Texas had two Thanksgivings? Yes, we were stubborn turkeys
(Adapted from columns that appeared Nov. 23, 2011, and Nov. 22, 2016.)
We’re ornery about everything in Texas.
Including Thanksgiving.
As late as 1956, Texans dined twice on turkey dinners in back-to-back weeks.
It was all because the Lone Star State celebrated Thanksgiving on a completely different day from the rest of America.
Through 1956, Texas’ official state holiday was the last Thursday in November. Some years, that’s a week after the national holiday, originally viewed by Texans as a federal abomination.
In the newspapers, the two holidays were called “Texas Thanksgiving” and (President Franklin) “Roosevelt’s Thanksgiving.”
The Star-Telegram headlined: “Take Your Pick, 2 Days Slated for Thanksgiving.”
Stores and federal post offices closed on the federal holiday.
But public schools and state colleges and offices closed the following week.
“Big business caused it,” an unnamed “woman shopper” complained in The Dallas Morning News.
Actually, politics caused it.
Back in 1939, Gov. W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a Fort Worth Democrat, had declared Texas would continue to celebrate the last Thursday as Thanksgiving in the name of America’s “Pilgrim Fathers.”
He refused to switch along with the rest of the country to the previous Thursday.
The new, earlier federal holiday was derided as a business scheme and Roosevelt’s “New Deal Thanksgiving.”
“While much of the world is at war,” O’Daniel said, “ … we, the citizens of Texas, have so much for which we should be thankful, we can very well observe two days of thanksgiving.”
The double Thanksgivings came again in 1940 and 1941.
Texas’ turkey breeders liked the extra sales.
Football also played a part. The 1939 college rivalry games, including the University of Texas-Texas A&M game, had already been scheduled on the last Thursday before Roosevelt changed the date.
This [holiday] isn’t being taken away from us. We’re giving it away.
State Rep. James Cotten
D-WeatherfordTexas couldn’t afford to be thankful twice, because state workers were choosing to take both holidays.
A ‘states’ rights’ Thanksgiving
Still, the Texas Legislature bickered mightily over changing it.
State Rep. Calvin Matthew from Cuero, “turkey capital of the world,” fought hard to protect the bird business: “You’re cutting in half the number of turkeys we can sell.”
With civil rights and school desegregation both prominent issues, state Rep. James Cotten of Weatherford called for Texas to defend celebrating its own separate Thanksgiving as “states’ rights”: “It is a Texas tradition and a Texas holiday.”
Even in 1956, State Rep. Scott McDonald, a Fort Worth attorney, was making the same states’ rights argument.
“Don’t you think if Texas holds the line, the other states will come along with us?” he asked.
By then, Texas had celebrated a separate Thanksgiving seven times in the 17 years since 1939.
Finally, in May 1957, Gov. Price Daniel — a graduate of Fort Worth’s Central High School, now Paschal — signed a new set of Texas holidays into law, aligning the state and federal Thanksgiving.
In conservative Montague County, the Saint Jo Tribune complained that he “went Yankee.”
A ‘Yankee institution’
That wasn’t even the first time Texas went rogue on Thanksgiving.
From 1879 to 1882, we had a governor who refused to declare the holiday.
Gov. Oran M. Roberts hated it.
Roberts, the first Tarrant County district judge and later the leader of Texas secession in the Civil War, considered the day an unwelcome federal mandate from Union Republicans in Washington.
He called it a “damned Yankee institution.”
Not until 1868 did Texas first celebrate Thanksgiving.
Even then, the Austin State Gazette mocked the day and asked why any Texan should ever celebrate “Reconstruction, the 14th amendment and [n-word] voting.”
Roberts called Thanksgiving a “religious exercise.” He said prayer wasn’t a government function.
Northern newspapers did not take him well.
The Cleveland Dealer called Roberts an “unrepentant rebel and traitor.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that he “seems determined to keep up his state’s record for barbarism.”
Even the Southern New Orleans Times called him “the most consummate demagogue … pandering to the worst prejudices.”
A 1907 Star-Telegram story calls him a Texas hero while adding casually that his slogan was “ ‘Civilization begins and ends with the plow’ — the motto of the Aryan race.”
Texas was stubborn about more than Thanksgiving.
This story was originally published November 24, 2020 at 7:15 AM.
