Plymouth and Jamestown Rejected Socialism, so MUST We
By Harold Pease, Ph.D.
Since 2008 half of America was lured into voting socialist despite the harsh lessons of our socialist beginnings. Plymouth and Jamestown rejected socialism and so MUST we to provide the level of universal prosperity America has provided its citizens for centuries.
This Thanksgiving Day we think of the Pilgrims enjoying abundant food, but this was not their real reality. To few note the starving times their first year in 1620 when half died of starvation. Harvests were not bountiful the first year nor the next. Plymouth was beset by laziness and thievery. William Bradford, the governor of the colony, in his History of Plymouth Plantation reported that “much was stolen both by night and day” to alleviate the prevailing condition of hunger. The somewhat mythical “feast” of the first Thanksgiving did fill their bellies, he reported, and they were grateful, but abundance had been anything but common. Why? Because they had fallen victim to the socialistic lure of “share the wealth.” This dis-incentivized the productive base of society.
Then suddenly, as though night changed to day, the crop of 1623 was bounteous, and those thereafter as well, and it had nothing to do with the weather. Bradford wrote, “Instead of famine now God gave them plenty and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God.” He concluded later, “any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day.” They ended universal poverty.
One variable alone made the difference and ended the famine. They abandoned the notion of government (or corporation) owning the means of production and distribution in favor of the individual having property and being responsible to take care of himself. Every family was issued its own land. Before, no one benefited by working for the common store because he received the same compensation as those who did not. After the change everyone retained the benefits of his labor. Those who chose not to work basically chose also to be poor and the government (corporation) no longer confiscated from those who produced to give to those who did not. No government food stamps here.
Ironically all this could have been avoided had Plymouth consulted history and communicated with their neighboring colony, some distance south of it, who had previously been down the same trail. Jamestown too was first a socialist society where each produced according to his ability and received according to his need, which, of course, affected supply. One cannot divide what does not exist. Our textbooks tell us that only one of twelve survived the first two years for precisely the same reason, starvation. The problem, as noted by Tom Bethel in his work The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages, was identified by an unnamed participant as “want of providence, industrie and government, and not the bareness and defect of the Countrie.”
Captain John Smith is credited with having saved the floundering colony by his “no workie, no eatie” government program (the Virginia Company was the government) and was hated for it. Addicted to the promise of getting something for nothing, even if it is always less than promised, the receiving part of the population will always oppose their not getting their “fair share.” Sound familiar? Captain Smith was eventually carted off to England in chains as fast as the parasitic population could do so. Once again, why? Philip A. Bruce in his Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, p. 121 called it agricultural socialism. “The settlers did not have even a modified interest in the soil…. Everything produced by them went into the store, in which they had no proprietorship.” When settlers finally were allowed to own their own property, and keep what they produced, things changed overnight.
Colony Secretary Ralph Hamor wrote of incoming prosperity, beginning in 1614, after ownership of land was allowed. “When our people were fed out of the common store, and labored jointly together, glad was he [who] could slip from his labor, or slumber over his tasks he cared not how, nay, the most honest among them would hardly take so much true pains in a week, as now for themselves they will do in a day, neither cared they for the increase, presuming that however the harvest prospered, the general store must maintain them, so that we reaped not so much corn from the labors of thirty as now three or four do provide for themselves.”
This Thanksgiving let us be grateful for the prosperity that we have—even the poorest among us. Jamestown and Plymouth set us upon a course that recognized that prosperity requires incentive to flourish and that the profit motive stimulates industry. We are so grateful that, having recognized the poison of the “share the wealth” philosophy, they purged it from their midst and proceeded to make, what later became America, the most prosperous country on earth.
On January 20, 2021, Democratic Socialists took over the White House and both branches of Congress. In ten short months of socialist rule, food prices have skyrocketed and shelves are emptying. Once totally energy independent, we now see fuel prices soar and severe shortages are predicted this winter; some economist even see an economic collapse. Joe Biden’s prediction of a “dark winter” appears on the horizon under Biden—not Trump. Socialism kills incentive to produce— it always has and always will.
Plymouth and Jamestown rejected socialism and so MUST we. Will we be as smart as they? Let us share this message at the table as we feast upon turkey and pumpkin pie this Thanksgiving Day so that our children will know how prosperity is really produced.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. Newspapers have permission to publish this column. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
Editor's correction:
“The early church was a socialist church.”
So said Rev. Raphael Warnock in 2016, four years before the citizens of Georgia elected him a U.S. senator.
