Sometime in the fall of 1621, possibly in November, the settlers at Plymouth Plantation held their first thanksgiving feast. After arriving the previous fall and enduring a harrowing winter, the fifty or so surviving Pilgrims had planted a successful crop of corn, along with “indifferent good” barley and some peas that withered on their stems. To celebrate the harvest, they invited over their neighbors—Chief Massasoit and around ninety of his men.
The menu included fowl (turkey, quail, ducks, and geese all abounded in the area), venison (which the Indians provided), and probably fish and shellfish. Boiled pumpkin and corn cakes and pudding are also likely candidates. These may have been supplemented with wild nuts and berries, but probably not cranberries, since the settlers had no sugar to sweeten them. They lacked wheat flour and dairy products as well. The feast lasted three days, and in a tradition that still continues, the women did the cooking while the men smoked, drank, and played games.
Strictly speaking, the high-spirited gathering was a harvest festival, not a thanksgiving, which would have been solemn and prayerful. The plantation’s first official day of thanksgiving was not proclaimed until July 1623 to mark the end of a long drought. In February 1630 the Pilgrims’ northern neighbors, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, held a thanksgiving day of their own after the arrival of ships bearing supplies and additional colonists. The following year saw Massachusetts’s first autumn thanksgiving.
Shortly after the Pilgrims’ celebration, on November 11, the ship Fortune dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor and disgorged thirty-five settlers. Their number increased to thirty-six the next day when Martha Ford, whose husband had died in transit, gave birth to a son. The debarkation inaugurated another hardy New England tradition: snootiness toward later arrivals. Gov. William Bradford sniffed that “most of them were lusty yong men, and many of them wild enough, who litle considered whither or aboute what they wente.” He conceded that “the plantation was glad of this addition of strenght, but could have wished that many of them had been in beter condition” and grumbled about having to share meager provisions (the Fortune brought none of its own). Only a third of the Fortune party adhered to the Pilgrims’ religious beliefs; the rest were “strangers,” which may account for Bradford’s disdain.
Despite their deficiencies, the “late commers” were fed, outfitted, lodged, and set to work alongside their venerable counterparts. When Christmas came around, many in the fresh-off-the-boat contingent insisted on taking the day off, which was not a Pilgrim custom. Bradford grudgingly agreed to indulge the greenhorns’ eccentricity “till they were better informed,” but when he later discovered them playing in the street, he angrily ordered them indoors.
Meanwhile, the Fortune was sent home on December 13 with five hundred pounds’ worth of lumber, “Saxefras,” and beaver and otter skins bought from the Indians. Near the English Channel pirates seized the ship, escorted it to the Ile d’Yeu off the French coast, and removed everything of value, leaving behind some apparently worthless papers. Thanks to the Gallic buccaneers’ forbearance, the Plymouth Plantation’s amended charter survived, along with an acrimonious letter from Bradford to Thomas Weston, the colony’s main financier. Also preserved was a series of articles written by settlers, which were published in London in 1622. The resulting pamphlet, now known as Mourt’s Relation, contained much valuable information about the colony’s early months, including the text of the Mayflower Compact; a sales pitch and instructions for potential emigrants; and —most important to the schoolchildren, cartoonists, and editorial writers of today—the only surviving account of the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving dinner.
1721Two Hundred Seventy-five Years Ago
The Inoculation Controversy
Around three o’clock on the morning of November 14, a crude grenade made of black powder and turpentine sailed through a window of Cotton Mather’s house in Boston. It landed in Mather’s guest room but failed to explode, thus sparing the life of his nephew. The attempted bombing was the most lurid episode in a campaign of intimidation aimed at Mather and his ally Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, whom rope-toting mobs had threatened to hang. What offense had these two men committed to enrage the Boston masses so violently? Inoculating their fellow citizens against smallpox.
Outbreaks of smallpox had occurred with grim frequency in colonial Boston since 1630. Mather had lived through earlier ones in 1678, 1690, and 1702, the last of which took his wife, Abigail. He and his fellow ministers explained the epidemics as divine retribution, meant to punish the wicked and chasten the proud. But around 1714 Mather, who had long been interested in science and medicine, heard of the African practice of inoculation from his slave Onesimus. He also read papers about inoculation in Turkey in a British scholarly journal. When smallpox made a lethal return to Boston in 1721, Mather resolved to give it a try.
The disease arrived in a ship from Tortuga in mid-April; within a month it was widespread. In early June Mather circulated an address to physicians advocating the “Wonderful Practice” of inoculation. Boylston read the manuscript and decided to act on its advice. On June 26 he inoculated his son and two slaves by opening veins and inserting pus from a smallpox victim. All three developed mild cases of the disease, as expected, and recovered without further complications. Encouraged by the results, Mather and Boylston began an aggressive inoculation campaign.
