Posted on 11/23/2005 5:46:38 PM PST by GladesGuru
THAT TURKEY IS MARXIST.
The first Thanksgiving was not at all what most Americans have been taught. The Indians didn’t make the difference between starvation and plenty for the Pilgrims in what they called ‘Ye Plimouth Colonie’.
What really made the critical difference between that first year, which Governor Bradford called “The Starving Winter”, and the year of the first Thanksgiving? This critical factor lies at the heart of the American experiment in government. Yet virtually none of the present American population knows about the real reason behind the first Thanksgiving.
I was a double major in college and one of my majors was history. But I didn’t hear about this critical moment in American history from my professors. And there is a reason that they didn’t tell me about this critical factor, but I’ll return to this later.
One thanksgiving season back in my college days when I was talking about what I had learned in my courses in American history with my girl friend, it happened. She listened to me until I had run down, so to speak, then she quietly said “It wasn’t that way at all.”
“And how would a psychology major know more than my history professors?” I asked. Mary was a small, quiet, very pretty blonde, with blue eyes and a very sweet and (fortunately for both myself and you, Gentle Readers) a very forbearing personality.
She smiled and said “One of my ancestors signed the Compact”. She meant the Mayflower Compact, of course. I deflated my ego and began to listen to what she said.
The Mayflower Compact was a document that established a religious society where all labored together, and each would share in what they produced. Many generations in the future, Marx would blabber about a society based upon a slightly different iteration of socialism - “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. But Mary’s ancestor in “Ye Plimoth Colonie” suffered the inevitable consequences of socialism long before Marx was born.
Mary was, of course, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. When I went to meet her parents, in Arlington, I slept in the guest room in the simple wood frame bed with rope supports under a feather mattress.
You guessed it, the bed frame was an antique (her ancestor’s bed, as a matter of fact), as was the mattress. No, the feathers probably weren’t all original. Yes, feather beds aren’t very comfortable by modern standards. No, her ancestor didn’t die that winter, but he certainly was afraid he might, because even though the bed was warm, there was little heat and less food.
That winter, the “Starving Winter” socialism killed one third of all the Pilgrims. The women and children suffered most. But Mary told me something that made the horror of that first Winter of Socialism come alive in a way that has never left my mind.
Mary also told me that there were stories among the old families that one of the men who survived the Starving Winter, when he buried his wife, didn’t bury quite all of her. Hunger was , all too real that winter.
She was quietly emphatic that I needed to read Bradford, and had a copy which she had brought to college with her. She showed me his description of how he had given to each man a parcel of land for that man to farm himself. Bradford thus changed the his colony, and the America that was yet to be, from a communal society to a society of individuals - property owning individuals.
Under the Mayflower Compact, that fateful first year in the New World, all land had been farmed as a community. But communal farming had not produced enough to sustain the Pilgrims. People were so hungry that starvation killed many. And one man didn’t bury quite all of his wife, remember?
Community - commune - communism. The Pilgrims tried it, they didn’t like it, and according to Governor Bradford, they abandoned it.
The increased productivity which resulted from abandoning socialism in favor of individual property led, according to Bradford, in a surplus of food. That surplus is what made the first Thanksgiving possible. Bradford was quite clear about that.
Which brings us to the point I said I would return to - why hadn’t I heard about this in my history classes? Why had my parents paid for what turned out to be shallow, revisionist history courses, as simplistic in their propagandizing as a Disney cartoon? Why was the most radical (and successful) experiment in the government of men not properly described and discussed?
The answer is at once simple and exceeding complex. It was not that I had attended a state subsidized school where I had gotten what my parents paid for, not at all. The University, which shall remain nameless out of charity, charged some 80% of the tuition at Harvard. But the Ivy League school to which I had won a scholarship (which I declined), was even more dedicated to revisionist history.
My mother’s graduate study was at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, which has been the preeminent school of education in America for generations. There, in the hallowed halls, and lying on the immense shelves of the Columbia University libraries, deeply hidden from public view lay the answer.
John Dewey had made Teachers College into the leading center of American educator education. But it was not teaching that which was historically American. Dewey’s curriculum was based on something very different from the Founding Documents. No longer were the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights carefully studied as the core concepts of America.
Dewey had been to Russia and had been shown a “Potemkin village”. This was a fake peasant village wherein all were leading the wonderful life made possible under the new world of Communism. All that “dwelt therein” were actors, even the animals. And the price of a bad performance was either Siberia or execution.
The village was not a real one, it was a set where a carefully scripted performance took place, and the rest of a cruelly suffering Russia supported the life style Dewey was seeing.
Not surprisingly, Dewey believed he was seeing the future. So did a whole generation of Western “intellectuals” from George Bernard Shaw on. This period is when Hollywood began to morph into Hollyweird as those sympathetic to what we now call Communism became producers, directors, script writers, and actresses and actors. Dewey was not the only sucker to fall for the “Party Line”.
He returned bubbling with enthusiasm for “the new group man” and made this a central aspect of curriculum studies at Teacher’s College, Columbia.University.
America’s educators no longer taught the traditional, historically proven values of individual responsibility, private ownership, and Unalienable Rights. Generations later, my professors didn’t teach me the basic historic facts of what had happened in “Ye Plymothe Colonie” as Governor Bradford called it, of the “Starving Winter”, or of the derivation of Thanksgiving because they hadn’t been taught them either.
That the most important lesson learned by Mary’s ancestor on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, socialism will kill you, is no longer taught should disturb you. As Paul Johnson said in his book A History Of The American People “should this experiment in government fail, that which will follow will be unspeakably worse”.
Given that Communism killed somewhere over 100,000,000 people in the name of “the new group man” Johnson would seem to have a point.
Summation: Lest Mary’s ancestor, and the rest of the Pilgrims suffered the horrors of the Starving Winter in vain, learn for yourself, and teach to your children, the core American concepts enshrined in the Founding documents. They are unique in the history of Man.
Right now, in a school, college, or university near you, America’s educators are teaching a curriculum more Marxist than American. It is time to muck the Marxism and the Marxist faculty out of the stable which America’s educational establishment has become.
We thought about going out instead, but gosh, who can pass up lobster! Plus, hubby is doing most of the cooking anyway! I'm baking bread, making the salad and dessert (apple turnovers). The rest is on him!
I do love turkey and smoked is the best way to eat it. I haven't ever tried the deep fried turkey tho, it sounds wonderful as well.
susie
I much prefer it at home!
I never tried the deep fried turkey either, but it's everyone seems to rave over it.
Other FReepers posted good links, as well. And at Thanksgiving dinner, my friend (a history teacher) told me that the Captain of the Mayflower had taken a bribe to drop the Pilgrims off in Massachusetts rather than Virginia.
Seems the Massachusetts Company wanted people and payed a bribe to the Captain.
Great oldie!
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