Page 14 - Leisure Living Magazine Autumn 2016

Thanksgiving Proclamations
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Arthur didn’t mention the slain president by name, but the clear reference to Garfield – “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” – is almost poetic.
Just 20 years later – when William McKinley was starting his second term as president – an assassin struck again. McKinley was shot in Buffalo on September 14, 1901. He died just 8 days later.
His successor was a force of nature named Theodore Roosevelt. In his first Thanksgiving Proclamation, Teddy didn’t hesitate to mention the late President.
“The season is nigh when, according to the time-hallowed custom of our people, the President appoints a day as the especial occasion for praise and thanksgiving to God. This Thanksgiving finds the people still bowed with sorrow for the death of a great and good President. We mourn President McKinley because we so loved and honored him; and the manner of his death should awaken in the breasts of our people a keen anxiety for the country, and at the same time a resolute purpose not to be driven by any calamity from the path of a strong, orderly popular liberty, which as a nation, we have thus far safely trod.”
It’s no surprise that Roosevelt was more forthright about McKinley than Arthur had been about Garfield; there was nothing particularly subtle about anything Teddy did.
Roughly 20 years after McKinley was assassinated, Warren Harding was elected president. But halfway through his second year in office, he died of a heart attack, in August 1923. His vice-president, Calvin Coolidge, was a taciturn fellow, but in his first Thanksgiving Proclamation after assuming office, “Silent Cal” rose to the occasion.
“The American people, from their earliest days, have observed the wise custom of acknowledging each year the bounty with which divine
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Providence has favored them. In the beginnings, this acknowledgment was a voluntary return of thanks by the community for the fruitfulness of the harvest. Though our mode of life has greatly changed, this custom has always survived. It has made Thanksgiving Day not only one of the oldest but one of the most characteristic observances of our country. On that day, in home and church, in family and in public gatherings, the whole nation has for generations paid the tribute due from grateful hearts for blessings bestowed.”
Coolidge continued, saying that 1923 “has brought to our people two tragic experiences which have deeply affected them. One was the death of our beloved President Harding, which has been mourned wherever there is a realization of the worth of high ideals, noble purpose and unselfish service carried even to the end of supreme sacrifice. His loss recalled the nation to a less captious and more charitable attitude. It sobered the whole thought of the country.”
(The second tragic experience that Coolidge mentioned was the Great Kanto Earthquake, a massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 1923, killing more than 140,000 people.)
Although each president’s Proclamation is unique to his own style, they all tend to follow a generally uplifting and grateful tone, even if the new president must help the nation mourn a fallen leader.
Perhaps ironically – given his reputation as a man of few words – the opening of President Coolidge’s second Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1924 captures the essence of Thanksgiving and neatly distills the mood of all the Proclamations – before and since.
President Coolidge wrote, “We approach that season of the year when it has been the custom for the American people to give thanks for the good fortune which the bounty of Providence, through the generosity of nature, has visited upon them. It is altogether a good custom. It has the sanction of antiquity and the approbation of our religious convictions. In acknowledging the receipt of divine favor, in contemplating the blessings which have been bestowed upon us, we shall reveal the spiritual strength of the nation.”
No matter how you celebrate this “altogether good custom,” may you and yours have a blessed and Happy Thanksgiving.
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