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Here’s an informative column by Caroline Baum!

Thanksgiving Is Incentive Success Tale: Caroline Baum (Correct)

(Corrects in first paragraph that Bradford was colony's second governor. Commentary. Caroline Baum is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

By Caroline Baum

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- It is the tradition of this column every year at this time to relate the story of Thanksgiving. For source material, I relied on the accounts of William Bradford, the second governor of the Plymouth Bay Colony (Bradford's History ``Of Plimoth Plantation'').

For most Americans, Thanksgiving is a holiday from work, a time to gather with friends and family and celebrate with a huge feast. If children know anything about the origins of this national holiday, declared each year by presidential proclamation, it's that the Pilgrims set aside a day to give thanks for a bountiful harvest in their new land, where they came to escape religious persecution.

What children -- and many adults -- don't know is that things weren't always good for the Pilgrims, a group of English Separatists who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 and established the Plymouth Bay Colony.

The first winters were difficult: The weather was harsh, and crop yields were poor. Half the Pilgrims died or returned to England in the first year.  Those who remained went hungry. Despite their deep religious convictions, the Pilgrims took to stealing from one another.

Finally, in the spring of 1623, Governor Bradford and the others ``began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery,'' according to Bradford's History.

Old-World Baggage

One of the traditions the Pilgrims had brought with them from England was a practice known as ``farming in common.'' Everything they produced was put into a common pool, and the harvest was rationed among them according to need.

They had thought ``that the taking away of property, and bringing in community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing,'' Bradford recounts. They were wrong. ``For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort,'' Bradford writes.

Young, able-bodied men resented working for others without compensation. They thought it an ``injustice'' to get the same allotment of food and clothing as those who didn't pull their weight.

A New Way

After the Pilgrims had endured near-starvation for three winters, Bradford, with the advice of the leaders of the colony, decided to experiment when it came time to plant in the spring of 1623. He set aside a plot of land for each family, that ``they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves.''

The results were nothing short of miraculous.

Bradford writes: ``This had very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than other ways would have been by any means the Govr or any other could use, and saved him a great deall of trouble, and gave far better content.''

The women now went willingly into the field, carrying their young children on their backs. Those who previously claimed they were too old or ill to work embraced the idea of private property and enjoyed the fruits of their own labor, eventually producing enough to trade their excess corn for furs and other desired commodities.

Incentives

Given appropriate incentives, the Pilgrims produced and enjoyed a bountiful harvest in the fall of 1623 and set aside ``a day of thanksgiving'' to thank God for their good fortune. ``Any generall wante or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day,'' Bradford writes in an entry from 1647, the last year covered by his History.

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the Pilgrims' good fortune was not a matter of luck. In 1623, they were responding to the same incentives that men and women still respond to almost four centuries later.

To contact the writer of this column:

Caroline Baum in New York at  cabaum@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this column:

Bill Ahearn at  bahearn@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 24, 2004 12:12 EST

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