Instead of being hailed as saviors, the two were reviled by many Bostonians for interfering with God’s will and spreading the dreaded disease. (In fact, the crude procedure induced cases of smallpox that, while not usually fatal, could be quite painful and repulsive.) A heated war of pamphlets and letters ensued. Dr. William Douglass, the only man in Boston with a medical degree, led the vituperation, which continued for most of a year. As the epidemic waned in 1722, the fiercely anti-Mather New-England Courant, established the previous summer, published a series of mocking letters under the name Silence Dogood (an allusion to Mather’s popular Essays to Do Good). The author, never identified, was the sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin, and the Dogood letters were his first published work.
Factors unrelated to medicine were at work in the dispute. Bostonians were losing their customary reverence for the clergy as ministers interfered boldly in secular issues, such as the printing of paper money. Class-based resentment accounted for some anti-clerical feeling, and Mather had recently made enemies by taking sides in a fight over the establishment of a new church. The grenade tossed into his house had a message attached (in a way meant to survive the explosion) that combined doctrinal and medical concerns: “COTTON MATHER, I was once one of your Meeting; But the Cursed Lye you told of — —, You know who, made me leave You, You Dog; And, Damn You, I will Enoculate you with this, with a Pox to you.”
Before running its course in the spring, the epidemic took nearly 8 percent of Boston’s population. After passions had cooled, most opponents admitted that the novel procedure had worked. Of the 287 people Boylston had inoculated, only six had died, and at least four of those had already been infected. When smallpox broke out anew in 1730, many Boston physicians embraced inoculation—even Douglass.
1921Seventy-five Years Ago
Ending the War to End Wars
Three years after the end of the Great War, Americans dealt with some unfinished business from that conflict. On November 8, after the Senate had ratified peace agreements with Germany, Austria, and Hungary to replace the rejected Versailles Treaty, President Warren Harding declared an official end to the war. On Armistice Day, November 11, the remains of an unknown American soldier, exhumed from a French grave, were interred in Washington, D.C. Military men from all nations paid tribute with medals, ribbons, and decorations, including an Indian who laid a coup stick and war bonnet on the bier.
The President delivered an oration that, while undeniably moving, presents no threat to the Gettysburg Address: “If American achievement is a cherished pride at home, if our unselfishness among nations is all we wish it to be, and ours is a helpful example in the world, then let us give of our influence and strength, yea, of our aspirations and convictions, to put mankind on a little higher plane, exulting and exalting, with war’s distressing and depressing tragedies barred from the stage of righteous civilization.”
The next day diplomats from nine nations met in Washington to discuss the resurgent naval arms race and security concerns in the Pacific. America and Japan had been the biggest winners in the war, the former by establishing itself as a world power and the latter by expanding its territory and influence in Asia. Now America wanted to solidify its newfound status, and Japan wanted to keep dominating the Far East, while Britain wanted to maintain its traditional place as Top Nation, especially on the seas. The result was a three-way game of naval can-you-top-this, with smaller nations struggling to catch up, that was already making a grim joke of the War to End Wars. To complicate matters, an Anglo-Japanese defense treaty from the ancient days of 1911 was still in effect; it would have required the British to take Japan’s side in a war with America.
Harding opened the conference with a brief and (for him) eloquent address. Charles Evans Hughes, the Secretary of State, was the next speaker. He began with the expected platitudes and then, without warning, made a proposal that caused jaws to drop throughout the hall, creating what The New York Times called “a thrill akin to an electric shock.” The United States, he said, was willing to scrap thirty ships totaling almost 850,000 tons. The offer was startling in itself, but then Hughes went much further, asking Britain to scrap almost 600,000 tons of its own ships, including four under construction, and Japan to scrap 450,000 tons.
As dazed diplomats struggled to regain their bearings, audience members burst into prolonged, frenzied applause. The conference immediately adjourned for two days, and by the time the delegates reassembled, public opinion around the war-weary globe was overwhelmingly in favor of the American proposals. By February the conferees had fixed limits on naval tonnage well below existing levels, agreed to respect one another’s rights in Asia and the Pacific, and established an open-door policy in China.
Except for die-hard isolationists, Americans hailed the agreements as a fulfillment of Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to eliminate warfare. Harding proclaimed “a new and better epoch in human progress” and said that “those of us who live another decade” would see “nations more concerned with living to the fulfillment of God’s high intent than with agencies of warfare and destruction.” Unfortunately events did not follow the President’s optimistic scenario. By dying in 1923, Harding missed seeing his prediction fall victim to the same forces that had nullified every European peace agreement before it.
