Narrator/Interviewer (7:47)
New England Granite. I like to think of the man in this first part of the story as just a bunch of dudes. Just a bunch of dudes doing dude things. Someone has an idea, probably while drinking. The year is 1774. It is the eve of the Revolutionary War. The place is Plymouth, Massachusetts. They have recently organized a militia there. They have put up a liberty pole, which is essentially just that, a big wooden pole. But it is, of course, more than just that. It is a symbol of defiance against the crown, a metaphoric middle finger rising from the town green. The liberty pole tradition traces its roots to ancient Rome, where a group of senators celebrated the Emperor's assassination by sticking a red cap on top of a pole. The cap was the same type that was given to freed slaves to signal their new status. The senators, it seems, co opted the cap to suggest that Rome, with Caesar's death, had been similarly freed. Then, during the Renaissance, when everything ancient Rome was new again, people revived the concept and refreshed it for a new era, turning it into a more generalized symbol of liberty, one that could be carried or rallied around as necessary, eventually bringing us the poles that popped up all over New England on the eve of the American Revolution. And from there back to the dudes in Plymouth. They want to do the other towns with their red floppycat cat poles. One better. This is Plymouth, after all, founded 154 years earlier by people who famously fled English oppression. A regular pole isn't going to do. The next morning, a large number gathers, that is as specific as the historical record gets on this. On the town green with oxen and the biggest cart they can find, and they head down to the shore to dig up Plymouth Rock and put it on top of the liberty pole. That will show them. I like to think that it wasn't just the transatlantic journey of the Mayflower in 1620 that led those men down to that shore with shovels in hand, but another, much shorter trip. That one took place in 1741, when a man named Thomas Faunce heard they were planning on building a new wharf on the Plymouth waterfront. Faunce was 95, which is plenty old now, but which back then was truly extraordinary. And when he heard about the wharf plan, he was bereft, because that wharf was going to cover up what we now know as Plymouth Rock. By all accounts, the very first time anyone mentions any rock in conjunction with the Pilgrim's landing comes in 1741, 120 years after they landed, thanks to Thomas Faunce. His father had arrived in Plymouth on a ship called the Ann a few years after the Mayflower. It being a very small community, Thomas dad was pals with all the original pilgrims. And one day when Thomas was a little boy, 20 some years after their arrival and after the first winter and first Thanksgiving and all that, his dad pointed out to the water's edge and said, see that rock? That's where Miles Standish and all them first got off the boat some 90 years later when he heard about the plan to build the wharf, he says he remembered that day with his dad and it didn't seem right to build a dock over such an important piece of history. So he told someone, his kids, a neighbor, we don't know, that he'd like to see the rock before it got covered up. But this wasn't going to be easy. He lived outside of town and was impossibly old and not particularly mobile. So the next day he was carried in a chair for three miles to see it. I like to think of this 90 year old man being set down in the sturdiest chair they could find, a blanket wrapped around his frail shoulders, being lofted through the woods as a crowd forms and joins them, swells as they approach town in the soft morning light, the smell of the sea greeting them as they come up and over Cole's Hill and make their way down the grassy slope to the shore where a witness named James Thatcher will write down that Faunce there upon that rock bedewed it with his tears and bid it an everlasting adieu. And I'd like to think this actually happened that way. That a 95 year old man was so distraught that this history was being forgotten, a history that only he apparently knew and thought to brung up at all. Only at the 11th hour that he wept so forcefully that tears actually splashed down onto the rock. But I doubted bedewed it with his tears and bid it an everlasting adieu. Is this stuff of poetic license and bad poetry? To this day historians debate whether Thomas Faunce's memory at 95 was accurate and whether that specific rock, or any rock for that matter, played any particular role in the Pilgrims arrival. But it is clear that it didn't hold any real significance, practical or sentimental to the pilgrims themselves because they basically wrote everything down and no one ever mentioned it. Instead, the thing that makes this rock Plymouth Rock is poetry. There is something moving about this 95 year old man being moved. There's something romantic about the idea that this right here on this spot, this is where it all began. That is where it all began for the idea of Plymouth Rock at least, when they built the wharf in a different spot and started to protect this rock and turn it into a relic, a symbol of freedom, a tie to a glorious past, an object worthy of veneration and apparently of being dug up by a bunch of dudes gathered at the waterside to stick it to England. Back in 1774, our dudes set themselves to the task of removing a 10 ton boulder from the sand to get it into a cart where 30 strong oxen