image of the Charlie Brown Thansgiving special next to a primers icon.
Cindy Marie Jenkins

Fact-checking “This is America, Charlie Brown: The Mayflower Voyagers”

The year is 1988, and we are living in Reagan’s America. Public schools across the country struggled with segregation and the rising concept of standardized tests, and college tuition was purposefully increased so only the very rich could afford it. The country waited to learn who would secede the popular actor-turned-politician: Vice President George Bush or Senator Michael Dukakis.

We’re two years gone from Chornobyl, the Challenger disaster, and the fall of The Berlin Wall. The musical Carrie, a high school horror story by Stephen King, shared the limelight on Broadway with M. Butterfly and The Phantom of the Opera.

That’s where we find ourselves on October 21, 1988, when “This is America, Charlie Brown” premieres, and the lovable Peanuts gang dutifully boards the Mayflower.

Even Woodstock gets to come along.

You could say the Mayflower television special sparked this whole Critical Curious Kids endeavor.

We’d been living in China for over a year, and Thanksgiving was coming. My kids were so young they had no recollection of Thanksgiving in the United States and asked questions about it that led us, predictably, to the internet. I found “The Mayflower Voyagers,” and I warned them it would be interesting but may not show us the whole truth. 

“Mommy,” my then 6-year-old said. “If they say anything not true, I want you to pause the show and tell us the truth.”

This began our family habit of simultaneous fact-checking any historical media.

I started writing this as a review, but there’s not much entertainment value or even artistic content to discuss. It’s unique in the Peanuts canon because we see and hear the adults, though the children drive the small semblance of a story forward. 

But entertainment is not the point of “The Mayflower Voyagers;” the point is to solidify the American myth that the Pilgrims were the beginning of American history, First Nations or Jamestown be damned. The National Endowment of the Humanities even calls it America’s Creation Story, which is such an amazing perspective that I’m stealing it. Historian Blake Scott Ball described the television special as a “unique blend of conservative Christian traditionalism and progressive historical revision” in his fascinating book Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Although prayer and religion were the undercurrents of many of his holiday specials, this television miniseries stands out in that regard. Even so, Biographer Stephen J. Lind states in his book  A Charlie Brown Religion that Schultz was quick to warn against Patriot = Christian:

“Denying that belief in God was important to historical or contemporary Americans would be naive, even delusional. Those religions that rotated the equation, however, making their own particular religious faith synonymous with and necessary for patriotism, were a dangerous and misguided breed.

‘I am very fearful of a church which equates itself with Americanism,’ Sparky [Schultz’s nickname since birth] once said. ‘This is a frightening trend – people who regard Christianity and Americanism as being virtually the same thing.’ ” 

Rather than try to review it, I’ll share an annotated, fact-checked version of “This is America: The Mayflower Voyagers.” I was honestly surprised to see some educational moments in the story, especially around illnesses and tracking storms then and now. It’s also not a bad way to introduce your kids to the idea that even if our history books are based on truthful events, classrooms across the United States still teach American mythologies as history. 


Fact-checking “The Mayflower Voyagers,” Charlie Brown

Claim 1: ”128 years since Columbus discovered America”

Fact: It’s hard to know where to start with this statement. The dates may be correct, but of course, it’s that word “discovered” that we need to parse The History Channel offers a pretty decent summation of the reality of this mythology: Columbus “stumbled upon the Americas and whose journeys marked the beginning of centuries of transatlantic colonization.”

Dialogue: History is written by people, and most often the victors. In school you’ll be taught that Christopher Columbus discovered America as part of a grand plan to not only assure the world that the world is not flat, but as part of a glorious age of discovery. He was really on a quest to increase his own fortunes and spread Christianity to bring about the apocalypse, to be exact. 

I have to stop there or I’ll have nothing to say about Columbus Day, usually properly replaced by Indigenous Peoples Day in the sane parts of the United States. 

Right, anyway, those first English settlers weren’t looking for religious freedom; they wanted to get rich.

Claim 2: “Pilgrims, leaving to seek religious freedom”

Claim 3: “English merchants will finance the journey and share any profits from new settlement with Pilgrims.”

Fact: I tied these together because they both tell part of the truth. Not all those on the Mayflower sought religious freedom.In fact, they had already traveled from England to Holland in search of their religious freedom. Once there, however, the Pilgrims weren’t satisfied with the money they were making and thought they could try to recreate the financial success of the Jamestown colony in Virginia. That was actually their original destination until weather intervened

Props to the writers for including the information about English merchants, but the London Adventurers didn’t just finance the journey. According to History.com, only about “three dozen church members made their way back to England, where they were joined by about 70 entrepreneurs–enlisted by the London stock company to ensure the success of the enterprise.” 

How Schultz and team illustrated the “strangers,” and I love the implication that Snoopy is one of them. (Let me have my head canon, please.)

An interesting wrinkle to the narrative of the entire Mayflower being Pilgrims, is the religious individuals tried to separate themselves from the “sinners,” as they referred to the English businessmen. Greg Garrison said in his 2017 article “Native Americans welcomed immigrant Pilgrims in the first Thanksgiving” that it “wasn’t until conditions got really rough and they were done to 50 people total that “they had all been humbled by burying friends and relying on the natives, who helped them find enough food to live…The distinction between saints and strangers faded.

