Proclamation 1284—Thanksgiving Day, 1914

It has long been the honoured custom of our people to turn in the fruitful autumn of the year in praise and thanksgiving to Almighty God for His many blessings and mercies to us as a nation. The year that is now drawing to a close since we last observed our day of national thanksgiving has been, while a year of discipline because of the mighty forces of war and of change which have disturbed the world, also a year of special blessing for us.

It has been vouchsafed to us to remain at peace, with honour, and in some part to succour the suffering and supply the needs of those who are in want. We have been privileged by our own peace and self-control in some degree to steady the counsels and shape the hopes and purposes of a day of fear and distress. Our people have looked upon their own life as a nation with deeper comprehension, a fuller realization of their responsibilities as well as of their blessings, and a keener sense of the moral and practical significance of what their part among the nations of the world may come to be.

The hurtful effects of foreign war in their own industrial and commercial affairs have made them feel the more fully and see the more clearly their mutual interdependence upon one another and has stirred them to a helpful cooperation such as they have seldom practiced before. They have been quickened by a great moral stimulation. Their unmistakable ardour for peace, their earnest pity and disinterested sympathy for those who are suffering, their readiness to help and to think of the needs of others, has revealed them to themselves as well as to the world.

Our crops will feed all who need food; the self-possession of our people amidst the most serious anxieties and difficulties and the steadiness and resourcefulness of our business men will serve other nations as well as our own.

The business of the country has been supplied with new instrumentalities and the commerce of the world with new channels of trade and intercourse. The Panama Canal has been opened to the commerce of the nations. The two continents of America have been bound in closer ties of friendship. new instrumentalities of international trade have been created which will be also new instrumentalities of acquaintance, intercourse, and mutual service. Never before have the people of the United States been so situated for their own advantage or the advantage of their neighbours or so equipped to serve themselves and mankind.

Now, Therefore, I, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States of America, do hereby designate Thursday the twenty-sixth of November next as a day of thanksgiving and prayer, and invite the people throughout the land to cease from their wonted occupations and in their several homes and places of worship render thanks to Almighty God.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this twenty-eighth day of October in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fourteen and of the independence of the United States the one hundred and thirty-ninth.

WOODROW WILSON.