That's kind of a dishonest rendering of history.
The Plymouth Colony was a corporate sponsored enterprise. They didn't collectively keep the results of their labor, they gave it to the sponsors of their expedition.
In my previous post I noted that Rush Limbaugh’s “Rush Revere” series has just come out as #1 in the “Children’s Series” category of the New York Times Best Sellers’ list. My fear is that som…
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But when it comes to the Pilgrims, there is another, even more egregious way in which Limbaugh earns the revisionist label. I have in mind his preposterous claims concerning the significance of the Pilgrims 1621 feast that we remember as the “First Thanksgiving.” Limbaugh builds his entire argument on a shift in economic organization in Plymouth Colony that occurred a few years after the Pilgrims’ arrival in New England. As explained by Pilgrim Governor William Bradford, when the Pilgrims set sail from Holland in 1620, they were required by their financial backers in London to hold all of their property in common until they had repaid the investors with interest. In 1624 they unilaterally abrogated that agreement (even though the debts were far from paid) and began to make permanent allocations of land to each Pilgrim family.
There is just one problem:
IT’S NOT TRUE. Oh, the Pilgrims undoubtedly moved toward the private ownership of property, but they did so in 1624, according to William Bradford, three crop years AFTER their autumn celebration in 1621. To make the movement toward private property the necessary precondition for the First Thanksgiving is, historically speaking, a real whopper. To use a pejorative label that the radio personality is fond of wielding, this is
revisionist history with a vengeance!
But there is more amiss here than a chronological gaffe. When the Pilgrims did move toward the private ownership of property, the shift was not quite the unbridled endorsement of free market competition that Limbaugh would have us believe. . . . In economics, as in all of life, the Pilgrims viewed liberty as the freedom to do unto others only as they would be done by. The golden rule meant that there were numerous instances in which producers must deny themselves rather than seek to maximize profit, and if they were unwilling to police their behavior voluntarily, the colony’s legislature was willing to coerce them.
Examples abound. The
Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth reveal that producers were prohibited from selling to distant customers if doing so created a shortage among their neighbors. Under the laws of Plymouth, it was illegal to export finished lumber under any conditions, and farmers could only sell scarce foodstuffs (corn, peas, and beans) outside of the colony with the express permission of the colonial government. Similarly, one of the very first laws recorded in Plymouth’s records prohibited skilled craftsmen from working for “foreigners or strangers till such time as the necessity of the colony be served.”