This Thanksgiving, Let’s Practice Constitutional Gratitude

Each Thanksgiving calls to mind early Thanksgivings — at Plymouth in 1621, of course, but perhaps also in the nation’s capital in 1789. In October of that year, just months into the nation’s new constitutional government, President Washington issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation. Its words of gratitude to “the beneficent Author of all the good” in our world, “for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us,” would ring familiar around American tables today, even in the most difficult of years.