FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

Mayflower set sail for Jamestown, sometime in late September 1620.  Navigational aids and steering gear weren't what they now are, and in November the ship made landfall off the Cape of Cod.  I had forebears aboard, who lasted long enough to sign the Mayflower Compact and be fruitful and multiply and produce descendants to fight in the War for Independence and further descendants to migrate to Wisconsin.  The anniversary of the landing merits contemplation.

The Mayflower compact is a significant historical document, the "wave-rocked cradle of our liberties", as one historian evocatively put it. Signed by the Pilgrims and the so-called Strangers, the craftsmen, merchants and indentured servants brought with them to establish a successful colony, it agreed to pass "just and equal laws for the good of the Colony". The first experiment in New World self-government, some scholars even see it as a kind of American Magna Carta, a template for the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Yet scholars at the Constitutional Center in Philadelphia suggest it had largely been forgotten by the time the Founding Fathers gathered at Independence Hall. Nor did the Pilgrims' belief in what Robert Hughes once called "the hierarchy of the virtuous" square with the more secular poetry of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Besides, the Mayflower compact started with a declaration of loyalty to King James.

Human institutions only take their final form immediately on a blackboard, and those plans tend not to survive first contact with reality.  I'm not sure, though, about this draft of history (it is one of Her Majesty's subjects writing the column, dear reader):

After Washington triumphed at Yorktown against the British, and this fledging nation started to assert itself in the world, the early drafters of the American story preferred to begin their histories with Christopher Columbus, even though the Italian explorer never set foot in North America. A new country that had just expelled the British did not want to be defined by its Englishness. Downplaying the Mayflower became an early act of decolonisation.

The Columbus legend might have come later, with more widespread immigration from Italy, but OK. (Weren't there French settlers in Quebec and what we understand today as Michigan and Wisconsin?)  What might matter more is that Puritan, or is it Calvinist  (or might there be a bit of Zwingli in it?) work ethic.

Taken together, though, the legacy of the pilgrims and the puritans is foundational. The work ethic. The fact Americans don't take much annual holiday. Notions of self-reliance and attitudes towards government welfare. Laws that prohibit young adults from drinking in bars until the age of 21. A certain prudishness. The religiosity. Americans continue to expect their presidents to be men of faith. In fact, no occupant of the White House has openly identified as an atheist. Also the profit motive was strong among the settlers, and with it the belief that prosperity was a divine reward for following God's path - a forerunner of the gospel of prosperity preached by modern-day television evangelists.

There's more in the essay, some of it in a less charitable vein. Fine. Read, reflect, then count your blessings.