Remember me
The special relationship gets through Thanksgiving each year in fits of awkward apologies. It is the moment America celebrates its first tenuous steps towards nationhood, free from the religious baggage of other holidays. But many Brits in the US fail to read the cultural cues. They often don’t realise that Thanksgiving sits in the upper echelon of holidays, alongside Christmas. In the month between the two festivals not a lot gets done in the States. So much for those Americans and their world-conquering productivity.
I gave thanks this year at a friend’s house in a Virginian forest. A fellow Brit was buried in her phone replying to emails from her British clients. I was taking calls from British sources for whom it was just another Thursday. A diplomat told me they were constantly fielding requests in New York that started with an affected apology from some Foreign Office mandarin: “Sorry, we realise you are doing that holiday that nobody else in the world celebrates, but could you…?”
It wasn’t always like this. In 1944, Winston Churchill went to the Royal Albert Hall to raise a Thanksgiving toast to the Americans (granted, he had American forebears, and so would have been au fait with the holiday’s hallowed status). The old imperialist managed to feign in the national interest that he was grateful that the United States in “three or four years” had become the “greatest military, naval, and air power in the world”. Those three or four years were quite important, but it’s worth remembering Keir Starmer’s bowing and scraping approach to the White House has a weathered pedigree.
Washington empties during the week of Thanksgiving as much as it does during the quasi-Egyptian summer heat in August. So I thought I’d make a weekend of it. Drive through Virginia and the view resembles a more rural version of the rolling road shot in Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent film One Battle After Another. The state is webbed in long, undulating strips of tarmac. White fences frame the route like the grid system on a zoomed-in Ordnance Survey map. Grand homes surveying empty farmland swipe by the car windows like an Instagram feed. Our destination was Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Palladian mansion.
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Jefferson treated his abode like a canvas. He tinkered with it for 40 years, adding new wings, windows and floors as he perfected his painting. He installed a mechanically automated double door, where closing one door would shut the other through a chain beneath the flooring. His bed, where he would sleep upright, was squashed within the walls between his study and chamber so he could easily get out on each side at will. He built an early version of the dumbwaiter in the dining room fireplace, allowing his Château Margaux to ascend from the cellar without disturbing his guests.
Jefferson also perfected spite. Read Gore Vidal’s novel Burr – which will quickly shake you of the notion that Trump is un-American – for an acid-etched portrait of this fidgety, self-mythologising Founding Father. At Monticello, Jefferson placed a bust of Alexander Hamilton, his Federalist nemesis, opposite his own marble carving in the hallway to render their rivalry in stone.
Throughout the tour, our guide would occasionally mumble something about the slaves who worked on Jefferson’s plantation. She fiddled in her plastic wallet trying to find a picture, and brought out a recent photo taken from when the descendants of Jefferson’s slaves gathered on the front lawn outside the mansion.
That Jefferson was a tinkerer throws up a conundrum for many historians. How could he prosper from slavery and yet risk his life in order to prosecute a revolution for a constitutional democracy? In an introduction for a new book on Jefferson and race, Annette Gordon-Reed makes the case that on the issue of slavery Jefferson chose incrementalism over revolution because he did not think the Virginian plantation owners would ever agree to liberate their slaves. She notes that in one draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson described Africans as having the “sacred rights of life and liberty” taken away. And yet, Jefferson didn’t free his own slaves. He suffered from what Charles Dickens would later call a “slave-rocked cradle”.
Dickens’s American Notes, his account of his tour of the East Coast, which took him through Virginia, was panned in the local press at the time for what the reviewers saw as its haughty take on the fledgling nation’s vulgar mannerisms and morals. “Slavery is not a whit the more endurable because some hearts are to be found that can partially resist its hardening influences,” he wrote. Americans – and they are hardly alone in this – despise the critical eye of foreigners.
Despite Jefferson’s drive to expand the American Revolution abroad, he was often more concerned with domestic affairs. The Irish politician and historian Conor Cruise O’Brien once made a persuasive case that Jefferson’s opposition to the Jay Treaty in 1794 – the US’s attempt to formalise a rapprochement with Britain – was based more on his desire to undermine the Federalist Party at home than to snub the British abroad. Even today, the US’s global meddling cannot really be separated from the machinations of Republicans and Democrats in Washington, their eyes turned towards their respective voter bases.
That goes some way to explaining why Americans, as opposed to harried British immigrants, don’t notice when those across the Atlantic forget Thanksgiving. Like Jefferson in Monticello, they live in their own eccentric universe.
[Further reading: Keir Starmer’s European opportunity]
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