[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 150 (Wednesday, November 17, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H7534-H7541]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE ECONOMY, UNEMPLOYMENT, AND THE ADVENT OF THANKSGIVING
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Polis). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin) is
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Good evening.
I would like to talk about several different topics today. One, I
think, is on the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere. I want to
talk a little bit about unemployment. I want to talk about the economy
and what the solutions are to this problem. This isn't very
complicated, but people try to make it more complicated than it needs
to be.
When we get done with that subject, I'm going to change gears and do
something that's a little bit more topical for the Thanksgiving season.
I'd like to tell you the actual story, a great adventure story, about
the Pilgrims, about the Thanksgiving that they celebrated and about the
many other ways that they have blessed our country.
First things first, let's talk a little bit, though, about something
that's on everybody's minds--the problem of unemployment and the
problem of the continuous and rapid growth of the Federal Government,
which stifles our freedoms and liberties, which buries us in red tape
and bureaucracy, which raises our cost of living, and which makes life
more and more miserable for Americans as they lose their freedoms, and
the Federal Government's out-of-control spending that accompanies that.
These are problems we've talked about, and these are problems that
the voters have voted on. The voters seem to think that this is a
problem in spite of the fact that we're going to try and shove
socialized medicine down the throats of Americans and in spite of the
fact they don't want it. We're not dealing with unemployment. We're not
dealing with the causes for unemployment, but I think we need to talk
about it a little bit because it isn't as complicated as some of my
colleagues seem to make it out to be. It's not a matter of class
warfare. It has nothing to do with that. It's just simple economics.
Now, if you want to talk to anybody who is a small business man and
ask him what are the things that kill jobs and ask him what are the job
killers, I would bet you he's going to be talking about things on this
list right here.
The first thing is excessive taxation. The second is insufficient
liquidity. What does that mean? It means it's hard for businessmen to
get money from banks.
Economic uncertainty. People don't want to take risks when they don't
know what's going to happen next. Then, of course, there is a whole lot
of red tape and government mandates. All of those things are enemies to
jobs and job creation.
Now let's go into this just a little bit because this isn't so
difficult. It's not a matter of class warfare. It's not a matter of
rich people not paying enough. In fact, there is an interesting
statistic or two. What percent of the overall tax burden do you think
the top 1 percent of Americans carry? What percent do you think the top
10 percent of Americans carry? Well, the top 10 percent of Americans
carry about 70 percent of the tax burden in this country. How about the
bottom 50 percent of Americans? What percentage do they carry? Less
than 10 percent. So I guess we've got a pretty graduated income tax. If
that were the solution, we'd already be in great shape, but let's get
back to the basics about jobs.
First of all, why is it that excessive taxation kills jobs? Well, the
reason is that the people who own small businesses create most of those
jobs. Small businesses--maybe we should say medium and small
businesses, which have 500 or fewer employees, are the businesses that
hire 80 percent of Americans.
Now, my Democrat friends can't seem to make this connection. If you
kill the business, you're not going to have the jobs. If you tax the
businessman's hide off, he's not going to hire people because he's not
going to have the money to buy new equipment, to
[[Page H7535]]
put up new buildings, to invent new technologies, and to expand his
business. So the connection is pretty straightforward. If you want to
kill jobs, you tax the guys who own those businesses. A lot of those
business owners don't really think of themselves as wealthy, because
they've started some little businesses that have grown and grown and
grown, and as they grow, they keep putting more and more money back in
the businesses. They haven't stopped to consider the fact that they may
be multimillionaires, but they keep putting the money into the
businesses and the businesses grow and they hire more people.
If you're just so hung up on the fact that somebody is filthy rich
and if you're so hung up on the fact that they may be having more fun
than you are and that you've got to tax them into the dirt, well, then
you're not going to have any jobs. You just can't have it both ways. If
you want jobs, you have to have healthy businesses, and you can't have
healthy businesses if you tax them out of existence. So excessive
taxation is just going to be a job killer.
Insufficient liquidity. That is, if you run your banks and if you
have bank regulators all over the banks so they can't make any loans,
it's hard for the businessman to get money to invest in new things.
Obviously, economic uncertainty. Let's say you own a business, and
you've got lots of money tied up in it. Are you going to take a great
big gamble when you don't have any idea what next goofy policy the
administration is going to come up with or what kind of additional
taxes and red tape and bureaucracy you're going to face? No. You're
going to hunker down. You're going to say, Wait a minute. I'm not going
to take any risks in this environment. Business is off.
A lot of people are boarding up their businesses. A lot of businesses
are shutting down. A lot of jobs are being shipped overseas. We create
such a hostile environment for business that the big businesses say,
Okay. You show us the rules. If you don't want to have your jobs in
this country, we'll take the jobs somewhere else. The small businesses
just close their doors, and the jobs are gone forever. So the economic
uncertainty is a job killer.
Of course there is red tape and government mandates. There is one
that should be on this list, and that is excessive government spending.
That is also something that has always, historically, been a problem.
Now, on top of the unemployment problem, on top of the runaway
Federal Government that is no longer a servant but has taken on the
effect of master and is bossing Americans around and taxing them out of
house and home and ruining the economy--if that's not bad enough, we've
got another problem that's coming, and it's something that we need to
deal with in the near future.
{time} 2100
That's the problem of a huge tax increase that's just around the
corner at the beginning of the year.
So, if we're already in trouble with close to 10 percent unemployment
and we know that excessive taxation is one of the things that is a job
killer, do we want to then apply a whole bunch more, another huge tax
increase to the economy? Most people would say you have to be crazy to
do something like that. Most people, when they look at history, say
that's the dumbest thing in the world to have a huge tax increase right
when the economy is having a hard time, and yet, that's precisely what
is going to happen next year if the Congress doesn't take action.
