A full week was given to the first Thanksgiving feast in New England in 1621. Governor Bradford sent men to hunt deer and turkey and to call Massasoit's tribe to the Pilgrim's table. Out of this harvest festival came the American institution of Thanksgiving Day. It is peculiar to our people. No other nation has a celebration exactly like it. It does not honor a victory, mark a revolution, or commemorate the birth or death of a national hero. It is the great holiday of the common people.
Thanksgiving is a national family celebration to thank God for the bounty wrought in liberty by our own labors. Many descendants of the Pilgrims still follow the custom, begun on that first Thanksgiving Day in Plymouth, of placing five grains of corn beside each plate at the dinner table. Five grains of corn was the daily ration during those desperate days before the harvest when food was scarcely to be had. At each subsequent annual feast, the Pilgrims placed the grains at the table so that the reason for their rejoicing might not be forgotten.
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When next you sing the "Hymn of Harvest Home", think kindly of our Pilgrim Fathers, for they were not "communists with a small c" nor any other kind of communists, Some conservative editors and commentators in recent years have given the impression that the Pilgrims were starry-eyed idealists intent upon founding a socialist utopia in the wilderness. One such editor, zealous to refute socialism, has written: "Socialism is not a new experiment in the United States. Neither is Communism. The Socialist community was tried by the Pilgrims in New England over three hundred years ago. The dream of the Pilgrims didn't work and the Mayflower Compact was a total failure."
British General John Burgoyne must have been bitterly disappointed one day in July 1777 in the upper Hudson Valley — the day his army, hot in pursuit of the Americans they had just driven from Fort Ticonderoga, ran into a lake that wasn’t supposed to exist.
Nathan Hale was full of fun and life, but he is remembered for his death. He was a man of honor who died in rank dishonor. His last words, which should have perished with him, have instead immortalized him. He was hanged for espionage 233 years ago this September 22.
