FROM THE ARCHIVES: WE ARE WHO WE THINK THEY ARE:

Feasting on Thanksgiving History (ROGER MILLER, November 22, 2006, NY Sun)

When you sit down to your sumptuous feast this Thanksgiving, if you spare a thought or a prayer for those who brought you the holiday, make sure you're remembering the right people. It was the Pilgrims, not those sour Johnnies-come-lately, the Puritans, who celebrated the first American Thanksgiving.

We confuse them all the time. I was reminded of this in rereading a classic of American historical writing, "Saints and Strangers," by George F. Willison. This splendid amalgam of research and writing, first published in 1945 by Reynal & Hitchcock, reveals a lot of truths and puts straight a lot of errors concerning these ancestors of ours. [...]

All right, then, we do know that they sailed straight from Plymouth in England to Plymouth in the New World and that they were all good, solid, middle-class burghers who set up democracy straightaway. Correct? No, they sailed from the Netherlands, where they had spent several years in rancorous religious infighting. Saint or Stranger, they were all from the lower classes, some desperately poor.

The past is ironic prologue: The Dutch tolerance that allowed the Separatists to worship as they pleased also upset them because it tended to "corrupt" their children into non-Separatist ways. If the Saints sound similar to the Muslim "separatists" in the Netherlands today, then bear in mind that the Saints, when they got to Plymouth, formed a government only a little less exclusionary than the one they had fled in their native England.

[originally posted: 11/23/06]

Posted by oj at November 22, 2012 12:00 AM
Tweet   

Follow @brothersjudd