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!