would haul it up Cole's Hill and then they would place it atop the Liberty Pole to tell every redcoat in the area that Plymouth was ready for a fight. That the spirit of the pilgrims, brave and defiant, still flowed through their veins. They sat at the ground with their shovels. They wedged enormous and ingenious screws beneath the corners of Plymouth Rock. It began to rise and the ox driver urged on the oxen and got the cart into position. And the gathered men put their shoulders into it, pulled at the levers, got ready to heave and push and lift this sainted stone. Maybe they agreed to push on the count of three. And they didn't even need to stop and ask whether they would push on three or say, 1, 2, 3 and then push. They were together. They were of one mind, filled with the spirit of revolution and of their ancestors who 120 years before had stepped off that fabled ship after 66 days at sea. And as their leather shoes touched that New England granite, they left their lives of persecution behind. And so the men counted to three and they pushed. And Plymouth Rock sheared in half. The top just popped off like they were splitting a muffin with a co worker at the free continental breakfast at the Airport Marriott. I like to think of those men there in the sand having just broken Plymouth Rock and of the shock and the finger pointing and the panic and the comedy. It seems that at one point someone said some version of hey, hey, hey, hey, hear me out, hear me out. What if this is actually good? And suggest that it was a sign from God that the colonies would like this rock break away from England and they just went with it. They put one broken half of Plymouth Rock into the wagon and the 30 oxen had an easier trip up Colesh Hill and they deposited it beside the Liberty Pole. No effort was made to hoist it. There it lay for many years, a sturdy and symbolic soapbox for speeches on liberty, a point of pride for plymouthians. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French chronicler of early America, arrived in Plymouth. He marveled at how the young nation, this great experiment in secular democracy, had turned this rock into a relic, had imbued it with near religious power. He saw pilgrims, lowercase P, not the pilgrim, pilgrims whose own mythic power was expanding well beyond historical reality. He saw Americans who'd come to Plymouth to See where this whole thing began. To touch their own toes to this rock, where those legendary trailblazers of liberty might or might not have touched their own 200 years before. He saw others who wanted to take a piece of it, who'd come to the metaphorical mountain with chisels in hand. In his travels, Tocqueville saw pieces of the famous Plymouth rock all over, used as doorstops, as paperweights, set in the centers of mantles like the mandibles of sainted martyrs. What had once been a point of local pride was being woven into the national story. There was a pilgrim museum built in the middle of the 19th century. They moved the rock again so it would be next to the museum. Another bunch of dudes and a bunch of oxen got it into a cart in one piece this time. But when they were taking it out, they dropped it and it split in two. I like to think of those men who had surely heard about the last time some dudes moved Plymouth rock, who'd probably joked about it. Wouldn't it be kind of hilarious if they dropped it again while doing everything they could not to drop it again, praying, please, please, please don't let me drop it again. And then dropping it again, they put it back together. This time, they put some mortar in there and smushed it together, and it was all good. In the 1860s, when the pilgrim story was fully enshrined as one of the pillars of capital H history, Thanksgiving became a national holiday. The genocide and forced removal of indigenous peoples in the west was in full swing. The Thanksgiving story, in its reductive construction paper pilgrim hat form, was offered up to soothe the discomfort of white Americans. They built an elaborate Victorian canopy to protect the rock from relic hunters and seagulls. And they also chiseled the date 1620 into its face. In the 1920s, they redid the waterfront, opened it up, got rid of some of the piers. It's nice. They moved the rock again, managing to keep it in one piece this time, and put it back there at the water's edge, more or less where it was when Thomas Faunce bedewed it with his tears, or didn't. And where the pilgrims first set foot on the land that would become America, or didn't, it is still there, still underwhelming tourists. Now it's surrounded by a fence and protected by a neoclassical structure like the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials or any of the other places where this secular country turns its recent history into Greco Roman myths. They've repaired the rock a number of times. A full moon or storm tide can cover it for a while, and the salt water does a number on the mortar. At some point before too long, scientists tell us the sea level will rise permanently above where it now rests, and perhaps we should just let it. There is so much that people have willfully gotten wrong about the story of the pilgrims in their first years in this place, Wampanoag land, that maybe we should just let the tide wash it away. I suspect they will move Plymouth Rock again one day. The old story, true or not, right or not, is too dear to too many people. People like to think what they think. I just hope they're more careful with it next.
