If you don’t know who Will Rogers was, look him up. We could use more Will Rogers nowadays. Here are some remarks of his relevant for Thanksgiving:
Well now, anyhow, another little announcement. On last Sabbath evening, I referred to the Pilgrims, our Pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock. Well, boy, you ought to wait ’til I heard from New England. I split New England just wide open. It seems there’s a town up there called Provincetown, and they have adopted a slogan which says, “Don’t be misled by history or any other unreliable source. Here’s the place where the Pilgrims landed.” This is by unanimous vote of the Chamber of Commerce of Provincetown. Provincetown has been made the official landing place of the Pilgrim. Any Pilgrim landing in any other place was not official.
If he landed on Plymouth Rock, well, it just served him right, that’s all. It served him right. Nothing but a chicken should be named after ’em…, Plymouth Rock. That’s for the town people. You country people got that gag. That’s for the town folks. Plymouth Rock, not a White Leghorn. Country folks is smarter than city folks anyhow. You never have to explain a joke to country folks. Who but a chicken, or a seal, or a Pilgrim would land on a rock anyhow?
Now in the first place, I don’t think that this argument I have created up there is so terribly important. The argument that New England has got to settle in order to pacify the rest of America is, “Why were they allowed to land anywhere?” That’s what we want to know. As a race there has never been any comparison between the Pilgrim and an Indian. Now I hope my Cherokee blood is not making me prejudiced. I want to be broad minded, but I am sure that it was only the extreme generosity of the Indians that allowed the Pilgrims to land. Suppose we reversed the case. Do you reckon the Pilgrims would have ever let the Indians land? Yeah, what a chance! What a chance! The Pilgrims wouldn’t even allow the Indians to live, after the Indians went to the trouble of letting ’em land.
Well anyhow, the Provincetown officials sent me a lot of official data, that when the Pilgrims landed they found some corn that the Indians had stored and that the Pilgrims were about starved and that they eat the Indians’ corn. And they claim that the corn was stored at Provincetown. You see, the minute the Pilgrims landed they got full of the corn and then they shot the Indians; perhaps because they hadn’t stored more corn.”
But they’d always pray. That’s one thing about a Pilgrim, he would pray. Mostly for more Indian corn. You’ve never in your life seen a picture, I bet any one of you have never seen a picture of one of the old Pilgrims praying when he didn’t have a gun right by the side of him. That was to see that he got what he was praying for.
