W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Fourteen percent.

Mr. AKIN. Death is a taxable event, is the way they want it to be.

Mr. AKIN. So we'll get them coming and get them going. If they're dead, they don't complain as much.

Mr. AKIN. Okay. So let's just run this logic. How logical is this if you want a decent economy? A guy is a farmer. Let's say he's got 200 acres of ground, maybe it's 2,000 acres of ground, and some tractors, and he dies. Now his son wanted to run the farm. So now when he dies, what does the son have to do?

Mr. AKIN. You mean the death tax.

Mr. AKIN. So he has got to pay 45 percent of the value of the farm. If he's got 2,000 acres and a couple of tractors or whatever it is, he will have to sell almost half of that. Then it will get to the point where the farm is no longer selling half of what it makes it so that it doesn't really work. So what happens then?

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, it's interesting you mention that. I have a nephew that worked on a dairy farm in upper New York State. What you mentioned, 80 cow. The number I recall then was about 90 cows, 90 to 100 cows. It's kind of the standard lot size. It's about how much one man can kind of operate with his family. So if you all of a sudden have to sell half of that, even if you could--say you could sell half the cows, half the farm, half the equipment, the problem is that half of it doesn't work. It no longer works. So if with every generation, you've got to cut the business in half, and give half to the Federal Government, how in the world are we going to have jobs and a strong economy? It's just nuts. So, first off, we've got the death tax. We've got dividends capital gains. All of those are expiring and going back, which is going to have the exact opposite effect on the economy as what it had a couple years ago when we put it in place and it helped the economy get going. Then on top of that, we've just spent $787 billion on that silly stimulus bill, $700 billion for the Wall Street bailout. And now we're talking about the biggest tax increase in the history of the country for global warming, an energy tax, along with tons of redtape that goes along with it, telling everybody in the country they've got to have an electrical outlet in their garage for their golf cart or whatever it is. I mean, this is an awful lot of redtape, regulations, and taxes, all with the effect it's going to just kill those jobs. So there's a reason why that red line is going up, isn't there?

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, this evening our topic is going to be something that is of interest, I believe, to all Americans, the topic of jobs. In the past we've talked something about health care. In fact, we've talked about that for a number of months. But it seemed appropriate to me this evening to open our discussion on the subject of jobs. Everybody in America is concerned about the subject. It is one of those things that affects everyone. And something that is not as clear, and the solution to the jobs question is not as simple as it might appear on the surface. And certainly, we have some examples of politicians doing exactly the wrong thing. So I think it's important that we start and just analyze what it is that makes jobs and what are the enemies of job creation. I have listed about six of them here that are the most common things that are destructive to jobs. The first would be a bad economy. That seems fairly self-evident. If the economy is not doing well, the thing that people tend to do is to say, well, things aren't going so well; I need to cut my overhead, and, therefore, we will cut some jobs. And so that is one thing that affects jobs is a slow or poor economy. Another thing that's extremely disastrous and very much basically stops the creation of jobs and maybe even gets rid of existing jobs is taxation. That also is fairly self-evident. Let's just think for a minute. You're an owner of a small business and you have 100 people working for you. All of a sudden, you find out, you read in the paper, here we go, the politicians, one more time are going to be taxing and spending. They're going to increase your taxes and increase the taxes to your business. Well, that has the same net effect as a bad economy because if all of a sudden you're expecting a big tax increase that your company is going to have to pay or you're going to have to pay because you own the company, you're thinking, oh my goodness, I don't have as much money to work with as I thought I did. I'm going to have to figure out ways to tighten the belt. And when you tighten the belt, many times that means you get rid of either existing jobs by laying people off, or perhaps you were thinking of creating new jobs and you decide, I think I'll wait on that expansion and buying that new piece of equipment and adding the addition to the building and in adding those new jobs. And so tax increases are also enemies of jobs. A third problem that can also affect jobs, and that is what sometimes people call liquidity; that is, the available supply of money. If you're a small businessman, one of the things that you need in order to keep your business going is some source of loans or money to work with. Most small businesses have loans from local banks, and they get those loans at a reasonable interest rate because many small businesses are very good and prompt payers. The bank trusts them. The bank knows that the small business is solvent, that they run a good operation, that they're doing good work in the community, so the bank is taking that risk and is loaning that money at a fairly reasonable rate of interest, so the small businessman has this money or this liquidity in order to start paying for things that he needs in his business. Just to give an example, perhaps, of a farmer. A farmer has a nice piece of land and he decides he wants to raise some crops. But in order to do that, he needs a tractor. He doesn't have enough money to buy that tractor right off the bat with cash, and so he gets a loan from the bank to buy the tractor, and then he uses the tractor to grow crops and to produce a product which we call food. In the meantime, as he makes profit on selling his food, he makes payments to the bank to pay for his tractor. It's a simple example, but what is required for jobs and for small businesses to operate is liquidity. There has to be a supply of money that's available at a reasonable interest rate in order to facilitate the growth of businesses, particularly small businesses, and jobs. If there is not good liquidity, not a good source of money, then you're going to have a problem with jobs. A fourth enemy of job creation is uncertainty. Again, put yourself in the shoes of that small businessman. You look out on the horizon and you see all kinds of things that you don't know what's going on, and you're worried about what's going on. You know as you look out at the horizon that there's talk that these taxes that used to be low are going to go up. There's talk about taxes on energy, talk about taxes, heavy taxes, on a new health care bill. There's the possibility of energy shortages; there's the possibility of anything that might be disruptive to your business. Well, that uncertainty is going to have the effect of saying, hey, before I stick my neck out and do something new, I think I'm going to just instead sit back a little bit and wait, because I don't want to be too far leveraged. I don't want to make too much of a commitment because I don't know what's going to happen. Everybody is buying ammunition and hoarding gold, and everybody's nervous and concerned. There's talk about this, that and the other. So when you get uncertain, uncertainty makes it hard for business people to want to add jobs, and it may reduce jobs. Businesses work well when they have a plan. They know that they're going to have so many orders for so many years, they know that they're going to build, they can plan out, buy their materials, get the equipment they need and get the manpower. And so, when you want to mess up job creation and business, all you do is introduce a lot of fear and uncertainty and you're guaranteed to be hurting jobs. A fifth thing that is going to be harmful to job creation is a whole lot of regulations and red tape. If you're thinking about taking on some new project or something, and you see just mountains of red tape, regulations, and all kinds of legal fees and problems in front of you that the government has created, then you're going to be a little bit more reluctant to jump into that project. I'll give you an example. For instance, let's say you're a power company and you have a number of coal-fired power plants. You take a look at what's going on, and you take a look at the technology that's available and you say, you know, I think that it would really make a lot of sense to build a nuclear plant because coal prices are going up. We know that nuclear is safe. We know it doesn't generate any CO2, so that should make people that are very worried about global warming happy, and we think that it makes sense to put a nuclear power plant. But then you start to think and say, Wait a minute. What are the regulations? What are the red tape? And how does this work? And you start looking at the red tape and you find out, oh my goodness, we apply for a license, and after we get done building the plant, which is going to cost millions and millions of dollars, then the government will tell us whether or not we can operate it. Wait a minute. That doesn't make sense. Doesn't the government give you a permit to operate the plant first, then you put the millions in and run the plant because you got the permit? No, you've got to get a permit to begin with, but you don't ever get any for sure that you can run that plant until after you've built it. Well, that would be an example of red tape and regulations making it so, hey, I'm not going to make that decision, I'm not going to do the job of building some big plant and a more efficient way to generate electricity because of the fact that we've got all this red tape and regulations in the way. And then I would suggest that there is a sixth thing that's a job killer, and that is the excessive spending on the part of the Federal Government. When the Federal Government spends a whole lot of money, it has the net effect of eventually costing businesses and the taxpayers all the money that they spent and all. And so that the idea of doing what's sometimes called stimulus or spending actually is an enemy to jobs. We're going to get into that a little bit further along this evening. But I thought it would be important to start by defining our terms. Jobs are important for all of us. That's what you need to pay your mortgage. That's what you need to pay the food bill for your wife and kids. Jobs are an important thing in America, and Americans are a lot happier when they've got something to work on anyway, a good project or some work to do and they have a sense of paying off the mortgage and working their way toward the dream of a more prosperous future. And so these are the enemies of jobs. I'm going to review them one more time. First of all, a slow economy. Second of all, taxes. The third thing is not enough liquidity. That is money. Fourth, uncertainty or fear. Fifth, red tape and government regulations. And sixth, the idea of excessive Federal spending, because that comes back in the form of taxes and reducing liquidity. I am joined this evening by a very good friend of mine, Congressman Scalise, who has a very good sense of business and a good sense of humor and is always a great contributor to our little Wednesday evening discussions. My good friend from Louisiana, please join us.

