When I celebrate Thanksgiving, I always think of the intrepid travelers, blown off-course to the northeast of the New World in the blustery and cold month of November in 1620.
Why?
Because we are the lucky, lucky beneficiaries of their pilgrimage for freedom of thought, and so much of our bounty is a result. Did you know that it was they who established the strong love of and pursuit of education in the New World? Their sect believed that each person should read the Bible himself, thus they established schools in every town, the first college here (Harvard in 1636, with 9 students) and the strong American pursuit of education.
So strong that by 1830, there were more colleges in Ohio than in the whole of Europe.
Alexis de Tocqueville, recounts the characteristics which formed the deepest part of American culture:
“The foundation of New England was a novel spectacle, and all the circumstances attending it were singular and original….The settlers who established themselves on the shores of New England all belonged to the more independent classes of their native country. Their union on the soil of America at once presented the singular phenomenon of a society containing neither lords nor common people, neither rich nor poor. These men possessed, in proportion to their number, a greater mass of intelligence than is to be found in any European nation of our own time. All, without a single exception, had received a good education, and many of them were known in Europe for their talents and their acquirements…
“They landed in the desert accompanied by their wives and children. But what most especially distinguished them was the aim of their undertaking. They had not been obliged by necessity to leave their country; the social position they abandoned was one to be regretted, and their means of subsistence were certain. Nor did they cross the Atlantic to improve their situation or to increase their wealth; the call which summoned them from the comforts of their homes was purely intellectual; and in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile their object was the triumph of an idea.”
The idea of freedom to think and live as they chose. And they endured mighty travails as a consequence:
“Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof:
“Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.
“Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.
“If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.”
Imagine facing that for an idea?
If they could face the New World, we can create a New World by changing our culture’s direction through education in Reason, Individualism, and Freedom.
