Thanksgiving Thoughts: Pilgrims Were Forced to Be Socialists By a Group of Wealthy English Investors!

That's a bit of info I picked up on the Thanksgiving Day this year.

I was going to re-post the last year's Thanksgiving Day post, about how the Pilgrims finally ditched "socialism" and embraced capitalism, to the benefit of all. The article cited in that post, "Great Thanksgiving Hoax", was from Ludwig von Mises Institute, and was written by Richard J. Maybury in 1985.

And no, Ms. Kate Zernike of New York Times, it is not the tea party propaganda. But she seems to like to reduce everything down to a right-wing propaganda or left-wing propaganda, a very cynical approach befitting certain Gen-Xer writers. (For more about her, here's what Andrew Breitbart had to say about her back in February this year.)

The Pilgrims became "socialists" not by choice but under the contract with big investors.

From Politizoid:

You might be surprised to know that the Pilgrims attempted to implement socialism. Of all the people in the world, it should have worked with them. They were a small, close-knit community united by a common religious and philosophical foundation as evidence by the Mayflower Compact, and yet their “communal service” experiment failed as all forms of socialism have done throughout history.

To be fair to the Pilgrims, it was not exactly their plan. Funded by a group of investors, they were contractually obligated to follow their benefactors’ blueprint for the settlement which included holding all things in common and sharing equally in the proceeds of their labor.

William Bradford, the second governor of the Plymouth Colony, describes this economic plan as a complete disaster in his History of the Plymouth Settlement. All produce was taken into a common storehouse where food rations were based on what people truly needed. At the same time, everyone was expected to work hard.

One minor problem, there was no motivation to work.

... The harvest of 1621 produced enough food to host the first Thanksgiving, but food soon became scare again. The 1622 harvest was even more disappointing, and starvation became the norm.

After three years of failure, they were forced to abandon their investors’ communal plan. It was a matter of life and death. There simply was not enough food to survive. The colony leaders finally decided to assign each family a plot of land and allowed every man to plant corn for his own household. ...

And America never looked back. Soon, the harvest was so plentiful that they started to export. No one went hungry.

Here's the link to my 2009 Thanksgiving post.

Happy Thanksgiving, and please remember never to follow, ever, the direction given by the big business or the big government. The pilgrims tried to adhere to their contractual obligations almost to their ruin and death. They finally realized enough was enough, and ditched the contract. Don't believe people in power who claim to know what's good for the rest of us.

(Hmmm. It sounds familiar... Underwater homeowners trying to keep paying the mortgages to the banks who ripped them off by inflating the property value and snared them with loose underwriting and then allegedly sold the mortgages to tax-shelter trusts to issue mortgage-backed securities to dupe investors like pension funds, although more evidence has begun to surface that these mortgage-backed securities have no mortgages that back them, because the banks didn't actually transferred the mortgages to the trust. The homeowners act like a responsible citizen who feels bound by the contract, while the banks have no problem ignoring the contract. When will be the "enough is enough" moment? Ever?)

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The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

or How Pilgrims Discovered Free Market and Thrived.

This is the post I wanted to present on Thanksgiving Day. The article below was written originally by Richard J. Maybury for the November 1985 issue of The Free Market newsletter from Ludwig von Mises Institute. It was later reprinted for Mises Daily on November 20, 1999.

The author cites 'History of Plymouth Plantation' written by the governor of the colony, William Bradford, and tells us a very different story of the pilgrims and their Thanksgiving Days. It turns out that the colonists went hungry for years, because of the economic system that they insisted on having - "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". In other words, early socialism.

It was after the governor gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit - in other words, introduction of a free market - that the harvest was so plentiful that the colonists began exporting. They never went hungry ever again.

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The Great Thanksgiving Hoax (Richard J. Maybury, 11/20/1999 Mises Daily, Ludwig von Mises Institute) [emphasis is mine]

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.

The official story has the pilgrims boarding the Mayflower, coming to America and establishing the Plymouth colony in the winter of 1620-21. This first winter is hard, and half the colonists die. But the survivors are hard working and tenacious, and they learn new farming techniques from the Indians. The harvest of 1621 is bountiful. The Pilgrims hold a celebration, and give thanks to God. They are grateful for the wonderful new abundant land He has given them.

The official story then has the Pilgrims living more or less happily ever after, each year repeating the first Thanksgiving. Other early colonies also have hard times at first, but they soon prosper and adopt the annual tradition of giving thanks for this prosperous new land called America.

The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.

In his 'History of Plymouth Plantation,' the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food. He says the colony was riddled with "corruption," and with "confusion and discontent." The crops were small because "much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable."

In the harvest feasts of 1621 and 1622, "all had their hungry bellies filled," but only briefly. The prevailing condition during those years was not the abundance the official story claims, it was famine and death. The first "Thanksgiving" was not so much a celebration as it was the last meal of condemned men.

But in subsequent years something changes. The harvest of 1623 was different. Suddenly, "instead of famine now God gave them plenty," Bradford wrote, "and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God." Thereafter, he wrote, "any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day." In fact, in 1624, so much food was produced that the colonists were able to begin exporting corn.

What happened?

After the poor harvest of 1622, writes Bradford, "they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop." They began to question their form of economic organization.

This had required that "all profits & benefits that are got by trade, working, fishing, or any other means" were to be placed in the common stock of the colony, and that, "all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock." A person was to put into the common stock all he could, and take out only what he needed.


This "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was an early form of socialism, and it is why the Pilgrims were starving. Bradford writes that "young men that are most able and fit for labor and service" complained about being forced to "spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children." Also, "the strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak." So the young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.

To rectify this situation, in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines.

Many early groups of colonists set up socialist states, all with the same terrible results. At Jamestown, established in 1607, out of every shipload of settlers that arrived, less than half would survive their first twelve months in America. Most of the work was being done by only one-fifth of the men, the other four-fifths choosing to be parasites. In the winter of 1609-10, called "The Starving Time," the population fell from five-hundred to sixty.

Then the Jamestown colony was converted to a free market, and the results were every bit as dramatic as those at Plymouth. In 1614, Colony Secretary Ralph Hamor wrote that after the switch there was "plenty of food, which every man by his own industry may easily and doth procure." He said that when the socialist system had prevailed, "we reaped not so much corn from the labors of thirty men as three men have done for themselves now."

Before these free markets were established, the colonists had nothing for which to be thankful. They were in the same situation as Ethiopians are today, and for the same reasons. But after free markets were established, the resulting abundance was so dramatic that the annual Thanksgiving celebrations became common throughout the colonies, and in 1863, Thanksgiving became a national holiday.

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.

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If the pilgrims and early colonists had stuck to their socialist model, they may still have somehow managed to survive and still somehow gradually conquer the rest of the continent. But they didn't. They very quickly learned what worked - a free market system - and the growth and wealth creation was explosive. The Erie Canal was dug in 15 years instead of 30, and was open for business after 8 years since it was started. Lewis and Clark Expedition of crossing the continent to the Pacific coast and back took them only two years.

And that's what has made this country unique and resilient, because it has been based on individual effort and ingenuity and the free market system that rewards them, to the benefit of everyone in the society.

Don't let anyone (particularly the government) convince you otherwise.

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