Welcome back to Radio Rothbard. I'm Ryan McMakin, executive editor at the Mises Institute, and I hope you're having an excellent Thanksgiving week.
This week, I want to look a little bit about the the history and economics of
Thanksgiving in contrast a little bit with communist ideas,
family dining, and the family dinner just to give a
greater contrast to how different things are
in the West and
where
Western civilization has valued the idea of the family dinner and how many institutions of commerce have grown up around that as
well.
So we can begin by noting that in modern-day America, Thanksgiving is a holiday that has come to have very distinct iconography and rituals.
Turkey, football, and the Thanksgiving Day parades are all part of this holiday,
and in fact, many of these rituals, such as football and games and parades put on by department stores, are now a century old.
Going back further though, we find that the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States has a rather diverse past.
Part of the origins of the idea of a national Thanksgiving day lie largely in government attempts at pushing
propagandistic narratives.
For example, Abraham Lincoln demanded Americans be thankful for, quote, the advancing armies and navies of the Union, unquote,
during the Civil War.
George Washington instructed Americans to give thanks for the new Constitution in 1789.
Andrew Jackson, in contrast, refused to boss around as constituents with days of mandatory gratitude,
but proclamations of prayer and Thanksgiving have been used by many U.S. presidents, especially during times of crisis.
In practice, however, what is now Thanksgiving Day involves mostly a celebration of domestic and family life, quite separate from any presidential imperatives.
Moreover, Thanksgiving celebrations take place primarily within the private and commercial spheres of life.
Preparing a Thanksgiving meal requires shopping for goods.
Traveling to see friends and relatives often requires the purchase of various transportation-related goods and services.
Enjoying the day is usually enhanced by consuming various forms of private sector entertainment.
These holiday activities and rituals are not fundamentally different, however,
from what countless human beings enjoy on a regular basis, a meal and leisure,
activities with friends and family within a private home and domestic setting.
These gatherings reinforce the status of the family as a fundamental building block of human society.
They remind us that private meals, like a Thanksgiving meal, are something valuable
and something distinct from public activities in public settings.
Historically, not everyone has been pleased by such things.
In the Soviet Union, for example,
there were concerted efforts to abolish the very concept of the domestic space and notions of hearth and home
by consigning citizens to communal kitchens and communal living spaces.
The goal was to abolish the bourgeois family, which was so often grouped around a private kitchen.
Naturally, this is greatly in contrast to Western ideals of the family dinner,
taking a look at the political and cultural importance of Thanksgiving can help us understand
this better. So where does Thanksgiving come from? As a holiday, Thanksgiving has gone
through several different forms. As described in James Baker's study of the holiday,
Thanksgiving, the biography of an American holiday, there had been a variety of Thanksgiving
traditions practiced throughout the U.S., but few of them closely resembled the Thanksgiving
we now know today. Moreover, the activities people adopted to commemorate the holiday
changed significantly over time. According to Baker, in the holiday's early years,
it served as the, quote, Puritan stand-in for Christmas, a holiday they rejected as
non-cananical and pagan, an early winter time for feasting and pious hope before
the long dreary months of cold and privation to follow, unquote. While a large meal was often
had at the celebration, the holiday was mostly religious in character. The highlight of the day
was a long stern sermon, presumably from a Calvinist clergyman. The holiday had long been
celebrated in New England and other regions as a sort of harvest festival, but it did not
commonly involve any narratives about pilgrims. That sort of thing was reserved for forefathers'
day, which had its own commemoration in New England on December 21st. Needless to say,
the rest of the country, especially those with little connection to New England,
did not enthusiastically celebrate the establishment of the Plymouth Colony.
Indeed, the use of tales about the pilgrims' first Thanksgiving
did not become a widespread practice until the 1900s. It was a complete invention of the public
schools, which then as now spent precious little time on academic skills in favor of concentrating
on endless hours of busy work and cultural indoctrination. By the time the public schools
were turning the holiday into a day about pilgrims, though the annual rituals of Thanksgiving,
which persist to this day, had been established quite independently from the political agendas,
far from being a national day to celebrate forefathers or the Plymouth Colony. By the
early 20th century, Thanksgiving had already become a celebration of domestic life and family fun.
In her history of Victorian America, called the Feminization of American Culture,
Anne Douglas explains the transformation that took place as U.S. culture moved away from the
hard-nosed theology and philosophy of the 18th century and something quite different.
Rather, by the late 19th century, the U.S. was undergoing a domestic revolution.
