In this special Thanksgiving Episode, Host Julian G. Simmons lets Director Rob Wilson break his vow of silence to share a bit of family genealogy about the first Thanksgiving in 1621.  Rob had eight ancestors on the Mayflower.  His grandmother, Carol Green Wilson, meticulously catalogued that history, and passed it on to her 12 grandchildren.  As a ten year-old boy, Rob actually helped decipher the  tiny print to discover one of those connections.

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Those Puritans insisted on practicing their strict form of worship, and increasingly came into conflict with the  Anglicans, who ostracized them from their communities.  Under King James I, Puritans were fined and imprisoned for refusing to join the official church.  King James,once declared "I will make them conform or I will harry them out of the land, or else worse—hang them.”  

This increasing persecution drove the Puritans -- who became known as the Pilgrims -- out of England.  Wishing to worship as they chose, they fled to Holland, where they made plans to emigrate to America.  After a few false starts, and incurring a large debt to backers, they crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower at the worst time of year -- sailing into wild, stormy seas, veering 200 miles off-course to land in a forbidding and freezing wilderness for which they were utterly unprepared.

 

The 102 passengers on the Mayflower were not, as myth suggests, a tight-knit congregation of God-fearing pilgrims, but a fractious assembly of 37 Puritans, their 21 servants (the oldest being 21, down to the youngest at 4 years old); 26 paying passengers recruited by the "London Merchant Adventurers " who funded the voyage; 6 of their servants, and a crew of ten.  Relentlessly rough seas and the unexpected brutality of the harsh winter killed almost half of those in their first year.  Besides that awful hardship, the Puritans carried an enormous debt to their backers. 

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Julian gives a glimpse into the lives of the assembled community with a dramatic reading of a letter written written by Edward Winslow, one of the Puritans who was an emissary to the Wampanoag and Patuxet.  It reflects that idealistic time when Natives and whites lived as friends and neighbors in peace, albeit tenuous.  We can view this brief moment in history as what could have been.  Tragically, the rapacious hunger for land and the grasping expansionism that infects our national character shattered this hope of peaceful co-existence with the Native people who had welcomed us as guests.  

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That devastating effect of our arrival began decades earlier,  when early European settlers brought viruses to which the Native people had no immunity.  Within years of European settlers arriving, terrible plagues of smallpox, chickenpox, syphilis, malaria, influenza, measles, the bubonic plague, and a rare disease called leptospirosis, decimated the tribes by up to 90 percent.  And when the Mayflower arrived in 1620, they found nothing but empty villages. and skeletal remains littered the landscape.

The Puritans, blinded by their faith in the Divine Providence that brought them to this New World,  deemed that devastation an Act of God preparing the land for their arrival.  Typical of the murderous arrogance of the English aristocracy, which viewed Natives as savages to be cleared like forests, England's King James I decreed:

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So the few remaining Wampanoag and Patuxet did have something in common with the withering Mayflower colony.   In this episode, we focus on the arduous struggle of man against Nature and the perseverance of those early settlers.  With the help of the Wampanoag and especially their sympathetic  representative Squanto, who had been taken to England as a slave and then returned, the remaining settlers survived.  By that next fall, Natives and Settlers did have a common reason to give thanks.  That feast, which 243 years later in 1863 Abraham Lincoln officially named Thanksgiving, was truly an occasion to be proud of, and a tradition to be honored. And so we do.

In this episode, Julian and Rob  discuss the origins of this holiday in a very personal way.

Join us!