[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 23]
[House]
[Pages 31798-31802]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              THANKSGIVING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin) is recognized 
for half of the remaining time until midnight as the designee of the 
minority leader, approximately 50 minutes.
  Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, it's a treat to be able to join you and take a 
look at a very interesting subject, a subject that we in America will 
all be thinking about here before so very long, the subject of 
Thanksgiving. There are, of course, many different Thanksgivings

[[Page 31799]]

that each of us have enjoyed with our families. But I am here to talk 
particularly about a little group of marines, they might be considered, 
a group of marines that undertook a great adventure to America, and 
that is, of course, the story of our Pilgrims.
  There is some debate and some belief that there was a Thanksgiving 
celebration in the area of Berkley or the Jamestown area in maybe the 
16th, 17th-ish vicinity. But the one that springs to most people's 
minds is the story of the Pilgrims. Perhaps the reason is because the 
Pilgrim story is such a fantastic adventure. It sparks the imaginations 
of not only children but adults as well. It goes back some time.
  So I thought what I might share this evening is this great adventure 
story, but with a purpose. The purpose is to suggest that there was 
something far more significant. In fact, a number of things more 
significant than the Pilgrims brought us, even in the tradition of our 
turkeys and cranberry sauce, better than the tradition of Thanksgiving, 
and far more significant to particularly those who meet in this 
Chamber.
  The story of the Pilgrims goes back a long way. The idea and the 
thing that separated the Pilgrims, to a certain degree, were the 
writings of a theologian from Scotland that followed Knox. As he looked 
into the Old Testament, he saw a pattern that had been overlooked by 
many in European history. He looked into the Old Testament and he 
noticed that there was a Moses, and that Moses seemed to run the 
government, but there was Aaron, who seemed to run the worship of that 
which you might call a church.
  Through the Old Testament he noticed there was a difference between 
church government and civil government. Now this was, in a way, a novel 
idea because those two had been confused for hundreds of years in 
European history. So he started to write about the idea that really 
maybe the church should be separate from the civil government.
  Now in those days in jolly Old England it was James who was King. He 
wasn't exactly the model of a good church leader, perhaps. So there 
were those who, as they read these writings, took them to heart. They 
were called Brownists or Separatists. They came up with the idea that 
they would start their own church separate from the King.
  Now this idea didn't go over politically very well at all. So this 
group of people met together, created their own little, if you would, 
New Testament church. They elected their own leaders and they met in a 
manor house in Scrooby, England. Well, the King, in response to these 
things said, I am going to hurry them out of England. So he put them in 
stocks and he taxed them and harassed them and charged them falsely 
with all kinds of things and persecuted them to the point that these 
Separatists had to leave England, one group after the next. There 
weren't that many, maybe several thousand in England at the time.
  They went, as many of you know to Lieden, over in the Netherlands and 
Holland. There they worked a very, very hard existence and had their 
difficulties there trying to learn a new language and trying to find a 
way to make a living.
  One of the things they found after they had been there some period of 
time was that their children started picking up some bad habits, in 
their opinion, of the Dutch children. So they determined that they 
needed to do something different. It was then that they looked around 
for the idea of perhaps finding a different place to build a new 
civilization based on new ideas that they had been thinking about.
  So the Separatists, particularly under the leadership of their 
pastor, John Robinson, started to consider the idea of coming to 
America and planting a colony. That, of course, required a lot of 
money. So they looked for some people to finance this expedition. They 
found the merchant adventurers. The merchant adventurers helped them 
raise the capital to fund the Mayflower. They also hired another 
smaller ship called the Speedwell. The picture of the Speedwell you can 
see on the rotunda, as the Pilgrims were having a prayer meeting aboard 
the Speedwell.
  So it was after a period of time these Separatists or Brownists, as 
they were called, got onboard.

