On October, 23, 2025, Encounter Books honored Charles R. Kesler with the Encounter Prize for Advancing American Ideals during its annual gala at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC.
Permit me, please, to thank a very different type of statesman, Senator Tom Cotton, for his warm introduction tonight. He and I are old friends, as he said, from when he came to Claremont as a Publius Fellow and then spent a year studying for a Master’s at Claremont Graduate School. In fact, if I remember correctly I still have a term paper of his that I am overdue to return… It was an A paper, so the Washington Post won’t be interested. And I believe it concerned The Federalist, which during the government hiatus no federal employee could be expected to care about.
In fact, this is the first time I have visited Washington when the government was, as they say in the doomsday media, shut down. Welcome to the state of nature! It doesn’t look like I had imagined it. During COVID-19 the mandarins easily distinguished between essential and non-essential government services, but these days the services are all deemed essential, except for the National Guard defending law and order in our inner cities.
One of Oscar Wilde’s characters remarked famously that to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. One may say something similar concerning national or patriotic holidays. Lincoln’s Birthday was never an official federal holiday though it survives in a few states and in tepid symbiosis with George Washington’s birthday and God knows what else as Presidents’ Day (plural possessive, except in a few states confused about what they are celebrating, or grammar, or both) on the third Monday in February. But have you ever heard of Forefathers’ Day? Not many people have.
Forefathers’ Day is nowadays celebrated only in parts of New England, particularly in Plymouth, Mass., on December 22 to commemorate the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock on December 21 (Old Style), 1620. Before the Civil War it was observed nationally or at least also in many states outside of New England, often sponsored by local New England Societies. It served as the occasion for patriotic oratory, with notable addresses by John Quincy Adams in 1802 and Daniel Webster in 1820, commemorating the Pilgrims’ contribution to American republicanism and civil liberties. By the 1840s and 1850s the holiday had become associated with the anti-slavery cause, and its sectionalism sharpened its edge. Almost every leader of that cause, from William Lloyd Garrison to Frederick Douglass to Owen Lovejoy, gave major Forefathers’ Day addresses. Abraham Lincoln did not, though as president during the Civil War he would later designate a national day of thanks that would perform some of the same functions with less regional edge.
The 1619 Project’s criticism of the Declaration and the Constitution as systemically pro-slavery documents would find fewer gullible takers, presumably, if the counterarguments for the Pilgrim founding (and the subsequent founding of 1776 and 1787) had remained associated with and honored by something like Forefathers’ Day, a public commemoration of the anti-slavery and pro-freedom origins of our republic. Before we may be properly grateful for our blessings as a country, we need to know what to be grateful for, after all. The revival of Forefathers’ Day might be a salutary step in that direction. It would not be without detractors, of course: do we need another commemoration of pale white males? Of religious zealots and witch burners? Not to mention another holiday before Christmas? Nonetheless, the rational, religious, and republican credentials of the Pilgrims are more substantial and laudable than our fellow citizens might expect; and the simple truth remains that the Mayflower carried no slaves to America, and that democratic government in America may almost be said to begin with the Mayflower Compact.
As a sample of the Pilgrims’ arguments, let me offer some brief highlights from John Quincy Adams’s discerning 1802 Forefathers’ Day address, simply titled “Oration at Plymouth,” one of his least well known but most helpful dissertations to our own age. Quincy was the eldest son of John Adams, America’s second president, and would himself later become the country’s sixth president.
Quincy Adams begins with his version of the age-old Socratic and Ciceronian point that “veneration for our forefathers” and “love for our posterity” are linked. “Man, therefore, was not made for himself alone. No, he was made for his country, by the obligations of the social contract; he was made for his species, by the Christian duties of universal charity; he was made for all ages past, by the sentiment of reverence for his forefathers; and he was made for all future times, by the impulse of affection for his progeny.” Such commemorations “introduce the sages and heroes of ages past to the notice and emulation of succeeding times; they are at once testimonials of our gratitude, and schools of virtue to our children.”
He pays tribute to the Pilgrims’ political and religious learning, based partly on their own experience in exile in Holland, and as distilled into the Mayflower Compact. “This is, perhaps, the only instance in human history of that positive, original, social compact, which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only legitimate source of government. Here was a unanimous and personal assent, by all the individuals of the community, to the association by which they became a nation.”
Adams anticipated the party platform of Zohran Mamdani, too. As you may know, the Pilgrims’ original political economy was communist or socialist: they experimented with the “community of goods and of labor, which fanciful politicians, from the days of Plato to those of Rousseau, have recommended as the fundamental law of a perfect republic.” “This theory results, it must be acknowledged, from principles of reasoning most flattering to the human character.” Yet here Adams parts company from the idealistic Mr. Mamdani. “A wiser and more useful philosophy, however, directs us to consider man according to the nature in which he was formed; subject to infirmities, which no wisdom can remedy; to weaknesses, which no institution can strengthen; to vices, which no legislation can correct. Hence, it becomes obvious that separate property is the natural and indisputable right of separate exertion; that community of goods without community of toil is oppressive and unjust; that it counteracts the laws of nature, which prescribe that only he who sows the seed shall reap the harvest; that it discourages all energy, by destroying its rewards; and makes the most virtuous and active members of society the slaves and drudges of the worst.”
Finally, Adams foresaw and dismissed the arguments for what these days we term ownership forgiveness, those phony ceremonies at the beginning of public meetings and so forth, apologizing to the Indians of the so-called “indigenous peoples” for appropriating their aboriginal lands. He dismissed such claims memorably. “What is the right of a huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in the quest of prey? Shall the liberal bounties of Providence to the race of man be monopolized by one of ten thousand for whom they were created? Shall the exuberant bosom of the common mother, amply adequate to the nourishment of millions, be claimed exclusively by a few hundreds of her offspring? Shall the lordly savage not only disdain the virtues and enjoyments of civilization himself, but shall he control the civilization of a world?”
Excellent questions, which deserve wise consideration as we and our elected representatives celebrate how and why to advance the ideals of American democracy.
Charles R. Kesler is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. A version of these remarks was delivered at the Encounter Books Gala on October 23, 2025 in Washington, DC.
