Thanksgiving In Plymouth

Ah, Thanksgiving. A time to eat, drink, and give thanks in remembrance of a cross-cultural alliance which cemented the English presence in the New World and lay the foundation for the future United States. This time of year, the thoughts of the nation turn eastward to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the entire hoopla started. In response, Plymouth. . . doesn’t really do much.

Contrary to popular belief, Thanksgiving in Plymouth is pretty much the same as it is everywhere else. We spend the night before cooking and cleaning, we take in the Plymouth South versus North football game in the rain, and then everyone comes to our house where we eat, drink, and discuss all sorts of interesting things until we pass out by the fireplace and throw on a movie.

Of course, there are a few significant differences; downtown, several native tribes observe their National Day of Mourning, and I believe the Plimouth Plantation hosts a dinner for tourists who want to get that “real Thanksgiving” feel. However, these events mean little to the actual descendants of the Pilgrims. We’d rather just be home eating pie.

In fact, for a few years while I was in high school, an outside company came in and attempted to throw a big corporate parade. Apparently they were upset that New York City seemed to have a monopoly on Thanksgiving celebrations while the actual place being honored, Plymouth, had nothing. So they got together with Disney and tried to shove this cheesy parade down everybody’s throat. I danced in it several times, it was mostly cold and miserable, and not many people came -- they were probably at home watching Macy’s on TV.

What the parade people, as so many outsiders, don't seem to understand is deep down, Plymouth is still Old Yankee, and as far as it's concerned, you can leave the spectacle to the crazy New Yorkers. Plymouth's an upstanding Massachusetts town satisfied by the half-time show at the high school football game. No matter how much corporate America tries to artificially inject Plymouth with some pomp, circumstance, and a sense of its own importance, we refuse to coroporate, and Plymouth remains a relative mystery to most people.

One of the reasons for this is quite simply, we don’t really read that much into our native holiday. Since we LIVE in Plymouth, we generally don't spend a lot of time reflecting on the first Thanksgiving. . . for us, the legacy of the Pilgrims exists in the fact that our town is still a living, breathing place, populated with many people, including myself, who can trace their family directly back to the signatures on the Mayflower Compact. As a result, we tend to think about these things all year round -- most often during the summer, as we’re cursing the hordes of Japanese tourists impeding traffic along the waterfront as they snap photos of the Rock and the Mayflower II.

Also, I think our idea of Thanksgiving is less mythical than the rest of the country makes it out to be, and so we tend to be a bit less demonstrative than say, our New York counterparts. Being a native Plymouthean, I grew up in an education system which made it a priority to debunk commonly held myths about the Pilgrims, such as that they wore buckles on their hats and shoes (those were the Puritans, they came later), that they were Puritans (they were Separatists), that they landed in Plymouth first (try Provincetown) and that they sat at tables for the first Thanksgiving (sorry, no). The entire thing was demystified to the point where it really didn't seem like a big deal -- It wasn't an official holiday until 250 years later, for goodness sake.

As a result of this Plymouth attitude, when this time of year comes around and random people claim to know something substantial about Plymouth past OR present, I generally have a bit of fun putting them in their place. Working in the local bookstore just before the holiday, I flipped through nearly every Thanksgiving-related book which came in -- and found something stereotypical and wrong about Plymouth in every single one. That does not mean, however, that no writer outside of Plymouth knows anything about the Pilgrims or early Massachusetts history -- it is just that those authors number far fewer than those who attempt to write Thanksgiving books.

This year, however, I found one book which was not only astonishingly well-researched, but also made for a great read. In fact, I learned a few things I never knew before -- and if a book by a non-Plymouthean can teach me something I didn’t already know about my hometown, well, that’s saying something.

Mayflower, A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick is a unique look at the Pilgrims and their native counterparts, going beyond the surface-level story and attempting to understand the beginnings of U.S. history through local politics and the personalities of the people involved. Using historical records including letters and other personal writings, Philbrick attempts to portray Plymouth’s settlers as individual characters, and explain their actions and interactions with each other and the native population. The result is a book which reads like a special on the History Channel -- rather than being cut and dry historical fact, it creates composite personalities for the historical figures which keeps the reader interested.

