More than any generation before us, we have cause to be thankful, so thankful, on this Thanksgiving Day. Our harvests are bountiful, our factories flourish, our homes are safe, our defenses are secure. We live in peace. The good will of the world pours out for us.
When President Lyndon Baines Johnson addressed a troubled nation on Thanksgiving evening, 1963, just seven days after the assassination of JFK, he spoke in two very different tones. Passages such as the above were meant to reassure America that its blessings were fundamental and enduring; passages such as the one below, recalling Kennedy’s famous appeal for citizens who would ask what they could do for their country, were meant to warn that there was only one path forward:
Let all who speak and all who teach and all who preach and all who publish and all who broadcast and all who read or listen — let them reflect upon their responsibilities to bind our wounds, to heal our sores, to make our society well and whole for the tasks ahead of us.
Though Thanksgiving’s official status has been defined by presidential decree — George Washington first proclaimed it a holiday, and Abraham Lincoln tied it to the third Thursday in November — it was Norman Rockwell, says Deborah Solomon in her biography American Mirror, who put the stuffing in the modern Thanksgiving. He did so, says Solomon, not just in the iconic magazine covers but throughout his half-century career:
The great subject of his work was American life — not the frontier version, with its questing for freedom and romance, but a homelier version steeped in we-the-people, communitarian ideals of America’s founding in the eighteenth century. The people in his paintings are related less by blood than by their participation in the civic rituals, from voting on Election Day to sipping a soda at a drugstore counter. Doctors spend time with patients whether or not they have health insurance. Students appreciate their teachers and remember their birthdays. Citizens at town hall meetings stand up and speak their mind without getting booed or shouted down by gun-toting rageaholics. This is America before the fall, or at least before searing divisions in our government and general population shattered any semblance of national solidarity.
If the communitarian ideals proved shaky in the paintings, they were almost absent in the painter, says Solomon. Behind the tweeds-and-pipe persona, Rockwell felt “lonesome and loveless,” his relationships with his parents, wives, and children “uneasy, sometimes to the point of estrangement.” He did not care for church, and he “eschewed organized activity.” At age fifty-nine, after decades spent with “anxiety and fear of his anxiety,” Rockwell entered therapy with the famous German-born psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who coined the term “identity crisis.”
Rockwell’s first Thanksgiving magazine cover appeared in 1913, but his most famous ones were painted at midcentury. The Unwinding, George Packer’s bestseller about the “Inner History of the New America,” takes the midcentury Rockwell Nation as its stepping-off point, the moment when “the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way”:
If you were born around 1960 or afterward, you have spent your adult life in the vertigo of that unwinding. You watched structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape — the farms of the Carolina Piedmont, the factories of the Mahoning Valley, Florida subdivisions, California schools. And other things, harder to see but no less vital in supporting the order of everyday life, changed beyond recognition — ways and means in Washington caucus rooms, taboos on New York trading desks, manners and morals everywhere . . . The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.
But Packer’s case-study portraits of those denied “the Roosevelt Republic” — Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Address inspired Rockwell’s Four Freedoms, his most famous series of paintings — are not sepia-toned. “The unwinding is nothing new,” he writes, and it “brings freedom, more than the world has ever granted, and to more kinds of people than before.” Cases in in point are provided by the households portrayed in Modern Families, which offers “Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship,” include a post-nuclear family of two adopted girls, one from Nepal and one from India, co-parented by two couples, one lesbian and one gay.
In his recent bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J. D. Vance offers a more personal exploration of what happens when families fray and social capital is squandered, especially if exchanged for a materialist alternative. Vance’s memoir gives voice to a working class swept up in a downward-spiraling, lose-lose scenario in which families and communities are destroyed by the pursuit of an American Dream that, like Gatsby’s green light, only seems to recede.
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Sig Nordal 