Melanie Kirkpatrick on Unveiling Thanksgiving's Hidden Heroines

Join Roger in this week's Liberty + Leadership Podcast as he speaks with author and seasoned journalist, Melanie Kirkpatrick. Roger and Melanie discuss her most recent book, "Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman." They explore the true meaning of Thanksgiving through her book “Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience," discussing the holiday's origins and the woman who played a critical role in the American Thanksgiving tradition. Additionally, they discuss Melanie's 2014 book, "Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad," the current climate of censorship in China and her friendship with imprisoned journalist, Jimmy Lai.

Melanie Kirkpatrick is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, having previously worked for 30 years at The Wall Street Journal, rising from copy editor to opinion editor, member of the editorial board and deputy editor of the newspaper’s editorial pages. In addition to authoring several books, Melanie is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; a trustee emerita of Princeton in Asia, an internship program in Asia for young graduates of American universities; a member of the Trollope Society; a member of the advisory board of the Human Freedom Program of the George W. Bush Institute; and a director of the America for Bulgaria Foundation. She was co-editor of several editions of the Index of Economic Freedom, published annually by the Journal and The Heritage Foundation.
 
Melanie received the 2001 Mary Morgan Hewett Award for Women in Journalism from the Friends of the East-West Center in Honolulu. The annual award recognizes a journalist who has demonstrated commitment. She received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s degree in English from the University of Toronto.
 
The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by kglobal. This episode was recorded at Reason Magazine’s podcast studio. If you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org.

To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.

Melanie’s Books:

• Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman  
• Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience 
• Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad  
• Princeton-in-Asia, a century of service: Reminiscences and reflections 

Transcript

Roger Ream: 0:00

Hello and welcome. I'm Roger Reem, and this is the Liberty and Leadership Podcast a conversation with T-FAS alumni, supporters, faculty and friends who are making a real impact in public policy, business, philanthropy, law and journalism. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Melanie Kirkpatrick. Melanie is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, having previously worked for three decades at the Wall Street Journal, rising from copy editor to opinion editor, member of the editorial board and deputy editor of the newspaper's editorial pages. Melanie is the author of several books, including, most recently, lady Editor Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman. Thanksgiving, the Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience. And Escape from North Korea the Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad. We'll discuss all three books, plus her work in journalism. Melanie is a supporter of the Fund for American Studies, so I may also ask her about that. Thank you for joining me today, melanie.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 1:14

It's great to be with you, Roger. I'm glad that you've invited me.

Roger Ream: 1:17

Well, I think this is an appropriate podcast for the month of November, especially because of your book about Thanksgiving, which we'll get to. But could I first ask you to just talk a little bit about your 30-year career at the Wall Street Journal and in journalism? How do you get your start in journalism?

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 1:37

I got my start in journalism a little late compared to lots of my colleagues in journalism. I was really interested in journalism in high school and was editor of our school newspaper. But when I got to college I became very academic. I spent most of my life in the library rather than being out doing things. And it was only when I went to graduate school that I realized after all I didn't want to be a professor. I wanted to do something that was more rooted in the present.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 2:13

So I went off to Tokyo with Princeton and Asia, which was and still is an organization that places graduates of any college in positions around Asia, and they put me with Time Life Books, which was a great entry into the world of writing. And when I was living in Tokyo I also was asked to co-host a TV show for junior high school students who were studying English, but the story is a little too long. But then I went back to my hometown, buffalo, new York, where I was able to get a job on the local newspaper. And from that that journalism experience and that Asia experience I applied to the Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong, which was a new edition of the Wall Street Journal, and off, I went to Hong Kong to work for them. So that was how I got my start, and then the rest of my journalism career was with the journal in Asia and here in the States.

Roger Ream: 3:22

How long were you in Hong Kong?

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 3:23

I was in Hong Kong for six and a half years and in Tokyo for three and a half, so a total of 10 years in Asia. And then I was also sent back there to do by the journal, to fill in for various people or do some writing, reporting and writing.

