In November 1620 the Mayflower deposited about 100 Pilgrims at the Wampanoag community of Patuxet, which the newcomers renamed New Plymouth. A year later, the English and Wampanoags enjoyed a three-day feast. For generations, Americans have celebrated that meal as the first Thanksgiving.

As traditions go, Thanksgiving seems pretty secure, though the recent redefinition of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day suggests that even once-sacred holidays can change. Columbus trotted through American culture until 1992, the 500^th anniversary of his first voyage. That year, Native and other scholars fueled a campaign to redefine the holiday by emphasizing Columbus’s role in brutal conquest, enslavement, and ecological catastrophe. But this was not the first effort to redefine America’s origins.

In the 1820s and 1830s, a Pequot minister named William Apess took aim at what would become Thanksgiving—arguing that the nation needed to rethink the colonization of New England, and view it through Indigenous perspectives. What does it mean when a nation extracts a benign interpretation of the past from a tangled and often violent legacy of encounters and conflicts? Indigenous peoples’ experience of conquest and colonization pivoted on dispossession. Shouldn’t that be part of the story too?

Apess tackled these questions at a time when prominent politicians linked the Pilgrims’ experience with two hallmarks of American democracy: the right for any community to govern itself, and the right for individuals to practice their faith without government interference. In the era of Indian removal, these notions became embedded in the federal government’s efforts to expand the nation westward into lands held by Indigenous peoples whom the Constitution excluded from exercising such rights.

In 1829, Apess’ A Son of the Forest became the earliest published Indigenous autobiography in the United States. He reported he was born in 1798, the grandson of “a white man” who had married the granddaughter of Metacom, the Wampanoag leader known to the English as King Philip. A Son of the Forest detailed Apess’ struggles with alcohol, and how he quit drinking and became ordained as a Methodist minister.

Apess was a leader in the Massachusetts Indigenous peoples’ battle to preserve their lands and to take greater control over their communities in an uprising known as the Mashpee Revolt of 1833-1834.  The Mashpees (or Marshpees) “wanted their rights as men and as freemen,” he wrote.  Apess and the Mashpees invoked the language of the Nullification Crisis of 1832, when the state of South Carolina failed in an effort to declare federal tariffs unconstitutional.  They tried to prevent white intruders from taking wood from Mashpee lands, which landed Apess briefly in prison.  Many non-Natives feared the implications of Apess’ stand, but their counsel, who was not Native, compared his clients to the patriots who had thrown tea into Boston Harbor in 1773.

Soon after, Apess turned his attention to the history of early New England.

In the midst of a war in 1637—less than 20 years after the famous Plymouth feast—Pilgrims and their allies set a Pequot town on fire and shot those who tried to escape. They killed 400 to 700 on a single night, including children and elderly people. They captured Pequot survivors and shipped them to the Caribbean as slaves. Forty years later, Apess’ ancestor, Metacom, led multiple Indigenous communities to battle for their homelands in a conflict known as King Philip’s War. From 1675 to 1677, Indigenous and colonial soldiers laid waste to each other’s communities, and colonists again bought and sold Indigenous captives, creating a market in enslaved bodies. The colonists believed Metacom and his allies posed the most serious crisis they had ever faced. After Metacom died in Rhode Island on August 12, 1676, English soldiers decapitated him, and colonists mounted his head on a post in Plymouth as a warning.

In powerful 1836 speeches and a book called Eulogy on King Philip, Apess used his ancestor’s story to redefine the colonial era. Unlike promoters of the myths surrounding Plymouth, Apess saw the 17th century as an era of struggle and sacrifice.  He described the Pilgrims as trespassers who took land “without asking liberty from anyone.” Apess castigated colonists for selling Metacom’s son into slavery, an act he called shocking by “a people calling themselves Christians.” He suggested that Metacom, rather than the English, was the true exemplar of Revolutionary ideals and sacrifice.

Apess delivered his eulogy twice in Boston in January 1836, but he soon after disappeared from the historical record. In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. He asked all Americans to recognize the strength of the country, and to seek divine protection for “all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife” engulfing the nation. But by then, the association of Plymouth and the holiday had already taken hold. Thanksgiving festivities continued to emphasize a sanitized version of events in early New England—and to wallow in nationalist pride, rather than reckon with the implications of European conquest.

For decades, scholars of early American history ignored Apess’ books, though an edition of his complete writings in 1992 brought new attention to his critique of early New England. By then, other Indigenous writers and speakers also thought it necessary to challenge the romance of the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving.

In 1970, an Aquinnah Wampanoag activist named Wamsutta Frank James delivered a speech in Plymouth that put the Indigenous experience at the center, not the periphery, of the history of the United States. Rather than celebrating a tradition of religious freedom and democracy, he spoke of centuries of prejudice and dispossession.  His words had lasting impact: Each year on the fourth Thursday of November, Indigenous and supporters congregate on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth to mark the holiday James suggested renaming the National Day of Mourning.

There’s a rich and still too-little-known tradition of Indigenous writings like Apess’, including Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s early 17^th century account of his travels and the many texts of Samson Occom, a Mohegan who raised funds later used (against his wishes) to establish Dartmouth College. Many of these authors offered penetrating critiques of the European conquest and colonization of the Americas. Like Apess, they bore witness and their words invite a similar reckoning.

Looked at from the vantage points of 1637, 1676, and so many other moments in our country’s history, that three-day meal in the autumn of 1621 was less a predictor of future good will among all Americans than a historic aberration. Thanksgiving may well survive for centuries. But as the rethinking of Columbus Day and the public’s broader understanding of slavery and American history through educational programs like “The 1619 Project” have shown, it is not too late to make progress. Rather than see this holiday as an opportunity to gorge on a meal and dwell on naïve fantasies about a period of accord, it could become an opportunity to retell the history of the United States, putting Indigenous experiences at the center instead of the periphery.