Sinners aren’t so bad when they feed you, I suppose.

Final counts:

Saints/Religious refugees: 36ish (History.com)/44 (AL.com)

Sinners/London merchants: 70ish v(History.com)/66 (AL.com

Claim 2.5: Calling the people on The Mayflower “Pilgrims”

Fact:

The term “Pilgrim” was not used to describe the Plymouth colonists until the early 19th century and was derived from a manuscript in which Governor Bradford spoke of the “saints” who left Holland as “pilgrimes.” The orator Daniel Webster spoke of “Pilgrim Fathers” at a bicentennial celebration of Plymouth’s founding in 1820, and thereafter the term entered common usage. (History.com)

Dialogue: Some history was written or re-written to expand upon the story the writers want to tell. It’s often based in the truth that then gets stretched to tell a larger, more virtuous story. Which sounds better: everyone on The Mayflower was fleeing persecution for their religious beliefs, or they’d found an element of religious freedom in another country but wanted to make more money, so set sail? Which story elicits more sympathy?

Points to the Peanuts special for laying that more factual aspect of their journey into the special. I grew up in New England and visited Plimouth Plantation every year on field trips and didn’t know that.

Let’s also note, however, that religious freedom seemed to only be a priority if related to their religious freedom, as is so often the case.  Smithsonian Magazine details how “the Puritan fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony did not countenance tolerance of opposing religious views. Their “city upon a hill” was a theocracy that brooked no dissent, religious or political.”

Religious freedom for me, Intolerance for you, as they say.

Claim 4: “arrive at a virtual wilderness”

Fact: This detail about their first stop in Provincetown was added likely to increase the suffering that the Mayflower travelers experienced while holding them up as frontiersmen, as adventurers who created something beautiful out of land that wasn’t in use. Historian David J. Silverman told a different story in his 2019  New York Times piece, “The Vicious Reality Behind the Thanksgiving Myth.”

“The Pilgrims did not enter an empty wilderness ripe for the taking. Human civilization in the Americas was every bit as ancient and rich as in Europe. That is why Wampanoag country was full of villages, roads, cornfields, monuments, cemeteries and forests cleared of underbrush. Generations of Native people had made it that way, expecting to pass along their land to their descendants.” (Silverman, 2019)

Dialogue: Who writes the history or articles or videos that they’re reading? Do the writers have their own points of view? Everyone has their perspective, no matter how objective a source may seem.

If a writer makes a claim that uplifts one side’s glory and makes them or their people look better, consider their perspective and what the writer gains by presenting you with a positive image of their actions. 

Claim 5: “Belief in God, desire for freedom from religious persecution”

See Claims 2 & 3.

These may be your descendants, Charlie Brown.

Claim 6: “Adventures will change the course of American history”

Fact: I give this claim a huge yes. Just one indentured servant on The Mayflower, John Howland, can count more than 2,000 descendants to his name. (The television special tells how Howland fell overboard but was rescued.) That’s just one example of how The Mayflower, the Pilgrims, their treatment of the Natives, and the resulting stories found a solid place in American history. Would we have known much about the Mayflower if it weren’t for Thanksgiving and the resulting tourist trade in Plimouth? Unlikely.

Oh yeah, there’s also the little fact of all the diseases that explorers brought to the land they called America, and how many Natives were killed thanks to them.

Claim 7: “Miserable conditions aboard ship”

Fact: Yeah, this one’s true. Can’t argue here.

Dialogue: This section got us talking about diseases, germs, and how people did or didn’t take care of them back then. Since we watched this in 2021 and our family had initially referred to COVID-19 as “The Big Germ,” our kids were interested in the seriousness of the Mayflower Voyagers’ illnesses. We also often watch great kids’ shows on germs like: 

I wouldn’t want to be on that ship.

Claim 8: “101 arrive, 2 died and one baby born”

Fact: I could only find a record of two deaths, and one happened after their long journey:

  • William Butten was an indentured servant who died during the journey. 
  • Elizabeth Hopkins gave birth to Oceanus on board the Mayflower, but the baby died at two years old.
  • Susanna White gave birth to Peregrine White during an anchorage in Cape Cod in 1620. Peregrine means “traveler’ or “Pilgrim.”

More died after they landed and in the first months after arriving in Cape Cod and Plimouth.

Dialogue: “Captain Standish as military leader, not a Pilgrim, helps with building, nursing the sick, training to defend ourselves [from indians]”

Fact: Standish met the Pilgrims while they lived in the Netherlands and became their leader while the journey was planned. Supposedly John Smith was their first choice but was deemed too expensive. Standish is certainly documented as building, nursing the sick – even after his wife died – and did train the people. 

He also led the Wessagusset tribe that had been helping them into a trap which resulted in a massacre.* But hey, he was a great Captain.

Talk to Kids About: People often simplify history, specifically those who make history, to suit their narrative. This television special follows the story of all interactions between Pilgrim colonists and Native tribes as peaceful.

