On this day in 1789, less than a year after the Constitution became law, the U.S. held its first presidentially proclaimed Thanksgiving holiday. President George Washington declared that Thursday, Nov. 26 as a “day of thanks-giving” celebrating the creation of the U.S. and its new Constitution.
The practice of holding thanksgiving ceremonies was started in the Americas in 1621 by the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, who held a feast after their first harvest and invited the Wampanoag tribe nearby, who also held such celebrations. It was celebrated through the American Revolution and was even proposed in the Continental Congress as a potential holiday celebrating the U.S. victory after the war. After Washington’s 1789 declaration, Thanksgiving was occasionally observed after certain fortuitous events, but wasn’t celebrated annually until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln issued a presidential proclamation declaring it an annually commemorated tradition held each year on the last Thursday of November.
That dating scheme worked until 1939, when the last day of November was its fifth Thursday. Concerned about the impacts on holiday shopping, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the second to last Thursday of November. But 16 states refused to comply and kept their Thanksgiving date on the last Thursday of the month. In 1941, Congress ended the squabble and set the holiday’s date to the fourth Thursday of November, where it’s stayed ever since.
You can read the proclamation here and read more about it on the Mount Vernon website.