It’s a strange statement, least of all because the description “socialist church” is an oxymoron. Not only would the Church fathers be puzzled by it, but so would socialism’s fathers. “Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms,” stated Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno, “no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”
“Religion and communism are incompatible, both theoretically and practically,” noted Nikolai Bukharin, founding editor of Pravda. “Communism is incompatible with religious faith.” On behalf of the Bolsheviks, he insisted: “A fight to the death must be declared upon religion. We must take on religion at the tip of the bayonet.”
That they did. They knew that religion and socialism/communism were incompatible.
(For the record, Marxism-Leninism defines socialism as the final transitionary step into communism. As Lenin explained: “And this brings us to the question of the scientific distinction between socialism and communism. What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the ‘first,’ or lower, phase of communist society.” Communism shares the exact same goal of socialism, namely: common ownership of the means of production. “We call ourselves Communists,” stated Lenin. “What is a Communist? Communism is a Latin word. Communis is the Latin for ‘common.’ Communist society is a society in which all things—the land, the factories—are owned in common and the people work in common. That is communism.”)
Nonetheless, statements like Warnock’s are not unusual among the highly confused “social justice” Religious Left. Even Catholics, who belong to a Church that has vociferously rejected socialism/communism since at least Pius IX’s Qui Pluribus in 1846 (two years before The Communist Manifesto was published), can succumb to the sloppy sophistry of thinking that Christians can find kinship in Marxism. The Jesuit America Magazine, in July 2019, published an astonishing piece titled, “The Catholic Case for Communism,” which very likely would have gotten the magazine excommunicated under Pius XII’s 1949 Papal Decree Against Communism.
It’s a sign of the times that followers of a Church with an unsurpassed intellectual tradition of opposing socialism/communism could think that a Catholic case could be made for either. Nonetheless, decades of failed teaching have brought us to this embarrassing point.
I’ve written about this here before, and clearly will need to continue to address it again and again. But I write now because of the recent New Testament reading from the Lectionary (carried into the week), which prompted one person to ask me to clarify how that reading from the “early church” (as Warnock would describe it) does or does not support socialism. Here’s the passage from Acts 4:32-35:
The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common. With great power the apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great favor was accorded them all. There was no needy person among them, for those who owned property or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds of the sale, and put them at the feet of the apostles, and they were distributed to each according to need.
It is this passage that Warnock was clearly lifting from. He told Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, back in 2016:
The early church was a socialist church. I know you think that’s an oxymoron, but the early church was much closer to socialism than to capitalism. Go back and read the Bible. I love to listen to evangelicals who stand on the Bible. Well, they had all things in common. They took everything—I’m just preaching the Bible—they took all of their things and they had all things in common. But even the folk who say they just follow every word of the Bible, they’re not about to do that. But if we would just share what we have, everybody can eat, everybody ought to have water, everybody ought to have healthcare. It’s a basic principle.
Well, it’s certainly not a “socialist” principle.
Let’s start with indeed the most basic principle, which is this: this passage from Acts is not socialism. Socialism/communism does not bear witness to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, or to belief of God. Likewise, do not be deluded by the phrase “distributed to each according to need.” Karl Marx, as he often did in his aping and mockery of religion, appropriated that line and rewrote it as, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
How does this passage bear no resemblance to socialism/communism? For many reasons, but above all, the religious believer reading this passage must understand that the passage deals with a religious movement. Socialism/communism is an anti-religious movement.
“Communism begins where atheism begins,” explained Marx. He wrote: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” He and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, said that communism represents “the most radical rupture in traditional relations.” It seeks nothing less than to “abolish the present state of things.” He and Engels closed the Manifesto by calling for “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
That included religion above all. Socialism/communism is a revolutionary ideology that completely rejects religion.
“There is nothing more abominable than religion,” declared Vladimir Lenin. He said that “all worship of a divinity is a necrophilia.” He echoed Marx: “Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze.” Lenin underscored socialism’s incompatibility with religion: “Everyone must be absolutely free to…be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule.”
I could list quotes like this one after another. Here’s one more example:
William Z. Foster was the first major public face, as well as chairman, of what became known as (and remains) Communist Party USA, prior to which he had been with the Socialist Party of America. Note this 1930 exchange he had with Congressman Hamilton Fish during sworn congressional testimony:
Fish: Does your party advocate the abolition and destruction of religious beliefs?
Foster: Our party considers religion to be the opium of the people, as Karl Marx has stated, and we carry on propaganda for the liquidation of these prejudices amongst the workers.
Fish: To be a member of the Communist Party, do you have to be an atheist?
