067 The Erickson Report for December 21 to January 4

 

Our traditional holiday show covering just two questions: Why is Christmas on December 25? Why is New Year's Day on January 1?

This is a repeat of last year's episode. The history hasn't changed in that time. :)

066 The Erickson Report for November 24 to December 14, Page One: The "First Thanksgiving"

066 The Erickson Report for November 24 to December 14, Page One: The "First Thanksgiving"

Gather 'round, kiddies, I'm going to tell you the real story, the based-on-actual-historical-sources story, of the "First Thanksgiving."

By which, of course, I mean the event that occurred in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts in the fall of 1621 which is the basis of our now-traditional Thanksgiving holiday.

One of the reasons I do this almost every year is that it is truly amazing just how much misinformation, mythology, and general muddle-headedness there is out there on this topic. In fact, it seems that what can fairly be called revisionist history about the events have become almost as traditional as turkey and pumpkin pie.

In fact, just two weeks ago I saw a bit on the BBC that not only treated those who settled Plymouth in 1620 and those who settled Boston in 1630 as if they were one group with identical views about religion (they were neither), but also said they settled here in order to engage in religious oppression because they could not tolerate the religious pluralism to be found in England!

Right. The England where it was required by law to be a member of the Church of England, were some of those who came on the Mayflower had spent time in prison for just that reason, where King James was saying of dissenters - including other Protestants - "I will force them to conform or I will harry them out of the land," and where, oh yeah, just 40 years earlier Protestants were being burned at the stake for the crime of not being Roman Catholic.

The basis for the claim of pluralism was the Toleration Act - which came in 1689, 67 years after the founding of Plymouth and on the far side of the English Civil War. What's more, while that act provided for freedom of public worship for people such as Baptists, they still could not hold public office and it didn't apply at all to Catholics or Unitarians. [Editorial note: In the broadcast version I said the Act was in 1682. 1689 is the correct year.]

I am not impressed with the scholarship shown.

So this traditional exercise in trying to bring some hard historical reality to the discussion.

To start our Thanksgiving tale, consider this:

    Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruits of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week.

    At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.

    And though it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

That comes from a letter dated December 11, 1621. It was written to an otherwise-unidentified "loving and old friend" in England by Edward Winslow, a Mayflower passenger and a leader in the early years of the colony.

By the way, Winslow had a portrait done in 1651, 30 years later, after he had returned to England. It is the only verified picture of a Mayflower passenger known to exist.

As for the rest of them, we have no idea what they looked like beyond the traditional description of Myles Standish as short with red hair, a description given some backing by the fact that in a book called The New English Canaan, a nasty satire of the Plimoth settlement written in 1637 by Thomas Morton, Standish is identified by the name "Captain Shrimpe."

Winslow's letter was contained in a book published in England in 1622 under the rather ponderous title of A Relation or Journal of the beginning and proceedings of the English Plantation settled at Plimoth in New England, by certain English Adventurers both Merchants and others.

The book is popularly known today by the less cumbersome name of Mourt's Relation and consists of eyewitness accounts of various events during the first year of the settlement.

Here's why that letter is important here: It is the only contemporaneous account of what we know as the "First Thanksgiving" which is known to exist. The only other even near-contemporaneous account comes from William Bradford, long-time governor of the settlement, who wrote about it in his journal at least 10 to 12 years later. Even there he just sort of brushes by it, endorsing Winslow by referring to "not feigned but true reports." Quoting:

    They now began to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses against the winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took in good store, of which every family had its portion.

    All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc.

    Besides they had about a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to the proportion. Which made many afterwards write so large of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports.

That's it. That's all of it. That's what the entire "First Thanksgiving" story is built on. Everything else is speculation, interpretation, some questionable third- and fourth-hand accounts, and guesswork, some of it informed, all too much of it not.

Some things we can tell from the accounts: For one thing, based on other references in those same sources, we know that the event took place after September 18 and before November 9. Mostly likely, it was in late September or the beginning of October, as that would have been shortly after harvest.

Which also means, by the way, that Winslow's account was written very likely little more than a month after the event, so yes, it was contemporaneous.

In considering the event, the first thing to realize is that this was not a "thanksgiving." To someone of the period, a thanksgiving was a religious occasion, a day set aside for prayer to give thanks to God for some special and unexpected blessing.

The first public day of thanksgiving in the town actually came in the summer of 1623: A six-week crop-threatening drought had lead to a day of "humiliation," a day of fasting and prayer to beg forgiveness for whatever they had done to cause God to bring this on them. Literally that same evening, the rains came - and not a storm, a gentle soaking rain which saved the crops and so a day of thanksgiving seemed appropriate.

So no, this was not a thanksgiving. Such days would occur occasionally as the cause arose; to plan for one in advance, much less to plan for one every year as we do now, would be regarded as a gross presumption on God's will and intentions.

What this was instead was a very traditional English harvest feast, a celebration of a good harvest to which it was customary to invite those who had been helpful to you over the course of the year - which is surely why the natives were there: They had indeed been helpful, so they were invited. And yes, that is the best understanding. The revisionists would have it that the Natives simply crashed the party - but perhaps realizing that put the Natives in an unfavorable light, it got revised to a version I first heard two or three years ago where Natives who happened to be in the vicinity heard the gunfire from the militia drill, assumed Plymouth was under attack, went 30 miles back to Massasoit's chief village, where he raised a force and went 30 miles back to Plymouth to help, all in the narrow time frame available - an account that could fairly be described as utterly nonsensical especially when you note that Winslow's account shows no trace of either distress or surprise at the Natives' presence.

One other thing here: True, the settlers didn't have a good harvest, the usual trigger for such a feast - note that Bradford describes it as "small" - but they had a harvest. That surely raised everyone's spirits: It indicated they were going to make it. Reason enough for a celebration, especially considering what they had been through to get to that point, including the death by disease - probably pneumonia - of half their numbers in the first months.

I want to make a quick aside to explain a rather subtle point more clearly: Europeans of the 17th century - especially the more religiously-conservative sorts, such as those that lead the Plimoth settlement - did not make the sort of clear distinctions between what is "religious" and what is "secular" that we do today. The sense of, a feeling of, an awareness of, the "hand of God" or the "will of God" was much more central to their lives than it is to the vast majority of us now.

What that means here is that the 1621 harvest feast would surely have included prayers of thanks to God and perhaps a sermon from their religious leader, Elder William Brewster, as significant features of the event, just as prayer would have been a frequent feature of their everyday lives, from meals to musket drills to mucking about in their fields, tending the crops.

However, they would not have regarded this as "a day of thanksgiving" as they understood the term: While the prayers would have been significant features of the event, they would not have been the central features; not the purpose, not the point, not the driver behind it. Celebration was, feasting was.

Put another way, had we been able to witness the 1621 feast, to our modern eyes there would very likely have been more than enough praying, giving thanks, and singing of psalms and hymns to make it look like a religious or at least religiously-inspired event, but to a person of the 17th century it would have looked about as (for lack of a better term) secular as such a thing got.

Anyway, back to our story. As for the eternal question of what they ate, we can confident they had fowl such as duck or goose (as the governor "sent four men on fowling" in preparation) and yes, quite possibly turkey ("of which they took many," Bradford said). We can also assume they had fish, specifically cod and bass, which are mentioned in the sources, and likely deer.

Another aside, this one on the issue of historical interpretation, specifically of using historical sources without running too far ahead of them, a sin of which too many of the revisionist accounts are guilty, making too much out of too little. Note that Winslow says the natives "went out and killed five deer," but he also says "which they bestowed on our governor" - that being William Bradford - "and upon the captain" - that being Myles Standish - "and others." In other words, they were given to various leaders of the community, not to the community as a whole. More to the point, we can't tell if those deer were brought to the feast and brought soon enough to be butchered, dressed, cooked, and presented as part of the feast or if they were brought afterward as a sort of thank you, a reciprocal gift in return for having been "feasted" for three days, which personally I find more likely because of Winslow saying the Natives "went out and killed five deer" rather than "brought five deer."

Bradford's mention of venison doesn't resolve things because in the period, "venison" meant "hunted meat," which obviously includes deer but isn't limited to it; in fact at the time the meat of hares was called venison. So while they quite probably had deer, either from the natives or their own hunting or both, we can't say it definitively.

Getting back to the menu, lobster and other shellfish is another real possibility; elsewhere in the letter that I quoted Winslow mentions that they are abundant in the area - as are eels, of which, he claims, they could take "a hogshead in a night." If you think "eels, eew," know that an English person of the period would have responded "They're just another sort of fish." (A hogshead is a cask holding about 63 gallons of liquid. Yeah, Winslow was likely exaggerating; he was like that.)

Beyond that, we can reasonably argue for some others foods such as a sort of pie made from squash from their gardens, sweetened with dried fruit which they would have brought with them from England, salad from other stuff from their gardens, and a sort of coarse corn bread.

Again, some interpretation here if only to show its importance in examining history: Some argue that there couldn't have been pie or bread because the settlement had no oven. It's true the primary sources covering the early several years of Plimoth make no mention of ovens one way or the other, either "we built some" or "we wished we had some," but there are a number of mentions of bread in various contexts. And with bread being such a staple of the English diet, I find it hard to accept that they got as far as harvest without having made at least a couple of ovens to make use of the grains they grew, which would primarily be for bread. But again my real point here is not so much to argue for my interpretation as to point up how much interpretation can go into judging history. We have to tread carefully.

Moving on, water would have been the major and perhaps the only beverage: Their supply of barley would be limited (Winslow says the "English grains," which would mean such as wheat, rye, and oats as well as barley, "grew indifferent good") and there is no mention of hops. No hops, no beer; no much barley, not much ale. Even if they did have some barley, there may well would not have been enough time for brewing since harvest. And while they did bring beer with them on the voyage, it is highly unlikely that there was any significant amount of that left nearly a year later. So they might have had a little ale or even maybe a little wine brought from England and reserved for a special occasion, but again is was likely mostly, and possibly only, water.

By the way, one classic of revisionism is the claim the settlers were persistently drunk because they drank a gallon of beer a day, Preferring it," in the words of a number of the revisionists, "even to water." Indeed it was preferred to water for good two reasons: One, being made from grains it provided nutrition which water didn't. In fact, beer was sometimes referred to as "liquid bread." The other is that it keeps longer. Water will spoil. Warm, even tepid, water is a good breeding ground for bacteria. Beer, on the other hand, is boiled in the course of preparation and contains alcohol, both of which serve to kill germs. The settlers knew nothing of germs, but they did know the effect: Beer keeps longer. As for the gallon a day, first, some revisionists claim it was a half-gallon a day and second, if you've been gradually introduced to drinking beer since you were weaned, that doesn't seem that big a deal. That doesn't mean nobody got drunk; it does mean it was not routine.

So that is pretty much it, pretty much everything we know or can reasonably assume about the event itself. Not much to build a whole mythology on, is it?

Even so, it drove the pap we got fed as children, marked by images of picnic tables laden with turkey, mashed potatoes, and apple pies surrounded by natives dressed like they just came from the great plains and smiling "Pilgrims" dressed in the fashions of the 1690s.

And that same sparseness of detail - and one of the reasons I go through this almost every year - is probably a good part of the reason the event provides so much latitude to those who want to replace the childhood (and childish) image of noble settlers and savage natives with one of noble natives and savage settlers, who every year, regular as clockwork, treat us to the historical revisionism that has, again, become as traditional as turkey and cranberry sauce.

In place of the happy talk mythologies of peace, love, and harmony we were spoon-fed as children we find people snarling out dark tales of drunken, murderous, bloodthirsty settlers facing off with natives "crashing the party" at the feast and doing it in such numbers because Massasoit feared he'd be kidnapped or killed otherwise. It is a vision that, as much as the earlier one, is an attempt to overwrite history with ideology. It is, in other words, pure bunk.

In point of historical fact, relations between Plymouth and the neighboring natives were reasonably good for several decades. There were stresses and strains and disruptions, yes, but for the most part they managed to keep intact the peace agreement-mutual defense pact they made in the spring of 1621.

Things gradually got worse and I won't go into all the reasons why but the biggest two were population pressure, which mostly arose out of Boston, which was established in 1630, and disputes over land that were rooted in vast cultural differences between the natives and the English.

For one specific, the native culture had no concept of land ownership. Not just they didn't own the land, or that everyone owned the land, or the Great Spirit owned the land; no, the idea of land as something you could possess just didn't exist. To own something, for the natives, meant you could pick it up and carry it away with you. How could you own something if you have to leave it behind anytime you go anywhere? Which makes real sense, especially for a semi-nomadic people who live in one area for part of the year and another area the rest of the year.

But for the settlers, for any European, land ownership, which by its nature includes the concept of exclusive use, was an everyday notion. That cultural chasm was a source of repeated conflict.

The peace finally, irrevocably, completely broke down - but that was in 1675, more than 50 years after the so-called "First Thanksgiving." The point here is that at that time, in the fall of 1621, native-settler relations were good.

In fact, the very next sentences of the Winslow letter I quoted above are these:

    We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us; very loving and ready to pleasure us. We often go to them, and they come to us; some of us have been fifty miles by land in the country with them.

Winslow also says that all the other native leaders in the vicinity have made peace with Plymouth on the same terms as Massasoit, as a result of which, he asserts, "there is now great peace amongst the Indians themselves, which was not formerly." He goes on to say that:

    We for our parts walk as peaceably and safely in the wood as in the highways in England. We entertain them familiarly in our houses, and they as friendly bestowing their venison on us. They are a people without any religion or knowledge of God, yet very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted, just.

Just to be certain you know, "trusty" means trustworthy, not trusting, and "quick of apprehension" does not mean quick to be apprehensive. It means quick to understand, quick to grasp the meaning of something.

As for "religion," in his later book Good News from New England Winslow says "therein I erred" and goes on the describe the native religion, as least as he understands it.

That does not sound either like bloodthirsty settlers eager to kill natives or like natives who feared contact with those same settlers or felt they had to display mass force to avoid being kidnapped or killed.

If you're still not convinced, consider that in June 1621, three or four months earlier, the town felt it necessary to send a message to Massasoit requesting that he restrain his people from coming to the settlement in such numbers. This is from Mourt's Relation, this is the heart of the message they sent to Massasoit:

    But whereas his people came very often, and very many together unto us, bringing for the most part their wives and children with them, they were welcome; yet we being but strangers as yet at Patuxet, alias New Plymouth, and not knowing how our corn might prosper, we could no longer give them such entertainment as we had done, and as we desired still to do.

That's how "afraid" the natives were of the settlers, so "afraid" the town had to ask them not to come around so much.

Assigning the role of angel or demon to either side is trash: Neither of these peoples were either. Neither were saints, neither were devils.

So I reject the revisionist history, indeed I resent the revisionist history. I resent it first because it’s lousy history. It's based on ideology, not information; it looks to satisfy demands of politics, not of scholarship, and it is every bit as full of false tales and mythology as the nonsense and pap that we got fed as schoolchildren.

Plymouth in the fall of 1621 genuinely was a scene of peaceful and friendly relations, of good feeling, between English settlers and their nearest native neighbors. The "First Thanksgiving" was a moment of celebration when everyone on both sides, even if they were still a little wary each of the other, believed that yes, this was going to work out.

That wasn’t going to happen; it was a false hope, even a foolish hope. It was brief enough moment, lasting by even a generous understanding no more than a few decades, and a rare enough moment in our nation's history of cruelty toward and genocide of the native peoples of this continent such that while "the First Thanksgiving" shouldn't be a source of happily-ever-after "why can't we all just get along" fairy stories, neither is there any need to co-opt it into the service of ideology-driven revisionism.

Because that moment of hope did exist. And frankly, I resent the attempts to strip away that one moment of hope in pursuit of a modern political agenda.

I remember a friend of mine some years ago talking about “the urge to find angelic forces in the world,” that is, the seeming need many of us have to fix on some group, some movement, some something that we can convince ourselves is utterly pure in its motives and behavior. In our attempts to find some better balance in our understanding of what was done to the natives of North America, the cruelties inflicted on them, the racism and bigotry which targeted them and still target them, too many of us in considering the “Pilgrims” of Plymouth have chosen to simply swap one mythology for a perhaps more satisfying but equally false one.

Balance, it seems, is still a long way off.

I'm going to wrap this up with a few quick sidebars about the time before any of what I've talked about, a few details surrounding those first months you might think worth noting.

- First, you often hear the Mayflower referred to as a "small" ship. To our eyes it is, but at 180 tun, it was somewhat larger than an average merchant ship of the period, which went around 140-160 tun, a tun being a large cask that became used as a standard measure of the capacity of a ship's hold.

- You also often hear it said the passengers came for "religious freedom." They did not. First, that would only have applied to a minority of those on the Mayflower and not only did they not believe in religious freedom as we understand the term, "freedom" being equated with anarchy, to the degree they sought what they would call "liberty of conscience," those who had been to Holland - which was that minority of the passengers - had it there. In fact, that's why they went to Holland in the first place: Because they refused to be part of "the King's Church" (the Church of England), they were held to be criminals; in fact, some of them had spent some time in prison because of it. Unfortunately for them, they not only found such liberty in Holland, they also found poverty of a degree that threatened to fracture their community, in fact they were afraid it was dissolving before their eyes. That's why they came to this continent. As for the rest, the majority, they came for that most of cliched American of reasons, a better life coupled with the promise of owning land, the very symbol of both status and security.

- It has also been asserted that the first winter was marked by starvation; I've even heard it claimed that they all would have starved to death but for the corn - which has somehow expanded in the revisionist tales to be corn, wheat, and beans - they stole from a cache while exploring Cape Cod. Okay, this is partly true. The deaths came as I said earlier from disease, likely pneumonia, spread by the necessity of living in close quarters until housing could be built. Starvation was not an issue: The ship's stores provided food for the winter, which could be supplemented by fishing. What is true is that they stole some corn, but that was for seed corn for the following spring, which makes it rather silly to imagine it was a quantity sufficient to feed the entire group for the winter. Make no mistake, that did involve disturbing some graves and that was a really scummy thing to do - and it wasn't the only scummy thing they did during those initial explorations, as they also stole some items from the houses they found because they thought they were as a modern person might put it "interesting artifacts." In fairness I do have to add that the settlers promised themselves they would make good for what they took, which they did when they were able to contact those natives - the Nauset - after the winter was over, but while that eases the wrong, it does not excuse it.

- Finally, they were not "greeted by the indigenous people." In fact, they didn't speak to a native until March and that was to Samoset, an Abenaki from what's now Maine. It wasn't until a couple of weeks after that when they first spoke to a local (Squanto, aka Tisquantum). And those indigenous people would not have called themselves Wampanoag. That is a native word that means something like "people of the east" or "people of the dawn" and it's been adopted by the Natives of what's now eastern Massachusetts as a generalized term for all the Natives of the area. But no Native of the period would have said "I am Wampanoag" because that would mean "I live to the east of where I live," which makes no sense.

