Pomp and Turkumstance: What's the Deal with Presidential Turkey Pardons?
A roundabout look at an odd American tradition.
Sporting a long peacoat and a particularly uninspired blue striped tie, last Friday Joe Biden strolled through the brisk afternoon air and up to a podium situated in the Rose Garden. Directing his gaze to a crowd just outside of the camera’s view, the president began to speak.
The occasion for today’s press conference? The pardoning of Peanut Butter and Jelly, two broad-breasted white tom turkeys hailing from Jasper, Indiana.
It’s all a part of an objectively bizarre American ritual that happens every November, just before Thanksgiving. Despite a political career spanning five decades, Joe stumbles a bit as he addresses his audience – a curious mix of photojournalists and turkey industry bigwigs, families in tow.
After expressing gratitude to National Turkey Federation chairman Pete Seger and his children, Biden attempts to make a joke(?) about how much he loves to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. This doesn’t yield much of a response, but the skilled public speaker quickly pivots. “Yes, instead of getting BASTED, these two birds are getting BOOSTED,” the president exclaims, referring to the FDA and CDC’s recent announcement to extend COVID-19 booster shots to all adults. This joke lands a few laughs. After adding in some brief sentiments on tradition and hope and healing and resilience, Biden takes a few steps toward a table adorned with a garland of autumn leaves.
A blonde woman lifts a turkey (Peanut Butter) onto the table, and the president admires his great size. Considering all of the commotion surrounding it, the bird is surprisingly calm.
This is because Peanut Butter has been conditioned from birth for this particular moment. As part of the “presidential flock”, Peanut Butter and Jelly were both raised specifically for the purpose of being spared by the President of the United States. From the moment they hatched in July, the flock has endured loud music, grabby children, and flashing lights (among other things) to acclimate them for this precise moment. Peanut Butter and Jelly, after being identified as the two birds in the bunch with the best temperaments, were then transported 10.5 hours away to Washington DC just for this ritual. The night before the ceremony, they stayed at the Willard Intercontinental, a luxurious hotel that can cost several thousand dollars just to stay the night. Here they are, trouncing around a hotel room that most people cannot actually afford.
After gingerly placing a hand on Peanut Butter’s back, Joe Biden bellows a resounding, “I pardon you”. An invisible marching band begins to blare a rendition of “God Bless America”. Before schmoozing with the press, Biden turns around to Jelly. “You don’t have to get up here, but I pardon you, kid,” the president says to the turkey as it aimlessly wanders.
Most Americans are familiar with (but don’t think particularly hard about) this peculiar practice. But when I recently explained to a few online friends from outside of the US that pardoned turkeys used to be sent to live out their remaining days at Disneyland, they thought I was weaving some sort of elaborate lie. In retrospect, I can’t blame them – when you take the time to actually explain the details, it very quickly makes the shift from merely surprising to absolute lunacy. And, inevitably, it brings up a simple question with a complicated answer: Why?
I suppose the best place to start is at the beginning – Thanksgiving.
As much as the United States loves to romanticize the story of Pilgrims spontaneously breaking bread with the indigenous tribes of the New World, the concept of “Thanksgiving” and autumn harvest festivals is hardly an American innovation. Agrarian societies have organized feasts to celebrate the bounties of growing seasons for several thousand years. The holiday Americans celebrate these days is simply the latest, region-specific iteration of an ancient tradition.
Almost as old as the harvest festival concept is man’s relationship with the turkey. Historians believe that the wild turkey was first domesticated by Mesoamerican civilizations about 2000 years ago. Indigenous to North and Central America, the fowl didn’t actually make its way to Europe until the Spanish shipped a few over in the 16th century.
When the first settlers came to the United States, they quickly integrated the strange and easily accessible birds into the harvest festivals they surely already celebrated. When the two were married, the first glimmers of the modern celebration we know today were born.
That said, Thanksgiving wasn’t celebrated with any regularity until 1863. Amidst the Civil Way, president Abraham Lincoln first declared the fourth Thursday of November a national holiday. Incidentally, Lincoln was also the president first associated with “pardoning” a turkey. However, all records indicate that this turkey was intended for Christmas rather than Thanksgiving dinner. Furthermore, the only reason the animal was allowed to live was that Lincoln’s son, Tad, had adopted the turkey as his pet.
There’s no real surviving answer as to why someone presented a live turkey to Honest Abe in the first place. But sacrifices and offerings to deities and high-ranking leaders, like harvest festivals, are nothing new to human civilization. The practice likely predates the Ancient Hebrew and Greek and certainly lives on today. Obviously, the sacrifices of today are less gory than the ones of yesteryear, but the sentiment of gratitude is still there.
From a capitalistic perspective, however, making an offering can become more than a simple display of gratitude. Done correctly, it can also serve as an opportunity to make a profit. Put simply, it’s free advertising.
Perhaps the first to see the market potential in feeding the president was Horace Voce, a poultry farmer from Rhode Island. After sending a dressed bird to President Ulysses S. Grant in 1873, Voce secured a niche position as the White House’s sole poultry supplier for the next 40 years. When Voce finally died in 1913, farmers from around the country rushed to fill the void left behind. By the time Calvin Coolidge assumed leadership in 1923, he had to explicitly request that the American people stop sending live animals for slaughter. Even after this request, citizens continued donating livestock and game of all sorts to the Commander in Chief. In 1926, he was even gifted a raccoon intended to be served for Thanksgiving dinner. Instead, First Lady Grace Coolidge named it Rebecca and began walking it around the White House grounds on a leash.
Coinciding with the rise of industrial agriculture, the National Turkey Federation ultimately seized the spot independent farmers clamored for and began officially scheduling turkey deliveries to Washington D.C. during the Truman administration.
