Thread by @NicholasGuyatt

Four hundred years ago today the Mayflower left England for America, carrying the “Pilgrims” who founded Plymouth Plantation. A century ago this anniversary was a huge deal; now it’s…complicated (thread)

The idea of Plymouth (and New England) as the origin of everything great about the United States has a long history: in the post-Revolutionary era, orators and historians (esp in New England) liked to present the Pilgrims as the pioneers of American independence

They also followed the settlers themselves in seeing Native Americans as either loyal (in the case of Tisquantum/’Squanto’) or (mostly) devilish, rehashing the claim that divine providence cleared away Native people to make room for whites (image from William Bradford’s journal)

Then in the nineteenth century Northerners used the Mayflower to distance the North from southern slavery — here’s Daniel Webster, in his celebrated 1820 oration marking the bicentennial of the Mayflower’s arrival, using Plymouth Rock as an altar of freedom

[This despite the fact that slavery was ubiquitous in seventeenth-century New England; see Wendy Warren’s book New England Bound]

A couple of decades later the Massachusetts politician Robert Winthrop (yes, one of those Winthrops) actually contrasted the slave ship that arrived in Virginia in 1619 with the Mayflower - again, trying to use the Pilgrims to launder American history

At the heart of these visions — which were studiedly antislavery for the most part — was a desire to remove both slavery and Black people from the American past and future. The Mayflower was a vision of a racially pure United States

The same was true when the tercentenary came around in 1920: by then, as John Seelye writes in his fascinating book Memory’s Nation, Plymouth Rock had become an “icon of race purity” in a moment of white fragility about immigration

The celebrations on either side of the Atlantic in 1920 were fascinating. The US and Britain were still reeling from World War I & the ‘flu pandemic; but there were huge events in Britain on September 16 to mark the Mayflower’s departure plus tons of newspaper coverage

Much of this was suffused with ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ - the late 19th/early 20th century idea that an English-speaking whiteness now held forth over the less fortunate peoples of the world. This connection flattered Britain as its imperial powers began to fade

The highlight of the British celebrations was a huge party at the Royal Albert Hall, one of London’s biggest venues, where the prime minister David Lloyd George was due to speak.

But then the PM couldn’t make it and had to send a bombastic message instead. In his absence one of the other speakers deployed Anglo-Saxonism to promote the new League of Nations - which had been partly the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson, but recently defeated in the U.S. Senate

What’s ironic about this is that when the celebrations of the Mayflower’s arrival took place on the American side in December 1820, the orator of the day was…Henry Cabot Lodge, Woodrow Wilson’s nemesis and the senator who killed US involvement in the League

His oration on the tercentenary of the Pilgrims was crabbed and fogeyish — you can imagine him writing to the Times to complain about the #1619Project. No one believed in progress any more, he complained; cynics like HL Mencken had trashed the reputation of the Puritans

The forces of reaction were hardly on the defensive in America: the Klan and Jim Crow were in the ascendancy; the Immigration Act of 1924 would curtail the migrations of the nineteenth/early 20th and console the racial anxieties of many white Americans

In his Plymouth oration Lodge insisted that the Mayflower really was the best of the United States; but he faintly realised that American history was already fracturing - that the idea of the Mayflower as the wellspring of Americanness wouldn’t hold together

The idea of the Mayflower as one colonial settlement among many has become more widely recognised in the US in recent decades, as #VastEarlyAmerica indicates; though the old origin myths die hard. The 1619 Project was in conversation with 1620 as well as 1776

For Britons, though, the eclipse of the Mayflower is more complete: the twentieth century offered a slow retreat of empire; and, for at least some of us, a creeping realisation that the United States would become a superpower without British tutelage or even influence

Even without Covid, here in the UK the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s departure would have been…complicated; here’s the official website, which confirms that most of the events have been cancelled mayflower400uk.org

The contrast with 1920 is huge: Back then we had weeks of celebrations, the King and the Prime Minister sending messages to packed gatherings in London & Plymouth, and a mini-Olympics in which the US and UK faced off against each other in a sweaty mist of Anglo-Saxonism

In 2020 we’ve got disgraced US ambassador Woody Johnson travelling to Plymouth to launch a robot ship (which won’t be actually be ready to sail to Massachusetts until 2021) plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-…

A silver lining: Britain's most villainous contemporary Anglo-Saxonist has been too busy with his own memory crusade to spend any time on the Mayflower.../

And a write-up of today's muted ceremonies in Plymouth theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/s…