What's happening is, because of some rules in the Senate, the Bush
tax cuts, a series of Bush tax cuts are going to expire, and when they
do, you can see some of the jumps here from 2010 to 2011. This ordinary
income tax, a bracket of 35 percent, is going to jump to 39.6 percent;
capital gains going from 15 to 20. You know, the capital gains, that's
an important one because that's a place where people who invest in
businesses have money. If this tax is low enough, they can plow it back
into business. As you raise it up, there's less money going back into
businesses. And these are different kinds of dividends, going from 15
to almost 40 percent.
And the death tax, wow, is that ever taking a jump. Everybody who
needs to die, you need to die this year, that's for sure, because death
tax is zero. It's jumping to 55 percent. So when you get beyond the
first million or two that are protected from the death tax, what's
happening is, your dad owns a farm and he has a lot of fields and he's
got a lot of pieces of equipment, and your plan is to follow in your
dad's footsteps and be a farmer, and your dad dies and you find out
you're going to have to sell 55 percent of your farm to pay the taxes
that your dad owes on his death. Isn't good enough to tax him when he's
alive. You tax him when he's dead. So we have a death tax. Well, by the
time you get rid of selling half the fields and half the pieces of
equipment you say, well, I can't run the farm. Well, that's really
smart tax policy, isn't it, that we shut down a small business by
jumping the death tax from 0 to 55 percent.
We have child tax credits here that are going up, marriage penalty,
lowest tax brackets going from 10 to 15 percent. So, these taxes are
coming. Most people would say, that studied economics a little bit,
would say this is not what you should be doing during a recession. In
fact, regardless if you're a Republican or Democrat, history says this
is not what we should be doing.
You could learn--and I'm kind of surprised that the Democrats haven't
taken a lesson from Kennedy because he had a recession when he was
President. He cut taxes and the economy sprung right back, and of
course Ronald Reagan did it. I don't expect the Democrats to learn from
Ronald Reagan, even though he used to be a Democrat, but JFK, you think
they could learn from him.
You think maybe they could have learned from FDR even. FDR had a guy
who was Secretary of the Treasury who was Henry Morgenthau. Henry
Morgenthau came up with the same idea that Obama and company came up
with a couple years ago, said we're going to stimulate the economy by
spending tons of money. It's a little bit like grabbing your bootstraps
and pulling and hoping to fly around the room. You know, they're going
to spend a lot of money, spend enough money that will get the economy
going. That's the idea.
Now, no normal rational person that's not been smoking those funny
cigarettes can come up with such an idea. If you came home and your
husband or wife said to you, hey, we've got too much credit card debt
here, or I'm not making enough money, you know, things aren't going
right economically, what do you think we should do? Oh, let's spend
money like mad. You would think somebody was crazy. That's what people
have tried. Henry Morgenthau tried it. He tried it for 8 years. He came
and appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee. His words were,
We have tried spending money. We're spending money, more than we have
ever spent before and it does not work, I say, after 8 years of the
administration. We have just as much unemployment as when we started
and enormous debt to boot.
Now, I would hope that we could learn something from history. This is
FDR. This is World War II vintage-type stuff. We should have learned
from this. We could have learned from JFK. No. Could have learned from
Bush. We could have learned from Reagan. When you're in trouble like
this, what you want to do is you want to back off on the taxes and back
off on the Federal spending. We're going the exact opposite direction.
It doesn't make any sense to be raising taxes. We know that taxing
small business is a job killer, and yet, we're forging ahead, trying to
get everybody paying attention to the fact that, oh, the rich's guy got
too many cigars or too many cars or something like that.
But the trouble is the rich guy, who owns that company, is the one
who's hiring people. He's the one making the decision to add a wing on
the building, put a new machine tool under the wing, to invest money in
new processes, to come up with a better way to do things, to be more
competitive than a foreign competitor and put Americans back to work.
Those are the kinds of people that you need to have taking your money
and plowing it back into the economy.
Now, there's some people think through this idea of Federal
Government spending money that you can put people to work by the
Federal Government hiring them. That seems on the
[[Page H7536]]
surface like a bright enough idea. Certainly if you take some tax money
and you go out and hire some people, those people have a job. Doesn't
that put people back to work? Well, yes and no. The people you hire do
get a job. The trouble is for everyone you hire, there are two people
in the private sector that lose their job because the government's
sucking that money for those salaries out of the private sector. The
private sector then becomes less efficient, and economists will say
that you lose about two jobs out of the private sector for everybody
you put on the government payroll. I mean, if putting people on the
government payroll worked, we'd all work for the government. They tried
that in the Soviet Union. It wasn't such a hot idea.
So, what's the danger? Why am I talking about this stuff? It should
be a day when politics is over, the elections are over, we could get
back to work and do the right thing. Well, the right thing here is
paying attention to the fact that America is in trouble with a 10
percent unemployment rate. It's actually more than that because I don't
know if you know it or not, but anybody who's been unemployed for a
certain period of time, they don't count them anymore. So they're not
unemployed, even though they don't have a job. That's sort of an
interesting way to count, isn't it?
But anyway, here's what happened a number of years ago. I actually
was here in Congress when this happened, and these charts go back a few
years, but I think it's kind of interesting. This is the gross domestic
product. So these vertical lines are America's GDP, and this is before
and after a tax relief which occurred in 2003 about the first or second
quarter of 2003.
