Monday, November 23, 2020
 
Give thanks for the Pilgrims and private property

Most Americans know the rudiments of the Thanksgiving story: How the Pilgrims suffered through that first year in the place they called Plymouth. How food and shelter were so inadequate during the bitter winter of 1620-21 that most of the small company grew sick and half its members died. How the survivors struggled to get the seeds they had brought from Europe to grow in the stony Massachusetts soil and how they might have starved if kindly Indians hadn't taught them to plant corn. How they were grateful for the first small harvest they managed in the summer of 1621, and for the abundance of fish and game with which they were able to supplement it.

It was to celebrate that initial harvest that Governor William Bradford authorized a community feast and invited the neighboring Indians — the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit and about 90 of his warriors — to “rejoice together” over venison and wild fowl. “All had their hungry bellies filled,” Bradford would later write in Of Plymouth Plantation. Today we look back to that harvest feast of 1621 as the first American Thanksgiving.

But 1621 wasn't a turning point and the celebrants at that “first Thanksgiving” didn't celebrate for long. Bellies were soon empty again. Plymouth Plantation was failing — and not because of bad weather or stony soil. It was human nature, not Mother Nature, that threatened the settlers with destitution. The settlement at Plymouth was a commercial enterprise but it operated, in effect, as a religious commune. The terms of the agreement by which the colony had been chartered, signed in London before the Mayflower sailed, were strict: “All profits and benefits that are got by trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means” were to become part of “the common stock.” Moreover, “all such persons as are of this colony are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock and goods of the colony.

As Nick Bunker writes in Making Haste from Babylon, his acclaimed 2010 history of the Mayflower Pilgrims and their world,

for the first seven years no individual settler could own a plot of land. To ensure that each farmer received his fair share of good or bad land, the slices were rotated each year, but this was counterproductive. Nobody had any reason to put in extra hours and effort to improve a plot if next season another family received the benefit.

To all intents and purposes, in other words, there was no private ownership. No one’s labor resulted in benefit for themselves or their family, so no one was motivated to work harder or more diligently. Whatever any individual produced would belong to all, and he would be entitled to get back only what was deemed necessary for him and his family. As Karl Marx would phrase it 255 years later, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need.” Communism was destined to fail in 20th-century Europe, China, and Cuba. It fared no better in 17th-century Massachusetts.

The system “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment,” Bradford recorded. “For the young men that were most fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense. The strong . . . had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter [of what] the other could; this was thought injustice. . . . And for men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery; neither could many husbands well brook it.”

Bad attitude led to bad crops — and worse. “Much was stolen both by night and day,” Bradford wrote of the 1622 harvest. “And although many were well whipped . . . yet hunger made others, whom conscience did not restrain, to venture.” It became clear that unless something changed, “famine must still ensue the next year also.”

It didn’t take long for the settlers to understand the built-in disincentives of the system they were operating under. The lack of private property, they realized, was stifling productivity and bringing out the worst in their characters. So in the spring of 1623, communism was replaced with capitalism.

As Bradford later recorded, it was decided to alter the rules, and to “set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. . . . And so assigned to every family a parcel of land. . . . This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise. . . . The women now went willingly into the field and took their little ones with them to set corn.”

The results were outstanding. In 1621, the colony had planted just 26 acres. In 1622, it planted 60. But in 1623, with families now working for themselves, 184 acres were planted.

When the harvest season came, Bradford later wrote, “instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God.” The effect of switching from communal to private property “was well seen,” Bradford noted — so much so that “any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day.” Before long, Plymouth was exporting corn.

The Pilgrims had tried to survive under socialism avant la lettre, and they met the disappointing results socialism always engenders. The introduction of private property and self-interest transformed that disappointment into success — something that has “happened so often historically it’s almost monotonous,” as Lawrence W. Reed remarks in an essay for the Foundation for Economic Education:

Over the centuries, socialism has crash-landed into lamentable bits and pieces too many times to keep count — no matter what shade of it you pick: central planning, welfare statism, or government ownership of the means of production. Then some measure of free markets and private property turned the wreckage into progress. I know of no instance in history when the reverse was true — that is, when free markets and private property produced a disaster that was cured by socialism. None.

A few of the many examples that echo the Pilgrims’ experience include Germany after World War II, Hong Kong after Japanese occupation, New Zealand in the 1980s, Scandinavia in recent decades, and even Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s.

It might be overstating the case to claim that the experience of the Plymouth colonists four centuries ago inoculated Americans against socialism. But it is fair to say that mainstream America has never been tempted by the socialist claim that letting government control all property and direct the economy will lead to prosperity. There is a Socialist Party in the United States and there have always been some candidates who preach the virtues of socialism. It isn’t hard to find ardent proponents of socialist nostrums on college campuses, in the media, and especially in the entertainment industry.

Nonetheless, most Americans know better. They perceive that wherever socialism has been imposed, its failures have been comprehensive: more poverty, less freedom, fewer resources, crippled agriculture, stunted growth, rising authoritarianism, and heartbreaking desperation. In just the last few years, socialism has destroyed Venezuela, turning the country with the highest standard of living in Latin America into an impoverished basket case.

The great economic lesson of Plymouth's early years is one that cannot be taught too often: Private ownership and a free market are indispensable to prosperity. The “first Thanksgiving” was in 1621, but the crucial insight — the one that rescued Plymouth from economic calamity and made possible the eventual emergence of American liberty — occurred two years later. The embrace of private property in Massachusetts was a godsend, one whose blessings we reap to this day. Let us give thanks.