Roger Ream: 3:41

We had a program at the Fund for American Studies in Hong Kong for just over 10 years and sadly had to shut it down there when things changed very dramatically the last few years. Hong Kong was just a great city. I'm sure you found it that when you were there Did you have the opportunity to meet Jimmy Lai when you worked for the journal there. I know he's a leading journalist.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 4:08

Yes, jimmy was a friend. I actually met him a few years after I left Hong Kong, when he was becoming a little more active in his thinking and in his public presence. But he is an amazing man. As you know, roger, he is in jail in Hong Kong right now. He was a newspaper publisher a publisher of the most popular newspaper in Hong Kong and it was pro-market and pro-human liberty which got him in deep trouble with the authorities, who were looking on from Beijing, and eventually his magazine was shut down, everything confiscated and he was thrown in jail, where he's been now for, I think, three years.

Roger Ream: 5:02

Yeah, yeah. It'll be sadly three years in December that he was put in jail and we were pleased to honor him last year in New York at our annual journalism awards dinner, which a big part of that dinner is to introduce our Joseph Rago fellow, who has the opportunity to work at the Wall Street Journal, and we love that. You've been able to come to some of those dinners. You knew, joe.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 5:29

Yes, I knew him. We worked closely together While I was still at the journal. He started out as one of the assistant op-ed editors and then moved into a full-time editorial writing job. He died suddenly when he was in his 30s of natural causes and it was a huge loss to journalism. He was already a star. He had won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorial writing and he was moving on to, I think, bigger things at the journal. So it was a great loss. He was a soft-spoken man but he had a powerful pen. He really could dive deeply into subjects. He was a great researcher and his writing had such a flair, a humor, interesting vocabulary, and all I can say is that I still miss him.

Roger Ream: 6:38

Yeah well, it was great he was recognized while he was alive with the Pulitzer Prize for that editorial writing and I'm so pleased that in partnering with his parents, paul and Nancy Rago, in the Wall Street Journal. Now we've had six Joseph Rago fellows there, two of whom were hired full-time at the journal after they completed their fellowship. A third was just hired by the Boston Globe and our sixth has just started at the journal and she's already had a piece that she wrote up here in the paper and is having a great experience there.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 7:12

Well, they couldn't have a better role model than Joe Rago.

Roger Ream: 7:15

That's right. That's right. Well, let's talk about your three books. The most recent is Lady Editor, and it covers the life and legacy of Sarah Josepha Hale, who I had not known about until you wrote this book, and it's a fascinating story about a woman who had a tremendous influence on 19th century American culture. But she's connected to Thanksgiving as well, another book you wrote.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 7:44

Yeah, she's known as the godmother of Thanksgiving and she was responsible, through her work as editor of Gaudi's Ladies' Book, to push for a National Thanksgiving Day. And here I need to back up a little bit in history. Before, lincoln called a National Thanksgiving Day in the middle of the Civil War in 1863, before that, americans celebrated Thanksgiving, but not on the same day. Thanksgiving was called by the governor of the state, and sometimes the governors didn't call a Thanksgiving Day, but by the middle, the second quarter of the country, most of the states and territories were indeed celebrating the holiday and Hale thought that the holiday. Every American should celebrate the holiday, and do so on the same day. She thought it would be a unifying factor for Americans to give thanks for their own blessings but also for the blessings of America, of their country, and it was kind of a quasi-patriotic holiday for her. And so in the late 1840s she began a campaign to editorialize for Thanksgiving to be a national holiday. And since her magazine, gaudi's Ladies' Book, was the most widely circulated magazine in America at that time, it was a national magazine and it had the unheard of circulation of 100,000 readers, plus, when you add the pass-along rate, many, many, many more.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 9:45