So anyway, I hope you enjoy your Turkey Day, I hope you have time to spend with your family or friends or better yet both - while staying safe for yourself and others - and I hope you can understand why I celebrate the day as an expression less of thankfulness for the past (or even the present) than as an expression of hope for the future. That hope, too, may prove as foolish as that of 1621, indeed these days I often think it is - but the blunt fact is, hope is also the one absolute, indispensable requirement for any effort to make that future a better one.

066 The Erickson Report for November 24 to December 14

 

066 The Erickson Report for November 24 to December 14

This is our annual telling of the story of "the First Thanksgiving" based on actual historical accounts.

Rest assured that both traditionalists and revisionists will have cause to be annoyed by an accurate telling of the tale.

Sources:
https://www.idahostatejournal.com/opinion/columns/teachers-don-t-dare-tell-kids-the-truth-about-thanksgiving/article_71dec4a1-3a12-55fb-8314-85ee64701493.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gej0eV85wu8&t=111s
http://www.histarch.uiuc.edu/plymouth/mourt6.html
http://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/newenglishcanaa00mort
http://mith.umd.edu/eada/html/display.php?docs=bradford_history.xml
https://brokenarrowranch.com/blogs/wild-and-pure/what-is-venison?_pos=1&_sid=95a434944&_ss=r
http://www.histarch.uiuc.edu/plymouth/mourt2.html
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/66332

044 The Erickson Report for December 16 to 29, Page Two: Why is New Year's Day on January 1?

So now the natural follow-up: Why is January 1 New Year's Day? Because that wasn’t always true. So why?

In large part, the reason has to do with the convenience of the Roman senate, a calendar almost no one uses any more, and the stubbornness of tradition.

The earliest recorded New Year's celebrations are believed to have been in Mesopotamia about 4000 years ago, that is, about 2000 BCE. Babylonians began the year with the first new Moon after the vernal equinox and greeted it with a multi-day celebration called Akitu. This actually is a logical time to start the year, since the vernal equinox is the first day of spring, in mid-March, and spring is traditionally a time of beginnings, of renewals, of planting crops and the birth of new farm animals.

Various other ancient cultures used different days, but all had some astronomical or astrological significance:

The Egyptians used the heliacal rising of the star Sirius, which is again the brightest star in the night sky of the northern hemisphere. The heliacal rising is when a star can be seen to be rising in the east just before sunrise, just before it is too bright to see any star other than the Sun. For Sirius, this takes place in what is by our present day calendar mid-July and it was important because it predicted the annual flooding of the Nile, an event so important to the the Egyptians' agriculture

Persians used the vernal equinox; the Phoenicians used the autumnal equinox, which is the first day of fall; while the Greeks used the winter solstice, the first day of winter.

All these choices carried some meaning beyond the date itself. January 1 doesn’t. So why January 1?

An early Roman calendar designated March 1 as the first day of a new year. This also explains something else you may have wondered about: If March is the first month of year, September is the seventh - and the Latin for "seven" is septem. Likewise, October, November, and December: octo being Latin for "eight," novem for "nine," and decem for "ten." Those months were named as they were because they were the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months of the year.

That early Roman calendar was a lunar one, based on the Moon. The problem is, the average lunar month is about 29 and a-half days and there is no way you can match that with a solar year of roughly 365 and a-quarter days. And it is the solar year, not the lunar year, which drives the seasons.

What’s more, that calendar consisted of 10 months and a 304-day year and didn't even count the days between the end of December and the beginning of the year at the vernal equinox, with the vernal equinox apparently being designated March 1.

The calendar was reformed around 713 BCE to add the months of January and February, creating a year of 355 days, still 10 days off the solar year. To correct this, the Romans from time to time inserted a leap month of about 22 days into February, which served to over-correct the disparity between the calendar and the solar year, giving them some time before the error again got so big that another leap month was required.

Next, according to general but apparently not universal agreement among historians, in about 153 BCE the Roman Senate moved first day of year to January 1 because that was beginning of the civil year, time that newly elected Roman consuls began their terms in office, and it was felt to be just more convenient to have the civil year and the legal year start on same day. January is also a reasonable time because January was named for Janus, the Roman god of gates, doors, and beginnings - that is, the god of all transitions - who had two faces so that he could see both the past and the future simultaneously.

Despite all the repeated corrections, by the time of Julius Caesar, the calendar remained seriously out of whack with the solar year. So in 46 BCE Caesar introduced a new, solar-based calendar. This Julian calendar, as it came to be called, also introduced the use of leap years to keep the calendar year from drifting too far from the solar year. Remember that the solar year is about 365 and one-quarter days, so every four years the calendar and the solar year diverged by a day and that error accumulates. So it doesn't take a great many years before the difference is noticeable. Adding a day every four years keeps the calendar more in line with the solar year. This same calendar came with a decree that firmly fixed January 1 as the start of the new year.

After the Roman empire fell, the generally-accepted year for that being 476, and as Christianity began spread across Europe, the Catholic church, which remember had previously adopted and adapted a fair part of the merry side of Saturnalia, now felt it was in a position to downplay "pagan," "unchristian" festivals such as those that had come to surround the new year in Rome.

So in 567, the second Council of Tours banned the use of January 1 as the first day of the new year. Remember, this is at a time in European history when the authority of the church in civil matters, not just religious ones, was all but unquestioned. If the church said do it, governments did it.

As a result, in the Middle Ages in Europe, the official new year started at different times in different places, the old day of March 1; March 25, which is the Feast of the Annunciation and right around the vernal equinox; Easter, even though was a different day year to year; and December 25, by then the traditional birthday of Jesus.

But remember: Julius Caesar had set January 1 as New Year’s Day in 46 BCE - which means that by time the Council acted, the practice of keeping that as the first day of the year had been going on for 613 years and was so well established that a lot of people simply ignored the "official" date and kept to the older one.

The Julian calendar also was flawed because the solar year is actually a few minutes shorter than 365 days and six hours, so the use of leap years every four years slightly over-corrects the difference. A few minutes may not seem like a big difference, but again the error accumulates over time and by the latter 1500s it had grown to 10 days.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII oversaw design of new, more accurate calendar, which changed the rule of leap years such that only century years divisible by 400, not 4, would be leap years, the better to prevent the over-correction of the Julian calendar. Thus, 2000 was leap year, but 1900 wasn't and 2100 won't be.

This still leaves a tiny over-correction but it will take over 3000 years for that error to build up to a single day, so nobody really cares and we'll all be using star dates by then, anyway..

Most significantly for our story here, Pope Gregory apparently knew a losing battle when he saw one and surrendered to tradition, restoring January 1 as the official New Year's Day for the church after 1015 years.

Catholic countries in Europe were quick to adopt the new calendar, with Spain, France, and Italy doing so the year it came out. But Protestant ones did so only gradually, suspicious that the “Antichrist in Rome” was trying to trick them into worshiping on the wrong days.

Scotland, for one, didn't adopt new calendar until 1600, nearly 20 years later. And England, which had used March 25 as start of year since sometime in the 1100s, didn't finally make change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar - along with its colonies, which included us - until 1752, 170 years later, by which time, the Julian calendar was 11 days behind the Gregorian, which was corrected by removing 11 days from the year: Wednesday, September 2, 1752 was followed by Thursday, September 14, 1752.

There are tales of riots breaking out with people believing their lives would be 11 days shorter or that they had lost 11 days of wages. While such sentiments existed, historians now are of opinion that the story of riots is a myth. However, the change of calendar was an issue in the 1754 parliamentary elections so it's hard to credit the idea that there were no protests of any sort.

Anyway, that's it: January 1 is the first day of year not due to any special meaning or relevance of date itself, but due to the convenience of the Roman Senate, the Julian calendar which almost no one uses anymore, and the surrender of Pope Gregory XIII to persistence of tradition.

So in the spirit of Constantine, let me say Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Chanukah, Happy Festivus, for all the atheists like me and all the pagans out there, Happy Winter Solstice, and to all of us, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year. Like the man in the story said, we are halfway out of the dark.

044 The Erickson Report for December 16 to 29, Page One: Why is Christmas on December 25?

This show will be seen in the second half of December, so it's a good time for me to engage is a sort of holiday tradition around here and put aside heavy-duty politics in favor of addressing precisely two burning questions: Just why is Christmas on December 25, as opposed to any other day of the year? And why is New Year’s Day on January 1, as opposed to any other day of the year?

To answer about Christmas, about why it’s on December 25 as opposed to June or something, right at the top, you have to realize something. Based on how we celebrate the season, based on how we - and by that I mean Americans and to a perhaps even greater extent Europeans - engage and embrace the season, the traditions we follow in our celebrations, Christmas is expressed in symbols such as Santa Claus, the Christmas tree, brightly-wrapped presents, candy canes, wreaths, and mistletoe, along with local traditions.

It is not expressed by a creche.

Because you know those people who go around saying that "Jesus is the reason for the season?" He isn't. And he never was. Now that half of you are composing nasty emails, let me explain. The season is because of astronomical patterns.

Until relatively recently, people were much more aware of the movements of the Sun and Moon and stars than we are now unless you are either a dedicated stargazer or an astronomer.

Such movements were necessary signs of the changing of the seasons, of when to plant, when to reap, when seasonal rains were coming, when game would be plentiful, and so on. The sky was their almanac, their seasonal calendar.

