I have long admired the work Snopes.com does. In fact, I am reasonably sure if I was to fact-check much of what I read in Facebook posts that come across my newsfeed, about half would turn out to be fake news. Snopes.com is run by Barbara and David Mikkelson, a California couple who met in the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup. Snopes takes it name from the Snopes trilogy – The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion – written by American novelist William Faulkner between 1940 and 1959 regarding the Snopes family in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.
You can imagine my relief then when Snopes.com labeled as false a claim by Real News Right Now reported earlier this year that Republican President Donald Trump had reversed multiple Thanksgiving turkey pardons issued by his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, and ordered the execution of five surviving pardoned turkeys. Admittedly, the Real News Right Now story, reported by R. Hobbus J.D., is a delightful read nonetheless and you can find it in its entirety here at http://archive.is/DJ2L1 or catch the drift with the snippet below:
“In another sweeping move aimed at undoing the perceived damage done by the Obama administration, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 24, 2017 directing the Department of Justice to revoke all 16 Thanksgiving Day turkey pardons issued by the former president during his eight years in office.
“After reviewing the decisions made by the previous administration, President Trump has determined that a number of turkey pardons issued by Barack Obama were done so in a manner that was both deceitful and hazardous to the American people,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer announced on Tuesday. “This morning, the president once again used his executive powers to see to it that justice is served and that the surviving creatures will be destroyed.”
Like all content published by Real News Right Now, the “story was satirical in nature, although the site does not include a disclaimer identifying its material fake news,” Snopes notes at https://www.snopes.com/trump-turkey-pardons-reversed/
However, the site’s “About” page includes several obvious indicators, such as its humorous claims that author R. Hobbus J.D. has received non-existent awards such as the “Oscar Mayer Award for Journalistic Excellence” and the “Stephen Glass Distinction in Journalistic Integrity.” If you know who Stephen Glass is you get it. If you don’t, well maybe not.
In 2014, then president Obama on the day before Thanksgiving pardoned “Cheese,” a 49-pound big boy born on July 4, 2014, with a height of 36 inches and a wingspan of 4½ feet, and a “strut style” described as “grand champion,” during an annual ceremony in the Grand Foyer of the White House. It was Obama’s sixth turkey pardoning as commander-in-chief at the White House. Cheese’s gobble was characterized as “loud, romantic, with a country ring to it.”
Thanksgiving in the United States this year falls later this week on Thursday, Nov. 23. While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well, even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such is the case this year. And such was the case also in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.
To understand the rationale more fully, harken back to that bygone era where it was quaintly considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have Christmas sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving, as opposed to the current day-after Halloween kick-off. Or is it the day after Labor Day now Christmas sales start? One of the two methinks.
Roosevelt, however, had waited until Oct. 31 to announce his thinking on the matter of moving up Thanksgiving by a week 23 days later. The short-notice change in dates affected the holiday plans of millions of Americans; while there was plenty of confusion and many were inconvenienced, others hit pay dirt.
On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.
The Thanksgiving winners in 1939 lived in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. Those three states observed two Thanksgiving holidays that year; the just-proposed Thursday, Nov. 23, and then they did it all over again a week later on the originally scheduled holiday on Thursday, Nov. 30.
Now, that’s something to express gratitude for, unless your were a turkey taking a double-hit on your numbers possibly in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. All told, 23 states and the District of Columbia, of the 48 states in those pre-statehood days for Alaska and Hawaii (both joined the union 20 years later in 1959), recognized Nov. 23 as Thanksgiving in 1939, while 22 states stuck with the original Nov. 30 date as planned.
Gradually, the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, with some see-sawing back-and-forth and general waffling, took a more permanent hold throughout the United States. Texas was the last state to change its holiday law, observing the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving when there are five Thursdays in the month for the final time on Thursday, Nov. 29, 1956.
The considerable, and for a time in the early 1940s, still ongoing confusion surrounding when Thanksgiving should be celebrated was not surprisingly diffused in the popular culture as ripe material for laughs through cinema, as well as radio. “In the 1940 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon Holiday Highlights, directed by Tex Avery,” Wikipedia notes, “the introduction to a segment about Thanksgiving shows the holiday falling on two different dates, one ‘for Democrats’ and one a week later ‘for Republicans.’”
In the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a classic black-and-white film, which I borrowed in DVD format from the Thompson Public Library a few years ago, there is a delightful parody where a November calendar appears on which an animated turkey jumps back and forth between the two weeks, until he gives up and shrugs his shoulders at the audience.
No word yet who President Trump will pardon in his Wednesday reprieve, but two turkeys arrived Nov. 19 in Washington ahead of the 70th annual turkey pardon. According to the White House, the two turkeys were raised in Western Minnesota, and after the pardon will join turkeys pardoned by Obama at Virginia Tech’s “Gobblers Rest” exhibit. While in Washington, they stay in style at the Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, as is tradition.
