Despite the Right’s Thanksgiving myth, the Pilgrims rebelled against their corporate landlord

Larry Kummer, Editor

12 years ago

Summary: Many posts here have documented the myths the Right has created to reshape our views of ourselves, of America. Today we debunk an especially ugly one, twisting the history of Thanksgiving. Read to the end for the big twist ending. {Second of two posts today}

Myths (AKA lies) are among the tools the Right uses to reshape America. Nicely crafted, interlocking stories about a fictional past of America. Such as a Thanksgiving as a celebration as an escape from socialism…

(a) “The Great Thanksgiving Hoax“, Richard J. Maybury, Mises Institute, 20 November 1999 — Opening:

Each year at this time school children all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating. It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving’s real meaning.

(b) “The Real Story of Thanksgiving“, Rush Limbaugh, 21 November 2007 — Opening:

That Thanksgiving story is right out of my second book, See, I Told You So, and we do that in the last half hour of every show on the Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving. It is so at odds with what all of us were taught in school. I’ll just give you a little heads-up. If you were like me, what we were taught in school was that the Pilgrims came over, and they were just overwhelmed; they were swamped; they had no clue where they were; they had no clue how to feed themselves; they had to clue how to protect themselves; they had no idea how to stay warm; they had no idea how to do anything. They were just typical, dumb white people fleeing some other place they couldn’t manage to live in.

(c) “The Lost Lesson of Thanksgiving“, John Stossel, Fox News, 24 November 2010 — “Had today’s political class been in power in 1623, tomorrow’s holiday would have been called “Starvation Day” instead of Thanksgiving.”

(d) “Occupy Plymouth Colony: How A Failed Commune Led To Thanksgiving“, Jerry Boywer, Forbes, 23 November 2011 — “It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom.”

(e) “The Pilgrims Were Thankful They Abandoned Communism; And We Too Can Be Thankful“, Liberty Counsel, 21 November 2012 — Excerpt:

“We have so much to be thankful for in America” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. “The Pilgrims learned a brutal lesson regarding communal living. In America, equal opportunity has always been a foundational value. Attempting to create equal outcomes for everyone will create disincentives and make society poor. Let’s be grateful and learn from the Pilgrims. Let’s not repeat their mistake.” Staver said.

(f) “Occupy Plymouth Colony: How A Failed Commune Led To Thanksgiving“, Jerry Boywer, Forbes, 23 November 2011 — “It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom.”

It’s been widely debunked, but the Left has never learned to play this game well. They address the facts, but can’t get the message out as well as the Right (with its well-funded array of institutional advocates). They’ve addressed the details, such as this thorough debunking: “Right Wing Continues to Push ‘Socialist Pilgrims’ Myth”, Brian Tashman, Right Wing Watch, 24 November 2011

But that hasn’t stopped the Right from propagating the myth that the failures of “socialism” forced them to embrace capitalism. In order to make the myth seem true, Fox News commentator John Stossel simply moves the date of the first Thanksgiving from 1621 to 1623 …

They’ve done it with humor: “Sorry, Mr. Limbaugh, Thanksgiving Has Never Been A Celebration Of The Pilgrims’ Triumph Over Socialism“, Doktor Zoom, 28 November 2013 — Opening:

It’s Thanksgiving Day, so as we gather together with (or hide from) our families, however functional or dysfunctional they may be, let us remember the true meaning of any American holiday: It’s an opportunity to pound home a political lesson about why We Are Good and They Are Bad. It’s a revered grim tradition: You serve Susan Stamberg’s socialist NPR cranberry relish, and your Teabagger brother-in-law recites how the settlers of Plymouth Plantation nearly starved because they had socialism forced upon them, but finally prospered after they became capitalists.

They’ve done it with scholarly thoroughness: “The Pilgrims Were … Socialists?“, Kate Zernike, New York Times, 20 November 2010 — Excerpt:

Historians say that the settlers in Plymouth, and their supporters in England, did indeed agree to hold their property in common — William Bradford, the governor, referred to it in his writings as the “common course.” But the plan was in the interest of realizing a profit sooner, and was only intended for the short term; historians say the Pilgrims were more like shareholders in an early corporation than subjects of socialism.

“It was directed ultimately to private profit,” said Richard Pickering, a historian of early America and the deputy director of Plimoth Plantation, a museum devoted to keeping the Pilgrims’ story alive.

The arrangement did not produce famine. If it had, Bradford would not have declared the three days of sport and feasting in 1621 that became known as the first Thanksgiving. “The celebration would never have happened if the harvest was going to be less than enough to get them by,” Mr. Pickering said. “They would have saved it and rationed it to get by.”

… Bradford did get rid of the common course — but it was in 1623, after the first Thanksgiving, and not because the system wasn’t working. The Pilgrims just didn’t like it. In the accounts of colonists, Mr. Pickering said, “there was griping and groaning.” “Bachelors didn’t want to feed the wives of married men, and women don’t want to do the laundry of the bachelors,” he said.

The real reason agriculture became more profitable over the years, Mr. Pickering said, is that the Pilgrims were getting better at farming crops like corn that had been unknown to them in England.

As for Jamestown, there was famine. But historians dispute the characterization of the colony as a collectivist society. “To call it socialism is wildly inaccurate,” said Karen Ordahl Kupperman, a historian at New York University and the author of “The Jamestown Project.” “It was a contracted company, and everybody worked for the company. I mean, is Halliburton a socialist scheme?” The widespread deaths resulted mostly from malaria.

… The Tea Party’s take on Thanksgiving may have its roots in the cold war. Samuel Eliot Morison, the admiral and historian who edited Bradford’s “Of Plymouth Plantation,” titled the chapter about Bradford ending the common course “Indian Conspiracy; Communism; Gorges.” But it is important to note that he was writing in 1952, amid great American suspicion of the Soviets. “The challenges of the cold war and dealing with Russia are reflected in the text,” Mr. Pickering said.

Likewise, Cleon Skousen, the author of the “Making of America” textbook, was an anticommunist crusader in the 1960s. (His term for Jamestown was not socialism but “secular communism.”)

A few give powerful rebuttals with the same power as the Right serves their myths. This is the best rebuttal I’ve seen: “The People’s Republic of Plymouth“, Joshua Keating, Slate, 25 December 2014 — “The strange and persistent right-wing myth that Thanksgiving celebrates the pilgrims’ triumph over socialism.” Excerpt:

This all sounds very Randian, but the story is not quite the free-market folktale that its boosters would have you believe. … But the Rush Limbaugh crowd should note that the settlers at Plymouth were rebelling against the rules set by a corporation, not against the strictures of some Stalinist collective farm or a hippie commune.

As Nick Bunker writes in 2010’s Making Haste From Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World “Far from being a commune, the Mayflower was a common stock: the very words employed in the contract. All the land in the Plymouth Colony, its houses, its tools, and its trading profits (if they appeared) were to belong to a joint-stock company owned by the shareholders as a whole. … Under the terms of the contract … for the first seven years no individual settler could own a plot of land.