US Thanksgiving, 2004

November 25, 2004

      A potpourri of phenomena that remind us of where we have been, and why gratitude today is not so much a moral response as simply an  accurate one:

      Today's review in the Wall Street Journal of The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin.   

Once, back on Jan. 12, 1888, the wind made good its angry promise, and 100 children died. Hundreds of adults as well, and thousands of horses and cows. First came the blasts of frigid air, followed quickly by the haze of ice dust that sliced the skin from the farmers caught outside. Then came the snow, and then the killing cold....Following the journals of the Norwegian and German immigrants who rushed to fill the Dakota plains in the early 1880s -- the Rolvaags, Albrechts and all their like -- The Children's Blizzard tells story after story of that grim day. Some of the children trapped at school tried to make it home. A few survived, burrowing into haystacks or forming rings in which the outer children froze to death while keeping the littlest children alive...

      And Donald Sensing's reminder of the men, especially women, and children who settled the mid-continent, inches and miles in ox wagons, 40 below in January and 105 in the summer. Boiled clothes and respectability.  Sometimes madness. Sod houses. No AC. Grit.

      Every year, the Journal publishes Nathaniel Morton's and Governor William Bradford's description of the desolate winter wilderness that met the Puritan settlers in 1620.  There could be no retreat.   

The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other's heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears. But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend Pastor, falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessing; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.

Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

      And the songs from Protestant hymnody with an uncanny memory-hook like the fragrance of turkey and the crinkle of paper pilgrim hats. Patrick O'Hannigan points to a 1644 hymn by a bereaved German pastor near-buried by pestilence in the Thirty Years War.

      Now that we are in the MIDI files, wandering and browsing, pausing at a Dutch hymn from 1597, likewise the relief of battle's end.

      And an 1844 verse from an English scholar who, contemplating his death, declared himself "a pilgrim traveling to Jerusalem." 

      Sometimes I hear these melodies on church bells in a city on a Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, and think, in line with my mongrel and ecstatic Welsh heritage, Yes, we have come this far.

Ebenezer.

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Update: It is awe-inspiring to recognize that by December of 1621, expressing the impulse to share, if it were possible, a servant was writing back to England about the bounty and relative comfort enjoyed by the settlers in the colony:

by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

Marginal Revolution offers an economic footnote about the course of Gov. Bradford's great experiment. The incentive structure for activity proved to be important. Goods-in-common did not succeed, even in this small group.  So the question is, what is the size of the group, the degree of affectional affiliation, and the level of objective or subjective stress, that marks the limit of such arrangements?