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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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In Our View: Giving Thanks Over the Years

The Columbian
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When you have been around for 125 years, you have plenty for which to be thankful — and many Thanksgiving Day observations under your belt.

So it is with The Columbian, which last month celebrated the 125th anniversary of its first publication on Oct. 10, 1890. Being a newspaper, and being one that likes to maintain a strong editorial voice in the community, that means that many an opinion piece has been loquaciously penned about Thanksgiving Day.

In the United States, Thanksgiving Day has been a federal holiday since 1863, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” He had a way with words, that Lincoln.

The tradition dates back to 1621 and what we now refer to as The First Thanksgiving, when Pilgrims gathered with Native Americans to celebrate their first harvest in the new world and spawn countless school plays over the next 400 years.

With today being the 153rd annual national observation of the occasion, it seems appropriate to look back at how the Editorial Page of The Columbian has marked the occasion over the years.

• On Nov. 21, 1890, just weeks after beginning publication, the paper printed a proclamation from Gov. Elisha P. Ferry. “Let us on that day, ceasing as far as possible, from our ordinary avocation of labor and business assemble ourselves together at our usual place of worship, and manifest in an appropriate manner our gratitude to Almighty God for the numberless and inestimable blessings vouchsafed to us during the past year, and humbly implore a continuance of Divine favor,” Ferry wrote, providing perhaps the last occasion on which “vouchsafed” appeared in The Columbian.

• On Nov. 28, 1918, the newspaper published a front-page editorial from Samuel T. Hopkins. “Of all Thanksgiving days in the history of the nation, perhaps there has been none with more universal cause for the giving of thanks than this day,” Hopkins wrote, less than three weeks after the end of what is now known as World War I. “As the tide of battle turned and the American wave swept the Hun hosts to destruction, we were at first benumbed — then like hysterical children we wept with joy at news we scarce could dare believe.”

• On Nov. 22, 1945, months after the end of World War II, The Columbian’s Editorial Page intoned: “Today those of life’s possessions that have always been most precious to the American people are secure. Thanksgiving Day accordingly assumes more than its customary significance. … Just as it was something more than an abundant harvest that inspired the Plymouth colonists to observe America’s first Thanksgiving Day, today a great nation of 145,000,000 people offers its thanks for something more than the material advantages it enjoys.”

• And on Nov. 27, 1980, the Editorial Page took measure of that year’s Mount St. Helens explosion and then noted: “There is a great disparity in the superficial symbols of Thanksgiving Day blessings — the bounty on the dinner table, the number and monetary value of the material things that surround it. But those are not really what this day is all about. Faith and hope. Strength of spirit. They are available to rich and poor, and they are the real ingredients of Thanksgiving.”

So it is that The Columbian has helped mark the passage of time through holidays past. Happy Thanksgiving Day to all.

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