Marketplace of Ideas Blog

Perhaps the single funniest 30 minutes in the history of sitcoms, based on a true story (and in radio, the weirder the story, the more likely it is to be true), begins our discussion of Thanksgiving tomorrow.

I prefer that opening to wading into the discussion of the extent to which accounts of the first Thanksgiving were fictionalized. (I read enough of them in repeated reading of When the Pilgrims Came in kindergarten Friday.)

Whether the first Thanksgiving was at Plymouth Rock, or two years earlier in Virginia, or even 56 years earlier in Florida, the first Thanksgiving holiday took place 219 years ago today — Nov. 26, 1789, proclaimed by new President George Washington. Thanksgiving was placed on the last Thursday in November by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, then made the fourth Thursday in November by Franklin Roosevelt in 1941.

The difference between the last Thursday and the fourth Thursday gets to the more recent symbol of this weekend — the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, beginning with Black (as in black on balance sheets) Friday the day after Thanksgiving. Of course, Christmas creep has gotten so out of hand that the Christmas shopping season might as well start on Dec. 26. (And in some households, it does.)

This weekend thus combines the sacred with the secular, as most American religious holidays now do. Thanksgiving, however, has, I would argue, kept its religious meaning more for most people than Christmas has, in part because Thanksgiving is not an exclusively Christian holiday, even if its origins are Christian. For whichever version of the first Thanksgiving you prefer, the original purpose of the day was to give thanks to God, initially for arriving in the New World, and then for what we have.

One of the things for which we should be thankful is free enterprise. The Plymouth Colony originally was designed as a commune, with the British investors and the first colonists sharing everything equally seven years after the colony was established. It took just three years, though, for the colonists to see that that approach wasn’t going to work. As the Hoover Institution’s Tom Bethell wrote:

[Gov. William] Bradford’s comments make it clear that common ownership demoralized the community far more than the tax. It was not Pilgrims laboring for investors that caused so much distress but Pilgrims laboring for other Pilgrims. Common property gave rise to internecine conflicts that were much more serious than the transatlantic ones. The industrious (in Plymouth) were forced to subsidize the slackers (in Plymouth). The strong “had no more in division of victuals and clothes” than the weak. The older men felt it disrespectful to be “equalized in labours” with the younger men. …

The Pilgrims had encountered the free-rider problem. Under the arrangement of communal property one might reasonably suspect that any additional effort might merely substitute for the lack of industry of others. And these “others” might well be able-bodied, too, but content to take advantage of the communal ownership by contributing less than their fair share. As we shall see, it is difficult to solve this problem without dividing property into individual or family-sized units. And this was the course of action that William Bradford wisely took. …

So the land they worked was converted into private property, which brought “very good success.” The colonists immediately became responsible for their own actions (and those of their immediate families), not for the actions of the whole community. Bradford also suggests in his history that more than land was privatized.

The system became self-policing. Knowing that the fruits of his labor would benefit his own family and dependents, the head of each household was given an incentive to work harder. He could know that his additional efforts would help specific people who depended on him. In short, the division of property established a proportion or “ratio” between act and consequence. Human action is deprived of rationality without it, and work will decline sharply as a result.

In difficult times, it’s easy to forget how blessed we really are, both in this country and here in Northeast Wisconsin. We have the ability to create a product or service that we can sell to someone for a mutually agreed-to price. A lot of businesses are experiencing lower profits, but less profit is better than no profit. Most people have watched their retirement accounts decline in value (unless you haven’t opened your quarterly statements, and no one would blame you), but, as pointed out yesterday, the only people who have lost actual money are those who have cashed out of the market.

No one knows for sure how long our current economic conditions will last, but only the reflexive doomsayer believes things will not eventually get better. And as it is, this area doesn’t get the subterranean economic lows of the coasts that attract the attention of the national news media.

It’s also easy to mistake what actually are gifts. My first job out of college was as a weekly newspaper reporter in a small town where I had virtually nothing in common with anyone else in that area, or at least anything in common that I found useful. And yet, try as I did, I was not able to attract the attention of any potential employer, despite my having done good work. Of course, had I left that area before I did, I would not have met my wife (to make a long story short, how I met her is one of the more unusual ways to meet spouses), or her family (which has never failed to feed me in the nearly 20 years I’ve known them), or other people who I believe will be lifelong friends.

The Wall Street Journal today will print two editorials it prints every Thanksgiving, “The Desolate Wilderness,” about the 1621 Thanksgiving, and “And the Fair Land,” the latter of which seems particularly appropriate this year:

But we can all remind ourselves that the richness of this country was not born in the resources of the earth, though they be plentiful, but in the men that took its measure. For that reminder is everywhere — in the cities, towns, farms, roads, factories, homes, hospitals, schools that spread everywhere over that wilderness.

We can remind ourselves that for all our social discord we yet remain the longest enduring society of free men governing themselves without benefit of kings or dictators. Being so, we are the marvel and the mystery of the world, for that enduring liberty is no less a blessing than the abundance of the earth.

And we might remind ourselves also, that if those men setting out from Delftshaven had been daunted by the troubles they saw around them, then we could not this autumn be thankful for a fair land.

Happy Thanksgiving to all. And watch out for flying turkeys.