OPINION: A tale of two colonies, with lessons for today

This is the time of year when schools everywhere sprout images of turkeys, pumpkins and especially Pilgrims - those dour, blunderbuss-bearing ancestors of ours who seem to cast such a long shadow over the American psyche.

But as Thanksgiving approaches, it's worth remembering that in 1607, 13 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, a roughly equal number of colonists arrived at a place called Jamestown, in Virginia. It might be useful this year to take notice of them. For the story of the Pilgrims and their Southern counterparts is really a tale of two societies. The stark differences between them illuminate choices that we, as their descendants, always face.

You don't hear much about the Jamestown colonists at Thanksgiving because they were essentially looters. They had little loyalty to one another and less interest in building anything permanent. By 1624, when the British crown took control from the merchants who had mismanaged Jamestown, 5,000 colonists had died out of the 6,000 who had landed.

The Pilgrims were something else again. Despite their reputation as, well, puritanical, these Puritans not only knew how to have fun, but had a rare genius for community-building, a capacity rooted partly in their brutal circumstances but mostly in their belief system. The goal of the Puritan exodus was to build a new society, and at this they succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imaginings.

Their secret was their faith in the future. The New Englanders believed in working much and consuming little, postponing gratification beyond the modest pleasures they felt they could safely indulge in order to refresh themselves for God's labors. Those labors were embraced by nearly everyone - unlike in Virginia, where manual labor was seen as déclassé.

The Puritans never focused on worldly success, but their behavior made prosperity inevitable. In practically no time, these disciplined, forward-looking settlers had transformed their unpromising strip of the New World into an economic powerhouse.

What a contrast with the starvation-racked colony to the south! The folks who settled Jamestown were free of the Puritans' repressive religious culture - as well as the Puritans' communitarian spirit. Instead of aspiring to build a city on a hill, they aspired to find gold. Where the Puritans stressed cohesion, in Virginia it was every man for himself. The Puritans built businesses. The Virginians wanted to get rich quick.

The Puritans strove for a moral form of capitalism constrained by community institutions. They insisted that towns of 50 families or more have a school. They founded a university, established printing presses and devoured books.

The Virginians, in contrast, wallowed in ignorance. Their governor, William Berkeley, recorded in 1671 that in his colony, "There are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these [in a] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world."

Unlike Jamestown, Puritan society stressed the link between individual and collective well-being. It was relatively egalitarian and, by the standards of the day, middle-class. Life expectancy was longer, infant mortality lower, and the sense of community stronger, even if the community did inflict a scarlet letter or two.

Americans have always oscillated between Plymouth and Jamestown. This year, after a tawdry season of appeals to voter selfishness by cynical politicians, it's worth recalling how well the Puritans succeeded by pulling together. And how badly their contemporaries fared in Virginia, where selfishness kept them apart.