Nicholas Guyatt Profile picture
Sep 16, 2020 23 tweets 8 min read Read on X
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…

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More from @NicholasGuyatt

May 23
American followers! Feel like you ought to have views on the UK's just-announced election (4th July!) but too traumatised by your own electoral nightmares to spend much time on ours? This thread is for you! 🇺🇸🇬🇧☠️🧵 Image
As you’ve probably heard, Sunak’s Tory party are miles behind in the polls. This because they’ve been running the UK for fourteen years and the country has been in the toilet (often literally) for most of that period: zero growth, austerity, Brexit, sewage everywhere, omni-gloom Image
The Tories have two clever ways of managing omni-gloom: they change their leader regularly, so each new Tory PM can say “I’m the fresh start the UK needs!” while continuing everything their predecessor did; and the media massively skews in their favour, especially newspapers Image
Read 27 tweets
Aug 23, 2023
And finally Giuliani gets his mugshot to go alongside his old friend Bernie Kerik: striking to think that the two most powerful people in New York City government after 9/11 ended up in police custody
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For all the drama of Giuliani's booking today, he still can't beat Bernie Kerik's incredible achievement of pleading guilty in court while having a major correctional facility named after him nytimes.com/2006/07/03/nyr…
Astonishing that Kerik & Giuliani teamed up again to help Trump overturn the 2020 election result, despite Kerik spending three years in federal prison; though I guess Kerik owed Trump after being awarded a presidential pardon earlier that year theguardian.com/us-news/2023/j…
Read 4 tweets
Jun 3, 2023
A thread on the Telegraph's epic war on working-from-home: just a *selection* of the anti-WFH articles in "Britain's Best Quality Newspaper" since January of this year

Let's start with dogs, working from home is sending dog ownership to unsustainable levels Image
WFH makes you less ambitious & productive Image
WFH made inflation happen Image
Read 24 tweets
Jun 1, 2023
Just caught the first episode of the BBC's new series on trade unions & found it surprisingly moving

I can't remember *ever* seeing a TV show which explains simply & honestly why working people join unions - this kind of show just never gets made bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod…
One thing the show captures brilliantly is the simple fact that workers *hate* going on strike; the scenes with the nurses, who walked out for the first time ever this winter, are absolutely devastating
Impossible not to get mad at bosses/politicians who blithely tell workers to swallow huge pay cuts; but there's also something inspiring (& shockingly original) about seeing these struggles from the perspective of the picket line, rather than via the lies & spin of the powerful Image
Read 4 tweets
Jun 1, 2023
If you want to know how conservatives (mostly old white men and their friends in the media) try to disrupt or deter research into legacies of slavery at British universities, ALL the receipts are here ⬇️ theguardian.com/news/2023/jun/…
The behaviour of retired fellows @CaiusCollege is shocking. But this is also a story of a right-wing media backlash which smeared responsible & honest research as 'woke history' Image
I have wonderful retired colleagues but I'm delighted the Guardian piece points out the absurdity of "life fellows" at Caius having full voting rights. A familiar story: old white men refuse to leave the stage and instead browbeat the people who are actually still in work Image
Read 6 tweets
May 31, 2023
If only vice-chancellors of UK universities had been bolder about this a year ago...

If only they could be more candid now in admitting that they have balanced the books by screwing their own staff
theguardian.com/education/2023…
The government response to the SOS from vice chancellors is predictably mendacious. How can universities be "independent" when government fixes tuition fees, loan repayment terms & basic regulation?

More gaslighting from Westminster, a common thread of the past twenty years Image
Tuition fees should not exist; higher ed should be free; a brave government (or opposition) would insist on the common good of every graduating student; and our widening-participation commitments should expose the canard that free tuition is a "middle-class giveaway" Image
Read 4 tweets

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