So she editorialized for Thanksgiving Day and in addition to that she conducted a private campaign among what we would call influencers. She wrote to every member of Congress and the House and Senate. She wrote to every governor, and she did this. These were all handwritten letters, so you can imagine what a task it was. She wrote to other people in the country who were well-known and urging them to join her campaign for a National Thanksgiving Day. She also rose to presidents of the United States and because she was such an influential, well-known person, they wrote back. And those letters are fascinating because they explain what the objection to Thanksgiving was among people who knew the Constitution. She's one letter she received from President Millard Fillmore spelled it out particularly well in which he said look, I'd love to have a National Thanksgiving Day, but this is a power that belongs to the governors, not to the president.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 11:11

So it wasn't until 1863, when she wrote to Lincoln, that he, I guess, decided you know, there may be constitutional objections, but there was a broader issue at stake and that was the health of the Union, and the American people needed a reason to unify. And he wrote this beautiful Thanksgiving proclamation, which I urge you and all your listeners to read if you haven't already. And it's almost like the war didn't exist. He was and he was thinking about what America would be like after the war. Gettysburg the Battle of Gettysburg had just happened that summer and the tide was turning. It was pretty clear at that point that the Union was going to win. And in his proclamation he didn't speak to just, you know, northerners. He spoke to everybody and talked about the country coming together with one heart as one people, a beautiful image and which I think still holds today.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 12:39

That's what Thanksgiving is about. It's at the heart of the holiday.

Roger Ream: 12:44

He wrote a marvelous book In 2016, I think it was published by Encounter Books Thanksgiving the holiday at the heart of the American experience, and it's it's a timeless book, so people should find it and buy it Big and read it in November, especially to learn about Thanksgiving it. It's wonderful you start out with the story of the newcomers school in Queens, which I'd never heard of and a Visit you paid there and I worry. I have a daughter who's a has been a teacher and I know the emphasis in her school system is not Really on all aspects of Thanksgiving. It's about the Indians who participated in it, the Wampanoag a tribe but I think it's so important that Americans learn the story of Thanksgiving In all aspects. Like you tell it in that book what, what first saw, what prompted you to write the book?

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 13:44

the Attacks in New York on September 11th. I was downtown, just outside the World Trade Center at that time and it, like as with every American, that had a profound impact on me and my thinking, and I started thinking more deeply about what it meant to be an American. And as Thanksgiving neared, I went to the section of William Bradford's, the first, one of the first governors of Plymouth Colony, the what, and he wrote a History of Plymouth Colony. And I went to the section where he talked about the first Thanksgiving. It's only a hundred words or so, but it it painted a picture of what Thanksgiving still is people coming together to give thanks, share a meal and In a always a friendly, peaceful way.

Roger Ream: 14:48

I grew up the son of a congregational minister, so Thanksgiving hours was my favorite holiday and we would have a Thanksgiving service at our church every Thanksgiving morning and and we kind of follow the traditional Order of the Puritan service, except my dad wouldn't give a two to three hour sermon, he'd read George Washington's Thanksgiving proclamation. He's often share some of William Bradford's writing as well, and so that was that's always been my favorite holiday. But I love that story at the start of your book because you, you were at a school of immigrants and you at you know you anticipated it would be difficult to get them to speak up when you went into the classroom to talk about it and then you tell the and hopefully that would be true today. But these, these immigrants, like like the pilgrims before them, really had an appreciation for the ideas around Thanksgiving.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 15:47

Yes, that's exactly right, and I should point out that newcomers high school is a public high school and and Thanksgiving, at least at the time and probably still today, was not on the curriculum. And there were, there was a tee. There was a high school history teacher in a high school ESL English is a second language teacher who thought that the students really needed to know more about the holiday and they, for immigrants, and, and traditionally the Thanksgiving has, the celebration of Thanksgiving has been a kind of Entry into the American life. It's, it's a, it's part of their pilgrimage to accepting America and being American. So these kids were Just dying to talk to me often, and usually in imperfect English.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 16:42

But there was one boy who said he was from Tibet, which is, of course, a region of China and hasn't existed as a country for more than half a century, but he said he was like the pilgrims. He said I am a pilgrim too because he left because his family was persecuted For being followers of the Dalai Lama in the Tibetan Buddhist religion. Then a girl spoke up and she was from Egypt and she was a copped, which is an ancient form of Christianity, and said that her family had to leave Egypt because they were Persecuted for their, their religion, egypt of course being a Muslim country, a mostly Muslim country, so the kids really took the holiday very, very personally. And Just one last anecdote when I asked, kind of facetiously, do you have to eat turkey on Thanksgiving? And like it was like, they answered in unison yes, it's the tradition. So they were very keen to taste turkey and Participate. So I found it very hard.

