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near Washington DC. They were later quietly killed there,
as their under-engineered legs would soon succumb to the
weight of their bloated bodies.
But from 2005 George W. Bush started instead to
send the birds to Disneyland in Florida by first-class
domestic flight.2 There, the National Turkey was placed
on top of a special parade float moving through cheering
Thanksgiving crowds, preceded by a procession holding
banners declaring him the happiest turkey on earth. A
Disney company press release unabashedly presented the
turkey event as Following presidential pardon, the hap-
piest turkey on earth heads west to the happiest place on
earth!3 (This was in 2006, when the turkeys were flown to
the California Disneyland in order to spread the grace). In
his first turkey pardon in November 2009, Obama simply
went along with this novelty, and apparently also with the
alternation between the East and West coast Disneylands,
where the spectacle is rounded off with the retirement of
the twin turkeys to a Disney animal ranch on which they
meet their ultimate fate.
The audacious remake of the last leg of the nationalpardoning ritual under George W. Bush (fig. 2) must
have something to do with the way in which Disneyland
epitomizes the pursuit of happiness believed to drive the
American nation, already so happy that it even hosts the
happiest place on earth. The idea of reanchoring the
turkey ritual in the unassailably all-American setting of
Disneyland may have been, in part, an attempt by White
House spin doctors to outwit and overcome the previous
years nagging criticism from PETA, the animal rights
activist organization, of both the unfortunately named
Frying Pan arrangements and the associated slaughter
of millions of turkeys. But there is more. The Disneyland
dream world figures in the American self-imaginary as
a fountain of happiness, almost a this-wordly paradise.Victorious sportsmen are often awarded a highly publi-
cized trip there, as a bonus prize. This notion of reward
for good service is now, morbidly, assigned to the already
dying National turkeys, extending presidential benevo-
lence all the way to Disneyland and squeezing out the last
possible drop of spectacular exhibition-value (Agamben
2007: 90) from these avian heroes of the Thanksgiving
sacrifice.
This means that the Thanksgiving ritual is further woven
into the fabric of the American exceptionalist imaginary
of manifest destiny of victorious happiness. Note too that
the public display has its complementary moral mirror
image in the domestic home setting in which the turkeys
are cooked and consumed. Much as in the European home-coming ritual of Christmas, the American Thanksgiving is
a fraught site for the rehearsal of, and challenges to, per-
In her article on the manifest domesticity which th
ritual is used to orchestrate, Amy Kaplan (1998; see als
Kaplan 2002) showed how the original 19th-centur
invention of Thanksgiving cast home-making America
mothers and families in a crucial supporting role for th
nation, just as the US began to assume its imperial pro
ject. Founding mother Sarah Josepha Hale designed th
Thanksgiving ritual as a nationwide contemporaneou
celebration that would consolidate the nation and its con
tinental conquests (up to the Rio Grande, and all the wa
to the Pacific [quoted in Kaplan 1998: 592]), encourag
its mission into the Philippines and beyond, and later, in
the tired Cold War phrase, confirm its status as leader o
the free world.
Kaplan exposed the imperial scope of America
domesticity as instituted in the 19th-century fashioning o
the Thanksgiving holiday which starts on cue from th
acting sovereign (Lincoln, Bush, Obama), and helps con
stitute him as such. All this is still with us, as American
mothers and fathers dutifully continue to cook their tur
keys and perform Thanksgiving as a quintessentiallAmerican ritual and family feast. Even when they do thi
privately, without reflecting on its history or its implica
tions for the state, the success of Hales scheme since i
was formally adopted by Lincoln in 1863 is fundamenta
and lasting.
Since that time, each president exhorts the citizenry t
give thanks and asks for divine blessing for the nation
in his annual Thanksgiving Proclamation, at the ensuin
turkey pardon, and also by way of the exemplary, publ
cized presidential domesticity that often includes publica
tion of dinner menus, and in the 2009 Obama configuratio
added visits to soup kitchens for the poor.
Despite todays multicultural inclusiveness, an
Obamas pointed gestures towards the Native Americanand towards the hungry, the Thanksgiving ritual remain
fundamentally associated with the mainstream, whic
means the White Anglo-Americans of the paradigmati
Plymouth Mayflower Pilgrims, and emphatically no
the Indians or the descendants of Africans brought to th
US as slaves. As Kaplan (1998) notes, Sarah Josepha Hale
the architect of the American Thanksgiving, believe
(like many others) that after the end of slavery, Africa
descendants should have been repatriated to Africa (spe
cifically, to Liberia),4 and not allowed to remain alongsid
the Whites or at least ought to be segregated. The per
during category of mainstream is to be understood as a
accommodation of such lingering nostalgia for purity.