Mr. AKIN. If I could reclaim my time, I think that the points that you're making are very, very good. I just want to recap what you're saying. I had, just as we got started, talked about things that kill jobs. And one of the things that kills jobs is excessive government spending. The first thing that you came to, ironically, was this supposedly stimulus bill which the President and the Democrat leadership thought was going to improve the economy, or at least they said that. That was what they claimed. In fact, the claim was, as you and I recall, that if we did not pass this $787 billion unfunded supposedly stimulus bill, we might get unemployment as high as 8 percent. We've seen unemployment go well beyond 8 percent. They passed that stimulus bill, and now unemployment is 10.2 percent. So that suggests just what we're talking about, that excessive government spending is, instead of making the situation better, will make it worse. But we were promised, as you were saying, by the administration, by the Democrat President, that this was going to create some jobs; and so they created a whole Web site, didn't they?

Mr. AKIN. Put everything on the line.

Mr. AKIN. If I could just ask you to yield back, everything you said is exactly spot on, and it is the solution to trying to deal with unemployment. But I think what I'd like to, if it's possible, just for a minute, get a little philosophical here and talk about the fact that when you take a look at the political parties, in general these are two different ideas about what you do when you've got problems with unemployment. One of them was proposed by a little British economist by the name of Lord Keynes. He was accompanied in his mischief with a fellow by the name of Morgenthau, who was FDR's Secretary of the Treasury. That idea was called ``stimulating the economy.'' The idea was that if the government will just spend enough money, it's going to create demand, and therefore the whole economy will run. It appeals to me as an engineer about just as much as the idea of reaching down, grabbing your bootstraps, and try to lift yourself so you can fly around the room. But the idea is that when you've got a bad economy, the government should spend money like mad and it'll ``stimulate the economy.'' And so that was one theory. Another theory that was developed--and that usually is the Democrat theory, although not entirely--the other theory is: get your foot off the spending and the taxing, leave enough money in the company and, particularly with small business owners, to allow them to invest. When they invest, they create jobs and you allow the free market and you allow Americans, in the ingenuity of Americans and freedom, to motivate and to build a country bigger and stronger than it was before. And by doing that the economy gets stronger because individual citizens, not the government, are the ones that create the jobs. And so that was another formula that was tried by, among others, by JFK. Also by Ronald Reagan and G.W. Bush. All got off the taxes, left more money in the pocket of the small businessman, and voila, the economy takes off like a rocket in all three instances. The other example, I want to run back to it. You've got this guy Morgenthau and here it is 1939. Now we have turned a recession into the Great Depression. And Morgenthau comes before the Ways and Means Committee. This is something that happened long enough that people around here should know something about it. This was the buddy of little Lord Keynes. And this is what he says: we have tried spending money. We're spending more than we have ever spent before--and it does not work. And he goes on to say, After 8 years of the administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot. This is FDR's guy that was one of the original stimulus people. So when I hear people say stimulus--this is the result of stimulus: it's unemployment. It turns a recession into a Great Depression. So what did we try in April or May of this last spring? We tried the same dumb idea. And guess what? We're getting the same lousy results. No big surprise. So there are two ways to approach unemployment when you've got a problem in the economy. And the idea of spending a whole lot of money that you don't have, like $787 billion, it never worked for him. And all of these nice predictions that we saw show that it just hasn't worked the way the administration said that's where we're going to be. Here's where we are. You see the trend of that line? That's not exactly a hopeful trend. I'd yield to my friend.

Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time, the fact is that history does not have to repeat itself. It repeats itself if people make the same dumb mistakes over and over again. That's when it repeats itself. What we're doing here is we're doing the same things over and over again that have not worked in the past. But it doesn't have to be that way. I really thank my friend, Congressman Scalise, for his perspective and for joining us. I'm also joined here on the floor by my good friend, Mr. Thompson of Pennsylvania. I'd like to yield time to the gentleman.

Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time, gentleman, you were here on the floor with me when we were talking about this very thing. It wasn't so many months ago. It isn't that we are great wizards of economics. It's just that we've learned something from history. The fact is is that the method and the approach of ``stimulating the economy'' or, effectively, tremendous levels of government spending and money that they don't have, does not help an economy that's ailing, and it's not going to help unemployment. We were here at this 8 percent unemployment, and we were told that, Hey, if you don't get this stimulus bill through, why, it's going to go above 8 percent. We passed the stimulus bill, and here we are at 10.2 percent. But that's not a coincidence. Now of course the Obama administration would love to try to blame that on President Bush and everything. But what he has unfortunately not done is learned from--even if he didn't want to learn from a Republican, he could learn from a Democrat. He could go back to JFK. JFK was faced with this problem. He had a problem with unemployment. And what did he do? He did something that was not intuitive to Democrats. He actually lowered taxes. He did a tax reduction just the same way Ronald Reagan did. And the effect of that tax reduction was to allow the small businessman to have more money to invest in their business. And guess what happens? When small businessmen have the liquidity and they have more money to invest in their business, they add a wing on the building, they add a new machine, a new process, a new invention, a new idea. And freedom works. What happens is, you create jobs, and the economy takes off. Now here are some numbers that--to my good friend, Congressman Thompson from Pennsylvania, you weren't here at the time. But when I came in at the beginning of 2001, people don't realize--just because the Federal Government doesn't like to balance their budget--they don't like to realize how much these recessions and a bad economy hurts the Federal Government in terms of taxation, in terms of revenue. And what was going on was, you know, the liberals were crying and moaning about how much money we spent on tax reduction, and Oh, we're giving the rich guys a deal, and you're reducing taxes, and that's going to cost the Federal Government all its revenue, because they calculated that if you lower taxes, then you're going to collect less revenue. That was the logic. It seems intuitive when you just look at it superficially. But what you found was--and this was an interesting number--as we reduce taxes, the businessmen, the owners of small businesses, then created more jobs because they had money to spend. They created more jobs, and the economy turns around. What happens is, we take in more revenue than we had before. But let's just say that, even in the most pessimistic sense, what surprised me was this: If you added the cost of--supposedly the cost of the Bush tax cuts, and you added the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan together, that total dollar value was less than what we had lost by the recession and what the recession had cost the Federal Government in revenue. You see this, gentleman, in Pennsylvania--and we do in Missouri, all the other States around the Union, particularly that have balanced budget amendments--and that is, when the recession comes, boy, the States are hurting. They have to really scramble because their revenues drop dramatically when we enter a recession. But that's also true of the Federal Government. Our revenues drop tremendously. So this formula of excessive government spending is the exact wrong thing to do. And what it does is, it turns a recession into a depression. That's why these charts are going the way they are. This should be a warning sign that what we should not be doing is a whole lot more taxing on small business, yet it seems that every time you turn around, here comes another tax. We've got to hit somebody, so why not tax? Let's take a look at just one other thing, and this will be something I would like to get your impression on because Pennsylvania is a good industrial State. You've got a lot of jobs, a lot of good hardworking people there. It's kind of a theoretical question. But does the government really create jobs? You know, on the surface, it seems like if the government takes the money and hires somebody to build a building or something, it seems like they have created a job, because somebody's got to build the building, and they took some money, and they paid somebody, and the somebody did something. So can the government really create jobs? What we find is that you've got to be careful. I just wanted you to talk about that a little bit, if you would like to, gentleman.