And so the tax decrease we're talking about here is the very tax
that's going to expire. So when we cut this tax in 2003, what happened
to GDP? Well, here's GDP going along like this before. We do the tax
cut and take a look at what happens to GDP afterwards. Now, that
suggests that if there's any causal relationship at all that the tax
cuts gave us a better GDP.
Let's take a look at the same tax cut not applied to gross domestic
product, but let's take a look at it applied to jobs. These lines are
job creation. The ones that go down mean that we are losing jobs. The
ones that go up mean that we're creating jobs. This is what the economy
is doing. Now, this, again, is this May 2003 when these tax relief
measures went into effect. Look at all the jobs we're losing here, and
look at the snappy turnaround right here when you let the small
businessman keep some of what he earns. My goodness, what a turnaround.
Now, here's a very unpleasant thought. If these tax cuts had this
positive effect when the tax cuts went into effect on jobs and on gross
domestic product, if these tax cuts had that positive an effect, what
happens when we reverse that same thing? What happens when we turn it
upside down? What happens when the tax cuts expire? Are they not likely
to exert the exact opposite force on our gross domestic product on our
already high unemployment? Now, we're not in this situation.
{time} 2110
Right now we're having trouble with unemployment, but why do we want
to put a force on it that's going to make it even worse. If these
things did some good when they went into effect, why do we want to let
them expire? It's bad enough the way it is. If we extend the tax cuts,
it may not fix the 10 percent, but it may not go to 15 percent anyway.
So this is what happened when the tax cuts went into effect to job
creation, and that's why the economy took off.
Now, one of the things, it seems to me, that my dear socialist
friends don't quite understand is that if you are a happy socialist,
what you want is, you want the government to be doing well, you want to
have lots of money that you can slop around and spend on different
programs. And of course we've been doing too much of that, spending
more than we have. But you would think you would want a strong economy
because what a lot of people don't realize is, if that economy isn't
strong, not only are individuals hurting, not only are States that have
to balance their budgets hurting economically, the Federal Government
revenues are also way down.
I was surprised during this time period when people wanted to say
that the tax cuts had cost us a whole lot of money, that when you took
the money they claimed the tax cuts cost in lost taxes and added it to
the war in Iraq and Afghanistan that the amount of money total was less
than what it cost us to have the economy in the tank in these first
couple of years. So when the economy is bad in your home, it's bad in
your State. It also is lousy in the Federal Government. So you put all
of these tax cuts in place. You think, Oh, that's fiscally
irresponsible because then the government is going to go into debt more
and more. Oh, is that really so? The fact is not so.
Let's take a look at what happened. Here are Federal revenues. This
is the year. That is the tax cut. So Federal revenues are coming down
here. We cut taxes, and the Federal revenues actually go up. Now that
seems like making water run uphill. Why is it possible that the Federal
Government would get more money when we reduce taxes? It is known to
some people as a Laffer Curve. But what this is, it's the effect that
when the economy gets going, we collect more tax revenues.
Let's look at it this way: let's say that you are made king for the
year, and your job is to collect as much revenue as you can collect in
the selling of loaves of bread. So you start to think. You say to
yourself, Well, I could put a one-penny tax on a loaf of bread and
people would eat a whole lot of bread because we're not taxing it very
much, and we'd raise a certain amount of money. And then you think,
Wow, but if I could do that with a penny, I could move that decimal
over and charge a dollar a loaf of bread. Then I would get much more
money. How about $10 a loaf? You say, Well, wait a minute. So $10 a
loaf, I could get $10 every time. But people wouldn't buy bread
anymore. It would be too expensive. It would go on the black market, or
they would buy cake or something else.
So common sense would tell you that if you are king for the year and
you are taxing bread, that there is some point between a penny and $10
perhaps, there is some point where there is an optimum amount of tax
where people will still pay it and still buy bread. And if you raise
the tax, what, in fact, happens is the revenue that the government
collects goes down rather than up. In other words, it's not possible to
just keep taxing too much because if you do, it basically drives the
amount of money you collect down. So there's an optimum point.
And my point here is that if you are a happy socialist, you want the
economy strong, and the way to do it is to let the people that run the
businesses have enough money to make those investments so that the
economy is strong, and we have more Federal revenue coming in. This is
what happened '04, '05, '06, '07. The Federal revenues start going up
even though we did these tax cuts. Now what we want to do is to reverse
this. We're going to get rid of the tax cuts which is then going to
have more effect to drive the economy down. It's going to create more
job loss, and it's going to make the GDP worse.
We are having trouble learning some very basic lessons from history
where we are at a point where we are overtaxing the economy. And if we
want to get this economy going, we have to learn from JFK, we have to
learn from Ronald Reagan, we have to learn from Bush II that the way to
deal with this thing is to cut government spending and to cut taxes.
It's a very straightforward answer. But we also have to realize that if
we don't deal with the tax increase that's coming up, we are going to
add significantly to the already existing economic problems of our
country.
So what's the solution? It's not complicated. Make the Bush tax cuts
permanent. Now we, Republicans, have proposed that for years. The
Senate Democrats have opposed it. The Democrats in the House have
opposed it. They say all of these tax cuts are for rich people, and
they talk about the classes of society in America. And the one thing
they can't seem to remember is the fact that if you don't have a strong
business, you're not going to have jobs, and you're just going to have
to get used to it.
In America, some people get stinking rich; and it's okay; and it's
all right for them to have their money because a lot
[[Page H7537]]
of times, if they get enough money, they start spending it on other
people anyway. And so what you've got to do is let those businesses
have some money to work with because the government is not going to
create the jobs. And by letting these tax cuts expire, you are just
going to further damage the economy and increase the suffering of
Americans all across our country.
