Happy Thanksgiving

This week marks the American holiday of Thanksgiving. Our Thanksgiving holiday has been celebrated in various ways, many devoted to retelling the story of Pilgrims, their assistance by Native Americans, and a feast of thanks that they held. But the story isn't so simple.. It's a legal national holiday now, but only since around the middle of the last century. It is true that a holiday of thanksgiving has been held on a local and less formal basis off and on since before this country existed. The one we celebrate now actually has its roots in an attempt by President Abraham Lincoln to foster national unity during the terrible Civil War of the 1860s.

Our popular holiday is remains rooted, though, in Pilgrims and turkeys and feasting and of course football games. Popular illustrations of the holiday, beginning a century or more ago and continuing into our own century, still celebrate those Thanksgiving icons. These are a few of my favorites Thanksgiving illustrations from the golden age.

This magazine cover by J.C. Leyendecker for Thanksgiving 1928 exemplifies the golden age of magazine illustrations. Among the illustrators working during that time, Mr. Leyendecker was the most successful and famous. He did many magazine covers, advertising illustrations (the Arrow collar man), and was a role model for many who followed. Norman Rockwell was among those who counted him as a personal hero. 

This one, also by Mr. Leyendecker, is a particular favorite of mine. It dates to Thanksgiving 1918, and gives us an American soldier leading (or being led by) a turkey. The first World War had ended a scant three weeks earlier amid delirious celebrations of thanksgiving. The metaphor of the image was obvious to everybody, worldwide.

Nearly three decades later, near the end of his career (1946) Mr. Leyendecker produced this cover art for the Thanksgiving issue of The American Weekly magazine. No football, no actual turkey, just a struggling artist dreaming of a feast.

This cover of The New Yorker from only a few years later is considerably more "cartoony" than anything Mr. Leyendecker ever did, but described the situation then and now.

Happy Thanksgiving
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