08/20/2007
Provincetown Celebrates 100th Anniversary of Pilgrim Monument
It's the most distinctive landmark in Provincetown. The 252-foot granite tower built to recognize the first landing of the Pilgrims in America had its cornerstone laid by President Theodore Roosevelt 100 years ago today.
According to the Cape Cod Times, "President Theodore Roosevelt arrived in the presidential yacht 'The Mayflower.' Eight battleships greeted the yacht in the harbor with a gun salute. Officials from the Grand Lodge of Masons arrived a little late — by train. It was their job — 100 men strong — to spread the cement onto the cornerstone with a special trowel, lower the 4,800 pound block of granite and declare it 'level, plumb, true and trusty,' according to monument records. The Monument, which is owned by the Cape Cod Pilgrim Memorial Association of Provincetown, cost about $95,000 in federal, state and local grants, and donations to build."
Senator John Kerry is expected to be on hand today when the occasion is celebrated with a parade and cannon salute.
Above photo is from a sequence of images I shot in 2004 as a sun pillar made its way across the sky early in the morning, briefly aligning itself with the monument.
Provincetown's tower turns 100 [cape cod times]
Pilgrim Monument turns 100 [boston herald]
Posted 3:35 PM EST by Andy in Massachusetts, News, Provincetown | Permalink
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and the ghosts of untold numbers of american indians are saying "we should have chopped them all up into itty bitty pieces"
Posted by: anon | Aug 20, 2007 4:16:02 PM
great photo.
Posted by: Kirk | Aug 20, 2007 4:35:34 PM
wonderful photo Andy !!
had no idea the tower was so young...
Posted by: A.J. | Aug 20, 2007 4:49:39 PM
This is right in my backyard (I live in Boston), yet I didn't know about it.
Posted by: Rhea | Aug 20, 2007 4:52:51 PM
Anon, the Pilgrims would have had a much harder time of settling there had the Native American who lived there not been wiped out by the almost-deliberate plague started by the initial settlers who came to the Americas.
It's a shame that this Euro-centric, revisionist history is still being taught.
Posted by: Tread | Aug 20, 2007 4:56:11 PM
Tread, I don't know anything about a plague in northern america.
I do know of the plague in central and south america due to the spanish but I am not sure about it being intended.
I do know about the USA government INTENTIONALY dolling out small pox infected blankets to indian tribes in winter to wipe out whole tribes. the documents detailing this exploit and the audits of how many blankets were handed out per millitary fort are all at the Library of congress.
Posted by: anon | Aug 20, 2007 7:50:50 PM
sorry, I forgot to add "way after the pilgrims"
Posted by: anon | Aug 20, 2007 7:51:51 PM
I so want the high res version of that spire pic. Any chance we can get it?
Posted by: Rucka | Aug 20, 2007 8:42:55 PM
Those of us who are descendents of Native Americans, Indians, whatever, don't think there's much to celebrate about the invasion of those disease ridden, terrorist, christian illegal aliens.
The genocide that followed the landings of Hernán Cortez, the Pilgrims.and Francisco Pizarro could have been prevented if they'd been met on the beaches and killed. Instead, they were treated them humanely and we paid a terrible price.
(Tread and anon, if you're interested get a book called 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. It's an excellent book that details what was lost, which is far more than you ever imagined.)
Posted by: Bill Perdue, RainbowRED Organization | Aug 20, 2007 9:01:05 PM
teddy was good as a populist, progressive, republican president, what with breaking up robber-barron practices and being pro-labor and such, but the truth remains that the "manifest destiny" bullshit that he (and his democratic forebears) championed caused the near extinction of native-americans.
btw, why is panama a separate country apart from colombia now? read your history kids.
Posted by: nic | Aug 20, 2007 9:03:11 PM
yeah NIC
Teddy is one that on the one hand i admire and praise for busting monopolies (oh how we need him today)and creating our national parks and forests (a republican did that = shocking how far they have fallen)
BUT like you mentioned he perpetuated the same "manifest destiny" crap that saw brown people exploited and or massacered.
Posted by: anon | Aug 20, 2007 9:43:49 PM
ANON, teddy was one of the last true repblicans. who woulda thunk that the dems would end up holding the high ground? after the dixie-crats became repugs, the dems under jfk, johnson, bobbie k., teddy k., mlk, cesar chavez, carter, and clinton have expressed, to a greater or lesser degree, the promise of a just society.