So the solution is straightforward, at least to what we should be
doing with these tax cuts. What we should be doing is keeping the tax
cuts and voting to make them permanent and not letting them all expire.
That's the commonsense way to approach the thing. It's not going to
necessarily get us out of all the problems we're in right now, but it's
going to prevent them from getting a lot worse.
And what we have to do then obviously is to get back into the
business of cutting back on Federal spending, and we're going to have
to cut back on government red tape, and we're going to have to
dismantle some of the complicated and redundant different Departments
that we don't need to be paying for. We have to start looking at the
Federal Government and say, What does the Federal Government have to do
and all of the stuff that it would be nice if the Federal Government
did that cost money, we're going to have to just stop doing that. We're
not going to get it out of waste, fraud, and abuse because there isn't
a budget line item that says that. What we're going to have to do is
we're going to have to reform the system.
The one thing I believe the Republicans are looking at very closely--
I'm certainly very interested in it and am trying to sell it to my
Republican colleagues--is the idea that we have an opportunity, though
we can't pass legislation through the Senate and even if we did, it's
unlikely that President Obama would sign it. But what we can do is we
can send bills to the Senate, and the public can watch and see that
we've heard the message. We understand. We want less taxes. We want
more affordable government. We want to shrink and reduce the Federal
Government in places where it doesn't really need to be putting money,
and we can do that.
But there is one thing we can do and that is in the House here, we
can change the rules. We can change the system. The House, with
Democrat and Republican leadership through many, many years, is really
a series of fiefdoms, as different committees gain lots of power.
And if we take a look at that system and we design a system which is
not so much designed to spend money but to make it hard to spend money,
then we can start making some progress to develop the tools here in the
House to try to reduce a government that is literally a runaway
government that is no longer the servant of the people but is
increasingly becoming a fearful master.
That is our task; and we will be evaluated by the American public, I
have no doubt, on our ability to perform the task. And to the degree we
have a majority in the House, we can at least start in the House by
saying, Let's change the whole committee structure. Let's take a look
at how we do the budgeting process. Let's take a look at how these
earmarks fit into who spends the money, who makes money, and how do we
hold the committees accountable for reducing the size of the Federal
Government.
All of these things are ahead of us, but we need to stop this train
wreck coming, and we need to make these tax cuts permanent. That's the
quick answer to something that we need to be doing.
Now I'm going to turn to perhaps a little bit lighter topic, a
completely different topic, and that is the advent of Thanksgiving
coming along next week. The Thanksgiving story is one that, as I have
gotten older, I get to love the story more and more. It's a fantastic
adventure story. It's a story of people of tremendous courage,
tremendous vision who took very great risks and gambles and blessed you
and I and all true Americans, blessed in ways that we've forgotten and
in ways that we need to remember. I'm going to grab a picture, if you
will excuse me a second.
{time} 2120
Last year, I had this picture on a larger format. Unfortunately, I
just had this framed copy. The picture that is by my side, some of you
may recognize, is a small version of the picture that is in the Rotunda
here not so far from where I am standing.
The picture is called ``The Pilgrims at Prayer,'' and I would like to
talk to you about this little group of Pilgrims that came over and gave
us our Thanksgiving, the particularly famous Thanksgiving that took
place in Plymouth, Massachusetts. There was an earlier Thanksgiving in
Virginia, but this particular group of Pilgrims, though, gave us a lot,
lot more than Thanksgiving. So while it is the Thanksgiving season, I
think it is appropriate to think a little bit about their great example
to us, because it is the principles and ideas of people like this that
we need to reproduce and we need to follow their example as we move
America forward in the days ahead.
So let me start by saying, first of all, who were these Pilgrims that
we talk about that were at Plymouth and that gave us Thanksgiving? Who
were the Pilgrims? They were really a couple of groups of people, but
about half of them, and some of the very influential ones, were called
Separatists. They were what you might call in their day sort of the
evangelical Christian types of England, except that they were a little
bit of a weird subset in this regard.
They had listened to the writing of a Scottish theologian that
followed Knox in about the 1580s or so, and he started finding in his
Bible this interesting idea that the Bible, particularly the Old
Testament, or, for Jewish people, the Torah, there seemed to be a
distinction between civil government and church government.
Now, that may seem very obvious to us today, but in those days, if
you recall, there was a king half the time running the church and a
church half the time running the kingdoms, and the two were very much
interconnected and very much intermixed dating back to the time of
Charlemagne.
But they came up with this idea that the Bible seemed to indicate
that there was a difference between church government and civil
government, and they got that from looking at the story about Moses.
Moses was like the civil authority, but he had a brother who was
running the worship service, Aaron. And so he saw that example, but
then there were other examples that were less known.
There was a guy, Uzziah, who was a king, and he went into the temple
and started burning incense because he thought he was able to do
anything he wanted. A couple of courageous priests stood up to confront
him, and he started to stick his finger at them and give them a lecture
and say, Off with their heads, and he looked and his hand was covered
with leprosy.
So there were these stories, particularly the story of Saul, the
first king, where he offered the sacrifice and Samuel read him the riot
act and said, You've really have blown it now, buddy.
So you have these examples in the Old Testament where civil and
church government were separate. So these guys, the Separatists, had
learned from their Scripture and had decided in their day that they
didn't want their church to be run by the King of England. This was
following old Henry VIII, who had separated the English church from the
church in Rome, and so the church was being run by the King of England.
These guys decided what they were going to do in Scrooby, England. They
decided that they would get this manor house. They would all get
together and worship and start their own little church, and the church
wasn't under the King and it wasn't under the King's thumb. Well, as
you can imagine, that did not meet with the approval of the King, and
he said, I am going to harry them out of England.
And so these Separatists were given all kinds of very tough
treatment--fines and taxes. Their wives were put in the stocks and made
fun of and all kinds of difficult things so that these Separatists
couldn't really live in England and they couldn't have their little
church that they had started or their series of churches. And so, as
you know the story, they moved to Holland where they could have freedom
to start their own church.
So they lived in Holland for some time. It was a difficult existence.
They
[[Page H7538]]
had to work 7 days a week and many, many hours a day; very, very
difficult economically for them. But they didn't complain, and they
were able to have their church worship service the way they wanted.
That lasted for some period of time as these Separatists were in
Holland, but a couple things happened that convinced them to look
around at something else, and the main thing was that their children
were picking up some bad habits from the Dutch kids and they didn't
like that. They had come there because they had some very strong
theological beliefs about what was right and wrong. They were worried
about their children and the culture in which they were living, and so
they cast about for what God would have them do.
So the picture that is printed, it is a wonderful painting. It is
about 10-by-20 feet in the Rotunda. This picture depicts the key
turning point for a bunch of these Separatists, and this is in the town
of Delfthshaven. And if you take a look closely at the picture,
certainly you can't see it here in the camera, but it says
``Speedwell.'' That is the name of the ship. And these are the
Separatists gathering together at Delfthshaven in a farewell to their
pastor, John Robinson, who they loved dearly.
John Robinson was a very even-tempered, peace-loving man. He had
risked his life a number of times trying to separate groups of
different Christians that were fighting each other, and his
parishioners said he had the wisdom to see trouble coming and to steer
his little flock away from the trouble. So they loved John Robinson.
He is now preaching his last sermon, because he will not go with the
Pilgrims to America but, instead, will stay behind with the members of
his church that were still going to be back in Holland.
And so, as you can imagine, if this is your last time and you have
all of these friends who are going on this absolutely incredible
expedition to plant a plantation in the middle of the wilderness all
the way across the ocean, you are going to give them your best shot.
You are going to talk to them about the things that you think are most
important.
So we have a recording of what he was preaching about. And he, first
of all, bewailed the state of the Calvanists and the Lutherans. And he
said, ``For though Luther and Calvin were bright lights in their own
day, yet were they living today they would readily embrace the
additional truth that God is breaking forth from his word.''
What he was saying, in effect, was that our understanding that we get
from the Bible is not static; it is something that moves over time. And
as people learn lessons from history, we should learn from them, and we
should continue to learn the additional things that God is going to
teach us in practical sense from his Bible.
In a sense, his idea of the Bible was it was a gold mine. It was full
of truth. And as men over time read it and understood it, they could
improve the lot of civilizations. It turns out that this was a pretty
good theory in all practical sense. Whether you happen to have any
interest in theology or not, it turned out to be a pretty good theory,
and you will see why in just a few minutes as we follow this little
group of people on this incredible adventure story.
You have to think about this. When people came to America in
Jamestown and other places, it was men. They came here, to some degree,
to say they were going to spread the light of Christ to the heathen,
but mostly they were looking for gold. That is what the history books
show us.
But this little group of people were different. They were going to
take their wives and their children on a one-way trip across the North
Atlantic to try to plant a civilization. And they were doing it not as
a bunch of dogs that had their tails tucked between their legs because
they had been chased out of one place and chased out of another place,
but with a vibrant vision of a challenge to build a new civilization
based on new principles and new ideas. They wanted a change from the
European civilization because, Robinson goes on and says: Now, when you
go to this new land, be very careful what you adopt as truth, sayeth
he, for it is unlikely essentially that a Christian civilization can
spring so rapidly out of such thick anti-Christian darkness.
He was talking about Europe, and how Europe was very resistant to
ideas that the Bible would suggest were a good way to do things. So he
was saying: Now, when you go over on this great expedition, be really
careful what you do, because how you set things up is going to be very,
very important. And you don't want to set it up just the way they did
in Europe, but continue to use the Bible as the blueprint.
So this group of people are going to leave Delfthshaven here and they
are going to go across and rendezvous in England with the ship
Mayflower.
Now, it turns out this old Speedwell was a leaky bucket. They tried
to take a couple of attempts to start from England to go over to
America, and the seams on the Speedwell opened up and it started to
leak so badly they had to turn around and come back, and then they had
to take some of the different passengers off and some of their supplies
off. They had to leave the Speedwell behind. It got to be kind of
complicated and expensive.
Eventually, like a family getting off on a vacation late, they
eventually get in the Mayflower everybody they could fit in there with
what supplies they could and started across the North Atlantic. Well,
that delay put them in the North Atlantic in the fall, which is a rough
time to be crossing the North Atlantic.
Well, the old Mayflower started getting beaten by storms. In the
beginning, the Pilgrims--and let me maybe clarify this point now. The
people in the Mayflower at this point are really two groups. About half
of them are these Separatists, which you see here, and the other half
were just jolly old blokes off the streets of England that were part of
the merchant adventurers financing this trip to plant a colony over in
the New World.
{time} 2130
The idea of the colony, of course, was it was going to make money for
the people that were financing this undertaking, and they were hoping
they would get rich from it. So you have really a little over 100
people, about 50-50 between these Separatists that have a vision for a
new civilization and other people that are just there mostly hoping to
make a good living and to turn a page in their lives.