The post We Can Tell New Thanksgiving Stories appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The discourse isn’t necessarily anchored to the fourth Thursday in November, and the people texting share neither DNA (nor deep-rooted emotional baggage). Rather, such pressing questions revolve around an unofficial holiday nominally in the Thanksgiving orbit that’s slowly formed its own customs and significance over the last decade or so to become a standalone celebration in its own right. The result, Friendsgiving, has become one of my favorite events on the calendar year.

Sometimes traced to November 1994, when the TV show Friends aired its first Thanksgiving episode, the concept was floating around for some time before the word “Friendsgiving” appeared in print circa 2007. The fledgling tradition received a boost four years later after Baileys Irish Cream used it in an ad campaign, and each November since, it has grown more popular, breaking through the American lexicon by the mid 2010s. (Merriam-Webster officially added the term to the dictionary in January 2020.)

But what if instead of thinking about Friendsgiving as a recent phenomenon, we considered it a welcome return to a time when our culture centered around friendship?

In classical philosophy, friendship was considered to be the summum bonum, or highest good.

That’s because the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed the relationship as a glue that held civic life together, uniting private and public spheres. As Aristotle once wrote: “Friendship or love is the bond which holds states together, and that legislators set more store by it than by justice; for concord is apparently akin to friendship and it is concord that they especially seek to promote.”

America’s founders also understood friendship in this light.

“Inspired by the ‘Aristotelian concept of friendship as collective tissue,’ early Americans understood male friendships ‘as crucial to the nation-building project and its creation of worthy republican citizens […] encouraging empathy between citizens in a society that no longer cohered through shared loyalty to a monarch,’” as American literary scholar Michael Kalisch argues in The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction.

Indeed, Kalisch contends that while the republic’s separation from Britain is often framed as a refusal of paternal authority, male friendship offered an “alternative metaphor of civic association in the nascent independent nation,” one that united it with France’s cry across the ocean for liberté, égalité, fraternité. Both revolutions, Kalisch posits, were “galvanized by the egalitarian promise of friendship”—even though, as he points out, such a promise only extended to white men.

But if ideas of friendship and love were long seen as interchangeable, friendship’s decline in the American civic space coincided with the separation of these spheres. In Perfecting Friendship, Dartmouth gender and literary scholar Ivy Schweitzer observes that by the late 1800s “the distinctions between friends and family, love and friendship gradually became clearer” and that, in turn, “friendship as the privileged site of sympathetic attachment became increasingly feminized, privatized, and removed from the public sphere of republican and democratic politics.”

In the 20th century, friendship remained on society’s periphery, Schweitzer continues, as “Western culture developed an obsession with individual selfhood and sexual desire.” So dramatic was the drop-off, she notes, that by the 1990s the American literary critic Wayne C. Booth confessed, while reading about Aristotelian friendship, “to be puzzled by the modern neglect of what had been ‘one of the major philosophical topics, the subject of thousands of books and tens of thousands of essays.’”

But the understanding of friendship as a civic model wasn’t abandoned wholesale during this period: Marginalized communities, in particular, continued to advance older notions of friendship, recognizing the ways in which it provided a powerful alternative mode of intentional community and organizing. In Feminism for the Americas, UCLA historian Katherine M. Marino shows how friendship was embraced as a model of social democracy during the rise of a global movement for women’s rights. Leaders like Panamanian feminist Clara González, Marino writes, understood that friendship corresponded “to the real needs of modern life, which is essentially a life of relationships, of interdependence, of solidarity, of mutual aid, of social action and of love.” The concept of the “chosen family,” first articulated in 1991 by anthropologist Kath Weston in Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, illuminated the ways that queer and transgender individuals, too, had pushed the notion of friendship to encompass deep, deliberate bonds that existed outside of legal or genetic ties.

The rise of Friendsgiving from an ad hoc replacement for being far away from home on the holidays into a ritual all its own suggests we’re seeing a larger, mainstream push to celebrate and honor these non-familial social relationships. And I hope its popularity is an indication of broader willingness to reconsider the role that friendship can play in our society.

So, if you’re participating in a Friendsgiving of your own this year, consider if you’re advancing a model of friendship that the ancients might recognize. And maybe save a toast for Cicero and his treatise How to Be a Friend or Laelius de Amicitia, and cheers to the benevolentia (mutual kindness), consensio (consensus), caritas (devotion), and fidelitas (loyalty) that you’re cultivating together.

The post Friendsgiving Puts Friendship Back Where It Belongs appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today, the pardoning of the national Thanksgiving turkey is an annual White House staple, complete with TV crews capturing the live pageantry. But this pomp and circumstance surrounding the pardon masks the larger question: Why we are granting clemency or extending mercy to turkeys in the first place?

A pardon entails the waiving of a punishment and the restoring of one’s civil liberties, while a reprieve delays imposition of a sentence or punishment (often because the sentence or punishment is seen as unjust given the crime). Importantly, none of these actions erase the guilt of the person to whom it’s being granted. But turkeys cannot commit crimes. And so the purpose of the president pardoning a turkey (or two) right before Thanksgiving only serves to mask the realities faced by those particular turkeys, and for that matter, most turkeys in the U.S.