Mr. AKIN. This is a million-dollar Web site created by the White House, the Obama administration. They come up with districts that don't exist in various States. And when asked--what was the quote again? This is brilliant. This is really academic. Who knows, man, who really knows. Hey, far out, dude. I mean, Woodstock lives. What are we talking about here? They're talking about districts that don't exist, claiming that jobs have been created; and yet here we are on the floor, we're not necessarily wizards, but we know enough about small business that excessive Federal spending is an enemy to it. And so what is it that the Obama administration promised? I happen to have the promise. Instead of all these jobs and, Who knows man, who really knows, here's who really knows. This is what the forecast was going to be for the unemployment if we passed the stimulus bill, which we did. This was the Obama forecast without the stimulus bill. And what really happened? Well, the red line is what's going on. This is unemployment after we spent $787 billion that we don't have, which really wasn't a stimulus bill. As you recall, the chief of staff for the President said, We want to use every crisis as a good opportunity to move our agenda. So their agenda in the supposedly stimulus bill was to basically get rid of all the Republican welfare reforms and add all kinds of money in all kinds of various bailouts and things, but there really wasn't even an FDR- type stimulus in this bill. And we stood here on this floor--I think you were with me, what was it, 6 months ago--we said, This isn't going to create any jobs. Now here we are at 10.2 percent unemployment, and that number is conservative because if you've lost your job for more than a year, you're not even on the report any more, even though you may be doing a little part-time work or don't have a job at all. It doesn't count you. And even not counting those people, 10.2 percent unemployment. And so what's happened here is just exactly what we talked about. I'd yield.

Mr. AKIN. I just want to stop you because what you're saying, people are going to think that this is either a comedy or a fiction. You're saying that we put millions of Federal dollars into creating a Web site to let people know where the jobs were being created by this supposedly stimulus bill, and whoever it was that was hired said that the jobs are going into an Eighth and a Ninth and a Tenth Congressional District in Louisiana, and you, being from Louisiana, know there's only seven districts. So you're saying the Federal Government hasn't figured out how many congressional districts there are in Louisiana. That's amazing.

Mr. AKIN. Right.

Mr. AKIN. I heard Oklahoma had 99 districts.

Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time, what you're talking about is the old proverb of killing the goose that lays a golden egg. Here is the thing that's a little bit tricky, because if you think about it, the government goes to hire somebody to build a highway. You say, Well, that's a good job. Somebody is building a highway. Well, it's true that for some period of time--and you put the emphasis on temporary--that job is there as long as we are taxing somebody to get the money in order to hire that guy. The way that economics works is that for every job, by taking taxpayers' money and creating a job with the government, what we do is we kill 2.2 jobs in the private sector. So effectively, what you're doing is a very inefficient means of bleeding part of the sector that creates the real jobs and creating temporarily a government job. My son is in Afghanistan. We have places where the Federal Government hires people. They're legitimate jobs that need to be done, but all of those things are balanced on the back of the private sector. If you get too greedy and you start to squeeze the private sector enough, not only do you make it sick, you can kill it. And that's what was done during the Great Depression. They started taxing those small businesses so much and put so many regulations on them that they killed them, and they went out of business. And that's what's starting to happen, and that's what frightens me terribly about the approach that we've got here. As I started this evening, I talked about what are the things that destroy jobs, and you just intuitively--you are talking about the people of Pennsylvania and about the businesspeople, you know, those courageous, quiet souls that go out and take the risks, not knowing whether they're going to end up sleeping under a park bench if their business goes out. They've put their whole life into it. They've invested in a new piece of equipment. And in the process, they create wealth and create jobs and stuff, those people. Well, what do we do if you really want to hurt them? Well, what we do is everything we've been doing for the last year. First of all, it's this out-of-control Federal spending on all kinds of wasteful things. For instance, that stimulus bill had billions of dollars for community organizers like ACORN. We had money in that bill to produce that Web site that created congressional districts that don't even exist, claiming the jobs were created. That's a waste of money. The next thing, as you properly pointed out, is that you start taxing people, not only for the stimulus bill, but you tax them on energy. So now this guy that's got a business, perhaps he uses a fair amount of energy, thinks, uh-oh, I'm going to have taxes on energy now. Then the issue that you properly pointed out is that you start creating this sense of fear and uncertainty. So now you've got red tape and more taxes and more taxes. The guy thinks, How in the world am I going to make a living with that? That's what's being done not just in Missouri and Pennsylvania, but it's being done to our economy because we're doing the wrong things. And it's not so complicated because other Presidents have shown the right way to go. Let's just take a look at what we're doing, just hammering them fiscally. You started to list them off. First of all, there's the death tax, and there's dividends and capital gains. Those are taxes that were cut by Bush back in 2001 and '03 in order to get those small businessmen up and going. So those have been cut temporarily, and now that's going to expire, and what have the Democrats told us? I yield.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. That may be almost a triple-dog dare. I've also heard it, now that I'm starting to get older and have to push my hands away from the cookie platter, you know, that I'm going to start my diet to lose a little bit of weight, but it's going to start tomorrow, you know. Maybe just the day after tomorrow, but that is when I am going to start up. I really am going to do it, it's just not going to happen right now