Posted by: nic | Aug 20, 2007 10:40:33 PM
Re: Bill Purdue's post:
Human history is replete with the atrocious acts that our ancestors have inflicted upon one another. There is not a human society that hasn't done brutal things to other societies.
The contact between Europe and the Americas was a complicated series of events that played out over centuries. Diseases went both ways without any deliberate intention on either side. Smallpox was deadlier to early Americans than diseases like syphilis were to Europeans.
And then there's this hopelessly romantic idea that North America belonged to the people who lived there before, say, 1500 a.d.
This is silly. In Europe, population migrations had displaced whole peoples for centuries before that time. In the Americas, the same thing happened.
There are countless examples of Europeans slaughtering Indians, and Indians slaughtering Europeans. The Europeans won because they had better weapons and because there were more of them. Had the reverse been true, Europe would have been conquered by the Indians.
People are people. Nursing 400 year-old grievances about "we" and "you" is childish.
Almost everyone in the United States is a native American.
Posted by: Alan | Aug 21, 2007 12:35:46 AM
NIC, you're wrong.
The last 'true' Republican was Lincoln, the first and last thrid party candidate elected President who, however haltingly, oversaw the second American Revolution and the destruction of the slavocracy.
ALL presidents since him in both parties have been creatures of the ruling rich, either rich themselves like Roosevelt, Kennedy, and the Bush boys, or hustlers on the take like Nixon, LBJ and the Clintons, who (for unknown reasons) amassed fortunes while in office.
None of them have done more that lie about wanting a 'just society'. Rooselvelt tried to defeat unions and forced the Japanese into war to end the Depression. Kennedy tried to invade cuba. The Bush boys support zionism and engage in wars of oil piracy. Nixon and LBJ (remember them, both ran as peace' candidates) conducted genocide in Vietnam and were responsible for the deaths of 58,000 GI's. Reagan was a senile thug who busted unions and Bill Clinton is the 'Big Daddy' (and Hillary the midwife) of DADT and DOMA.
If any of those people or their policies are attractive to you then you've retreated into a political closet. Please, come out before it's too late.
Posted by: Bill Perdue, RainbowRED Organization | Aug 21, 2007 12:51:15 AM
really, alan? "Almost everyone in the United States is a native American." what the fuck do you mean by that? Pobrecito, gringo idiota! no matter how you try to rationalize the conquest of the americas, especially by northern euoropeans, the damage is done and still felt by actual REAL native-americans. fuck you, bitch.
Posted by: nic | Aug 21, 2007 12:59:21 AM
to bill perdue,
give it a rest, dude. you have a tenuous grasp of history. if you did know history, you would not continue to post the big lies about DADT and DOMA. bill clinton did not, as you have suggested, force anything through congress. if you were really honest about this, you would acknowledge that clinton was not backed by members of his own party. do you remember sen. sam nunn of georgia? probablly not. do you remember that DOMA was written by repulican bob barr of fla.? clearly not, since you insist on laying all the blame on the clintons' doorstep. you and your pie-in-the-sky-workers-unite tripe is all well and good, but i am focused on who gets to nominate the next supreme court justice. i'm pragmatic. so fuck me, i'm funny that way.
Posted by: nic | Aug 21, 2007 1:23:30 AM
Alan, your smug analysis of the European invasion of America is arrogant and racist. Your assumption that the death of millions is just so much trifling historical trivia is contemptible.
The genocidal carnage that cleared this continent - from the first contact by Columbus, whose men fed Carib slaves to war dogs to the murder of millions of Mexicans and Incans, down to the murder of the remnants of north Americans after disease devastated them, continues today in life on the 'res' and the wanton misuse of native labor and lives in ‘latin’ America. It’s a story of extraordinary horror, and it’s not over yet.
You’re right when you say the historical record is full of slaughter and mayhem. No doubt Caesars campaigns against the Belgae and the Gauls were awful, but France, Belgium and Germany survived and prospered. And however dreadful the prot-brit occupation of Ireland, and the artificial famine imposed by the English, the Irish, to their credit, survived.
You cannot same the same for Americans. In Mexico and much of the south natives have been wiped out and in other areas the descendents of the survivors still live in desperate poverty at the hands of descendents of the colonialists, now with military and policing assistance from their US big brothers.
No sniveling excuse that “Oh my heavens’, it was all ages ago, can’t you ingrates just forget and get on with it” can explain away the truth of history.
