Page 13 - Leisure Living Magazine Autumn 2016

Presidential Thanksgiving
Proclamations
By Justice Paul Pfeifer, Ohio Supreme Court
As we all learned in school, the first Thanksgiving was the great feast the Pilgrims shared with the
Indians who had
helped them survive their brutal New England winter. But the Thanksgiving holiday that we recognize today didn’t come about until 1863, when President Lincoln issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation inviting Americans to “observe the last Thursday of November” to give thanks to “our beneficent Father.”
Lincoln only
had the chance
to issue one more
Proclamation before
he was assassinated in
April 1865. But his successor, Andrew Johnson, kept the tradition alive, thus making Lincoln’s Proclamation the first in an unbroken chain of annual presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations that continues today.
In the 152 years since then, six presidents have died while in office, either by assassination or natural causes. Remarkably, three of them were from Ohio – James A. Garfield, William McKinley, and Warren G. Harding. How did their replacements handle Thanksgiving Proclamations that came in the wake of a national tragedy?
President Garfield took office in March 1881. Just four months into his presidency, he was shot in Washington, D.C. while waiting to board a train. Garfield lived until September before succumbing to his wounds. He never got a chance to issue a Thanksgiving Proclamation.
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But Garfield’s vice-president, Chester A. Arthur, acknowledged the nation’s loss in his first Thanksgiving Proclamation that November: “It has long been the pious custom of our people, with the closing of the year, to look back upon the blessings brought to them in the changing course of the seasons and to return solemn thanks to the all- giving source from whom they flow. And although at this period, when the falling leaf admonishes us that the time of our sacred duty is at hand, our nation still lies in the shadow of a great bereavement, and the mourning which has filled our hearts still finds its sorrowful expression toward the God before whom we but lately bowed in grief and
supplication...”
Continued on page 14
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