This change in social attitudes went hand in hand with the rise of Victorian culture in the
United States. It combined with the new economy of mass production and mechanization
to help create the nostalgic sentimental and consumption-fueled event we now think of as the
Thanksgiving holiday. The meal, the family gathering, and the domestic setting for celebration that are
all now familiar were established in this Victorian period. The biggest change over the years
has been the addition of football, first viewed in person and then on television,
as an additional family activity. The economic prosperity of the second half of the 19th
century, the much maligned so-called Gilded Age, made this possible. Although the period is today
badmouthed as an era of people suffering under the iron grip of robber barons, it was during
this period that countless Americans were able to move out of poverty and into the middle classes
for the first time. These changes made it easier for families to create a domestic experience
with all the trimmings that Victorians valued, and which are now hallmarks of the standard
American Thanksgiving celebration. Not only was food becoming more affordable for many,
but more Americans could afford more and better versions of silverware, china, clothing, and
furniture. They could afford more building supplies for nicer homes, and as was happening
in Europe as well, more workers could afford to actually take some time off to enjoy recreational
team sports a day at a park and other past times. Thanksgiving was no longer a religious
holiday in which Americans contemplated complex theological truth, and much more so a holiday of
consumption, recreation, and the domestic life of home and family. This new phenomenon of buying
mass-produced goods to augment one's domestic enjoyment expanded into the early 20th century,
so that by the 1920s, Thanksgiving was looking more and more like a holiday geared around
buying things. Historian James Baker tells us, quote, a new holiday event emerged in the 1920s,
the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Strictly speaking, Thanksgiving parades are not about Thanksgiving
at all, but about Christmas. Yet they do provide a Thanksgiving Day activity that is enjoyed by
millions of Americans in person or on TV. The first Thanksgiving parade was put on by the
1920s. It consisted of 50 people, 15 cars, and a fireman dressed as Santa Claus who marched in the
parade and then entered the Gimbal's toy department by a ladder. The central feature of the Gimbal's
Thanksgiving Day Parade, like all similar parades, was the official arrival of Santa Claus,
in his most marketable guise as patron saint of holiday commerce, unquote. Of course,
department stores were themselves a creation of Victorian culture, first in England and later
in the United States. In terms of economics, they offered a higher standard of living for
their customers, and they offered many goods not available anywhere else. And what goods did they
have were often at lower prices than at smaller stores. On a cultural level, the department
stores were important as well. They offered unprecedented freedom for women who could
use the department stores as a safe place to meet with others in public spaces, unescorted by men.
Employment at these stores offered many young women an escape from farm work and factory work.
And of course, for the primary managers of the household budget, which is what many middle
class Victorian women were, department stores offered a new, clean and comfortable place to
do business. Thus, it's no wonder that our modern practice of Thanksgiving is so wrapped
up with the Victorian version of the holiday. It sprang from the 19th century spread of consumer
goods and the social freedoms that came with them. The Thanksgiving that we know and which
most of our grandparents knew is an apolitical holiday formed around the modern world or
relative plenty made possible by the modern industrialized economy.
The connections between family dining rituals and free commerce did not escape the
notice of communists in either the 19th or the 20th centuries. It should not shock us to learn
that communist totalitarians once sought to eliminate domestic meals
as a common aspect of civilized life. The destruction of the family as a bourgeois institution
was explicitly listed among Marx's priorities for implementing the communist revolution.
After the communists came to power in what became the Soviet Union in 1917,
the new regime sought to address what were then common housing shortages by placing
Russians in state-owned communal apartments called communalki, where seven or more families
were expected to share a single kitchen and bathroom. Driven by both ideology and economic
necessity, the communists viewed domestic meals and meal preparation as wasteful
activities. Both men and women, it was believed, would be better off spending their
time in factories and other settings where the production of industrial goods could be maximized.
Indeed, in 1923, Lenin's Communist released a propaganda pamphlet titled
Down with the Private Kitchen. As recounted by Anja von Bremsen, the pamphlet explained how,
quote, the traditional domestic kitchen was branded as ideologically reactionary,
unquote, and ineffectual. The Soviet authorities pushed residents toward government-run cafeterias
known as Stolavias, or dining rooms. This was believed to accelerate the process of conditioning
Soviet citizens with communist propaganda. Eating became a political activity.
In typical Soviet fashion, however, these new dining venues were anything but a pleasant respite,
and they were, in fact, quote, ghastly affairs, unquote. But from the Soviet perspective,
it was all quite necessary. Quote, they would like to have houses without kitchens, says Russian
journalist Alexander Jenis. Because kitchen is something bourgeois, every family, as long as
they have a kitchen, they have some part of their private life and private property, unquote.
Many citizens, of course, continued to eat at home, and not in the state-run cafeterias
during the hardest decades of Soviet social engineering, but this process involved its
own trials and dangers. As NPR reported in 2014, kitchens became a source of tension and conflict.
Quote, when relations between the neighbors were especially fierce, you could see locks
on the cabinets, unquote. Families cooked in quick staggered shifts, quote, they cooked in
the kitchen, but practically never ate there, says Marsha Karp, who was born in Moscow and worked
as a Russian features editor for the BBC World Service. They would go with their pots along
the corridor and eat in their rooms, unquote. With up to 20 families sharing a single kitchen,
conflicts were sure to be common, and Jenis concludes communal kitchen was a war zone, unquote.
But using the communal kitchen with other housemates present could also be a danger to life and limb.