Some of that awareness lives on in popular expressions and mythology. For example, did you ever wonder why the hot humid days of July and August still sometimes are called "the dog days?" Ancient peoples by their observations were able to realize that the star we call Sirius, which is at its highest point in the sky in the middle of the night in the middle of winter, is at its highest point in the sky in the middle of the day in summer.

Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky in the northern hemisphere. It is in the constellation Canis Major, or the Big Dog, and is known as the Dog Star. So the middle of summer becomes the days of the dog - the dog days.

In prehistoric times and even well into recorded history, people believed that things like the Sun acted willfully or were controlled by gods that acted willfully - and each year watching it get lower and lower in the sky each day as winter approached, a fear developed that one year, one of these great cycles, the Sun would keep sinking until it disappeared below the horizon, leaving them in perpetual darkness and cold. So each year, when the Sun stopped sinking and began to rise higher in the sky each day, it was reason to celebrate.

This is the time of the winter solstice, which occurs in the Northern Hemisphere, depending an exactly where you are, around December 21 or 22.

"Solstice" is derived from two Latin words - sol and sistere - which together mean that "the Sun stands still," which is what it appears to do at the solstice: Every day, the sun had been lower and lower in the sky; at the solstice, it stops doing it and then reverses, climbing higher and higher each day.

All over the Northern Hemisphere, this was a time to celebrate: China had celebrations, as did ancient Egypt had celebrations, as did ancient Greece - in fact, in the earliest days, theirs involved a human sacrifice.

The Druids celebrated, it was celebrated in Iran, Native American peoples of North America, including the Pueblo and the Hopi, had their celebrations.

In pagan Scandinavia the winter festival was called the Yule. Great yule logs were burned; people drank mead around bonfires listening to tales of great stories of the past for as long as the log burned, which could take 12 days. A boar was sacrificed to the chief god Odin, who donned a broad-brimmed hat and magic blue cloak and sped around the world at night on his great white horse. Mistletoe, which was a sacred plant because it grew on the most sacred tree, the oak, was cut and a spray given to each family to be hung in doorways as good luck.

That is our first reminder that a lot of our holiday traditions - including the term "Yuletide," the time of the Yule - are drawn from pagan ones, including decorating with garlands, wreaths, and the Christmas tree itself, along with the man who can magically fly around the whole world in one night.

For the date of Christmas, though, now we're getting into the space that lies between history and interpretation.

While historians are confident they can date the year of the birth of Jesus without a couple of years, no one knows the day of the year Jesus was born - or even what season. To the extent that the Bible can be trusted as a source we can be very confident that it was not in the winter since shepherds did not watch their flocks by night at that time of year; the flocks would most likely have been corralled.

In fact, "watching their flocks by night" was most commonly done in the spring when the flocks were pastured and newborn lambs needed special protection from wolves. That has lead some to argue he must have been born in the spring. But that is an awfully thin reed on which to try to build a foundation, much less a conclusion.

What's more, the earliest known use in English of the word "Christes-Maess," or the Feast of Christ, or Christmas, was in a list of Feast Days with Mass Days that was set down in England in 1038, a thousand years after Jesus died. No Saint's day listed for December 25th.

Indeed, early church leaders (I'm talking 2nd and 3rd centuries here) argued about when Jesus was born - the options included January 2, March 21, March 25, April 18, April 19, May 20, May 28, November 17, November 20, and, yes, December 25. And at the same time, some, such as Origen, argued that the whole thing was pointless and wrong because it shouldn't be celebrated at all. Celebrating birthdays, he said, was for pagan gods.

Still, by the mid-third century, the idea for having a day to celebrate the birth of Jesus was getting established. Nonetheless, it took another hundred years for that notion to become formalized and for a date to be fixed.

Meanwhile, in 313, Constantine the Great issued his Edict of Milan, legally allowing Christianity in the Roman Empire - actually, he went considerably beyond that; the text actually says it was

proper that the Christians and all others should have liberty to follow that mode of religion which to each of them appeared best.

Which shows a lot more tolerance than many here do today, especially among our right-wing so-called Christians, the fanatics who every year around this time get such a kick out of playing the oppressed victim under the relentless assault of the atheistic socialistic hordes - even though Christians make up over 78% of the US population.

Oh, and as a sidebar and contrary to popular belief, while Constantine considered himself “an emperor of the Christian people,” he did not actually formally convert by getting baptized until shortly before his death in 337 and Christianity did not become the official religion of Rome until 380, 43 years after his death.

Getting back to the point, the earliest known reference to Jesus being born on December 25 doesn’t come until the first years of the 3rd century, about 175 years after he died, with the first recorded date of his birth actually being celebrated on that day was not until 336. And it wasn’t until 350 when Pope Julius I officially declared that the birth of Jesus would be celebrated on the 25th of December.

But that just brings us back to the start. How did the chosen date, why did the chosen date, come down to December 25? That was the question, after all.

To answer that, first remember that these developments were taking place in Rome, which had become the nerve center of organized Christianity.

Which brings us us back, in turn, to the winter solstice. The Romans, like many other ancient peoples, had solstice celebrations. In Rome it was called Saturnalia.

This was originally a feast day to the god Saturn, but over time it grew to a gigantic fair and a festival of the home. It began with sacrifice of a pig and involved riotous merry-making, feasting, and gambling. Houses were decorated with laurel and evergreens. Schools were closed; the army rested; no criminals were executed.

Friends visited one another, bringing good-luck gifts of fruit, cakes, candles, dolls, jewelry, incense, and more. Temples were decorated with evergreens. Processions of people danced through the streets, with masked or blackened faces and wearing fantastic hats.

Masters feasted with slaves, who could do and say what they liked - supposedly, anyway. I doubt they really felt free to push the privilege very far since in at most a few days later they would be back to just slaves, but hypothetically they could.

Notice, by the way: traditions including decorating your home. Laurels. Visiting friends. Gift-giving. Holiday parties. Not Christian traditions, Roman ones. Pagan ones.

The old Roman goddess of the solstice was Angerona, whose festival day was, logically enough for a goddess of the solstice, December 21st.

But when Mithraism, personified by the god Mithra, was introduced to Rome in the mid-2nd century, the goddess was largely supplanted in favor of Mithra's day of seasonal rebirth, which was December 25. Mithra, himself a composite of earlier beliefs, became amalgamated with a Roman sun god named Solis Indigini, or the Native Sun, a god which in turn came from the Pelasgean titan of light named Helios.

"Pelasgean," by the way - yes, another sidebar - was how the ancient Greeks referred to the people who lived in the region before Greek culture emerged.

This new being, this combination of Mithra and Solis Indigeni, this composite of two composites, was Sol Invictus, the "invincible" or "unconquered Sun," and Mithra's day, December 25, became Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, or the birthday of the unconquerable Sun. When the emperor Aurelian proclaimed Mithraism the official religion of the Roman Empire in 274, the day became an official holiday.

So, put it all together. Before Constantine the Great issued his Edict of Milan in 313, being a Christian in Rome could get you killed. Refusal to participate in the Imperial cult was considered treason.

During the Great Persecution carried out by the emperor Diocletian from 303 to 311, Christian buildings and the homes of Christians were torn down, their sacred books were collected and burned. Christians themselves were arrested, tortured, mutilated, burned, starved, and condemned to gladiatorial contests to amuse spectators.

So if you wanted celebrate the birth of the man you regarded as your savior - and the idea of having such a celebration was by then pretty widely accepted among Christians - you had to hide it. So since the time is purely symbolic and basically arbitrarily chosen because no one knows the actual date for certain and it's really based on tradition and nothing more, what better time to do it than during Saturnalia - when everyone else was celebrating and so no one would notice? And what better day to pick than December 25, when the birthday of the unconquerable Sun could be thought of as the birthday of the unconquerable “Son?"

Indeed, according to St. John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, writing in the late 4th or very early 5th century, just a few decades after Christianity had become the official religion of Rome,

[the] Roman Church purposefully placed the keeping of Christmas between two popular folk festivals, Saturnalia and the Kalends of January, in order to give Christians something to celebrate about [undisturbed] while others were engaged in secular merrymaking.

The Kalends, by the way, is the first day of each month in the Roman calendar; it’s the source of our word calendar. And yes, there was a popular folk festival in Rome the first week of January which was a significant part of the Roman solstice celebrations.

By the year 354 CE, four years after Pope Julius I had designated it as such, December 25 had been accepted in Rome as the date of the Feast of Christ, or Christ-Mass, Christmas. Gradually most of the Christian Church agreed.

Once Christianity became the legal religion of Rome in 380, the church began appropriating what old pagan customs it could, with the result that the merry side of Saturnalia was gradually adopted and adapted to the observance of Christmas.

And so that is why Christmas in on December 25: Because Christians hid within, then adopted, then adapted, pagan celebrations of the winter solstice. By 1100 Christmas was the peak celebration of the year for all of Europe.

But let me finish up by saying that even then the idea was not universally accepted. Origen's conviction that celebrating the birth of a god was for pagans persisted among conservative Christians for centuries, including among the separatists and Puritans who settled Plymouth and Boston here in Massachusetts. They regarded Christmas as a pagan celebration with no Biblical justification. Instead of Yuletide, Puritans called it “Foolstide,” proving that no, puns are not a recent invention. In fact, at one point Boston had laws against celebrating Christmas.

As an illustration of the attitude, we have the journal of Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford, who in the entry for 1621 recalled what he called a passage "rather of mirth then of weight." (Spelling in the excerpt has been modernized.)

