Thanksgiving weekend for many American households often includes food, gatherings of friends and family, and perhaps a viewing of the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Photos and video documenting everything from the iconic to the mundane will be shared across digital platforms, capturing the holiday festivities and preserving their memories. The Kurt K. Film Collection P-805 at the American Jewish Historical Society holds such a memory- several in fact. The collection documents the leisure activities of an American Jewish Family from 1939 to 1966 and includes several trips to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade starting in 1940, then jumping to 1945 and 1946. (The parade was cancelled during World War II for rationing, when materials like rubber and helium were needed for the war effort.)
Today, the featured balloons, celebrity appearances, and other novelty elements of the parade offers insight into current American popular culture. A look at past processions from the 1940’s shows us that many elements of the parade appear to be consistent: Marching bands, balloons, whimsical characters, and an appearance of Santa. Other elements such as fairytale characters, Union Pacific Railroad floats, rocket ships, and Santa’s workshop being pulled by a small airplane, give us a sense of what was occupying the American imagination at the time. Nestled among these joyous holiday images, we also see cartoonish depictions of multiple cultural groups, including indigenous American tribes, that demonstrate the ways these communities were shown at the time, oftentimes in stereotyped and negative ways that were far from the reality. This footage reflects the ugly historical reality of the attitudes of those tasked with putting on the parade, and are part of a much longer, difficult chapter of our nation’s history.
If you choose to document your holiday weekend, we hope you capture wonderful moments that will be fond memories to look back on for years to come. And who knows, one day they may end up in an archive.