Mr. AKIN. Well, it's just a treat I have a chance to join on the floor a couple of my very good friends. We've got a guy who's a medical doctor and a Congressman. We have a friend of mine whose a lawyer, an attorney, of course, and also a judge, and here I am the engineer. I guess it's almost setting up the beginning of a joke or something. You're talking about the cost of this bill that was unfunded today. We're talking about, and the numbers have been different. I've heard different people quote things. The lowest number was $210 billion. The higher number was $279 billion, as I recall, somewhere in that neighborhood of a quarter of $1 trillion. Now, just the amount of money that I have to pay bills, that amount of money is a little beyond my imagination, so I'd like to try and think of how much really are we talking about here. And I think maybe it helps to put it into perspective. Democrats and some Republicans were critical of George Bush for spending too much money. His worst year, in terms of creating a deficit, or creating a debt within a year, was 2008. That's when the Democrats ran the House here, and that was his biggest spending year, and he ran up a deficit of 250 something, no, excuse me, 450-some billion dollars, which was too much money, and various people thought we shouldn't have spent so much money--450. Now, if you take a look at 2008, then you move to 2009 and you have President Obama spending, with a Democrat Congress, and that's $1.4 trillion. So we're talking about three times more money was spent beyond our budget in 2009 than in 2008. So putting those numbers, you've got 450 for Bush, 2008; $1.4 trillion, 2009. And now, on top of that, you're talking about here 250, perhaps, billion dollars in addition, which is not small change when you're already way beyond with the budget. And I recall my good friend from Texas, he has a down-home way of putting things that Missourians like me can understand. He says, this time I really, really, really am going to do it. It reminds me of trying to get through high school. You guys were really smart in school. But, you know, I always had trouble trying to study. And there would always be a test coming up. I'd say, God help me in this test because next time I really, really, really will study for this test.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Good evening. I have a chance to get out here on the floor at various times, and some of our subjects that we cover are pretty serious in the sense that we are talking about overspending and some of the various government policies. However, at this time I would really like to turn to a somewhat different topic, as we have already adjourned and are thinking about heading on our way home to celebrate Thanksgiving. As many, many people know, when you think of Thanksgiving in America, a uniquely American national holiday, your mind goes immediately to the story of the Pilgrims. In fact, they were maybe not the first to declare a day of Thanksgiving. Supposedly, according to history, in 1619 there was a celebration of some Thanksgiving in Virginia. But the main one that we think of is the story of the Pilgrims, and the Pilgrims' story is probably the greatest adventure story that history has ever dealt to mankind. It's bigger than life. It's bigger than the biggest screen kind of thing you could imagine on television. It's big because the fact that the Pilgrims had such a bold vision for where they were going and what they were trying to accomplish. It's big because of the tremendous amount of daring and their enterprise and the tremendously high price that they paid; the suffering, and the perseverance in terms of character. It is a huge story because of the incredible intricacies of the providence of God that wove all of these amazing different kind of situations together in such a fascinating pattern. It is the story of American Thanksgiving, but it is a story of much more besides, because the Pilgrims gave us much more than just Thanksgiving--they gave us our entire American system of government and some views on economics and a couple of other very, very important starting points for America. The Pilgrims had a tremendous influence on the way that America as a nation was going to start partly because of their early arrival date, but also partly because of the vision and the source of where they got their knowledge from. Today, we are going to look at this incredible, bigger-than-life adventure story about the Pilgrims. I believe it is probably being recorded and may be available in segments on our Web site at some time in the future. First of all to understand the Pilgrims, we have to know who they were. The Pilgrims were comprised of several different groups. The most noteworthy were a group of people that were frequently called either Brownists or Separatists. They were in England in the 1610-, 1620-ish type of time frame, and they were, if you will, in a sense a sect of the Puritans. They were what we would today call evangelical Christians, except for they had this weird idea. Not weird to us today, but weird in those days. And that was, as you recall, in England after Henry the VIII, the church in England had been taken over by the King. So the King ran everything. He ran the church, he ran the state, and everybody's lives, and everything else. So that was the way he did it in jolly Old England. But there was a group of these Christians who had been reading some of the writings that were written about 1580 or so in Scotland talking about a pattern that they saw in the Old Testament; and that pattern was that there appeared to be several types of governments. They noticed Moses seemed to be a little bit like the governor or the President or whatever, but Aaron ran the worship service. They saw this separation of civil government from church government. As they studied it, they found other patterns. They found the first King of Israel, Saul, and Saul had an army, and the army was very frightened. Samuel was supposed to give a sacrifice, and he was hoping the sacrifice would buck up people's courage. But Samuel wasn't around when he was hoping he'd be there so Saul took the initiative, offered the sacrifice, Samuel read him the riot act and said, ``Now you really got God mad at you.'' And again you see a mixing of civil and church governments which apparently in the Old Testament seemed to be separated. Anyway, this theologian was making notes, and this little group of people called Separatists took the idea that they were going to separate civil government from church government. Now, they never had the idea of taking God out of anything. That's more of an invention of the Supreme Court in the mid-1900s. But this little group of people here, this picture that I have--which has been touched up a bit; computers do wonderful things--is actually in the public domain, and it is on the wall of the Rotunda of the Capitol not more than a few hundred feet from where we're standing right now. It's a bit darker. This has been lightened up some. You have a picture here of these Separatists, and these Separatists are at prayer, and this is being depicted. It has got a beautiful rainbow. It says ``God with us.'' This has been touched up so you can read it a little bit better. You have got the building of Delfthshaven over here. You have the Pilgrims at prayer before they're going to be starting on this fantastic adventure. But we need to back up just a little bit to say, where did these guys come from? They were these Separatists in England. They met in Scrooby, England, and there were different leaders. One was John Robinson, who was their pastor; another one was Bradford, who was actually an orphan. He had been growing up as a child with some relatives and then attached himself to these Separatists--or as some people thought of it, in a way, as a cult. And what these people decided to do was to create their own New Testament church. So they met at a manor house in Scrooby, England, and together they covenanted to start this little church. It was not under the king, particularly King James. They didn't like King James. King James was a little bit weird. He had some very weird habits. They didn't want him running their church, and they decided they were going to be Separatists, get their own pastor and have their own worship service. Well, King James didn't like that. He said, I'm going to harry them out of my country. And so, they were harassed at every side, all kinds of different taxes, their women put in stocks, humiliated, put in jail, and property confiscated. In fact, the life of these Separatists was made so miserable, even though they tried to meet secretly and arrive at worship services at different times so people wouldn't get wise to them, eventually they were harried out of England as the king said he would do, and they moved over to Holland in the Leiden area. Now, they worked there for a number of years. It was very, very hard living. Of course, they had a different language, it was not easy to make that cultural jump, but they did have religious freedom in Holland. And after, though, about a 10-year-or-so period, what they started to notice was there were a number of things that they didn't like. First of all, their bodies were being worn out. They had to work so many hours 6 or 7 days a week that they were prematurely aging. But worst of all, their children were picking up bad habits from the Dutch children, and they had made such a big effort to try to walk closely with God that they didn't like the idea of their children being sort of absorbed into the Dutch culture. So they started casting about for what they might do, and they had a vision for trying to do something that was significant and different in their day. And so it was that they struck on the idea of moving from Holland over to America. At that time in England, there were these various loan sharks and merchant adventurers and different companies that were being set up that thought they could make a whole lot of money if they could just get some trading posts set up over in North America. So they were going to the king and getting what we would think of today as a corporate charter to start a company, which was really planting a plantation or a little colony, which would be a trading