1946Fifty Years Ago
Republicans Capture Congress
On November 5 the Republican party won control of Congress for the first time since the Hoover administration, with 246 of 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 51 of 96 in the Senate. The old Confederate states remained solidly Democratic, by a margin of 103 House seats to 2, but the rest of the House was almost three-to-one Republican. Americans were suffering through a rocky transition to peacetime, and the Republicans had capitalized on voters’ anger with the slogan “Had Enough?” The focus of the gibe was the country’s foundering President, Harry S. Truman.
The problems Truman faced—military demobilization, converting industry to consumer production, labor strife, a housing crunch—would have daunted anyone. In addition, foreign affairs, which typically occupy 75 percent of a President’s time and 5 percent of the voters’ interest, were especially complicated in 1946. Still, Truman made some unforced errors. By freeing wages but retaining many price controls, he ensured a year of strikes, shortages, and black markets. He also looked weak and indecisive in handling the resignations of Harold Ickes and Henry Wallace from his cabinet. In comparison with his predecessor, the revered Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman seemed distinctly second-rate by the fall of 1946.
Among the first-time congressional winners were a pair of naval veterans, Richard M. Nixon of California and John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Nixon had been selected by a group of Los Angeles-area businessmen eager to unseat Jerry Voorhis, a popular Democrat, from their heavily Republican district. The committee had first solicited candidates with a newspaper advertisement and was as successful as people usually are when seeking romance by that route. Then the ex-president of Whittier College recommended Nixon, a former student who had gone on to Duke Law School. Using tactics that would prove useful later in his career, Nixon aggressively associated Voorhis with the far left and ended up winning by a comfortable margin.
JFK’s candidacy had been predestined in the ambitious Kennedy clan ever since his older brother, Joseph, was killed in the war. His campaign also set a pattern for the future by using plenty of Kennedy money, Kennedy relatives, and Kennedy charisma. It took a while for the wealthy ambassador’s son to get a feel for his workingclass Boston-area district, but with a heroic war record and a prominent family behind him, as well as countless hours of pounding the pavement and shaking hands, he easily won the Democratic primary over nine opponents. November’s general election was a formality. Other freshmen in the Eightieth Congress included Rep. Carl Albert of Oklahoma (a future Speaker of the House) and the Red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
Four days after the election a glum Truman removed price controls from everything except sugar, rice, and rent. The poor stayed home and ate a lot of rice pudding while the rest of America went on a spending spree that would raise prices by 25 percent over the next two years. Yet even as Republicans gleefully looked ahead to 1948, Truman was beginning his political comeback. On November 20 John L. Lewis called a walkout of his United Mine Workers. They had struck in the spring and signed a new contract after the government seized the mines, but now Lewis was making new demands. Truman, in no mood for such games, slapped Lewis and the union with an injunction and massive fines. On December 7 Lewis capitulated. Even before the hostile Congress convened, Truman had taken the first step in his conversion from a bumbling failed haberdasher to Give ‘Em Hell Harry.
Racism on the Gridiron
On November 5 Penn State and the University of Miami canceled a football game scheduled for the end of the month in a dispute over the presence of two black players on the Penn State team. Bowman P. Ashe, the president of Miami, had banned the pair on grounds of good fellowship, saying that he hoped to avoid “unfortunate incidents” and “not catapult very important, not-well-understood interracial problems into a football game.” Carl P. Schott, dean of athletics at Penn State, insisted that “the colored boys are regular members of the Penn State football squad” and declined to place any conditions on their participation.
Similar disagreements were cropping up elsewhere. The day before, Nevada had canceled a scheduled game at Mississippi State rather than agree to withhold its two black players. Once again the Southern school invoked social responsibility to justify its actions, explaining that interracial athletic contests were traditionally banned in Dixie and that Mississippi State “would not violate that tradition.” Earlier in the season a pair of smaller colleges had worked out a solution to the American dilemma: Fresno State’s black players sat out a game at Oklahoma City but would be allowed to play in a future return match at Fresno.
Divide and Conquer
In Tokyo on November 11 Kiyoshi Matsuzaki struck a blow for Japanese technological supremacy by defeating a GI’s electric calculating machine with an old-fashioned abacus. Matsuzaki, a government clerk, outpaced Pvt. Thomas Wood of Deering, Missouri, in subtraction, addition, and division, losing only in multiplication. In a final problem combining all four arithmetical disciplines, Matsuzaki produced the correct answer four seconds ahead of his rival. Wood, an experienced bookkeeper, was gracious in defeat, shaking hands with Matsuzaki as he maintained his preference for the seven-hundred-dollar mechanical calculator over the six-dollar soroban. Another soldier was less magnanimous: “It’s the first time the Japs have won anything since the battle off Savo Island.” In the aftermath (so to speak) of the event, no politicians felt the need to call for trade sanctions.
