Why did the Pilgrims starve?

Why did the Pilgrims starve?

The Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth late in 1620; the famous Thanksgiving celebration took place in the fall of 1621. But the early years were rocky, and hungry.

Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution has written a short holiday post (A Thanksgiving Lesson) arguing that a large part of the problem was an attempt by the colonists to function as a communist society. Tabarrok's post is built around the quotation of an eloquent discussion of incentives written by Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford in his History Of Plymouth Plantation. I won't quote from it here, but it's worth reading in Tabarrok's post. The remainder of this post will make more sense if you do read Tabarrok's.

Why did the Pilgrims experiment with communism? They didn't want to. The investors in Europe, who financed the Pilgrims, insisted on it. Lyle Glazier, writing in 1954:

"As serious colonial scholars know, these claims that the Plymouth settlement was patterned after "apostolic communism," or after Plato's ideal commonwealth are flights of fancy which even a casual reading of Bradford's History immediately dissipates. The fulminations against "that conceite of Plato's," far from indicating that the Pilgrims had modeled their commonwealth on Plato's, indicates rather that Bradford, exasperated at the inefficiency of a system which threatened the Pilgrim's with starvation, vilified that system in hyperbole by condemning its most famous exposition.

The truth is that although the Pilgrims did accept economic communism for the first two and a half years of their plantation at Plymouth, they did so unwillingly, not ever considering it an idealistic experiment in social betterment. For them all - for all the others as well as for Bradford - it was an economic expediency, forced upon them by the English investors, or "adventurers," who insisted that for the first seven years of the settlement all goods and all profits should be shared in common. Far from sanctioning such a program, the Pilgrims resented it from the beginning, and they continued to resent it as long as it endured...

...Robert Cushman, [agent for the Pilgrims - Ben] apparently believing (and with some grounds) that the entire project would fail unless he met the conditions imposed by the investors, agreed to abrogate the two terms which the Pilgrims prized above all: (1) that their dwellings and lands, with improvements, should be their own and not be included in the general settlement at the end of seven years, and (2) that each settler should be granted two days each week to work for the improvement of hs own property...

...the planters [the Pilgrims - Ben] remained so rankled by the new terms that they resolutely refused to accept them, so that when at last they left England for America, they had not signed the papers. In fact, at the last moment they had to sell some of their badly needed supplies, including firkins of butter, in order to pay harbor clearance fees, when the angry investors refused to advance them any further loans.

Later, some months after they had settled in Plymouth, they did sign the agreements in desperation, after Cushman, coming over on the Fortune, had preached them a sermon on their moral obligation to meet the demands of the investors who had paid their passage. As the result of this signature, they did commit themselves to economic communism for a period of seven years, a commitment which Bradford took the initiative in breaking during the summer of the third year, in order to save the colony from another winter of starvation rations..."

(American Quarterly; 6(1):72-75; Spring, 1954).

So the communal system was in place from sometime in (the Spring?) of 1621, until the summer of 1623 - or for two summers. After the two year experiment, it was abandoned by the colonists.

It sounds like the "communal" system might have been the result of an effort by the investors to solve a principal-agent problem. The colonists would have been on their own, a long way off. They could easily have diverted time and resources to their own purposes, rather than to the purposes of the joint enterprise. The investors might have insisted on the conditions (all houses built and lands improved, and no time for your own use) to constrain the opportunities of their agents, the colonists, to ignore the investors' interests.

The early organization of the Plymouth Colony has been put to rhetorical use. A Google search after reading Tabarrok's post brought up a large number of conservative's citing it in favor of the importance of economic systems that consider incentives. The Glazier note I've been quoting indicates that liberals, also, have drawn on it:

"...it seems to have become fairly common for liberals (on the defensive) to point out, "Well, after all, you know, the Pilgrim Fathers were communists." Far from it...

This would have been in 1954, and the years before.

I'll skeptical of this for now; the "communism" episode, placed it is full context, including its rejection, couldn't have been favorable to liberal causes. Only certain radical strains of liberal thought would have advocated communism any way.