post or a base to do trade for different things that might be of value in North America. There were also some that were going down further into South America from other countries as well. So anyway, this little group of Separatists under John Robinson with Bradford, who was the young, now strapping farmer who was growing up, are here pictured on a ship that is called the Speedwell. Many people have not heard of the Speedwell, but Speedwell was rented by them to take across the ocean to North America. In fact, their charter that they were getting was for a colony in Virginia. And so here they are, and what has happened is they have gone from Leiden earlier this day in three barges and run down some canals from Leiden to Delft Haven. This picture is in Delft Haven and depicts one of their prayer meetings before they were going to leave, just as they were departing. Now, we have from history a record of some of John Robinson's, their pastor's, words at this time of departure. Robinson was very much loved by the Separatists because he was, first of all, a very kind and gentle guy. He wasn't judgmental, and he tended to bring groups of Christians together that had their different doctrinal disputes. They used to settle things with fisticuffs and worse in these days if you didn't agree with something theologically. Robinson was a much more tolerant kind of guy but a man who knew what he believed, and he believed that God meant civil and church governments to be separated. And so he preached, and you can imagine, because he had many, many people who could not go on this expedition, so he stayed behind with his congregation. But his heart was in this great, great adventure that was soon to take place. So he set, in a sense, the tone by his last words. This was the last time that Robinson would ever see his beloved Pilgrim people again. And so, in a sense, he is preaching to them here. I think we need to take a close examination of these words because it sets up the entire great story of the Pilgrims. He says, I'm fully persuaded that the Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy word. Remember, that it is an article of your church covenant that you shall be ready to receive whatever truths shall be made known to you from the written word of God. Now, what he is saying here is the concept that while lots of people can read the Bible, what he is saying is the Bible, in a sense, is a blueprint for civilization, a blueprint to do something new that the world has never seen before. So he says now you need to keep your hearts and minds open to what is in God's word. Remember every other article of your sacred covenant, but I must here withal exhort you to take heed what you receive as truth. Examine it, consider it, and compare it with other scriptures of truth before you receive it, because it is not possible that the Christian word should come so lately out of such thick anti-Christian darkness and that perfection of knowledge should break forth at once. Now, here, what you have is a vision for what Robinson was giving to the Pilgrims coming to this land. It's commonly told, people, that the Pilgrims came here for religious freedom. Of course, that's not true. In fact, much of what you hear, the stereotypes of history, in fact, are not true. They had religious freedom in Holland, so they didn't come to America for religious freedom. They had that in Holland. Instead, this shows a much greater vision, a vision that they were trying to build a civilization different from what they had seen in England and in Holland, a new entire concept using the Bible as the blueprint to do things in a different way. Now that is not exactly a small thing to want to do because we tend, as we grow up, to do things the way our parents taught us to do them. We tend to do things the way the people around us do them. We copy the habits and the way that our culture works. And so these people are saying, wait a minute, before we just assume the way we used to do it was right, we are going to keep checking it with the Bible and see is this really a biblical way to do things? And so, this was the vision of Robinson and it was depicted here by the artist as the Pilgrims here are leaving Delft Haven and on their way over to England. They are going to be shuttled to England over to Plymouth, and there they are going to rendezvous with a larger ship, the Mayflower, and the Mayflower also has some Separatists and other just jolly old blokes that came off the streets of England. Now, what is going to happen in this expedition is new to America in this regard. It is true that Jamestown, there had been numerous attempts to try to establish a colony there, but it was always groups of men mostly interested in finding their fortune and finding gold. This was a very different kind of expedition, because this, as you can see, is men, women, and children, and they are coming particularly for this great purpose of this great adventure. The first thing that happened was a little bit like a family vacation. The idea was to start across the North Atlantic in the summertime. And as you think about family vacations, sometimes they start with somebody forgetting their wallet, forgetting to lock the door of the house, forgetting to bring a suitcase, and so they had a couple of fitful starts. The fitful starts particularly were because this ship, the Speedwell, when it put to sea, started leaking. Now, leaking is not a good thing in the North Atlantic, and so they had to go back and they had the ship recaulked. The Speedwell started out again and, under heavy sail, she started leaking again. So they brought her back, finally made the decision to leave the Speedwell, to sell it, and to put as many of these different people we call Pilgrims into the Mayflower; it turns out, 102 of them. So they were all packed as tight as could be into the Mayflower. Speedwell was left behind, and that, of course, delayed their getting off, and so they got off later in the year at a more dangerous time in the North Atlantic. As they were on that trip, to begin with, as you can imagine, the first thing that happened was they started to get seasick. And if anybody has been seasick badly and been on a little, small ship being tossed about by the waves, it can be pretty miserable. There was a boatswain's mate that made fun of them. He called them ``puke stockings'' or ``puke socks,'' and he said they were kind of green colored. And he said, We are going to be feeding you to the fish pretty soon. We are going to sew you up in a sail and put a brick at your feet and push you overboard, and you are going to be dying. Well, what happened is the storms got worse and worse, and even the sailors got concerned. It turns out the one guy, the boatswain's mate that was teasing them and making fun of them, he just sort of amazingly within 1 day got very sick and died, and he was the first one that went overboard. In the meantime, the storms got more and more severe, and the Mayflower, and you can imagine 102 of these Pilgrims basically underneath the decks, not safe to go on deck, underneath the decks, seasick, lots of kids down there, men and women packed into these tight quarters and being just tossed about continuously by the storms, and they were a noteworthy group. These people did very little complaining, and it would have been an absolutely miserable time. How long were they down underneath that deck with the storms banging them around? Well, on the main part of their expedition coming across from Plymouth, England, over to the North America continent, that was a 66-day trip; in other words, 2 months of being under. Now there was one young man that made the decision that he wasn't going to stay down there. It smelled so bad, it was so crowded and so noisy and intolerable, he decided he was going to go up on deck. He went up on deck, and all of a sudden, the deck dropped out from underneath him, and he found himself in the middle of the North Atlantic in November. That water will wake you up in November. And it is estimated that he wouldn't have lasted more than a few minutes at that temperature. But at that time, the Mayflower was knocked over by such a severe blow that some of the rigging dragged in the water, and as he was drowning, he put his hand out, grasped the piece of rope--he is turning blue he is so cold--holds on to it and is hauled back on deck. He went down like a halfway drowned rat down below and did not return back again on deck until there was a safe time to come up after they had sighted land. This was a very, very difficult passage for the Pilgrims, yet they showed an incredible endurance and willingness to suffer hardship. So we have this little group of people propelled by prayer, propelled by a vision, not coming to America for religious freedom, but for a much bigger vision, the idea of a new nation founded on a different set of principles, unlike anything found in England and Europe before. Well, let's see, how well did they do? Well, first of all, one of the things that happened was, as a result of all of those storms, they were driven off course in their ship. And as they were driven off course, they landed or they first sighted land out on Cape Cod. We summer vacation out in Cape Cod. I go sailing there and know something about the nature of the way Cape Cod sticks out into the ocean. It's thought it was pushed there by great glaciers. They saw the shore of Cape Cod. They knew enough about the shoreline of North America to know it was Cape Cod. They knew where they were. They knew where Virginia was. They were too far north, and they immediately tried to head south down toward Virginia because the contract that had been signed, or the charter as it was called, was for Virginia. But the hard winds and the weather did not allow them, even though they tried several times to go south along the outside of Cape Cod. If you think of Cape Cod as a great sandy hook, they were out on the tip. They were trying to get south. But these old square-rigged ships like the Mayflower were not very good at pointing into the wind, and it was very dangerous to be caught with the wind blowing you on the lee shore, and so they had to be careful. After a number of tries, they decided instead to bring the Mayflower to anchor around the tip of