The critique of Thanksgiving for entangling church and state was predictable secularist fare, the same turkey freethinkers carved up every year. â??We hav[e] no objection to pumpkin pie,â? the convicted blasphemer C. B. Reynolds insisted in 1891, â??but protest against its being seasoned with theology.â?
The censure got more tantalizing, though, as freethinking liberals increasingly leavened their attack in the 1880s and 1890s with populist indignation over Gilded Age inequality, greed, and exploitation. Not all secularists, of course, were economic populists, ready to express a fierce solidarity with labor and the dispossessed, but across the country, in one village after another, a freethinker or two or three often stood up to the complacent gospel of wealth and abundance given routine expression at Thanksgiving. Seeing the holiday as best suited to the dayâ??s most prominent capitalistsâ??Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and companyâ??these irreligious populists ripped into the celebration as a mockery of mortgaged farmers and starved wage-laborers.
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