Commercially bred turkeys grow quickly and produce a lot of meat, especially breast meat. Their large breasts make natural mating difficult, so they are bred through artificial insemination, and their eggs are placed in an incubator to hatch. Neither the process of collecting semen nor the process of insemination is done gently. The chicks hatch in batches of 10,000.  They are usually debeaked, desnooded, detoed, and have their spurs trimmed so they won’t harm one another as they grow in barns crowded with 7,000 to 10,000 birds. They remain in light at all times to promote eating and growth, reaching their slaughter weight in three to four months.

The U.S. produces about 250 million such turkeys each year. One or two of them are “pardoned,” and are generally sent to an animal sanctuary to live out their lives. But those lives tend to be fairly short. These turkeys usually have to be kept on special diets (which may well leave them hungry most of the time) in order to slow their growth and prolong their lives. If they are allowed to eat normally, they will grow too large for their bones and legs. Given that they have been bred for maximum growth and early maturity, it is not clear that the “pardon” is in the interest of the turkeys. It seems to be about making humans feel better about themselves before they sit down to a Thanksgiving meal.

The Thanksgiving holiday is fraught with hypocrisy and outright brutality. The fate of turkeys in what is now the U.S. is to be a brutalized commercial product that symbolizes a meal of peace that masks the brutality of European settlement here and the genocidal policies that attempted, but did not succeed, in wiping Native people completely off the map. Turkeys are linked to this history; indigenous to the Americas and first domesticated by Native Americans, they played an important role as food and as a religious sacrifice for many Indigenous peoples. But European colonists overhunted wild turkeys and continuously pushed them off their native habitats. By 1930, only a few hundred thousand wild turkeys were left.

Colonists also took turkeys back to Europe—kept in narrow cages and often force fed—where they became a popular food item, particularly for the Christmas holiday. With continued European immigration to the U.S., turkeys became a common food bird here as well. The American meat industry began breeding and raising them in ways that ignored their naturally seasonal reproductive patterns, denied their natural patterns of eating and movement, and showed no respect for their social and inquisitive way of being.

At the same time that the annual numbers of commercially raised turkeys were moving from tens of millions (1940s) to hundreds of millions of birds (1960s), efforts to reintroduce turkeys to the “wild” also started to take hold. But this work was not done for the sake of the turkeys or to make amends for hunting them nearly to extinction. It was done, like many American wildlife restoration efforts, so that turkey hunting could once again be a popular and profitable activity.  Many wildlife restoration efforts in the U.S. owe their success to the fact that hunters wanted to hunt them. The 1937 Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act taxed hunting guns and ammunition to fund wildlife restoration efforts. For turkeys these reintroduction efforts were successful, and by 1950, there were about 500,000 “wild,” or more accurately, free-living turkeys in the U.S. By 1973, that number was estimated to be 1.5 million, and in 2005 it reached 7 million. Ironically, it was the ready supply of commercial turkey meat that allowed for the successful reintroduction of free-living turkeys. Since there was such a robust supply of commercially bred turkeys for the dinner table, for lunch meat, and for burgers, the hunting pressure could be removed from the free-living birds and allow them to recover.

While free-living turkeys spend up to five months with their mothers, learning a lot about where to find food and how not to be food for others, domesticated commercial turkeys never know their (or any) mother. They don’t range over territories, mate, brood, or find their own food. They end their very short lives by being tightly packed into crates and shipped to a slaughterhouse, where they are hung upside down while still alive. Most are slaughtered by being electrified, then having their throats slit, but if they are not the standard size, they may survive these measures. This results in live birds being dunked in scalding water before they are defeathered. Given that the turkeys have been living in their own excrement, the slaughter process often promotes the spread of disease. Turkey meat is regularly recalled due to salmonella and listeria contamination. The commercial production of turkeys has a detrimental impact on the environment and harms human health through the consumption of contaminated meat and through air and water pollution.

It seems that the human commercialization and mass consumption of turkeys is a crime that needs our attention, and not a pardon. The poultry industry is guilty of overusing antibiotics, creating toxic amounts of manure, polluting waterways and killing fish, polluting the air, and forcing a painful and unnatural life and death on hundreds of millions of turkeys each year in the U.S. alone. As we rethink the myths this country was built on, it’s a good time to reflect on the crimes we are all complicit in as well.

The post What Crime Does the Thanksgiving Turkey Answer For? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Now it’s that time of the year when we should give thanks for the only California real estate that’s still cheap—all that space that we’re occupying, rent free, in the heads of our fellow Americans.

This Thanksgiving, as you out-of-state friends and relatives welcome us into your homes across this crazy country, visiting Californians should take every opportunity to tell you just how grateful we are for your constant attention.

It never fails to impress me how top of mind California is across these United States. I recently spent a working weekend in that glorious cradle of American ideas, the home of Washington and Jefferson and Madison, the great state of Virginia. At least, that’s what it used to be called. But between meetings in a hotel conference room, I learned that Virginians now call their state “California East.”

Yes, Virginia has a number of new locations of California-based Trader Joe’s (including a very good one across the street from my hotel). But I don’t think Virginia’s newly elected governor, Glenn Youngkin, was calling his own state “California East” in campaign speeches because of his love for seasonal Joe-Joe’s cookies.

“In a few short years, Virginia has become California East. It happened quickly,” Youngkin warned. Coming from a Republican who attributed this Californization of his state to “the left liberal progressive agenda,” this was supposed to sound critical. But when his allies listed policies and proposals that were turning the Old Dominion into California East, it actually sounded like they were listing the rosy side of Golden State governance: strengthening clean air laws, legalizing marijuana, shortening sentences for non-violent offenders, sending a ballot in the mail to every voter, and going four entire years without executing anyone.

“California East” isn’t a Virginia creation. Political leaders in Nevada and even Colorado have waved the phrase around like a boogeyman to warn about the perils of all the Californians moving in. Then again, can you blame them? We Californians can be so good-looking that you don’t want to look directly at us—lest ye be blinded.

Sometimes, though, this obsession with California is so over-the-top that it can get a little scary. Texas talks about us so constantly that, if it weren’t for the physical separation provided by Arizona and New Mexico, California might have to get a restraining order.

Texans like to pretend that they don’t want California influences around—they even had these great T-shirts made (I own one) that say, “Don’t California My Texas.” But, in reality, they brag whenever Californians or California companies relocate themselves and their California values to the Lone Star State. Texas is now home to 40 different In-N-Out Burger locations, Elon Musk, and an electric grid in even worse shape than ours. Plus, all the transplants have made Austin an unofficial California colony.

Lately, I’ve noticed Iowa and other pork-producing states have rivaled Texas in their fixation on California. Iowa Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst can’t stop talking about what they claim is a California ban on bacon. “We thought we’ve seen it all from the radical left … but this takes it to a whole new level: banning bacon? No way, folks,” Ernst said.

This worried me at first, because I love bacon.  So, in order to investigate the salt-cured delicacy’s availability and legal status, I sought out my favorite downtown L.A. food vendor, who sold me a bacon-wrapped hot dog. As a final journalistic confirmation, I Ignored my wife’s dietary advice just this once and ate it.

It turns out that what Iowans are really hog-tied over is California’s commitment to animal welfare. In fact, California hasn’t banned anything; we just won’t let Iowa sell its pork products here until they start complying with our more animal-friendly laws on how pigs are confined. So, the 3.2 million human Iowans may whine a little, but Iowa’s 23.8 million hogs and pigs should love us!

Here’s the truth about what lies in the hearts of Iowans, Texans, Virginians, and everyone else who just can’t get California off the brain: Almost all their criticisms of us are really compliments—love, even—disguised in the homespun idioms of good, God-fearing Americans.

So, Californians, don’t lose your cool if a relative tries to bait you at holiday dinner. Instead, I’ve mocked up this handy California hate/love translator with some common examples to help you understand what your family member is actually trying to say:

– “You’ll let anyone vote, you election fraudsters” means “I’m awed by your state’s commitment to democracy.”
– “You guys love illegals and open borders” means “I find it hard to admit how much I admire your desire to solve the worker shortage and keep immigrant families together.”
– “You don’t respect the rights of gunowners” means “Thank God there’s one American state trying to reduce gun violence.”
– “You’re giving everything to the welfare queens” means “I really love how California led on Medicaid expansion.”
– “Your environmental regulations are out of control” means “Thank you for saving the planet so we don’t have to.”

That said, don’t let all this praise go to your head.  We Californians need to admit to ourselves that we’re not really the unstoppable, progressive colossus that other Americans imagine us to be. Our homelessness is even worse than it looks. PG&E is an unrepentant killer. Our cost of living is crushing. So is business regulation. And our schools, gutted by pandemic closures, really should teach critical race theory—so they can at least say that they are teaching anything at all.

So, my fellow Californians, stay humble as the pie you’re eating as you move around the country this holiday season. Don’t brag about our world-beating economic growth, or the recent sharp decline in our poverty rates. Resist the temptation to mention the long history of would-be American leaders bashing California—I’m looking at you Mitt Romney—even as they buy residences here.

Instead, let yourself savor all the California love you receive, in whatever form you receive it. And give thanks for all the Americans who won’t stop talking about our state. Because California couldn’t afford all this promotion itself, even with a $31 billion budget surplus.

Happy Thanksgiving, California East… oops, I mean, America!

The post Thanks for Being Obsessed with Us, America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In part, the importance of the Pilgrims has been exaggerated because of the peculiarly American values that they are said to have brought to the New World and spread through the colonies: rigid discipline, austere rejection of earthly pleasures, the fusing of religious impulses with political ideas. All of these indeed distinguished the Pilgrims from other groups of early trans-Atlantic migrants, though the old easy binary between profit-seeking Virginians and pious Yankees no longer commands much respect among scholars.

Yet it is another attribute of the Pilgrim influence that arguably holds even greater sway four centuries after their arrival. Understanding that influence starts with the history of their name. The Pilgrims weren’t called that in their day. Instead, they were known as “Separatists,” for their desire to break completely from the Church of England, rather than cleanse and reform it from within—the approach urged by the more moderate Puritans.

That separatist impulse to leave an established community in protest of its corruption, to choose the remedy of “exit” rather than “voice,” would set the pattern for countless American protest movements to come. The Pilgrims, by word and deed, established separation as an actionable precedent for any American group alienated from the status quo. From colonial times to the present—especially in the Revolution and the Civil War—that secessionist impulse would define American history, and sometimes threaten to overturn it entirely.

While the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving is a familiar story, Americans know little about their pronounced separatism—radicalism, really. The Separatists emerged near the end of the 16th century, as a renegade movement of dissident Protestants arose in the East Midlands of England. Rejecting the state-backed Church of England as too rigid and autocratic, too similar to the Roman Catholicism from which it had itself broken off a few decades earlier, the dissenters started setting up their own illegal congregations. Many were fined for not attending official services, while others were executed for refusing to renounce their heretical beliefs.

Before long, congregation member William Bradford later recalled, “they could not long continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted & persecuted on every side.” By 1608, many had decided to leave. About 100 sailed across the North Sea to Amsterdam. A year later they resettled in Leyden, 20 miles to the southeast, which Bradford called “a fair & bewtifull citie, and of a sweete situation.”

