How the Pilgrims' Image Evolved

ByABC News
November 19, 2001, 5:44 PM

Nov. 21 -- What if the Pilgrims hadn't invited the Indians to a Thanksgiving feast, but instead took them out to the local tavern and regaled them with boastful tales and lewd jokes?

Well, there weren't any bars in the tiny Plymouth settlement in 1621, so it couldn't have happened that way. But our image of the hosts of the first Thanksgiving as somber, gray-clad men wearing hats with buckles took some time to evolve. And it certainly wasn't the way most of their contemporaries thought of them.

Religious separatists like the Pilgrims often called Puritans because they believed the Church of England needed to be "purified" of all Roman Catholic influences were mocked and vilified in the literature of the day, says Kristin Poole, an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware.

"The way people were imagining the Puritans in England was almost 180 degrees opposite" to the way they are seen today, says Poole, author of Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton. "They were being portrayed as drunken gluttons and routinely accused of being sexually promiscuous."

Reputation Goes From Drunken to Dour

This stereotype predominated from the 1590s to the 1640s, as evidenced by plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson