Soccer Dad

Gobble it up

The New York Times has a fascinating op-ed about Thanksgiving by James McWilliams a professor of history in Texas, "They held their noses - and ate" in which he argues that the Pilgrims would have only reluctantly partaken of meals that were prepared by the Indians:

Given these expectations, English migrants recoiled upon discovering that the native inhabitants hunted their game, grew their grain haphazardly and foraged for fruit and vegetables. Squash, corn, turkey and ripe cranberries might have tasted perfectly fine to the English settlers. But that was beside the point. What really mattered was that the English deemed the native manner of acquiring these goods nothing short of barbaric. Indeed, the colonists saw it as the essence of savagery.

From the colonists' perspective, Native Americans grew crops in an entirely corrupt manner. They typically prepared fields by setting fire to the underbrush and girdling surrounding trees. Afterward, they planted corn, gourds and beans willy-nilly across charred ground, possibly throwing in fish as fertilizer. To the Indian women who tended the plants with clamshell hoes, the ecological brilliance of this arrangement was abundantly clear: the cornstalks stretched into sturdy poles for the beans to climb upon, the corn leaves fanned out to provide squash with shade, and the beans enriched the soil with extra nitrogen. But the English, blinded by tradition, never got it - they just looked on in horror.

Where were the fences? The neat rows of cross-sectioned grain? The plows? Where were the carts of dung? The team of oxen? The yokes? Why were perfectly good trees left to rot? Why not burn them to power a fireplace? And those fish! Why not salt them down and export them to Europe for a tidy profit? What was wrong with these people? The collective English answer - "everything" - honed the colonists' distaste for foods, especially corn and squash, that they quickly judged best for farm animals.

The article is fascinating. It provides some history too of when Thanksgiving became a holiday that was celebrated by eating. My problem is that Prof McWilliams seems to be looking for a nice provocative, overarching theme, but in doing so overlooked the facts.

I'm no expert on the Pilgrims. (Living in New England for 5 years doesn't make one an expert automatically.) Rather the Volokh Conspiracy.Jim Lindgren excerpted a letter dated December 1621 from one of the Pilgrims, Edward Winslow (via Instapundit):

We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn [i.e., wheat] did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

Does it sound from this letter like Winslow was ashamed of hunting? Or ashamed of planting the way the Indians did? Rather the letter seems to show a certain pride in the Pilgrims' ability to adapt to their new land.

It's ironic then that Prof McWilliams uses the history of Thanksgiving to celebrate the adaptablity of Americans:

This hurt. And under the circumstances no status-minded English colonist would have possibly highlighted his adherence to native American victuals - even if the early Thanksgiving holiday had been a genuine culinary event. Indeed, it wasn't until after the Revolution, when the new nation was seeking ways to differentiate itself from the Old World, that these foods became celebrated as a reflection of emerging ideals like simplicity, manifest destiny and rugged individualism.

Today, of course, we proudly evoke this native American heritage by crowding the table with turkey, corn, stuffing, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie as if they had always been there. That they weren't shouldn't be a cause for chagrin, but a reminder that Americans have survived in some measure because we are endlessly adaptable and capable of overcoming our deepest prejudices - even if the Pilgrims wouldn't have approved.

The Winslow letter, though, suggests that the Pilgrims had that quality too.

Posted by SoccerDad at November 24, 2005 6:35 PM