How To Use This Discussion Guide

Begin by reading George Washington’s “Thanksgiving Proclamation” on our site or in your copy of What So Proudly We Hail.

Materials for this guide include background information about the author and discussion questions to enhance your understanding and stimulate conversation about the story. In addition, the guide includes a series of short video discussions about the story, conducted by Christopher DeMuth (Hudson Institute) with the editors of the anthology. These seminars help capture the experience of high-level discourse as participants interact and elicit meaning from a classic American text. These videos are meant to raise additional questions and augment discussion, not replace it.

About the Author

For any American, George Washington (1732–99) is—or ought to be—a man who needs no introduction. Commander-in-chief of the Continental Army in the War of American Independence (1775–83), president of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and unanimously chosen to be the first president of the United States (1789–97), Washington has long enjoyed the deserved reputation as the Father of his Country. Universally admired for his courage, integrity, and judgment, Washington had great influence and power as the nation’s first president. But ever mindful of the precedents that he would be setting for future leadership, he took pains to cultivate practices and manners that would stand the nation in good stead long after he was gone from the scene. Such considerations appear evident in his Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789, Washington’s (and the nation’s) first presidential proclamation, issued in the first year of his first term as President of the United States.

Summary

In colonial times, Thanksgiving was a harvest festival, in which the colonists offered thanks to God Almighty for a good harvest, sometimes by feasting, sometimes by fasting. Such a holiday was celebrated already in the Spanish colony of Florida in the sixteenth century, and in the British colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, most famously in 1621, when the Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation celebrated their first successful harvest in the company of some of the Native American tribesmen. Thanksgiving became a regularly celebrated national holiday only during the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a day of national Thanksgiving in 1863, and each president since has annually issued Thanksgiving Day proclamations. The date for the holiday was set as the fourth Thursday in November by an act of Congress only in 1941.

But the first day of national Thanksgiving was proclaimed by George Washington in the first year of the new American republic, whose appearance on the world stage—after the perilous Revolutionary War, the failure of the Articles of Confederation, and the contentious Constitutional Convention—seemed little short of miraculous. Washington spoke not of harvests but (mainly) of matters political.

Section Overview

The structure of his proclamation is straightforward. After the formal introductory opening—“By the President of the United States of America. A Proclamation.”—the three paragraphs deal in turn with the reasons President Washington is issuing the proclamation, the things for which he recommends we give thanks to God, and the things for which we should humbly offer God our prayers and supplications.

Section Overview

Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation raises questions about the role of government in our private and religious lives, about the place of religion and piety in the American political order, about the connection between our public and our private—and between our natural and our political—blessings. It also invites questions about the meaning of the holiday of Thanksgiving and the role it should play in American life today.