Melanie Kirkpatrick, THANKSGIVING: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience
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[0:41]Melody Kirkpatrick is the author of Thanksgiving, the holiday at the heart of the American experience.
[0:47]And again, I hope you are all having an amazing Thanksgiving in 2021 filled with lots of joy and fun and football and food and all the good things.
[0:56]Melanie is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
[1:02]She's the author of Lady Editor Sarah Giusefah Hale and the making of the modern American woman.
[1:07]Thanksgiving, the holiday at the heart of the American experience and escape from North Korea.
[1:12]The untold story of Asia's underground railroad.
[1:15]She has lived in Tokyo, Toronto, Hong Kong and Manhattan, and now resides in rural Connecticut.
[1:20]Welcome, Melanie.
[1:21]Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Thanksgiving.
[1:25]The holiday at the heart of the American experience from 1621 to 2021.
[1:30]It's great to be with you Sivi and I love talking about Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday.
[1:35]Well, I learned so much about Thanksgiving from this book.
[1:39]I mean, there were so many things that I had no idea about.
[1:42]For example, and maybe this is embarrassing to admit, I didn't know there was a forefather's day.
[1:48]I didn't know the extent of the campaign to make it an national day and the ins and outs of that, which I found fascinating.
[1:56]And even like the Jews of Charleston and their, you know, so many interesting things that I learned.
[2:03]So thank you very much.
[2:04]You're welcome.
[2:05]I had great fun researching it and, you know, it's not just all about the programs in the Indians.
[2:10]Thanksgiving has been a part of many, many facets of American life.
[2:15]And it truly is, as the subtitle says, a holiday that's at the heart of the American experience.
[2:22]So true.
[2:23]And I'm also now a sort of obsessed with Sarah Josepha Hale.
[2:26]I read it on your book and read another book about her recently.
[2:29]I saw that you wrote an actual book all about her.
[2:32]So then I was like, yes.
[2:34]Yeah, it's my latest book. It's called Lady Editor.
[2:37]And I think she is probably the most influential woman of the 19th century.
[2:43]And one of the most influential women of the American history.
[2:47]It was fascinating to research her life and my ambition is to make her better known.
[2:53]Totally. I mean, she, I just found her so inspiring.
[2:59]Like the Oprah of her day and really amazing.
[3:02]More than that.
[3:03]Yeah. Is there going to be a movie about her?
[3:05]What do you think?
[3:06]I wish.
[3:07]I wish too.
[3:08]Yeah.
[3:09]Here's a lady who was widowed, left with four children and a fifth on the way.
[3:15]And it went on to remake herself as editor of Godie's lady's book.
[3:20]And one of the most widely circulated or the most widely circulated magazine of the pre civil war period.
[3:27]And she did so much to help women get educations.
[3:32]And she was the godmother of Thanksgiving, our modern Thanksgiving day holiday.
[3:37]And I bet you didn't know that she wrote Mary had a little lamb.
[3:41]I didn't know that now that I read this book.
[3:43]But rather than that, I did not know that.
[3:45]There was like nothing she couldn't do.
[3:47]And she's even campaigning with Abraham Lincoln to make it a holiday.
[3:51]I mean, she has, you know, using the papers of her magazine for her campaign,
[3:55]writing to Abraham Lincoln.
[3:57]She was a poet.
[3:58]Right. There was so much about her.
[4:00]She seems just like such a take charge of women from recipes to.
[4:04]Yeah.
[4:05]She was a celebrity in her day.
[4:08]And serves to be better known today, I think.
[4:11]And her accomplishments acknowledge.
[4:13]But at the part that I found most powerful.
[4:17]Well, of course, Thanksgiving, that's at a tremendous accomplishment.
[4:20]The lady who threw her magazine persuaded many Americans to sign on to this idea of a national Thanksgiving day.
[4:29]Before her, Thanksgiving was celebrated locally.
[4:33]And her nurse of individual states would call Thanksgiving's a, but they didn't coordinate.
[4:39]So all Americans celebrated on different days around the country until she came along.
[4:44]And Lincoln took up her proposal in 1863 in the middle of the Civil War,
[4:50]which was amazing in itself.
[4:53]And we've been celebrating Thanksgiving, all Americans together on the same day ever since.
[4:58]I like how you even talked about why it's the Thursday that it is because that was the one that all this was in the middle of all the states that they could finally agree on because some were later in November and some were earlier and this was sort of the medium.
[5:12]Yeah.
[5:13]Yeah. I was a happy medium. And she was a very.
[5:16]She was a very powerful figure in the 19th century.
[5:19]Her influence was great because of the editorship of her magazine.
[5:25]But she also was a very realistic woman, I think.
[5:29]And so compromise was okay. She was able to compromise, but she it was a compromise. You're right.
