WE GATHER TOGETHER

Kiernan traces the history of the formalization of Thanksgiving Day while reframing the holiday’s sense of gratitude.

The author’s overarching concern is the timeless role of gratitude in the practice of thanksgiving days scattered throughout the year. Her main character is Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879), who, as a magazine editor, became “an influencer…of fashion, manners, and the well-set table” as well as a force behind the publishing of such writers as Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman. In addition to penning “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” she displayed a singular passion in championing the making of Thanksgiving Day a national holiday. She believed that in bestowing federal stature upon Thanksgiving, the citizenry would experience “a grand spectacle of moral power and human happiness,” and she lobbied presidents to support her cause, beginning with Zachary Taylor. Hale emerges as an intriguing yet hardly revolutionary historical figure. “As tirelessly as Hale may have advocated, in action and voice, for women’s education and marital rights,” writes the author, “she stopped far short of being a suffragette. Hale would never lobby for the blanket rights of women.” Throughout, the author attempts to burnish Hale’s appeal, with mixed success. “Hope sprang eternal. Her pen would not rest,” writes Kiernan, emphasizing her subject’s ceaseless striving for “a coming day of thanks that would herald the virtue of gratitude in these cruel times.” As the author admits, Hale was a traditionalist who felt that “anarchy is worse than despotism. The final third of the book is the most interesting, as Kiernan engagingly explores the economic, political, and cultural roots and consequences of holiday practice, including the connections between Thanksgiving and football (“never in her life would Hale have envisioned football being part of the national celebration”), war, pandemics, and relevant historical episodes such as the 1621 day of thanks between the Pilgrims and Wampanoag people.

Not as riveting as Kiernan’s previous books but still a bright tribute to Thanksgiving’s expression of gratitude and grace.