They called themselves Saints, but were also known as Separatists, for their desire to separate themselves completely from the established church. “The Mayflower pilgrims were the most extreme kind of reformers. Purists, by definition, are extremists, and it’s no accident that many in England dubbed those who wanted to reform the Church of England “Puritans,” which “was always a derisive term,” Donegan explains. They want to transform a nation-state into something that resembles what they take to be a Godly kingdom.” Quite the opposite: They had very specific ideas about how to worship God, and were intolerant of deviations.” Historian Pauline Croft of the Royal Holloway University of London declares in the film, “One might say, if you wanted to be critical, they’re religious nutters who won’t settle for anything except the most literal reading of the Bible. The Pilgrims were not for freedom of religion. “Actually, the Pilgrims saw the world as a wilderness, in which the one right way of practice toward God might cultivate a garden-and you needed a hedge around that garden to protect it from the wilderness. “A big misconception is that they were for religious freedom and liberty,” says Donegan. Many imagine that the Pilgrims left the Old World behind to worship as they pleased and start a new country imbued with religious freedom, an ideal later codified in the First Amendment. The image of intergroup harmony and tolerance is naturally appealing to an immigrant country like America. In that sense they are almost modern characters: Replace their wide-brimmed hats, doublets, and petticoats with baseball caps, T-shirts, and jeans, and they might easily blend into a homeschooling support group or a Tea Party rally. The forces that shaped their lives also remain in place today. The Pilgrims did embody elements that took root in American culture, and this helps explain why, in retrospect, we call them our founders. The Pilgrims’ relations with the Narragansetts, or the Pequots, were completely different.”Ĭlearly, the story of a “multicultural festival” happening in newborn America resonates with the national ideology of inclusiveness. But just as the Pilgrims don’t represent all English colonists, the Wampanoags, who feasted with them, don’t represent all Native Americans. “It has been translated into this multicultural festival. For example, “the story of the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving has Native Americans welcoming them with open arms,” says Kathleen Donegan, a Berkeley English professor interviewed in The Pilgrims whose book Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America was a source for the film. It draws on the unique, nearly lost history, Of Plymouth Plantation, written by William Bradford, the new colony’s governor for more than 30 years, whom the late actor Roger Rees portrays from a script derived from Bradford’s book.įilmmaker Burns interviews several scholars, who show how the reality of the Pilgrim experience diverged in several ways from images embedded in the public imagination. Its retelling of the Pilgrims’ adventure and ordeal sheds new light on why their story became the creation myth that we, as a people, adopted. The Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock have eclipsed the earlier 1607 English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, as the place where America was born.Ī new documentary, The Pilgrims, written and directed by Ric Burns and made with the help of a production grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, airs on PBS’s American Experience this November 24 and again on Thanksgiving night. Every culture invents creation myths to answer the questions, Where did we come from, What got us here? Such myths mingle tall tales with, at times, a seasoning of fact.įor American culture, the story of the Pilgrims, including their “first Thanksgiving” feast with the local Native Americans, has become the ruling creation narrative, celebrated each November along with turkey, pumpkin pie, and football games. Howland’s story suggests the seminal power of the handful of Pilgrims who landed in Plymouth, near Cape Cod, in the late fall of 1620. These included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Smith, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Humphrey Bogart, Chevy Chase, and both Presidents Bush. They produced ten children, who begat 88 grandchildren, from whom an estimated two million Americans descended over the next four centuries. Howland not only made it to America and worked off his indenture, but married a pretty young woman in the new colony named Elizabeth Tilley.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |