She Spent 38 Years Badgering Presidents — And That's Why You're Eating Turkey Tonight

Every November, roughly 46 million turkeys meet their end in the name of American tradition. We carve them, argue over the drumsticks, and quietly accept that this is simply what you do on Thanksgiving — a custom handed down from the Pilgrims, right? A sacred link to 1621 and that famous harvest feast at Plymouth?

Not quite. The backstory is messier, more recent, and honestly more interesting than anything you were taught in elementary school.

The Myth of the Pilgrim Turkey

Here's what we actually know about the 1621 Plymouth harvest celebration: it happened, it lasted three days, and the menu probably included venison, shellfish, and wildfowl. Whether that wildfowl was turkey is genuinely unclear. Edward Winslow's firsthand account mentions that Governor Bradford sent men out "fowling" before the feast, but he never specifies the bird. Historians largely agree that wild ducks and geese were far more likely candidates.

More importantly, that 1621 gathering wasn't called Thanksgiving, wasn't repeated the following year, and didn't spark any kind of ongoing national tradition. For most of the next two centuries, Thanksgiving was observed sporadically — sometimes declared by individual states, sometimes by presidents for specific occasions, but never as a fixed, recurring national holiday.

So how did it become the fourth Thursday of every November, complete with a turkey centerpiece? That's where things get interesting.

Enter the Most Persistent Woman in American Publishing

Sarah Josepha Hale is not a household name today, which is a genuine historical oversight. She edited Godey's Lady's Book — the most widely read magazine in America for much of the 19th century — for nearly four decades. She championed women's education, helped raise funds to complete the Bunker Hill Monument, and is the reason you know the words to "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (she wrote it). She was, by any measure, a cultural force.

She was also absolutely relentless about Thanksgiving.

Starting in 1827, Hale began a one-woman lobbying campaign to establish a unified national Thanksgiving holiday. She wrote editorials, published recipes, and sent formal letters to governor after governor and president after president. Zachary Taylor got a letter. Millard Fillmore got one. Franklin Pierce got one. James Buchanan got one. Each time, nothing happened.

She kept going anyway.

The Letter That Finally Worked

In September 1863 — thirty-six years into her campaign — Hale wrote to Abraham Lincoln. The Civil War was tearing the country apart, and she framed her argument carefully: a shared national holiday, she suggested, could serve as a unifying ritual for a fractured nation. A single day when Americans, North and South, paused together.

Lincoln, advised by Secretary of State William Seward, signed a proclamation in October 1863 declaring the last Thursday of November a national day of Thanksgiving. It was the first time a sitting president had made the observance an annual, recurring national event.

Hale was 74 years old. She had been writing those letters since she was 39.

So Where Does the Turkey Come In?

This is where the story shifts from politics to practicality — and commerce.

Turkey wasn't invented as a Thanksgiving food by any single person. But several forces pushed it toward the center of the table throughout the 19th century. For one thing, turkeys were logistically sensible: unlike chickens (which produced eggs) or cows (which produced milk), a turkey had no secondary economic purpose. It was raised to be eaten. It was also large enough to feed an extended family in a single sitting, which suited a holiday explicitly designed around communal gathering.

Hale herself promoted turkey in her Thanksgiving editorials and in her 1827 novel Northwood, where she described a New England Thanksgiving spread with turkey as the centerpiece. She was, in a real sense, doing early content marketing for the bird decades before the holiday was official.

By the late 1800s, as Thanksgiving became commercially established, the food industry leaned in hard. Turkey farming scaled up to meet seasonal demand. Magazines — including Hale's own — ran turkey recipes every November. By the time Norman Rockwell painted his iconic "Freedom from Want" in 1943, the roasted turkey had become so synonymous with Thanksgiving that most Americans had simply stopped asking why.

The Tradition Behind the Tradition

What makes this backstory worth sitting with is how manufactured the whole thing is — not in a cynical way, but in a deeply human one. A holiday that feels ancient was essentially designed by a magazine editor with a long-term vision and an unusual tolerance for rejection. The turkey at the center of your table isn't a relic of Pilgrim survival; it's the result of practical economics, 19th-century food media, and one woman's stubborn conviction that Americans needed a shared ritual.

Sarah Josepha Hale never got full credit for it in her lifetime. She probably wouldn't mind — she got the holiday.