Proclamation 3752—Thanksgiving Day, 1966

They came in tiny wooden ships. On an unknown and alien shore, they planted and built, settled and survived. Then they gave solemn thanks to God for His goodness and bounty. America, well over 300 years ago had its first Thanksgiving Day.

For many years your Presidents have had the opportunity to proclaim Thanksgiving Day, to address themselves to the American people, to remind us of the blessings we enjoy and the thanks that we owe.

If we consider the fervor with which those colonists in Virginia and Massachusetts gave thanks, when they had so little, we are taught how much deeper should our thanks be--when we have so much.

Never, in all the hundreds of Thanksgiving Days, has our nation possessed a greater abundance, not only of material things but of the precious intangibles that make life worth living.

Never have we been better fed, better housed, better clothed. Never have so many Americans been earning their own way, and been able to provide their families with the marvelous products of a momentous age.

Nor has America ever been healthier, nor had more of her children in school and in college. Nor have we ever had more time for recreation and refreshment of the spirit, nor more ways and places in which to study and to enrich our lives through the arts.

Never have our greatest blessings--our freedoms--been more widely enjoyed by our people. Nor have we ever been closer to the day when every American will have an equal opportunity and an equal freedom.

No, we do not yet have peace in the world. Our men are engaged again, as they have been on so many other Thanksgivings, on a foreign field fighting for freedom. But we can be thankful for their strength that has always kept our liberty secure. We can be thankful for our science and technology that helps to guard our America.

Thanks are better spoken by deed rather than word. Therefore, it behooves a grateful America to share its blessings with our brothers abroad, with those who have so little of the abundance that is ours.

Simple justice and a concern for our fellow man require that we be ready to offer what we can of our food, our resources, our talents, our energies, our skills, and our knowledge to help others build a better life for themselves.

We should thank God that we are able. Let us, therefore, in this splendid American tradition, thank Him who created us and all that we have. Let us do so with a firm resolve to be worthy of His abundant blessings. Let us assemble in our homes and in our places of worship, each in his own way.

Let us thank God for the America we are so fortunate to know.

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 24, 1966, as a day of national thanksgiving.

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

DONE at the City of Washington this seventeenth day of October in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and ninety-first. [SEAL]

LYNDON B. JOHNSON

By the President:

DEAN RUSK

Secretary of State