                              {time}  2220

  They traveled from Leiden, which was their hometown, to Delfthshaven. 
You can see in the Capitol Rotunda Delfthshaven in the background, and 
the Pilgrims at prayer about to leave to come over to England, where 
they would rendezvous with the Mayflower and other separatists who were 
going to be making this expedition, along with just some plain old 
families, jolly old blokes off the street of England. So this 
expedition was taking shape.
  The trouble was the Speedwell was a pretty leaky ship and the captain 
wasn't too enthused about going across the ocean. They put the gear 
into the ships, started to try to get off in the summertime and made 
one start. And the Speedwell started leaking after 3 days. They had to 
turn around and come back. They re-caulked the ship and set off again. 
It started leaking again. They could find no leaks in it. They finally 
decided to leave the Speedwell behind. The Mayflower had to put off 
with just the people they could fit in the Mayflower.
  Now, as they took off, you can imagine what started to happen. You 
have got men and women and children, a little over 100 of them, cramped 
in very tight quarters aboard the Mayflower. And if you have been at 
ship at sea for a little while, you know what happened. They started 
turning greenish in color and started getting violently seasick.
  In the meantime, they had a bosun that made kind of a sport of making 
fun of them, saying, ``Puke socks, we have seen this before. We will be 
soon wrapping you up in a sail and sending you down to feed the fish.''
  So it was that they started this very long and difficult voyage in 
the Mayflower across the stormy North Atlantic.
  Now, these people were praying people, a good many of them, and you 
can imagine they were hoping they would get a nice, easy voyage. But it 
didn't happen that way. Instead, the storms just howled around them, 
and they continued seasick. And it was about a 66-day voyage that they 
were pretty much not quite locked, but kept completely underneath the 
deck.
  There was one of them that just couldn't stand this, the foul air 
down in the cabin with all of these kids crying and mothers and 
everybody seasick, who came up on deck, and a wave about washed him 
overboard. And he was in the ocean for a while, and he put his arm out, 
grabbed a rope and was hauled back into the ship. He was about blue, he 
was so cold, and he went down under the deck and didn't stick his head 
out again until they finally sighted land.
  Well, as they were about two-thirds or so away across the Atlantic, 
the ship was pitched from side to side in the huge storms. There was a 
groan and a terrible creak as the main beam that supported the mast, 
the main mast of the Mayflower started to give way. It was cracking and 
sagging under the weight of the mast and the duress of the wind and the 
sails of the Mayflower.
  The captain, taking a look, thought they might have to put back, but 
they were in very bad shape with the beam cracking this way. It was 
then that some of the passengers remembered the big printing press that 
was in the hold of the Mayflower. They wrestled it into position, 
jacked it up and forced the huge oak beam back into place, and the 
Mayflower continued on.
  Finally sighting land, not in Virginia where they had intended to go, 
but blown north of their course by the heavy storms and sighting the 
windswept coast of Cape Cod. Now, they immediately tried to sail south 
to get down toward the Hudson River. The south side of the Hudson River 
in those days was known as the Virginia area. It was really what we 
think of as New York. And the storms did not allow the Mayflower to 
make that. The ships are not very good at running close hull to the 
wind, and the treacherous shoals

[[Page 31800]]