So they come across the North Atlantic, and in the beginning the
sailors all start making fun of them because they are all seasick. It
is pretty miserable to be seasick. You almost feel it would be better
to die when you turn green. So the sailors would call them ``puke
socks.'' That was what one of the boatswains called them, ``you puke
socks,'' because everybody was sick and feeling pretty bad.
But the storms intensified as they crossed, and after awhile the poor
old Pilgrims noticed that the sailors weren't joking so much about it.
They looked a little bit upset too, because the storms got really
severe. And in spite of their prayers and everything else, the
Mayflower was just beaten by storms.
One time in the middle of the night they heard a groaning and a crack
as though they had run into a rock or something, and it turned out one
of those great big huge oak beams that was supporting the main mast had
started to sag and break under the weight of the mast and the
tremendous pressure of the wind and the rigging and the sails.
So they were almost thinking they had to turn the Mayflower around
and go back to England, when one of these passengers, one of the
Separatists, remembered there was a big printing press screw jack in
the hold, which they fought out of the hold and managed to get it in
position and cranked it up to support the oak beam so it would not be
sagging.
They continued the trip across the ocean, and because of the storms
were blown significantly off course and landed the first time out in
Massachusetts, which, of course, is not Virginia. Virginia in those
days went as far north as New York, but they were headed much further
south. They weren't surprised. They knew they had been blown north by
the storms.
So there they are after a couple of attempts to try to come south
down the outside of Cape Cod. The winds were very unfavorable, it is
late in the season, the storms are rough. These old
[[Page H7539]]
square riggers, the Mayflower, they were not great technological
wonders at being able to sail into the wind, so consequently they
didn't want to get with a hard wind to be driven on to the sandy beach,
because the ship would break up and that would be the end of the deal.
So they are anchored out at Provincetown, and it is getting I guess
into about the November timeframe, getting pretty chilly up in
Massachusetts. They realized that they are not in Virginia and so their
charter didn't apply. So now we get the first real lesson in civil
government from the Pilgrims, and, boy, what a great lesson for all of
us it is today.
Because the charter didn't apply, the two groups that were in the
Pilgrims were known as the saints and the strangers. The saints were
the Separatists, that is the saints here at prayer, and the strangers
were the ones that were strangers to God. And the strangers are saying,
hey, it is like Australia, you know. No rules, mate. Everybody for
himself. We get to shore, we can do whatever we want to do.
It had quite a smell of anarchy about it, and it was then that the
saints said, no, we kind of need to pull things together. So they
exercised some leadership, took a piece of paper and wrote a document.
It is called the Mayflower Compact, one of the greatest American
documents produced. We don't have a copy of it. We have copies, but we
don't have the original. It was viewed by the Pilgrims as not really an
astounding thing, but subsequently we have considered it of great
import.
So it starts ``In the name of God, amen.'' It goes on to say, ``We do
covenant and combine ourselves together in a civil body politic for the
glory of God, the advancement of the Christian faith, and to frame such
just and equal laws as may seem good.''
And so what is it that is so special about this Mayflower Compact?
Well, as far as I know, it is the first time in human history where you
have a group of free people under God creating a civil government to be
their servant. Does that sound like a familiar pattern? Of course. It
is very similar to what our Declaration of Independence is saying.
You have to understand in the context of history how innovative what
they had done really was, because in Europe, the model for civil
government was the divine right of kings. If you are a politician, it
was a great deal. You say ``God put me here as king. When I say jump,
you are supposed to say `how high?' ''
So Europe had been dominated by the divine right of kings, and each
king felt like they weren't a servant, they were the boss. God put them
there, and they tell you what to do. That is how Europe did things.
But these Separatists when they came across the ocean had the concept
that we are trying to infuse in the Republican Party as we deliberate
very soberly about changing the system, that we are going to change the
system from Europe and the divine right of kings to the system that the
government would be the servant of the people and that individual
citizens had God-given rights and it was the responsibility of the
government to protect your God-given rights.
That is what the Mayflower Compact was all about, and that is why
this very first moment, as they are at the great big oak table in the
great room of the Mayflower, why this moment is so significant to all
of us, because the Pilgrims gave us the model of American civil
government.
Now, to them it was sort of a straightforward idea, because they had
already struggled with this question in the context of their church
government. In Scrooby, England, they had decided to separate
themselves from little old King James. He was a little bit of a weird
fellow. He had some very strange social habits. They didn't want him
running their church.
So a group of free people under God had covenanted together to create
a New Testament church, and they took that model of the New Testament
church and simply picked it up and applied it to civil government. A
group of free people under God created a civil government, not a church
government, to be their servant.
Now, they believed those two were separate, so they didn't tangle up
the church with their civil government, but they used the same pattern.
So the Mayflower Compact is really to our knowledge the first written
constitution pulling these elements together; that under God, free
people are creating a civil government to be their servant. That is the
basic pattern. It is called the covenantal view of civil government. It
is the first written Constitution in America that is on that same
pattern. That was 1620.
Now, I will continue with the story of the Pilgrims, but just to jump
forward, it is not so long after that, 1620 to 1634, you have a more
advanced constitution for Boston, and then a very highly advanced
constitution called the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, only 18
years later. So that is 1638, very early.
The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut has basically the whole model
for the whole U.S. Constitution. It has federalism, separate branches
of government, a lot of the technical sophistication of the U.S.
Constitution just 18 years after these Pilgrims had started with the
Mayflower Compact. So you have a tremendous period of the development
of the concept of American civil government very early.
Well, I told you this group of Pilgrims here had blessed us in a lot
of ways. It should be obvious, two of the ways they blessed us--these
are ideas that just completely undergird America. The first is
separating civil government from church government. That is something
they took from the Bible. It is amusing, isn't it?