Although this method has caused some to criticize Philbrick’s work as being “history light,” Mayflower is not, I believe, inappropriately called an accurate account. Although Philbrick took some license imagining the internal struggles of these men and women, he never makes illogical leaps with his characters which have no basis in historical record. As someone who grew up among places named for these historic, yet often hollow, figures, the humanizing of famous characters such as Massasoit, Squanto, Governor Bradford and Miles Standish was quite fascinating.

Also interesting is the book’s emphasis on politics -- it is often overlooked that the Pilgrims came to North America not to start a country, but to get away from civilization altogether. They believed they were God’s chosen people, and as such they wished to live alone in the wilderness and prepare for their ascent to Heaven. Instead, they arrived on a populated land filled with its own internal racial and poltical struggles. Almost immediately, the Pilgrims realized that if they hoped to survive, they must abandon their isolationist tendencies and participate fully in the complex web of tribal relations.

Similar to his treatment of the Mayflower passengers as individuals, Philbrick gives individual attention to the native tribes, rather than lumping them together as many books on Plymouth often do. Of personal interest to me was his depiction of my ancestors, the Manomets, as a separate entity whose members did not get along with the Plymouth colonists. These people were completely different from the Pokanoket tribe led by Massasoit, who befriended the Pilgrims. Also separate were the Massachusetts, who lived closer to Boston. Philbrick even separated the “Cape Cod Indians” into their proper tribes, such as the Nausets (yes, most of our towns are named after tribes. Good for you for noticing).

Also, the book cleared up for me something which had always been confusing - just who are the Wampanoags? They are the tribe portrayed at Plimouth Plantation, and are often the ones mentioned in Thanksgiving folklore. If you ask around enough, people claim almost everybody to be a Wampanoag, be he Massasoit, Squanto, or my own ancestors. But Massasoit was definitely Pokanoket, so what gives? Philbrick’s explanation was that the term Wampanoag didn't come into being until after King Philip’s war. At that point, there were so few local Indians left, many groups merged to form the Wampanoag tribe. This makes sense, as the Wampanoag language uses words from different tribes, such as “pumpkin” and "squash," which have Narragansett origins.

Another wonderful thing about Philbrick’s book is that the second half of the book focuses exclusively on King Philip’s War. Although little is often made of the conflict, the war, led by Massasoit’s son, King Philip, attempted to rid the New England of the English for good. Philip could see how swiftly native land was dwindling, and he attempted to band all the local tribes together towards the English. What followed was a giant mess, and in the end, 80% of the native population of New England was killed, sold into slavery, or moved West. As a result, King Philips’ War is rarely discussed; despite the fact I was raised on Plymouth colony history, I learned practically nothing of King Philips’ War. In fact, other than a brief summary in high school history, I never heard it mentioned again until graduate school, when I was TAing a writing class and one of my students chose to do her final project on it. Then, she struggled to find much workable literature on it (although she refused to take my advice and call up Plimouth Plantation and other local histoical societies for interviews).

Given this lack of coverage, I had assumed it was a relatively small conflict; or at least one that didn’t really involve Plymouth. Reading this book, however, I discovered that in truth, matters were quite the opposite -- not only did a lot of the fighting during the war take place in Plymouth itself, but the original disagreement which sparked the entire conflict was directly between Philip and Plymouth Colony.

It’s not surprising I didn’t know any better; not only was the war never mentioned in my public education, but no landmark of the war exists in Plymouth. For example, when visiting Plymouth today, you’d never know that a garrison by the Eel River was burned to the ground by hostile Indians, killing almost a dozen women and children. The site of this atrocity is covered by a parking lot -- for Plimouth Plantation, no less. They don’t care to advertise the spot, and as a result, it goes forgotten. Even more shocking, for about a hundred years after the end of King Philip's War, tourists flocked to Plymouth, not to see the famous Rock as they do now, but to see King Philip's head, stuck on the end of a pike and displayed in the center of town, but you won’t see a plaque marking that spot either.

Unfortunately, Plymouth, like the rest of the country, likes to be selective when it comes to history; the first Thanksgiving is warm and fuzzy, so it’s celebrated and enshrined in Plymouth and beyond, whereas King Philip's War is upsetting and regretful, so it is buried and forgotten. Luckily for the historically minded among us, Philbrick gives us a good slice of both the good and bad to help us wash down our turkey dinners.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Rock The Vote: Election 2006

Don’t worry my Republican friends, I won’t gloat too much about the sweeping Democratic victories in Congress and our “thumping” of your party in the midterm elections this week. I won’t dance on your Kerry Healey posters (although I doubt I’m friends with you if you actually like somebody as scummy as Healey) or taunt you with visions of a world where Americans enjoy federal health care, the Middle East includes a Palestinian state, and Bill Clinton is in charge of dinner menus at the White House. First of all, I figure watching Nancy Pelosi become House Speaker is punishment enough, and second, I’m too tipsy from throwing back cocktails at Don Rumsfeld’s Pink Slip Party to be overly snide.

But mostly, I’m just enjoying myself too much to be mean-spirited. And why shouldn't I be? There’s been a lot for us liberals to love about the 2006 election.

However, despite the U.S.'s sudden swing towards center, what I think I loved the most about Tuesday's runoff was a completely nonpartisan issue: for the first time in as long as I can remember, it seemed like everybody -- across age, race, political, and economic lines -- was abnormally interested in the races and honestly passionate about voting.

Last year when I was talking with my Taiwanese roommate, Becky, about U.S. elections, she was appalled to discover that such a low percentage of Americans actually WENT to the polls. In Taiwan, where democracy is still a relatively new thing, they usually average an 80% voter turnout -- a figure practically unheard of in the U.S. The two of us wondered if the Taiwanese would eventually slip into a similar pattern and become more apathetic, or if there was something innately cultural about American complacency.

Despite this pessimistic discussion, I don’t actually believe that we, as Americans, are really politically apathetic -- at least not as much as some of us claim to be. As a people whose ancestors got so pissed about overpriced tea that they overthrew a monarchy and kicked an entire empire off the North American continent (okay, okay, I’m wildly generalizing here), we can’t really describe our culture as one which encourages the perpetuation of the status quo. In fact, we’re a society that loves to argue; bring up politics around any American dinner table and you’re sure to get an earful. Or two. Or twelve. Flip a couple of 24/7 news networks and listen to the people who call, write in, and argue passionately about almost anything -- hell, the fact that we even HAVE so many 24 hour news networks says something about our culture. We certainly care enough to keep Larry King in snazzy suspenders well into his golden years. Then why, come election time, do we scrape the bottom of the barrel to reach a 50% voter turnout? We haven’t hit 60% in a Presidential or midterm election since 1968 (when the turnout = 60.8%).

I’m certainly no expert, but aside from the obvious hurdles of the U.S.’s shear size and population, I think that our nation, despite our willingness to participate in political discussion, has an an innate aversion when it comes to taking political ACTION. We may be an opinionated people, but we’re also lazy, dislike change, and remain unequivocally optimistic in the face of adversity. Although there is a portion of our nation which jumps to participate in almost any cause, most of us are satisfied with sitting home and believing that everything will work out eventually. This Pollyanna attitude was one voiced by many British colonists prior to the Revolution, and one which has carried much of our population through the United States’ most polarized times.

Need a more recent example?

Ask almost anyone if they think the electoral collage is a good thing. Most people will give you a very passionate “no,” especially after Al Gore’s loss of the Presidency in 2000 despite winning the popular vote (yeah, I’m still mad about that. I love Al Gore. Certainly better than our hack of a junior senator, Kerry. But moving on. . . ). But does anyone rally to abolish the electoral collage? Nah. They think, “That would take a lot of work. And effort. And the electoral collage works, even if it messes up sometimes. It’ll be fine. . . let’s just keep it.”