In 1620, the Separatists decided once again to move on. They didn’t speak the language (though their children increasingly did, causing parents to fear assimilation); they had few economic opportunities; and they didn’t think Dutch morals were quite up to snuff.

They contracted with a ship called the Mayflower to take them across the Atlantic. Yet even another exodus wouldn’t cure the group of its fractious tendencies. The ship’s passengers, one wrote early in the journey, were “un-united among ourselves.”

They landed first on Cape Cod, in November 1620. Who knows what thoughts occurred to them as they walked on the snowy shoreline, breathing in the pure, frozen air? The future was uncertain. Half would be dead by spring. But with what Bradford called “the vast and furious ocean” between them and their tormentors, one thing was clear: If they had wanted separation, this was it.

Some wanted even more. Most of the early New England towns and colonies were founded in the act of secession from another pre-existing community. Once the new arrivals began separating themselves from those whom they deemed impure, there seemed to be no end to the fragmentation.

In 1636, Roger Williams, a fiery preacher who before leaving England had taken Hebrew lessons from the poet John Milton, was expelled from Massachusetts for denouncing the colony as insufficiently extreme. In the middle of a brutal winter, Williams escaped arrest during a blizzard and spent 14 weeks walking more than 50 miles through the snow, “not knowing what bed or bread did mean,” before finding shelter with sympathetic natives. In the spring, he founded a new colony at the head of Narragansett Bay. He called it Providence. With its commitment to religious pluralism and strict separation of church and state, the town became a haven for dissenters from the other colonies.

The separations continued. In 1638, Anne Hutchinson of Boston, a self-proclaimed prophet, was convicted of sedition, excommunicated from the Puritan church, and banned, like Williams before her, from Massachusetts. Hutchinson and her supporters went south to Aquidneck Island in Narragansett Bay, and started building a settlement they called Portsmouth. (Meanwhile, her brother-in-law, John Wheelwright, another dissenting minister, went north with some 175 followers to found the town of Exeter, later part of New Hampshire.)

Soon a group of dissenters left Hutchinson’s Portsmouth to found Newport. Then there was Samuel Gorton, whose belief in the divinity of every human being set him outside the bounds of even the most radical Puritans. He tried to live in Boston, Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Providence before finding each of them inadequate. His sect founded its own settlement, Warwick, just south of Williams’ city.

It would take more than a century-and-a-half after the landing at Plymouth for the North American colonists to discover the merits of forming a single national union. Yet the one formed then—during the Revolution against Great Britain, a founding act of secession—was weakened from the beginning by the fact that each state retained its separate character and sovereignty.

A decade later, the new federation all but collapsed and had to be replaced by a Constitution concentrating far greater power in the central government. Still, compromises had to be made with the spirit of separatism. This included the provision mandating equal representation in the Senate for all states regardless of population, which gives Wyoming the same number of senators as California, despite the former having less than two percent of the latter’s population.

The tradition of separatism handed down from the Pilgrims imbued American social and political life with the brash individualism and political fractiousness so evident—and dangerous—today.

The post Thank the Pilgrims for America’s Tradition of Separatism, Division, and Infighting appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Pointing to sources like the proclamation, today’s religious leaders often count Washington as one of their own. The late Tim LaHaye, whose Left Behind series sold over 11 million copies, cast Washington as a “devout believer in Jesus Christ” who had “accepted Him as His Lord and Savior.” David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, an evangelical Christian advocacy organization, and the former vice chairman of Texas’s Republican Party, pictured a reverent Washington kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge on the cover of his book, America’s Godly Heritage. And politicians look to texts like Washington’s proclamation as proof that America was founded as a Christian nation. All doubters need to do, according to Sarah Palin, is “go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant.”

But what did Washington’s talk of this “glorious Being” really mean at the time? Are these references proof that Washington would, in LaHaye’s words, “freely identify with the Bible-believing branch of evangelical Christianity?” Or do they mean something else—something that would have been clear to Washington’s audience in 1789—but which eludes us today?

To find out, research psychologist Eli Gottlieb and I conducted a study in which we asked people with varied levels of historical knowledge and religious commitment to read Washington’s proclamation and tell us what they thought. At one end of the spectrum were members of the clergy; at the other were agnostic and atheist scientists. We also questioned professional historians, religious and nonreligious alike.

Clergy and scientists agreed that Washington was deeply pious. Where they parted ways was about whether his piety should be applauded—or denounced. A Methodist minister found support in Washington for the claim that the United States was founded on a “general Christian faith” and that “religion and spirituality played a significant role” in American life, more so than people are willing to admit today.

For their part, scientists chaffed at Washington’s “violation of church and state.” A biologist compared the president to a “country preacher” who arrogantly assumed “that everybody believed the same thing.”

And the historians? They reacted so differently that it seemed as if they had read a different document entirely.

Regardless of their religious leanings, historians focused less on what was in Washington’s address than what wasn’t. One historian remarked that the proclamation would “depress Pat Robertson,” the evangelical media mogul and chairman of TV’s Christian Broadcasting Network, who would fume at the fact that the proclamation made “no mention of Jesus Christ.” In lieu of recognizable markers of Christian piety—Jesus, Son of God, the cross, the blood of salvation, the Trinity, eternal life, the Resurrection—one finds airy and nondescript abstractions like “great and glorious Being” or “the Lord and Ruler of Nations.”

Historians were not deaf to Washington’s religious references. While the clergy and the scientists saw them as evidence of Washington’s devotion, the historians stressed the president’s precision in crafting a vocabulary that would unite the dizzying array of Protestant denominations in post-revolutionary America without alienating the small but important groups of Catholics, Jews, and freethinkers dotting the American landscape. It was precisely because he understood that Americans did not believe the same thing that Washington was scrupulous in choosing words that would be acceptable to a wide spectrum of religious groups.