[5:35]But it was also the date. The last Thursday of November was the holiday that well, was the day the George Washington called for a national Thanksgiving in 1789 his first year as president.
[5:50]And Hale was a passionate admirer of George Washington. So that made her happy.
[5:57]That's exciting. That's just so I mean, I just love this. It's really neat.
[6:01]And I didn't realize, you know, it was nice of you. Well, not nice, but I opening of you when you talked about what happened in Charleston and how some nations as they started adopting the Thanksgiving said it was for Christians, right.
[6:14]This would be an occasion for all Christians to celebrate the land and not Jews and heathens and other people like that. I happened to be Jewish.
[6:22]So I found this very fascinating. And that the Jewish people of the day wrote a whole letter back, which you included Jews of Charleston letter in 1845.
[6:31]And eventually, of course, it all works out, but you know, yeah, well, not that that's just a really important, I think development in the history of Thanksgiving.
[6:42]Washington had made it clear when he proclaimed the national Thanksgiving that it was to be open to all people.
[6:50]And he was famously ecumenical and he saw himself as the first president as being very important and setting examples for future presidents.
[7:01]The presidents have been pretty good. It had been very good about that, making it clear that Thanksgiving is an open holiday. There's, you know, doesn't discriminate on the basis of anything.
[7:11]But not every governor was and the governor of South Carolina of the day thought Thanksgiving should only be for Christians and that would exclude Jews or unitarians or Muslims or anybody else.
[7:25]Great the way the Jews of Charleston fought back and it's, and in a public way made it clear that this was a holiday for people of all faiths and the governor who had made this proclamation.
[7:40]This term ended a few weeks after Thanksgiving that year. And one of the first actions of the new governor was to issue a new Thanksgiving proclamation, saying that it was open to everybody.
[7:56]Well, I know we already have a national independent bookstore day today, but I feel like maybe we need on the national levels and sort of national day of reading or something with books or authors or something that we could try to institute what you think.
[8:12]Oh, that's also a good idea, make sure to see if a hail is included in it. Yeah, thanksgiving. But you know, I think getting back to the idea of reading a national book day.
[8:23]I think Americans, especially young people need to be better educated on the holiday.
[8:29]There are a lot of myths that float around the first Thanksgiving in particular. And you know, we would all, I think it would enhance the meaning of our Thanksgiving if we learned more about the holiday.
[8:47]I think there should be a movie that is called Thanksgiving or hail or something.
[8:52]And I think it should be about Sarah just have a hail and the development of Thanksgiving.
[8:57]And then you could play it like everything's giving like Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving and all those things.
[9:03]And well, I'll see if I can help.
[9:06]And I'd love to be an advisor to them because I've learned a lot about Thanksgiving and Sarah Josepha.
[9:12]And all over the years, she is an eminently interesting character for a movie, you know, a widow who goes on to remake herself as a lady editor in a time when she was the first successful woman as editor of the publication.
[9:31]She campaigned, it's hard to believe when she started her first magazine in 1828, only half of American women were literate and there was not a single institution of higher education that admitted women.
[9:44]So she can't pay in, she was an editor for 50 years.
[9:48]And every month, every issue of her magazines had something about women's education in it.
[9:54]She believed that women were the intellectual equals of men, but the reason they.
[10:00]couldn't succeed in professions and outside and work outside the home in general,
[10:06]was because they weren't educated. That was an exclusive privilege of men. And she campaigned about
[10:14]this in her magazine for years. And she really, in my view, changed the national conversation,
[10:20]so to speak, about what women were capable of. And in that way, she was extremely influential
[10:27]in the issues that later came. She, for example, thought women should be teachers. And back in
[10:35]the 1830s as the public schools were opening up around the country, there was a view that only men
[10:42]could teach kids. Women could be relegated to teaching small children, but not older kids. And
[10:49]Hale thought that women could teach any subject to anybody, so long as they were educated in that
[10:57]area. She also supported women becoming doctors and thought that women should treat women doctors
[11:04]should treat women and children exclusively. That men didn't kind of have the nature to understand
[11:11]female women and children. And she wanted to be the exclusive privilege of women. And she also
[11:18]supported women working in many other fields, like being post mistresses, being waitresses. Now,
[11:24]that seems pretty mundane, but there was a period when only men were being waitresses. I mean,
[11:31]waiters, sorry. And then when Vassar College was in the works, one of the first colleges for women,
[11:40]she advised Vassar the founder of the school in many ways. The idea was to create a
[11:48]preeminent intellectual institution for women. And she was very impactful there. But on another subject,
[11:57]she used her magazine to help create an American culture. She believed that the country had been
[12:03]unified politically by the revolution. But it wasn't yet unified culturally. Everybody was still
[12:10]looking toward the mother country and not, it wasn't that the country wasn't developing its own
[12:16]literature, for example. And she announced that she was going to publish American authors writing
[12:24]on American topics. Now, this seems obvious from the perspective of the 21st century. But then
[12:31]it was unusual because a lot of publications were made up of articles that have been stolen from
[12:39]British publications or other American publication and just cotton pasted into their own
[12:46]publication without credit, whereas Hale published original work. And she also supported a lot of
[12:55]young American writers who were just getting started, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, 25 years before
[13:01]Uncle Tom's cabin, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and many, many other writers who are now
[13:08]classic figures in our literature. And beyond literature, she went on to Oprah White help create
[13:15]kind of common American aesthetic. She published recipes. She was the first one to publish a
[13:22]recipes section in her publication. And she championed the white wedding gown and the Christmas tree
[13:30]two customs that obviously are still going strong today. Wow, it's really amazing because it
[13:37]also shows that if you just take enough interest and have enough sort of commitment to something,
[13:44]you can really change the country. I mean, of course, the whole history of America speaks to that.
