best, OSU-Michigan match-ups in the league’s history – “The Game of the Century,” some pundits have called it.  Having already played and defeated the No. 2 team in the country, Ohio State ought not to have to play another game to prove what every sports writer in the country already knows: that it’s this year’s No. 1 team. 

            Yet the plans for the January 8 game go forward, and the BCS polls continue to be taken for two more weeks – until the last major college games are played on December 2 and the BCS formally selects the teams for their bowls, including the national championship game.  It’s not surprising that Michigan, which came within three points of defeating Ohio State, stayed at No. 2 in the latest BCS poll:  right now, only one team in the country is better than Michigan, and that’s the team that won in Columbus last Saturday.  If the top two teams indeed must play on January 8, the only pairing that makes sense is a rematch between Michigan and Ohio State.  They are unquestionably the two best teams in the country, this year. 

            A rematch is a real possibility, if Southern Cal – the team currently ranked No. 3 in the BCS poll – fails to win its last two games, against Notre Dame on Nov. 25 and against UCLA on Dec. 2.  (BCS analyst Jerry Palm, who runs the collegebcs.com Web site, predicts that if USC wins out, it will be the highest-rated one-loss team in the computers and thus will move ahead of Michigan in the BCS poll.  If USC loses either to Notre Dame or UCLA, then Florida may have a realistic chance to meet the Buckeyes – if Florida can beat currently-ranked No. 6 Arkansas on Dec. 2.)  None of the other one-loss teams currently in the running to play against Ohio State on Jan. 8 – neither USC nor Florida – are better than Michigan; their losses were not against the No. 1 team.  And the only other one-loss team currently in the BCS top five – No. 5 Notre Dame – certainly does not deserve to climb past Michigan in the rankings, considering how soundly the Wolverines pounded the Irish, 47-21, when the two teams played in September. 

            Former OSU coach Earl Bruce commented on a local radio show this week that a Michigan – Ohio State rematch would be “anticlimactic,” and he’s right, in a sense:  it certainly would be anticlimactic, for OSU fans, for Ohio State to be defeated by Michigan and for Michigan to claim the national championship that it may very well deserve.   Buckeye fans don’t want a rematch because they fear the second time around, Michigan is likely to win.  The shocking death of legendary U of M coach Glenn “Bo” Schembechler on Nov. 17, the day before The Game, may not have directly hurt the Michigan players and coaches – Michigan head coach Lloyd Carr, being the classy guy that he is, refused to exploit Schembechler’s death by calling for the team to win the game “for Bo” and instead just urged the team to play in a way that would make Bo proud -- but it’s likely that, at least indirectly, the shock from the suddenness of Bo’s death did cast a pall over the team, especially over Michigan’s defense.  The 187 rushing yards, 316 passing yards, and 42 points that Michigan gave up to OSU was not typical of the stingy defense that all season long (before Nov. 18) was third in the nation in total defense (holding opponents to 231.4 ypg) and led the nation in rushing defense (holding opponents to only 29.9 ypg, one-sixth the yards they gave up to the Buckeyes).  As the Wolverines running back Mike Hart said after the game, “If we played them again, it would be a whole different game.  Guarantee that.”  And he’s right. 

            I’m one Michigan football fan who’s rooting for a rematch against Ohio State on January 8 – not only to definitely prove that Michigan is the best team in the land, but also to win one more for Bo.

     | Link to this Entry | Posted Tuesday, November 21, 2006 | Copyright © David N. Mayer