Cape Cod where there's a natural kind of swirl of sand which we call Provincetown. There was a nice harbor there. So they pulled the Mayflower into the harbor, dropped anchor, and kind of caught their breath, if you will, from this trip. They weren't beaten by the waves, of course, there, and the first thing that came to their mind was some of the people realized, hey, this is like Australia. No rules, mate, down under, and so when we go to shore, there is no contract. The contract was for Virginia. There are no rules, and therefore we can do whatever we want. Well, the Separatists saw that that was very much close to anarchy, and they knew that they had to do something to establish some type of order. And so they struck on the idea of pulling a piece of paper out and writing what we call the Mayflower Compact. The Mayflower Compact was actually the first U.S. Constitution and the first constitution in the world of this type. And it was, as we will talk about in just a minute here, you will realize that this was an absolutely incredible foundational stone for the building of a new nation. But let's take a look at what the Mayflower Compact actually said. I just have some excerpts from it. It's about 2\1/2\ times longer. This is pretty short, just one page. It starts out: In ye name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, having undertaken for ye glory of God and advancement of ye Christian faith and mutually in ye presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politick for our better ordering and preservation to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws as shall be thought most meet and convenient for ye general good of ye colony under which we promise all due submission and obedience. Notice the basic ideas here in this document. The first thing is that this is a contract under God by a group of free people to create a civil government to frame just and equal laws and essentially to be their servant. Let's say that again. This is a government under God of a group of free people creating a civil government to be their servant and to frame just and equal laws to protect their rights and liberties. That basic idea of this Mayflower Compact is the same idea as in our Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and governments are constituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Sound a little familiar? 170 years later, this is the first Constitution in America, a group of free men and women, under God, creating a civil government to be their servant. Now you say, Well, that does seem like a nice thing, but what's so unique or special about that? Well, you recall these people had a vision of planning a civilization different than the way they did things in Europe. If you take a look at the way they did these in Europe, this becomes much sharper in how distinctive it is, because in Europe the basic idea was the divine right of kings. For people who were politicians, this was a good deal. The king says, God made me the king. When I say jump, you're supposed to say: How high? And that was the way it was done all through Europe, and yet these people rejected the concept of the divine right of kings and said, No, the government is to be the servant of the people, protecting their God-given rights. They turned everything upside down. Now this particular tremendous development in civil government not only is at the beginning of our Declaration and U.S. Constitution; it is also something that, to them, was fairly logical, because they had done the exact same thing when they started their little New Testament Church in Scrooby, England. A group of free people, under God, covenanted together to create a church government. They merely took their church government concept and moved it over into the area of civil government, and in this regard displaced the whole concept of divine right of kings and, in a sense, in 1620, in November, when this was signed by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, they were putting the powder keg under the throne of King George that, 170 years later, would reject the divine right of kings in the American War of Independence. So we have already, before they've hardly had a chance to get dried off from their trip, they have already established a completely new idea for the foundation of the land, but this great adventure story just has barely begun. Here we have an old lithograph, a picture that was done of the Pilgrims in the great room of the Mayflower, signing this Mayflower Compact. We do not have a copy of the original Mayflower Compact. It's been lost. It was probably lost back about 180 years later during the War of Independence. But Governor Bradford--he was not yet Governor, he was just Bradford, who was part of this great expedition--in his chronicles wrote a lot in the history of Plymouth Plantation, a lot about the story of these Pilgrims, and he has a copy so we have these words that come down to us from Bradford. Here is a picture, again, of them sitting with this Mayflower Compact. Now they had a plan, and part of that plan included a prefabricated, small-size boat that would hold maybe about 30 people--30 at the most. It was called a shallop, a shallow-drafted vessel, and it had been taken apart and left in pieces in the hold. It was to be refabricated when they got to this country. Well, the storms had beaten on the Mayflower so much that a lot of these pieces were damaged, and they had to do some work so it took them some time to assemble this shallop and get it so it was seaworthy. When they had done that, they left the Mayflower in Provincetown Harbor; and a group of them went in the shallop around the inside of Cape Cod. Again, Cape Cod is like a hook. The Mayflower is anchored out here in Provincetown. And they head around the inside of Cape Cod. Again, now we're starting to get into December, when the weather is really cold, late November and December, and the spray off the waves that are hitting the shallop is freezing to their clothes and they're really cold. For a while there, they got on around the inside of the cape. They made their first landing at Eastham, which is over about here on Cape Cod, and spent the night. They pulled some different trees and things together to make a little bit of a shelter for themselves, and all night long they heard the howling and yelling of the Indians. Those were the Nauset Indians. They had an attitude problem--and for good reason. There had been some dishonest sea captains that had shanghaied warriors and sold them into slavery. So the Nausets had a bad attitude about white men and ships. So early, just before sunrise, they attacked and sent arrows all through the different coats that were hanging up, and yelling and screaming. In the meantime, these Pilgrims had managed to get a couple of their gunpowder firing--they were basically blunderbuss kinds of weapons--and fired those, and nobody got hit. The Indians were bad shots with the arrows because, fortunately, no one was hit of the Pilgrims. Eventually, after sort of a confrontation, the Nausets were scared off. And the Pilgrims, at that point, being well woken up, got back in their shallop and headed back around the inside of Cape Cod. But as they were coming around, the weather turned to the worse. It started to snow heavily, and they were trying to find the entrance to what we would call Barnstable Harbor. That, of course, is not the way it's said up on Cape Cod. It's Barnstable Harbor. They were looking for Barnstable. They were out in the surf, with the snow going hard, very cold, water freezing all over them, trying to find the entrance to the harbor. Their pilot thought they saw it. They pulled in toward the shore, only to see that it was just waves breaking on the shallow sands of Cape Cod. That, of course, would have been big problems for the shallop. There was a seaman among them by the name of Clark, and he grabbed a couple of steering oars and swung the shallop between a couple of waves around, pointing the bow out to the ocean, and he said, If ye be men, pull for your lives. So everybody dug in with the oars. They pulled off of the shore, got out where it was deep, where the waves weren't breaking so badly, and there they were at night, with the snow coming down, wind howling, ice freezing all over them, in Cape Cod Bay. Well, as it turned out, before too long they found that they had managed to get around into the shelter in the lee of some land, which turned out to be an island. They called it Clarks Island. The next morning, they woke up. They were cold and wet and everything, and observed Sunday on Clarks Island, and then immediately started doing some exploration and they found one wonderful thing after the next. They found that they were in a natural harbor that was deep enough for the Mayflower to be able to come around from Provincetown, come around over here to Plymouth. And so it had deep water in the harbor. There was land, fantastic land that had been cleared, that didn't have a lot of trees on it, which of course is a big problem if you're trying to farm, to get all the trees off the land. This land had been cleared and there was beautiful fresh water coming down from several streams from springs on the hill, with a hill behind, which was defendable. You could put a fort on it and try to protect yourself some. So you had a place for the Mayflower to anchor, a fort on the hill, beautiful fresh water, cleared land, and no sign of anybody there except for a bunch of human bones and skeletons that remained and some tattered pieces of fabric and all and some poles, various things like that. A very curious kind of situation, but they didn't see anyone, and there were no Indians to give them a hard time. And so they came as it was, in December, to Plymouth Harbor. Now when they got to Plymouth, they started in about Christmastime and started to build some houses and things which, of course, was slow work. And they had to wade through the water to get off and on, back and forth from the Mayflower. They started to get sick, partly because they didn't have very good food. Probably some of it was scurvy and maybe their bodies were just weakened by the tremendous difficulties of the crossing from the ocean. It was not uncommon when people first came