As Kaplan goes on to point out, the Indians were altogether absent from Hales original construction, as the
were from many early settler accounts of Thanksgivings
Fig. 2. President George
W. Bush pardons a turkey,
20 November 2007. (Photo:
Joyce N. Boghosian, courtesy
George W. Bush Presidential
Library.)
Fig. 3. President George
H.W. Bush Senior with
pardoned turkey, 1991.
(Photo courtesy George H.W.
Bush Presidential Library.)
promoted the joy of their
park by contrasting footage
from a synchronized Indian
pow-wow drum dance,
intended to suggest utter and
incomprehensible boredom,
with that of select happy
roller-coaster revellers at their
easy-going park. For images,
see http://www.10news.com/
news/5402133/detail.html, or
http://www.disneydreaming.
com/2009/11/27/courage-
the-turkey-in-the-disneyland-
thanksgiving-day-parade-video/ (accessed 7 June
2010).
4. Her hope was that
Thanksgiving Day would be
used for collecting money
in churches, for this very
purpose (Kaplan 1998).
5. The reappropriation
of the image of the Indian
included fantasies of a
gentler, kinder, American-
styled imperialism, such
as that immortalized in the
huge tripartite statue at the
main gate of the American
Museum of Natural History in
New York, depicting its main
patron, President TheodoreRoosevelt, on horseback
leading an African and an
Indian man on foot, one on
each side.
6. Unsurprisingly,
vegetarian campaigns
initiated for health reasons
by governors like Michigan
governor Jennifer Granholm,
who declared 20 March
2010 Michigan Meatout
Day, or Tennessee governor
Lamar Alexander, who
once proclaimed a World
Vegetarian Day, have been
hard fought, and defeated, by
the meat industry lobby. See
photos of Ford, Nixon and
others at: http://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/
h lid /th k i i /
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tiny (cf. Fiskesj 2003). Hale must have assumed this
solution was safely under way. It appears that it was only
in the late 19th-century period of triumphant imperialism
that the Indians were painted into the nowadays so familiar
and ubiquitous renderings of the first Thanksgiving dinner
(see fig. 5),5 and that it is only with the recent introduction
of multiculturalism that they have been cast in the express
supporting role hailed in Obamas 2009 embrace of the
Native Americans contributions. This sympathetic ges-
ture cannot possibly clear up the lingering ambivalence
about the genocidal crimes committed against their fore-
bears, and should also be analysed as a new version of
the very mystery of state power that is epitomized in the
turkey pardon: the awesome power to launch wars and
take lives is presented to its subjects as coterminous with
a magnanimous and benign care for the weak, the hungry
and the marginalized.
Sarah Palin pallin around with animals
Another closely related new development was Sarah
Palins widely reported but woefully under-analysed turkeypardoning fiasco, in late 2008. Palin is a rising political
star of the right and clearly a US presidential contender,
mainly by virtue of her demagoguery of frontierswoman
fantasies, through which she expertly denies the need for
serious change in the face of climate change and other
problems facing her country, or the world (cf. Covington
2009). She is also closely associated with the growing Tea
Party Movement, whose central Take back our country
slogan is widely understood to refer to Obama, seen as
illegitimate because Black.
Shortly after her defeat as vice-presidential candidate in
the elections earlier that autumn, in November 2008 Palin
was still Alaskas governor but already deeply engaged
in crafting her new position as a political leader definedby nativism and oil-guzzling populism. As if seeking to
usurp some of the symbolic power about to be handed to
Obama as commander-in-chief, Palin arranged a visit to a
turkey farm in Alaska. She was filmed by TV news com-
panies as she waded through a sea of turkeys waiting to be
slaughtered, picked one out, and then declared it pardoned
in a makeshift ceremony (see fig. 4). Like the national cer-
emony, this was meant to be fun, in all seriousness.
