The Thanksgiving Lady

 Daniel Deagler

              Sarah Josepha Hale

Philadelphia has more than its share of holiday connections: The Fourth of July, Flag Day, and Mother’s Day were all born in the City of Brotherly Love. You might want to add Thanksgiving. What? Impossible! What connection does the quintessential New England holiday of Pilgrims, turkeys, and pumpkin pie have with Philly other than perhaps the fact that Gimbels created the first Thanksgiving Day parade here in 1920, four years before Macy’s?

The answer is, more than you think and all because of the tireless efforts of an extraordinary woman whose name ought to be much more famous than it is.  Sarah Josepha Hale was arguably the most influential American woman of the 19^th century. As the editor of the Philadelphia-based publication, Godey’s Ladies Book, Mrs. Hale was that era’s ultimate arbiter of taste, style, and etiquette -- the Victorian version of Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart and Rachel Ray all rolled into one.

Born in Newport, New Hampshire in 1788, Sarah Josepha Hale ended up becoming a person of consequence out of necessity. She found herself widowed with five children in 1822. With the financial help of some of her late husband’s Freemason lodge brothers she was able to self-publish a book of poems called The Genius of Oblivion.  In 1830 she published a collection of verse, Poems for Our Children, that included one called “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”  She also wrote a novel called Northwood: A Tale of New England, in which one of the characters laments, "We have too few holidays. Thanksgiving, like the Fourth of July, should be considered a national festival and observed by all our people . . . as an exponent of our Republican institutions."

The success of these literary endeavors inspired the Rev. John Blake to offer Mrs. Hale the editorship (she preferred the term “editress”) of his Boston based Ladies Magazine, a job she held from 1828 to 1836. Louis A. Godey, a rival publisher in Philadelphia who had his own magazine, Godey’s Ladies Book, coveted SJH the way George Steinbrenner now covets Cliff Lee, and ended up buying the Boston Ladies Book, first renaming it American Ladies Magazine but quickly merging it into his own monthly. Godey allowed SJH to edit the combined magazines from Boston until her son graduated from Harvard. She then moved to Philadelphia. It is not what Sarah Josepha Hale found in Philadelphia that inspired her life’s great quest, but what she didn’t find. She didn’t find Thanksgiving. 

New Englanders loved their Thanksgiving, and for good reason. When Sarah wrote, "We have too few holidays,” she wasn’t kidding. Puritan New Englanders of her era had exactly three: Washington’s Birthday, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.”  They certainly didn’t celebrate Christmas, which they considered to be a popish/pagan abomination. The holiday that became our Thanksgiving evolved in New England in the late 17^th century into a sort of acceptable Puritan substitute for Christmas, combining elements of that holiday –family celebration, big dinner - with customs remembered from the old English autumn festival Harvest Home, as well as generous dollops of the Pilgrim cook out with the Wampanoag Indians at Plymouth in 1621 blended with the separate “thanksgiving” called for by Governor Bradford in 1623. (To the Pilgrims, a true thanksgiving would have been a day of fasting, not feasting.)  

Thanksgiving had already existed in New England in much the same form for about 150 years by the time Sarah used a two-prong attack to promote a nationally observed holiday. First, she utilized the power of her magazine. The November issue of Godey’s would year in year out be filled with stories, recipes, engravings, illustrations, poems, decorating ideas and advice on how to plan for the perfect Thanksgiving. Sarah presented it as though it already existed and created in the minds of American homemakers a desire they didn’t know they had.

Second, she embarked on a 17 year letter writing campaign to US governors and to five American presidents: Zachary Taylor, Millard Filmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. She finally succeeded with Lincoln in 1863 when her needs intersected his. In 1863, the year of Gettysburg and in November of 1863, the Gettysburg Address, national unity was very much on the president’s mind. On October 26, 1863, Abraham Lincoln invited his fellow citizens “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

 (Needless to say, the Thanksgiving holiday did not catch on right away in the South.)

In addition to giving us Thanksgiving and Mary had a Little Lamb, Sarah Josepha Hale was a prime mover in the building of the Bunker Hill Monument in Boston, and in the preservation of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate.

Mrs. Hale died at her Locust St. Philadelphia home in 1879 at the age of 90 and is buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery on Ridge Avenue.

On this Thanksgiving maybe some of our thanks could be saved for the extraordinary lady who did so much to give us the quintessential American holiday.

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