And why not?

Strange as the dynamic is between us and our governmental system, I’m not about to take out a giant Steven Colbert waggy finger and reprimand the nation. In fact, I argued to Becky that this “apathy towards action” we have is actually what makes our system WORK, while other democratic nations whose populaces readily jump into action stumble. As citizens, we care what happens within our government, but not enough to gang up and overthrow it. As passionately as many Americans hate Bush, for example, I doubt many would say his Presidency calls for a coup. Such upheaval would destroy a governmental system which does work for us, and we’re not about to do that just because we happen to dislike our current leader. We think, “He’ll be gone soon. . . It’ll be fine. . . let’s just keep him. Although I’ll get really mad at social gatherings if his name comes up.”

See a pattern emerging here?

In many newer democratic states, such as Ecuador, the government, corrupt or not, never has a chance to get off the ground before some group gets disgruntled at the President and overthrows him to install someone they like better. Then the opposition group rises up and does the same, which completely bypasses the democratic process and ultimately leads to a cycle which lacks any hope for resolution.

Conversely, Americans are hopeful enough that they can wait out the years of the political cycle to exact change in a more legal way: through elections. Although our political system was designed to incorporate checks and balances, the best check and balance we have is the two party system where the voter is in charge of the pendulum swing between libralism and conservatism. The end result is that we tend to walk the middle line more often than we're willing to admit -- and that keeps everyone moderately happy.

Although many citizens are pessimistic enough to think that a single vote counts for nothing, it takes a lot of people to change the motion of a heavy pendulum, and each side needs all the help it can get. If you’re not willing to get out and push the nation out of a ditch, who is to say your neighbor will do it for you? Therefore, despite the fact that a little ambivalence is what makes America great, no citizen should refuse to cast his drop in the bucket. Personally, I feel that if you don’t participate in the electoral system, you have no right to complain about the government. Stand up or shut up.

And that was the other amazing thing about the 2006 elections - those people stood up. For the first time in recent memory, an election showed the country what can happen when enough angry people push back their dinner conversation chairs and actually show up at the polls. Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, Independent, Green Rainbow or Jedi Knight, on election day you saw a huge group of people speak, and they said:

“Congress’ job performance sucks. They are SO fired.”

Immediately, Washington answered, handing Rumsfeld a pink slip and changing “Stay the Course” in Iraq to “Accepting Exit Strategy Plan Suggestions Please.”

Hopefully, this massive Congressional power shift will humble the current administration into acting more moderately. The thing that has angered me most about Bush and his cronies has been their arrogance -- his 5-year-old insistence on working unilaterally, whether that meant bypassing Congress, the U.N., or common sense. Losing Congress will force them to work with their opposition rather than just sticking their fingers in their ears and going, “I can’t hear you! La la la!”

At the same time, however, I don’t want to see the Democrats get full of themselves just because they suddenly seem to be having a good day. The Democratic party has suffered from a lack of direction for years, and for the last five or so has billed itself as the “anti-Bush” party or the “anti-Republican” party. Memo: nobody wants to vote for an Anti. They want to know what the Democratic party stands FOR, not what it doesn't stand for. The public's distrust of negative campaigning was reason #1,450 why Deval Patrick buried Healey in Massachusetts' Gubernatorial race. The Democrats also don’t help themselves by promoting some of their stupider members, like that jackass, John Kerry. Yeah, I voted for him for President, but I hated myself for doing it. I’ve never liked him, and despite my exasperation with Bush’s incompetence, I’m glad Kerry isn’t President.

So with November almost over, I’ve done my part by going to the polls, and for the first time in my short voting career, I was actually pleased by the results. Now I can go back to being lazy and optimistic, and leave the arguing to the dinner table.

Although if Al Gore changes his mind and runs in ‘08, I may just have to volunteer for his campaign.