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Writer's pictureGuy Priel

Do the Pilgrims Still Matter?

Updated: Nov 20, 2023

As Thanksgiving approaches, I remember being in elementary school and seeing pictures of pilgrims (men in tall black hats and women in long skirts) and Indians (half naked men with pants and feathers and women dressed in animal skins) as they sat down to enjoy a feast together to celebrate surviving the first rough winter in the new world.

As I got older, I learned that the history of those depictions was mostly inaccurate and there was a lot more to the story than was ever told in school, especially after having read the account Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford.

At the tip of Cape Cod lies the town of Provincetown, where a monument marks the place where the pilgrims first made land fall after weighing anchor in the waters off the cape. They had received a charter from the king to settle in Virginia, were blown off course and landed in Provincetown. Eventually, however, wanting to establish a colony, they found the Provincetown landscape too sandy for their crops. After less than six weeks, the Pilgrims raised their anchors and made for the closest fertile land, which was Plymouth.

The Mayflower sits calmly at anchor, its sails furled after a long voyage. Around it, a crush of smaller boats fills Plymouth Harbor, jockeying for position, vying to be the closest. The photograph is old and grainy, but it is clear what is happening on the shoreline. Thousands of people stand at the water’s edge, pressed cheek to jowl, shouting, cheering, celebrating.

This is the scene at Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where 2020 marked the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrim landing, an event commemorated by a postage stamp from the United States Postal Service and a commemorative coin issued by the United States Mint. The highlight of the museum’s celebrations was the return of its Mayflower replica from a restoration stint at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. When it first sailed into the harbor in 1937, 25,000 people greeted its arrival.

As American icons, the Pilgrims have lost much of their shine over the past several decades. The days of elementary school pageants - with half the children in buckle hats and the others in feather headdresses - are mostly over. The Pilgrims’ story once bound the country together; now it is a source of division.

Plimoth Plantation is a living history museum. Its grounds are dominated by an authentic re-creation of Plymouth as it would have looked in 1627. Each of the “Pilgrims” you find there is an interpreter role-playing an actual historical figure. From 9 to 5 they live and breathe the 17th century. They will talk your ear off about what life was like in Holland, the rottenness of the Church of England, or the temperament of their rare-breed sheep, but they will not break character, no matter how many times you ask to take a selfie with them.

The history they teach is a lightning rod. To some people the Pilgrims represent American ruggedness, religious freedom, and democracy; to others they represent colonialism, white supremacy, and the genocide of Native Americans. In truth, they were a little bit of all of these things, but complex stories do not hold up well in a culture war. The Pilgrims are no longer just historical figures, they are symbols - and a symbol must stand for something.

The museum does its best to stay above the fray. Plimoth Plantation is more than happy to tell you what the Pilgrims were like, but it lets you make up your own mind about what the Pilgrims mean.

This approach sets the museum up as a kind of Pilgrim Switzerland - not neutral, per se, but noncombatant.

Even without the coronavirus, the 400th anniversary never stood a chance of topping the 300th. America greeted that date with a level of spectacle that would put a Super Bowl to shame. The town of Plymouth hosted a pageant featuring nearly 1,400 actors; the country’s most famous composers provided the music and Robert Frost contributed to the script, which set the Pilgrims at the heart of an epic that transcended time. Among the cast were a group of Vikings, Sieur de Champlain, and Abraham Lincoln. Plymouth Rock itself even got a speaking role. “As one candle may light a thousand so the light here kindled hath shone to many, yea, in some sort to our whole nation,” the rock bellowed.

Across the country, politicians of every stripe offered up their praise. Massachusetts governor and soon-to-be-president Calvin Coolidge gave a speech in which he immodestly declared that the Pilgrims had not, in fact, sailed from England: “They sailed up out of the infinite.” He then equated the Pilgrims with the very notion of religious freedom and carved out a place for them in the broader Christian cosmology, as though the long road from Genesis to Revelation runs squarely through Plymouth Harbor.

“Civilization has made of their landing place a shrine,” Coolidge said. “Unto the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has been entrusted the keeping of that shrine.” He argued, essentially, that remembering the Pilgrims was a sacred duty.

One hundred years later, a very different governor of Massachusetts declared it legally “nonessential.”

History 400 years in the making will always lose out to history being written right this moment. No one seems to have an appetite for debating what the Pilgrims mean to America today.

When the original ship arrived in 1620, there was no one on shore to witness it. The only eyes present belonged to those on board, and they were undoubtedly looking west toward an unfamiliar land and an uncertain future.

It is a fair bet that on that day, not one of them speculated about how they would be remembered centuries later. They were Calvinists - humble people who viewed the world as just a prelude to the infinite. When they thought of the future, they thought of their afterlife, not of their earthly posterity. If any of them could have seen that 300th anniversary gala, they probably would have condemned the spectacle as garish idolatry.

That is the thing about making heroes out of historical figures: It is rarely about them or what they would have wanted. We do this for ourselves. Humans have always had a weakness for heroic origin stories. They make us feel as if we are inheritors of some great tradition. They also make the past seem simpler and more intentional. Ideally, we would like the past to be like a tree - a great, linear trunk branching into innumerable stories, each connected and dependent upon that one perfect seed from which it all sprang.

But that is a fantasy. The forces that shape the world are bigger than individuals, bigger than single moments. History is not a tree, it is a meadow. It is a million individual threads twining and unraveling in the wind. When you are in the midst of it, it is chaos. It is only from a great distance that you can discern the shape of it - and fool yourself into believing that it is one single, coherent thing.

If the Mayflower had sunk in the North Atlantic, New England still would have been colonized. Native Americans still would have been killed or displaced. Democracy, religious freedom, revolution - none of these things were dependent on 100 soggy settlers stumbling onshore one chilly day in 1620.

Yet just because they were not the cause of these things, it does not mean there is no value in their story. It does not mean we cannot learn something or feel some connection. In fact, during the darkest days of the pandemic, as I compulsively reloaded news websites, I understood the Pilgrims better than I ever had before. I could see them now not as heroes, not as founders, but as a confused bunch of people who, like me, were scared, focused on the present, and completely unable to predict what their lives would look like a year in the future.

They were then as we are now - lost in the weeds of a history that had yet to be written.

Whatever historical pause we experienced at the beginning of the pandemic and its aftermath is over. Americans definitely want to argue about the past, and it is only a matter of time before the Pilgrims have their moment.

But this is not all new.

This is the kind of history Plimoth Plantation likes to do. It shows you what the past was like, with all the warts and contradictions, and then, if you want, it gives you a chance to unpack it all.

This is what good history is. It is what sets a museum apart from a monument. It acknowledges that historical figures, when they were alive, were just as flawed as we are today. More important, it acknowledges that historical figures are, in fact, dead. None of the praise or condemnation leveled at them ever reaches their ears. They do not know, and they do not care. All that is left on this earth of the Pilgrims and everyone else from 1620 is the lingering consequences of their actions, both good and bad. We all feel them, whether we are aware of them or not. The only way to understand the legacy of the past is to let go of the myths and the heroes and the simple stories and look bravely at the whole big ugly mess.

The message is what it is.

It is an interesting thought. Will living through a tragic and divisive time make us more receptive to talking about tragic and divisive history? Maybe, but I think we have a long way to go. People may be toppling statues, but I do not think we are ready to topple the very idea of statues itself. I am sure we will continue to divide history into heroes and villains. I am sure we will continue in vain to balance truths atop pedestals. I am sure we will continue to turn people into symbols and then argue about what those symbols mean.

When they see the Mayflower today, back at its berth once more, I think most people will still feel as though they have a binary choice, to either cheer for it or curse it. But I hope some will find a space in the middle. I hope some will come to see it not as a monument, not as a symbol, but as a frank acknowledgment of what happened and an invitation to have a long, painful, and honest conversation about everything that happened next.

That is something I ponder every Thanksgiving.




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