{"id":386,"date":"2019-11-28T09:39:47","date_gmt":"2019-11-28T15:39:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.randybaran.com\/blog\/?p=386"},"modified":"2019-11-28T09:45:53","modified_gmt":"2019-11-28T15:45:53","slug":"squanto-the-wampanoag-tribe-the-puritans-and-the-origins-of-thanksgiving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.randybaran.com\/blog\/?p=386","title":{"rendered":"Squanto, the Wampanoag Tribe, the Puritans, and the Origins of Thanksgiving"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thursday, November 28, 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n

If you will, read this interview of Wilfred McClay, a history professor, who wrote ‘The Land of Hope: And Invitation to the Great American Story.’\u00a0It’s about gratitude – in its purest form.<\/p>\n

Thank you! And have a happy Thanskgiving.<\/p>\n

Fundamental American values manifested in the story of Thanksgiving centuries before the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, explained Wilfred McClay, author of\u00a0Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, in a Tuesday interview on SiriusXM\u2019s Breitbart News Tonight<\/em> with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.<\/h2>\n

Mansour invited McClay\u2019s assessment of criticisms of the November holiday among left-wing teachers calling<\/a> for students to \u201cunlearn\u201d a \u201cfeel-good\u201d Thanksgiving \u201cmyth.\u201d<\/p>\n

McClay said of leftist contempt for Thanksgiving, \u201cI think it\u2019s a reflection of what \u2014 for some people \u2014 is the obsession with the politicization of all aspects of life, and everything has to be brought into conformity with some kind of ideological worldview.\u201d<\/p>\n

McClay continued, \u201cIt\u2019s almost like a kind of revolutionary religion, like in the French Revolution, the way they abolished the calendar, and tried to reinvent civilization from the bottom up. It\u2019s the kind of mentality [against] something that really \u2026 is one of most admirable holidays imaginable. Of course, we aren\u2019t the only ones that have Thanksgiving in the world, but it is integral to our essential practises, and it\u2019s an expression of gratitude.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has religious roots,\u201d said McClay of the history of Thanksgiving. \u201cIn the 1620s \u2014 there\u2019s some debate over when the first Thanksgiving was, whether it was in Virginia or whether it was in Plymouth, but it\u2019s in the 17th century \u2014 it had religious overtones, particularly with the Pilgrims in 1621.\u201d<\/p>\n

McClay added, \u201cIt is an amazing story. Of course they had come in pursuit of freedom to practise their religion and raise their children as they saw fit. They had come from the Netherlands, where religious liberty was available to them, but it was a hard place to live for various reasons, and particularly for their children, to have them grow up not speaking English and all of that, so they got on the Mayflower and came on over.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a terrible, brutal first winter,\u201d stated McClay. \u201cThey suffered from disease and exposure, and about half of them died. Many of them never came off the ship because they saw the landing as so dangerous, but they did have favorable contacts with some of the native tribes, the Patuxet Tribe [and] Squanto, and he taught them how to cultivate corn, what plants to eat and what plants not to eat.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c[Squanto] was an intermediary,\u201d explained McClay. \u201cHe helped [the Pilgrims] form relationships with the Wampanoag Tribe. \u2026 They had this celebratory feast in November 1621 to celebrate a successful harvest of corn that Squanto had helped show them [how] to cultivate. So that\u2019s seen as the historical origin of it, and it was, by all accounts, by everything we know about it, and we don\u2019t know a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

McClay remarked, \u201cPuritans were great about keeping journals and diaries. They saw success or failure as evidence of the degree to which they were being faithful to God. \u2026 That\u2019s what their settlement was all about. They saw this as a mission, this errand into the wilderness.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTen years later, John Winthrop, who led the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which became Boston \u2014 he gave this magnificent speech \u2026 where the phrase \u2018city on a hill\u2019 comes from \u2014 makes it very clear this was a religious enterprise, so they\u2019re grateful to God [for] the success in finally getting through \u2014 or at least having the materials to get through \u2014 the coming winter,\u201d added McClay.<\/p>\n

Fundamental American values were being developed by the early colonists, explained McClay.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat they did was enact social compact theory that had been sort of kicked around in Europe \u2014 especially in Britain \u2014 for awhile,\u201d McClay noted. \u201cThey created a body politic out of the consent of those who were aboard the ship, and they had the foresight to realize they should [and] could do that \u2026 two centuries before the Declaration of Independence, the idea that government is based on the consent of the governed, which of course is one of the fundamental American ideas. So all of this is prefigured by the Mayflower Compact.\u201d<\/p>\n

McClay said, \u201cThere\u2019s a kind of audacity about these [first colonists] that we miss, I think, in the historical accounts. Their journeys were dangerous. The habitats into which they were coming were brutal, and they lost many lives, and yet they had this sense that \u2026. they were on a mission of God, \u2018The eyes of all people are upon us.\u2019 \u2026 They were so deeply committed to the vision of what they were doing, and that was the germ of what became, ultimately, a great nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Puritans sought religious restoration via their settlement enterprise, explained McClay.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The Puritans] wanted to just have a faithful remnant of a church that they thought had become corrupt in England, and in Europe, in general,\u201d McClay shared. \u201cWhat they really wanted to do was recreate what [William Bradford] called, \u2018the primitive church,\u2019 and that doesn\u2019t mean people running around with spears and that sort of thing. It meant a church that resembled the church of the time of the apostles and Jesus and immediately after Jesus\u2019s crucifixion and resurrection, the early time of the church, when it was simpler, when you didn\u2019t have a lot of pomp and ceremony and popes and bishops running around in fancy robes and the accumulation of wealth and worldly power.\u201d<\/p>\n

McClay added, \u201cIt\u2019s proper, I think, that we really trace Thanksgiving more to the Puritans, to a kind of reverent Thanksgiving.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c[Left-wing criticism of Thanksgiving] doesn\u2019t touch the validity of the holiday for us, because we don\u2019t necessarily ground what we value of Thanksgiving in that historical episode. It\u2019s not like the founding is, where it really matters what the language of the [Declaration of Independence] and Constitution was, and we want to try to stay as close as we can to the original intent of those documents. We don\u2019t have that same kind of relationship to the first Thanksgiving, so I think it\u2019s kind of a phony charge, what it does reflect to me is this pervasive politicization of American life, particularly from a left, radical, critical perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

McClay described Thanksgiving as an \u201caspirational\u201d holiday.<\/p>\n

\u201cA myth, properly understood, is not a falsehood,\u201d McClay said. \u201cWe say that we believe all men are created equal. In some literal way, of course that\u2019s not true, so what do we mean? Do we mean all men are created equal in the eyes of God? Maybe, although secular people might object to that formulation, but we certainly mean we have a kind of aspiration towards recognition of \u2014 in some ultimate way that\u2019s very hard to define \u2014 the equal worth of all individual people. That\u2019s really, I think, fundamentally religious. It\u2019 s hard to\u00a0imagine that existing out of a Juedo-Christian understanding of human beings.\u201d<\/p>\n

McClay went on, \u201cWe have this day because we aspire to reconciliation to one another and a recognition of just how profoundly indebted we are to those who came before us, to our parents, to our surrounding society, to our neighbors and friends, that there\u2019s so much that we take for granted every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow are you going to go through life?\u201d asked McClay. \u201cHow are you going to go through the world? Are you going to go through it thinking that everything is your due and everything you don\u2019t get [means] you\u2019re being cheated by the world? Or do you think, \u2018Why do I have something rather than nothing? Isn\u2019t that great?’\u201d<\/p>\n

McClay continued, \u201cThe Christian view \u2014 I\u2019m sweeping widely, here \u2014 is that we don\u2019t really deserve anything. Our sinful nature is that we don\u2019t really have anything coming to us, that it\u2019s God\u2019s graciousness that is the source of all these good things that we really don\u2019t deserve.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a time in which we recognize our own insufficiencies, that we are not islands unto ourselves and that we depend on others, and that there are so many people in our lives to whom we owe profound gratitude, and just the bounty of existence,\u201d determined McClay. \u201cThese are all reasons for gratitude.\u201d<\/p>\n

McClay contrasted gratitude and ingratitude.<\/p>\n

\u201cGratitude is the proper disposition of a healthy human soul, and it\u2019s the proper disposition of a good citizen in a democratic society,\u201d assessed McClay. \u201cIf we lose those things and we become, sort of, brats \u2014 and I\u2019m not meaning to say all the radical critiques of American society are bratty, most of them are, but not all of them \u2014 brattiness is a kind of ingratitude and a feeling that, \u2018I deserve it all and whatever I don\u2019t get is a form of expropriation.\u2019\u00a0It\u2019s the seed of other good things, other forms of mutual appreciation and reconciliation that can occur, and to take that away atomizes people.it leaves people without a means to reach out to one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

Left-wing critiques of Thanksgiving are generally a part of a broader political campaign to undermine America\u2019s founding, concluded McClay.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

–Robert Kraychik, Breitbart<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thursday, November 28, 2019 If you will, read this interview of Wilfred McClay, a history professor, who wrote ‘The Land of Hope: And Invitation to the Great American Story.’\u00a0It’s about gratitude – in its purest form. Thank you! And have a happy Thanskgiving. Fundamental American values manifested in the story of Thanksgiving centuries before the … Continue reading Squanto, the Wampanoag Tribe, the Puritans, and the Origins of Thanksgiving<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randybaran.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randybaran.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randybaran.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randybaran.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randybaran.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.randybaran.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397,"href":"https:\/\/www.randybaran.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions\/397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randybaran.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randybaran.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randybaran.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}