and sandbars around Cape Cod were threatening.
  The decision was made then to anchor in Provincetown Harbor and then 
to find a suitable location for their plantation north up in the area 
that we now know as Cape Cod and Massachusetts.
  This brought on a little bit of a political crisis, and it is one of 
the beginning and most amazing stories of the Pilgrims, because when 
they were there in Provincetown Harbor, the people that were not so 
much known as Christians, the jolly old blokes off the street of 
England, they were known as strangers. There were saints and strangers. 
The saints were known as the Christians. The strangers were just the 
people off the streets of England.
  The strangers said, hey, when we get to shore, no rules, mate, like 
down under, and we will do whatever we want.
  Sensing a certain amount of anarchy, the saints decided on a course 
of action. They took out a piece of paper and they wrote the Mayflower 
Compact. It starts out, ``In ye name of God, Amen. We do covenant and 
combine ourselves together unto a civil body politic for the glory of 
God, for the advancement of the Christian faith,'' and it goes on to 
say ``to frame such just and equal laws as would be meek and necessary 
for our little plantation.''
  In other words, what had happened, the very first time in all of 
human history, a group of free people under God created a civil 
government covenantly and elected their own leadership to that little 
civil government. This was the first written constitution in all of 
history that we know of, and it was the very beginning of all of 
American civil government.
  If you think about that formula, under God, a group of free people 
creating their own civil government to protect their basic rights to 
make basic laws, this was essentially the Declaration of Independence 
170 years earlier. And it was in extreme contrast to what was going on 
in Europe, because in Europe, the basic model of all of government was 
the divine right of kings. When the king says ``jump,'' everybody is 
supposed to say ``how high?'' But here in America, there was a new 
model, completely new technology, the idea of a written Constitution, 
that under God a group of free people could create a civil government 
to be their servant.
  And so it was that the Pilgrims at this very time in Provincetown had 
taken their idea of a New Testament church, a group of free people 
under God, covenanting together to create a church, and they picked up 
the idea, even though they knew very well that there was a difference 
between church government and civil government, but they used the same 
pattern, and they picked it up and carried it across and applied it in 
the Mayflower Compact. So you have in the first time in history the 
beginning of a whole new view of how a country should be built.
  Now, this was very much in keeping with the sermon that Pastor 
Robinson had given to the Pilgrims as they left. He had been a 
wonderful pastor to these people in Leiden and steered them from a lot 
of dangers. But as he said good-bye to them, knowing probably that he 
would never see them again, he said, Now, be very careful when you go 
to America to plant this Christian civilization, be very careful what 
you adopt as true, sayeth he, for it is unlikely that a Christian 
civilization should spring so rapidly out of such anti-Christian 
darkness.
  What he was saying was that the patterns of the way things had been 
done in Europe were maybe not consistent with the Bible, and that they 
should be very careful how they built this new civilization. And this 
first step, this creation of a covenant, the Mayflower Compact, is 
essentially the beginning of all of our civil government in America.
  Well, of course, they couldn't stay in Provincetown forever. They 
took a prefabricated boat called a shallop that it was put together in 
the hold of the Mayflower in pieces. They took it out and assembled it 
on the shore. It had been damaged by the storms, and they continued to 
explore around the inside of Cape Cod. As they did, they had an 
encounter with the Indians who attacked them. Fortunately, nobody was 
hurt on either side.
  The Pilgrims continued on around, almost freezing and getting caught 
in the surf, and, miraculously, almost at the time when there was no 
more sunlight, the wind was blowing hard and the ice was freezing on 
their clothes, they came into the shelter of an island, which they 
didn't really know quite where they were, and they had sailed around 
the inside of Cape Cod over to Plymouth Harbor.
  In the morning they discovered that they were on an island that was 
safe, there were no other Indians there, and they made a whole series 
of discoveries that they were in a harbor that was more than twice deep 
enough for the Mayflower. They found there was land that had been 
cleared and nobody appeared to claim it, fresh water coming down the 
hillsides of what we now know as Plymouth, even a pretty good size 
rock, I suppose, that they could land on.
  So, taking the shallop back to the Mayflower, the Mayflower came 
across from Provincetown over to Plymouth, anchored in the harbor, and 
they started there late in December on putting together their little 
civilization. In fact, it was Christmas Day that they started in on 
some of the buildings in Plymouth Plantation.

                              {time}  2230

  Well, things became very difficult for the Pilgrims at that time. 
They started to die. They died from what they called the general 
sickness. It was probably caused by scurvy and colds and pneumonia and 
various things that weakened them. In December, eight of the 100 or so 
Pilgrims died. And then it got worse in January and February. By the 
time they got to March, almost half of the crew and half of the 
Pilgrims had died.
  Now, that I suppose would be kind of a discouraging thing for people 
who felt that they had come over here with this noble expedition in 
mind, the idea of building a new civilization on new principles.
  At that time the captain of the Mayflower, who had been standing with 
them, the Mayflower had been anchored in Plymouth harbor, said: it is 
about time for us to go back to England. It has been a great try, but 
half of my crew is dead and half of you are dead. You need to get on 
the Mayflower and come back to England with me.
  You can picture yourself now on the shore of Plymouth and the 
boatswain is giving the calls. The anchor cable is winched up from the 
bottom of the harbor, covered with seaweed. The boatswain gives the 
commands and the yardarms are swung to the wind. At first large and 
then small, the Mayflower disappears over the horizon. The wind is 
blowing through the pine trees behind and 50 people, a little over 50 
people, the Pilgrims, left standing on the shore amid some primitive 
huts they had been able to build.
  You may ask: What was the dream? Why would these people dare take 
such a tremendous risk?
  And the answer was found by the sermon Robinson preached about the 
idea of building a new civilization on new ideas. So it was then not so 
many days later that they were greeted by a cry from the lookout: 
Indian coming.
  You mean Indians?
  No, Indian coming.
  Here walking down the main street of their little village was an 
Indian with nothing but a loincloth. It was very cold weather, and he 
said in very broken English, Do you have any beer?
  What an interesting thing to ask for. It turned out it was Samoset. 
He was an Indian chief from up in Maine. He had a little bit of 
wanderlust and he was down visiting Massasoit. He heard about the 
settlers that were trying to make a go of things at Plymouth, and he 
came over to see how they were doing. After they fed him a good meal, 
they told him about the Indians they had seen in the distance, but none 
had bothered them at their site in Plymouth.
  What they found out was that the Indians that had lived in the land 
there at Plymouth were the Patuxets, quite a war-like tribe, but the 
war-like tribe

