The Science behind the Persistence of the Thanksgiving Myth

When asked to list five pivotal events in the founding of the United States, a significant number of Americans would mention the Pilgrims, according to a study involving 2,000 respondents. These iconic figures occupy a central role in national folklore, despite their other contenders in American history. Alongside mention of the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence, Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas and the Civil War, the Pilgrims secure seventh place. These findings were reported in Memory Studies in 2022.

Abram Van Engen, coauthor of the study and an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, finds the Pilgrims' high ranking in American minds slightly perplexing. Given that they were far from the first inhabitants or settlers on American soil—native tribes, Spanish settlers in St. Augustine, Florida, European settlers and the slaves they brought in Jamestown, Virginia—all preceded them. Van Engen, however, feels that the simplification of their tale into an inspiring narrative of religious persecution, endurance, and the establishment of self-governance offers a comforting national origin story.

Coauthor and cognitive psychologist Henry Roediger echoes this sentiment, arguing that the popular narrative of Thanksgiving is part of this story of the Pilgrims. The history of the event, however, is considerably more complicated, featuring deadly illnesses and violent conflicts that had devastating effects on indigenous populations, both before and after the 1621 harvest celebration.

Despite concerted efforts to correct the historical record, these sanitized versions persist, highlighting the difference between historical fact and collective memory. The narratives people remember often serve to create unity rather than reflecting historical accuracy, a phenomenon often seen in the myths that justify group identities.

Origin myths aren't confined to America, as pointed out by Chana Teeger, a sociologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. However, scholars are starting to question how nations should account for troubling aspects of their past while maintaining strong national identities.

As Aristotle noted around 2,400 years ago, stories contain a distinct beginning, middle and end, strung together by a causal chain or plot; a structure that still defines popular narratives. Psychologists James Wertsch and Olivia Jäggi argue that our brains are naturally geared towards these kinds of stories to avoid being overwhelmed with information, using “cognitive miserliness.” This creates a preference for simpler stories, rather than the intricate, and often harsh, shape of history.

The complexity of the real history of Thanksgiving illustrates this point. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in December 1620, epidemics introduced by earlier European explorers had already wiped out up to 90 percent of the Wampanoag population. Additionally, faced with the threat of another tribe, the weakened Wampanoag were obliged to teach the Pilgrims—who were ill-prepared for their new environment—how to farm in exchange for protection. This alliance, however, was short-lived and led to increasing conflict and suffering over subsequent decades. The story of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag is thus a far cry from the harmonious image often presented in American Thanksgiving celebrations.

Common storytelling often portrays settlers as heroes. However, examining this closer, everything falls apart, according to John Bickford, a social studies educator at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston.

There's a distinction between history and memory in their relationship with the past, Wertsch explains. While historians prioritize facts over narrative, those who shape collective memory, such as political leaders, museum curators, teachers and family members, often sacrifice facts in favor of maintaining narrative — and group stability.

Therefore, memory and history often clash, as noted by French historian Pierre Nora in his 1989 article "Representations". He wrote, “Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition."

Furthermore, breaking from narrative patterns set by memorable but potentially false stories can be as difficult as breaking habits like nail biting or skipping a cup of daily coffee. For instance, upon hearing the word “bread,” we think “butter.” When we hear the term "Thanksgiving," we think of Pilgrims and Native Americans harmoniously together.

However, the introduction of pilgrims into the Thanksgiving story is actually a recent development, occurring some 200 years after they set foot in New England.

Originally, Thanksgiving was a more casual event. European settlers were celebrating harvest festivals, also known as thanksgivings, prior to the arrival of the pilgrims. The celebration was inconsistent among the Pilgrims themselves, marking the day when new allies or resources arrived from Europe or when they triumphed over the Native Americans in battle. In 1789, although Thanksgiving was not yet a national holiday, George Washington praised the day in the name of an “Almighty God”.

Around the 1820s, when the United States was about 50 years old, formalities began taking shape. According to research on nation-building, this is typically when official histories start to appear in textbooks, as noted by Van Engen. These histories often double as memory projects.

