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History See other History Articles Title: THANKSGIVING FOR THE TIMES "The New York Times," that is. In the November 20 issue of the good gray lady, titled "The Pilgrims Were . . . Socialists?" Kate Zernike reveals a startling fact: there is an interpretation of the first Thanksgiving that is circulating inside the Tea Party. This interpretation insists that the Pilgrims were socialists. Not commies, you understand, but pinkos at the very least. Can you believe such a thing? Can you imagine anything so off-the-wall nuts? Well, yes, I can. That's because I earned a Ph.D. in history. My specialty was colonial American history. My sub-specialty was Puritan New England. I wrote my dissertation on "The Concept of Property in Puritan New England, 1630-1720." This does not make me an expert in the Pilgrim fathers, of course. Plymouth Colony began a decade earlier. It never quite fit into the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which got rolling in 1630 with the arrival of about 1,000 colonists on 16 ships. Only in 1691 did Plymouth merge with Puritan Massachusetts. The Pilgrims had a problem. Actually, they had several. Their main problem was that they were outside the Church of England. They were separatists. They were persecuted by King James I. A group of them fled to Holland in 1609. Holland was a much more open society. Dutch Protestants were Presbyterian-type Calvinists, while the Pilgrims were Congregationalists. If they stayed in Holland, their grandchildren would wind up non-Scottish Presbyterians. So, they wanted to leave. They were able to get financing to hire two ships to take them to the Virginia Colony. They climbed on board the "Speedwell" and set sail for Southampton, where other separatists joined them on the "Mayflower." But the "Speedwell" proved leaky. They returned, and the Dutch- based group got on board the "Mayflower." They were packed in so tightly that they described the entire trip as the Mayflower compact. OK, I made that up. They landed in what is now Massachusetts -- not Virginia. There they disembarked. In that first winter, almost half of the 102 immigrants died. By the following November, at the famous feast, only four adult women remained alive. There had been 18 when they sailed in 1620. They did not call this feast "Thanksgiving." That began only in 1623. COMMUNAL OWNERSHIP To gain financing in England, the leaders of the group had been asked to agree to a division of the profits after seven years. Half would go to the investors. This led to a familiar economic problem: the free rider. How could everyone be persuaded to do his "fair share" of the work and investing? Tom Bethell described all this in a 1999 article in the Hoover Institution's "Hoover Digest." * * * * * * * * * The colonists hoped that the houses they built would be exempt from the division of wealth at the end of seven years; in addition, they sought two days a week in which to work on their own particular plots (much as collective farmers later had their own private plots in the Soviet Union). The Pilgrims would thereby avoid servitude. But the investors refused to allow these loopholes, undoubtedly worried that if the Pilgrims three thousand miles away and beyond the reach of supervision owned their own houses and plots, the investors would find it difficult to collect their due. How could they be sure that the faraway colonists would spend their days working for the company if they were allowed to become private owners? With such an arrangement, rational colonists would work little on company time, reserving their best efforts for their own gardens and houses. Such private wealth would be exempt when the shareholders were paid off. Only by insisting that all accumulated wealth was to be common wealth, or placed in a common pool, could the investors feel reassured that the colonists would be working to benefit everyone, including themselves. Those waiting in Leyden objected to this arrangement. If the Pilgrims were not permitted private dwellings, the building of good and fair houses would be discouraged, they wrote back to London. Robert Cushman was thus caught in a cross-fire between profit-seeking investors in London and his worried Leyden brethren, who accused him of making conditions fitter for thieves and bondslaves than honest men. . . . This suggests that a form of communism was practiced at Plymouth in 1621 and 1622. No doubt this equalization of tasks was thought (at first) the only fair way to solve the problem of who should do what work in a community where there was to be no individual property: If everyone were to end up with an equal share of the property at the end of seven years, everyone should presumably do the same work throughout those seven years. The problem that inevitably arose was the formidable one of policing this division of labor: How to deal with those who did not pull their weight? * * * * * * * * This arrangement led to a predictable disaster. Everyone became a shirker. Governor William Bradford in his diary described the problem facing the colony. The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. In 1623, against the original agreement, Bradford broke the contract. He and the leaders established a new ownership system. Bradford described it. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the Governor (with the advise of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves; in all other things to go in the general way as before. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of the number, for that end, only for present use (but made no division for inheritance) and ranged all boys and youth under some family. This had very good success, for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression. This extract is from Bradford's "Of Plymouth Plantation." These famous passages are found in the Wikipedia entry on "Plymouth Colony." THE FIRST THANKSGIVING The first Thanksgiving feast was held in 1619 in Jamestown, way down south in what we call Virginia. That is what it was called then, too. There were no such feasts in the first seven years of the colony. The settlers experienced what the Pilgrims had experienced, and for the same reason: common property. For three years, they went through what was later called "the starving time," 1607-10. Two-thirds of the 104 settlers died in the first year. More settlers arrived in 1608. But in 1609, the death toll rose again. At least 80% of them died. Then came the turnaround. This is from the Wikipedia entry on "Jamestown Settlement." Due to the aristocratic backgrounds of many of the new colonists, a historic drought and the communal nature of their work load, progress through the first few years was inconsistent, at best. By 1613, six years after Jamestown's founding, the organizers and shareholders of the Virginia Land Company were desperate to increase the efficiency and profitability of the struggling colony. Without stockholder consent, Governor Dale assigned 3-acre (12,000 m2) plots to its "ancient planters" and smaller plots to the settlement's later arrivals. Measurable economic progress was made, and the settlers began expanding their planting to land belonging to local native tribes. Is this the work of a Tea Party fanatic? Hardly. It has been a standard interpretation for over 60 years. In their 1958 textbook, "Colonial America," Professors Barck and Lefler provided the historical background. Dale imposed a new rule: "no work, no food." Close to the end of the seven-year period -- the same rule that the Virginia company imposed on the Pilgrims in 1620 -- the colony leased the three-acre plots. One of the residents, Ralph Horner, wrote to England in 1615. When our people were fed out of the common store, and labored jointly together, glad was he who could slip from his labor, or slumber over his task he cared not how, nay, the most honest among them would hardly take so much pains in a week, as they now themselves will do in a day; neither cared they for the increase, presuming that howsoever the harvest prospered, the general store must maintain them. The authors added: "So this start toward private ownership was a great boon to Jamestown" (p 45). A VAST TEA PARTY CONSPIRACY Ms. Zernike remains unconvinced. She is derisive. She begins with the standard account of the post-harvest feast, where the Pilgrims invited the local Indians. All very kumbaya, say Tea Party historians, but missing the economics lesson within. In one common telling, the pilgrims who came to Plymouth established a communal system, where all had to pool whatever they hunted or grew on their lands. Because they could not reap the fruits of their labors, no one had any incentive to work, and the system failed -- confusion, thievery and famine ensued. Finally, the governor of the colony, William Bradford, abolished this system and gave each household a parcel of land. With private property to call their own, the Pilgrims were suddenly very industrious and found themselves with more corn than they knew what to do with. So they invited the Indians over to celebrate. (In some other versions, the first Thanksgiving is not a feast but a brief respite from famine. But the moral is always the same: socialism doesn't work.) The same commune-to-capitalism, famine-to- feast story is told of Jamestown, the first English settlement, in 1607. Dick Armey, the former House majority leader and Texas congressman who has become a Tea Party promoter, related it as a cautionary tale in a speech to the National Press Club earlier this year. But it gets worse, in her view. Much worse. Rush Limbaugh promotes the same view. And, horror of horrors, Glenn Beck, too. Rush Limbaugh repeats the Thanksgiving story of Plymouth every year, reading it from a chapter in one of his books titled "Dead White Guys, or What Your History Books Never Told You." (Some details change; one year, he had the Pilgrims growing organic vegetables.) The version is also taught in a one-day course called "The Making of America," which became popular with Tea Party groups across the country after Glenn Beck recommended the work of its author, W. Cleon Skousen, who died in 2006. Tea Party blogs have reposted "The Great Thanksgiving Hoax" from a Web site celebrating the work of the libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises, a favorite of Ron Paul devotees. The post concludes: "Thus the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them." She admits that Bradford got rid of the common property system, but "not because the system wasn't working. The Pilgrims just didn't like it." Why didn't they like it? Bachelors did not like feeding married men's families, she says. No doubt. As for Jamestown, she says, one historian has said that there was not enough advanced planning. They came for gold. There was no gold. So? This has been in the textbooks for many decades. It has been used to show that the colonists prospered with tobacco rather than gold -- a story that goes back four centuries. She blames the Bradford story on Samuel Eliot Morrison, who edited a version that was published in 1952. "But it is important to note that he was writing in 1952, amid great American suspicion of the Soviets." I see. What Bradford wrote is not relevant as a document, because the editor was writing in 1952. Then why did he devote a paragraph to this in his 1965 classic, "The Oxford History of the American People"? He wrote of Jamestown: "No private property was allowed, hence there was no incentive" (p. 50). This was 13 years after his edition of Bradford's history appeared. Morison was widely regarded in his day as the dean of American historians. His college textbook, "The Growth of the American Republic," co-authored with liberal Henry Steele Commager, was dominant for half a century. His version of Jamestown was standard in 1952, 1958, and 1965. It still is. CONCLUSION The prevailing view of the failures at Plymouth and Jamestown has not varied much for four centuries: common property, also known as state ownership of the means of production, also known as socialism. Yet this young woman calls both stories into question. It is guilt by association: the Tea Party. She is the author of "Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America." So, she says these versions of Plymouth and Jamestown are inventions of the Tea Party. She exemplifies an old insight: "When all you've got is a hammer, you think the whole world is nails." I say "Happy Thanksgiving," even to "The New York Times."
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