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The Pilgrims, Leiden, and the Early Years of Plymouth Plantation - Preface

Popular History Confronting the Professional Yes, Maybe, But ...

From time to time, especially towards the Thanksgiving season, I am asked to comment on drafts of books or articles about the Pilgrims. Usually, when alerted to problems of fact or interpretation, authors or editors modify passages, but not always. Some interpretive habits must be well-loved even without any historical basis. One example is the nineteenth-century romantic novelist's myth of Dorothy Bradford's supposed suicide. That continues to reappear because some people think nowadays that being depressed about arriving at Cape Cod in 1620 is an expectable and understandable reaction. Popular psychology thus invents a voice for the silence of the past. Considering the Pilgrims' strong religious beliefs, I think that it is unlikely that a suicide among the faithful would have been passed by without a word of interpretation. Another practically ineradicable myth is the idea that Myles Standish was a courageous, trusty outsider who remained aloof from the Pilgrims' religion. The journalist George Willison emphasized this notion in 1945, writing that, "Alone of the Pilgrim leaders, [Standish] never joined the church at Plymouth. His name is conspicuously absent from its records and rolls. Nowhere is he listed among the communicants." As I remark in my article, "Myles Standish, Born Where," a couple of reasons could account for the absence of Standish's name in the Plymouth church records. One is that there are no lists of communicants. Standish moved away from Plymouth about forty years before the Plymouth church records in fact begin. He died eleven years before the first entries. Furthermore, no one who was already a member in Leiden had to "join" the church at Plymouth. And there is no evidence that Standish was not a member in Leiden. Such a statement rests, however, on two negatives. Yet they do not form a positive to the effect that there is evidence that he was a member. Instead, there is just as much circumstantial indication of his having been a member as there is for most of the rest of the church. If there were lists, they may have been in the first pages of William Bradford's Letter Book, that after much destruction now begins on page 339.

Documentary evidence unfortunately fails to provide us with the wealth of insight into attitude, mood, and self-contemplation that we might prefer. Nonetheless, there is plenty of opportunity for fashionable explanations of the past by the application of popular psychological notions. The Pilgrims' experience as exiles in Leiden can be understood in terms of psychological or sociological truisms about the effects of displacement on identity. The social development of their colony is best understood through the concept of tribalism. King Philip's War is to be understood most deeply as an identity crisis rather than a response to loss and restriction of land use. So we may think.

Popular history takes many forms in attempting to connect the past with our own experiences. The Pilgrims are important because in some way or other their experiences were formative in the development of the modern American psyche. Last year, in The Times, a journalist announced that the Pilgrims were England's seventeenth-century terrorists, a group of Talibanish tyrants attempting to establish a fundamentalist theocracy. (For this article and my reaction:)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1740910_1,00.html

http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=67124&bheaders=1#67124

And costume drama puts on the appearance of the past while inevitably proceeding to act from a very modern conception of motivations and social interaction. Spurious dialogue emphasizes popular simplifications. The professional historian can be used as a stock figure — the expert who talks — but rarely has a chance to correct the preconceptions of the journalist or film producer, or to be understood as more expert than the random local amateur or self-proclaimed ethnic representative given equal presentation status in the final version.

The historian can refuse to participate — or can attempt to help edit away the most obvious inaccuracies. A footnote of thanks may represent hours of corrective work. It's all part of the public service one expects to perform. Not long ago, however, I provided detailed commentary to try to salvage an article that would appear in a major popular history magazine, and I allowed the editor to read some chapters of a book I'm writing about the Pilgrims, Leiden, and the early years of Plymouth Plantation. The editor wrote a letter thanking me extensively for help in revising the article but surprisingly stated that the magazine does not print acknowledgements. The resulting article may therefore be misleading as regards authorial competence.

I'm not sure what the best response is. But one possibility is simply to share the first two chapters of my book with a wider audience. I thank the Pennsylvania Society of Mayflower Descendants for the opportunity to publish these chapters on their website.

Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs
Leiden, The Netherlands

>> Chapter 1, page 1

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