Skip to main content

Happy Thanksgiving

By


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 clemency to a turkey recorded in an 1865 dispatch by White House reporter Noah Brooks was the origin for the pardoning ceremony. Brooks noted,

About a year before, a live turkey had been brought home for the Christmas dinner, but [Lincoln’s son Tad] interceded in behalf of its life. . . . [Tad’s] plea was admitted and the turkey’s life spared.

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.” The formalities of pardoning a turkey gelled by 1989, when George H. W. Bush, with animal rights activists picketing nearby, quipped,

. . . this guy [has] been granted a presidential pardon as of right now.




Comments

  1. avrdsNovember 22, 2012 at 3:52 PM

    I still haven't pardoned that one White House turkey, George Jr.

    Happy Thanksgiving to all of you. I'm thankful I stumbled into a discussion of Lewis and Clark at the NY Times in September 2001 -- and Gintaras was kind enough to answer my questions. Been many great book discussions since then.

    ReplyDelete
  2. TripplerNovember 22, 2012 at 4:51 PM

    As we used to say in Brooklyn, Happy Toykee Day!

    ReplyDelete
  3. James FergusonNovember 22, 2012 at 6:11 PM

    It's been a pleasure av and trip. So thankful to have good persons to discuss am history books with and exchange thoughts in general.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Rick DiguetteNovember 25, 2012 at 5:22 PM

    Took in the Lincoln film last night. The theater was packed; in fact, we just managed to get two tickets before the show we wanted to attend sold out.

    I give the film a B. Daniel Day-Lewis is very good, as expected, and so is Sally Fields. The script is at times also very good but at times rather weak. A scene late in the film when Lincoln has a brief conversation with a black house servant on the steps of Blair House is painfully earnest and completely unconvincing. And the scene at Appomattox Courthouse when Robert E. Lee is about to ride off in defeat is not much better. Almost schmaltzy.

    Overall worth seeing, but this is a rather old fashioned Hollywood movie. I will be interested to learn what others here think.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more