6-27-05, 9:53 am

In the fabric of America’s national creation myth we find its highest ideals – but so too, we see the shadows cast by its darkest truths.

After nearly thirty-five years, I can still remember:

In the school gymnasium of a small New England town, twenty-five first grade students sit cross-legged, in a large circle. A dozen or so of the children wear black hats made of construction paper. Each hat has a yellow paper belt fitted around it with a square paper buckle. The remaining children also wear headgear made of construction paper – brown headbands with hand-painted paper feathers. In the circle’s centre sits a woven cornucopia. Nearby is corn still on the cob, cylindrical cranberry sauce in a dish, peas, pies, and a turkey. Also on the floor are paper decorations, paper cutouts of pumpkins and turkeys, pilgrims and the leaves of fall. Behind the children, parents watch from a row of assembled chairs.

The students’ teacher kneels in the circle. She is tall with shoulder length blond hair. She wears a blue knit sweater and a short brown skirt. 'Do you remember what we talked about, children?' she asks. 'ThePilgrims? And where they landed?'

'On Plymouth Rock,' a few students say.

'That’s right, children,' the teacher says with a smile. 'The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620.' Then she adds, 'The Pilgrims came to America to find freedom.'

This celebration was the first time I remember thinking about America’s creation myth – The First Thanksgiving. And although the memory remains fragmentary, I recall that I was a Pilgrim. And I was proud of that. Pilgrims, as we were told, were the first settlers in America.

Of course, this wasn’t true. The true natives of the continent predated the Pilgrims by thousands of years. Later, the Vikings – 600 years before the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth – tried to settle in Newfoundland, with little luck. In fact, the Pilgrims of Plymouth were not even the first permanent European settlers. That had already happened in 1607, in Jamestown, Virginia. So why say the Pilgrims were the first? What was it about these people and this event – the Pilgrims, their Plymouth settlement, and the Thanksgiving holiday – that captured the American imagination and became the first creation myth of America?

The answer is idealism. The Pilgrims metaphorically became the first 'Americans' because they came to the new world to create an ideal community. Unlike the settlers of Jamestown, the Puritan Pilgrims were settlers of conscience, fleeing religious persecution in England, seeking freedom of worship in America. Their survival and success in the new world was evidence of God’s deliverance bringing liberty and freedom to America.

Of course, the myth was not always in tune with reality. True, the Pilgrims did leave England in 1620 – after living a few years in the Netherlands – to establish a new community in which to practice their faith without the King’s interference. And true, they were persecuted – to some extent – in England. But the Puritans were also a political power, taking control of the country for a time under Oliver Cromwell.

But the most fanatical Puritans believed that the corruptions of England and the English church would never be purged. They left England, in October of 1620 – financed by speculative merchants hoping to profit by the pilgrims’ labor – to create heaven on earth in America.

On a windy day in September of 1620, 102 pilgrims gathered on the busy docks of Plymouth, England. There, with their modest possessions and provisions, they boarded the three-mast, wooden ship called the Mayflower and set sail for the new world. After sixty-six days at sea, on November 11, 1620, they landed on the shores of Massachusetts. And after five weeks of looking for a satisfactory site, they settled 'Plymouth plantation.'

Their first year was difficult – forty-six of the settlers died – but they persevered, with the considerable help of the native Wampanoag Indians, who brought the starving Pilgrims turkey and corn. As well, the Wampanoag showed the Pilgrims how to cultivate the land, and soon the Pilgrims prospered.

The successful harvest of 1621 warranted a celebration. As legend has it, the Pilgrim leaders invited some ninety-one Wampanoag to share in a three day thanks giving celebration – a moment of genuine brotherhood against the elements.

So too, back in the school gymnasium, the twenty-five children continue their free-form reenactment of the occasion, sharing the food with enthusiasm and laughter. This Thanksgiving was a noble creation of the American ideal.

Or was it?

The annual celebration of Thanksgiving was not begin until 1676, long after the Pilgrims had established themselves in this new land. And by this time, the memory of their native friends had evaporated in the face of war with the Wampanoags. After the celebrations of 1621 and again in 1623, tensions between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags grew as the British plied the Wampanoags with alcohol to obtain signatures for land rights. The aggressive displacement of the Wampanoags resulted in war, which the British easily won.

The victory and subsequent enslavement of the Wampanoags was the reason for The Day of Thanksgiving proclamation of 1676. The proclamation begins, 'The Holy God having by a long and Continual Series of his Afflictive dispensations in and by the present Warr with the Heathen Natives of this land, written and brought to pass bitter things against his own Covenant people in this wilderness...'

Residing in the dark shadow of America’s creation myth is a paradoxical truth: in settling Plymouth plantation, the Pilgrims had created a fundamentalist religious state, which neither tolerated non-Christians nor dissenters. Those among the Puritans who did not live up to the faith were banished. Others were famously accused of witchcraft and, found guilty by a 'trial,' were hanged.

And the paradox?

The pilgrims were tenacious and industrious. Their work ethic remains one of the enduring values of America. But their escape for freedom was not for liberty. It was for purity. Ironically, out of this dark, intolerant society came America’s purest value – idealism. And this idealism would, in part, be used by the enlightenment founding fathers for different ends. Though the Pilgrims established America’s ugly strains of fundamentalism, racism, and manifest destiny, the ideals behind the creation myth – brotherhood, liberty, community – gave the children sitting in a gymnasium in 1971 an idealized expectation for their America.

And for me, proudly wearing that black construction-paper pilgrim hat, the creation myth of the Pilgrims and of Thanksgiving was a promise.

And a promise, especially for a first grader, meant something.



--Steven Laffoley is an American writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The above is excerpted from Mr. Bush, Angus and Me: Notes of an American-Canadian in the Age of Unreason to be published in September 2005 by Pottersfield Press. You may e-mail him ator steven_laffoley@yahoo.com.