Will Thanksgiving 2010 be in September?

If our president, who was so often and favorably compared to FDR earlier this year, continues to try to tinker with the economy, it wouldn't surprise me (but I'm mostly engaging in hyperbole here).

What got me thinking was this very interesting (and brief) history of the holiday -- both in its inception and eventual federalization -- that The Front Porch Republic recently ran by Bill Kauffman.

George Washington issued the first National Thanksgiving Proclamation on November 26, 1789, but the early presidents, disproportionately Virginian and of a states' rights disposition, regarded such proclamations as excessively Yankee and Federalist. Even John Quincy Adams...was reluctant to be seen as "introducing New England manners" by a public acknowledgement of Thanksgiving.

...The indefatigable [antebellum New England novelist and editor Sarah Josepha] Hale propagandized ceaselessly for the glory of late November Thursdays, pumpkin pie, roasted turkey, "savory stuffing"—everything but the Detroit Lions. It took 35 years and a civil war, but Mrs. Hale's efforts paid off when President Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November a national day of Thanksgiving and a legal holiday.

Lincoln's successor's fiddled with the date a little, but in the end, for 70 years, the last Thursday of November was the holiday (which many states didn't recognize, or recognized when they wanted to).

It seems that in 1939 Thanksgiving was to fall on November 30th, a matter of consternation to the big merchants of the National Retail Dry Goods Association (NRDGA). The presidents of Gimbel Brothers, Lord & Taylor, and other unsentimental vendors petitioned President Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving to the previous Thursday, November 23, thus creating an additional week of Christmas shopping—and to the astonishment of those Americans without dollar signs in their eyes, the President did so. (Not all merchants favored the shift. One Kokomo shopkeeper hung a sign in his window reading, "Do your shopping now. Who knows, tomorrow may be Christmas.")

Opinion polls revealed that more than 60 percent of Americans opposed the Rooseveltian ukase; dissent was especially vigorous in New England. The selectmen of Plymouth, Massachusetts informed the President, "It is a religious holiday and [you] have no right to change it for commercial reasons." Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks to the Almighty, harrumphed Governor Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, "and not for the inauguration of Christmas shopping."

Although the states customarily followed the federal government’s lead on Thanksgiving, they retained the right to set their own date for the holiday, so 48 battles erupted. As usual, New Deal foes had all the wit, if not the votes. A New Hampshire senator urged the President to abolish winter; the Oregon attorney general versified:

Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November;

All the rest have thirty-one.

Until we hear from Washington.

Ack, I've quoted, too much, go read the rest of Kauffman's piece, which I'd just reproduce totally here, but I hate when blogs do that...so go, read, and head over the river and through the woods and find yourself some turkey.