In his own time, Washington’s reluctance to show his doctrinal cards dismayed his Christian co-religionists. Members of the first Presbytery of the Eastward (comprised of Presbyterian churches in Massachusetts and New Hampshire) complained to the president that the Constitution failed to mention the cardinal tenets of Christian faith: “We should not have been alone in rejoicing to have seen some explicit acknowledgement of the only true God and Jesus Christ.” Washington dodged the criticism by assuring the Presbyterians that the “path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.”

Similarly, a week before his 1789 proclamation, Washington responded to a letter from Reverend Samuel Langdon, the president of Harvard College from 1774-1780. Langdon had implored Washington to “let all men know that you are not ashamed to be a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Once again, instead of affirming Christian tenets, Washington wrote back offering thanks to the generic “Author of the Universe.”

Even historians who have spent a lifetime studying Washington find his religious beliefs difficult to pin down. (John Adams once remarked that Washington possessed the “gift of silence.”) According to historian John Fea, himself an evangelical Christian, Washington’s Christianity took a back seat to his republicanism. Washington believed that personal interests and commitments of faith should be, as Fea put it, secondary to the “greater good of the nation.”

The last state to ratify the Constitution was Rhode Island. Only after they had done so did Washington agree to visit the state. Arriving in Newport on August 17, 1790, Washington listened to the town’s notables offer greetings, among them a representative from Yeshuat Israel, Newport’s Hebrew congregation. Moses Seixas thanked Washington for “generously affording” the “immunities of Citizenship” to a people “deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens.”

Moved by these words, Washington responded four days later by making clear to the members of Yeshuat Israel that citizenship in this new country was not a matter of “generosity” or the “indulgence of one class of people” by another. America was not Europe, where tolerance of religious minorities, where it occurred, was an act of noblesse oblige. In the United States, Washington explained, “all possess alike liberty of conscience and the immunities of citizenship.”

Today, George Washington has been conscripted into the culture wars over the religious underpinnings of this country. The stakes are high. As one prominent theologian put it, if Washington can be shown to be an “orthodox Trinity-affirming believer in Jesus Christ” then “Christianity today is not an interloper in the public square” but can be mobilized to counter “the secular assault against the historic values and beliefs of America.” Those who summon the first president to the contemporary battlefield must pay a price: They must scrub Washington of the ambiguity, prudence, nuance, tact, and caution that so defined his character.

In the rare moments when Washington was forthcoming about religion, he expressed fear about using faith as a wedge to separate one American from another. He understood how religious disputes tear at civic union. “Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind,” Washington wrote Sir Edward Newenham in the midst of the bloodletting between Ireland’s Protestants and Catholics, “those which are caused by a difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing.”

Washington dreamed of a nation, as he wrote to Newport’s Hebrew Congregation, that gives “bigotry no sanction … persecution no assistance.” What makes Americans American, he believed, is not the direction they turn to in prayer. Rather, it is the respect they owe fellow citizens who choose to turn in a different direction—or in no direction at all.

The post Why George Washington Embraced the Idea of a ‘Nondescript’ God appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In December 2017, he sat down with Zócalo Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Gregory Rodriguez in Los Angeles to talk about what “the South” is, how the South came to embrace Thanksgiving, and why old country songs often reinforce a cult of the noble loser.

This transcript of the discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

The post Why Has America Been So Reluctant to ‘Own’ the South? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With the holidays approaching I thought that I couldn’t be any happier. Over the past four years everything has been going great. My family and friends are happy and healthy. I made supervisor at my job. I bought a car. I’m more involved in my community. Most importantly I grew to become a better person. With everything going well, I anticipated things would be great this holiday season for the fourth time in a row, but an unexpected turn crushed my hopes.

Over the past couple of years, my community has changed a lot. Most people would say things changed for the better, being that much-needed resources were added to the community over the past four years. For example, a new Work Source Center and The College Track, a resource center for aspiring college students in the community, were opened recently. Alta Med and Children’s Institute contributed new locations in Watts. Also, Martin Luther King., Jr Community Hospital was modernized, and a newly designed community garden even brought a smile to my face. Beyond this, the introduction of the “community based improvement initiative” Watts Re-imagined, the goal of which was to add opportunities and resources that benefitted the community, gave me even more to be thankful for just in time for Thanksgiving.

In addition to the changes, the apartment complex that I lived in was renovated. Some of the renovations included new paint jobs, hardwood floors, a new dishwasher, and new windows, which was great because they provided a cozy new look for residents. Just as everyone was elated over all the new resources, some of my neighbors were unfortunately given letters asking if they would consider moving in exchange for a small amount of money, or face eviction.

I didn’t agree with the idea of paying tenants to leave homes that they’d lived in for years. Rightfully angry, my neighbors rallied, arguing that this is an injustice, and that this is exactly what is wrong when gentrification infiltrates communities. Some of them even pointed out that they felt it was unfair that they weren’t going to be able to enjoy all these new resources, which they once had been thankful for. If the new upgrades meant that they would be left homeless, or forced to break social ties, they would rather do without.

I was equally upset and fearful that the some of the inevitable negative effects of gentrification would further encourage involuntary displacement. To me it felt like watching a child open up a desired Christmas gift, then having it snatched from them after it was unwrapped. I know from personal experience how hard financially the holidays can be on some families—and the additional stress and financial burden of moving from a beloved community to a new home had to be worse.

