WEDNESDAY: President Lincoln proclaimed the day!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2025

With that, Thanksgiving was born: Should the Democratic Party Six have issued that videotaped statement?

It triggered the predictable fury, first from President Trump himself. After that, it came from the fellow who prefers to call himself the Secretary of War, even though, as far as we know, it's still not entirely clear whether he is or he isn't.

As a general matter, we'd prefer that people say what they mean (present company excluded). We thought the videotape was a bit murky, and therefore perhaps a bit insinuative. The inevitable rage came next. But then again, tell us when that hasn't happened.

(There may be medical reasons...)

Tomorrow being Thanksgiving Day, we'll go with a sacred remembrance. It comes from Bret Stephens' new column for the New York Times—at least, from this first part of the column:

Thanksgiving Is an Opportunity for a National Reset

Though the Thanksgiving story is typically associated with the harvest feast of Pilgrims and Wampanoags in Plymouth, Mass., 404 years ago this fall, the national holiday Americans celebrate every fourth Thursday of November only began thanks to a presidential proclamation from Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the same year he delivered the Gettysburg Address.

That’s not just historical trivia. What we are meant to commemorate on Thanksgiving isn’t merely a mythologized version of our origins. It’s a celebration of American rebirth—and of the possibilities, personal and political, that go with it.

Stephens was already getting a bit highfalutin. We're not sure that we agree with everywhere he went after that.

We're not sure we agree with every word. We came here to post the history, and the history goes like this:

(continuing directly)
The idea for a national Thanksgiving holiday was not Lincoln’s own. It came from Sarah Josepha Hale, among the most influential Americans you’ve probably never heard of. “A partial list of Hale’s achievements on behalf of women,” wrote Melanie Kirkpatrick, Hale’s biographer, “includes leading the fight for property rights for married women, campaigning for women to be welcome as teachers in public schools, supporting medical education for women, creating the first day care center for small children and the first public playground, founding a society dedicated to increasing the wages of working women, and helping to found Vassar College, the first college for women.”

That wasn’t all Hale did. She wrote a best-selling antislavery novel. She spent decades as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely circulated magazine in the United States before the Civil War...And, beginning in the 1840s, she petitioned president after president to make Thanksgiving a national holiday.

Why was Hale obsessed with setting a national date for Thanksgiving? “There is a deep moral influence in these periodical seasons of rejoicing in which a whole community participates,” she wrote in 1835. But her purposes were also political: a national holiday, she argued, could help preserve the Union. Among her fiercest opponents, unsurprisingly, were Southerners who thought that designating a holiday was an issue for the states to decide.

In September 1863, following the Union’s victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Hale again petitioned the president for an “annual Thanksgiving” to have “a National and fixed Union Festival.” In Lincoln and William Seward, his secretary of state, she found receptive ears. On Oct. 3, Lincoln proclaimed “a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”

President Lincoln proclaimed the day. Also this:

"We must not be enemies," he said at the end of his First Inaugural Address. "We are not enemies, but friends."

Soon thereafter, he chose to "accept" the war. Where possible, it's better avoided.

Tomorrow: Most likely, no fish tomorrow