A Thanksgiving Contemplation and History

What Are You Grateful For?

[First published Nov. 25. Additional material added Nov. 26]

What are you grateful for?

The question is now in wide circulation and not only at Thanksgiving.

Historian Michael Hoffman at Plymouth Rock, 1990

It’s a challenging one that calls us to a consciousness of the riches we have received. It was popularized in the first part of this new century by the proprietors of a vegetarian restaurant chain in California, Cafe Gratitude. Their book, Sacred Commerce: Business as a Path of Awakening remains one of the most effective human relations and management guides extant.

Even an arch-cynic like Niccolo Machiavelli acknowledged the supremacy of the virtue of gratitude:

“Machiavelli despaired of men left to their own resources with a more than Augustinian despair.…It was not so much that men were naturally evil as that he found them naturally selfish, cowardly, fickle, base, and generally worthless. And yet in the pages of the Discourses on Livy which he had dreamed over as a child, and in the other histories of antiquity he had leisure to study in his enforced retirement, there were instances of human behavior at the highest level, of courage and self-sacrifice, of justice and generosity, of wisdom and moderation, even of that rarest of human virtues, gratitude.”

Garrett Mattingly, Facets of the Renaissance (1959), p. 35.

This “rarest of human virtues” was articulated by poet Ray Bremser as “finding what there is to celebrate even in the darkest penal hole.”

An attitude like that cannot be defeated. To discover what is good amid immense adversity is a test of our character and the prime prophylactic against spirit-withering resentment and despair.

Traditionally our youth acquired knowledge of the provenance of the Thanksgiving holiday in elementary schools throughout America, fashioning Pilgrim hats and Native attire and learning of the voyage of the tiny Mayflower and its 102 intrepid passengers, from England to Cape Cod in November, and arriving at Plymouth Rock in December 1620, in search of religious freedom. During that first winter nearly half of the entire Mayflower company, both Pilgrims and members of the ship’s crew, perished from privation and famine-related immune collapse, leading to pneumonia.

The Thanksgiving feast shared nearly a year later by the indigenous (Wampanoag) people of the northeast with the indigenous (Anglo-Saxon and Celtic) emigrant people from the island of Britain, has warmed the hearts of generations of Americans with its depiction of inter-racial comity amid new-found abundance.

The Mayflower people in their once famous “Compact” refused any distinctions of aristocratic rank. Equal rights before the law was their byword.

Building upon the ideals of the Mayflower Compact, Plymouth settlers declared that ‘according to the free liberties of England’ they would not suffer any law or tax imposed upon them except by their own consent. They also regarded annual elections and the right to a jury trial as fundamental liberties.

Both in new England and old England, there was disagreement about who possessed these liberties and exactly what constituted consent, but there was a common vigilance against the arbitrary exercise of political power.” ( John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty [2020] p. 5).

Prof. Turner is a generally fair-minded Leftist whose book is valuable for its core facts when the advanced student is vigilant in detecting the author’s concessions to post-modern pieties, which nonetheless, do not cancel the usefulness of his discoveries, at least for those who have sufficient knowledge to perceive and partition the two.

Pilgrims (desirous of separating from the state Church of England), and Puritans (who sought to remain within the official church in order to reform, i.e. “purify” it), were not Democrats. They favored a republic, and their republican convictions were the foundation of their understanding of liberty. The distinction has largely been lost in our time.

Revisionist History

A white tribe had arrived and settled, just as historically American Indians tribes routinely settled in territory claimed by other tribes. Here are three examples of the latter fact (there are many more):

1 . The Mohawk displaced the Mohicans, 1624-1628. In the 1660s the Mohicans were nearly exterminated. Approximately fifty percent of adult male captives were tortured — sometimes with cannibalistic elements—and killed: burned at the stake, flayed alive. This was standard Iroquois practice during the 17th century.

2. In 1649 the Seneca and Mohawk tribes of the Iroquois confederacy nearly annihilated the Huron confederacy in southern Ontario. Huron villages were razed and thousands of Hurons were killed or enslaved. Within a few years the Iroquois had settled permanently around Georgian Bay and Lake Erie on land stolen from the Hurons.

3. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries the Wabanaki confederacy in the area of present-day Maine repeatedly engaged in the conquest, displacement and theft of territory of neighboring tribes. The Wabanaki-affiliated Mi’kmaq stole land along the Maine coast from Etchemin-speaking tribes. From 1610 through the 1640s the Mi’kmaq had through bloody conquest seized territory from the Etchemin as far west as the Penobscot River.

The history of “stolen land” in North America is freighted with the omissions of woke ideologues disguised as historians. They are eager to brand the English tribe as wicked invaders of unheard of malignity who disturbed the peace of a native utopia.

Sacred Time

Thanksgiving in America has been reduced to turkey and football.

When things so trivial become our seasonal markers, our time-consciousness decays and our place in the cosmic turning of the wheel of eternity is lost.

This deterioration is linked to our vanished conception of Christmas time. Some non-Christians try to confine Christmas to “Sanny Claws” and the Yule, in which case they should label it in those terms. Christ Mass is part of the Liturgical Year, and not only for Catholics. The Calvinist Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) for example, observe Lent, Advent and Christmas seasons.

The Liturgical Year begins with the First Sunday of Advent which occurs this year on November 30. Advent is a time of preparation for the Christmas season. It is not itself the Christmas period. Advent recreates the longing of ancient Israel for the coming of the Messiah. This was the tradition of Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican and some Calvinist churches for hundreds — and in the case of Catholics and Orthodox — more than a 1000 years.

Even as recently as the 1950s and early ‘60s it was understood that the Christmas season begins on December 25, commencing twelve days of joy and celebration, through January 6 (Epiphany).

Christmas trees were cut and displayed in homes on Christmas Eve. The contemporary practice of discarding trees on December 26 would have been inconceivable.

Little remains of this calendar and rhythm of life other than the medieval song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” made famous in recordings by Bing Crosby, Burl Ives and the Ray Conniff singers, among others.

Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, though ribald rather than religious, refers to the evening festivity preceding the celebration of the Epiphany.

Because Americans are under the misapprehension that Christmas ends on St. Stephen’s Day (December 26), they rush to put up their trees and festive decorations a week or so after Halloween, largely eclipsing the autumnal observance of Thanksgiving and its Pilgrim origin story. Thus, we have Christmas in November.

The traditional communal pathways by which memory is structured have deep ramifications for the spirit of a people. To strip memory from the calendar is to denude our soul.

Our family’s Nativity Scene and holy day (“holiday”) lights will be installed on the day after Thanksgiving — “Black Friday” — the appropriate name for the frenzied consumer orgy which makes the birth of Christ precious to the cash registers of corporate America and stampeding bargain-hunters who have substituted commercial time for sacred time.

I am providing an annotated revisionist reading list for those who wish to undertake the unreconstructed study of the Pilgrims and Puritans — flawed though they certainly were — who carved a civilization out of a howling wilderness.

We begin with New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians 1620-1675 by Alden T. Vaughan. (I recommend the third edition of 1995). Vaughan painstakingly documents the magnanimity of the Puritans toward the Native Americans they encountered.

From the book: “What increasingly impressed me as different about the Puritans was their attempt, marked by failure in the long run but partly successful in the early years, to deal justly and peacefully with their Indian neighbors. For example, in 1638 Plymouth colony hanged three Englishmen for murdering an Indian…

“Puritans revealed a paternalistic but genuine concern for the Indians — rather than hostility or indifference. By mid-century, Harvard College welcomed Indian students, as the colony’s common and grammars school had for many years. The college’s purpose, according to its charter of 1650 was ‘the education of the English and Indian youth of this country.”

The Salem Witch Trials are perhaps the most notorious blot on New England. The simplistic tale of female group madness retailed by Arthur Miller in his fictional play “The Crucible” has served as the defining account. Cornell University Prof. Mary Beth Norton in her brilliant book In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (2002 ) debunks the standard telling. She writes that many of the young accusers were survivors of Native American massacres. They were suffering from what today we know as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, not the devil:

While witchcraft was often feared, it was punished only infrequently. In the first 70 years of the New England settlements, about 100 people were formally charged with being witches; fewer than two dozen were convicted and fewer still were executed.

…Then came 1692. In January of that year, two young girls living in the household of the Rev. Samuel Parris of Salem Village began experiencing strange fits. The doctor identified witchcraft as the cause. After weeks of questioning, the girls named Tituba, Parris’s female Indian slave, and two local women as the witches who were tormenting them.

