The Real Story of Thanksgiving Not Taught in Schools: America’s First Socialist Failure.

Frequent readers of my blog already know Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Probably because I have a whole lot to be thankful for in my life, and well I love food… I have also enjoyed the story surrounding Thanksgiving.

Ever since I was a child, and I suspect the majority of Americans too, were taught the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock settling in this barren place with no ability or knowledge on how to survive or feed themselves. It was so bad, that if it had not been for the Indians teaching them how to grow corn, hunt and slaughter animals, they would have surely starved to death and died! In order to show their thanks and appreciation the Pilgrims held a feast with the Indians This commencing Thanksgiving as taught in schools, it’s not at all what happened.

The truth is Thanksgiving was a celebration of how capitalism, private property and individual initiative saved the colonist from starvation.

Yes it is true the Mayflower brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth in 1621. It was a barren land and it was very hard times, but it was not hard times because of a lack of survival skills.

William Bradford, the governor of the Pilgrim colony, writes about this in his journal. The colony was first organized on a communal basis, as their financers required. The land was owned in common and farmed communally. Whatever they produced went into the common store so all could share the fruits of everybody’s labor.

This is one of the first known experiments with socialism and it was based on all the great compassion and fairness you can think of, but the results were disastrous!

Some Pilgrims realized they didn’t have to do anything in order to get what they needed from the common store, because other people would pull their weight.

The food supply quickly became short and the winters long. At one point corn was rationed out at three kernels per day per person. By 1623 the colonist had suffered severe losses and starvation was almost imminent.

Bradford now realized the communal system was not working because it encouraged and rewarded laziness and inefficiency while destroying individual initiative. So he abolished the plan, distributed private plots of land among the surviving Pilgrims, encouraging them to farm as individuals and what you produce is yours. If there is a surplus you can sell it for a profit. This is when the Pilgrims began to flourish, and they shared their bounty with the Indians.

In the true story of Thanksgiving as wrote by Bradford, is thanks to God…It was thanks to God for helping them learn the way to survive and prosper when they arrived in this forsaken, unknown place.

So how was this story left out of the history books? Well, unfortunately Bradford’s journal is about the only recorded history we have from this time period. Many parts of his journal recording these events were lost. When Thanksgiving was later made a national holiday, the lesson the Pilgrims so painfully learned was not made part of the holiday.

Several years later, Bradford’s diaries were found. They’re now available in paperback documenting how capitalism saved the Pilgrims.

This Thanksgiving I now have one more thing to be thankful for…capitalism. The system that has lifted more people out of poverty than any other in history, perhaps one day America will return to it.