US national Holidays - 28 November 1997

In the good old days that never were – by which we usually mean in the days of our youth – I used to do an annual talk about the last Thursday in November, which is, and has been for many years, proclaimed by the president to be a day of thanksgiving.

For what, foreign visitors used to ask. A question that is now asked only by American college students who know little or no American history. Another catch for the unwary is to declare that Thanksgiving Day is, along with Independence Day, Labor Day and Washington's birthday, a national holiday. Technically, actually, as we English were fond of saying, there are no national holidays. The choice of public holidays belongs to the states. Each legislature may decide.

You will forgive me if I now remember and must tell you about how I alone, or as they say in the New York Times "this reporter" made George Washington's birthday a true national holiday which it had not been until 1956.

On the last day of January 1955, I was sitting down to think up this letter. It was to be a character sketch or profile of the father of the country, himself, George Washington, something I had, weirdly, not done before. I found myself writing "he, alone among all eminent Americans rates a national celebration of his birthday throughout every state and territory of the Union".

Well, even so long ago, I'd been a reporter long enough to learn to have second thoughts whenever I wrote a superlative. "The" only eminent American, etc. These talks were occasionally listened to by zealous parsons and retired librarians in Brighton or Bombay whose main occupation in life was to pour through encyclopedias and almanacs and pounce on any dubious item a hectic reporter had grabbed from his memory against a deadline.

I thought again. I, too, poured through the finest print of the latest world almanac. Under National and State Holidays, I read, 22 February, Washington's birthday, a legal holiday in all the states and territories except Idaho. Except Idaho? Idaho, larger than Portugal, 86,000 square miles with its 21 million acres of forest, its 5 million cattle, 2 million pigs. The great timber state of the Pacific north-west. Too proud to honour George Washington once a year? An extraordinary exception. Something, I felt, must be done.

So I sat down and wrote another letter. This one to the governor of the state whose baked potatoes are famous throughout the world. Well, the nation, anyway. "My dear Governor, in preparing a weekly broadcast done by me in New York and transmitted throughout the British Isles and thereafter to Europe, Africa, Asia and Australasia, I came across a puzzling statement, that the state of Idaho is the only one in the Union that does not recognise the birthday of George Washington as a legal holiday. This is an aberration I simply hate to have to mention in a talk three weeks from now I hope to devote to the immortal memory. There is time yet to correct this evident misstatement, one so gross that I fear its circulation around the British Isles alone, not to mention Switzerland, Hong Kong and the Scilly Isles will dreadfully dim the lustre of the great state of Idaho. Will you, dear Governor, be so kind as to deny this ridiculous error or say how it came into being? Anxiously yours..."

Five days later, I received by special delivery – which was something in those days from 3,000 miles away – a splendid letter bearing the embossed seal of the state of Idaho. The letter read, "Dear Mr. Cooke, the question which you present in your letter of January 31st is now before the legislature and a bill is pending and may be law by February 22nd. Perhaps in your broadcast you will be in a position to include Idaho with the other states of the Union. Very truly yours, Robert E. Smylie, Governor". There was a rapidly inscribed postscript in the Governor's own handwriting. It said, "The bill is now before me for signature. It will have my approval and February 22nd will be a legal holiday in Idaho. R.E.S." That was quick work.

And let's not be mean about how it was done. Let's not think of the salty dialogue, the frothing telephone exchanges between the governor's mansion and the Speaker of the Legislature. And the chairman of the board of Idaho Potato Exporters Inc. The patriotic vote was taken and thunderously ratified and there was more rejoicing over one state that repented than over the, then, 40 and 7 just states that needed no repentance.

I believe, though I'm not going to stick my neck out, that George Washington's birthday is the only national holiday, in fact, celebrating an individual. How about Lincoln? The almanac tactfully says, "In most states". I don't think anything formal has been done throughout the southern states, which for very many decades declared the birthday of the southern commander, Robert E Lee, to be a public holiday, but not the man who, during the Civil War itself, was known, in the south, as "the evil one". I don't believe the question was ever put to the governors of southern states as I put it to Governor Smylie.