Judging by previous incidents, one would have expected the episode to end there. But it didn’t. Other young Salem women began to suffer fits as well. Before the crisis ended, 19 people formally accused others of afflicting them, 54 residents of Essex County confessed to being witches and nearly 150 people were charged with consorting with the Devil. What led to this remarkable outcome?

Traditionally, historians have argued that the witchcraft crisis resulted from factionalism in Salem Village, deliberate faking, or possibly the ingestion of hallucinogens by the afflicted. I believe another force was at work. The events in Salem were precipitated by a conflict with the Indians on the northeastern frontier, the most significant surge of violence in the region in nearly 40 years.

In two little-known wars, fought largely in Maine between 1675-1678 and 1688-1699, English settlers suffered devastating losses at the hands of the Wabanaki Indians and their French allies. Most of Maine was abandoned twice, in 1676 and 1690, not to be resettled thereafter for decades.

The key afflicted accusers in the Salem crisis were frontier refugees whose families had been wiped out in the wars. These young women said they saw the Devil in the shape of an Indian. In testimony, they accused the witches’ reputed ringleader — the Rev. George Burroughs, formerly pastor of Salem Village and of several Maine parishes -- of bewitching the soldiers sent to fight the Wabanakis.

It is worth noting that while Tituba, one of the first people accused of witchcraft, has traditionally been portrayed as a black or mulatto woman from Barbados, that was not the case. All evidence points to her being an American Indian. Her contemporaries uniformly referred to her as Indian. In addition, most slaves in Massachusetts at the time were indigenous to North America —transported from Spanish missions in Florida and the Georgia sea islands.

Samuel Sewall was one of the nine judges appointed to hear the Salem trials. Five years later he was the only member of the court to publicly recant his involvement. In Judge Sewall’s Apology, (2005) Richard Francis recounts the inspiring story of Sewall’s subsequent courage and integrity.

John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father by Francis J. Bremer (2003) is a superb biography of the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and his effort to create a Pilgrim “City on a Hill” ( a phrase famously quoted by Ronald Reagan). His biography is an evocation of the earliest roots of our nation and the leadership of one of its first patriots.

For an account of the Mayflower and the planting of the colony we ought to first turn to primary research in the form of the testimony of an eyewitness. William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620 to 1647 (Random House, 1981) is the Mayflower testament against which all others should be judged.

The equation of Puritanism with prudery and abstinence from alcohol are laughable stereotypes. Puritans married at a young age and on the death of a spouse typically remarried in short order. Moreover, the first building constructed at Plymouth after the church meeting hall was a whiskey distillery.

Like our nearly extinct contemplation of the roots of the Thanksgiving holiday, not much of the original doctrine of the Puritans is retained in America. What remains of their legacy is an ethos of public service and a high-minded tradition of civic morality. The finest single volume chronicling this civilization is David D. Halls’ The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (2019).

For your children I recommend Stranded at Plimoth Plantation 1626 by Gary Bowen, illustrated with charming woodcuts by the author.

Marilynne Robinson writes of the clash between consensus history and the revisionist real thing:

…the way we speak and think of the Puritans…is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved. And it demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry.

I know from experience that if one says the Puritans were a more impressive and ingratiating culture than they are assumed to have been, one will be heard to say that one finds repressiveness and intolerance ingratiating.

Unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension, not intentionally and not to anyone’s benefit, but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus.

I am grateful to Substack for the opportunity to write freely and to the paid subscribers who assist this writer in maximizing the opportunity.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Revisionist historian Michael Hoffman explores the ascendance of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalistic mind virus in his book The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome.He explicates the alchemical processing of humanity in Twilight Language. He is the author of eight other volumes of history and literature including Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, as well as Usury in Christendom, Judaism Discovered, They Were White and They Were Slaves, and Adolf Hitler: Enemy of the German People.

Michael has written extensive introductions to three books published by Independent History and Research: Alexander McCaul’sThe Talmud Tested, Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s Traditions of the Jews, and The 1582 Rheims New Testament.

Mr. Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and a former paid consultant to the news department of the New York Times.

Three of Hoffman’s books have been published in translation in Japan and France.

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