C-Minus Rations
On November 13 U.S. Army brass announced scientific proof of what any World War II veteran could have told them: C rations tasted lousy. In tests at Camp Carson, Colorado, soldiers fed on traditional C rations for a month had lost an average of one pound apiece, while those given a reformulated version had gained an average of three pounds. The data came as no surprise to GIs who had suffered through the war on the prepackaged diet of meat-and-beans, hash, or stew (a largely theoretical distinction), accompanied by desiccated crackers and vile alleged coffee. The C ration, a day’s worth of meals contained in an inconvenient cylindrical can weighing a hefty five pounds, had been meant for emergency use only, but as always in wartime, the distinction between emergency and normal situations quickly evaporated.
According to an official Army history, the World War II C ration “was seriously lacking in variety” and “would become monotonous if it were the only food available over protracted periods,” which happened with distressing frequency. Furthermore, “crackers, stored for a year or more, underwent chemical changes that made them rancid and gave them unpleasant flavors,” and the fat in meat items often “separated from the other elements and formed a reddish conglomeration at the ends of the can, so distasteful in appearance that soldiers repeatedly threw the whole mass of food away. With age the onions, carrots, and meats acquired new and less acceptable flavors and, according to some consumers, came to look and taste like ‘dog food.’” Even Uncle Sam’s toughest Marines “could not eat more than half a canful of C hash at a time.” Bill Mauldin’s highly unofficial book on the war, Up Front, reported that “prisoners scream when we throw C rations at them. According to the rules, they are supposed to get the same food as their captors, and they refuse to believe that we also eat C rations.”
The revised version was improved in both quantity (an extra meat item was included) and variety (the available dishes eventually included hamburgers, franks and beans, spaghetti, pork sausages, ham, and chicken). Army culinary standards still prevailed, which may explain why another addition, canned fruit, was best received by the soldiers. A further welcome novelty was a tin of real bread to supplement the “biscuit units.” The cigarette allowance was also increased, from nine to twenty.
Although the revised bill of fare was an improvement on the old C rations, it was not exactly appetizing. A Korean War soldier later recalled: “Ham and limas I don’t think nobody wanted. We gave a can to a Chinese prisoner once, and even he wouldn’t eat it. On the other hand, everybody wanted the cans of fruit. Can of peaches, or fruit cocktail, it made your day.” The Korean War’s multinational character would create other headaches for American procurement officers. Muslim troops from Turkey would not eat pork, until finally religious leaders gave them permission to consume it in combat rations (a mixed blessing, to be sure); they also scoffed at what Americans called coffee. Hindus shunned beef and demanded rice and spices; Italians required tomato paste; Greeks had olive oil shipped from home. Thai and Ethiopian soldiers came up with what may be the best way to make military food palatable: They requested a supplement of hot sauce and applied it liberally to everything.
1971Twenty-five Years Ago
Like Wow, Man
November 8 saw the release of the fourth album from the British rock group Led Zeppelin, with a song that would become God’s gift to the American marijuana industry: “Stairway to Heaven.” The album, commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV, had for its actual title a group of cryptic symbols that was rendered very roughly as “#&@%” in Lenny Kaye’s Rolling Stone review. Kaye singled out “Rock and Roll” and “When the Levee Breaks” for especial praise, mentioning the eight-minute “Stairway” only in passing. Yet the song’s blend of mystical and apocalyptic imagery with Zeppelin’s usual incendiary riffs, pounding bass, and thunderous drumbeat—building, in classic rock-anthem style, from a quiet acoustic introduction (with recorders, even) to a thrashing, head-banging climax—has proved irresistible to generation after generation of adolescent potheads. It is still the most popular rock song of all time among frat boys and people with nothing better to do than phone in to radio-station listener polls.
The song spawned myths and rituals that have long outlived Led Zep’s 1980 breakup. Concertgoers began lighting matches and sparklers when Jimmy Page launched into the opening notes, creating what William S. Burroughs in Crawdaddy called “the atmosphere of a high school Christmas play.” The recondite lyrics elicited endless hours of discussion in between bong hits, and the fanciful interpretations multiplied when Robert Plant’s screeching delivery led to misunderstood lines like “And there’s a wino down the road.” Such confusion was easily avoidable, since the words were printed inside the album’s gatefold cover, which listeners generally opened at least once a day to clean more dope. In most cases, however, they were in no condition to read them.
In the ensuing decades other bands have paid tribute to Led Zeppelin’s warhorse, from the Butthole Surfers’ Hairway to Steven to a recent album called Elevator to Hell. The ultimate accolade came in the 1992 movie Wayne’s World, when Mike Myers, idly playing the first few notes in a guitar shop, is admonished to stop by the proprietor, who points to a sign on the wall reading NO STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN. Unlike most of the 1970s-heavy Wayne’s World canon, though, “Stairway to Heaven” does not rely on hip-to-be-square irony to justify a contrived return to coolness. It has never gone out of fashion, and as long as marijuana grows in the fields, back yards, and basements of America, it never will.
