Master of the Munich Golden Legend, 1400-1460
The Tower of Babel
Folio 17v from the Bedford Book of Hours.
Illumination (10 in × 7 in), 1415-1430
Genesis 11:1-9It is fascinating that Melanie Kirkpatrick should start her new book Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience with the chapter headed Newcomers. She writes in the chapter of her visit to Queens, New York to give a presentation on Thanksgiving to sixteen-year-old new immigrants in a public high school especially constructed for "new comers" and aptly called Newcomers High. She could have at least called it "New Americans."
1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
She writes, as though it is a good thing: "If the Tower of Babel had a contemporary earthly home it would be located in the corridors of Newcomers High." Yet this biblical tower, which was intended to reach God, was never completed since he "confound[ed] their language, that they may not understand one another's speech" and thus couldn't communicate with each other. Their lofty and arrogant goal collapsed.
But what is fascinating about Kirkpatrick's account is not this usual glorification of multiculturalism, which all westerners are now doing, but how she rewrites the history of Thanksgiving to fit this multicultural ethos.
Thanksgiving dinner was created out of a specific historical context. The foods describe the original historical event and thus a specific time in American history. Re-structuring the menu changes this history and makes Thanksgiving something else.
Kirkpatrick recounts their Thanksgiving meals students described to her:
There would be non-traditional food on the menu too as their families initiated their own Thanksgiving food traditions by incorporating favorite home-country dishes into the classic American meal.If Kirkpatrick wants immigrants to contribute their thanks with their own particular histories and backgrounds, then she should advocate for a different holiday: Multicultural Thanks to America perhaps. Changing the foods changes the holiday. Kirkpatrick is not directly (or consciously) advocating for a new Thanksgiving narrative, but in her desire to be "inclusive" she is boldly rewriting American history. A less generous critique would be (given that she is a seasoned researcher and historian) that she is provoding a false version of American history to fit her ideology of inclusiveness.
The rest of the book offers nothing new or no new insights. There is the mandatory chapter on the "tragedy" of the Native Americans, who have wrung the sympathy tears out of contemporary Americans for decades, the same way that blacks have picked at the wounds of slavery even when they now have been infinitely compensated by the collective guilty conscious of whites. In an interesting but long chapter on turkeys, Kirkpatrick appears to refute the historical presence of the bird on Americans' Thanksgiving dinner tables by weaving in substitutes (oysters, geese chicken) but finishes off the chapter by acknowledging the importance of the bird in celebrating the holiday.
She also writes of the generosity of Americans in holding out their hands to the poor. Churches and communities provide food and dinners for the poor to celebrate the holiday, with some collecting their turkey from food banks, and other sitting together at communal tables for a Thanksgiving meal in church basements. Thanksgiving, in the peculiar history of American christianity, is a quintessentially American Christian holiday, coming close to Christmas and Easter. She gives no account of parallel charitable outreaches by those multi-faith, multi-cultural Thanksgiving co-celebrants she writes about.
What could have been an interesting re-counting of the American Thanksgiving story becomes tarnished by its ode to multiculturalism and its attempt to make Thanksgiving, inacurately, into a multicultural event. It might be excusable if Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience were an innocent attempt at inclusveness. But its agenda is bigger than a generous inclusion of all "Americans" and becomes a subtle movement toward changing America instead.