across the ocean for a number of people to die--not so much dying on the trip, but when they got over, partly because of food, nutrition, and various types of sicknesses. So as December rolled along, they had, of their 102, we had six people die. And then in January, another eight people died. Of course, it's cold and they're trying to build the buildings. At one time, they had one of the buildings built, they had people with blankets that were going to sleep in the building, and all of a sudden somebody yells, Fire, and the whole grass roof of the building was on fire. Inside the building they had open barrels of gunpowder and the sparks are starting to come down from the ceiling that's on fire. And they grabbed the gunpowder, ran out into the night, and didn't escape with too much of their blankets or clothing; but, fortunately, no one was blown up or killed. So it was a very difficult time. By the time in January, there were eight that died. February, 17 people died, sometimes as much as three or four people in a day. And in March another 13 died. So now you're starting with about 102 Pilgrims and you've gotten, in total, about 47 had died. When you take a look at that, you must be thinking a little bit in your own mind, Look, John Robinson, our pastor, had a beautiful vision for what we're going to accomplish here, and we thought God wanted us to come to this new land, but now look, almost half of us have died. This is kind of discouraging. We didn't complain when we were cast about inside the great room of the Mayflower as we were tossed in the oceans. Yet, now half of us have died. If you take a look down the list, you find that of the daughters--and there were seven daughters--none of them died. Of the little boys, there were 13 little boys. Three of them died. Well, the reason the children didn't die so much is the mothers had been sacrificing. Of the 18 mothers, 13 of them died. And in the middle of the night, so that the Indians wouldn't think that the Pilgrims were weak, in the middle of the night sometimes they would take their dead and drag them out across the frozen ground and try to scrape out with their hands a shallow grave of rocks and leaves and things to cover up their dead and the dead bodies. And so it was a very, very grim time. When you think about the story of the Pilgrims, it's a great story in terms of adventure, in terms of vision, but also in terms of the terrible suffering that these people underwent here, not only in coming across the ocean, but having almost half of them die in these first 4 months. It just seemed like death had them in its grip until about mid- March, when they made their first sort of face-to-face, if you will, encounter with an Indian. It was, again, just like everything to the Pilgrims, it's bigger than life. You picture here it is, mid-March, and somebody yells from the wall, Indian coming. Well, you must have got that wrong. You mean Indians? No, Indian coming. You look out and here, coming right up to the blockhouse is this tall, stately dignified Indian, nothing on but his loin cloth. He walks right into the blockhouse and right up to the leader and says, Welcome. And they're thinking, How did this guy learn to speak English? They're kind of taken aback. Welcome, they said. His next words were, Do you have any beer? That was kind of surprising to them, too, as well. They said, Where did this guy find about how to speak English and whether they had beer or not? Well, it turned out they were out of beer, but they did have some brandy. So he sat down and helped himself to the brandy and to the roast duck and had a very nice large meal. They kept asking him questions about the local Indians and he didn't say a word until he'd had a nice, big square meal. Then, later on they find out who the Indian was. His name was Samoset. Samoset was a sachem, or a chief, of the Algonquins up in Maine. It seems that he had the concept of going from Maine down south in the wintertime, and he had bummed a ride from an English sea captain down the coast. He had learned to speak English and had stopped to spend the winter with Massasoit down in Massachusetts. So he would have gone from Maine to Massachusetts. And when he heard about the Pilgrims, he decided to go pay them a visit. So their first contact was actually an Indian from Maine, Samoset, a great man; and he told them that the Indian chieftain in the area was named Massasoit. He was a great chieftain and he ruled over quite a number of the Indians, but the main tribe was 50 miles to the southeast, some considerable distance away. They asked him about whose land they were on, and he said, Well, this land used to belong to the Patuxets, a very warlike tribe that had been completely destroyed in a plague. And that was several years before. So the land that they found didn't belong to anybody and the other Indians thought it was cursed so they would have nothing to do with that particular place. So they found, by God's providence, perhaps the one or only area on the eastern seaboard where they had cleared land, beautiful water, a good place for defense, and nobody claimed the land. So that's what they had found, almost by God's providence, of course. Well, before too long, it was about a week later, other Indians arrived--not just Samoset, but Massasoit came with the other warriors. Massasoit was of the Wampanoag Tribe. But there was somebody who had attached himself, aside from Samoset, to Massasoit, and that was an Indian by the name of Tisquantum. Tisquantum had an incredibly interesting story. Tisquantum was the last remaining Indian of the Patuxets. He had taken a trip with the English some years before over to England, spent 10 years, learned to speak English flawlessly, developed a taste for English food and English customs and all, and then got a ride back across the ocean to come back to the Patuxets. Later, however, he was shanghaied, sold into slavery over in the Spain area, was bought free by some monks there, traveled back to England and made a trip again back to his Patuxet Village in Plymouth. But when he arrived, he discovered that his village was gone. There was no one there. The places that he had learned to swim and play, the trees he had climbed in, the forests he had walked in were there, but his tribe was all gone, everyone dead. And heartbroken, he went and hiked for miles over to Massasoit and attached himself for a while to the Wampanoags. But later in his sorrow, he just kind of moved off and lived by himself. When he got word that there was a little band of English settlers that were hard- pressed, he figured out a new reason for living, and he decided to come and visit with the Pilgrims. Tisquantum became a great friend to the Indians, teaching them all kinds of practical things. One of the things I am certain the young ladies would like to know about was, they didn't have much food, and he taught them how to take their moccasins off and to walk in the mud of the creeks and to find eels with their toes and to trap the eels and bring them up, fry them up and eat them. The eels were apparently good eating. He also taught the English settlers about beaver pelts, which were very sought after. They became a mainstay of trade. The trade worked between corn that was traded to the Indians for beaver pelts, and beaver pelts were sent back to England and Europe and used for making hats. You just weren't cool if you didn't have a beaver pelt hat when you were back in England. So they got a very good price for the beavers, and there were a lot of beavers still in the New England area at that time. By April 21, you have perhaps one of the great tests of the indomitable will of the Pilgrim people. Captain Jones of the Mayflower has lost almost half his crew to the same sicknesses and diseases, and he had agreed to stay just to try to give them a little bit of a headstart on their new home. But he went to the remaining 52 Pilgrims, and he said, You know, things aren't going so well. I recommend that you come back to England on the Mayflower with me. So it was that they had to make a decision. Were they going to stay on with the vision that Robinson had given them to plan new things, that they had felt God was calling them to this great adventure? Or were they going to give up after half of them died, almost, and go back to England? So it was that Jones and the sailors with him departed in the long boat for the Mayflower. They heard the sound of the old anchor cable being wound in and the boatswain giving the commands, the yardarms swinging into place, the bowsprit pointing out to sea, the sails filling and being trimmed. The Mayflower, first large and then small, disappears over the horizon as a speck. Nothing but the gray sky and the wind blowing through the pine trees behind them. And there are 52 brave Pilgrims with still this dream that God's put in their heart to build something unlike anything they'd ever seen before, something based on ideas that they took from the Bible. Well, as this summer started and the spring went on, things got a little more cheery. In May, because of the deaths in some of the families, they had their first wedding between Mr. Winslow and Mrs. White. She had lost her husband. He had lost his wife, so they had a nice occasion for a wedding. In October 1621, they decided to celebrate a day of Thanksgiving. This is a beautiful picture of this day of Thanksgiving. It didn't work quite the way they planned. The plan was to invite Massasoit and a few of his chiefs to join them in the celebration of Thanksgiving. What actually happened was Massasoit came with 90 braves, and when the poor little 52 Pilgrims--those were just women and kids, some of them, too--when they saw 90 braves, they go, Oh, my goodness, how are we going to feed this Army? But fortunately, Massasoit had had some of his hunters hunt for deer and turkey, and they brought a lot of food with them. So they celebrated a day of Thanksgiving. In the process of doing Thanksgiving, the young braves and the young men of the colony took part in shooting contests with rifles and with bows and arrows. They did wrestling and foot races and leg wrestling, all kinds of activities. In the meantime, the Pilgrims were taught about some new delicacies. They took the ground corn and mixed it with