Claim 11: “20 adults, 30 children survived”

Fact: The numbers vary depending on the sources, but this is generally true. The variations also depend on the exact time you count survivors: when they docked at Cape Cod, when they were closer to Plimouth, after they’d gotten off the ship?

Get this caption: “If there was an upside of captivity for Squanto, it was the opportunity to learn both English and Spanish fluently enough to become a translator.”

Claim 12: Samoset: speaks English, welcomed to their land, dressed in mohawk, leather

Fact: A lot of criticism of this television special express disbelief that Samoset “inexplicably” speaks English. It seems quite convenient, but it was true. What’s noteworthy, however, is that Samoset learned English because, as a youth, he was kidnapped by merchants and forced into slavery. His first words to the Mayflower survivors were also allegedly: “May I have a beer?” You can’t really put that into a kids’ show, though.

I also checked if his outfit in the cartoon was accurate, and it rings pretty true. According to Jerry Reif’s history papers:

“The startled colonists described Samoset as a tall and straight man with long black hair down his back, short hair in the front, and without a beard. Samoset carried with him his bow and an empty quiver in a gesture of peace. In his hand he held two arrows, one tipped and ready for battle, the other untipped. Samoset must have been considered virtually naked to the Puritan Pilgrims, since he wore only a fringed loincloth around his waist and moccasins on his feet. The day was mild but windy, so they offered him a horsehair coat to cover his body. Samoset told the Pilgrims that he was originally from Monhegan Island, which he said was five days journey by land but only one day by ship. He also told them that he had been in the Patuxet region for the past eight months visiting the Wampanoag, and that was planning to return to his people shortly. He stated that he had learned English from contact with the English fishermen and traders who visited Monhegan Island. “ (Reif)

Did you know?

The episode also ran into public controversy for its brief usage of the term “savage” to refer to Native Americans in the original script. The American Indian Parents, a Minneapolis civil rights organization that had worked as show consultants, protested to CBS, and the term was removed. (Ball, 2021)

Claim 13: “Squanto only survivor. Kidnapped and sent to Spain. Master learned English and lent him money to return to his land”

Fact: Born around 1580 to the Pawtuxet Tribe, Captain Thomas Hunt persuaded Squanto and 23 other Natives to board their ship with promises of trade. But they were held captive and sold in Spain.

Claim 14: “Land of Pawtuxet Tribe – cleared land, all died of plague”

Fact: The cartoon colonists wonder who cleared all the land at this, their second stop in Plimouth, and Squanto explains. What Squanto doesn’t tell them here is that soon after he and his fellow Natives were stolen, most of the Pawtuxet Tribe died from disease given to them by explorers.

Another interesting fact is that Squanto was a prisoner of the Wampanoag Tribe when Samoset offered his translation services to the Pilgrims.

Claim 16: “Signed a treaty of friendship and mutual assistance, lasted for half a century”

Fact: This is true, although the motives behind it were more defensive than straight out peace. As Ramona Peters, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, told Indian Country Media Network, the tribes had come into contact with voyagers before, and many had died from their diseases or the new weapons called guns and cannons they brought on their ships. By signing a treaty, the Wampanoag Tribe hoped to keep at least the weapons at bay. 

The treaty stated that the Wampanoag Tribe and the Mayflower colony would come to one another’s defense if needed. If either side went against the treaty’s terms, the offending party would be sent to the side they had offended for punishment. 

Claim 17: “Fall 1621 large harvest and feast of Thanksgiving”

Fact: It is almost certain that a large feast occurred around the time our Thanksgiving stories say it did. That is because there was traditionally feasting around harvest time. For a longer explanation of the actual history behind Thanksgiving, please read “Talk to Kids About: Thanksgiving” here. 

Conclusion

This television special isn’t a bad way to open up a conversation about the Mayflower Voyage but put it into context. Depending on your child’s age, you won’t go into this much detail. However, introducing children to the idea that history is written, that those who write it have a point of view, and that they should always consider their sources — can start at almost any age.

READ MORE: Thanksgiving Specials: Classics in Context

Image Credits: Crash Course, All That’s Interesting

FAIR USE: Fair use permits a party to use a copyrighted work without the copyright owner’s permission for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. These purposes only illustrate what might be considered as fair use and are not examples of what will always be considered as fair use. In fact, there are no bright-line rules in determining fair use, since it is determined on a case-by-case basis. But copyright law does establish four factors that must be considered in deciding whether a use constitutes a fair use. These factors are:

  • The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes;
  • The nature of the copyrighted work;
  • The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
  • The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

–Copyright Alliance

Further Research & Sources

1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving

In the fall of 1621, English colonists and Wampanoag people feasted together for three days. Join us for a new look at the real history behind the event that inspired the myth of The First Thanksgiving.

Written by Catherine O’Neill Grace and Margaret M. Bruchac with Plimouth Plantation.

Photographs by Sisse Brimberg and Cotton Coulson.

National Geographic Society, Washington D.C.

Stay one step ahead

Need help talking to your kids about media? Get my monthly guide for all the tools to show them how to make smarter media choices - beyond parental controls.

3 comments

Leave a Reply