On the day called Christmas day, the Governor called them out to work, (as was used,) but the most of this new company [Here is referring to some people who had arrived the month before, in November 1621, on a ship called “Fortune.”] excused themselves and said it went against their consciences to work on that day. So the Governor told them that if they made it a matter of conscience, he would spare them till they were better informed. So he led away the rest and left them; but when they came home at noon from their work, he found them in the street at play, openly; some pitching the bar and some at stool-ball, and such like sports. So he went to them, and took away their implements, and told them that was against his conscience, that they should play and others work. If they made the keeping of it a matter of devotion, let them keep to their houses, but there should be no gaming or reveling in the streets. Since which time nothing has been attempted that way, at least openly.

That last part gets some added significance when you recall that Bradford is writing here in about 1631 or 1632, about 10 years after the fact.

 And the outlawing of Christmas not just here at home. In 1644, Great Britain's Puritan-dominated parliament passed an ordinance which called for December 25 to be a day of “solemn humiliation,” following up in 1647 by abolishing outright the feasts of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun - known in the US as Pentecost. The ban was not lifted until the restoration of the crown in 1660.

Back in the colonies, as I already mentioned, the MassBay colony - that is, Boston - banned celebrating Christmas altogether. That was in 1659. The ban remained in place for 22 years, until 1681, and even then it was a governor appointed by the restored British monarchy who revoked the ban.

Despite the lifting of the ban, the first recorded celebration of Christmas in Boston wasn't for another five years, in 1686. Even for many years thereafter, Thanksgiving remained the important seasonal holiday in New England.

Then in the wake of the revolution, interest in Christmas in the former colonies faded because it was seen as a British holiday. In fact, Christmas did not again become a major holiday in the US for several decades, not until a religious revival in the early 1800s spurred interest in the day, particularly in the South. As a result, it was, it's generally agreed, more than 50 years after the revolution before Alabama, in 1836, became the first state to make the day a holiday.

Even then, New England continued to lag behind: In Plymouth, the first time Christmas was even mentioned in one the town’s newspapers as far as anyone can tell wasn't until 1825. As late as 1856, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that “The old Puritan feeling prevents [Christmas] from being a cheerful hearty holiday” in the region, but, he added, "We are in a transition state."

And so it was: By 1860 that same Plymouth paper - which, interesting sidebar, is still being published, by the way, 198 years after it started - was filled with ads for Christmas presents and by the end of the century Christmas was as much a part of Plymouth and the rest of New England as it had become in the rest of the country.

044 The Erickson Report for December 16 to 29

 

044 The Erickson Report for December 16 to 29

 

This is This episode of The Erickson Report is our annual holiday episode, stepping aside from hard politics to address two burning questions: Why is Christmas on December 25? And why is New Year's Day on January 1?

 

The Erickson Report is news and analysis from the radical nonviolent American left. It is advocacy journalism, using facts and logic in pursuit of justice, never denying it has a point of view but always respecting truth.

 

Comments and reactions are welcome either here or at my personal email of whoviating at aol dot com.

042 The Erickson Report for November 18 to December 2, Page One: The "First Thanksgiving"

Gather 'round, kiddies, I'm going to tell you the real story, the based-on-actual-historical-sources story, of the "First Thanksgiving."

By which, of course, I mean the event that occurred in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts in the fall of 1621 which is the basis of our now-traditional Thanksgiving holiday.

One of the reasons I do this almost every year is that it is truly amazing just how much misinformation, mythology, and general muddle-headedness there is out there on this topic. In fact, it seems that what can fairly be called revisionist history about the events have become almost as traditional as turkey and pumpkin pie.

I like to try to bring some hard historical reality to the discussion.

So to start our Thanksgiving tale, consider this:

    Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruits of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week.

    At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.

    And though it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

That comes from a letter dated December 11, 1621. It was written to an otherwise-unidentified "loving and old friend" in England by Edward Winslow, a Mayflower passenger and a leader in the early years of the colony.

By the way, Winslow had a portrait done in 1651, 30 years later, after he had returned to England. It is the only verified picture of a Mayflower passenger known to exist.

As for the rest of them, we have no idea what they looked like beyond the traditional description of Myles Standish as short with red hair, a description given some backing by the fact that in a book called The New English Canaan, a nasty satire of the Plimoth settlement written in 1637 by Thomas Morton, Standish is identified by the name "Captain Shrimpe."

Winslow's letter was contained in a book published in England in 1622 under the rather ponderous title of A Relation or Journal of the beginning and proceedings of the English Plantation settled at Plimoth in New England, by certain English Adventurers both Merchants and others.

The book is popularly known today by the less cumbersome name of Mourt's Relation and consists of eyewitness accounts of various events during the first year of the settlement.

Here's why that letter is important here: It is the only contemporaneous account of what we know as the "First Thanksgiving" which is known to exist. The only other even near-contemporaneous account comes from William Bradford, long-time governor of the settlement, who wrote about it in his journal at least 10 to 12 years later. Even there he just sort of brushes by it, endorsing Winslow by referring to "not feigned but true reports." Quoting:

    They now began to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses against the winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took in good store, of which every family had its portion.

    All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc.

    Besides they had about a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to the proportion. Which made many afterwards write so large of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports.

That's it. That's all of it. That's what the entire "First Thanksgiving" story is built on. Everything else is speculation, interpretation, some questionable third- and fourth-hand accounts, and guesswork, some of it informed, all too much of it not.

Some things we can tell from the accounts: For one thing, based on other references in those same sources, we know that the event took place after September 18 and before November 9. Mostly likely, it was in late September or the beginning of October, as that would have been shortly after harvest.

Which also means, by the way, that Winslow's account was written very likely little more than a month after the event, so yes, it was contemporaneous.

In considering the event, the first thing to realize is that this was not a "thanksgiving." To someone of the period, a thanksgiving was a religious occasion, a day set aside for prayer to give thanks to God for some special and unexpected blessing.

The first public day of thanksgiving in the town actually came in the summer of 1623: A six-week crop-threatening drought had lead to a day of "humiliation," a day of fasting and prayer to beg forgiveness for whatever they had done to cause God to bring this on them. Literally that same evening, the rains came - and not a storm, a gentle soaking rain which saved the crops and so a day of thanksgiving seemed appropriate.

So no, this was not a thanksgiving. Such days would occur occasionally as the cause arose; to plan for one in advance, much less to plan for one every year as we do now, would be regarded as a gross presumption on God's will and intentions.

What this was instead was a very traditional English harvest feast, a celebration of a good harvest to which it was customary to invite those who had been helpful to you over the course of the year - which is surely why the natives were there: They had indeed been helpful, so they were invited. And yes, that is the best understanding. The revisionists would have it that the Natives simply crashed the party - but perhaps realizing that put the Natives in an unfavorable light, it got revised to a version I first heard two or three years ago where Natives who happened to be in the vicinity heard the gunfire from the militia drill, assumed Plymouth was under attack, went 30 miles back to Massasoit's chief village, where he raised a force and went 30 miles back to Plymouth to help, all in the narrow time frame available - an account that could fairly be described as utterly nonsensical especially when you note that Winslow's account shows no trace of either distress or surprise at the Natives' presence.

One other thing here: True, the settlers didn't have a good harvest, the usual trigger for such a feast - note that Bradford describes it as "small" - but they had a harvest. That surely raised everyone's spirits: It indicated they were going to make it. Reason enough for a celebration, especially considering what they had been through to get to that point, including the death by disease - probably pneumonia - of half their numbers in the first months.

I want to make a quick aside to explain a rather subtle point more clearly: Europeans of the 17th century - especially the more religiously-conservative sorts, such as those that lead the Plimoth settlement - did not make the sort of clear distinctions between what is "religious" and what is "secular" that we do today. The sense of, a feeling of, an awareness of, the "hand of God" or the "will of God" was much more central to their lives than it is to the vast majority of us now.

What that means here is that the 1621 harvest feast would surely have included prayers of thanks to God and perhaps a sermon from their religious leader, Elder William Brewster, as significant features of the event, just as prayer would have been a frequent feature of their everyday lives, from meals to musket drills to mucking about in their fields, tending the crops.

However, they would not have regarded this as "a day of thanksgiving" as they understood the term: While the prayers would have been significant features of the event, they would not have been the central features; not the purpose, not the point, not the driver behind it. Celebration was, feasting was.

Put another way, had we been able to witness the 1621 feast, to our modern eyes there would very likely have been more than enough praying, giving thanks, and singing of psalms and hymns to make it look like a religious or at least religiously-inspired event, but to a person of the 17th century it would have looked about as (for lack of a better term) secular as such a thing got.

Anyway, back to our story. As for the eternal question of what they ate, we can confident they had fowl such as duck or goose (as the governor "sent four men on fowling" in preparation) and yes, quite possibly turkey ("of which they took many," Bradford said). We can also assume they had fish, specifically cod and bass, which are mentioned in the sources, and likely deer.

Another aside, this one on the issue of historical interpretation, specifically of using historical sources without running too far ahead of them, a sin of which too many of the revisionist accounts are guilty, making too much out of too little. Note that Winslow says the natives "went out and killed five deer," but he also says "which they bestowed on our governor" - that being William Bradford - "and upon the captain" - that being Myles Standish - "and others." In other words, they were given to various leaders of the community, not to the community as a whole. More to the point, we can't tell if those deer were brought to the feast and brought soon enough to be butchered, dressed, cooked, and presented as part of the feast or if they were brought afterward as a sort of thank you, a reciprocal gift in return for having been "feasted" for three days, which personally I find more likely because of Winslow saying the Natives "went out and killed five deer" rather than "brought five deer."

