Reasons to be thankful

Reasons to be thankful

Looking for something to be thankful for on this most troubled Thanksgiving Day since 2001? There is much.

Financial turmoil is dominating the national consciousness today, and we quickly forget how recently we were pausing on this day to be thankful for this nation’s resilience in the wake of an act of terrorism that wounded its soul.

Thanksgiving Day is rooted in a weeklong celebration of survival held by the Pilgrims with their neighbors, the Wampanoags, 387 years ago. But it has taken on more solemnity over the centuries than was evident in its earliest days.

President George Washington proclaimed the new nation’s first Thanksgiving Thursday, Nov. 26, 1789, but the holiday was largely ignored by his successors. It only got traction less than 150 years ago, after Abraham Lincoln encouraged its observance.

Karl Jacoby, a history professor at Brown University, suggests that the image of Pilgrims and Indians breaking bread together allowed Americans to gloss over the divisions that led to the Civil War and remained after Lincoln’s assassination. Conveniently overlooked was the historical fact that about 50 years after that first Thanksgiving, the Wampanoags and the Plymouth Colony engaged in a vicious war over the encroachment by the settlers on Indian lands.

Every president since Lincoln has issued Thanksgiving proclamations, and this year is no exception. The last such proclamation to be issued by President George W. Bush notes that this is “a time for families and friends to gather together and express gratitude for all that we have been given, the freedoms we enjoy, and the loved ones who enrich our lives.”

And we shall. Editorial cartoonists use exaggeration to make their point, and Steven Breen is no exception in the cartoon at right. He draws on an iconic Norman Rockwell painting of a family feast, replacing Rockwell’s golden turkey with a can of Spam. It’s worth remembering that Rockwell’s painting did not depict a Thanksgiving of plenty from the post-war boom days of the 1950s, but was published in 1943, at the height of World War II. It illustrated one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “four freedoms,” in this case the freedom from want. The painting’s first appearance in the March 6, 1943, Saturday Evening Post was not tied to Thanksgiving.

Time of uncertainty

Breen’s cartoon makes the point that this is not a typical Thanksgiving for many American families. There is economic turmoil. Investments are shrinking. Jobs have been lost, and unemployment is projected to climb next year.

But in historical perspective, these are troubled times, but far from the worst of times.

Are we in a recession? Almost certainly. But 75 years ago, the U.S. economy was in free fall. By 1932, industrial production had fallen by two-thirds and the GDP by half from their 1929 highs. The Dow Jones Average fell that summer to 41 from its pre-Crash high of 381.

Unemployment today is just over 6 percent; in 1932, it was over 24 percent. Those lucky enough to have a job were paid an average of $16 a week. And businesses were still slashing salaries.

As today, the auto industry was a sort of bellwether. Sales of automobiles fell from 5 million in 1928 to 1 million in 1932. In other sectors of the economy, over 1,600 banks failed.

If we are looking for economic news to be thankful for, it is that today America recognizes that it has a problem and its leaders are working on solutions. And we can be thankful that in this time of uncertainty, the nation came together, elected new leaders and both the old and the new are working on an orderly transfer of government that is a model for the world.

To be sure, in an economy as large as that of the United States, and in a world as interconnected as ours has become, there are no easy answers. Things may get worse before they get better, but during nearly four centuries of imperfect history dating to that first Thanksgiving, the American spirit has persevered.

We can be thankful that when challenges have presented themselves, we have met them. We have been true to Roosevelt’s call, and we have pursued not only the freedom from want, but freedom of speech, freedom to worship and freedom from fear.

That’s a legacy of which a nation can be proud and for which each of us should be thankful.