And, here’s a bit of bad news for people like you, there is no forgiveness. We’ll always be here, on and off the ‘res’ to remind you and ourselves about what happened. There is a reason why we need to remember this history and it’s the same reason we insist on remembering the Holocaust, it’s that knowledge which arms us to prevent it happening again.
Posted by: Bill Perdue, RainbowRED Organization | Aug 21, 2007 1:53:41 AM
bill perdue,
you and i are closer than i would have thought. scale down your rhetoric and we could be bffl'ssssssssssssssssess'es.
Posted by: niic | Aug 21, 2007 2:09:42 AM
Bill Purdue-
I don't for a moment dismiss the deaths of millions of american indians from European diseases as a trifle.
It was horrific - but it was not something the conquistadors planned on unleashed on the Americas. It just happened. It was , in a sense, an act of God.
Unlike the Holoccaust and Lord Jeffrey Amherst's use of smallpox infetcted blankets in the 18th Centery (before the US existed), an utterly unintentional consequence of the Encounter that happened - by chance - to greatly benefit the Europeans while killing the Indians.
I hardly seek to apologize for countless atrocities the US inflicted over the centuries to the people who were "in the way," but there's an underlying assumption here that a vastly expanding European population didn't have the same right to the whole of North America than the aboriginals did.
It would have been great had they all gotten along, but such thought didn't exist back then
Posted by: Alan | Aug 21, 2007 2:46:51 AM
alan,
re-read your comment, then say to yourself "what a stupid fuck i am."
Posted by: nic | Aug 21, 2007 3:13:50 AM
1) It wasn't the disease it was the murder that that made it genocide. Cutting, burning, knifing, hanging, working to death - etc.
2) The murders were not an act of god (there is no god) they were the acts of colonialists and invaders. As usual the prot and roman cults, acting as always in the interest of the ruling rich, largely excused the murder and enslavement of millions. The population of the occupied territories after the various conquests and after disease took its awful toll dropped by millions because of murder and working people to death.
3) Of course the Europeans had no right to the Americas, any more than jews have a right to Palestine, Germans’ to Poland and Czechoslovakia, or the US has rights in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, etc., etc., etc.
Your European logic begins to sound a little like a famous Mitteleuropean statesman with the initials AH whose peace plan consisted of taking a piece of Poland, a piece of France, a slice of Slovakia and gobbling up Belgium, Denmark, Norway etc.
4) You just wish we could all get along. It's hard to get along with people whose credo is "The only good Indian is a Dead Indian" and who follow that up with deeds. You forget all this real history and wring you hands and say "God made us do it." What is the difference between your view of history and AH's who said historical and racial necessity made us do it.
And ditto what NIC said.
Posted by: Bill Perdue, RainbowRED Organization | Aug 21, 2007 3:50:18 AM
Talk about your revisionist history. According to the two simpleton posters here the Native American’s where just a bunch of peace loving tribes that all got along and that none of them would have suffered if it where not for the evil whites. Yes, we need to totally disregard facts like the Seneca tribe being the bitter enemies of the Illini tribe or the wars involving the Iroquois, Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga against the Algonquin. But in fact if one would look at the real history of America BEFORE the whites arrived one could find many such instances of Native American tribes killing all the members of weaker tribes. Isn't funny how the color of one’s skin does not equate to one's moral superiority.
I guess it just show you that Human’s have a history of killing each other no matter where they lived.
Posted by: RealityCheck | Aug 21, 2007 9:41:26 AM
RealityCheck, we'd have a more thorough knowledge of the history of the people on this continent before Europeans arrived had we not slaughtered most of them.
The genocide and persecution of the Native Americans is 3 times worse than what the Jews faced, but no one wants to admit that because the people who did it are *our* descendants.
Your post wreaks of "they did it, so why couldn't we".
Alan, you need to read more about our early history than what you apparently have only learned from our romanticized, dumb-downed high school history courses. I suggest Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" and James Leowen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me" and "Lies Across America". We have some ugly things in our past and we should be able to confront them without rose-colored glasses.
Posted by: Tread | Aug 21, 2007 9:59:54 AM
TREAD, don't put words into my mouth.
I never said "they did it, so why couldn't we". My post clear states "Human’s have a history of killing each other no matter where they lived" and as I also stated “the color of one’s skin does not equate to one's moral superiority”
Killing is killing regardless of who is doing the killing and my take is that no one group is innocent.
According to you the Jews shouldn’t be able to complain because the Native Americans had it worse. Again, let me type this slow because I know you have a “slow” mind, Killing is killing regardless of who is doing the killing and my take is that no one group is innocent. NO one is right and everyone is wrong.