This was because any disloyal or bourgeois statements in casual conversation
might end up being reported to the authorities. People would report on each other, Russian
never know who would be reporting. Thus, in many cases, it was best to keep one's mouth shut and
retreat to one's bedroom as quickly as possible. Now let's contrast the Soviet dining ordeal
with the household dining spaces in America or in Western Europe. By contrast, a recent survey
suggested that 78% of American homes have a separate dining room in addition to a kitchen
dining area. This is all a symbol of modern-day Western affluence. Since the 18th century,
domestic dining areas have become larger and roomier. In our modern age, in which
many families eat out at restaurants several nights per week, and public activities and
entertainment venues are extremely common, the importance of domestic sociability is often
overlooked. Yet, as Thanksgiving demonstrates, the act of gathering and socializing in a
private home remains important for many families. Moreover, in times of economic downturn, domestic
entertainment and social gatherings become more important because they are relatively more affordable.
Like so many market innovations that have improved the domestic living space,
the enlargement of spaces dedicated to dining and entertaining have helped improve the lives of
women most of all. It was during the 18th century when middle-class families could begin
to aspire to having a separate dining area large enough for serving and entertaining groups beyond
the nuclear family alone. By the 1820s, specialized dining rooms became almost common,
making this all the more something that middle-class families could perhaps obtain.
The social importance of dining rooms should be apparent. Even from the early days of the
bourgeois middle-class household, the ability to entertain at home meant a greater ability
for women to socialize. This is not to say that it was unheard of for women to socialize outside
the home, as Catherine French shows in her research on late medieval bourgeois households,
rising incomes and worker productivity gave women more options in terms of consumption.
This indeed meant more opportunities to socialize with friends and public,
including in taverns. Moreover, as is so often the case with the spread and democratization
of goods and services in the marketplace, public drinking houses were associated with
overturned hierarchies, quote-unquote, and social flexibility in general.
These were places where married women lacking such spaces in the cramped quarters of their
houses could gather on their own terms. This form of socializing among women
was regarded with suspicion, however, and respectable women were often hesitant
to be seen spending much time in ins and taverns, as even the better ones were sometimes associated
with gambling, prostitution, and disorder. While rising incomes did provide greater access to
social venues outside the home for women, and men too, of course, the new concept of the
private dining room provided additional outlets, and ones that were unlikely to threaten one's
respectability. After all, the domestic space had long been associated more closely with women
than men, as men could more freely move outside the domestic sphere. As homes became more spacious
and social spaces like dining rooms have become more common, women were more able to bring the
outside world to themselves and avoid the socially taxing challenges associated with
dining outside the home. These new social spaces made it possible for women to visit each other
in their homes, reducing the relative social isolation endured by many women who lacked the
economic means or hood spa needed to drink with friends and taverns. As an alternative,
historian Barbara Catech notes, quote, during the 18th century, the domestic interior became
an arena for polite social entertainment. Home became a focal point of polite culture,
and simultaneously it became a pleasant place to spend time. The development of a feminine
culture of house visiting, which started in the late 17th century, led to the advent of
domestic sociability. Unquote. Community social events were no longer simply carried on either
in public drinking spaces or in parish hall meetings. Social events now took place in
private homes, which by the 18th century had finally become spacious and well furnished enough
to support such activities. As custodians of the domestic sphere, it was mostly women who
managed these private social events. Catech goes on. Women were responsible for mediating domestic
sociability for the family. They had the knowledge and the power to create an environment
within which that was possible. For example, when John Marsh, a gentleman musician and lawyer,
relocated his family to Chichester in 1787, his family immediately set about ordering,
well that is his wife specifically, immediately set about ordering suitable furnishings for
their drawing room so that they could announce the family's arrival into local society
by, quote, unquote, seeing company. It was essential for them to successfully announce
their arrival by partaking in the polite culture of domestic sociability.
Modern day social rituals have become far more flexible and the stakes are clearly now
lower for women who have many more ways of securing social status or socializing
in general and in public. Yet one could scarcely say that the role of the family dinner with
family friends and neighbors has ceased to be important in the social life of the community
overall and especially in family life. Clearly, this sort of thing contrasts greatly with the idea
of the family kitchen in the Soviet Union, which the authorities sought to replace with
factories and sparse state controlled cafeterias. Perhaps more so than any other day of the
year Thanksgiving Day illustrates this clearly. On the one hand, we have the Leninist Stalinist
drive for greater production and the minimization of unnecessary, quote, unquote, consumption
in the name of industrializing Soviet society. The communists sought to ensure Soviets were,
quote, liberated from fussy dining, unquote, so the new Soviet man could create it more rapidly.
On the other hand, even a 19th century American Thanksgiving meal would appear to the
Leninist ideologue as both consumerist and bourgeois in the extreme. Things are even worse
by communist standards today. Moreover, most Thanksgiving meals take place in private living
quarters, far from the prying eyes of police and other state enforcers. Rather than spend the
day producing goods and services for, quote, unquote, society, countless millions of Americans
instead spend the day consuming food and entertainment and enjoying leisure time.
It's difficult to imagine a scenario more unlike that imagined in Down with the Private
Kitchen by Lenin's people. And that's something to be thankful for.
I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Radio Rothbard. We'll be back next week with more,
so we'll see you next time.