Roger Ream: 18:04

Yeah, yeah. Is there anything in in researching and writing the book? That surprised you.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 18:09

Well, yes, there were actually quite a few things, but One having to do with what we call the first Thanksgiving, that is, the pilgrims and the Wampanoon Indians. I found it curious that William Bradford and other pilgrims who wrote about it did not refer to this as a Thanksgiving. To them it was just another day. They were celebrating the harvest. And the first Thanksgiving in Bradford's writing was A day a couple of years later, in the middle of July, when a Rainfall ended a drought that was seriously impacting the colony and and their crops. So he called a Thanksgiving Day in celebration of that rainfall. And you know, the definition of Thanksgiving has. The definition today is really an amalgam of a lot of traditions, so religious tradition, of course, and not just the pilgrims, in the Wampanoag it's, there were Europeans and and Native Americans celebrating Thanksgiving's prior to the arrival of the pilgrims, and that was a very interesting chapter for me to research in Texas, in Florida, in Maine. So that was one thing that surprised me, I guess I I also was surprised to hear about the spat in the 1940s, before the World War II began in America, about the date of Thanksgiving.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 20:03

Sarah Hale and those who supported her campaign all pushed for Thanksgiving Day to be the last Thursday of November, and that had been the case until the late 30s when FDR Franklin Roosevelt, the president, said he was going to change the date of Thanksgiving. He wanted to make it earlier in the month of November so that there was more time for Christmas shopping and supposedly, under this not very clever economic theory of his, if Americans had more, had another week to shop, they'd buy more. Well, of course that wasn't the case. Americans didn't have the money to purchase more. So this turned into a big fight among the states and what happened was that half of the states, primarily those with a Democratic governor therefore they would have been supporting FDR. Those Democratic states, for the most part, chose to celebrate on FDR's designated day, and everybody else, especially in New England, were outraged that he would tamper what they saw as the sacred date and they decided to celebrate on the traditional date, which was the last Thursday of November, and this threw the whole country into a state of debate and annoyance.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 21:45

My own mother from Buffalo, new York, a Democratic state, was at school in Boston, a Republican state, and, of course, the state where the so-called first Thanksgiving had taken place. So for four years for four years in college, she couldn't go home for Thanksgiving because her days off were a week later than the days off back in Buffalo. Fdr saw that it was clear. His idea was going nowhere and eventually, in 1941, in the autumn of 1941, congress passed a resolution which made the Thanksgiving Day official, and that's how we now vote. It would not be possible today, or would not be easy at least, for states to choose their own day, because up until now, as a result of all of that, we have an official date of Thanksgiving and it's decided by the president. Well, it's decided by law. I take that back. The president issues a proclamation, but it's Congress that has set the date.

Roger Ream: 23:06

Yeah, that sounds like faulty economics that FDR was using to try to change the holiday, especially at that time and the situation the country was in. Let me ask for Americans who do cherish Thanksgiving as a special holiday, what can we do beyond eating turkey and watching football games to connect to that tradition of the first Thanksgiving and the pilgrims and the importance of showing thanks?