Your hatred for white people is very obvious. I know you hate to admit it but not all white people are evil.
Posted by: Realitycheck | Aug 21, 2007 11:49:11 AM
The important thing is to understand history. Atrocities have been covered up and need to be exposed. Every merican knows that the creation and expansion of the United States came at the expense of other peoples and cultures.
That said, it's not the best use of time and energy merely to nurse grievances based on a history no one can change.
We are born into a world that exists as it is. Our duty is to make it a better place and to prevent such things from happening again.
The sweep of history continues and we should debate what we can and cannot do to change its forward course.
Posted by: alan | Aug 21, 2007 1:05:26 PM
Attn; REALITYCHECK
1) Learn to read - no one said that Indians were peace loving, they fought, and some, like the Azteca were imperialists and some engaged in the slave trade. What we did say is that the Europeans engaged in genocide. That is the question here and if you care to dispute that go right ahead.
2) You are the only one so far in this discussion who thinks that the color of ones skin determines their views. Back off little man, skin color and the grievances of offended pouty "white people" aren't germane to this or any other discussion. Skin color is not the question, and if you continue to inject it you brand yourself as a racist.
3) This discussion is not about arcane historic knowledge or unscientific religious and race based notions about the evil of 'human nature' nor does it occur in a vacuum. The question of genocide is one that should interest gays and lesbians especially because some loonies on the religions right are beginning to think about that as a solution to the "gay question'. They may be loonies, but so was Hitler and one of the real lessons of history is that we ignore them to our peril.
Posted by: Bill Perdue, RainbowRED Organization | Aug 21, 2007 2:57:33 PM
Dear RealityCheck: I'm white. The end. And who's putting words in one's mouth? I only mentioned the genocide of Native Americans as a comparison point, not as contention. But thanks for trying to make me seem like a bigot.
Alan, you're advocating sweeping under the rug what's happened in the past. I simply don't agree with that. The past is there for us to learn from. If the ugly truths about how our country came to be can't be told accurately and with honesty, then we fail ourselves in the present.
Posted by: Tread | Aug 21, 2007 3:22:56 PM
Tread, Niic & Bill,
I can't even begin to address all of the distortions and outright lies that you guys are trafficking in so I'll just ask this for now: What exactly is it that you guys WANT? What is the point of all of your hysterics?
Posted by: Mike | Aug 21, 2007 4:22:11 PM
Oh and a special question for Nic, just WTF is the "conquest of the americas, especially by northern euoropeans" worse than what the Spanish did?
Posted by: Mike | Aug 21, 2007 4:30:05 PM
Bill Perdue,
You will NEVER be a big enough man to make me back down. You are nothing but a pompous ass.
You stated that “the Europeans engaged in genocide”.
You and several others are making generalizations that ALL Europeans (they were white if you noticed) came here to kill all the Natives.
Did you notice that you didn’t say some Europeans but you did make the blanket statement that would include ALL Europeans?
I don’t think people came to America for the purpose of killing the natives like you do.
Yes, SOME of the Europeans did massacre the natives. But some of them worked very hard to make it stop. But of course you can only see everybody as one group and not the individuals.
Posted by: Realitycheck | Aug 21, 2007 4:31:28 PM
How did we get soooooo far off topic. Isn't the picture of the Pilgrim thing lovely. Are you all just crazy, insane, digressive, goofs? Or, what? Lighten, lighten, lighten, uuuuuuuuuup.
Posted by: Isabella Clark | Aug 21, 2007 6:43:22 PM
Evidently, NIC is one of those MEChA dickheads.
Fuck YOU, puta. I hope the gringo stomps you into oblivion, ESE. Humans have subjugated each other forever, and yet you want to make out like the European is some sort of unique creature.
Your own history is replete with brutality (e.g. AZTECS); you simply can't get a grip on the fact that you got beat. PUTA! Get over it. You lost.
Build the fence, NOW. No more anchor babies. No more welfare for asshole PUTA whiners.
PS: Bill, you're still here. Lots of tribes were totally wiped out. Ask the ZULU about mercy, you idiot. They have none. We do. Be grateful.
Posted by: John | Aug 22, 2007 3:20:20 AM
john,
you are quite a paranoid-delusianal personalty aren't. no, seriously: i read your blog today. get help, please.
Posted by: nic | Aug 25, 2007 8:17:25 PM