Although the holidays have been going well for me for the past couple of years, I couldn’t feel well inside knowing that although my community was progressing as a whole, some members were being left behind. It was a bittersweet feeling: to be thankful for all the resources given to my community, but knowing that some people were being asked to leave, unable to enjoy the holidays in the community they’ve lived in for years. I’m not sure how I could enjoy my holiday knowing that all wasn’t well—but it’s definitely on my Christmas list to help in any way that I can.

The post I’m Counting My Family’s Thanksgiving Blessings. My Neighbors Aren’t All So Fortunate appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Richard Anthony Marin deserves our gratitude not just because his new autobiography, Cheech Is Not My Real Name … But Don’t Call Me Chong, turns out to be the best California book of the year. And not just because his career should give you hope that no matter how short, bald, or brown you are, you can be a star.

The biggest reason to thank Cheech now is that his life embodies Thanksgiving itself: a big, robust meal that includes many different flavors but is ultimately for everyone. This California entertainer’s decades-long persistence at the center of our culture reminds us, happily, that our state’s cultural mainstream is so much more interesting and inclusive than we acknowledge.

Indeed, Cheech is evidence of a California paradox: To stay in the mainstream here, you have to be something of an outsider. To achieve Cheech-level ubiquity in a place as big and diverse as this, you have to cross lines, rather than respect them.

In the case of Cheech, this is all the more so because he is most often identified as a “cult” figure—best remembered as one-half of the stoner comedy team, Cheech and Chong, that produced hit comedy records and the 1978 film Up in Smoke. But his career has been much bigger and more mainstream than that.

Indeed, the dirty secret of Cheech’s life, as he tells it, is just how much of a square he’s been. Marin was a middle-class kid who saw two sides of L.A. He spent his early years in African-American sections of South Central Los Angeles, where his parents had gone to high school. His father was an LAPD officer; his mother was president of the PTA. But by his teens, the family had relocated to a white neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley.

Racially and ethnically, he was an outsider in both places, so he coped by doing everything he could to fit in. The future stoner actor-musician-writer-comedian was a Cub Scout, a Boy Scout, an altar boy, and “a little wiseass who got straight A’s,” first at Catholic schools and later at San Fernando Valley State College (now Cal State Northridge). Marin describes himself as an educational traditionalist, stumping for the values of the classic liberal arts education. He even worked in aerospace during college, manufacturing airplane galleys at Nordskog.

The book’s signature moment—recounted by Cheech as the Apostle Paul might have recalled his trip to Damascus—is when he smoked marijuana for the first time, and found that the allegedly mind-rotting substance expanded his perspective. He thought: “What else have they been lying about?”

And with that, he discovered art, awakened politically, dodged the draft, went to Canada, met former musician Tommy Chong, and began playing shows all over the world. The rest is California history. Lou Adler started managing him, he bought a house in Malibu, and even practiced Transcendental Meditation, as taught by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Cheech proudly identifies as Chicano and Latino, and sees his heritage as bridge, not niche. The glory of being Latino, in his telling, is that you are part of a demographic that is itself so diverse as to contain multitudes.

“My face has some kind of international malleability to it. Add your own preferences or prejudice to it, and I could be anything,” he writes, before sharing a successful romantic strategy in which he told women he was “Dutch Indonesian.”

But narrow-minded Hollywood types couldn’t see his natural breadth at first, and sought to pigeonhole him in narrow roles. Marin countered by writing his own material, most successfully in the 1987 film, Born in East L.A. The movie is quintessential Cheech—a comedy that frames the Mexican-American story as fundamentally American, and demonstrates the absurdity of trying to put people in boxes.

(Its humor holds up far too well. Marin’s character, an American citizen and native Angeleno, gets caught up in an immigration raid and mistakenly deported back to Mexico, where he is a fish out of water. Today, that comic premise is a nasty reality: The federal government has been mistakenly deporting thousands of American citizens annually, according to the Deportation Research Clinic at Northwestern University.)

Marin’s other strategy was to find roles in the most middlebrow TV, movie, and musical productions and make them his own. He did a spin-off of The Golden Girls. (“When the opportunity came to be in a very, very mainstream, down-the-middle-of-Middle-America show, I jumped at it,” he was quoted as saying at the time). He also made a successful children’s album, and became a regular player in Richard Rodriguez movies.

He has touched most stations of the California cultural cross. For years, he co-starred with Don Johnson on the high-ratings police drama Nash Bridges, which was set and filmed in San Francisco. Marin loved the city so much that he moved his family there, and developed a golf jones from sneaking away from the set with Johnson to play Pebble Beach.

He also found time to appear in the premiere of a Sam Shepard play, The Late Henry Moss, opposite Sean Penn at San Francisco’s Theatre on the Square. And he turned himself into a regular voice in the animated films of Emeryville-based Pixar films, most notably as Ramone in the Cars films. He also showed up as Banzai in The Lion King.

Marin is unapologetic about mainstream success. His book includes an entire chapter on how he outsmarted Anderson Cooper to become the champion of Celebrity Jeopardy. And by his account, his old partner, Tommy Chong, is a cautionary tale, whose career founders because he was not willing to evolve to reach audiences.

“I have no hard feelings about the journey,” he writes. “We’ve been successful and made a lot of people happy. I just wonder why we were so hard for people to see for so long.”

Marin has made news recently as a leading collector and public champion of Chicano art. The City of Riverside has proposed to turn over its main library—across the street from the historic Mission Inn—for the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture, and Industry. Marin, ever mainstream, emphasizes that, “Chicano art is American art.”

Despite his cult status, it’s hard to call Cheech countercultural now. The man who performed his most recent marriage, former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, is a leading candidate for California governor. And on January 1, 2018, recreational marijuana will become legal in his home state. The counterculture has become the mainstream, and Cheech has one foot in both. Isn’t that the California dream?

