The Anti-Pilgrim

Reflections of history while writing my novel, American Hero.

Maypole Envy

For want of a nail . . . the kingdom was lost. For want of an O’Doul’s non-alcoholic beverage, America lost a non-stop, multi-cultural, party-all-the-time party and got the Puritan Work Ethic, instead.

Let’s back up. Way up.

Back to the Roaring 20s—the 1620s. The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock and started an intolerant, close-minded, xenophobic, racist, and repressed worker’s paradise. But a little side note has been written out of the history books.

Let’s dash across the pond to the Mermaid Tavern. (Shakespeareans know what I’m talking about). At a table in the back, through the haze of lavender and dill flavored tobacco smoke (What?), behind a small army of beer tankards you will see Thomas Morton, a Falstaffian libertine with poetry in his heart and beer on his breath. He just closes his copy of Francis Bacon’s utopian screed, Bensalem, that argues against the shame/guilt/blame sandwich that forms the staple of contemporary diets. Bensalem suggests, and Morton nods eagerly, that maybe God doesn’t want us to suffer. Maybe God didn’t necessarily create a zero sum world of pre-Darwinian Darwinism, winner takes all, to the victor go the spoils. Maybe God created the world’s biggest playground—the world—and said, okay, kids, go play, Daddy’s gonna take a nap.

Maybe life is about the pursuit of happiness (that’s right, young Tom Jefferson, pay attention). Maybe life is about exploration. Maybe science is not about defining the world, but fooling around with it. Maybe art is about the possible. Maybe people aren’t to be feared because they’re different. Maybe it’s more fun that way, more colors in the Crayola box.

So Morton gets funding from the Merchant Adventurers, the same cabal of business interests that funded the Mayflower and Jamestown—it’s called hedging your bets—and came to the New World, settling across the street from Plymouth in a plot of land Morton actually paid the Algonquin tribe for (unlike the Pilgrims who just bloody well took it), and, in honor of his Celtic ancestors—who were pretty much identical to the native population in America, especially with their fondness for feathers and naked dancing in the moonlight—he created Merrymount.

The difference between Morton’s Merrymount and Plymouth/Jamestown was that Morton had no interest in recreating the dysfunctional Church and State bananafish of the old world. He wanted to reinvigorate the ecumenical encomiendas of Bartolomé de Las Casas in Venezuela from the 1540s. He encouraged indentured servants to rebel against their masters. They did. He wanted the Indians to live with their English cousins. They did. Morton invited everybody to the party: Africans (including Muslims), Catholics, even Jews. There was complete equality between women and men. He established a representational democracy based on the Iroquois system. Everybody had a voice.

Mostly, the voices were singing. Morton felt the best use of time and resources would involve a lot of dancing and drinking beer.

 When they actually built a Maypole, a symbol of European paganism, and danced around it with ribbons and flowers in their hair, it became too much for the Puritans, who had already looked upon their neighbors as an incurable tumor.

They sent the stout Miles Standish, or as Morton called him, Captain Shrimp, to perform the operation. Two-dozen armed Pilgrims marched down the road to Merrymount singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

Standish’s bloodlust was frustrated because he arrived the morning of May 2^nd, the night after the Maypole revelry, which left the entire population merrily unconscious or with start-the-revolution-without-me hangovers. The Pilgrims bum-rushed the Catholics and Jews, re-indentured the white men, shipped off the Africans to the slave markets of Barbados, chased the Indians back into the forest, and married off (enslaved) the women. As for Morton, who as leader of the Merrymounters set the bar high for drunken revelry, he finally woke up chained in the hold of a ship plowing back to Merry Old England.

Thus ended a noble experiment in personal inspiration and social acceptance. The Merrymounters may have been having too good of a time, but eventually, people either moderate or pixilate. The Merrymounters never got that chance. I like to keep Thomas Morton’s fever dream alive every time I raise a pint, or some less fattening equivalent, but I don’t think of what might have been. I think of what can be.