Thanksgiving 1987 - 27 November 1987

At Christmas time you expect, do you not, to see Christmas cards, department stores, Santa Clauses, and here, carol services – at least in those towns and communities where Christians are in a sufficient majority to discourage legal suits from the others claiming that amplified Christian hymns going out on the midnight clear constitute a violation of the Constitution's guarantee that church and state shall be separate. This is no joke.

It happens all the time. And will happen many times a month from now. But this weekend you certainly expect to see plenty of signs of the one annual event that all Americans of all faiths, colours and sorts celebrate more than Christmas as the family festival. The festival of Thanksgiving. Which was first proclaimed after the Massachusetts colonists saw their first harvest in 1621.

A Yorkshireman, William Bradford, is, so to speak, the patron saint of this great occasion because he was the governor of the colony and because he decreed an annual day of prayer and thanksgiving. And he remains a memorable figure because he kept the chronicle of the Mayflower's voyage, and wrote the great passage which described the ship's arrival on these shores, "Being thus past the vast ocean and a sea of troubles, they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies, no houses, or much less towns, to repair to. It was muttered by some that if they got not a place in time they would turn them and their goods ashore and return. But may not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say, our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean and were ready to perish in the wilderness. But they cried unto the Lord and he heard their voice and looked on their adversities".

So, Massachusetts started it and, in time, all the New England colonies followed suit, keeping the celebration to a weekend at the end of November. It took the better part of two centuries for the custom to spread to the rest of the states. It was Lincoln, as late as 1864, who started the practice of putting out a national proclamation fixing a certain day in November as the day of Thanksgiving. He had no power to order a holiday for all the states, but he would have been a very unpopular governor of any state who didn't soon succumb to the custom.

After a little squabble in 1939 between President Franklin Roosevelt and some Republican governors who wanted to set their own dates, it was agreed, once for all, that the last Thursday in November should be set aside for all Americans as the day to recall and to celebrate with the original New England bird, the turkey, and the dishes, corn maize pudding, pumpkin pie, sauce made from the cranberry that grew in the bogs of Cape Cod, to celebrate the survival of the first English colony.

Of the men and women who came here, unlike the Spanish to roam and conquer, or the French to map the rivers and extend an empire, but it can be fairly said about the English that they came, for better or worse, to find or build a home away from home.

I said at the beginning that this week you expect to see signs of the one annual family festival which unites all Americans, but apart from advertisements in the papers of restaurants featuring especially lavish Thanksgiving dinners, I don't remember a year in which there's been so little public notice.

Not a magazine that I've seen, with a cover story about the history of the custom. Nor a main editorial in a newspaper reciting the blessings that the nation can give thanks for. Though I don't expect Mr. Reagan will let the weekend go by without seizing the opportunity, as all presidents do, to attribute the present blessings of the republic to their own administration.

It may be that we've just entered an era when we recognise for the first time that the world is a vulnerable whole. When the economies and the physical security of many nations are inevitably intertwined. That we are, as the Bible says, more than ever, members one of another. And so national celebrations, the recall of old festivals mean less and less to the life of today, and maybe Thanksgiving Day will go the way of Empire Day.

At any rate, there's so much going on, so many alarms and excursions buffeting the Reagan administration that I can understand why it might feel embarrassed to dwell too lovingly on the blessings and the peace and prosperity of America in 1987.

The Congressional Committees that called the Iran-Contra hearings have delivered a report which charges the president with failing to execute the laws of the land, and which casts suspicion on the role of the Attorney General who is the chief law enforcement officer of the land.

Three of Mr Reagan's valued advisors, two of them his long-time intimates, have been appearing in court during the past few weeks. Mr Michael Deaver is on trial for perjury. Colonel North is being questioned before a Grand Jury on the issue of possible defrauding of the government of the United States in the Iran-Contra affair. And the Attorney General, himself, Mr Meese, has been before another Grand Jury looking into his association with a business corporation which is suspected of fraud.

As Johnny Carson put it to his national television audience the other night, "One thing you have to hand to the president, he may not be able to get them on the bench, but he can get them into the courts".

There is also the coming summit meeting and the prospect, by no means rosy, of the Senate's ratifying the treaty banning intermediate-range nuclear missiles. The administration may enjoy its moment of brief authority on 7 December when Mr Reagan and Mr Gorbachev will sign the treaty. But there's a rising wave of opposition to it by conservative Senators, conservative columnists, by the influential body of former Democrats who've turned against their party in the matter of nuclear policy.

The last-minute agreement between the president and the leaders of the two parties in Congress to cut the budget deficit by $76 billion in two years; it sounded impressive in the moment it was announced but it has satisfied nobody, least of all the waiting and watching bankers, stock markets, economists of West Germany and Britain. It points out a target and does not indicate the user or weapon.

The new taxes, which were first touted as a triumph over the president's absolute rejection of any tax increases turn out to be modest revenue increases and an excise tax or two. No change at all in income taxes, corporation taxes, cost of living increases, no VAT, no National Sales Tax.

There are slight cuts. Not in the payment of Medicare to the old, but in the proposed rate of increase. Farmers will have 3% less support. Student loans will still be available to anybody whose parents earn a little less than $30,000 a year, which was the previous proof of neediness.

The cut in defence spending is less than half what it would have been if there'd been no agreement and we'd had to fall back on the automatic deficit reduction required by the new Gramm-Rudman law. That was to have called for a $23 billion cut this year but, under that law, the specified cuts were to be more severe.

So to the satisfaction, perhaps, only of the White House, the agreed plan cuts less than the Gramm-Rudman law which the Europeans and Japanese were the first to say is not enough to restore confidence to the international markets and encourage an attack on the twin villain of the financial crisis, the American trade deficit.

And now blowing up in our faces on the eve of Thanksgiving came the riots of Cuban prisoners in a detention centre in Louisiana and in the federal prison in Atlanta that was set on fire, the explosion of a time bomb that was planted in 1980 but triggered by an agreement reached only a week ago.

It's a pitiful and frustrating story, and a legal labyrinth. In 1980, in what was hailed at the time as a courageous undertaking, 125,000 Cubans were allowed into the United States. Refugees from the Castro regime who came in, in what was known as, the Mariel boatlift. They came in without passports or other papers of legal entry, and many thousands of them were given something called "immigration parole" and allowed to make their way in this country and remain if there was no proof of bad behaviour.

Well, during those seven years, more than 7,000 have been arrested and committed for crimes. Just under half of them have served a prison term and then been transferred to detention centres as aliens. There are another 3,000 who have committed crimes in the United States, served their sentences and are now living with families or with women or friends in the same situation.

Of course most of those 125,000 have been absorbed into the life of the country, the great majority in one county, in Florida, which has become almost a separate Cuban province whose businesses, politics, professions are filled by Cubans. A curious kind of colonial success, you could say – so much so that the worst unemployment is among white Americans who speak no Spanish. An alarming un-melting of the old melting pot.

The fuse that ignited the explosions in Louisiana and Georgian, however, was an agreement Fidel Castro made a week ago to allow the United States to deport, to send back to Cuba, about 2,500 Cubans Castro had been delighted to send here, along with the boat people, who are either hardened criminals or mental patients.

The United States has been at its wits' end to know what to do with them. But when these inmates got the word over the weekend that they were to be sent home, they revolted and seized, in Atlanta, 75 hostages. They went on a rampage, and when the government offered a moratorium on the deportation order, they shouted in both places that they would not go back to Cuba under any circumstances.

In despair at their hopeless lives in an American prison, they would yet rather die here than be returned to a Cuban prison.

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