How Capitalism Paved the Way for the First Thanksgiving

With inflation raising turkey prices 20 percent over last year, according to the American Farm Bureau, Thanksgiving dinners will be served alongside arguments over restoring prosperity. It’s a challenge the Pilgrims can teach us to overcome, with their plan for replacing the hunger pains of collectivism with the full stomachs of the free market.The Pilgrims who stepped off the Mayflower 400 years ago faced more dire challenges than pricy cranberry sauce, so the goal of their debates wasn’t to deliver the perfect “sick burn” to relatives who disagreed, but to solve problems of starvation, disease, and getting along with the locals.As I discussed with historian Rebecca Fraser, author of “The Mayflower: The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America,” we tend to distill the Pilgrims down to caricatures, exaggerating everything from the buckles on their shoes to their noble or evil legacies.“One of the key things about the Pilgrims which is rightly celebrated in the Thanksgiving commemoration,” Ms. Fraser said, “is that they do have this very warm, symbiotic relationship with the Wampanoags and with Massasoit, and that has a ripple effect so that they have this tremendously cordial relationship with the Native Americans living far and wide.”When my late boss, Rush Limbaugh, read “The True Story of Thanksgiving” each holiday, it gave leftists enamored with communism fits, but he did something that is so important in history and journalism: He went to a primary source, the governor of Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, and what he wrote in his diary about getting a turkey in every pot.Faced with dwindling supplies, Bradford wrote that the colonists “began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.” They decided to give each family a plot of land to farm for their own profit.“Profit” didn’t mean disposable income, as the closest Best Buy was centuries away — it meant not starving. The Pilgrims were a “ragged” lot, according to Ms. Fraser. “There’s a record,” she told me, “saying some looked almost naked and newcomers were really aghast at how they looked.”What we’d today call free-market reforms, deregulation, or selling of state assets wasn’t a faculty lounge discussion in the 1620s, but a life-or-death crisis. So, it was fortunate that the new policy “had very good success,” and Bradford was able to write that “it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been….”Women and children “went willingly into the field” where they “before would allege weakness and inability,” a 17th century version of “quiet quitting.” To have compelled them to work, Bradford said, “would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”He added that “the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service” griped that they shouldn’t have to “spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. … And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men … they deemed it a kind of slavery….”One need only look at the famines in Communist China and the Soviet Union — which tried to compel farming at the point of a gun — to see that Bradford made the right call. The Marxist ideal of “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” didn’t work any better 400 years ago than it has since.This slice of the Pilgrims’ progress in the New World resulted from their ability to solve problems, a lesson overlooked in the race to cast them as villains, as if they crossed the ocean bent on extermination, like the Spanish Conquistadors, and not in search of religious liberty.History revisionists may rail against the truth at Thanksgiving, but thanks to the enduring strength of free people and free markets, they’ll be doing so with full mouths. When the topic of rising prices comes up, we’ll all do well to remember the lessons of Plymouth, and how capitalism best ensures that nobody goes hungry.

How Capitalism Paved the Way for the First Thanksgiving

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