Enchanted in America is Now Quiet Reading with Tara Penry
And here's a Thanksgiving post to mark the occasion
After nine months of Enchanted in America, today this newsletter announces a new name, Quiet Reading with Tara Penry. We could spend the whole post talking about what that means in general terms, but I prefer to give you a regular post, full of other people’s passions and words. If you want to start by satisfying your curiosity about what’s new, here’s a quick link to the new About page. Hint: We’ll still enjoy enchantment, and also more.
In the U.S., we celebrate Thanksgiving this week. Here’s a Quiet Reader’s investigation of some language that launched the holiday. The renovated newsletter will offer longer posts like this one covering more substantial passages of original text (like we were used to with Enchanted in America) as well as shorter posts about little marvels of language, which subscribers will sample next Monday.
Before 1863, Thanksgiving was celebrated as a local holiday in the United States, but not a national one. The first female editor in the country, Sarah Josepha Hale, devoted herself for nearly two decades to the cause of a national Thanksgiving.1 She thought it was important for a country to have national customs to bind disparate people together. A critical reader could fault her for imposing her New England version of a Christian harvest festival on a large, diverse nation, but a quiet reader admires her bold idea and notices how it has seeped into the culture even beyond her first imagining.
Hale intended the national Thanksgiving to graft itself onto the ancient and contemporary observance of harvest festivals. She petitioned five U.S. presidents to give Americans a common day of celebration on the fourth Thursday in November. In September 1863, in the midst of the U.S. Civil War, Hale renewed her old appeal in public with an editorial in Godey’s Lady’s Book, the magazine where she exercised great national influence as editor. “Can we not,” she urged,
following the appointment of Jehovah in the “Feast of Weeks” [Jewish Shavuot], or Harvest Festival, establish our yearly Thanksgiving as a permanent American National Festival, which shall be celebrated on the last Thursday in November in every State of our Union?2
Before the war, Hale observed, thirty states, three territories, plus some ships and embassies already celebrated Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November. The editor (or “editress” as she preferred) urged Lincoln to make it official. If it was “more noble, more truly American, to become nationally in unity when we offer to God our tribute of joy and gratitude for the blessings of the year,” then the proclamation should “emanate from the President of the Republic.”
On October 3, Abraham Lincoln fulfilled part of Hale’s wish by proclaiming the fourth Thursday in November a national day of Thanksgiving, at least for 1863. Not until 1941 did Congress formalize the fourth Thursday of November as the recurring date for Thanksgiving, but in the meantime, Lincoln issued a new proclamation in 1864 to pin the date at the same time for that year.
When Lincoln announced the November observance for 1863, he found a list of things to be thankful for even in the midst of a gruesome civil war, but none of them sound like Sarah Josepha Hale’s large-scale harvest festival. He agreed with Hale that God was behind all blessings and it was “fit and proper that [blessings] should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice, by the whole American people.”3
But Hale pictured turkey in the oven in homes across the land. She pictured cultural cohesion. The mother of five understood that the abstract community of a “nation” needed shared ritual observances and that the harvest season was the ideal time for large gatherings with abundant food, traditional recipes, and a spirit of celebration. She recommended “appointed times for national reunions which combine religious sentiment with domestic and social enjoyment.”
Despite his commitment to political Union, Lincoln’s proclamations say nothing of the cultural union championed by Hale. If even those two had different visions of the day, one around the table, one in prayer, can it be any wonder that Thanksgiving means different things to different people today, some of them religious or spiritual, others grounded in family traditions or football and shopping seasons?
English majors and historians well trained in critical reading would point out today that Hale’s Lady’s Book and her own writings expressed a bias for a New England-style national holiday.
A quiet reader listens between the lines for Hale’s grand human aspiration, acknowledging that even with her human blind spots, the big idea took hold. Quiet reading does not negate critical reading but allows a writer to have human limitations, to hold only a piece of the larger human puzzle and to rely on others to hold other pieces. I can acknowledge that Hale’s vision was too uniform for many Americans today without needing to quarrel with her about it. She gave us something that would need modification, and still it was marvelous.
Sarah Josepha Hale wanted “souls” to “thrill” with “deepest emotions of thankfulness” at least once a year, at a time when it was publicly acceptable and patriotic to do so.
As editress of a magazine from which American women cut patterns to sew family clothing and from which western Americans cut illustrated pages to hang as artwork on bare walls, she had her finger on the pulse of middle-class American homes. The holiday she envisioned may have been “national,” but it centered around the home and women and food and rituals to thrill the soul.
How far is that from what we have?
We can be critical and quiet readers not only of old prose but of the holiday too. We need criticism of the retail mood, the relationship between brain injury and football, the gender of the people in the kitchen and the tv room, and the meat processing industries when we are ready to take action and make change. But when we are not making change, the critical habit can get in the way of other human needs.
On Thursday in the U.S., or other days of thanks in other countries (or really any day at all), quiet readers can pay attention to what makes the “soul” “thrill.” It might not be national. It might not make a lot of noise. It might not be recognizable to Abraham Lincoln or Sarah Josepha Hale, but I feel certain they would not quarrel with it if it comes from “deepest emotions.”
Hale and Lincoln were both sincere about a holiday for reverence and gratitude, even though they differed in some details.
That seems to give us latitude to differ in details too.
May your Thanksgiving vegetarian sushi please everyone around the table.
See you next week!
Laurie Halse Anderson’s picture book, Thank You, Sarah: The Woman Who Saved Thanksgiving (2005) provides an introduction to Sarah Josepha Hale suitable for all ages. Melanie Kirkpatrick also describes Hale’s campaign in Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience (2016). She devotes a chapter to this subject in Lady Editor, a Biography: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman (2021).
[Sarah Josepha Hale], “Editor’s Table / Our National Thanksgiving,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, vol. 67 (September 1863), pp. 276-277. Hathi Trust Digital Library.
Like other presidential proclamations, Lincoln’s announcement of a national day for thanksgiving appeared around the country in local newspapers, including the pro-Union New South in Port Royal, South Carolina, where the text appeared on October 17, 1863, on page 3. From the Library of Congress Chronicling America newspaper database.
She was an extremely prolific author and abolitionist, but now she's probably known only for this and authoring the nursery rhyme "Mary Had A Little Lamb".
Much I didn't know. Tara, you are a delight.