The Real Story of Thanksgiving

Rush Limbaugh Show ^ | November 23, 2011 | Rush Limbaugh

[bopdowah]

RUSH: Now time for a tradition, an annual tradition, and that is The Real Story of Thanksgiving from my book that I wrote back in the early nineties. I wrote two of them, actually. In one of the books I wrote, The Real Story of Thanksgiving. And reading from it has become something we do every year on the program because it's still not taught. The myth of Thanksgiving is still what is taught, and that myth is basically that a bunch of thieves from Europe arrived quite by accident at Plymouth Rock, and if it weren't for the Indians showing them how to grow corn and slaughter turkeys and how to swallow and stuff, that they would have died of starvation and so forth.

[JerseyanExile]

Like I said on the other thread about this, the history regarding Plymouth is a bit more complex then that. You have to be careful when trying to correct revisionist history, that the account you come up with isn't just as flawed as what you were trying to fix. Make Haste From Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World Pg 250. From the outset, the colony was a commercial project, as well as a mission inspired by religous ideals. Weston wished to make money, as the contract put it, from "trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing" on the American coast. Far from being a commune, the Mayflower was a common stock: the very words employed in its contract. All the land in the Plymouth Colony, its houses, its tools, and its trading profits (if the appeard) were to belong to a joint-stock company, owned by the shareholders as a whole. When the final value of the assets was determined after seven years, the investors and the colonists would divide them up: that was the plan. All of the participants, those who stayed in England and those who had come to America, would recieve a dividend in proportion to the amount of shares they owned. Those who had no capital, but simply came on the boat, were deemed to have a single share. If any investors injected more cash, he or she would recieve extra shares accordingly. It was not the same thing as a modern corporation, but a likeness existed.

[Jack Hydrazine]

http://freedomkeys.com/thanksgiving.htm

[marsh2]

The joint stock company was the basis for the organization of several of the original European settlements on the east coast.

[GladesGuru]

A case can be made that the core issue is: Centralized decision making or diffused, individual decision making.

When William Bradford allotted specific portions of land to individuals/families, when to sow, work the fields, and reap became the decisions of the individual rather than the community of a central planner.

Bradford was quite clear that the individual method was what saved the Plymouth Colony from another (and probably final) “Starving Winter”.

[GladesGuru]

Correction: “community of a social planner” should be “a community or a social planner.”

[JerseyanExile]

A good point. But still, my point is that calling the Plymouth Colony in its first year communist is wrong. By that standard, anyone who isn’t self employed is a communist. A corporation? Communist. A company town? Communist.

[Salvation]

Tenacity: A Thanksgiving Lesson
On The Grace of Gratitude – A Thanksgiving Meditation
Father Corapi: This Thanksgiving, Give Thanks For What You Have [blurry screen alert]
This Thanksgiving, Give Thanks For What You Have And For What You Have Lost!
[CATHOLIC/ORTHODOX CAUCUS] Prayer for the Church and for Civil Authorities
Giving Thanks for the Hard Things in Life
100 Reasons to be Thankful, Even in Hard Times
Let Us Give Thanks (even in these difficult times)
Thanksgiving Day

[RobbyS]

As you say, be careful. Read Max Weber and you see that the religious motives and the economic motives were mixed, and the religious motives were strong. Careful you don’t imply that the Pilgrims were like Ben Franklin in their thinking. Just as the Virginia company was more strongly influenced by religious motives than we are led to believe , so the Pilgrims were more a religious colony than a commercial enterprise.

[Jack Hydrazine]

The Pilgrims and Property Rights: How our ancestors got fat & happy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66QdQErc8JQ

[fella]

The reason most of the hippie communes in the 60s and 70s failed was that they turned from being communal to being communist where a few self appointed themselves to be the leaders. The leaders were of course to busy leading to engage in actual work and the workers suddenly realized that they were more like slaves. Food then ran out in the Winter and the workers left then the leaders couldn't maintain and the farm went up for sale in the Spring. Saw it happen time and again when I was there in the Ozarks.