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They lived in exile in Leiden for a decade, in the same neighborhood where the young Rembrandt was then attending school, and then made a (bad) bargain with a band of investors called the Merchant Adventurers. Unlike the Puritans, though, the Pilgrims broke communion with the English church, and faced persecution for it. Like the Massachusetts Bay Puritans who later in the decade would settle just north of them in Boston, the Pilgrims believed the Church of England had been corrupted by venality and anti-scriptural superstitions inherited from Catholicism. The Pilgrims were “Separatists” from the Church of England. It is still told in straightforward histories, of which a representative recent example is Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower (2006).

It is worth looking more closely at who the Pilgrims were, and what they did, to understand why so many people have grown so uncomfortable telling their story. The story of the settlement of North America has become a scandal. Over time, the intended result is reached: authorities cannot teach the story of the Pilgrims even if they would, because most of them no longer know it.

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The “subversive” or “alternative” narrative, meanwhile, has become doctrine: it is championed by corporations and foundations and backed by the government’s full power to punish. No establishment lifts a finger to defend it.

To which one can only reply: Isn’t it already? Even in Plymouth?Īs in every matter that involves ethnic, cultural, or racial interactions, the “traditional” or “establishment” narrative has been censored in schools, city halls, and all the traditional places it was once told. The Pilgrims survived, he said, because the Wampanoag Indians “helped them in true social-justice fashion.” A founder of the Bernie Sanders-linked group Indivisible Plymouth complained over the summer about such local commemorations as were planned: “houldn’t the struggle for the right for women to vote,” she asked, “be as well-known as the story of the Mayflower and 1620?” The director of the Provincetown Museum boasted to the Boston Globe about the “tough conversations” he had had as he trained his staff to think about the Mayflower landing in a different way. In July, citing the “reckoning with racial injustice” underway in street protests across the country, the trustees of Plimoth Plantation, the living-history museum that has explained the Pilgrim settlement to schoolchildren and tourists since 1947, announced they were changing the institution’s name to Plimoth Patuxet (the Wampanoag name for the spot) in order to be more inclusive. Those locals to whom the Pilgrims’ memory has been entrusted have rushed to cooperate in their demotion. A year ago, the New York Times launched a “1619 Project” dedicated to the proposition that the original, the more consequential, and therefore the real founding of the country came with the arrival of a Portuguese slave ship in Jamestown the year before the Pilgrims arrived. There is an active project to exorcise them, in order that the country might find itself a past more congruent with its present-day political commitments. Here is a better one: what hope is there for a nation that doesn’t care about its beginnings?Īt work is more than a failure to summon the Pilgrims to mind. What hope is there, he asked, for a nation that doesn’t care about the greatest military victory of its greatest leader, in this case Napoleon? It was a good question. Half a generation ago, journalist and historian Éric Zemmour expressed astonishment that the French government was ignoring the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz (1805). Absent is the passion society’s leaders bring to commemorations they actually care about-the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the centennial of World War I, and all those local triumphs of the Civil Rights movement that have come to fill our civic calendar like so many saints’ days. No magazine essays unstitching the religious conflicts that drove the Puritans into exile or the republican philosophy of the Mayflower Compact and its relevance to us.

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There have been no TV features relating what happened 400 years ago. But with 2020 nearly over, it looks like the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth, Massachusetts, is going to pass uncommemorated. Possibly someone will surprise us at the last minute.