[[Page 31801]]

had been destroyed by a plague a few years before. Almost all of the 
Patuxets was dead. There was one at least alive. He had been taken by a 
sea captain and was going to be sold into slavery in Spain, and he was 
rescued by some monks and managed to get to England and later got 
across the ocean back ultimately to find his village and home gone 
because of the damages of the plague that had come before.
  So it was that Samoset introduced them to another Indian by the name 
of Tisquantam, one of the last of the Patuxets. Tisquantam, or Squanto, 
as we know it, had not really had a whole lot to live for. But when he 
came to see these hard-pressed Pilgrims, he felt sorry for them so he 
taught them how to plant corn and how to find those eels by going 
barefoot in the mud by the side of the streams. And he helped them to 
survive through the first year. And following that and their being able 
to plant some corn, they celebrated in the fall their first 
Thanksgiving.
  The idea was that the settlers, the Pilgrims, invited Massasoit, who 
turned out to be a very fine Indian chief, and contrary to some 
people's understanding of history, was very loyal and followed all of 
the treaties they set up and was a good chieftain, as was his son.
  Massasoit was invited to celebrate the first Thanksgiving that the 
Pilgrims had, and he decided to bring some of his other Indian friends 
along, quite a few Indian friends, so you had even more Indians than 
there were Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving. They had a good meal. 
The Indians weren't in any mood to leave, and so Thanksgiving continued 
for 3 days. There was wrestling and foot racing and sort of military 
drills, and all kinds and manner of things. The Indians did the hunting 
for turkey and deer and the Pilgrims were cooking and baking fruit 
pies, perhaps, and things like that. So they celebrated Thanksgiving, 
not just for a day but for 3 days, and it was an event that was a great 
celebration and was a great success.
  So we have the tradition that particularly the Pilgrims and other 
groups passed on to us. Thanksgiving became a popular day in the 
colonies. All sorts of towns celebrated it on different days and times 
of year.
  To my knowledge, the first national Thanksgiving was declared in 1777 
by the Continental Congress many, many years later. That was to 
celebrate the victory at Saratoga. That also is depicted in our rotunda 
in the beautiful, large Trumbull-painted rendition of the surrender of 
the British at Saratoga. So that was a national day of Thanksgiving 
that was recommended by the Continental Congress.
  The words of these Thanksgivings, for instance the actual declaration 
of Thanksgiving by the Continental Congress, were explicitly Christian. 
It starts out: ``Forasmuch as it is the indispensable duty of all men 
to adore the superintending Providence of Almighty God; to acknowledge 
with gratitude their obligation to Him for benefits received and to 
implore such further blessing as they stand in need of; and it having 
pleased Him in his abundant mercy not only to continue to us the 
innumerable bounties of His common Providence to smile upon us as in 
the prosecution of a just and necessary war for the defense and 
establishment of our unalienable rights and liberties.''
  And it goes on to talk about Christ and the Holy Ghost. This is a 
product of the Continental Congress in 1777 after winning the Battle of 
Saratoga. There were other Thanksgivings, and then eventually George 
Washington declared a national day of Thanksgiving in 1789. He says: 
``Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence 
of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for his benefits, and 
humbly to implore his protections and favor.'' That is Washington as he 
declared a day of Thanksgiving in celebration of the adoption of the 
U.S. Constitution.
  So that is the tradition of Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims passed 
Thanksgiving along to us, and of course this first Thanksgiving was a 
pretty good one. It lasted 3 days with the Indians.
  If we look back and think about this little group of heroes that came 
to America, what we find was it was an awful lot more than Thanksgiving 
they gave us. They gave us a whole view of civil government, the idea 
that government is created by a group of free people and that there is 
no sovereign.
  In fact, in the War of Independence, the battle cry was ``No King But 
King Jesus.'' It was the idea of a group of people created under God to 
defend a set of rights. And as we later worded it, life, liberty and 
the pursuit of happiness.
  So they give us this idea of a written Constitution in 1620. They 
also understood that we celebrate civil government from church 
government. That may seem ho-hum to most Americans, but we have to 
realize that the Europeans still use tax money to pay for their 
churches. And, of course, the Islamists tend to mix civil and church 
government completely together. So this technology that the Pilgrims 
brought us was extremely significant, far more significant probably 
than the celebration of Thanksgiving.
  So we have the whole constitutional form of government, the 
separation of civil and church governments, and then later in the fall, 
the Pilgrims took another step. The loan sharks in England who had 
arranged the journey over on the Mayflower had insisted that everyone 
work in a common store. That was socialism, that is, everybody owned 
everything. Well, that didn't work.
  Governor Bradford took a good look at that. It was not working. The 
people were going to starve to death, and so they basically canned 
socialism and he wrote in his history of ``Plymouth Plantation'' as 
though men were wiser than God and the ancient conceit of Plato and 
others who thought that they were smarter than God and he said this 
thing has been tried among Godly and sober people, and it just doesn't 
work. And so they pitched socialism out and were able to do a lot 
better in the colonies.