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 23:36

One of the things that has changed drastically in our lifetimes, roger, is that most religious institutions don't have Thanksgiving Day services on Thanksgiving Day itself anymore. They may give thanks the previous Sunday or even have a separate service earlier in the week, and that's a big change. At the same time, one survey shows that if Americans are going to say grace before a meal, they do it on Thanksgiving Day, and my anecdotal experience has been that a lot of families stop to give thanks for various blessings. Many even go around the table and ask participants to mention one thing for which they are thankful. But I'd like to see I guess I'd like to see more emphasis on the thanks part of Thanksgiving, and not necessarily religious, but to help bring us back to that first Thanksgiving I like and I close my book with this I'd like to suggest a revival of a tradition that took hold in the 19th century and it's called Five Kernels of Corn, and the tradition which we follow in my own family now is to place five kernels of corn on the Thanksgiving table, and the five kernels of corn are in memory of the starving time that the pilgrims experienced when they first came to America and the grace with which they accepted, according to legend, five kernels of corn that were handed out to them as food.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 25:40

The legend is probably not is probably a legend, not rooted in fact, but the spirit behind it was certainly true and the idea is that even during hardship, we are able to give thanks as a community for what little we have. And that tradition took hold in the 19th century and people would place the five kernels of corn on their Thanksgiving table as a memory of that, and I'd like to see that tradition revived.

Roger Ream: 26:23

Excellent, excellent. I like that idea. Well, let's. In. The time we have remaining, I definitely want to talk about your 2014 book on North Korea Escape from North Korea the Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad. I know it was brought to my mind just in the past month when I read that China had sent quite a few refugees who'd escaped from North Korea back to North Korea to who knows what fate they faced not a good one, I'm sure, and at least some. The United States government, I think, and other governments called out China for doing that. But you tell quite a story in this book. First of all, what inspired you to write it?

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 27:13

As we mentioned earlier in this hour, I spent a lot of years in Asia and became interested in North Korea over that time. I also visited South Korea a number of times and wrote stories about its remarkable achievements in the economy and in its culture. In the late 90s I began hearing reports of people who were escaping from North Korea. It's a crime to leave North Korea without permission. And yet there was a famine going on and tens of thousands of North Koreans illegally crossed the northern border into China. And at the same time China had been opening up a little bit. It had diplomatic relations with South Korea, so South Koreans could go to China, and of course, americans had been going to China since the late 70s. But what happened was a lot of religious people, missionary pastors from America and South Korea started setting up operations in northwestern China northeastern China, excuse me to help the North Koreans who had settled in China, to help them get out of China along a kind of underground railroad. There were also brokers, often not very nice people, who would help North Koreans escape as well, and under South Korea's constitution, any Korean who made his way to the south could stay in South Korea and was considered a citizen of South Korea.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 29:12

So these escapees began turning up in South Korea and their stories became known. It was an ordeal to leave. People could not go directly from north to south. They had to go thousands of miles across China, usually crossing the border on foot, into a Southeast Asian nation that bordered the country, sometimes going north to Mongolia, again crossing by foot. But they were desperate to get out and in Escape from North Korea. I interviewed many North Koreans who had escaped from their country and I also interviewed their rescuers and it was a fascinating experience for me, a very powerful experience, to talk to these people who were so desperate to escape. They told stories about children dying in their arms of starvation and many other terrible things, but they had hope and they were able to somehow manage to get out and create new lives for themselves.

Roger Ream: 30:38

Yeah, it is quite a story that you tell in your book, and the witness of some of these people, some of whom are in the United States now speaking about their experience, is powerful as well, and you capture that in your book. I like to tell young people to open up their search browser and put into it Korea at night and look at those satellite images, which I know you've seen, that show half of that peninsula illuminated in light of civilization and the other half in darkness. Why do you think the Kim family has been able to maintain such a hold on power so many decades?