But about 15, perhaps more, years ago, a solution was achieved which called for, as the fat man said, "The most delicate judgment". It was decided to avoid for ever the great public inconvenience of having two national holidays so close together, Lincoln born 12 February and Washington the 22nd. They are now merged and celebrated together on the 22nd. That way the president can say with a straight face that all the states celebrate Lincoln's birthday and the southerners can say surely they are celebrating the Virginia born on the 22nd?

But Thanksgiving which we are just getting over or recovering from, is a holiday everywhere. It is the great American family feast. The standard dinner, usually set out in mid afternoon, assembles the famous bird the Pilgrim Fathers had never seen before, the turkey, and the vegetables they learned to grow from the Indians, notably the pumpkin and a sauce, made from a berry that grew wild, the cranberry, over the sand bogs of Cape Cod, where the Mayflower, blown by a storm far north from its intended landfall in Virginia, landed on the beach. In the words of a famous Yorkshireman, William Bradford, "they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean".

Well, they had a rough year of it. Some went back. Some committed suicide. Many died of disease. But most worked and planted and survived through to the first harvest. And it was then, with a pack or pride of Indians as guests, that they put together a dinner of these new edibles. It was then they called the first celebratory meal "thanksgiving".

Well, it's still there every fourth Thursday in November and only a few old families in the midwest, with German or Scandinavian roots I dare say, substitute the goose for the whacking great-breasted turkeys. It's served in the richest houses and I see that the shelter for the homeless of West Harlem had an order for 30 turkeys. In Atlanta, volunteers fed 30,000 homeless.

A few things have been added this year. Medical warnings mainly that were bound to come from all those years fretting about cholesterol. After about 40 years, I suppose most Americans who can read and run, run in fright, know that the thing to avoid is fat. Animal fat. Avoid saturated fats. Go for polyunsaturated fats. That, we were told years and years ago, would greatly reduce the risk of a heart attack. Well, now, just in time for the eager consumers of turkey, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie and ice cream, now came the urgent word that it's not how much fat you eat, but what kind. That's new. What kind?

Well, a study has just been published, an impressive study of 80,000 nurses who with half of them as a control group were studied over 14 years. The result? There's something called trans fat. Formed when liquid, brace yourself, vegetable oils are processed to make hard or semi-soft spreads which we'd been told were wonderfully better for us than butter.

"Well forget it!" is the advice of the eminent New England Journal of Medicine. A stick of margarine is the chief villain. 21 grams. Tub margarine, 11. French fries? Perilous. But the great news is vanilla ice cream, less than half a gram. Cheesecake also. Whole milk. Never mind low-fat, skimmed or whatever. Whole milk, one tenth of one gram. This report came out 48 hours before the great cook-in and was carried by the wire services and the TV networks. Lord only knows what effect it had on the Thanksgiving dinner of the 80 million families who drove over the hill or flew 3,000 miles away to get it. Not forgetting the thousands of troops and scores of naval and air force crews assembled in the Persian Gulf.

I ought to say that, apart from considerations of health, which are ever uppermost in the concerned American breast, I've not heard an ethical whisper, not even a whimper of protest, from vegetarians or from anti-game groupies about the slaughter of, at last estimate, 120 million turkeys. There must be some people who take a moral stance about eating the noble bird?

Anyway, just in case, President Clinton, last Wednesday afternoon, on the White House lawn, performed a ceremony which President Truman, another wily politician, invented. The stroking and blessing of a great 60-pound gobbler. The solemn proclamation of a presidential pardon and stay of execution and an order to transport, under Secret Service protection, the pardoned bird to a retirement home in Virginia. "So that he", as the presidential pardon reads, "so that he can live out his days in dignity".

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