[13:48]But yes, especially as a woman and a mother, and I just find this so personally energizing
[13:55]to know that she made such a difference at a time when it was really tricky to do so.
[14:00]And yes, how we celebrate Thanksgiving. Yeah, Edgar Allen Poe called her a woman of genius
[14:06]and excuse the sexism, masculine energy. Yeah, well, no surprise with that. And you have been
[14:15]with the Wall Street Journal for a long time, right? Tell me about that. Yes, I worked for the Wall
[14:19]Street Journal for 30 years in Hong Kong. And then in New York City, where I wrote editorials
[14:26]was at editor and deputy editor of the opinion section. So I had a wonderful career.
[14:32]And now I'm writing books. Wow, that's exciting. How do you feel being on the book side? Do you
[14:38]miss the newsroom atmosphere? I do. You know, the energy of being in a working for a daily
[14:45]newspaper can be intoxicating. And having to focus my mind on digesting and understanding
[14:56]so many issues that are in the news these days. And then writing a coherent opinion piece about
[15:03]it or soliciting in a coherent opinion piece is hard work, but it's very satisfying work.
[15:11]So I do miss that at the same time. I've been very satisfying to me to be able to focus my
[15:19]attention on a single subject in my writing. And though my first book was on North Korea,
[15:26]and my second book on Thanksgiving, and now Sarah Josefa Heil, who's an offshoot of my research
[15:33]into Thanksgiving. But I keep my hand in with the paper, writing an occasional article or book reviews
[15:39]for them. What subject are you going to tackle next? I haven't decided. I may go back to North
[15:46]Korean topic, but I'm, you know, I'm welcome to ideas if you have any. Sure. I'm evaluating
[15:54]different thoughts right now. Excellent. I mean, you could just go to the next holiday, find out
[15:59]who the main person was in that. You could do a whole thing on uncovering American holiday
[16:05]history or something. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a lot. All right. Not a great one. Okay. You'll
[16:09]be all think of something better. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
[16:15]My advice is probably the one they've heard before, which is keep at it. Keep writing and keep
[16:21]reading. A lot of what I learned about being a writer was from reading, but others people wrote.
[16:31]And, you know, writing, and another thing I'll say is that a lot of people want to be a writer,
[16:37]they say, but you have to write about something. You have to know something. So you just don't
[16:44]pick up a pen or open your laptop and say, okay, I'm going to write today, you have to know something.
[16:51]So that means you have to educate yourself. You have to do a lot of research or reporting.
[16:56]And that requires a lot of tedious work as well as interesting work. So once you know a subject,
[17:04]it's a lot easier to write about it. Yes. Although there are plenty of people who write about things
[17:10]with no research and just like, you know, whatever's on their minds, which is often that's a
[17:14]problem. That's that's you're right. And that's a problem. Especially with our our media today,
[17:22]it's much more off the cuff than it is fully developed. So, you know, you can hit people who are
[17:29]glib talkers or good writers, but they are no nothing. And that does not help the reader or the
[17:37]it might change them, but it doesn't educate them. Right. Well, hopefully, the people listening to
[17:44]this will have something good to say and then write it. Well, thank you so much for this book. And
[17:51]I'm going to go read the Sarah, Joseph, a hail book next. I only had this one for Thanksgiving for
[17:57]the theme and the timing, but I'm so interested in her now. And I don't know, I'm on a roll. I'm
[18:03]but I keep well, that's that's great to hear. And I hope you like the book. And I'd be welcome
[18:08]to come back and talk more about Sarah. Just see for a hail. But in the meantime, let me be the
[18:13]first to wish you a happy Thanksgiving. You are the first. So I will let you. Happy Thanksgiving to
[18:20]you too. Thank you very much, Sydney. Okay, take care. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to this episode
[18:27]of moms. Don't have time to read books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at
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[18:41]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the Sound Editing. And thank you to
[18:46]Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.