Bradford's mention of venison doesn't resolve things because in the period, "venison" meant "hunted meat," which obviously includes deer but isn't limited to it; in fact at the time the meat of hares was called venison. So while they quite probably had deer, either from the natives or their own hunting or both, we can't say it definitively.

Getting back to the menu, lobster and other shellfish is another real possibility; elsewhere in the letter that I quoted Winslow mentions that they are abundant in the area - as are eels, of which, he claims, they could take "a hogshead in a night." If you think "eels, eew," know that an English person of the period would have responded "They're just another sort of fish." (A hogshead is a cask holding about 63 gallons of liquid. Yeah, Winslow was likely exaggerating; he was like that.)

Beyond that, we can reasonably argue for some others foods such as a sort of pie made from squash from their gardens, sweetened with dried fruit which they would have brought with them from England, salad from other stuff from their gardens, and a sort of coarse corn bread.

Again, some interpretation here if only to show its importance in examining history: Some argue that there couldn't have been pie or bread because the settlement had no oven. It's true the primary sources covering the early several years of Plimoth make no mention of ovens one way or the other, either "we built some" or "we wished we had some," but there are a number of mentions of bread in various contexts. And with bread being such a staple of the English diet, I find it hard to accept that they got as far as harvest without having made at least a couple of ovens to make use of the grains they grew, which would primarily be for bread. But again my real point here is not so much to argue for my interpretation as to point up how much interpretation can go into judging history. We have to tread carefully.

Moving on, water would have been the major and perhaps the only beverage: Their supply of barley would be limited (Winslow says the "English grains," which would mean such as wheat, rye, and oats as well as barley, "grew indifferent good") and there is no mention of hops. No hops, no beer; no much barley, not much ale. Even if they did have some barley, there may well would not have been enough time for brewing since harvest. And while they did bring beer with them on the voyage, it is highly unlikely that there was any significant amount of that left nearly a year later. So they might have had a little ale or even maybe a little wine brought from England and reserved for a special occasion, but again is was likely mostly, and possibly only, water.

By the way, one classic of revisionism is the claim the settlers were persistently drunk because they drank a gallon of beer a day, Preferring it," in the words of a number of the revisionists, "even to water." Indeed it was preferred to water for good two reasons: One, being made from grains it provided nutrition which water didn't. In fact, beer was sometimes referred to as "liquid bread." The other is that it keeps longer. Water will spoil. Warm, even tepid, water is a good breeding ground for bacteria. Beer, on the other hand, is boiled in the course of preparation and contains alcohol, both of which serve to kill germs. The settlers knew nothing of germs, but they did know the effect: Beer keeps longer. As for the gallon a day, first, some revisionists claim it was a half-gallon a day and second, if you've been gradually introduced to drinking beer since you were weaned, that doesn't seem that big a deal. That doesn't mean nobody got drunk; it does mean it was not routine.

So that is pretty much it, pretty much everything we know or can reasonably assume about the event itself. Not much to build a whole mythology on, is it?

Even so, it drove the pap we got fed as children, marked by images of picnic tables laden with turkey, mashed potatoes, and apple pies surrounded by natives dressed like they just came from the great plains and smiling "Pilgrims" dressed in the fashions of the 1690s.

And that same sparseness of detail - and one of the reasons I go through this almost every year - is probably a good part of the reason the event provides so much latitude to those who want to replace the childhood (and childish) image of noble settlers and savage natives with one of noble natives and savage settlers, who every year, regular as clockwork, treat us to the historical revisionism that has, again, become as traditional as turkey and cranberry sauce.

In place of the happy talk mythologies of peace, love, and harmony we were spoon-fed as children we find people snarling out dark tales of drunken, murderous, bloodthirsty settlers facing off with natives "crashing the party" at the feast and doing it in such numbers because Massasoit feared he'd be kidnapped or killed otherwise. It is a vision that, as much as the earlier one, is an attempt to overwrite history with ideology. It is, in other words, pure bunk.

In point of historical fact, relations between Plymouth and the neighboring natives were reasonably good for several decades. There were stresses and strains and disruptions, yes, but for the most part they managed to keep intact the peace agreement-mutual defense pact they made in the spring of 1621.

Things gradually got worse and I won't go into all the reasons why but the biggest two were population pressure, which mostly arose out of Boston, which was established in 1630, and disputes over land that were rooted in vast cultural differences between the natives and the English.

For one specific, the native culture had no concept of land ownership. Not just they didn't own the land, or that everyone owned the land, or the Great Spirit owned the land; no, the idea of land as something you could possess just didn't exist. To own something, for the natives, meant you could pick it up and carry it away with you. How could you own something if you have to leave it behind anytime you go anywhere? Which makes real sense, especially for a semi-nomadic people who live in one area for part of the year and another area the rest of the year.

But for the settlers, for any European, land ownership, which by its nature includes the concept of exclusive use, was an everyday notion. That cultural chasm was a source of repeated conflict.

The peace finally, irrevocably, completely broke down - but that was in 1675, more than 50 years after the so-called "First Thanksgiving." The point here is that at that time, in the fall of 1621, native-settler relations were good.

In fact, the very next sentences of the Winslow letter I quoted above are these:

    We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us; very loving and ready to pleasure us. We often go to them, and they come to us; some of us have been fifty miles by land in the country with them.

Winslow also says that all the other native leaders in the vicinity have made peace with Plymouth on the same terms as Massasoit, as a result of which, he asserts, "there is now great peace amongst the Indians themselves, which was not formerly." He goes on to say that:

    We for our parts walk as peaceably and safely in the wood as in the highways in England. We entertain them familiarly in our houses, and they as friendly bestowing their venison on us. They are a people without any religion or knowledge of God, yet very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted, just.

Just to be certain you know, "trusty" means trustworthy, not trusting, and "quick of apprehension" does not mean quick to be apprehensive. It means quick to understand, quick to grasp the meaning of something.

As for "religion," in his later book Good News from New England Winslow says "therein I erred" and goes on the describe the native religion, as least as he understands it.

That does not sound either like bloodthirsty settlers eager to kill natives or like natives who feared contact with those same settlers or felt they had to display mass force to avoid being kidnapped or killed.

If you're still not convinced, consider that in June 1621, three or four months earlier, the town felt it necessary to send a message to Massasoit requesting that he restrain his people from coming to the settlement in such numbers. This is from Mourt's Relation, this is the heart of the message they sent to Massasoit:

    But whereas his people came very often, and very many together unto us, bringing for the most part their wives and children with them, they were welcome; yet we being but strangers as yet at Patuxet, alias New Plymouth, and not knowing how our corn might prosper, we could no longer give them such entertainment as we had done, and as we desired still to do.

That's how "afraid" the natives were of the settlers, so "afraid" the town had to ask them not to come around so much.

Assigning the role of angel or demon to either side is trash: Neither of these peoples were either. Neither were saints, neither were devils.

So I reject the revisionist history, indeed I resent the revisionist history. I resent it first because it’s lousy history. It's based on ideology, not information; it looks to satisfy demands of politics, not of scholarship, and it is every bit as full of false tales and mythology as the nonsense and pap that we got fed as schoolchildren.

Plymouth in the fall of 1621 genuinely was a scene of peaceful and friendly relations, of good feeling, between English settlers and their nearest native neighbors. The "First Thanksgiving" was a moment of celebration when everyone on both sides, even if they were still a little wary each of the other, believed that yes, this was going to work out.

That wasn’t going to happen; it was a false hope, even a foolish hope. It was brief enough moment, lasting by even a generous understanding no more than a few decades, and a rare enough moment in our nation's history of cruelty toward and genocide of the native peoples of this continent such that while "the First Thanksgiving" shouldn't be a source of happily-ever-after "why can't we all just get along" fairy stories, neither is there any need to co-opt it into the service of ideology-driven revisionism.

Because that moment of hope did exist. And frankly, I resent the attempts to strip away that one moment of hope in pursuit of a modern political agenda.

I remember a friend of mine some years ago talking about “the urge to find angelic forces in the world,” that is, the seeming need many of us have to fix on some group, some movement, some something that we can convince ourselves is utterly pure in its motives and behavior. In our attempts to find some better balance in our understanding of what was done to the natives of North America, the cruelties inflicted on them, the racism and bigotry which targeted them and still target them, too many of us in considering the “Pilgrims” of Plymouth have chosen to simply swap one mythology for a perhaps more satisfying but equally false one.

Balance, it seems, is still a long way off.

I'm going to wrap this up with a few quick sidebars about the time before any of what I've talked about, a few details surrounding those first months you might think worth noting.

- First, you often hear the Mayflower referred to as a "small" ship. To our eyes it is, but at 180 tun, it was somewhat larger than an average merchant ship of the period, which went around 140-160 tun, a tun being a large cask that became used as a standard measure of the capacity of a ship's hold.

- You also often hear it said the passengers came for "religious freedom." They did not. First, that would only have applied to a minority of those on the Mayflower and not only did they not believe in religious freedom as we understand the term, "freedom" being equated with anarchy, to the degree they sought what they would call "liberty of conscience," those who had been to Holland - which was that minority of the passengers - had it there. In fact, that's why they went to Holland in the first place: Because they refused to be part of "the King's Church" (the Church of England), they were held to be criminals; in fact, some of them had spent some time in prison because of it. Unfortunately for them, they not only found such liberty in Holland, they also found poverty of a degree that threatened to fracture their community, in fact they were afraid it was dissolving before their eyes. That's why they came to this continent. As for the rest, the majority, they came for that most of cliched American of reasons, a better life coupled with the promise of owning land, the very symbol of both status and security.

- It has also been asserted that the first winter was marked by starvation; I've even heard it claimed that they all would have starved to death but for the corn - which has somehow expanded in the revisionist tales to be corn, wheat, and beans - they stole from a cache while exploring Cape Cod. Okay, this is partly true. The deaths came as I said earlier from disease, likely pneumonia, spread by the necessity of living in close quarters until housing could be built. Starvation was not an issue: The ship's stores provided food for the winter, which could be supplemented by fishing. What is true is that they stole some corn, but that was for seed corn for the following spring, which makes it rather silly to imagine it was a quantity sufficient to feed the entire group for the winter. Make no mistake, that did involve disturbing some graves and that was a really scummy thing to do - and it wasn't the only scummy thing they did during those initial explorations, as they also stole some items from the houses they found because they thought they were as a modern person might put it "interesting artifacts." In fairness I do have to add that the settlers promised themselves they would make good for what they took, which they did when they were able to contact those natives - the Nauset - after the winter was over, but while that eases the wrong, it does not excuse it.

- Finally, they were not "greeted by the indigenous people." In fact, they didn't speak to a native until March and that was to Samoset, an Abenaki from what's now Maine. It wasn't until a couple of weeks after that when they first spoke to a local (Squanto, aka Tisquantum). And those indigenous people would not have called themselves Wampanoag. That is a native word that means something like "people of the east" or "people of the dawn" and it's been adopted by the Natives of what's now eastern Massachusetts as a generalized term for all the Natives of the area. But no Native of the period would have said "I am Wampanoag" because that would mean "I live to the east of where I live," which makes no sense.

So anyway, I hope you enjoy your Turkey Day, I hope you have time to spend with your family or friends or better yet both - while staying safe for yourself and others - and I hope you can understand why I celebrate the day as an expression less of thankfulness for the past (or even the present) than as an expression of hope for the future. That hope, too, may prove as foolish as that of 1621, indeed these days I often think it is - but the blunt fact is, hope is also the one absolute, indispensable requirement for any effort to make that future a better one.

042 The Erickson Report for November 18 to December 2

 

042 The Erickson Report for November 18 to December 2

This episode:

- A correction

 

- The story of "the First Thanksgiving"

http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/mourt6.html
http://static.squarespace.com/static/50a02efce4b046b42952af27/t/50a8701fe4b08d1f2ced2ff4/1353216031950/MourtsRelation.pdf
http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/of-plymouth-plantation/
https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/newenglishcanaa00mort
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/50a02efce4b046b42952af27/t/50a86f6ce4b089e056ee46f6/1353215852147/Good+News+from+New+England.pdf

 

040 The Erickson Report, Page 2: A Longer Look at Where We are

040 The Erickson Report, Page 2: A Longer Look at Where We are

For the rest of the show we are going to take A Longer Look at where, at least to me, it seems we are now.

I expect we all know that we are facing threats to our very survival as a republic - threats marked by restrictions on voting plus gerrymandering, together creating the real potential for permanent, entrenched minority rule on behalf of an economic and social elite, and less well noticed but equally threatening restrictions on the right to public protest, even as we are aswarm with useful idiots ignoring the real threats and being distracted into wallowing in paranoia and conspiracy theories demonstrated most recently by mob rule at school board meetings.

The degree of threat to our continuing functioning as a free republic is serious; indeed it appears to be greater than it has been in generations if not longer - but it is not new. Every free society is at constant risk of having those freedoms lost through some combination of usurpation by the few and indifference among the many and what we face now we have in various ways and to various degrees faced before. 

Nearly 60 years ago - November 1964 - noted American historian Richard Hofstadter described what he called "the paranoid style in American politics," citing examples from the 1790s up through McCarthyism and the right-wing seizure of the Republican Party and the 1964 candidacy of Barry Goldwater it produced.

Without going into the history of the various movements and upheavals he mentioned, what's of particular note here is the common threads he found running through all of them: Adherents either believed they were holding off threats to what they held dear - what Hofstadter called the "causes and personal types" that were the "established way of life" - or that they had to reclaim, to claw back, those "causes and types," an "established way of life" that was already lost. And always, always, there were conspiracies among powerful hidden forces to undermine, to destroy, that way of life.

Think of that description and you'd think that Hofstadter was writing in 2021, not 57 years earlier. What we're seeing now has been a consistent thread in American history - although I will add as an aside that as Hofstadter noted, it's not only American history, it's human history; in fact as support he cited some examples from other nations.

Be that as it may, the point remains that even with the caveat that its not just us it still does appear that the degree of internal risk to our future is greater than at any time since the Civil War.

What I want to talk about, though, is that part of our problem, something that adds to that risk, is that significant parts of the liberal and progressive left have failed to understand or at least address the underlying nature, by which I mean the roots, of that risk, arguing instead that its just the the GOPpers are irredeemable racists and, displaying a remarkable lack of historical perspective, that it all started with the election of Barack Obama breaking open the damns of racism or the rise of Tweetie-pie or, more sophisticatedly, that Tweetie-pie released, enabled, the already-existing racism.

But while that, particularly the last part, is true, in fact the roots of our current crisis date back well before 2016, well before 2008. In fact, we should look back about 45 years to the mid 1970s.

To see why, jump back a bit further to the political and social climate surrounding the social changes of 1960s.

The Indochina - nee Vietnam - War was every bit as divisive as what we are seeing now, the social conflict was to be blunt every bit as great; it literally shattered not just friendships but families.

Beyond that, a time of dramatic social upheaval. A not-exhaustive list:

The civil rights movement that started in the '50s continued throughout the '60s.

The Port Huron statement came in 1962 and if you don't know what that is, look it up. You  may even want to read it; it's rather long but there is still-relevant material in there.

The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963 and the first modern women's liberation groups were founded in 1966 and 1967.

The Stonewall Uprising came in 1969.

The first Earth Day, long before it devolved into a corporate- and government-sponsored paean to picking up litter was in 1970.

And all this amid talk of violent revolution, riots - events such as those Detroit and Newark in 1967 make the so-called "riots" around BLM protests look like tea parties - the counterculture, three assassinations, and demands that all dissent be violently repressed.

But we got through that, not only in spite of but to a significant degree because of the protests and upheavals and a decade later, polls reported that a majority of Americans said we as a people were better for the changes that came as a result.

I'm not here to praise the '60s - the record is enough to need no puffing from me - but rather to ask, what is different this time? Even through all the upheaval of that earlier time, I don't recall ever a pervading sense that our society was disintegrating, unlike today there was no sense that even if we were not on the verge of actual civil war it certainly wasn't over the horizon. It's just not the same this time. So does it seem so now? Why do the stresses now seem so much bigger, the threat so much larger?

Where is where the left's failures to understand come in, failures I will show with three graphs and one headline. First the graphs.

This is from a study based on Census Bureau reports, showing real - that is, after allowing for inflation, so becoming a measure of how much stuff you can actually buy - household income at various levels over a 45 year period 1967-2012. Of course, the higher lines on the graph describe richer levels but what I want you to notice is the third line from the bottom, the gold-colored one. That marks the 50th percentile, that is, the median income, the point at which there are the same number of households below that level as there are above it. Note that it is essentially unchanged over those 45 years. While the rich got richer, pulling away and the richer you were the more away you pulled, half of American households gained almost nothing.

Zoom in a bit and come a little closer in time with the second one. It's from Pew Research, covering 1964 to 2018. While average hourly wages for American workers are nine times what they were in 1964, purchasing power has gone up only a bit over 10% and in fact if you look a bit closer you'll note that purchasing power is actually below where it was in the 1970s. Fifty years of work and the average wage-earner is worse off than they were.

Finally one from the Federal Reserve showing how much of total wealth is held by the top 1% and by the middle class, defined as the middle 60% of Americans by income - that is, ignoring the poorest 20% and the richest 20%. As recently as 1989, the middle class held double the wealth the 1% did, 36.4% to 17.2% - but this year, for the first time, that changed and the rich hold 27% of the nation's wealth o the middle class's 26.6%. 

Another way to look at it is to note that over the past 30 years, 10 percentage points of American wealth has shifted to the top 20% of earners, who now hold 70% of the total, according to the Federal Reserve.

This is one real difference between now and the '60s: Then, even as events and changes - whether welcomed or disturbing - swirled around you, you mostly had a sense of security, economic security, in your own personal life. The economic status of the middle class had been growing and looked like it would continue to do so and people felt they could look forward to a secure retirement and the prospect that - in what I maintain is the true American dream - their children would be better off than they were. It provided a foundation, a stability that made coping with the social changes much easier.

Yes, of course that was less true of blacks and other minorities and of the poor in general, but it was true of that broad middle class and to the extent that middle class was mostly populated by whites, to that same extent it was the genesis of another root of our current crisis, which I'll get too soon.

The point here - I seem to be saying that a lot - the point here is that that sense of economic stability no longer exists. It's something that has been developing for decades as real median family income in the US has gone nowhere since despite the growth of two-income families, which went from 25% of households in 1960 to 60% in 2012.

And while people likely didn't know the facts and figures of that trend, they knew the feel of it, the sense of it, the sense that things were just "not right," that things were not turning out the way they had come to expect not only for themselves but more importantly for their children.

In 1995, that loss of economic security had created what was then called the “angry white male” who I looked at with some sympathy. He is, I wrote, "not without legitimate grievances: His hopes are shrinking, his dreams for his family and his children are fading, he keeps working harder and getting less for it. The result is that he feels pressured, frustrated, haunted by the suspicion that he’s failed his family, that his efforts are unappreciated, which combine to make him bitter and defensive; ready, even eager, to have someone to blame to relieve his own guilt and creeping despair, making him an easy mark for, as Bill Clinton put it, a hot 30-second ad saying 'You didn’t do anything wrong, they did it to you.'"

In 2010 it was the Tea Party, and again, I took what I called "a not altogether unsympathetic look at the teabaggers," saying "they are not without real grievances and not without genuine frustrations," but again, just like before, they were aiming their anger at the wrong target.

These people have been misguided. Misled. Lied to. Manipulated. They are directing their frustrations at the weak, not the strong; at the victims, not the victimizers; at the servants of the powerful (in and out of government), not the powerful themselves (mostly not in government). For all of the noise, all of the shouting, all of the energy, all of the speeches signs slogans, the fact is they for the most part really have no idea what’s going on, what the real causes of their stresses are. They just know they want things to be the way they used to be.

Because when people are under stress they become in the social and psychological sense of the term, rather than the political one, conservative. Cautious, less willing to risk, less able to deal with change, more concerned with holding on to what they still have.

Recall when Barack Obama was attacked for referring to people in western Pennsylvania as “clinging to their guns and their religion.” The point was clumsily expressed and deserved a clearer explanation, but entirely valid: The people in the area were suffering real economic dislocations. Jobs were disappearing and more importantly the sort of stable communities on which those people had depended for generations were disappearing along with them. So of course they clung to their guns and their religion. When you are under pressure, constantly stressed, when the things you have counted on seem to be slipping away, you are going to cling ever more tightly to those things you have left, those parts of your world that still make sense, that you still can control. It is a natural, normal, entirely human reaction.

Some years ago, someone, unfortunately I don't recall who, noted how times of social change can be difficult for those living them, but, he said (and I'm sure it was a he), "people adjust, they move on, and a generation or two later people don't understand what all the fuss was about." But when there is a constant undercurrent of emotional, of psychological, stress rooted in a lack of stability, a lack of economic security, it is that much harder to deal with other issues and that difficulty can be and has been exploited by the very people most responsible for that constricted future, that sense of loss - that is, the corporate elite, the rich, the powerful, those who’ve selfishly gained from the economic trends, those who benefit the most from the old oppressions and divisions, the people who are doing their damnedest to get fingers pointed at anyone except them.

The bottom line, the thing that too much of the liberal and progressive left either fails to understand or at least fails to address is that we can't address the social dangers we face to our future as a free people without addressing the economy, not in a vacuum but as an integral part of achieving the ends we seek, an economy for the 99%, to recall the Occupy Movement 10 years down the road, which means including addressing the legitimate economic concerns, appreciating the economic stresses, of that white middle class which we too often dismiss as unworthy of our attention.

Now. Before I move to the other way the left has failed to grasp the nature of the threat to our future, I want to mention briefly - briefly because it has been discussed by others - that another part of why that threat is greater now than at earlier times is the facility with which the lies can be spread, the opportunities for manipulation that exist. Not only the technological changes such as the founding of outlets like Faux News and Facebook algorithms pushing users to ever-more paranoid content but the simple fact that the right-wing has over time become more adept at exploiting the stresses, at directing where the fingers get pointed. Recall during the time of the "angry white male," it was, as Clinton put it, "a hot 30-second ad during a political campaign." By the time of the Tea Party, is was staged chaos at public meetings of members of Congress. Now it has graduated to staged chaos at school board meetings. Give the devil his due: The puppet-masters of the right have upped their game.

Okay. The other thing that the left has failed to appreciate can be summed up in this headline from AP: "US is diversifying, white population shrinking."

The Census Bureau predicts that the US will become a majority-minority nation, that is, one where no ethnic or racial group makes up a majority of the population, within 25 years. In fact, that is already true from those under 18.

Now yes, this has often been mentioned in lefty discussions, but it is usually in an "In your face, right wing!" style under the notion that this heralds an increasingly liberal/progressive people and electorate. Which may prove to be true; US minorities have voted more liberal than whites. Other lefties, such as me, are less convinced that this will usher in a new, dramatic progressive era but who will look at that headline and react to it as an interesting demographic fact that promises a multiethnic, miultiracial, and therefore more interesting America.

Conservative and even moderate whites look at that same headline and find it threatening.

It’s been demonstrated often enough by both psychological testing and historical analysis that the one common factor that unites those who call themselves politically “conservative,” crossing all lines of age, sex, race, nationality, income level, and gender, is fear of change. Conservatism, bluntly, is based on fear - and I don’t mean fear-mongering as a political tactic here, I mean an internal fear, a personal fear, that the world around you is no longer comprehensible. And the more change there is and the more rapid the change, the more that conservatism grows.

If the world, if society, around you is changing in ways you can’t seem to understand, that don’t fit your personal worldview, you can become disoriented and frightened - and that fear, that fear of the changes, will make you more conservative. And that sort of disorientation is exactly what a significant percentage of white Americans are experiencing.

One of the things that struck me about the Tea Partiers and strikes me again now is that there's an overwhelming, an extreme, sense of what can only be called entitlement in the entire undertaking. Tea Party proponents would say over and over “it’s our country” and they were going to “take it back.” They insist that government failure to do what they wanted was “ignoring the will of the people.” Their progeny today echo all that with their delusions about election fraud and their loud shouts about their "freedom" when it comes to matters of public health.

That notion of entitlement was demonstrated in the results of a NYT/CBSNews survey from April 2010, which included the question “Do the views of the people involved in the Tea Party movement generally reflect the views of most Americans?” Some 25% of all respondents said yes - while 84% of people who identified themselves as Tea Party supporters did. Overwhelmingly, they were convinced that they did represent “the people," that they were "the people," despite the fact that the same survey showed the views of the Tea Partiers to be clearly, sometimes dramatically, sometimes stunningly, to the right of the general public.

With that in mind, consider the teabagger demographics revealed in that survey, demographics I would happily wager are much the same with the current crop: On the whole, white, male, older, somewhat richer, and somewhat more educated than the general populace. Which means that until fairly recently, these people were “the people.” That is, their views, their take on life and society and politics did define what it meant to be American. They did define the standard to which others were expected to hew, the default from which others who diverged were anything from odd to abnormal to aberrant. When someone pictured "an American," they tended to picture a somewhat older, upper-middle-class white male. And it's entirely reasonable to think that those who are now screaming about mask mandates, ivermectin cures, and "stop the steal" came to maturity, just like their forebearers, thinking of themselves in just that way: that they defined "American."

But that has been changing for several decades now. The world in which they grew up, the world in which they formed their worldview, is disappearing, splintering, crumbling. This is not to say that racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, and the rest no longer exist, but it is to say the world has changed, it is changing and will continue to even against resistance.
To a significant number of white people, those changes are threats to Hofstadter's "causes and types," an existential threat to that "established way of life" they were raised in and which formed the core of their worldview, their way of making sense of the world around them.

So when people already subjected to social and economic stresses inflicted by forces beyond their control and usually their understanding are faced with the prospect of things becoming in their view even more unhinged, such as the prospect of the US becoming a majority-minority nation, well that just can’t be right and that plus any bigoted leanings provide the seeds for conspiracy theories that serve, ultimately, to deny this really could be happening legitimately.

What all this means, ultimately, is that while we often describe, we dismiss, the protesters, the shouters, the mask-ranters, the "stop the steal" screechers as some dangerous combination of nutso and racist, the fact, the fact we have failed to recognize or address, is that a good many of them are genuinely scared and they don't even truly understand why or even about or of what, they just know it feels wrong. Which is why logical argument seems and often is so unavailing in dealing with them - because emotions are, by definition, not rational. So instead of spending as much time as we do in self-satisfying mockery of their foolishness, what we should do is consider ways we can address that psychic, you could almost call it socially primal, fear.

On that front I admit to have no specifics to offer beyond what could be offered in private conversations if you have any with people across the divide such as reminding them of how many social changes we have seen over the past say 50 or 100 years and how, y'know, we have managed to get through them all and we're still here so we can deal with those to come or, more daringly, if they raise the "great replacement" notion, note that this past June, an article in The Atlantic argued that considering among other things the rising number of multiracial and multiethnic households in the US, those lines are already becoming blurred to the point where by the time this "majority-minority" point is reached, it just won't be that big a deal.

Let's be clear: Bigotry is still bigotry, even if driven by economic stress and manipulated fears. Looking for ways to address those stresses and fears does not mean you give them a pass on the bigotry. It doesn't mean you tolerate their behavior, it doesn't mean you condone it or ignore it. It doesn't mean you refrain from calling it out. It means, rather, that you try to be able to say, in the immortal words of Mr. Spock, "I do not approve. I understand."

And the truth is, ultimately I feel sorry for those sorts of folks. First because some of the changes that are so frightening to them will not be stopped. They can adapt or they can live the rest of their lives in fear because they will not turn the clock back. They are no longer the definition of American and never will be again. Second because they are almost a sort of Greek tragedy with the doomed hero: They have, again, been manipulated and mislead into blaming their troubles on the wrong forces and the wrong people. To the very extent that their effort succeeds, to that very same extent they will lose and find themselves even deeper in the pit they themselves dug on behalf of their real masters who they failed to recognize.