Happy Thanksgiving 🦃

Ashley Walker
6 days ago
5 min read

To the Lettermen of the USA veterans community and our loyal patrons,

This Thanksgiving, my heart is overflowing with gratitude for you. Your steadfast support and sponsorship of our work—through President’s Corner, Notes, our social media platforms, videos, and website—gives us the privilege of serving America’s veterans full-time. It is an honor we never take lightly. As my family and I gather around the table this year, you—our Lettermen of the USA family—are at the very top of what we’re thankful for.

In that same spirit of gratitude, I want to share something deeply meaningful with you this Thanksgiving. It’s a message that Brian Cunningham, our Executive Director, and I have revisited many times, a message that used to be taught in schools long before many of us were born. It is the real lesson of Thanksgiving, told every year by the late Rush Limbaugh until the Lord called him home. It is a story about faith, endurance, community, and the power of freedom.

And by God’s grace, we still have the privilege of passing it along.

Here is the heart of that message:

In the early 1600s, the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in search of a place where they could worship God freely. Their journey on the Mayflower was perilous, but their faith was unshakable. When they stepped ashore, they drafted the Mayflower Compact—America’s first governing document—establishing just and equal laws rooted in Scripture.

But their first two winters were brutal beyond imagination. Half the company—51 out of 102 souls—perished from cold, hunger, and disease.

Why? Because their London investors had forced them into a seven-year contract that required every crop, every fish, every fur to go into a “common stock.” Everything was to be shared equally, regardless of who worked and who didn’t. In plain language, the colony began as a socialist experiment: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Governor William Bradford recorded the results in his own journal, Of Plymouth Plantation:

“This community [in property] was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense… And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.”

The strong got the same as the weak. The diligent got no more than the lazy. Productivity collapsed. Starvation followed.

Finally, after years of needless suffering, Bradford did something radical. In his words:

“The Governor…gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular… and so assigned to every family a parcel of land… This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been… and gave far better content.”

The change was instantaneous. Women and children who had pleaded sickness now worked willingly in the fields—because the harvest would feed their own families. Abundance replaced famine. Bradford wrote with relief that “any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day.”

Only then—in the fall of 1623—did they have enough surplus to hold the three-day feast of thanksgiving we remember today. They invited their Wampanoag friends, gave thanks to Almighty God, and celebrated the fruit of free men and women working for themselves and their loved ones—not for a common storehouse run from London or Plymouth.

That, my friends, is the real story of Thanksgiving: socialism nearly killed them; freedom and private property saved them. And from that hard-won lesson came the first true American harvest of plenty.

As we sit down with our families this week, let this story remind us what we are truly thankful for: faith that sustains, freedom that liberates, and the individual responsibility that built—and still sustains—this great nation.

Your sacrifices, and the sacrifices of every veteran we serve, have preserved those very blessings for us and for generations yet unborn.

From our family to yours—thank you. We are proud to stand with you, serve you, and honor the heroes of this Republic.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Darryl Fuhrman

Lettermen of the USA