Life — November 22, 1906 — page 10: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "Our Beginning" - Pilgrim Ancestry Satire This page satirizes Puritan ancestors and their supposed moral superiority. The text mocks the Pilgrims' pretension to religious virtue while noting their actual ancestry included "all kinds of brass, and, what is more, they hanged it down to their children." The main illustration shows the Mayflower arriving with Pilgrims greeting the shore—a romanticized historical moment. However, the accompanying text undercuts this: it ridicules the Pilgrims' narrow-mindedness, their need to avoid Dutch ancestry for "harder to pronounce" names, and their religious rigidity (Old Testament Christians with "vagrancies in head-gear"). The satire suggests that Americans' celebrated Puritan heritage masks hypocrisy and inherited moral compromise, deflating the mythic status of the Pilgrims in American consciousness.