An Affluent Thankgiving

On May 24, 1607, when the Pilgrims were still living comfortably at Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, the Virginia Company planted the first permanent English colony in America at Jamestown. By the time the Pilgrims debarked from the Mayflower, the settlement at Jamestown was thirteen years old. Long ago before Squanto taught the New England Separatists how to fish and raise crops, the Virginians were exporting thousands of pounds of tobacco to satisfy the nicotine hunger of England. Jamestown was earlier, bigger, and richer than Plymouth. Yet we commemorate the Pilgrims' first good harvest, and all but ignore the Virginia colony.

Thanksgiving was created by naive men for an ingenuous age, when the saga of the Pilgrims could still awaken a poignant inspiration in the nation's soul. In 1863, the year the holiday was first observed by proclamation of President Lincoln, the Plymouth adventure still symbolized the courage and idealism of a young America. The country responded to the charming religious faith of William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, who wrote,

Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by his hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousand; so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea, in some sorte, to our whole nation.

America has grown up in the century since Lincoln, and Thanksgiving has become an anachronism. There is no place for a special day of gratitude in the modern calendar. We are now mature enough not to wax sentimental over our memories, and committed enough to concrete personal goals not to reach after flimsy national destinies. Most important, the holiday we will go through the motions of celebrating next week no longer represents the spirit and values of the nation. Americans regard affluence as a birthright, not a providential boon. There is no point in our communing with an impoverished past as long as we keep on getting richer.

Prosperity has knocked the moral stuffing out of Thanksgiving. The third Thursday of November once heard the patriotic flapping of the bald eagle; today it is a feast day, a holiday of turkeys.

The ideals of the Jamestown colony have grown unreal and stale like the values of Plymouth. The men who backed the Jamestown venture were no other-wordly visionaries, but practical men of business. The Virginia Company hankered after precious metals, a Northwest Passage, and raw materials with which to produce "all the commodities of Europe, Africa and Asia, and to supplye the wantes of all our decayed trades." Bradford's "spirite of God and his grace" were conceits foreign to the minds of these entrepreneurs. In return for their investment they wanted earthly dividends of the sort envisioned by Michael Drayton in his "Ode to the Virginia Voyage":

And cheerefully at sea,

Successe you still intice,

To get the pearle and gold,

And ours to hold,

VIRGINIA,

Earth's only Paradise....

Here is a proper ethic for a self-possessed, acquisitive people, and here is a bit of the seventeenth century that embodies the principles of the twentieth. If the lessons of Plymouth could inspire the 1860's, the ambitions of Jamestown are suited to our own decade.

The record of Jamestown has all the theatrical trappings of an achievement to be honored in a national holiday. Like the Pilgrims, the Virginia colonists barely survived their first years in the New World. Like the Pilgrims, they persevered. Against Miles Standish's bungled courtship of Priscilla Alden, the Jamestown legend can put the capture of John Smith by Powhatan and his rescue by Pocahontas. The counterpart of the Pilgrim's harvest feast in Virginia was the arrival of a relief expedition on June 16, 1610.

By leveling their gaze at material gain, the founders of Jamestown made themselves the truer precursors of modern American ideals. Thanksgiving, though reduced to an occasion for a square meal, still immortalizes the deeds of the Pilgrim Fathers. Surely the Pecuniary Fathers of Jamestown deserve to be enshrined in the nation's folklore with their own holiday.