The real story of Thanksgiving actually begins long before the first Thanksgiving. For me, I feel like Rush Limbaugh's telling of the first Thanksgiving should start back earlier in the chapter before he talks about the actual first Thanksgiving. For me, it should all begin with Christopher Columbus about 130 years earlier. As Rush points out, the politically correct view of Christopher Columbus today is that the Italian explorer did not actually discover America because people were already living here. According to the revisionist history that we are taught in schools today, Christopher Columbus brought nothing to the “peaceful New World paradise” but oppression, disease, brutality, and genocide. But this is not an accurate picture of Christopher Columbus, as I have also pointed out in some of my own Wisdom On Wheels blogs and podcasts, especially around Columbus Day. Christopher Columbus really did discover America. That does not mean that no human being had set foot on the continent before 1492 when Columbus discovered it. But just because there were people already here doesn't mean he didn't discover anything. I discovered a very small amount of money I didn’t know I had recently, but that doesn’t mean I’m denying its presence before I discovered it. But that doesn’t make me any less of a discoverer either. Maybe my middle name should be Columbus! Anyway, it was Christopher Columbus that brought this continent to the attention of the technologically advanced, civilized world and paved the way for the expansion of Western Civilization. In 2021 (and really long before that), Western Civilization has been wrongly equated to white supremacy. Nothing could be further from the truth. But that is the nature of the newspeak society in which we live today.
When Christopher Columbus discovered this land in 1492, what kind of a place did he discover? Did he find blissful natives living in perfect harmony with one another and communing with nature, as the politically correct history of today would have us believe? No. Nobody was painting with all the colors of the wind as sang in the Disney movie by Elizabeth Warren--I mean Pocahontas. What Columbus found was a land sparsely inhabited by nomadic hunting tribes. Many were constantly on the verge of starvation. They had not yet discovered the wheel and had no written language. They lived a violent, tribe against tribe, brutal existence. One of the Caribbean Indian tribes that Columbus came into contact with was the Arawaks. The Arawaks attacked and enslaved the Siboney. Another tribe, the Caribs, literally feasted on both tribes because they were cannibals. One of Columbus' search parties found large cuts of human flesh. Arawak boy captives were being fattened for the griddle. Girl captives were mainly used to produce babies for the Caribs to dine on. Did I mention you probably shouldn’t read this until after you have had Thanksgiving dinner today? Oops. Oh well, better a late warning than none at all, right? In today's history books, Native American life is often romanticized. But even a cursory examination of the historical record shows that life was far from utopian for these people long before Columbus. That's not to say that there were no atrocities against Indians by white people. But there were just as many committed against them by other Indians and with a greater degree of savagery. It is also worth pointing out there are more American Indians alive today than there were when Columbus arrived or at any other time in history. If Columbus was trying to commit genocide, he sucked at it.
The education establishment and the media have also twisted history when it comes to the contributions of America's earliest permanent settlers, the pilgrims. The story of the pilgrims begins in the early part of the 1600s. The Church of England under King James I was persecuting anyone and everyone who did not recognize its absolute civil and spiritual authority. Those who challenged ecclesiastical authority and those who believed strongly in freedom of worship were hunted down, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their beliefs. A group of separatists first fled to Holland and established a community. After 11 years, about 40 of them agreed to make a perilous journey to what they called the New World. They knew in advance they would face hardships, but they also knew they would finally be able to live and worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including 40 pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of their new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs. The ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact came from the Bible. The pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And because of the biblical precedent set forth in the scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work. But this was no pleasure cruise. The journey to the new world was a long and arduous one. When the pilgrims landed in New England in November of 1620, they found a cold, barren, desolate wilderness. There were no friends to greet them. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves. And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just the beginning. During the first winter, half the pilgrims, including William Bradford’s wife, died of either starvation, sickness, or exposure. When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod, and skin beavers fur coats. Life improved for the pilgrims, but they did not prosper yet.
Rush points out in his book that this is where American history lessons often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives rather than as a devout expression of gratitude with biblical roots. Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract the pilgrims had entered into with their merchant sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store. Each member of the community was entitled to one common share. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well. William Branford recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the pilgrims as the first harsh winter was, which had taken so many lives. So as governor of the colony, Bradford decided to take bold action. He assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace. What we learn from this story in Rush’s book is that before Karl Marx was even born, the pilgrims had experimented with socialism and it didn't work! What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation. The pilgrims decided early on to scrap socialism permanently. Bradford wrote that by taking away private property and trying to force the community to split their wealth evenly amongst themselves, they were trying to act wiser than God. For the community, this bred much confusion and discontent. The young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did not believe that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense. They thought it was an injustice to expect such a thing. The pilgrims found that people cannot be expected to do their best work without incentive. So instead, they harnessed the power of free enterprise through the capitalistic principle of private property. Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and was permitted to market its own crops and products. They saw immediate, successful results, as it made all hands industrious. Much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. It is here that Rush points out that supply-side economics existed before the 1980s and Ronald Reagan. All you have to do is read the story of Joseph and Pharaoh in Genesis 41. Following Joseph’s suggestion in Genesis 41 34, Pharaoh reduced the tax on Egyptians to 20% during the seven years of plenty and the earth brought forth in heaps. In no time, the pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat by themselves. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with Indians. In other words, their prosperity enabled them to be more generous. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London and the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans. This began what came to be known as The Great Puritan Migration.
One of those attracted to the new world by the success of Plymouth was Thomas Hooker, who established his own community in Connecticut, the first full-fledged constitutional community and perhaps the freest society the world has ever known. Hooker’s Community was governed by the Fundamental Order of Connecticut, which established strict limits on the powers of government. So successful was this idea that Massachusetts was inspired to adopt its Body of Liberties, which included 98 separate protections of individual rights. These ideas and concepts are tied directly to the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution.
Nevertheless, the pilgrims and Puritans of early New England are often vilified today as witch burners and portrayed as simpletons. On the contrary, it was their commitment to pluralism and free worship that led to these ideas being incorporated into American life. Our history books purposely conceal the fact that these notions were developed by communities of devout Christians who studied the Bible and found that it prescribed limited, representative government and free enterprise as the best political and economic systems. There was a time when every schoolchild learned these basic lessons of the American culture. But now thanks to censorship, these truths are being systematically expunged from the history books in a favor of leftist claptrap.
That’s not where Rush’s chapter ends, but that is the end of the part that I found most relevant to us on Thanksgiving today. There is a part I want to focus on here at the very end that Rush points out. The first Thanksgiving was not primarily about the pilgrims thanking the Indians, although I am sure they were thankful for the help they received from them. But they recognized that their ultimate help came from the Lord. It is to him that they expressed thanks for. That is what Thanksgiving was about and continued to be about for a long, long time. What about today? What about you and your family? Is this just Turkey Day (or in my case Ham Day since that’s what I ate for Thanksgiving dinner)? Or is today for you about being thankful to God for what he has done in your life? Even if your life is pretty rough right now, you still can’t say he hasn’t done anything for you. He did the greatest thing he could ever do when Jesus came to Earth, lived a perfect, sinless life, and died on the cross. He paid a debt he did not owe because we owed a debt we could not pay. All we have to do to avail ourselves of that is to follow Romans 10:9-10. If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is by believing in your heart that you are made right with God, and it is by openly declaring your faith that you are saved (NLT). With an offer like that, we all have something to be thankful for this and every Thanksgiving.
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