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 31:18

That's a tough one, roger, but one of the reasons is the lack of information that North Koreans have about life outside their borders. The Kim family has controlled access to the country for 70 years now. To give just one powerful example, there are only an estimated thousand or so North Koreans who have access to the Internet. North Korea has its own intranet and of course, it can control what North Koreans see. All this is changing, and there is a chapter in my book called the Information Invasion, which has been going on now for more than a decade, and North Koreans are beginning to find out more about the outside world through videos that are videotapes that are smuggled in, or access to international radio broadcasts, for example.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 32:25

So that's one reason lack of information about the outside world, and, I should add, perhaps even more importantly, lack of information about the Kim family regime, which is highly secretive and most North Koreans know very little. They are required to have pictures of the Kim leaders in their homes and to dust them, and they worship, in a way, the Kims, but they don't know very much about how they operate. So that's another example. But a third is the brutality of the regime is unprecedented in the modern world, and so that discourages people from speaking out. The Kim family regimes over the 70 years have threatened people with punishment of their families for crimes of an individual. So if an individual North Korean is found to have escaped illegally from the country, his family is often punished, and so that's a powerful deterrent from trying to speak ill of the regime. Or you just want to keep your head down and out of sight.

Roger Ream: 34:03

Well, I don't know. I recall a story that it might be in your book or I may have heard you, in giving a talk about your book, say this, but I don't remember the source. But it was about a North Korean who was a diplomat and was sent to a Middle Eastern country for a posting and when he arrived there he was shocked to see that people wore shoes, because the story he had heard in North Korea was that only in North Korea do people have shoes to wear.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 34:31

Wow.

Roger Ream: 34:32

And it was just an amazing story. And you know I guess these books we're talking about Thanksgiving and Escape from North Korea in a sense are companions, because if you read Escape from North Korea you know you have a lot to be thankful for. If you were either born in the United States or you live here now as an immigrant, you have so much to be thankful for that you weren't born in North Korea. At the Journal I know you had responsibility for the index of economic freedom which the Wall Street Journal has published in partnership with the Heritage Foundation. That is a powerful teaching tool. It shows that the freest countries are also the richest, the cleanest, the healthiest and that the most totalitarian countries, like North Korea and now of course Venezuela and Cuba and many others, are among the most powerful. They are among the poorest and least healthy and least well educated countries. But I think your book on North Korea, that satellite image, that index, are all just great teaching tools for us to have in the classroom, to teach young people today about the importance of liberty.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 35:47

You said it well, roger, and I experienced it when I lived and worked in Asia. I saw what was called the four tigers Singapore, taiwan, south Korea and Malaysia become no, yes, I guess that's the four grow from poor countries to prosperous and that's the case of Singapore, excuse me and in the case of Taiwan and South Korea into democratic, free societies under a rule of law. So there is a connection and you speak well of it.

Roger Ream: 36:31

Well, and I saw a story in the Wall Street Journal last week that showed a significant exodus of Western companies from Hong Kong, with the least loosening of the rule of law, of course, and pulling back from democracy.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 36:50

Well, china was first opening to American businesses in the late 70s and early 80s, and American businesses would require that any dispute be resolved under Hong Kong law, not under Chinese law, and that was because they felt they could trust the British legal system that was in place there, as indeed they could. And now Hong Kong, being under the thumb of Beijing, has become a much more risky place to do business.

Roger Ream: 37:36

Before we conclude, can I? I'd like to ask if you have another book underway? I hope the answer is yes.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 37:44

Not underway, but underthought.

Roger Ream: 37:46

Okay, wonderful, wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation. Thank you for writing some fantastic books that I hope people will still go out and buy. I'm sure they're all available on Amazon and they're fascinating reads, and especially in this month of November, I hope people will be mindful of the things we've talked about today and that Melanie Kirk-Packard has written about with regard to Thanksgiving. So thank you very much.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: 38:15

Thank you, roger, and thank you and your colleagues at the Fund for American Studies for all that you do. Teaching young Americans to value our nation and our nation's history are extremely important activities and I applaud you for it.

Roger Ream: 38:35

Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast. Please don't forget to subscribe, download, like or share the show on Apple, Spotify or YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcast. If you like this episode, I ask you to rate and review it, and if you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email. At podcast at tfastorg, the Liberty and Leadership Podcast is produced at K-Global Studios in Washington DC. I'm your host, Roger Rean, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.