Leiden in Holland where the pilgrims settled and worked for several years was a flourishing city of 100,000 souls with weaving establishments and a book printing and publishing industry. The pilgrims prospered finding many forms of employment in an industrialized city. Nothing counted for them but the truth of the Christian religion and the spiritual life it made possible, but still their minds were infected by the middle-class ideology that made towns like Leiden hum with rational disciplined merchants and entrepreneurs. When the pilgrims landed in Plymouth in 1620, the native Indians supplied them with corn and enough corn seed to plant a life-saving crop the following spring. They learned from the Indians rational strategies about how to live and thrive in the glorious unending wilderness of America, strategies that had nothing to do with the rational strategies suited to middle-class industrialized Leiden. So when the pilgrims sat down with their Indian friends and neighbors at the first Thanksgiving feast, the three elements always present ever afterwards in American life and history were present in the minds of the men and women enjoying the feast. The spirit of unbridled freedom that the American wilderness made possible was already present in the Indians and was beginning to gain ground in the minds of the colonists. The second element, independent Christian spirituality, was deeply grounded in the spirits of the colonists for they were believing Protestant Christians. They had been indoctrinated in the third element in England and in the industrialized city of Leiden, the middle-class doctrine that a rational disciplined and educated approach to work in an industrialized society will always yield economic success. The spirit of the Indians unfortunately was fortified with only one element, the deep American belief that life without freedom is worthless.

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