The Origin of the Continental Blow Out - 24 November 2000

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, the first truly American festival and the one that sets more millions of Americans in a turmoil of transit, criss-crossing thousands of miles to join long-separated families at a feast of turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie - the strange, unknown foods that the native Indians introduced to those starving English men and women and children who'd landed, 380 years ago, on the bleak and unfruitful soil of a Massachusetts cape.

This festival was inspired by a letter from America written by a Yorkshireman, son of a farmer, written as a report on his first transatlantic voyage, along with other mostly humble folk, who sought new land across the ocean in order to practise a religion freed from the corruption in 1620 of the Church of England.

They had none of our advantages so William Bradford's writing is bereft of parliamentary English, congressional English, business English, advertising English or the lawyers' English we've been exposed to for the past fortnight in the case of Gore versus Bush.

This company of very mixed social types, just over a hundred of them, had been 64 days out of England and meaning to settle at the mouth of the Hudson River and start a trading post. However, this is William Bradford's account of what happened. I thought it might be a refreshment:

"But after they had sailed at course about half a day they fell among dangerous shoals and roaring breakers and therewith conceived themselves in great danger. But the wind shrinking among them with all they resolved to bear up again for a cape to the north - later to be known as Cape Cod - and thought themselves happy to get out of those dangers before night overtook them as by God's providence they did. And the next day they got into the Cape harbour where they rode in safety.

"Being thus arrived in a good harbour and brought safe to land they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean and delivered them from all the perils and the miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth - their proper element."

During the relentless battle between the vice president's flock of lawyers and Governor Bush's flock of lawyers - 72 in all - a foreign friend called me to wonder if life still went on in the United States.

The questioner was not a naïve man but when it comes to picturing life in a troubled world spot we're all innocents.

I remember during the civil uproar in Beirut writing to a friend there wondering if she was safe and sound. She sent back a colour photograph of herself with friends in swimsuits stretching by the poolside at one of Beirut's swankier hotels, one of course still intact.

And I recall how in the 1960s how many anxious friends in London would ask in letters if we stayed off the streets, if we too had been mugged. True, at the time, about one, sometimes two, even three people a week were mugged in New York City's eight parks but that still left seven millions of us un-mugged.

If you've read the nightly television stories about our crisis in civil aviation, the desperate flight controllers, the airports adrift with thousands of stranded travellers, I have to tell you that my wife and I have just survived with ease two cross-continental trips. Thanksgiving eve, the worse airline travel day of the year, has come and gone with a record low in accidents, flight delays and general misery.

So to quote one of my favourite columnists on turkey feast morning: "Whichever way it goes we'll live with it - no Armageddon yet."

Well, we left William Bradford and his crew on their knees giving thanks to the God of heaven for having saved them from the vast and furious ocean. But that's not what Thanksgiving is about.

Within 24 hours they had good cause to bemoan the place they'd landed on. They had intended, when they left Plymouth two months before, to land in Virginia - "Earth's only paradise," wrote an English poet who'd never been there, "where nature hath in store fowl, venison and fish and the fruitfulest soil."

But they missed the southern coast of Virginia. Storms sent them up 500 miles north, kept them from the Hudson channel, blew them another couple of hundred miles and on Cape Cod found - what? No friends, no houses, no inns but - I quote from Bradford - "A hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men."

Well it was, as I hinted, those wild men who saved most of the Puritans with their introduction of the, unknown to Europeans, turkey, potatoes and a red berry they'd never seen either which was the only fruitful growth on the Cape. The cranberry bogs produced this red berry which, as an accompanying sauce, is - as one of the Bush/Gore lawyers might say - "considered mandatory" at the family's Thanksgiving dinner.

I'd better say at once that cranberry sauce is to me one of those things you must be born to - like peanut butter and drum majorettes.

Today cranberry juice has become a mad fashion in this country as a health drink of choice, recommended strongly even by cardiologists - heart doctors - since the recent large, and I believe, first long-term clinical trial of vitamin C pills which reported that whatever else vitamin C supplements may do they are first rate producers of hardening of the arteries.

Consequently an eminent cardiologist predicts that the retreat from orange juice will be as fast as the advance on cranberry juice. All I can say with the Japanese, who they say started this fashion, is "rots of ruck."

I deduced, I think you'll believe correctly, that of those four dishes that saved the Puritans' life - not to mention of course the cod swimming by - the cranberry is the one that would most interest most listeners since most of them today have known about turkey and potatoes for centuries.

Not long ago I ran into an old English lady who said: "Turkeys came from America? What rubbish, why my grandmother had a turkey every Christmas and that was in the middle of the 19th Century." I hope I made it clear at the start that William Bradford ate his first turkey in 1621 when he was 43.

But many of the Puritans did die from starvation during the first winter. It was in the late summer of 1621 that they had their first harvest. They'd learned too about planting the crop known from the Canadian border to the tip of Chile as corn but in England, just to be different, as maize.

I often wondered how that early maker of breakfast cereals would have done if they'd tried to popularise maize flakes, which is what they are.

Well it was some day after the first harvest was in and the Bradford crew knew that they were in Massachusetts for keeps that legend has it they held a feast.

Somebody made up a hymn - the one we sing now is a 19th Century invention - and gave up a public prayer of thanksgiving. That's what we'd like to say is the origin of the continental blow out that took place last Thursday.

In dry fact it wasn't until the middle of the 19th Century when somebody thought it would be a charming thing to have a national day of thanksgiving, really to congratulate each other on having settled in America, or having been born American. This year, you'll gather, there are in some places some misgivings.

Anyway it wasn't until 243 years after the supposed event that Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving.

Many, if not most, states paid no attention. But gradually over about 80 years it dawned on people it was yet another excuse for another day's holiday.

Finally Franklin Roosevelt not only proclaimed it but read it over the radio and put in a little sermon of his own about William Bradford and company. And by 1940 it had become an immovable feast celebrated by Act of Congress on the third Thursday in November.

Forty years ago this weekend there was a terrific national panic that blew up when, a month or so before Thanksgiving, the Pure Food and Drug Administration, which passes on the safety of all crops and new drugs, put out a general warning that cranberry crops set aside for Thanksgiving had been found - well, two shipments anyway - to contain a weed killer poison - aminotriazole.

The secretary of health, education and welfare was instructed to go through the entire Thanksgiving reserve to see how much threatened the survival of the nation. Two small bags of cranberries were found to be suspect.

The rest of the seven million pounds he searched were safe - home free.

On the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving an enterprising reporter asked if President and Mrs Eisenhower were going to serve cranberry sauce as usual.

"None of your business," the White House replied, in the days when you could say such things. Quite right.

A little later your own enterprising reporter made enquiries. President Eisenhower, the American hero of the Second World War, served apple sauce.

Everybody wondered this weekend what they ought to be thankful for. Miss Gail Collins, the New York Times light-hearted columnist, said: "New Yorkers ought to give thanks that they live in a chad-free zone."

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