The Real Story of Thanksgiving

The Real Story Behind Thanksgiving

Did you know that the first [Plymouth Colony Pilgrim's] Thanksgiving was a celebration of the triumph of private property and individual initiative?

William Bradford was the governor of the original Pilgrim colony, founded at Plymouth in 1621. The colony was first organized on a communal basis, as their financiers required. Land was owned in common. The Pilgrims farmed communally, too, following the "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" precept.

The results were disastrous. Communism didn't work any better 400 years ago than it does today. By 1623, the colony had suffered serious losses. Starvation was imminent.

Bradford realized that the communal system encouraged and rewarded waste and laziness and inefficiency, and destroyed individual initiative. Desperate, he abolished it. He distributed private plots of land among the surviving Pilgrims, encouraging them to plant early and farm as individuals, not collectively.

The results: a bountiful early harvest that saved the colonies. After the harvest, the Pilgrims celebrated with a day of Thanksgiving -- on August 9th.

Unfortunately, William Bradford's diaries -- in which he recorded the failure of the collectivist system and the triumph of private enterprise -- were lost for many years. When Thanksgiving was later made a national holiday, the present November date was chosen. And the lesson the Pilgrims so painfully learned was, alas, not made a part of the holiday.

Happily, Bradford's diaries were later rediscovered. They're available today in paperback. They tell the real story of Thanksgiving -- how private property and individual initiative saved the Pilgrims.

This Thanksgiving season, one of the many things I'm thankful for is our free market system (imperfectly realized as it is). And I'm also grateful that there are increasing numbers of Americans who are learning the importance of free markets, and who are working to replace government coercion with marketplace cooperation here in America and around the world.

Paul Schmidt


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And there you have it - the real story of Thanksgiving - Collectivism fails yet again. Another experiment proving the truth.

 

So is this to suggest the Native Americans didnt bail them out?

 

The natives bailed them out when they were starving under their failed socialist system which is not to be confused with thanksgiving.

 

Capitalism must be balanced with some socialism to succeed. That seems to be the best forumala for success.

 

Problem is there's no "formula" for collectivsts in this regard. They're never satisfied - except to continuously place more and more of the private sector under government control. There is no "happy medium," as you allege.

When does it end? It ends when collectivist idiots go too far and introduce the "straw that breaks the camel's back."

 

Come now Coyote. Argue if you like, but at least attempt to be honest. Capitalism must be balanced with some socialism in order for you to be happy. Admit it. Success has nothing to do with it.

 

You know it is interesting that one brings up collectivism vs privitization in regards to how the pilgrims faired. Meanwhile, the Natives seemed to be doing just fine in a more or less collective system at the same point and for thousands of years before hand.

 

If you call never making any technological advancements fine and living in a highly primitive state compared to others doing fine...

 

Firstly, they werent on the verge of starving to death.

Your notion of highly primitive and having no technology is objective and not based on reality at the time.
Native American life was not easy, but the social structure and the tools they developed to live in that or any enviroment was most often satisfactory for thier purposes.

 

Just how collectivist were they in reality though? They traded obviously. Did tribal chieftans control what they could and couldn't trade? If two native americans wanted to deal with each other and trade things, did the Chiefs or tribal council or whatever have to approve it? I'm thinking they probably had a great deal of freedom. I doubt it was a purely collectivist society.

 

Thier systems of food gathering and other production was largely collective. As was its consumption.
In regards to trade, I would imagine thier chiefs may have regulated trade between tribes, but not much between individual tribal members. Certainly no taxes came as a result of it.

 

Just a bit of anthropological study is due on your part bunz. There is ample evidence that any of the primitive hunter gatherer societies could live off land that would drive you or I into starvation. That doesn't mean that they were doing fine.

The natives arived here in the stone age and when we found them, they were still using stone tools and had pitifully short life expectancies. Call it what you will, but it is not doing "fine". They were surviving and expending most of their waking hours and lives doing it. Much like many of the modern collectivist societies. Consider the soviet union for example. Standing in line all day for a loaf of bread, a few potatoes and a bottle of vodka. They spent most of their waking hours gathering those few items. Surviving. Is that the sort of life you dream for yourself? If you were living like that, would you characterize yourself as doing "just fine"?

 

The real first Thankgiving

The real first Thanksgiving appears to have happened in St Augustine 2 years before the Pligrims in Massachusetts.

A diary of one of the Spanish soldiers assigned to duty in St Augustine recorded details of the true first Thanksgiving. The Spanish invited the local Indians and the Indians brought local foods to add to the food provided by the Spanish. The menu included fish, oysters, bread, corn, a kind of cornbread, rum and wine.

This post, in no way, is meant to diminish the relevance of the original post in this forum. The Plymouth Colony was a dismal failure as a communist venture. It was saved and fortunes turned around immediately when free enterprise was instituted. These events have been well documented and have been extensively studied.

The USSR failed miserably.
The Plymouth Colony communist experiment failed miserably.
Cuba and North Korea can't produce enough food for their citizens but have huge military machines.
The biggest mass murderers in history were Communists or Socialists. (Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, and even Hitler was a socialist). These disciples of Karl Marx have the blood of almost 100,000,000 humans on their hands.
Capitalism and free enterprise in the US, Canada, Australia and W Europe have produced the highest standards of living the world has ever known.

When coyote and the other commie lovers on HOP post slams on free enterprise, remember that history is on the side of free enterprise and capitalism. The promises of socialism and communism are empty promises which have never been fulfilled by any regime in human history.

 

I don't get all the holiday icons. OK I get Santa Claus for Christmas and The Easter Bunny for Easter... but Pilgrims for Thanksgiving?

Pilgrims were extremely prudish, very sexually repressed people that liked to shoot anything they didn't understand.............. or as they're called today Republicans...

 

No one laughed at that joke the first time you made it either, top gun.