The Review

As columnists remind us every year, there are a lot of problems with Thanksgiving — the glorification of settler-colonialism; the tense dinners with relatives; turkey. But long before the current crop of debunkers and kvetchers, the dean of American studies, Perry Miller, who died in 1963, identified what he saw as the holiday’s original sin: its abandonment of the logic of Puritan days of thanksgiving, which were held in gratitude for good harvests, good weather, the cessation of disease, the avoidance of shipwreck — and which had their opposite in days of humiliation, desperate fasts imposed whenever things went wrong. Things were going wrong most of the time. Early on, as Miller explains in The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953), the settlers “observed mostly days of humiliation.”

The disappearance of Thanksgiving’s opposite number, the fast day, might bear some responsibility for the self-satisfied chauvinism that is such a tempting target for today’s Thanksgiving naysayers. Miller got there first: “By the time ceremonial gratitude can be channelized into an annual festival, calculated in advance, society is rewarding its own well-doing, not acknowledging divine favor.” The really characteristic 17th-century ritual was not the day of thanks but the fast day. (Something like Thanksgiving as we now know it would have to wait until 1863.)

By the 1660s, a special variant of fast-day sermon had emerged: the jeremiad, usually based on a text from Jeremiah or Isaiah. Miller calls it “the one literary type” into which the colonists “poured their energy and their passion.” The jeremiad enumerated faults — “sinful Heats and Hatreds,” as Increase Mather and his co-authors put it in a 1679 document, “evil Surmisings, uncharitable and unrighteous Censures, back-Bitings, hearing and telling Tales,” not to mention a tendency to get “Drunk, or well Tipled” — and urged repentance,

So if you’ve overindulged on Thanksgiving food and are asking, with The New York Times, “How Can I Soothe My Stomach After Thanksgiving Dinner?” you might want to supplement their advice (spoiler alert: peppermint oil) with Thomas Shepard Jr.'s 1672 fast-day sermon “Eye-Salve, or a Watch-Word from Our Lord Jesus Christ Unto His Churches in New England.” Shepard saw his people in a sorry state — “Hypocrisy, divisors, carnal mixtures, despising God’s Sabbaths, loosewalking, temporizing, sensuality, pride and idleness, fullness of bread” — and counseled “Moderation! Moderation! Moderation!” That, peppermint oil, and repentance should go a long way.

For more on Perry Miller, check out Rivka Maizlish’s tribute in the blog of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, here.

Recommended

• “He wanted to be a ‘liberal of a new kind,’ aligned neither with ‘the friends of order’ nor with the ‘dirty democrats of our age.’” In The New York Review of Books, Lynn Hunt on Tocqueville, by way of Olivier Zunz’s new biography.
• “Freud is like the weather. He’s everywhere.” In Five Books, Lisa Appignanesi on what to read about Freud.
• “It’s difficult to think of a more electric meeting of author and subject than Garry Wills and Richard Nixon.” In their podcast, Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell discuss Wills’s 1970 Nixon Agonistes, which they say “might be the best book ever written about American politics.”

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin