To understand how Thanksgiving became a conservative touchstone, we need to turn to history—but to the history of opposition to New Deal liberalism, rather than the history of the Pilgrims of 71th-century New England. As Joshua Keating showed in Slate in 2014, the “free enterprise Thanksgiving” arguments misconstrue the history of the Plymouth settlement. For one thing, the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving not in 1623, when they supposedly threw off the shackles of socialism, but in 1621, when they were still supposedly suffering under it. While the Pilgrims complained a lot in the early years, they did so more as unhappy shareholders of a corporation, then as victims of communism. The accuracy of these histories of the first Thanksgiving matters. So, too, does how and why this reading of the Pilgrims as repentant socialists and die-hard free enterprisers—as Whittaker Chambers–like converts from communism—emerged.
The narrative of free enterprise Thanksgiving was a proxy skirmish in the battle between conservatives and New Deal liberalism and its emerging welfare state, which many critics on the right conflated with socialism and even communism. In claiming Thanksgiving, a holiday associated with family, abundance, and Americanism, these critics sought the legitimation of history for their view that security underwritten by the state was not only un-American, but the path to authoritarian socialism—a charge that took on particular force during the Cold War, when this narrative of “free enterprise Thanksgiving” was born.
The first use I’ve found of the argument that Pilgrims found success by rejecting socialism appeared in 1920, a time when, according to an editorial in the South Idaho Journal, the story had “special significance” as “theories of socialism are running rampant throughout the world.” But the narrative of Thanksgiving as a vindication of free enterprise capitalism was widely popularized in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and gained momentum in the postwar years, as critics of expansive Rooseveltian liberalism sought to find a usable past to justify their dislike of his popular New Deal. By claiming that the Pilgrims rejected a philosophy that they analogized to New Deal liberalism and embraced free enterprise capitalism, these critics sought the sanction of history for their view that, as a political columnist wrote in 1952, “in recent years this love of liberty has been subordinated to an alien philosophy of security” and “the siren song of the welfare state.”