The second thing they did was give us our model of civil government,
which is the fact that the government is to be the servant, not a
fearful master. So those were pretty good ideas.
They also came, and I think this is a pretty important concept, they
came with the belief that they could learn things from the Bible and
should use the Bible as a blueprint to guide how they did things. And
that same concept was picked up later by the people who would follow
after the Pilgrims.
So let's finish the story a little bit and get to Thanksgiving. The
Pilgrims, they are on Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod, and they do
the Mayflower Compact. Then they take pieces of a prefabricated boat
called a shallop that was stored in their holds and they put that
together. It had been damaged some by the storms coming across. It took
them a number of weeks to build it up. But a shallop is a pretty good
size rowboat. It would carry more than a dozen people, it had a sail
and a rudder.
They took the shallop up in the shallow water around the inside of
Cape Cod, and they had their first encounter at Eastham beach, there
just about sunrise. A whole bunch of Indians screaming and yelling shot
arrows at them. It wasn't exactly a warm welcome. They shot some of
their muzzle loaders off and nobody got hurt. And they continued around
the inside of Cape Cod.
They were looking for a place, and Cape Cod, I have a chance to go
there in the summer times, it is known as Barnstable Harbor.
Translated, that means Barnstable Harbor.
They were out in the surf, the sand is shallow there, they are out in
the shallop and it got to be dark, and they are trying to figure out,
the wind is coming up, it is starting to snow, they are getting ice all
over their clothes. They try to make a run in to where they thought the
entrance to Barnstable Harbor was, and they were mistaken. It was not.
It was just a sandy beach, and the surf was starting to pile in on the
beach. And right when they are in the waves, the guy by the name of
Clark says--grabs the steering oar, and he swings the shallop around in
a desperate maneuver. He says, ``If ye be men, pull for your lives.''
{time} 2140
And they laid into the oars and were able to snatch the shallop out
of the waves and out into the deep water. Again, the snow. It's dark
and the snow is coming down. Ice is freezing on their clothes. And
eventually, eventually they manage to find something where they can
pull into the lee of this piece of land where they got out of the heavy
blowing wind and were able to pull their boat up on the shore where
there weren't any waves, and they spent a waterlogged Sunday on this
island. It turned out when they got up in the morning, it was an island
in the middle of a beautiful harbor, which we now
[[Page H7540]]
know as Plymouth, Massachusetts. The island was named after the seaman
Clarke, who said, If ye be men, pull for your lives.
And so they start making rapid discoveries. They find that there's an
area of land that's clear where they can plant crops. There's beautiful
fresh water coming down from a hillside and a high area that they can
fortify to try to protect themselves, defend themselves from whatever
problems there might be. Particularly, they were concerned about the
Indians that were in those parts. They didn't see any Indians, but they
were worried that there might be some because the other Indians over in
Eastham had not been too friendly. Of course, there's a reason they
hadn't been too friendly. It's because there had been some ships that
had come by and stolen some of them and sold them off into slavery. It
put the Indians in a bad mood, you might say.
And so you have the Pilgrims now late in the season, in fact, about
Christmas Day, starting to build their first shelters in Plymouth. As
you can imagine, the trip had been tough. Their supplies were limited.
And the people that were getting in and out of the wet boats and trying
to work on building shelters there started to get sick. And over a
period of the next couple of months, more and more of them died, to the
point that in some days as many as four Pilgrims at a time would die.
There was a time, a day or two, when everybody was so sick there were
only two or three that were able to get up and feed everybody else and
sort of show themselves on the palisades of the little fortification
they'd made just in case the Indians made some sort of attack.
But they were in rough shape. In the middle of the night sometimes a
man would take his dead wife, would drag her out across the frozen
ground and bury her under leaves and rocks. And it was very tough.
There were children, wives, and adults. By the time that March came
around, half of the Pilgrims--almost half the Pilgrims had died.
Now you might ask yourself, these are people that came with a vision.
They had a vision that God was calling them to found a new Nation based
on new principles, new ideas, ideas that they took from the Bible. And
you'd say, Well, where was their God? He blew them off course by the
storm and now half of them died. You'd think they might get
discouraged. It's easy to be discouraged, as you can imagine, in those
conditions. Very few families didn't have someone who died in that
first couple of months.
And so the captain of the Mayflower, who had anchored the Mayflower
there in Plymouth Harbor for the winter to try to give them some
protection, in the spring decided he had lost half his crew, decided he
had to sail back to England. And so he prevailed on the Pilgrims. He
said, Now, you need to go back with me to England because this little
adventure hasn't worked too well. Half of you are dead; half my crew is
dead.
And so you can picture standing on the shore, Plymouth, and the wind
is blowing through the pine trees behind you and you're looking across
to the harbor. There's the Mayflower and the boatswain is giving the
call. Sails are being squared to the wind. The sail is being raised.
Men are walking or actually turning a big crank. It wasn't quite a
capstan. It was a different type of arrangement to lift the old
seaweed-covered line that held the anchor to the bottom of the harbor.
And first large, then small, the Mayflower disappears over the horizon
and there's just the sound of the wind in the trees. And every one of
the Pilgrims stayed there on that beach because they believed that God
had called them to a mission, to the beginning of something that was
going to be great that He would bless, in spite of the fact that half
of them had died.
It wasn't too long after that that they had their first Indian
sighting. The lookout said, Indian coming. You mean Indians? No.
Indian. They look out and here's this tall brave dressed in a loincloth
walking boldly down the street. He looks at them and in perfect English
says, Do you have any beer? Quite a reception from their first Indian
guest.
