## Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, An American History

by Diana Karter Appelbaum

Facts on File Publications 1984

CHAPTERS 11 AND 12: RECONSTRUCTION AND VICTORIAN ERAS AND SOME LOCAL
TRADITIONS

# Victorian Holiday

Pages 163-166

Andrew Johnson proclaimed December 7, 1865, Thanksgiving Day for a
nation at peace,...

President Johnson's Thanksgiving proclamation created a legal holiday
only for federal employees and residents of the District of Columbia.
Elsewhere, Thanksgiving depended upon proclamations issued by state
governors. Although southern governors in 1865 anad since have generally
ordained days of Thanksgiving to coincide with presidentially proclaimed
days, some of them felt as Oran Milo Roberts, governor of Texas from
1879 to 1883, did when he refused to proclaim Thanksgiving Day for
Texas, declaring that, "It's a damned Yankee institution anyhow."

December 23, 1875, was proclaimed a special thanksgiving in Alabama to
honor the replacement of a reconstruction constitution by a new document
that restricted black participation in state government.

Louisiana skipped Thanksgiving several times during its tempestuous
reconstruction, then celebrated a special thanksgiving on May 10, 1877,
when an all-white government was restored.

In Georgia, the return of white supremacy was celebrated by observing
Thanksgiving Day one week earlier than the date set by President Ulysses
S. Grant for the rest of the nation.

# Religion and Thanksgiving

Page 168

Earlier, during the 1840s, the country had witnessed one of the periodic
flood tides of religious enthusiasm in American Protestantism. Interest
in religion was widespread and fervent and churches were filled on
Sundays and on Thanksgiving Day as well. When this religious enthusiasm
ebbed in the 1860s and 1870s, the Thanksgiving service, with its happy
associations of home and family, retained its hold longer than other
forms of devotion.

# The Family Still Comes Together

Pages 168-171

The ideal Thanksgiving was delineated so regularly in the press that it
became permanently embossed on the American consciousness. The image was
epitomized by President Benjamin Harrison's 1891 Thanksgiving
proclamation which advised citizenry that "Among the appropriate
observances of the day are rest from toil, worship in a public
congregation, the renewal of family ties around our American firesides,
and thoughtful helpfulness toward those who suffer lack of the body or
of the spirit."

Railroads made it possible for families to travel substantial distances
to be together on Thanksgiving, although the most common journey was
from any major city to the villages and farms of the surrounding
countryside.

# Thanksgiving Festivities

Pages 173-175

Thanksgiving matinees soon achieved such popularity that they became a
Thanksgiving tradition in their own right. Every large town had its
theater or opera house visited by touring players, singers and
musicians.

Even more popular than the Thanksgiving matinee was the Thanksgiving
ball. Balls were sponsored and attended by every segment of society.
Debutantes danced in mansion ballrooms and country girls danced in
farmhouse parlors.

# A Times of Sharing

Pages 178-183

Thanksgiving dinners were given at prisons, almshouses, hospitals,
orphanages, settlement houses and insane asylums amidst great
self-congratulation over the fact that on this day no one went hungry.

All charitable enterprise on Thanksgiving Day was approved by the world
of fashion, but it was more fashionable to feed children than adults
and, among children, the most fashionable objects of charity were
newsboys.

In the Victorian era, Thanksgiving completed its transition from a
regional holiday to a national one. . . The religious core of the
holiday, however, was lost in the translation.

# New York's Fantasticals

Pages 186-189

\[Between 1840s to beginning of World War II\], New York had parades of
"fantasticals" on Thanksgiving Day. The fantasticals were
neighborhood-based organizations of young men whose sole purpose for
existence was so that their members could dress in flamboyant costumes
and parade through the streets on Thanksgiving. It has been suggested
that these fantasticals had their origins in the celebration of the
final evacuation of British troops from New York on November 25, 1783,
the costumes perhaps suggesting the varied rags and odd bits of clothing
worn by the Continental soldiers who marched into the city as British
troops left. Others have written that the fantastic costumes were a
remnant of European Mardi Gras customs, suppressed by Dutch and English
Protestants and somehow transposed to Thanksgiving.

# ![](media/image1.wmf)The Target Companies

Page 190

New York's second, unique Thanksgiving custom was the target company.
These quasi-military clubs of men, more restrained than the fantasticals
and a cut above them in social class, existed for the sole purpose of
parading on Thanksgiving morning toward the edge of the city, where they
engaged in target shooting for prizes.

# The Ragamuffins

Pages 190-3

Black youngsters, faces whitened with talcum, and white children, faces
blackened with coal dust, scurried through the city streets in gay
costumes accosting passersby \[by asking for money\]

About 1900, Progressive era reformers made the ragamuffin the target of
a campaign of eradication.

# Military Parades

Page 195

Military Thanksgiving parades were known before the Civil War, but the
war gave the custom impetus.

On Thanksgiving morning in any particular city anywhere from one to 100
military units might march, but there was no coordinated Thanksgiving
parade.