For some time, the delivered birds were killed and consumed without a second thought. But, for reasons never made entirely clear, in 1963 President John F Kennedy made a spur-of-the-moment decision not to kill a 55 lb fowl gifted to him by the NTF. Kennedy was assassinated just 72 hours after the pardon, but the inexplicable mercy he showed that Thanksgiving lived on.
Though presidents Nixon and Reagan quietly made arrangements for their NTF birds to continue living quiet lives, it wasn’t until George H.W. Bush’s stretch in 1989 that pardoning turkeys became official practice. Since then, each president has adopted their own way of handling the strange event. Both Bushes recruited children to interact with the animals and, presumably, mask the inherent awkwardness that results when you force a politician to interact with any animal less tame than a dog. Obama used strings of dad jokes to cope, while Clinton’s strategy seemed to be getting through the necessary speech and ceremony as quickly as humanly possible.
Trump, in true Trumpian fashion, steamrolled through out-of-touch monologues that primarily centered on the greatness of himself and his family. At one point during his first turkey pardon, he even alludes to having looked into overturning the turkey pardons Obama granted the year prior.
As for Biden? After a tumultuous first year in office, turkeys seem to be the furthest thing from the 46th president’s mind.
With the prospect of football games, family gatherings, and feasts ahead, it’s easy for most Americans to forget about the annual turkey pardon. The presidents, historically, don’t seem to put much thought into it either. Even the leaders that first began the practice did so on a whim more so than for any serious consideration of the turkey in question.
But not everyone has such a laissez-faire attitude about turkey pardoning. or those fueling the industry, the silly tradition arguably plays a crucial role in maintaining the current status quo of turkey as a holiday must-have.
As much as we take the grab-and-go deli counters available to us today for granted, poultry was not always so accessible. For a long time, turkey was a delicacy because its increased body mass and decreased egg output (compared to run-of-the-mill chickens) made it a less profitable animal to farm. As hard as it is to imagine, turkey was not always a guarantee on the holiday table unless you had the means to go shoot one down yourself. This scarcity likely explains why someone decided to send the Coolidges a live raccoon to feast on instead back in the 1920s.
Relatively recent innovations in industrial agriculture have changed all of that. The discovery of Vitamin D around the turn of the 20th century led to the invention of incubators, which in turn allowed farmers to produce eggs and meat all year long. This drastically lowered the price of eggs, making the prospect of raising turkeys en masse much more viable. In conjunction with this, poultry farmers were perfecting the art of selectively breeding bigger birds and feeding them in a way such that they could balloon to massive sizes.
With the rest the of mechanics of factory farming in place, the only thing left for meat producers to do was get the word out about all of the turkeys now up for grabs. And what better way to do so than with the pageantry and theater of a presidential pardon?
By a large margin, the United States is the world’s largest provider of turkey. Thanksgiving day is the day that US citizens statistically buy (and eat) the most turkey. Even though these facts may seem obvious, it’s hard to understate just how crucial the singular holiday is in maintaining the turkey entire industry. This CNBC article mentions that Americans ate 45 million turkeys over the course of Thanksgiving 2017. The average domesticated turkey weighs between 30-40 lbs, which means that approximately 1.35-1.8 billion pounds of turkey are reserved for Thanksgiving alone. Throughout 2017, about 6 billion pounds of turkey was produced. By these metrics, it’s safe to say that 20-30% of the nation’s turkey supply is consumed within the last week and a half of November.
That’s not to say that the National Turkey Federation puts all of its eggs in one basket, so to speak. A quick look at their Youtube channel features a stream of fairly polished pro-poultry propaganda, urging people to eat more turkey. One farm and factory tour features prominent animal behaviorist Temple Grandin reassuring viewers that each animal is treated with the utmost care. From the moment turkeys leave the confines of their eggs to the moment they’re rendered unconscious by controlled CO2 leaks prior to slaughter, Grandin assures us that we can take comfort in the fact that the operation is being executed “the right way”.
But what about Peanut Butter and Jelly? Now that they’ve made the appearance they were born for, what will become of them? As is part of our frankensteined tradition, both turkeys will live out their lives enjoying the best care a turkey could hope for. They’ll return to Indiana and be supervised by attendants at Perdue University for the rest of their lives. It all sounds pretty nice and is surely preferable to life in a crowded barn.
Unfortunately, these two toms are fated to have a short life, and will likely die before next Thanksgiving, even with the best veterinary care available.
The largest wild turkey ever recorded weighed 37.6 lbs. Domesticated turkeys –which are genetically identical to their wild cousins – have been known to grow as large as 86 lbs. Morbid obesity strains a bird’s organs, leaves them susceptible to overheating, and results in long-term mobility issues. Sad as it may be, Peanut Butter and Jelly were sentenced to this fate long before they hatched, and nothing the President says can take that away.
Earlier, I made a comparison linking modern-day turkey pardoning ceremonies to the sacrifices of ancient times. I stand by that claim to a degree – Peanut Butter and Jelly are sacrifices. But instead of sacrificing PB&J’s lives, the powers that be instead sacrifice the profits the two birds might otherwise yield. By strutting in front of a camera, in ways they couldn’t possibly begin to fathom, the pair do their small part in ensuring turkey continues to be a part of Thanksgiving dinner. Instead of slaughtering a few to benefit the living left behind, Peanut Butter and Jelly have been spared this November to ensure that the cycle they’re trapped in continues for generations to come.
UPDATE (11/23/22): Turns out my prediction last year was wrong! As of 11/22, PB&J are still poking around Perdue University. Godspeed, boys.