It turned out he was an Indian that was a chief of a tribe up in
Maine. He liked hitchhiking down the coast. And he could speak English.
He'd actually gotten to know English pretty well and developed a taste
for smoked duck and for beer and things. Until he had eaten a
good supply of the Pilgrim's food, he wouldn't tell them too much.
After he had a good meal, he told them about the Indians in the parts.
He told them about the fact that the land where they were living had
been considered cursed by the Indians because the Patuxets that had
lived there had died of a plague. And so God in his providence took the
Pilgrims to probably one of the only places on the eastern seaboard
where they could stay where there weren't hostile Indians.
It turned out they made a good alliance with Massasoit, who was a
good Indian chief and had became a friend of the Pilgrims. Massasoit
talked to them about the last of the Patuxets that was living by
himself, alone and lonely. And when Tisquantum understood the plight of
the English settlers in Plymouth, he decided to join them because he
knew something about it. He had been shanghaied, sold into slavery,
bought out of slavery by some monks, traveled to England, learned to
speak English, and gotten a trip back in a ship to go back to the
Patuxets. He got there and the Patuxet tribe was wiped out, I assume by
small pox or something. And so he's living by himself.
Now he joins the Pilgrims and helps them and teaches them all kind of
useful lessons. He told them that in a short period of time that the
streams would be full of little fish and they could use that to plant
corn. He taught them important things like taking your moccasins off
and wiggling your toes in the mud so you can catch eels, which they
could fry up for food. All sorts of useful things Tisquantum taught
them. Of course, we know him as Squanto, friend of the white man.
Squanto lived with them some time and helped the settlers there. They
were living under the conditions of the contract that the merchant
adventurers had set up. And one of the things that they had set up was
it was going to be a socialistic society. Everybody was going to pitch
into the common store. They had common land. They're going to grow food
on the land. Everybody had to work the field. Everybody had to wash
everybody else's laundry. And that wasn't working too well. In fact,
Governor Bradford--he was elected Governor soon after Governor Carver
had died, probably of cerebral hemorrhage--Governor Bradford said in
his diary of Plymouth Plantation, as though men were wiser than God, he
said this idea of socialism--he didn't use the word socialism--taking
everything in common may have been a good idea to Plato and other
ancients as though they were wiser than God.
But he basically pitched out socialism and said every man can have
his own field, could grow his own corn, and his diary said that it made
hands very industrious. People who would feign to be sick or too weak
to work now were out busy in the cornfield growing corn for their
family and the women didn't complain about washing other people's
clothes.
Anyway, they got rid of socialism. Eventually, after about a year or
so, decided to celebrate a day of thanksgiving. And so they invited a
couple of Indian chiefs to join them for thanksgiving. The trouble is
the Indian chiefs, Massasoit, brought along about 90 braves. So when
the Pilgrims saw this massive number of Indians they were going to feed
for a meal, they're thinking, Oh my goodness, this isn't going to work
very well.
Fortunately, the Indians did some hunting. They brought deer and
turkey and a number of other things, berries that they had collected.
And they had a wonderful Thanksgiving. The Indians didn't know they had
just been invited for one Thanksgiving dinner. They stayed 3 days and
enjoyed Thanksgiving over and over again. In the meantime, they had
footraces and contests and shooting with bows and arrows and all kinds
of other things that they did that was a lot of fun. It was a great
couple-day celebration of thanksgiving in Plymouth Plantation.
Thanksgiving became a very popular holiday in the colonies up and
down the eastern seaboard. And the first national day of thanksgiving
was called by George Washington to celebrate the adoption of the U.S.
Constitution. It was later set at a particular time in
[[Page H7541]]
November--I think it was the third Thursday in November as I recall--
and it has stayed there to this time.
{time} 2150
So we have the story now of the Pilgrims. As you celebrate your
Thanksgiving this year, it might be helpful to think back and say there
is more than Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims. They were a group of
people who were willing to change the system, to think of different
ideas. They came here and separated civil and church governments. They
came here and created the model of a written constitution, the idea
that the government is to be the servant of the people, that people
have God-given rights and that it is the job of government to protect
those rights, as we stated another 150 years later in our Declaration
of Independence. They came here with the idea that, after trying
socialism, it wasn't going to work. They realized that it was not
biblical, that it was a form of theft, so they kicked socialism out.
They learned that in the early 1620s.
So we can thank these people because of the fact that they were
innovative and had that spirit and desire. Even when half of them died
and the Mayflower was going back, they clung to their vision. They had
the courage to create a new civilization. In the words of Bradford
Prince, as written in his diary, they felt that perhaps they'd lit a
candle on a dark shore. They felt that perhaps they could be
steppingstones for people who would come after them to found a great
Nation. So the dream that they had of coming here to do something new,
unlike what Europe had done, was very much in their hearts. It was very
much a part of their thinking as they scratched that existence on that
lonely, rock-strewn Massachusetts shoreline. To this day, as we
celebrate Thanksgiving, we can remember their first Thanksgiving when
they put a few kernels of corn on a plate to remind them of how close
to starving to death they had been at one time.
It's a beautiful story. There's a lot more to it, a lot more
adventure to it. There were knife fights in cabins. I haven't had time
to cover all of that with you, but the basics are there. This is a
great bunch of Americans, a wonderful adventure story and a time for us
to give consideration to the fact that we also have been given a
challenge, a challenge of a beautiful land that was established on a
firm foundation. It's our job to keep it that way and to pass it on to
our children--a government that is the servant of the people and not
the master.
God bless you all. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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