Proclamation 3819—Thanksgiving Day, 1967

The first American tradition grew out of gratitude for survival.

It began--long before independence was a dream--with families responding to an even deeper human impulse. They had suffered the rigors of winter in a new world-and they had endured. They put aside their plows and thanked God for the harvest's bounty.

Over the years, we have made Thanksgiving a unique national occasion. Thanking God for His goodness, we thank Him as well for the promise and the achievement of America.

Our reasons for gratitude are almost without number. We are grateful for the endurance of our government for one hundred and eighty years. We are grateful that the founding fathers planned so wisely for the generations that followed them. We are grateful for a material abundance beyond any mankind has ever known. In our land, the harvests have been good.

Much as we are grateful for these material and spiritual blessings, we are conscious, in this year, of special sorrows and disappointments. We are engaged in a painful conflict in Asia, which was not of our choosing, and in which we are involved in fidelity to a sacred promise to help a nation which has been the victim of aggression. We are proud of the spirit of our men who are risking their lives on Asian soil. We pray that their sacrifice will be redeemed in an honorable peace and the restoration of a land long torn by war.

We are grateful for the tremendous advances which have been made in our generation in social justice and in equality of opportunity, regardless of racial background. But we are saddened by the civil strife which has occurred in our great cities.

Recognizing the trials we have endured and are enduring, I have turned to the Thanksgiving Proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. President Lincoln faced, with equal emphasis, both the blessings and the sorrows of the people.

He recommended to his fellow citizens that, "while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged."

In a similar spirit I ask my fellow citizens to join their thankfulness with penitence and humility. Let us implore Almighty God that, to all our other blessings, He may add the blessings of wisdom and perseverance that will lead us to both peace and justice, in the family of nations and in our beloved homeland.

Now, Therefore, I, Lyndon B. Johnson, President of the United States of America, in consonance with Section 6103 of Title 5 of the United States Code designating the fourth Thursday of November in each year as Thanksgiving Day, do hereby proclaim Thursday, November 23, 1967 as a day of national thanksgiving.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this ninth day of November in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and ninety-second.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON