Thanksgiving: The Keeping Story

And now… the rest of the story.

Good day. It is a very good day.

It was November, 1621. Ninety Wampanoag warriors and their chief, Massasoit, sat down with fifty-one Pilgrims for a three-day feast of deer, wild turkey, and corn the Indians had taught them to grow.
The history books call it “The First Thanksgiving.”
And it was… glorious.
Laughter, gun salutes, archery contests, and tables groaning with food.
What the paintings don’t show is that half the Pilgrims who had arrived the year before were already dead. Starvation had taken them.
And the ones still alive? They were one bad harvest away from joining them.

Why were they starving in a land overflowing with game and fish and fertile soil?
Because of an idea. A very modern idea.
Communal property.

When the Pilgrims stepped off the Mayflower, their contract with the investors back in London required everything they produced (every bushel of corn, every fish, every board they sawed) to go into a common store. Each family got an equal share, no matter how much, or how little, they worked.
Governor William Bradford wrote later that the system was “found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment.”

The young men asked, “Why should I bust my back all day when the lazy guy next door gets the same ration?”
The women said, “I’m not hauling water and hoeing corn so someone else’s kids can eat it.”
Even the teenage boys refused to work.
Bradford said the result was plain: “much hunger and nakedness.”

So in the spring of 1623, after two winters of famine, Bradford did something radical.
He broke the contract.
He gave every family their own plot of land.
Plant what you want. Keep what you grow. Trade the surplus if you wish.
In other words, he introduced private property and profit motive to the New World.

Bradford recorded what happened next with astonishment:

“This had very good success. It made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before they would claim weakness and inability… There was no more talk of stealing from the common store, for there was no common store.”

The harvest of 1623 was so abundant they didn’t just feast; they traded the surplus with the Indians for beaver pelts and other goods.
The colony never starved again.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Pilgrims did not discover turkey and pumpkin pie in 1621.
They discovered something far more important in 1623:
When people own the fruit of their labor, they work.
When they don’t, they don’t.

That single change (from collectivism to private ownership) turned a failing socialist experiment into the foundation of the richest, most generous nation on earth.

So when you sit down to Thanksgiving dinner this year, and the table is piled high with more food than any Pilgrim ever dreamed of…
Remember that the turkey on your platter and the freedom in your heart have the same ancestor:
A quiet decision made four hundred years ago to let people keep what they earn.

That… is the rest of the story.

Good day.