Thanksgiving in California - 29 November 1996

San Francisco airport is as you might guess, one of the largest and most spacious in the country. But we flew in here the other day to see a very odd headline on the front page of the evening paper. "Parking," it said, "SRO, at SFO." Standing room only for airport parking. This was not a report of what had happened but a warning of what was going to happen three days later on the eve of Thanksgiving which is always the fourth Thursday in November.

By mid morning of Wednesday the paper said, any space in the parking lots is pretty sure to disappear. A graph accompanying this piece showed that November is the worst month for airport parking, since the airport handles more passengers then, three million and 40,000. More than in any other month of the year and the worst day of the month was last Wednesday.

What is it, a stranger might ask, that makes Thanksgiving so special? Well so far as travel is concerned, it is the family festival. A time when more Americans travel and they're not going away, they're going back home, than on the eve of any other holiday. To incredulous Englishmen who say: "Surely not as many as Christmas?" I have to remind them that the United States, in spite of the fulminations of the true believers known as the Christian right, the United States is not a Christian country. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion," is the first clause of the first sentence of the first of the ten amendments to the Constitution that became known as the Bill of Rights.

That simple phrase begins to carry a peculiar poignancy as the Pacific coast receives more and more Asian refugees, and the mainland, more and more Muslims. In the wake of several, frightful terrorist explosions, riots and public threats that you've heard about, there are desperate newcomers who need to be told that it is not a Muslim country either. This influx from a country with a particular religious bent is an old recurring chapter in the story of American immigration. The one quarter, was it, of the Irish population that fled from the potato famine in the late 1840s, ran into one trouble they'd not anticipated which was prejudice against their Catholicism.

In the beginning this prejudice flared up among the people of Massachusetts, the descendants of the Puritans who were determined to purify the Church of England they'd left behind. The corrupt church as they thought. And for several generations, reaching into my own time, the 1930s, there were signs, stickers on the windows of shops and offices advertising for help: "No Irish need apply." Down in the states of the Deep South, the filtering-in of the Irish was instantly viewed by the Baptists and the more evangelical sects as the forerunners of a Roman invasion.

This panic emotion gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan. As late as 1928 the Democrats nominated for the presidency the Irish Governor of New York, a waggish, wily, honest politician. And a Catholic. He was defeated mainly by the Southern vote which saw Al Smith as the chosen emissary of the Pope. And even so late as 1960 when John Kennedy, grandson of one of those same impoverished Irishmen escaping from famine, when Kennedy started his primary campaign in the South, he knew he would have to confront the rising fear of the great population of Southern Protestants that his first loyalty would be to Rome. In a speech in Texas he put it on the line. That he was running for president as an American, a Democrat, a man from Massachusetts whose first and only political loyalty was to the Constitution of the United States. It was a sharp and eloquent speech and memorable enough to stifle any lingering fears about Rome and popery. But just think. It took 112 years after the first great tidal wave of Irish immigration before a Catholic could become President of the United States.

Of course the Catholics in many more cities than Boston, New York, Chicago, have long ago been assimilated. Though they're always a factor considered as a voting block in elections. But now only one of several. And the point of my bringing this up is that the recent presidential election made something glaringly clear that we, we wasps especially, took seriously for the first time. Which is that there are newer immigrants who are beginning to constitute a political force, what I call, more crudely, a voting block.

Hispanics – what we must now call Latinos – have to be not only considered but wooed and welcomed. It has come out that what carried Florida for Clinton was not only the great population of old, retired people who were scared by the story, untrue, that the Republicans would cut Medicare, the free medicine for the aged, but also by the preponderance of the Latino vote, young and middle-aged, particularly, that see themselves embraced by Clinton and the Democrats, but greeted with a slightly apprehensive look by the Republicans.

Consider. Of the 60-odd counties in California the most dependably stalwart rock-ribbed Republican county, down the last four, five decades in Southern California, has been Orange County. Some of you may possibly recall a talk I did from there during the Gulf War, when, surprisingly, fewer Americans were flying than ever in modern times. There was a weird irrational fear of Iraqi air raids. Los Angeles, I recall, ran out of its stacked inventory of gas masks.

Well I flew with about ten other people into the airport of Orange County. Who do you think it's named after? It's called the John Wayne International Airport. And at its entrance stands a statue of him that would shame the statue of Helios, the Colossus of Rhodes. And when you drive out you find yourself very quickly on a boulevard or motor highway named after General Douglas MacArthur, the colossus of Manila. I remember saying at the time that Orange County, California, was where you would least be likely to see a statue of Franklin Roosevelt or Adlai Stevenson or any other Democrat.

Well, this time around, there was a contest between a seat in Congress between a fine old purple-angry Republican male and a young Latino woman, a Democrat. Twenty years ago this would have been a no contest exercise in the ridiculous. The young Latino won. I believe she did. She was leading by several hundred votes and she took off for Washington and her basic training while her Clinton-bashing opponent was swelling his veins with fury and howling for a recount.

There are similar stories from around the country. Results that only eight years ago would have been passing aberrations. So far we've not noticed the rise of an influential Muslim voting block and here on the West coast, the incoming or first generation Asians – that we used to call Orientals – they seem to work first, very hard, to match and surpass long established locals, in the sciences and trades, and think about a political presence later. But it will come.

So what I've been implying is, among American institutions that are not subject to change, there remains the blessed un-politicised institution of Thanksgiving. Whether the newcomer knows the original story or not, it's the same for everybody. At the end of the first successful harvest in the founding colony of Massachusetts, after a brutal winter of sickness and actual starvation, the founders gave thanks with a feast. And they cooked a beast they'd never seen in Europe, a turkey. And cooked him with the new, the local vegetables, maize, forever after called here corn, and made a sauce of the cranberries they found in the coastal bogs. And for pudding, which later here came to be called dessert, they made many dishes, but, at Thanksgiving, a pie. A pumpkin pie.

So far in the matter of Thanksgiving dinner, ingredients, ethnic ingredients, I've noticed on the part of the airlines no concession to new Americans, apart from, what has been true for a long time, the provision at the touch of a telephone, of kosher meals, especially in planes out of or into New York, which after all contains one third of all the six million Jews in the United States.

But so far no breast of lemon tea turkey with mango fig cornmeal sauce and red pepper crusted pumpkin mousse. Just the old originals. The one variation I've noticed was voiced in a newspaper piece, a health column. A desperate piece, attempting to see that you followed the traditional meal without breaking your own diet rules, since, the writer says, a Thanksgiving dinner is a coronary blow-out. Better baste the turkey not with butter, but with fruit juice. Mash the potatoes, not as usual with cream and butter, but, he dares to say it, and I'm afraid it may still be right in the English fashion, with - urgh - skimmed milk. And then better skip the pumpkin pie and substitute persimmon slush. I mean, enough!

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.