Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.
In contrast to Halloween and Christmas, both of which have escalated into an overkill of weeks-long celebrations and an overwhelming number of movies, shows and specials, Thanksgiving remains a largely compact celebration with just the right number of traditions that seem to be more grounded. Perhaps it’s more of a "cult" holiday. Whether it's the football (be it the high school games in the morning, your friendly backyard tilt or the NFL games in the afternoon in evening), the small but influential collection of Thanksgiving songs (including Arlo Guthrie's seminal "Alice's Restaurant" or Shirley Caesar's gloriously remixed "Hold My Mule"), or the basic embrace of a family meal and gratitude for one's blessings, Thanksgiving traditions feel... just right. Even if a few of the traditions, like our parades, come off as a little silly and kitschy.
Perhaps no tradition is sillier than the National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation, the annual event where the President, for some odd reason—more on that later—pardons a live turkey. It's inconsequential. It doesn’t make much sense… yet I love it.
The ceremony has a long and twisted history dating back almost as long as the holiday itself. Though we traditionally trace Thanksgiving to the Pilgrims’ 1621 and 1623 celebrations, and the idea of giving thanks for blessings and celebrating a harvest both date long before that, Thanksgiving as a national holiday only dates to 1863. The South, ironically still hanging on to the institution of slavery, saw the northern Americans as bigots and Puritans. Well, eventually, war broke out as we all know, and though Lincoln insisted on a unified country, he still took the opportunity to take advantage of the South’s abstention from federal affairs to declare a national Thanksgiving holiday. (The South, after losing the war and abandoning slavery, eventually acquiesced, especially after they came to like the idea of college football being played on the holiday.)
There are scattered claims on the Internet that the idea of the turkey pardon originated with Abraham Lincoln pardoning his son Tad's Christmas turkey in 1863. This claim did not appear in print until after Lincoln's death in 1865 and does not appear to have influenced later traditions.
In 1873, Horace Vose, an enterprising 33-year-old turkey farmer from Westerly, Rhode Island, began a tradition of sending a large-sized turkey to the President each Thanksgiving and Christmas (the smallest Vose turkey on record. For the next 40 years, Vose was the de facto turkey provider to the President. He slaughtered, dressed and sent the turkeys by express mail to the White House each year. In 1904, a scurrilous rumor emerged that President Theodore Roosevelt's children had chased Vose's turkey around the Rose Garden while Roosevelt laughed—which everyone noted was impossible because the turkey had always arrived already dead. Even in the 1900s, fake news was a thing.
Eventually in 1913, South Trimble, the clerk of the House of Representatives, got fed up with Vose’s monopoly on the practice and decided to send the President a turkey of his own. Though Vose’s turkey that year was bigger, Trimble fed his turkey a diet including red peppers in an attempt to make it more flavorful. No record exists of which turkey President Woodrow Wilson chose, but it was no matter: Vose died in December of that year, and a free-for-all sending Thanksgiving turkeys to the President had begun.
Warren Harding had a harem of fangirls who sent him Thanksgiving turkeys by train beginning in 1920 when he was still President-elect. Cuero, Texas sent their own turkeys to the White House, which were notable for being still alive. Wilson let the 1920 turkey strut around the White House for a while before having it slaughtered.
By 1923, Calvin Coolidge, ascending to the Presidency after Harding’s death, was alarmed by the massive numbers of turkeys and other birds being sent to the White House each year. He pleaded with America to stop the practice. Yet by 1925, Coolidge had relented—and the gifts kept on coming. Coolidge was being bombarded with all sorts of poultry—chicken, turkey, quail—and in 1926, a Mississippi farmer even tried sending Coolidge a live raccoon to eat. (Coolidge said no. He named the raccoon Rebecca and gave it a treehouse in the White House lawn, where it became one of the Coolidges’ many White House pets.)
The story gets a little quieter in the 1930s and early 1940s, with the Great Depression and World War II. The main Thanksgiving scandal of that era was Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to move the holiday ahead one week as an economic boost; a compromise was eventually reached setting it on its current date at the fourth Thursday of November. But in 1947, things finally came to a head when President Harry Truman attempted to ban turkey for Thanksgiving, Christmas AND New Year. It was all part of a plan to boost foreign aid and rebuild the areas ravaged by World War II, and Truman reasoned that by diverting feed away from livestock, it could be used for relief efforts overseas. To that effort, he proposed "Meatless Tuesdays" and "Poultryless Thursdays," and although the proposals were never mandatory, Americans were strongly discouraged from eating meat or poultry on those days. The problem was that Christmas and New Year's Day also landed on Thursday that year, as Thanksgiving always did and does. After suffering through the poverty of the Depression and the rationing measures of the war, Americans were not happy at having their lives micromanaged for unnecessary and fruitless measures (gee, does that sound familiar?) and no organization was more outraged than the National Turkey Federation and the Poultry and Egg National Board, both of whom furiously lobbied Truman to change his mind. The lobbyists succeeded, and ahead of Thanksgiving 1947, a compromise was reached: "Poultryless Thursday" was reduced to "Eggless Thursday" for the rest of the year, and the President would be presented with a live turkey in a public ceremony, which eventually became an annual tradition. Truman ate the turkeys, as did his successor Dwight D. Eisenhower.
So where does the pardoning bit come in? Not until the 1980s, and if you believe it or not, Oliver North was indirectly an inspiration for the idea. Before I get there, let me note that there is one other use of the term "pardon" for a Thanksgiving turkey, and that was in 1963, when newspaper headlines described John F. Kennedy rejecting the 55-pound California turkey presented to him as he planned to, after his visit to Dallas, celebrate the holiday on Martha's Vineyard (Kennedy was assassinated before that could happen) as a pardon. Again, like the possibly apocryphal Lincoln claims, there seems to not be a connection to later practices. By the 1970s, it had become a regular practice not to eat the live birds sent to the President; Richard Nixon and his wife Pat spared the birds sent to them, Jimmy Carter refused to hold a public presentation ceremony and had his wife Rosalynn arrange for the birds to be sent elsewhere, and Ronald Reagan sent his turkeys to farms and petting zoos.
Which brings me back to Oliver North. In 1987, at the presentation of a turkey named Charlie, Reagan began fielding questions from the media, and the Iran-Contra scandal came up. A reporter had asked whether North and some other figures in the affair would be pardoned. Reagan deflected: "If they’d given me a different answer on Charlie and his future, I would have pardoned him." Thus, a tradition of pardoning a turkey as a spoof of political scandal can likely be traced to Reagan's flippant comment.
Two years later, as George H. W. Bush became President, animal rights activists began protesting the ceremonies. A speechwriter for Bush wrote up some copy for Bush to pardon the turkey presented to him. Bush didn’t particularly care for the language, but it stuck, and ever since, the National Turkey Federation has turned the presentation into a media circus, selecting a live turkey (later upped to two live turkeys), bringing it to the White House to live in the Willard InterContinental Hotel for a few days, and get a ceremonial pardon, with a speech spoofing the issues of the day, before being sent to live out the rest of their unnatural lives. Though initially the turkeys were sent to become tourist attractions, the short life spans of the commercially bred turkeys led to changes that now send the turkeys to specialized farms (on university campuses since 2016) to prevent them from becoming sedentary, obese time bombs. (For the record, the animal rights activists, true to form, were not placated by the efforts, and now claim that the birds’ living conditions are substandard.)
So this year’s turkeys, Peanut Butter and Jelly, will receive a semi-coherent (if we’re lucky) spiel from President Biden. It’s pure, nonsensical silliness, and unlike most things that come out of Washington these days, I love it.
