Growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s, at the height of the Cold War, everything we were taught in our classrooms was designed to combat the dreaded communist peril that surrounded us. This was the era of Joe McCarthy and the adoption of “In God we trust” as our nation’s motto to appear on all paper currency (it was already on some coinage). We were well on our way to proving just how different we were from those nasty Soviets.
Part of that indoctrination included the colorfully embroidered story of the valiant Pilgrims persevering against terrible odds that included a sixty-six-day passage on the Mayflower and a brutal winter that saw their population cut in half. The following year (with assistance from the local Native American Wampanoag, Abenaki, and Patuxet tribes) brought a harvest that promised to sustain the growing settlement at Plymouth over the winter. The Pilgrims celebrated the harvest with a three-day festival, which the members of the tribes were kindly invited to attend.
The painting above perfectly encapsulates the myths we were taught that reinforced our belief in American Exceptionalism.
But I don’t recall my teachers telling me about Squanto, a Patuxet tribe member who, along with 23 other members of the Patuxet and Nauset tribes, was kidnapped by English sea captain John Hunt, who hoped to profit by selling them all into slavery in Malaga. Squanto eventually made his way to England and then to the New World as part of an exploratory expedition, before finally returning to what remained of his family. His tribe, the Patuxet, was devastated by a plague which may have been smallpox or tuberculosis, or both.
Nor do I recall my teachers explaining that the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags, assisted by Squanto, formed a 50-year alliance that stands as the lone exception to the European advance across what would become the United States.
None of those details were allowed to mar the image of an America that could have been created in a Disney studio: a fictitious nation built on a desire for religious freedom and settled by well-meaning Pilgrims who wore strange attire and smoked a peace pipe with the friendly tribes whose land they took. And whom they graciously allowed to join their harvest thanksgiving festival—if they remained seated on the ground.
Whatever they are teaching children today, let’s hope it bears a closer resemblance to reality. Historic reality is always more fascinating than highly-pasteurized, ideologically-colored fantasy.
Another example of fascinating reality: Even though the first Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621 and individual colonies and then states, especially those in the Northeast, celebrated an annual day of thanksgiving, there was no federal holiday for more than 200 years. It took one woman who persisted, for 27 years, in asking the federal government to create one.