                              {time}  2240

  Even so, it would be another 7 years before Governor Bradford would 
write that they could relax and taste the goodness of the land. It was 
a very hard time for the Pilgrims in this time period.
  But I think it is important for us to remember as we join together 
with our families and we enjoy the wonderful tradition of Thanksgiving, 
to remember the other blessings that this little group, this 
adventuresome little group of men and women and children that came to 
this land. Of course, Jamestown was settled by men; they called them 
adventurers. But they were not women and children so much. These were 
people that put their families onboard ship and risked it all to make a 
beachhead in a new land. And they came with new ideas, ideas that have 
been a great blessing to us. I think it is important for us to remember 
how it was that God heard their prayers and used them. And Governor 
Bradford would write a little wistfully saying that he hoped that as a 
candle can kindle other candles, yet that they might be a bit of a 
light to a whole new country that would be born. Little did he know 
what would happen as a result of the blessings that they brought us 
across the ocean, this first little group of waterlogged marines as 
they landed in Provincetown and then Plymouth Harbor.
  And so the story of Thanksgiving is mixed tightly and connected 
tightly together with our heritage as a Nation, and I think it is 
important for us to remind our children and our families the high price 
that was paid even at an early date.
  Another thing that many people don't understand or don't know is that 
when the first Constitution in the Mayflower Compact was 1620, it was 
only 18 years later in the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut that you 
had the entire U.S. Constitution, the whole technology for our U.S. 
Constitution pretty much in place in Connecticut in 1638. The license 
plates in Connecticut say ``The Constitution State,'' and with good 
reason, because the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut had federalism 
and most of the developments in terms of civil government that we now 
have in the U.S. Constitution.

[[Page 31802]]

  People sometimes say, well, this was the product of enlightenment 
thinking. This was way, way before the enlightenment. This was the 
result of a group of people who came here, first of all, the Pilgrims, 
who took their principle of a new testament church and simply applied 
it to government; and, following that, by a pastor by the name of 
Hooker, who was Cambridge educated, came from England, first landed in 
Boston, was a friend of Winthrops, and then went to found Connecticut. 
And as a result of his sermons, this Fundamental Orders of Connecticut 
is drafted.
  I think the only thing that is missing possibly is the bicameral 
nature of the legislature, and some of us in this body are not sure 
that the Senate was a good invention anyway. But be that as it may, you 
had this Constitution, which is pretty much the U.S. Constitution, as 
early as 1638.
  And so as we celebrate Thanksgiving once more, I think we can 
remember the idea of separating civil government from church 
government, the idea of a written Constitution, the idea of pitching 
socialism out, and the tremendous courage and dream that they had for a 
new Nation, which we have inherited and have been blessed with. So it 
is a beautiful time to celebrate Thanksgiving.
  Thank you for sticking with me as we think a little bit about this 
little group of courageous people that settled these shores.

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