Now that Cheech is an institution, maybe it’s time to honor him as one. Perhaps California could have its own version of Mt. Rushmore; the natural spot to chisel out the faces of Golden State greats would be in the Granite Mountains, a small range in the Mojave Desert.

There would be many great candidates for this pantheon. But why not start by carving the old stoner in stone?

The post A Very Cheech Marin Thanksgiving appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What we choose to remember about the past often says more about America than what actually happened. Thanksgiving betrays a need—which we see throughout American history—to create a shared national identity. And, in this case, the way we have addressed that hunger is by creating shared food traditions.

Because very little is known about what actually happened at the “first Thanksgiving,” we’ve been free to commemorate it based on what we’ve needed it to look like over time. Most of what is known about the foods of the “first Thanksgiving” is based on what foods were common at that time in the region, and a letter written by Edward Winslow to a friend in England describing the feast in 1621. Winslow wrote that Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Colony sent men out to hunt wildfowl (most likely goose or duck) while Wampanoag Indians brought deer to the feast. While turkeys were plentiful in New England in the 1620s, historians agree it is unlikely that they were the centerpiece of the “first Thanksgiving.” Turkeys were hard to catch, and the meat was tough and lean. Fish, however, would have been plentiful and almost certainly part of any harvest celebration.

The Pilgrims may have stuffed their birds (though most likely not turkeys) with onions and herbs. Cranberries were native to New England and would have been in the native diet in the 1620s, so they could have been part of the Thanksgiving meal, too. If cranberries were in sauce form, the sauce would have been sweetened with maple syrup. We also know that pumpkins, a type of squash, were eaten in 1620s New England, though there was no flour and hence no pies.

“Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” Thomas Nast 1869

With very little historical basis on which to create a shared national holiday, America needed someone to tell them how the holiday should be celebrated. And Sarah Josepha Buell Hale was just the woman for the job. Hale, based in Boston, and later Philadelphia, was the editor of Godey’s Ladies Book, a very popular women’s magazine of the mid-19th century. She wanted to create an American tradition that brought people together and, according to historian Anne Blue Wills, hearkened back to the rural, Protestant foundations of the country.

Hale first wrote about the Thanksgiving meal in her novel Northwood: A Tale of New England, published in 1827: “The roasted turkey took precedence on this occasion, being placed at the head of the table; and well did it become its lordly station, sending forth the rich odor of its savory stuffing, and finely covered with the frost of the basting.” Her meal included not only turkey, but also “a sirloin of beef, flanked on either side by a leg of pork and a joint of mutton,” along with, “innumerable bowls of gravy and plates of vegetables” and “a huge plum pudding, custards, and pies of every description known in Yankee land.”

This 19th century pie crimper was both decorative and useful for making your pies look good

This vision of the overflowing plentiful feast table represented mid-19th-century ideals of the woman’s role in creating a perfect home, a vision that Hale spread through her editorials each November in Godey’s detailing how women should prepare and celebrate the Thanksgiving feast in the home. Featuring recipes for turkey, stuffing, and pie, her writings created the “classic” American Thanksgiving ideal. As the United States was divided by the Civil War, Hale wrote a letter to President Lincoln urging him to make the day a national event, one that would bring Americans together. On October 3, 1863, Lincoln did just that, declaring the last Thursday in November a “day of Thanksgiving and Praise.”

As America entered the 20th century, Americans tweaked their Thanksgiving food traditions to reflect the modern vision of America. Progress, innovation, and technology all became part of the Thanksgiving table. Take the beloved cranberry sauce. Cranberries were too delicate to transport long distances and were consumed mostly in New England. But in 1912, Marcus Urann, head of the United Cape Cod Cranberry Company, started packaging and selling canned cranberry sauce under the name Ocean Spray Preserving Company. Now cranberries could enjoy a longer shelf life and become fixtures on the Thanksgiving table far away from cranberry bogs.

Cranberries shipping crate, early 19th century

Stuffing, too, got a modern “upgrade.” The convenience-food revolution of the mid-1900s introduced pre-packaged stuffing mixes to the home kitchen; perfect stuffing became as easy as just adding chicken broth. These same convenience foods in the home earned green bean casserole a place at the Thanksgiving table. Campbell’s Soup Company published the first recipe for green bean casserole in 1955, trying to create a recipe made up entirely of things the “average” cook had on hand. The recipe, which has remained the same for over 50 years, used their cream of mushroom soup, crispy onions, and green beans.

Even pies took a turn to convenience with the introduction of canned, pureed pumpkin. Today, the vast majority of pumpkins grown in America are turned into canned pumpkin puree, which takes away the need to bake and mash a real pumpkin. Through these food innovations, every home in America could have a “traditional” Thanksgiving that meshed with the 20th-century vision of a modern America. So nowadays our Thanksgiving feast is as much a tribute to the mid-20th-century modernist ideal as it is to a 19th-century idealized view of our 17th-century origin story.

My Thanksgiving meal this year is going to be a mash-up. I can’t give up the canned cranberry sauce, even though locavores might shudder at the idea that I enjoy slicing its jellied perfection on the lines. But I’ve also ordered a “heritage” turkey—a bird that has more in common with a wild turkey than a Butterball—and added fish to the menu as a way to give those around my dinner table a taste of what the Pilgrims might have tasted back then. And I’m also going to add some mutton, as a nod to Hale’s Northwood feast. Thanksgiving not only reflects who Americans are, but who we want to be. And so what I really think Thanksgiving shows is how creative we are in putting new twists on old experiences.

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