Coolidge, Thanksgiving, and the Importance of Gratitude

The Coolidges leaving Thanksgiving Day service, 1925

By the Editors

The image most associated with Calvin Coolidge and Thanksgiving is that of a raccoon.

In 1926, a Mississippi supporter sent Coolidge a live raccoon…

…to be served at the First Family’s Thanksgiving feast.

President Coolidge received assurances of the animal’s “toothsome flavor,” according to the Washington Post. But the Vermonter had never tasted raccoon and decided he wouldn’t sample it now.

Instead, the raccoon—“Rebecca”—became a Coolidge family pet. Rebecca liked to play in the bathtub, First Lady Grace Coolidge said. The Coolidges even brought the raccoon with them when they spent the summer of 1927 in South Dakota.

But sparing a raccoon’s life was hardly President Coolidge’s only notable involvement in Thanksgiving. Like presidents before and since, Coolidge issued annual statements proclaiming a day of national Thanksgiving and prayer.

Coolidge issued his first Thanksgiving proclamation as president on November 5, 1923. Only three months earlier, his predecessor, Warren Harding, had died in office. Coolidge noted another recent tragedy: the Great Kanto Earthquake, which claimed more than 100,000 lives in Japan.

Still, the new president emphasized the importance of gratitude. A day of Thanksgiving offers a time for reflection, an “opportunity justly to balance the good and the evil which we have experienced.”

Coolidge concluded with a reminder as important today as a century ago:

Even in the least propitious times, a broad contemplation of our whole position has never failed to disclose overwhelming reasons for thankfulness.

Two years later, President Coolidge took note of the prosperity Americans enjoyed. But contrary to a common caricature, Coolidge did not focus solely on financial success. “As we have grown and prospered in material things, so also should we progress in moral and spiritual things,” he said in his 1925 Thanksgiving proclamation.

Coolidge would underscore the point the following summer, when he said: “The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp.”

The Governor’s Proclamation

Calvin Coolidge had issued Thanksgiving proclamations before coming to Washington. He wrote his first as Massachusetts governor in November 1919, only a year removed from the armistice that ended the First World War.

This proclamation deserves to be reprinted in full:

The people have had a year of peace. It has been marked not by sorrow at the departure of those who nobly served a cause great as America, but by joy at their return with righteousness victorious. The sense of loss has been tempered by the sense of gain from duty patriotically done.

With peace has come prosperity. Burdens have been great, but the strength to bear them has been greater. The condition of those who toil is higher, better, more secure than in all the ages past. Out of the darkness of great conflict has appeared the vision nearer, clearer than ever before of a life on earth less and less under the deadening restraint of force, more and more under the vitalizing influence of reason. Moral power has been triumphing over physical power. For satisfaction with present conditions there is every evidence, every reason deep and enduring, for discontent there is only the purpose of those who wish to advance the cause of public enemies.

For peace, for prosperity, for present attainment, for future hope, for the power to know and the resolution to do right, for the peace of mind that has come from duty done, in accord with custom for centuries past, when Massachusetts was weak, and not forgotten now when she is strong, for these bounties, for this vision,

Thursday, November 27, 1919

is hereby set apart as

A Day of Thanksgiving and Praise

for giving thanks to “the Giver of every good and perfect gift,” for giving praise to those who have done His works, in prayer for a strength to see, for a purpose to endure, may the people of this Commonwealth, as through all generations of her history, mark and observe this day.