Despite historians' efforts, Thanksgiving misconceptions endure

NEW YORK — One autumn day in 1621, newly arrived Pilgrims joined native Wampanoag Indians in Massachusetts' Plymouth Colony to share a harvest meal of thanksgiving, including roast turkey, pumpkin pie and the Indian-supplied delicacy, popcorn.

Most Americans know the story of Thanksgiving cold. And most of them would be wrong.

It's time to talk turkey.

While long immortalized in painting, poetry, Hallmark cards and school re-enactments — the "First Thanksgiving" that gave rise to America's holiday tradition never occurred, at least not in the way most of us picture and understand it.

There is no historical link between the harvest meal in 1621 and America's Thanksgiving narrative. It is, quite simply, a "myth," albeit a cherished one, according to no less authority than the historians at Plymouth's Plimouth Plantation, a nonprofit educational institution and living museum that researches and replicates life in the early years of the colony.

Other entrées

For starters, there is no conclusive evidence that turkey was on a menu that more likely starred venison, ducks, geese and shellfish. There might have been stewed pumpkin, but certainly no pumpkin pie in the then almost certainly ovenless Plymouth Colony. Cranberry sauce was as yet unknown to the colonists and the Indians, and neither yams nor white potatoes were grown yet in North America. There is nothing to suggest the Native Americans popped corn and bestowed it on their colonizers. And there likely was no groaning board around which diners gathered.

"Did they even have a table? Maybe," said Elizabeth Pleck, a historian at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who has written extensively on the history of Thanksgiving.

The modern Thanksgiving tradition is rooted in a 165-year-old historical misunderstanding that goes far beyond the question of whether turkey was served. There was no connection made between Pilgrims and Thanksgiving until 1841, when Alexander Young published a book in Boston containing a letter written by Edward Winslow, one of the Plymouth Colony leaders, on Dec. 11, 1621.

Let's party

The letter includes one paragraph in which Winslow described a three-day harvest celebration attended by the 50 colonists and some 90 Indians:

"Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after 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, among 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."

On his own, Young decided to add an asterisk, a fateful footnote describing the event as "the first Thanksgiving" and dragging in the unmentioned turkey by stating "they no doubt feasted on the wild turkey as well as venison." In essence, Young wrongly conflated the English tradition of a secular harvest festival with the very specific Puritan tradition of observing holy days of Thanksgiving, which occurred primarily in church and only when occasions warranted.

Making it official

In fact, Thanksgiving, arguably America's most inclusive and cherished day of family observance, didn't become a permanent national holiday until President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it so in 1863. And that primarily was the result of a 17-year campaign by magazine editor Sara Josepha Hale, who initially thought such a holiday might avert the Civil War and subsequently hoped it would help heal the nation's wounds.

But it all started with Young's faulty footnote. "So, basically, that asterisk sets the myth in motion," said Jennifer Monac, public-relations manager for Plimouth Plantation. "That's all it was, a paragraph in a book, and it's turned into America's most beloved holiday."

"To the English of Plymouth Plantation, what is now referred to as the 'First Thanksgiving' was neither a 'first' nor a 'thanksgiving,' " as Kathleen Curtin, Plimouth Plantation food historian, states bluntly in her 2005 book, "Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving Recipes and History, From Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie." If there was, indeed, a "First Thanksgiving" in Plymouth Colony, it came in 1623, when the colonists, short on food, thanked God for the end of a drought and the news that a supply ship was on its way.

The truth is hardly a secret. The historians at the Plimouth Plantation, among many others, have published what is known about the true origins of Thanksgiving in scholarly journals, "but nobody paid any attention to it," said Andrew Smith, culinary historian and author of the just-published "The Turkey: An American Story."

They still don't, according to Plimouth's Monac.

"We tell [the true story] every year, and we tell it often on widely seen publications and media. Like 'Good Morning America' is coming here early next week ... but it's amazing what the common misperceptions are."

Among those, she noted, is the fact that Pilgrims didn't wear buckles on their hats and shoes because "there weren't any buckles until the 1630s."

There are more, many stemming from the fact that the Victorians who promulgated the Pilgrim connection tended to imagine them as Victorians. Thus came the concept that Pilgrims dressed austerely in black and white, when in fact they often wore earth tones, scarlet and yellow, according to Francis Bremer, chairman of the history department at Pennsylvania's Millersville University.

And Bremer dismisses the idea that Pilgrims were priggish about alcohol and sex.

"Their tradition coming from England was to drink beers, ales, stouts and other home-brewed beverages," he said. "They would have continued that." As for sex, between a married couple it was encouraged and not just for procreation, Bremer said.

He added, "It doesn't really matter if they were eating turkey. What really mattered is they came together as a community and welcomed people from another society. ... And that element ... of welcoming the Native Americans, who had a very different culture, is something I think we ought to spend more time thinking about."

Information in this article, originally published November 23, 2006, was corrected November 26, 2006. A previous version of this story incorrectly claimed white potatoes had not been grown in the New World at the time of the Pilgrims' Thanksgiving feast. They are native to the Andes Mountains of South America.