Bradford’s posterity

Wikipedia has a fascinating list of well known people who are descendants of William Bradford (1590-1657), the leader of the Plymouth Colony in the first 30 years of its existence. So much of the American population derives from the few thousand Pilgrims and Puritans who settled in Plymouth Colony and, far more importantly, Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1620s and ’30s. Generation after generation, the descendants of the New England Puritans spread westward along the northern tier of the United States, ultimately ending up in Oregon, Washington, and, in the farthest continental reach of this great branching, southern California. But over the last 30 years, the Anglo-Saxon Americans descended of that great nation-building movement, under the influence of a liberal ideology that could be described as Puritanism without God, and under the impact of the mass immigration of Latin Americans unleashed and permitted by that same ideology, have begun steadily retreating from the land their ancestors settled and built.

Which makes the following highly relevant:

William Bradford died at Plymouth, and was interred at Plymouth Burial Hill. On his grave is etched: “qua patres difficillime adepti sunt nolite turpiter relinquere” “What our forefathers with so much difficulty secured, do not basely relinquish.”

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Jeff W. writes:

New England people have supported mass immigration because they need allies if they are to gain political control of America. New England people are not now, nor have they ever been a majority of Americans. Southerners, together with Middle Americans from Pennsylvania, the Ohio River Valley, and border states constitute a majority. Because New Englanders are a minority, they need some allies.

New Englanders have always believed that they should rule America, but translating that belief into reality has been problematical. Their Federalist Party elected only one New England president, John Adams, and he only lasted one term. Later they formed the Whig Party, and tried to recruit Southern help to oppose Jackson and his successors, but the Whigs only lasted about 20 years. In the aftermath of the Civil War, their Republican Party did run the country for 68 years, from 1865 until 1932. But in 1932 the GOP collapsed.

Many New England people then migrated to the Democratic party, where they had to share power with Southerners—which they did not enjoy. Over time, they drove white Southerners out of the Democratic party. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prompted many Southerners to vote for Goldwater, and Southerners voted for George Wallace in 1968. After that, most white Southerners supported the GOP.

After white Southerners were driven out, New Englanders were surprised to discover that they again had trouble getting a majority of the votes. The Civil Rights Act had given them the solid support of the blacks, but it was still not enough. They needed still more allies if they were to outnumber Southern and Middle Americans.

It does not matter to New Englanders where these allies might come from, how poor they are, or how uneducated, or whether they are legal or illegal. As long as immigrants can be bribed into supporting the principle that New England people should rule America, then they are welcome. Millions of them. The more the better.

LA replies:

Thanks. I don’t know enough about this to agree or to disagree with you on the particulars, but that’s a really interesting angle on the country’s history.

I do agree with you on the New Englanders’ sense of mission to lead (whether as a Puritan or a liberal). But what do you actually mean by New England people? Do you mean all Americans predominantly descended from the New England Puritan settlers of the 1630s? If so, does that group, wherever they may live today, have a unified identity and agenda as a group? Do they know each other as a group and act together as a group? Or is it just that they are culturally and politically alike wherever they happen to be and thus naturally form a coherent interest without thinking of themselves as a particular group, whether “New Englanders” or whatever?

Also, are we talking about cultural New Englanders (like Dukakis, who though a Greek by ancestry, and a technocrat by formation, has all the closed sense of superiority of the classic New Englander), or just about the generic liberal white elite, i.e., the typical white people who support Obama?

A problem I have with your theory is that the “I deserve to lead you” liberalism has broken free of its New England Puritan origins. Take Karl Rove. He’s a Texan, but in his desire to engineer and dominate America in a liberal direction, e.g., his all out support for open borders and globalism, isn’t he a New Englander?

You just need to define New Englander more exactly.

LA continues:

Maybe I’m making this too complicated. You’re simply talking about the New Englander in David Hackett Fisher’s sense of one of the four basic types that constituted the original American population: people who are either physically or culturally descended from the Puritans. They may live anywhere, they don’t have any collective name for themselves as a group, but they have certain shared dispositions which will bring them into alliance and common purpose with each other wherever they happen to be.

But then we still have the problem that modern liberalism is an offshoot of this New England influence. And since virtually all people today are under the influence of modern liberalism, your New Englander type could be seen as co-extensive with the white population, or at least with the college educated part of it.

