The newsletter: Thanksgiving edition | Jim Acosta reconsidered
Hello friends!
I'm going to try to keep this week's newsletter on the quicker side since most of you are gearing up to head off for the holiday.
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. You get to be a gluttonous layabout for several days in a row, and the only religion celebrated is food. Every year I look forward to the tradition of returning to Maryland and seeing family and old high school friends and the swirl of red and yellow leaves during long walks. The rituals of home throw my ever-changing life into stark relief; it's a good time for reflection.
I'm not going to impose any insufferable "How to talk to your family about politics at the Thanksgiving table" Internet #content on you. Instead I'll just share a fun bit of trivia that explains why we're having Thanksgiving this Thursday as opposed to the final Thursday of the month this year. It's a story that illustrates how big business has managed to leave a mark on a long-running tradition in American life (excerpted from a brief article I wrote a few years back):
"Beginning in the 19th century, Thanksgiving was traditionally observed on the final Thursday of November. But in 1939, during the later years of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt took executive action to move the holiday a week earlier.
November had five Thursdays in 1939, meaning Thanksgiving would be held uncommonly late. The retail industry lobby foresaw a shortened Christmas holiday shopping season and leaned on the White House to move the date earlier. Roosevelt, concerned about missing an opportunity to stimulate the economy, agreed to the idea and unilaterally changed Thanksgiving a week earlier.
The public was not happy about it. The new Thanksgiving date was derided as "Franksgiving," and dramatic attacks came from all quarters. Alf Landon, the Republican governor of Kansas who lost to Roosevelt in the 1936 elections, cried out that he had imposed his decision "upon an unprepared country with the omnipotence of a Hitler." The people of Plymouth, Massachusetts — the site of the first Thanksgiving — were horrified. Polling showed that most Americans disapproved of the change, and many states kept the original date.
In short, it was a disaster.
For the next few years the country remained divided over when it should be celebrated, but eventually the struggle to get the entire country onboard was rendered pointless by studies revealing that the earlier date had a negligible impact on sales and the economy.
And so toward the end of 1941, Roosevelt signed a joint resolution of Congress which moved Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November. This achieved a middle ground between the public's desire to preserve tradition and the business lobby's thirst for profit; under this arrangement, Thanksgiving is typically in the last week of November, but also shifts to an earlier date on Novembers with five Thursdays."
This year is a November with five Thursdays! So we're celebrating it on the fourth one! History!
An addendum on Jim Acosta
In last week's newsletter I found myself in the unusual position of arguing that a reporter should be less adversarial toward Trump.
The crux of my argument was not that Jim Acosta's violations of White House decorum were unseemly, but that that they were ineffective. I argued that his stunts would hand a victory to Trump's agenda to paint the media as treating him unfairly without obtaining anything meaningful in return.
Upon reflection, fueled in part by some pushback online, I suppose I don't care that much about how Acosta chooses to comport himself.
It could be argued that even if Acosta abided by the rules, Trumpland would still be convinced that CNN is fake news, and so the costs of his activism is marginal. And then there's also a case to be made that while Acosta is not going to win a concession from the administration, he could, theoretically, inspire other White House reporters to be fiercer. That's a good cause — the White House Correspondents' Association is such a spineless institution that it has decided this year to break from its tradition of inviting a comedian to its annual dinner. Let that sink in: In the Trump era, the organization has chosen to try to avoid controversy and make the president feel less worried about being roasted.
So let me get to the big unspoken impulse that drove my initial post: I'm angry about inconsistency.
I'm angry that Acosta's behavior in all likelihood would never have happened had Ted Cruz won the presidency and pursued an extremely similar policy agenda and quested to sate the toxic impulses of the same reactionary constituents because he knows how to do it with a veneer of civility. And I'm angry because White House reporters like Acosta have declined to act this way in the past as presidents, both Democratic and Republican, have run circles around credulous, flat-footed reporters.
A lot of liberals like to cry out that this Trump's lying is "not business as usual" or that "this is not normal." This kind of rhetoric often obscures continuity. Yes, Trump has led us to new frontiers in untruth, but let's be clear: lying is business as usual for politicians. Yes, Trump's white nationalism has broken some new ground, but the Southern Strategy has prevailed for decades.
In recent years before Trump took office journalists have failed to aggressively push back against falsehoods used to justify atrocities like the Iraq War, gutting protections for the poor, protecting bankers from prosecution, preventing universal healthcare and inaction on climate change. Where were the Acostas then? The flagrancy of a Trump lie deserves an adversarial press; the sophistication of a Bush or Obama or Paul Ryan lie deserves one just as much.
So my more considered response to Acosta's behavior is: either get in the face of every lying politician you see — even the ones who veil their deception and their misdeeds with great skill — or do what you usually do.
A lot of journalists seem to be taking the wrong lesson from the Trump era. As I argued in an essay about Ben Smith's widely lauded piece on the supposed decline of insider journalism, the Trump era shouldn't be making journalists nostalgic for coziness between the press and the political class in older times — it should be making them realize that the old model was bad.
I'll refrain from recommended reading this time around because people are probably too busy for it. Happy Thanksgiving to all!
If you want to give me any feedback or just want to share some thoughts, you can reply directly to this email and I'll be able to read it — and respond.
If this was forwarded to you or you caught this online, you can sign up for this newsletter here and check out the archive here.