CULTURE WARS ARE PART OF OUR HERITAGE.

Byline: Kimit Muston

I want you to take this holiday weekend to relax and stop worrying about America. If you listen to the cable TV pundits and read the print pundits, we're in the middle of a cultural civil war, red states versus blue states. Politics is so partisan these days, it's hard to imagine a time when we didn't hate each other.

You know why it's hard to imagine? Because we've always hated each other. Because politics has always been partisan. That's the point of politics. And this country has been in a cultural civil war with itself since the Puritans hung out their ``No Catholics welcome'' signs on Plymouth Rock, and Puritan politicians accused each other of not being puritan enough. But probably the silliest, most idiotic of all of the partisan political cultural battles in American history has to be the Battle of Thanksgiving, a brouhaha so pointless it's been almost completely forgotten.

In the spring of 1939, the National Retail Dry Goods Association, the lobby group for the large department stores, approached Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt with an issue of great national concern. Thanksgiving, held by tradition on the fourth Thursday of November, would fall that year on the 30th, the last day of the month, which would leave only 20 shopping days until Christmas. They told the president that moving the holiday to the third Thursday in November would pump an extra billion dollars into the national economy. Roosevelt, eager to please the business community who despised him, issued a proclamation on August 8, 1939, setting Thanksgiving on November 23rd.

The proclamation was legally binding only in the District of Columbia, but immediately a lot of people were very angry. Norman Vincent Peale publicly worried about the president tampering with ``a sacred religious holiday.''

That kind of language indicated his objection wasn't practical, but cultural. In fact, there was a lot more anti-New Deal sentiment in America during the Great Depression than the history books would lead you to believe; even among those people Roosevelt had helped the most. Republicans had almost doubled their seats in Congress in the election of 1938. They knew a battle over Thanksgiving would not win them the White House, but it would fill the newspapers with criticism of Roosevelt until Christmas.

By November it had become a political battle royal. Church leaders railed from the pulpit against the godless socialists stealing our national holiday, and merchants pleaded for reason. Twenty-three states gave thanks on ``Franksgiving,'' named after Franklin Roosevelt, and 23 gave thanks on the Republican Thanksgiving, the 30th - a perfect party line split. Texas and Colorado celebrated on both days.

But if you lived in Republican Connecticut but worked in Democratic New York City, when did you celebrate with your family members - on their day off or yours? Residents of Republican Kansas City, Kansas, who worked in Democratic Kansas City, Missouri, faced the same dilemma. And how did they schedule all those important football games when the teams and fans had to cross state lines?

All the anger and permutations made for a lot of headlines. And a lot of people did a lot of shouting and name-calling. In the end, the only politician who got advantage out of all of it was George Leach, the mayor of Minneapolis, who declared that, in his city, Thanksgiving would begin at 12:01 a.m. on November 23 and end on 11:59 p.m., November 30.

Of course, nothing came from it all. Wendell Wilkie, the Republican candidate, tried to use the issue in the 1940 campaign, but Roosevelt won by yet another landslide. Still, after a second year with no improvement in Christmas sales, he knew he had made a mistake. So on May 20, 1941, Roosevelt signed a second proclamation, returning Thanksgiving to the last Thursday in November. Congress passed a bill making that date a national holiday and Roosevelt signed that, too.

While it lasted, the battle sold a lot of newspapers, it got people on both sides very angry and pundits waxed poetic about how much damage it had caused Roosevelt or how reactionary and irrational the Republicans were being. But in the end, nothing was changed, except that America had survived yet another emotional crisis that had seemed to portend the end of Christian civilization or the end of progress. As it will probably survive even our current crises.

So let us pause and give thanks for that.