While it’s being billed as the 70th annual turkey pardon, The White House Historical Association, a private, non-profit organization founded in 1961 by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy with a mission to protect, preserve, and provide public access to the history of “America’s Executive Mansion,” as it calls the White House, explains there’s more on the plate when it comes to turkey pardons than first meets the fork, err … eye:
“The official ‘pardoning’ of White House turkeys is an interesting White House tradition that has captured the imagination of the public in recent years. It is often stated that President Lincoln’s 1863 clemency to a turkey recorded in an 1865 dispatch by White House reporter Noah Brooks was the origin for the pardoning ceremony.
“Reports of turkeys as gifts to American presidents can be traced to the 1870s, when Rhode Island poultry dealer Horace Vose began sending well fed birds to the White House. The First Families did not always feast upon Vose’s turkeys, but the yearly offering gained his farm widespread publicity and became a veritable institution at the White House. At Thanksgiving 1913, a turkey-come-lately from Kentucky shared a few minutes of fame with the fine-feathered Rhode Islander. Soon after, in December, Horace Vose died, thus ending an era.
“By 1914, the opportunity to give a turkey to a President was open to everyone, and poultry gifts were frequently touched with patriotism, partisanship, and glee. In 1921, an American Legion post furnished bunting for the crate of a gobbler en route from Mississippi to Washington, while a Harding Girls Club in Chicago outfitted a turkey as a flying ace, complete with goggles. First Lady Grace Coolidge accepted a turkey from a Vermont Girl Scout in 1925. The turkey gifts had become established as a national symbol of good cheer.
“With animal rights activists picketing nearby, President George H.W. Bush quipped “‘Reprieve,’ ‘keep him going,’ or ‘pardon’: it’s all the same for the turkey, as long as he doesn’t end up on the president’s holiday table.”
“Recently, White House mythmakers have claimed that President Harry S. Truman began the tradition of “pardoning” a turkey. However, the Truman Library & Museum disputes the notion that he was the first to do so. The focus on Truman stems from his being the first president to receive a turkey from the Poultry and Egg National Board and the National Turkey Federation. From September to November 1947, announcements of the government encouraging “poultryless Thursdays” grabbed national headlines. Outrage from homemakers, restaurant owners, and the poultry industry was palpable in Washington. This came to a head when the poultry industry pointed out that the upcoming Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, the three big turkey holidays, happened to fall on Thursday.. The effort was deflated in time for Thanksgiving, but not before poultry growers had sent crates of live chickens— “Hens for Harry”— to the White House in protest. The turkey they presented to President Truman that December promoted the poultry industry and established an annual news niche that endures today.
“While 1947 was the beginning of the official turkey presentation from the poultry industry, the turkey pardon remained a sporadic tradition. In December 1948, Truman accepted two turkeys and remarked that they would “come in handy” for Christmas dinner. There was clearly no plan for these birds to receive a presidential pardon. The Washington Post used both “pardon” and “reprieve” in a 1963 article in which President Kennedy said of the turkey, “Let’s keep him going.” During the latter years of the Nixon presidency, Patricia Nixon accepted the turkeys on behalf of the President and in 1973 sent the bird to the Oxon Hill Children’s Farm. The 1978 turkey, presented to Rosalynn Carter, met a similar fate when it was sent to Evans Farm Inn to live in a mini zoo.
“After 1981 the practice of sending the presentation turkey to a farm became the norm under Ronald Reagan. The turkey ceremony also became a source of satire and humor for reporters. The formalities of pardoning a turkey gelled by 1989, when George H. W. Bush, with animal rights activists picketing nearby, quipped, “But let me assure you, and this fine tom turkey, that he will not end up on anyone’s dinner table, not this guy — he’s granted a Presidential pardon as of right now — and allow him to live out his days on a children’s farm not far from here.”
The annual tradition now sees two turkeys spared from the dinner table, but only one is selected to take part in the White House pardon ceremony.
The 2014 duo was “Mac” and Cheese, but only Cheese got to ham it up before the cameras.
“I am here to announce what I’m sure will be the most talked about executive action this month,” President Obama said at the time, his two daughters Sasha and Malia by his side. “Today, I’m taking an action fully within my legal authority, same taken by Democratic and Republican presidents before me, to spare lives of two turkeys — “Mac” and “Cheese” from a terrible and delicious fate.”
He added, “If you’re a turkey, and you’re named after a side dish, your chances of escaping today dinner are pretty low, so these guys beat the odds. … They’ll get to live out the rest of their days respectably at a Virginia estate. Some would call this amnesty, but there’s plenty of turkey to go around.”
Mac, also a male born on the Fourth of July in 2104, came in two pounds lighter than Cheese, tipping the scales at only 47 pounds. He also had a half-foot smaller wingspan of only four feet. His strut style was described as “feather-shaker.” Mac’s gobble was characterized as “rhythmic, melodious, with a touch of bluegrass.”
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