The turkey pardoning was institutionalized in the late
1980s as a national presidential ritual, and only very few
state governors pardon turkeys: it is done, for example,
in Alabama, where the ceremony was first invented in
the 1940s as a governors ritual, and from where it was
exported to the capital in 1947 (Fiskesj 2003). By step-ping into the fray, Palin tries to mock the Washington
against which states rights are asserted, using the same
institution of the pardon is a suitable arena for playin
this sort of game: the power of pardon is the suprem
sign of sovereign power, deciding over life and death, an
just such powers are invested in the offices of both U
presidents and (most) US state governors. Both decide, a
their respective level, on clemency and the ultimate fat
of prisoners under death sentence (cf. Sarat 2005), an
presidents decide on war.
But, unfortunately for Palin, the cameras kept rolling a
she was interviewed on other matters against the back
drop of a spectacle of brutal, mechanized turkey slaughte
proceeding just behind her. Clips of this event went vira
on the internet but mainly just the slaughter part of th
footage and not the preceding pardon (Lester 2008 is
more complete video; see also the eyewitness account b
the blogger Celtic Diva, 2008). Instead of helping endea
her to voters as down-to-earth, rustic and funny, the inc
dent served to reignite the debate around meat-eating
vegetarianism, tofu turkey alternatives, and the like, rathe
than around the turkey pardoning itself, which man
simply laugh off as a bit of fun.But although the shrewd Palin did not volunteer t
pardon another turkey in 2009, she quickly seized on he
curious ability to have everything both ways (and get awa
with it), to overcome the negative publicity of the 200
incident. She did this by reaffirming her toughness in th
face of the necessary and virtuous killing of animals, suc
as Alaskan wolves, moose, etc., while caring deeply fo
ordinary Americans. She had established these creden
tials earlier when she famously bragged about her skill
in skinning dead moose, and she often poses with dea
animals.
This certainly shifted the spotlight back onto Palins vir
tues including as a folksy inheritor of the longstandin
tradition of manipulating hunting lore for the purposes opolitical power. Such schemes have of course been use
since ancient times, as when early kings domesticated
their subjects-to-be by asserting a position as hunter-in
chief and conqueror of the wild (Fiskesj 2001). Man
later reigning or would-be kings and presidents hav
played this game in the US, not least the paradigmati
turn-of-the-century big game hunter President Frankli
Roosevelt (Haraway 1993, Fiskesj 2003), who in hi
other guise as wildlife preservationist managed to harnes
the symbolic force of both life-preserving beneficence an
martial readiness, as the archetypal American-style benig
yet fearsome imperial sovereign who loves his people.
Eagles vs turkeysThe trend for playing politics with birds has been superbl
mocked by US satirical newspaper The Onion (2010
8. This is somewhat
morbid, of course, but is
occasionally also done at the
state level when governors
pass on frozen turkeys as
symbolic gifts to homeless
shelters, etc.
9. As was suggested
by one of the anonymous
reviewers for this article, to
whom I am grateful for urging
me to consider these aspects.
I also thank Pete Richardson
for sharing his profoundinsights on several points, and
the Editor for precious help,
not least with illustrations.
Agamben, Giorgio 2007. In
praise of profanation. In
Profanations, pp. 73-92.
New York: Zone Books.
Bergland, Renee 2000. The
national uncanny: Indian
ghosts and American
subjects. Hanover, NH:
University Press of New
England.
Celtic Diva 2008. I watched
Governor Palins turkey
pardoning! (with
pictures). Update 3,20 November. http://
divasblueoasis.com/
showDiary.do?diaryId=320
(accessed 7 June 2010).
Clifford, James 1988.
Identity in Mashpee.
In The predicament of
culture: Twentieth century
ethnography, literature,
and art, pp. 277-346.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Covington, Coline 2009.
What deniers of climate
change are really denying.
The First Post, 17
December. Available at:
http://www.thefirstpost.
co.uk/57532,news-
comment,news-
li i h h d i
Fig. 4. Sarah Palin, script
in hand, with her pardoned
turkey in Wasilla, Alaska,
20 November 2008. (Photo:
Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.)
Fig. 5. The first thanks-
giving, by Jean Leon Gerome
Ferris, from the series The
pageant of a nation (c. 1912-
15). Image reproduced from
a postcard published by The
Foundation Press, Inc., 1932.
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on the current US wars, because, as he put it, Im not a
hawk or a dove [] Im an eagle.
You see, these issues are not so cut and dried, continued the
Haliaeetus leucocephalus specimen. And yet, every time I try
to explain myself from atop a flag pole or the middle of a base-
ball field, no one wants to listen. They just cheer and chant
U.S.A.! U.S.A! U.S.A.!