Foster: In order to be—there is no formal requirement to this effect. Many workers join the Communist Party who still have some religious scruples, or religious ideas; but a worker who will join the Communist Party, who understands the elementary principles of the Communist Party, must necessarily be in the process of liquidating his religious beliefs and, if he still has any lingerings when he joins the party, he will soon get rid of them.
He must get rid of them because one could not be a communist and a Christian. (For the record, in the USSR, one had to be an atheist to be a member of the Communist Party, as the party militantly pursued what Mikhail Gorbachev described as a “wholesale war on religion.”)
As for the passage from Acts, there have long been religious communities that engage in common ownership. Those communities are driven by religious motivation. They are voluntary movements of free will. Members agree to sell property and share things by their own choice, not under compulsion by a coercive socialist/atheistic state which insists that every citizen, under threat of punishment, sell and share all resources.
An even cursory read of The Communist Manifesto, or the brute decrees of Lenin and Stalin and Mao and the Kims and Castro, shows no similarity with the language of the Old and New Testaments. The fact that certain passages of Scripture, or certain guidelines of religious orders, express forms of communalism doesn’t mean they’re thus practicing the perverse and destructive 19th century ideology known as communism/socialism. That’s a really silly simplification. From the Acts of the Apostles to, say, the Franciscans, these groups were forged on a Christian model; religion served as their anchor, their rudder, their animating force—the very spiritual force that communism ridicules, rejects, and seeks to abolish. Read any writing by Marx or Engels or Lenin vs. Jesus Christ or Paul or St. Francis; they’re completely different in every meaningful respect.
Moreover, the Bible offers vigorous defenses of property rights, as rudimentary as the understanding implicit in the Creator’s Ten Commandments: thou shalt not steal. To steal is to take someone’s property, a basic right according to biblical and natural law. The assertion by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto that “the entire communist program may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property” is completely antithetical to the teachings of God.
I could go on and on with examples. In the New Testament, individuals like the Good Samaritan or Zacchaeus or the vineyard owner all voluntarily give their own wealth or earnings as free-will acts of benevolence, not as forced responses to state fiat. (Read on in Acts 4, which in the next line speaks of the first of two disciples who voluntarily “sold a piece of property that he owned.”)
I’ll close with a word of advice to Reverend-Senator Warnock. It comes from Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno: “Those who want to be apostles among socialists ought to profess Christian truth whole and entire, openly and sincerely, and not connive at error in any way. If they truly wish to be heralds of the Gospel, let them above all strive to show to socialists that socialist claims, so far as they are just, are far more strongly supported by the principles of Christian faith and much more effectively promoted through the power of Christian charity.”
As Pius XI noted, there’s “no reason to become socialists.”
In other words, just become a Christian—and please stop with the claptrap about “Christian socialism.”
Editor's note: most refer to thanksgiving as I’m going to get together with family, and it’s going to be about sharing the meal, but we’re not going to acknowledge the Mayflower and the pilgrims because it’s holding up this false moment of friendship and completely disregards the genocide and the mass land theft and the brutality that all Native peoples experience,’” Dr. Mosteller said.
Plymouth and pilgrims
Textbooks often indicate the Pilgrims settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, because the harsh winter was approaching, or a storm sent them off course from their original Virginia destination.
“Winter’s onset cannot have been the reason, however, for the weather would be much milder in Virginia than Massachusetts. Moreover, the Pilgrims spent six full weeks — until December 26 — scouting around Cape Cod looking for the best spot,” Loewen wrote in Lies My Teacher Told Me.
The Dutch possibly bribed the Mayflower’s captain to sail north, a good distance from New Amsterdam in present-day New York. Some historians believe their arrival in Cape Cod was purposeful.
“Historian George Willison has argued that the Pilgrim leaders, wanting to be far from Anglican control, never planned to settle in Virginia,” Loewen continued. “They had debated the relative merits of Guiana, in South America, versus the Massachusetts coast, and, according to Willison, they intended a hijacking. Certainly, the Pilgrims already knew quite a bit about what Massachusetts could offer them, from the fine fishing along Cape Cod to that ‘wonderful plague,’ which offered an unusual opportunity for English settlement.”
Disease
Prior to European arrival, America’s Indigenous did not experience illnesses attributed to livestock, overcrowding or poor hygiene.
“Residents of northern Europe and England rarely bathed, believing it unhealthy, and rarely removed all of their clothing at one time, believing it immodest,” Loewen wrote in Lies My Teacher Told Me.
“The Pilgrims smelled bad to the Indians. Squanto ‘tried, without success, to teach them to bathe,’ according to Feenie Ziner, his biographer.”
