Happy Thanksgiving!

Charles Blow's column this morning is "The Horrible History of Thanksgiving," a helpful reminder of the Native American genocide at the core of U.S. history; in it Blow concludes:

I spent most of my life believing a gauzy, kindergarten version of Thanksgiving, thinking only of feasts and family, turkey and dressing.

I was blind, willfully ignorant, I suppose, to the bloodier side of the Thanksgiving story, to the more honest side of it.

But I’ve come to believe that is how America would have it if it had its druthers: We would be blissfully blind, living in a soft world bleached of hard truth. I can no longer abide that.

Blow has been a man-on-fire recently with his hard-hitting columns on Mike Bloomberg (see "You Must Never Vote for Bloomberg" and "Bloomberg’s Bogus, Belated Mea Culpa"). Unfortunately, the company that employs Blow, The New York Times, is one of the world's chief bleachers of hard truth. Hopefully Blow can sustain his man-on-fire rebirth and focus some of his wrath on the newspaper's manufacture of official enemies. Maybe there will be column on Julian Assange or Jeremy Corbyn.

It's too bad that Blow didn't read a column that appeared on the same opinion page 25 years ago. Written by Arthur Quinn, my professor in the Department of Rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley, "The Miracle Harvest" traces the origin of Thanksgiving as a national holiday to a proclamation by Abraham Lincoln following the Union's bloody defeat at Chickamauga. Basically, Thanksgiving was a reelection ploy.

The Civil War is the single greatest event in the history of the United States, an event that still dominates our politics today. We shall see next year if a purely Dixiecrat campaign can triumph for the first time in a national election. Trump did not run a completely white ultra-nationalist campaign in 2016. But Trump's four years in office have eliminated the "big tent" aspects of his candidacy -- the promise of a vast infrastructure rebuild; the promises to reduce the U.S. overseas military footprint and to discipline the Saudis -- and left him entirely reliant on appeals to a Wallacite Know Nothing reactionary base of voters.

Quinn notes (something Blow mentions) that when the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth they found it largely deserted, the natives having been wiped out by plague:

Moreover, the Pilgrims had survived their ordeal, if barely, only because a previous people had not. The colonists had found Plymouth deserted but with many signs of previous inhabitants. They found large corn caches, without which they almost certainly would have starved. They also found human bones scattered around -- not just the occasional skeleton but piles of them, as if this had been a battlefield where corpses had been left to rot. The Pilgrims subsequently learned that the Pawtuxet Indians who lived there had recently been wiped out by an epidemic, a catastrophe that would become all too familiar to the indigenous peoples of eastern North America.

Troy Vettese argued in an excellent article last year in New Left Review (see "To Freeze the Thames") that the Little Ice Age of the 17th century was caused by the genocide of millions of indigenous people in the New World due to exposure to settlers from the Old World.

Thanksgiving, both its origin as a national holiday during the Civil War and as an actual historical event in the 1600s, might be dubbed Halloween II; it is essentially a nationalist appreciation of the dead by those who remain behind. (That being said, maybe Veterans Day is Halloween II and Thanksgiving is Halloween III.)

Art Quinn died of brain cancer in 1997. Today U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library offers a research fellowship in his name.