Ortelio writes:

“William Bradford died at Plymouth, and was interred at Plymouth Burial Hill. On his grave is etched: ‘qua patres difficillime adepti sunt nolite turpiter relinquere’ ‘What our forefathers with so much difficulty secured, do not basely relinquish.’”

Thus Wikipedia. But one of the things Bradford labored to acquire was fluency in reading Latin, Greek and Hebrew, so that he could taste Christendom’s written sources directly and defend them against objectors. So it’s ironical that the inscription on the obelisk over his ashes doesn’t make sense. It has to start “quae” = “those things”; perhaps the stone-carver misread what he was given, or perhaps the “ae” was carved as a dipthong which has weathered down to “a” (though the internet photo doesn’t seem to indicate that). Anyway, the meaning of the only possible Latin is more elegiac and resonant: “Those things that our fathers arduously acquired, do not shamefully let go.”

Mark E. writes:

For another insightful angle on this discussion, I recommend Tom Wolfe’s essay about Intel founder Robert Noyce, “Two Young Men Who Went West,” in his anthology, Hooking Up. (Noyce was from Grinnell, Iowa, and his father was the minister of a Congregational Church.)

Oh yes! What a treasure indeed was the moral capital of the nineteenth century! Noyce happened to grow up in a family in which the long-forgotten light of Dissenting Protestantism still burned brightly. The light!—the light at the apex of every human soul! Ironically, it was that long-forgotten light … from out of the churchy, blue-nosed sticks … that led the world into the twenty-first century, across the electronic grid and into space.

Surely the moral capital of the nineteenth century is by now all but spent.

(Hooking Up, paperback, p. 63)

Jeff W. writes:

The New England people dominate a cultural zone that stretches across the northern U.S. It reflects the historical settlement patterns of New Englanders. If you want to examine more closely where the New England people settled, you can just look at voting records. The New England people like Obama. The states where Obama got a lot of votes are in the New England cultural zone. Kentucky Democrats, on the other hand, very few of them from New England, do not like Obama. In some Kentucky counties, Obama got less then 10 percent of the vote.

I live in Ohio, the northern section of which was settled by New England people. The northern section of Ohio called the Western Reserve once belonged to Connecticut. As a rule, northern Ohio people vote for Democrats. Southern Ohio is populated by non-Yankees who came mainly from Virginia and Pennsylvania via the Ohio River. They vote for the GOP. Southern Ohioans talk differently from northern Ohioans. They sound more like Southerners. They sound the same as Kentuckians.

As a rule, immigrants such as Dukakis will work to fit into their adopted cultures. In general, Dukakis’s political views, then, will be identical with those of the descendants of Bradford.

The New England culture is an identifiable culture. New Englanders have long sought to dominate America, with their most aggressive actions occurring during the Civil War. New Englanders tend to view themselves as the most intelligent of Americans (largely due to their universities), and also as the most moral of Americans (even though their definition of morality is constantly changing). They are always the most moral as measured by the yardstick of their own constantly-changing moral fashions.

In such a complex world as this, any generalities such as these will not be entirely true. But the New England culture is a real thing and is a worthy object of study. David Hackett Fischer cannot be commended enough for the work he did in describing the New England culture, and the other three British founding cultures of America, in his book “Albion’s Seed.”

Philip P. writes:

Bradford’s quote reminds me of the idea suggested by, I believe, Kirk, that good government is a three-way pact, considering not just the present and future, but the past as well. The dead are the giants whose shoulders we stand on, and their beliefs and customs warrant not total but certainly significant recognition and, yes, respect.

My family is old New England stock . We’ve lived throughout the region since the mid-17th century, and our line includes governors and generals and diligent DAR members, all that good stuff. I was raised constantly reminded that we’ve helped work this country up from wilderness, and I think it has made all the difference in how I’ve come to view goings-on. The largest painting in my parents’ house is a large portrait of George Washington, and fixed above their door is a sign that supposedly comes from way back. It’s hard to read now, very hard, but you can still make out the words: FOREVER FREE.

There might be some impulse among the New English/Puritans to assume a haughty vanguard position, but there also exists a more conservative and passive temperament, one that prizes hard work, keeping to oneself, stoicism, simplicity, tradition, and the sovereignty which comes with responsibility. Those were the lessons my parents taught me; they’re the better half of the New England character, the one which is overshadowed these days by the liberal millennialism that began sometime later, with the likes of Horace Mann.

Anyway, fine post.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 05, 2008 12:39 AM | Send