Hit and myth of Pilgrim piety

ROGER FRANKLIN on Thanksgiving, fiascos and Florida

NEW YORK - Yesterday in America, as 60 million Thanksgiving turkeys went into the oven and the country celebrated the fond myths of its birth, it was tempting to imagine what Benjamin Franklin would have thought about the electoral fiasco that continues to unfold in Florida.

Perhaps the greatest of those idealistic cynics who gathered in Philadelphia in 1776 to draw up the United States Constitution, the printer, inventor and pamphleteer was adamant that the charter of the nation he hoped to found should serve as both a testament to liberty and a check on the ambitions of ruthless men.

Franklin and his allies won that fight, leavening the Constitution with a host of obstacles that have so far prevented this country drifting from democracy to despotism.

What he didn't win, however, was the battle to have the turkey declared the national bird. Unlike the eagle, which today glowers proud and haughty on the presidential seal, Franklin argued that the gobbler was a clean and virtuous creature, faithful to its flock, wholesome in its habits, and wise enough to avoid trouble whenever possible. The eagle, on the other hand, is a screeching scrounger, a carrion eater that is an enemy of its fellow birds, and altogether too proud by half.

If that wasn't enough, Franklin pointed out, turkeys taste good, too.

They were all observations that seemed particularly appropriate to the moment, as the two men who are each determined to succeed the present lame-duck President continue to conduct their post-election campaigns with all the dignity of squabbling geese. Given the choice between Al Gore and George W. Bush, Americans quite sensibly gave a collective shrug this week and voted with their knives and forks.

And that is just as Franklin would have wanted. Lincoln, too, for it was he who declared Thanksgiving an official national feast in 1863, when the country was being torn apart by civil war.

Perhaps, Lincoln reasoned, if Americans could all just sit down at laden tables to honour the Mayflower's brave and virtuous pilgrims, the bitter differences that were then making Gettysburg a synonym for carnage might be more easily settled.

Turkey meat, both Lincoln and Franklin believed, had the power to heal, particularly when accompanied with side dishes of candied yams, cranberry sauce - and a heapin' helpin' of the myths that survive only because Americans are loath to take too close a look at them.

Take the first Thanksgiving, for example, when the pious pilgrims are supposed to have gathered to thank God and the local Indians for helping them to survive that first lean year of 1621.

And the truth? Well, according to historian and anthropologist Chris Fennell, piety had little to do with it.

"The pilgrims had a tremendous problem with drunkenness," Fennell said. "And tremendous problems with lot of other things, too. They were beset by character flaws that, really, it has been in this country's best interests to overlook."

According to Fennell and co-author James Deetz, the first Thanksgiving was a three-day bacchanal. There were no turkeys as they were and remain too smart to be easily caught. Instead the pilgrims dined on deer and punctuated the courses by firing their muskets, sometimes at each other.

And when the sun went down, sheep had good reason to be scared. "Bestiality was common, as was theft, and all the more conventional forms of fornication," Deetz said. "The surviving records and histories leave no doubt about that. One of the colony's first ministers ran off with a teenage congregant. And in 1642, one Thomas Granger was hanged at the age of 16 for having sex with a variety of animals that were also put to death.

As for those friendly Indians, the pilgrims repaid their kindness 11 years later by massacring thousands and selling the survivors into slavery.

To people like Fennell, the wilful ignorance of his countrymen is understandable - indeed, entirely forgivable.

"The new nation needed a myth of epic proportions on which to found its history," he writes in The Times of their Lives: Life, Love and Death in Plymouth Colony. "When you are building a nation, fiction is often more useful than fact."

Which brings us back to modern Florida, where Al Gore's White House hopes may well have been humbled by a modern Thanksgiving myth.

It was exactly one year ago, late on Thanksgiving afternoon, that little Elian Gonzalez was found floating off Miami. To Florida's Cuban exiles, his arrival was the confirmation of one of their own folk stories - the one that talks of a young boy who is saved by kindly dolphins and grows up to liberate his people.

If the Vice-President had only been more forceful in arguing against his Administration's decision to return the child, Cuban-Americans would almost certainly have given him the 1000-or-so votes he now needs to win Florida and lock up the state's 25 vital votes in the Electoral College. Whatever his other faults, Gore is no dictator in the making but if Franklin were alive he would take undoubted satisfaction in the spectacle of ambition brought to heel by a few offended citizens.

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