Presidents didn’t always pardon holiday turkeys
Trump continues tradition in Rose Garden on Tuesday.
Let’s talk WASHINGTON — turkey.
On Tuesday, President Trump will pardon a turkey in the annual Rose Garden ceremony. Just how the Thanksgiving tradition of presidents pardoning poultry began is still a matter of debate.
President Abraham Lincoln is credited as being the first to free a turkey after it was sent to the White House in late 1863. Lincoln’s young son Tad named the turkey Jack, adopted it as a pet and begged his father to spare the bird. Lincoln did, but Jack was intended as a Christmas turkey, not a Thanksgiving one.
Horace Vose, a poultry farmer in Rhode Island, began the tradition of giving presidents Thanksgiving turkeys in 1873 when he sent a 38-pound gobbler to President Ulysses S. Grant. Vose, known as the Turkey King, continued to send prize Thanksgiving turkeys to presidents through Woodrow Wilson in 1913.
The only hitch came in 1904 when the Boston Herald reported that President Theodore Roosevelt’s children had chased the gift turkey “all over the White House grounds, plucking at it and teasing it, and yelling and laughing, until the bird was well nigh exhausted, while the President looked on and laughed.” Roosevelt’s secretary, William S. Loeb Jr., fired back that the story was fake because the Vose turkey was delivered dead, dressed and ready to be roasted for Thanksgiving dinner.
After Vose died in late 1913, others rushed to gobble up the turkey publicity. In 1922, the girls’ club of Morris & Co., a Chicago meat packing company, for the third straight year sent a dressed turkey, named Supreme III, to President Warren G. Harding. Carrying this turkey was a General Motors truck that set a record for truck travel going nonstop from Chicago to the White House in 37 hours and 34 minutes.
After Harding died in office in August 1923, President Calvin Coolidge tried to discourage the turkey-giving that Thanksgiving, saying he would buy his own bird. But in later years Coolidge gave in after the White House was flooded with Thanksgiving offerings of everything from turkeys and ducks to deer and even a live raccoon. Coolidge opted for turkey and kept the raccoon as a pet named Rebecca.
President Harry S. Truman often is wrongly credited with being the first president to pardon a Thanksgiving turkey in 1947. Actually he was the first to receive a live turkey from the National Turkey Federation, an industry group that has presented the presidential bird ever since. Truman didn’t pardon the “National Turkey”; he ate it. As did presidents through Lyndon B. Johnson, except for John F. Kennedy.
At a White House Rose Garden ceremony on Nov. 19, 1963, Kennedy received a 55-pound live turkey with a sign around its neck reading: “Good Eating, Mr. President!” But JFK said, “We’ll just let this one grow.” He never said the bird was pardoned, though some newspaper reports did. Department of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced in March that a question about citizenship would be added to the 2020 Census. Wide-ranging opposition followed — from local and state governments and members of Congress to former directors of the Census Bureau, all citing consequences for decades to come.
Historically, the Census Bureau has worked to guarantee the most accurate count of the entire United States population, notwithstanding citizenship. Census-recorded data has been used to determine how to draw congressional districts, allocate federal funds, and for national disaster and epidemic preparedness.
Supporters of the question say its inclusion is logical and necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The current administration’s unabashed hostility toward immigrants has led others to believe that undocumented individuals will hesitate to participate in a survey that asks about citizenship, resulting in a significant undercount of immigrant and minority communities.
Ross, embroiled in a multistate lawsuit to block the question, has been accused of adding it for partisan purposes. Key issues in the case have made their way to the Supreme Court.
Yes, and one that affects all U.S. residents, including legally documented populations.
The most commonly discussed consequences of an undercount are its effect on congressional districts and federal funding. Robert Shapiro, senior policy fellow at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, estimates that more than 24 million people could avoid the 2020 Census to keep their information from being shared with law enforcement. This would impact federal programs, such as Medicaid, Section 8 Housing and school lunch programs.
From an emergency management perspective, although there is an important need for accurate counting, particularly when discussing electoral representation, any discrepancy between the census-reported “official” population and the actual population is problematic, Jeffrey Schelegelmilch, deputy director for the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, told The Washington Post.
Strategic planning begins with survey data, he said, yet public health responders are responsible for entire communities, notwithstanding the census count. Depressed census numbers threaten to undercut funding and create preparation blind spots.
“You only know what you know,” Schelegelmilch noted.
He also explained that public health responders’ ability to interact with all members of a community is necessary to protect it.
Between 1820 and 1950, a different version of a citizenship question was included on decennial censuses. Since then, it has only appeared as part of the American Community Survey, also administered by the Census Bureau, but annually and to a smaller number of participants.
Typically, new survey questions must go through a lengthy approval process, with the Census Bureau running tests in the years leading up to the count. Accuracy of the count is of utmost importance, according to Juan Pablo Hourcade, a member of the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee and associate director for informatics education at the University of Iowa.
Contrary to the census tradition of testing a question’s impact before adding it, the citizenship inquiry was introduced late, preventing the bureau from fully piloting it, according to the committee’s spring 2018 report.
In a Jan. 8, email, Stephen Buckner, assistant director for communications at the Census Bureau, wrote to set up a meeting with Ross and Undersecretary Karen Dunn Kelley. Buckner said that he wanted to discuss the “crisis” — which he defined as “the unprecedented level of public distrust and fear of providing information to the Census Bureau that Census Bureau field representatives are experiencing” — and the bureau’s plans to address it.
On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments over whether Ross and others can be compelled to explain their actions.