In fact, three years before the pilgrims landed, English and French fisherman transmitted diseases to tribes as they came ashore to find fresh water, firewood and capture Native Americans for slave trade.
“Within three years the plague wiped out between 90 to 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England. Native societies were devastated. Only ‘the twentieth person is scarce left alive,’ wrote Robert Cushman, an English eyewitness, recording a death rate unknown in all previous human experience,” Loewen wrote.
Those who did survive left their communities to join others, bringing the illnesses along with them. This caused many Native Americans to perish, even though they had not encountered Europeans. Once the pilgrims did arrive in 1620, the epidemics across Indian Country were far from over.
Throughout history, religion has served as a means of justification, and for the English Separatists, it was no different. They believed the wide-spread death and devastation of Native Americans due to disease was divine provenience and that God willed them to take over the land.
“By the time the Native populations of New England had replenished themselves to some degree, it was too late to expel the intruders. … If colonists had not been able to occupy lands already cleared by Indian farmers who had vanished, colonization would have proceeded much more slowly. If Indian culture had not been devastated by the physical and psychological assaults it had suffered, colonization might not have proceeded at all,” Loewen wrote.
Squanto (Tisquantum) and the Wampanoag
The story of Squanto, a member of the Wampanoag tribe, is much less innocent than the narrative that he assisted the pilgrims with teaching them how to grow crops and take advantage of North America’s bounties.
Six years before the Mayflower arrived in present-day Massachusetts, a slave-trader captured Squanto — Tisquantum — and a group of Native Americans. With help from the Catholic Church, Tisquantum escaped and found his way to England where he learned English. He eventually returned to North America in 1619.
While Tisquantum was overseas, New England’s Indigenous experienced a monumental death rate, with some communities losing nearly every tribal member to the decimating effects of European diseases.
Upon returning to North American and his village of Patuset, Tisquantum found only piles of bones of his fellow tribesmen killed by the plagues. He realized he was the sole survivor of his village. The illness spread so quickly that many local tribes never had time to bury their dead.
Where Tisquantum’s village once thrived, the pilgrims established Plymouth Plantation.
During this time, the Wampanoag lost up to 75 percent of its people, while a nearby enemy tribe, the Narragansett, did not. Wampanoag leader Massasoit saw the pilgrims as possible allies against the Narragansett. Due to his English-speaking abilities, Massasoit used Tisquantum as a translator, though the Wampanoag leader did not trust his fellow tribal member and held him as a prisoner.
Rather than continue a life of servitude to Massasoit, Tisquantum established himself as a key resource to the pilgrims, teaching them how to survive.
The Wampanaog and the pilgrims made a treaty that established an understanding that the tribe would look out for the pilgrims against their enemies and vice-versa.
“Squanto’s travels acquainted him with more of the world than any Pilgrim encountered. He had crossed the Atlantic perhaps six times, twice as an English captive, and had lived in Maine, Newfoundland, Spain, and England, as well as Massachusetts. All this brings us to Thanksgiving,” Loewen wrote in Lies My Teacher Told Me.
The pilgrims celebrated their successful harvest in 1621 by shooting their guns into the air, which caused Massasoit to bring together warriors and prepare for battle. Instead of fighting, the Wampanoag and pilgrims worked together to prepare a feast.
In an article published by Indian Country Today in 2011, Thanksgiving Day is a time of grief for Native Americans. Many Natives continue to gather at Cole’s Hill near Plymouth Rock and remember the losses experienced for the past 400-plus years through the National Day of Mourning. The event began in 1970 when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts invited Wamsutta (Frank) James to address the public on behalf of the Wampanoag people. However, once organizers learned the subjects of his speech, which included highlighting the death and broken promises at the hand of settlers, colonial powers and the United States, James was no longer invited. This prompted the formation of the National Day of Mourning.
James wrote, “This action by Massasoit was perhaps our biggest mistake. We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end.”
Ways to combat the false narrative
For those in education, Dr. Mosteller encourages seeking alternative curriculum and guest speakers from Native communities that can shine an appropriate light on the holiday’s history.
“The Chickasaw Nation, for example, has a curriculum specialist who develops curricula to make available to school districts, not just on Thanksgiving, but on a whole list of issues where the Native narrative has been either turned on its head to make something that it wasn’t or we’ve just been erased from the narrative altogether,” she said.
While many will continue getting together with friends and loved ones to celebrate and recognize the gifts provided since the year before, incorporating traditional ingredients and recipes as well as teaching the factual history can go a long way in healing and restoring the Native narrative within the American culture.
Factually speaking all Christian settlements and colonist were communist Christian communities where the church fulfills a need “We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.”
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