Every year we sit down to turkey and stuffing, say a quick thanks, and move on with football and Black Friday plans. Most of us vaguely remember the childhood pageants with construction-paper buckles and feathered headbands. The story we were taught was sweet: the Pilgrims were saved by friendly natives who taught them to farm, everyone shared, and that’s why we give thanks.
Nice story. Almost entirely wrong.
The real history is far more brutal—and far more useful—than the cartoon version. It’s a story about life and death, about human nature, and about an economic experiment that failed so spectacularly it nearly wiped out the colony. Funny thing is, the man who documented the whole disaster was the colony’s own governor, William Bradford. His words are still in print, and they read like a warning label we keep ignoring.
The Experiment Nobody Talks About
When the Mayflower dropped anchor in 1620, the Pilgrims weren’t just religious separatists looking for freedom. They were also bound by a seven-year contract with their London investors. That contract required everything they produced—crops, furs, houses, even the shirts on their backs—to belong to the “common stock.” Everyone would work according to ability and receive according to need.
Sound familiar? It should. It was textbook socialism, three centuries before Marx.
At first, the arrangement seemed Christian and noble. Sharing everything felt righteous. But within months the cracks appeared. Bradford’s journal is painfully honest about what happened next.
“Young men that were most able and fit for labour and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.”
— Governor William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
Translation: the strong, healthy guys realized they were busting their backs so someone else’s family could eat. Not surprisingly, they started doing the bare minimum. Why kill yourself in the field if the harvest gets divided equally anyway?
The Deadly Consequences of “From Each According to His Ability”
By the second winter, half the colony was dead. Half. Women, children, the elderly—they starved or succumbed to disease brought on by malnutrition. Bradford wrote that the communal system “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment.”
Think about that for a second. These were the same people who had endured a brutal Atlantic crossing, who had already lost family members to scurvy and storms. They were tough, devout, and remarkably unified in belief. Yet even they couldn’t make collectivism work.
Why? Because human nature doesn’t change. When you remove the link between effort and reward, effort collapses. It’s not greed; it’s basic psychology. I’ve seen the same dynamic in modern communes, co-ops, even group projects in college. The moment personal consequences disappear, productivity tanks.
- Able-bodied men pretended to be sick to avoid work
- Women refused to wash clothes for other families
- Corn was stolen at night because no one felt ownership
- Resentment grew between families exploded
Bradford finally called a meeting in the spring of 1623. He told the colonists that from now on, every family would get their own plot of land. Whatever they grew after paying a modest tax to the common stock was theirs to keep, trade, or eat.
The Miracle That Followed Private Plots
The transformation was almost immediate. Here’s Bradford again:
“This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been… The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability.”
— William Bradford
Suddenly the same people who “pleaded weakness” were working for the common good were out from dawn to dusk on their own land. Children helped. Teenagers worked like adults. The harvest that year was so abundant they started trading surplus with nearby tribes.
Bradford called it “the power of property.” I call it the moment America’s economic DNA was born.
Why the Traditional Thanksgiving Story Skips This Part
Most school textbooks jump straight from “Pilgrims arrive” to “Squanto teaches them corn” to “big feast with Indians.” The three-year socialist disaster and the private-property turnaround? Usually one paragraph, if that. Sometimes it’s framed as the Pilgrims being too religious or too European to farm properly.
But that’s nonsense. The soil didn’t magically improve in 1623. The weather wasn’t dramatically better. The only variable that changed was incentives.
I suspect the real reason this part gets downplayed is that it’s politically radioactive. Acknowledging that socialism almost destroyed the Pilgrims—and that capitalism saved them—doesn’t fit the preferred narrative of many academics. Easier to focus on friendship and sharing.
The Same Pattern, 400 Years Later
Look around today. We’re running variations of the same experiment. Massive government programs that sever work from reward. Housing policies that treat property as a collective resource rather than an individual right. Calls to “abolish profit” in entire industries. Each time, the results echo 1621: shortages, resentment, and eventual collapse.
Venezuela had the largest oil reserves on earth fifteen years ago. Today people eat zoo animals. Cuba’s doctors drive 1950s taxis on the side because state salaries can’t buy food. These aren’t anomalies—they’re the predictable endpoint of removing private incentives on a national scale.
Closer to home, look at any American city where rent control has been in place for decades. Buildings fall apart because owners can’t profit from maintenance. Waiting lists stretch years because no one builds new units. Same principle: kill the reward, kill the behavior.
What Bradford Understood That We Keep Forgetting
Governor Bradford wasn’t an economist—he was a devout Christian who originally supported the common course. But he was honest enough to admit when reality contradicted ideology. His conclusion cuts to the bone:
“The experience that was had in this common course and condition…may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.”
— William Bradford
In plain English: God Himself designed human beings to respond to personal incentives, and any system that tries to override that design is doomed.
That’s not conservative talking-point spin. It’s the recorded observation of a man who watched half his friends die because of a failed theory—then watched abundance return the moment he abandoned it.
A Thanksgiving Worth Celebrating
So maybe this year, between the turkey and the pie, we can tell the real story. Not to be combative, but because it’s actually more inspiring than the sanitized version.
It’s the story of people who tried the highest ideals of collective living, watched those ideals murder their neighbors, and had the humility to change course. It’s the story of human nature not as something to be ashamed of, but as a force that—when channeled by property rights and personal responsibility—produces staggering abundance.
That abundance made the famous 1621 feast possible. That abundance is why we’re still here, arguing and eating and living in the freest, richest society the world has ever known.
And if we forget where it came from, we risk running the Pilgrims’ experiment all over again—this time with 330 million lives on the line.
Happy Thanksgiving. May we remain grateful for the hard-won lessons that let us celebrate it at all.
