Somehow, in the midst of all the current craziness, I missed the fact that today – December 21, 2020 – is the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims landing in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

As someone who grew up hearing lots about the Pilgrims – and of course being someone who lives in greater Boston – that seems like it should have been a big deal. But, as best I can tell, it’s gotten virtually no attention.

That’s very different than 100 years ago when the U.S. Post Office Department issued three separate stamps to mark the 300th anniversary. Those stamps, which collectively are today’s #stampoftheday, are a 1-cent stamp that pictures the Mayflower; a 2-cent stamp showing the Pilgrims landing in Plymouth, and a 5-cent stamp showing the signing of the Mayflower Compact, all issued on December 20, 1920

At that time, stamps honoring events were quite rare, which suggests that in 1920 the Pilgrims were a big deal. Illustratively, the last event honored with a stamp before the Pilgrims’ stamp, was one celebrating Victory in the “The Great War,” which was issued in March 1919, 20 months before the Pilgrim stamps. And it took until November 1922 for the Post Office to issue another stamp that wasn’t a portrait of a president or other well-known historic figure. (At that time it issued three stamps depicting the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Niagara Falls.)

So is it COVID fatigue or something else that has caused the landing to go unnoticed? As I do almost every day, I did some superficial digging until I came on some useful and surprisingly timely nuggets, most of them articles and events that coincided with Thanksgiving, which was have been the 399th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth.

The Pilgrims, of course, were famous for two things: Thanksgiving and the Mayflower Compact, a 200-word document written and signed by 41 men on the ship who pledged that they would “combine ourselves together into a civil body politic” that would “enact…just and equal laws” that would serve “the general good of the colony.” The signers, moreover, “promise[d] all due submission and obedience” to these laws.

In the 19th century, some seized on the settlement and the compact as a key element in the American story. Mancall, for example, notes that George Bancroft, one of that century’s leading American historians, claimed that it was in “the cabin of the Mayflower” where “humanity recovered its rights, and instituted government on the basis of ‘equal laws’ for ‘the general good.'”
This account became the standard view of the compact. The mainstream history.com website, for example, says the compact “was the first document to establish self-government in the New World” and was an “early, successful attempt at democracy.”
But the historic record is actually pretty thin. In fact, wrote Peter C. Mancall, who holds a chair at USC named after Andrew W. Mellon (the subject of yesterday’s #stampoftheday), “as a scholar of early 17th-century New England, I’ve always been puzzled by the glory heaped on the Pilgrims and their settlement in Plymouth.

Native Americans had met Europeans in scores of places before 1620, so yet another encounter was hardly unique. Relative to other settlements, the colony attracted few migrants. And it lasted only 70 years.

So why does it have such a prominent place in the story of America? And why, until recently, did the more troubling aspects to Plymouth and its founding document, the Mayflower Compact, go ignored?”

Mancall also noted that “as the years after 1620 bore out, the migrants did not adhere to [their] principles when dealing with their Wampanoag and other Algonquian-speaking neighbors….The Pilgrims exiled an English lawyer named Thomas Morton, in part because he believed that Indigenous and colonists could peacefully coexist. And in 1637, Plymouth’s authorities joined a bloody campaign against the Pequots, which led to the massacre of Indigenous people on the banks of the Mystic River, followed by the sale of prisoners into slavery.”

So what gives? In a recent piece entitled “Mayflower at 400: What we get all wrong about the Pilgrim Fathers,” Nick Bryant, bbc.com’s New York correspondent wrote: “As the historian David Silverman has shown…the notion that the Pilgrims were the fathers of America was seized upon by New Englanders in the late 18th Century worried that their cultural clout was not as strong as it should be as the early republic took shape. From then on, the primacy of the pilgrims, and myths of Thanksgiving, were repurposed whenever white Protestant stock felt its hegemony was threatened.”

So perhaps the 400th anniversary has been ignored because we are in the midst of reexamining the nation’s roots, an effort that has included the New York Times’ provocative 1619 project.

Not surprisingly, this effort has led conservative forces to try and reassert that the Pilgrim’s and the Mayflower are a foundational part of America. In November, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark), a prominent conservative, for example, contended in a Senate speech that “there appear to be few commemorations, parades or festivals to celebrate the Pilgrims this year, perhaps in part because revisionist charlatans of the radical left have previously claimed the previous year as America’s true founding. Maybe the politically correct editors of the debunked 1619 Project are now responsible for pumpkin pie recipes at the Times as well.”

And in November 2020, the conservative Heritage Foundation had a major online event on “A Legacy of Freedom: 1620 and the Mayflower Compact.” The description of the event contended: “The Mayflower Compact stands as a rebuke to those who denigrate America’s historic commitment to freedom and democracy, ideals which were written into the very first pages of the American story.”

Others, of course, disagree. As Joshua Zeitz wrote in Politico: “The nonimportance ascribed to the 400th anniversary of the Plymouth landing, in contrast to the spirited debate over 1619, reflects the right priorities. We still grapple with the legacy of slavery in ways both profound and worrying, and the impulse to claim the mantle of ‘true Americans’ hasn’t left our politics. But we can be thankful that the Pilgrim’s world of “invisible saints” and unregenerate sinners, of closed communities and neo-theocracy, has little to do with the America we know, nor has it for a very long time.”

Perhaps this is the year that a different story will take hold. And, when that occurs, there probably won’t be a stamp like today’s that puts the Pilgrims at the heart of the narrative.

Be well, stay safe, “combine together into a civil body politic” that will “enact…just and equal laws” that will serve “the general good,” fight for justice, and work for peace.