In the United States, this process began during a time when the young nation was transitioning from an agrarian to an industrialized society. As people moved away from their homes in search of work, family bonds began to weaken. From 1827 on, author and editor Sarah Josepha Hale began advocating for an official, family-focused Thanksgiving holiday to reunite families. Nearly forty years later, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday to promote unity.

From that point forward, US Presidents, fundamental in shaping a nation's collective memory and associated senses of national pride, have issued annual Thanksgiving proclamations, says political scientist Judd Birdsall. Birdsall, who is based at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and has read every one of these speeches, observes how these memories have evolved into the modern-day Thanksgiving spirit.

Theodore Roosevelt was the first to allude to “the first settlers” in his 1905 proclamation, attributing their many difficulties to the Pilgrims, according to Birdsall's 2021 report in the Review of Faith & International Affairs. The Pilgrims were explicitly mentioned by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939. It wasn’t until after World War II that the Pilgrims became regular features in these proclamations, transforming into “archetypical Americans,” as Birdsall notes.

Even though the Pilgrims arrived after many others and had little to do with the origins of America, they still ranked seventh with 17 percent of the votes when researchers asked 2,000 U.S. survey respondents to list five “important foundation events of America”. This might be attributed to how the Pilgrims’ story of dining with local Native Americans has become a part of Thanksgiving lore.

These speeches also reveal that America's founders and political leaders have typically either disregarded Native Americans or treated them as secondary characters in the main story. Native Americans first appeared in the Thanksgiving narrative in Teddy Roosevelt's 1908 derogatory mention of an "Indian haunted wilderness". In 1980, President Jimmy Carter subtly mentioned Native Americans by describing Thanksgiving as “a commemoration of the day America’s earliest inhabitants sat down to a table with European colonists”. Native Americans were given a more central role in the Thanksgiving narrative by Ronald Reagan in 1986 when he acknowledged: “Indeed, the Native American Thanksgivings antedated those of the new Americans.”

Breaking up with the Thanksgiving narrative is no easy feat. But some people in the United States are starting to question Thanksgiving and other stories pointing to the country’s rosy beginnings, Wertsch says. “How do you [begin to] break a bad habit? You have somebody point it out to you.”

That’s what happened, say Wertsch and others, when a group of journalists at the New York Times launched the 1619 Project a few years ago. Led by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, that long-term endeavor began the U.S. story with slaves’ arrival in Virginia in August 1619. The nation’s story, they argued, spirals outward from that ugly point.

“If there’s anything that debunks our national origins, it’s the 1619 Project,” Bickford says.

Today, that project has come to frame many of the country’s ongoing culture wars, especially fights over how to teach history. Institutions, such as schools and museums, become places where history and national identity collide, says Teeger. “History education [is] a site where collective memories are negotiated.”

Social scientists refer to conflicts over how events ought to be remembered as “mnemonic standoffs.” In the case of Thanksgiving, the standoff is over whether Thanksgiving ought to be remembered as a day of celebration or, as a growing chorus of Indigenous people and their allies call for, a day of mourning. Such standoffs illuminate the central tension between history and collective memory, researchers say. How do people maintain unity while acknowledging their difficult pasts?

Historians and social scientists used to assume that collective memories need to be positive, even mythological, to succeed. “Forgetting, I would go even as far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation,” French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan argued in 1882.

Contemporary researchers question that view. Georgian people’s collective memories, for instance, include ideas of the Eastern European country as a perpetual underdog, says anthropologist Nutsa Batiashvili of the Free University of Tbilisi in Georgia. “The skeleton narrative, which repeats itself, is that a big enemy comes, and Georgians fight heroically, but they have traitors inside. And they lose the war but still manage to save the culture and integrity and identity.”  

Can people in the United States rewrite their national story to reflect this sort of complexity? That remains an open research question, Wertsch says. Stories work best when they have a neat beginning, middle and end. But Thanksgiving, and the broader American origin story, remain caught in the messy narrative middle. “We don’t have an ending of racism in America. It’s still here,” he says.

The more optimistic framing, Batiashvili says, is that the American story is still being written. “It’s a narrative in the making.”