Thanksgiving's advocate

TWO HUNDRED YEARS ago, the Thanksgiving holiday was regularly celebrated only in New England. By 100 years ago, it had become a great national feast. Every New Englander who migrated to distant parts of the country shares credit for the spread of the custom, but the leading role was played by Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, one of the most influential magazine editors of her day.

Hale's effort to spread Thanksgiving well beyond its regional origins was an early example of the power of the national media to shape public opinion. The emergence of Thanksgiving as a national celebration also shows the power of holidays to bring comfort in turbulent times.

Thanksgiving evolved from religious celebrations in the Puritan towns of 17th-century New England. It didn't start with the famous feast of the Pilgrims and the Indians in 1621. That was a one-time event to celebrate the Pilgrims' survival from a terrible first winter in Plymouth and to cement their alliance with the tribal leader Massasoit.

As the settlements matured, the Pilgrims and the Puritans, who founded Boston, felt the need to celebrate the end of harvest time in their new homes. And they wanted an end-of-the-year feast to replace Christmas, which they considered too Catholic. Diana Karter Appelbaum, in her book "Thanksgiving," speculates that a Thursday was chosen because Puritan clerics held informal prayer meetings on that day, and could easily transform these into two services of thanksgiving, one before and another after the family meal.

While the date of Thanksgiving drifted a bit, a consensus developed for the latter half of November. By 1788, when Sarah Josepha Buell was born in Newport, N.H., the holiday was anchored in New England and spreading into New York State.

North and South

Sarah Buell married David Hale, a lawyer, in 1813, had four children and was about to give birth to a fifth in 1822 when her husband died. To support her family, she wrote the novel "Northwood" in 1827, which contrasted life in New England with that of the South, devoting a chapter to the Thanksgiving feast. "We have too few holidays," she wrote. "Thanksgiving, like the Fourth of July, should be considered a national festival and observed by all our people . . . as an exponent of our Republican institutions."

The success of "Northwood" gave her the opportunity to establish the Ladies' Magazine in Boston, the first of its kind in the nation, and from there the publisher Louis A. Godey recruited her to edit Godey's Lady's Book in 1937. She also found time to write a book of children's verses, which included "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

Sarah Hale never lost her enthusiasm for Thanksgiving and in 1846 began an annual campaign to have the governors of all states declare an official holiday on the last Thursday in November.

In the 1850s, Godey's, with a circulation of 150,000, had become the most popular magazine in the United States. And every November it would feature recipes for the Thanksgiving feast and holiday-themed short stories, often about an extended family about to sit down to dinner when they are surprised by a long-lost son, home from the frontier or the sea.

New England emigrants reinforced Hale's message as they moved to New York, to the upper Midwest, and across the Plains and desert to California. In Hawaii, then an independent nation, King Kamehameha III was so impressed by the missionaries' celebration that he proclaimed his own day of thanksgiving in 1849, on Dec. 31.

A national holiday

When civil war erupted in the United States, editress Hale (as she preferred to be called) saw the holiday as a celebration that could help reunite the country. In 1863, she suggested that the president, rather than individual governors, proclaim the fourth Thursday in November as day of national Thanksgiving. Abraham Lincoln agreed. "In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude . . . ," he wrote optimistically, "peace has been preserved with all nations, the laws have been respected and obeyed and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the field of military conflict."

Sarah Hale made sure other presidents followed Lincoln's precedent, and when she stepped down from Godey's in 1877, at age 89, the annual proclamation had become a national tradition. She died 14 months later.

Thanksgiving didn't become an official national holiday until Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed it such in 1939, and to give merchants a longer shopping season, he specified that the holiday be celebrated on the third Thursday of November. The nation was outraged. Roosevelt promptly backtracked, and Thanksgiving has been celebrated on the fourth Thursday ever since, just as Sara Josepha Hale specified. And just as she had hoped in 1827, Thanksgiving has joined the Fourth of July as the preeminent made-in-America holiday.