This is counter-intuitively funny precisely because the
eagle, with its appropriately fierce profile, is a national
totem of the USA even if it isnt recognized in the terms
of totemism, which are of course reserved for Native
Americans and other supposed primitives. James Clifford
(1988: 321) once observed and recorded a memorablescene of US court proceedings where American Indians
who had sued to get back their lost territories were taken
the litigating Indians, as all the while the mighty US eagl
totem watched from the official courtroom wall insigni
right above them.
TheOnion is mocking the symbol of sovereign powe
but failed to engage the interesting issue of the eagles pre
sumed gender, as well as the point that (as even Palin
speechwriters know) the late 18th-century selection o
this fierce-looking eagle as national totem was oppose
by Benjamin Franklin, who famously held that the eagl
in real life is an opportunistic scavenger and the nationa
bird should really have been the morally upright turkey.Obviously, animals are not just good to think with, bu
also serve as exemplary materializations of morality use
to guide and forge a national citizenry. However, Frankli
lost out. The soaring eagle (which cannot be farmed fo
food) is manifestly much more suitable for projecting th
nations outwardly martial and distinctly masculine o
macho ambitions. The turkey, whose edibility sustains th
citizens on the domesticated home front, is better suite
to reaffirming the citizenrys manifest domesticity and it
unity, around the kitchen table, in grateful support of th
nations lofty endeavours, and its troops.
The pardoning ritual as it is pursued today was origi
nally also a commercial gimmick, invented to promot
consumption of turkey meat, and accepted into th
national celebration in part because it highlights the sover
eigns role in facilitating the sustenance of the people. Th
National Turkey Federation (NTF) and other commercia
outfits have long helped promote turkey consumption (an
their profits) by donating turkeys to the White House (se
Figs 6, 7 and 8).
The same logic linking business with state sovereignt
seems to propel all the recent attempts to adopt the par
doning ritual formally in Minnesota (said to be the U
state that raises the largest number of farm turkeys) as we
as in Missouri, Iowa and North Dakota all agricultura
states that benefit heavily from increased production an
consumption of farm-industry meat,
6
and where state governors are also often folksy game hunters.
The apparently seamless marrying of the politica
cosmological significance of the pardoning act with th
industry-promoted pursuit of profit derived from con
sumption and the fun that goes with it is striking and fo
anthropologists, it should recall A.M. Hocarts half-for
gotten but highly relevant theories about the co-evolutio
of economy and governance (see Schnepel 1988). (Th
NTF for its part must inevitably be worrying about th
dangers of any politicizing of the Thanksgiving game, a
this might ruin their fun.)
Why pardoning pigs wont do
It is not just birds that are in play, but other animals too. Ithe swing state of Virginia, another new movement is afoo
demanding that the president should really be pardoning
pig, not a turkey (Suhay 2007). The argument is founde
on a claim that not turkey but pork and possibly oysters
too was eaten at Thanksgiving celebrations in Virgini
that took place two years earlier than the conventionall
mythologized Massachussetts First Thanksgiving even
(in 1621, at Plymouth, where, in any case, venison wa
probably the main course).
But regardless of the facts here, the key point is that th
Thanksgiving holiday was being invented after the defea
of the separatist Confederate slave states which include
Virginia, and this is why the Massachussetts event wa
singled out for mythologization in Lincolns times. Thihistorical divergence means that the Virginian demands
however strongly pushed by governors, senators and th
Davis, Kenneth. 2008. A
French connection.New
York Times, 26 November:
A33; http://www.
nytimes.com/2008/11/26/
opinion/26davis.html?em
(accessed 7 June 2010).
Faludi, Susan 2007.
Americas guardian
myths.New York Times,
7 September. Available
at: http://www.nytimes.
com/2007/09/07/
opinion/07faludi.html
(accessed 7 June 2010).
Fiskesj, Magnus 2003.
The Thanksgiving turkey
pardon, the death of
Teddys bear, and the
i ti f
Fig. 6. Thanksgiving turkey for the President
(Herbert Hoover), November 1929.
Fig. 7. Thanksgiving turkey for the President,
delivered by Minnesota farmers, November 1929.
Fig. 8. Thanksgiving turkey crate in the shape of a
warship, made for President Warren Harding (1921-
1923) by the Chamber of Commerce in Cuero, Texas,
home of the Turkey Trot (a then-popular ragtime tune).
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