the maple syrup--which perhaps even today people put a little maple syrup on their cornbread--and found that that made a pretty good meal. They also took some of their precious flour and worked it with the berries and wild fruit of the area and made pies and other kinds of things as well as the turkey and venison and all that they had. It seems that Massasoit liked a good party, and he had his 90 braves. They were having a good time. So they decided to stay for 3 extra days. So Thanksgiving was quite a celebration and treat. It wasn't too long after the first Thanksgiving that another ship arrived, and that ship dropped off quite a number of passengers. I think 30 or 40 as I recall. The problem was, they didn't have any food or supplies. So that second winter was also a very, very difficult one for them. They didn't have a lot of deaths, but people didn't have a whole lot to eat either. After that, the colony started growing. Of course Tisquantum, or Squanto, had taught them about planting corn. That was the main thing that they needed was corn. He taught them how to plant corn, how to clear land for it, and how to put a couple of fish by each ear of corn to help it grow. They had a problem, and that was because the loan sharks or the merchant adventurers or whatever you want to call them from England, the people who financed the expedition, had insisted that the charter included that they would live socialistically. That was that there would just be one cornfield, and everybody had to work in the cornfield. Everything that was grown belonged to everybody. The women were supposed to wash the clothes of everybody else. And this was something that Governor Bradford--by this time, he was Governor. I should have mentioned before that Governor Carver had been Governor, but he had not been there for more than a few months when he had some type of either a stroke or something wrong with his brain. He just passed out, never regained consciousness and died several days later. He was replaced and voted in by Governor Bradford, who was the one who has given us in his wonderful diary a lot of the stories of the Pilgrims. Governor Bradford knew that socialism was un-Biblical. He knew it was a bad idea. It wasn't going to work. Eventually they were forced to throw it out because they're going to starve to death if they kept working, trying to make socialism work. So these are words from Governor Bradford's diary. After much debate of things, the Governor, with the advice of the chiefest among them, gave way that they should set corn to every man to his own particular, and in that regard, trust to themselves. In other words, instead of having a communal cornfield, everybody had a piece of land they could grow their own corn on. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious. Governor Bradford then continues. He said, ``The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients''--these are the people, Plato and the other ancients, the ones advocating socialism--``that the taking away of property and bringing in community (or communism) into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.'' Governor Bradford had studied his Bible, as he had been instructed by their Pastor Robinson, and realized that socialism was un-Biblical. It was a form of theft, and it was not a good system for this community. It was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. It went on to say that people who, before, they had to almost whip them to get them into going to the cornfield, now went willingly and happily forward to grow the corn. The corn, again, was traded for the beaver skins and all. So you have the beginning of the colony. It wasn't until about 8 years later that Governor Bradford wrote that they had a chance to almost catch their breath and taste the sweetness of the land. It was scratching. Every day it wasn't clear what the meals were going to be. It was a very, very difficult time. But through this very difficult and trying time, this group of people came together on a vision to build a new civilization. So what was it now if we start to add all these things up? What was it that the Pilgrims gave us? Well, first it was the first of the northern colonies up in Massachusetts. Second of all, they gave us the Mayflower Compact which was America's first constitution and based on the same principles that would later become the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and other State constitutions as well. They did separate their church and civil governments. They never thought that there was any idea of separating God from any government. If you take a look at Bradford's writing--he was the Governor. He is declaring a Christian day of Thanksgiving to give thanks to God and encouraged people in trying to run a Christian civil government. But he also had Brewster, who ran the church, a different person, and the church had a different function than the civil government. So they separated church and civil governments, never thinking to take God out of any government. They also had a vision for a Christian civilization. And when you take a look at the things they gave us, first of all, the idea of the written constitution, a group of free people under God, covenanting together--that was quite a development. That was the equivalent of Einstein to the science of civil government. But they also separated church and State. We take that for granted today as well, but when you think about the Muslim countries, they don't tend to separate their civil from their church governments. This was a very important technology for America, to bring a lot of peace and harmony to America by this idea of separating civil and church governments. Then there was the rejection of socialism. Governor Bradford knew his Bible well enough to know that socialism was in violation of God's law. God's law says, ``Thou shalt not steal.'' It allows for the ownership of private property, and it never gives the government the right to take something that belongs rightfully to one person and redistribute it to someone else. Governor Bradford understood that far better than the pastors of our churches in America do today. They rejected socialism. And of course they gave us this wonderful tradition of Thanksgiving. You perhaps may be wondering. You're saying, My goodness, Congressman Akin. You are making a long story of getting around to Thanksgiving. Well, that was a wonderful Thanksgiving, tremendous food, 3 days of celebration and giving thanks to God. Thanksgiving became a very popular holiday among different colonies up and down the seaboard. But the first national day of Thanksgiving was declared in 1789 by George Washington to thank God for the fact that the new U.S. Constitution had just been ratified. So the ratification of the Constitution was the event for the first national day of Thanksgiving. And later on, under Abraham Lincoln, he declared in the middle of the Civil War--in 1863, he declared that there should be a yearly national day of Thanksgiving. There was some moving around of when the date would be, and finally was settled in November on the fourth Thursday. So we see that the Pilgrims gave us this beautiful celebration of Thanksgiving. But so, so, so much more, particularly the idea of our Constitution, the separation of civil and church governments, the rejection of socialism, and particularly the vision for civilization, so much different than where they had come from. Quite a work of accomplishment. Were the Pilgrims proud of what they did? Actually they had a very hard time. The contracts that they were part of--for the next 25 years, they were paying way, way more than what was fair. The merchant loan sharks in London charged them a tremendous amount of money. In fact, they paid 20,000 pounds after having borrowed 1,800. So it was more than a 10 times ratio. Sometimes interest rates at 30 and 40 percent. So they were really taken advantage of. As they were older and the puritan culture had come in and settled Boston, the seaboard was getting more and more ships coming across, they might have wondered did we really accomplish so much. But yet, Governor Bradford, looking back, must have seen into the future when he wrote, ``Thus out of small beginnings greater things have grown by his hand, who made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are, and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light kindled here has shone to many. Yea, in a sense to our whole nation. Let the glorious name of Jehovah have all the praise.'' And so it was that though they didn't feel very important, this little, small band of water-tossed saints of God, men, women and children, daring to come across this vast ocean, landing on the stern and rocky shoreline of Massachusetts in wintertime, carving out an existence, barely snatched from starvation by Tisquantum, always looking to God, were able to carve out a civilization which laid the foundations for a Nation yet to come. And so we have the great adventure story, a great adventure story in terms of the sacrifice and the vision that is involved, and particularly the trajectory of the great ideas that they established, were to be the foundation and the pinning for our Nation. So as we celebrate Thanksgiving, my American friends, we have a lot to be thankful for, not just for some good food and turkey, not just to remember the terrible sacrifices of those who have come before, but also to remember how it was that as they used their Bibles, they built a civilization unlike anything the world had ever seen before. God bless you all. Enjoy a fantastic Thanksgiving.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the order of the House of today, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. I appreciate your keeping it in a sort of a big picture form as to what we're talking about on cost.

Mr. AKIN. So seven--I was being too generous.

Mr. AKIN. So if you take the 10 factor, how much congressional budget--I mean, they're making assumptions trying to guess what something is going to be years into the future. But if you take that 10, if you put the unfunded mandates from the States and you put in the fact that they skewed the time schedule to try to keep it under a trillion, say, they're over 2 trillion, that's $20 trillion?