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RUSH: One of the great myths of Thanksgiving is that we swindled the Indians when we bought Manhattan Island from them. We swindled them. Twenty-four bucks is the equivalent. It turns out, according to a book about Teddy Roosevelt, that that’s not true. It turns out that the Indians are the ones that ran the real estate scam when they sold Manhattan. The Book is ‘Commissioner Roosevelt: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and the New York City Police, 1895-1897,’ by H. Paul Jeffers. Here are the relevant paragraphs about this: ‘A persuasive case can be made that the city of New York began with a swindle. For generations school children have been taught that a slick trick was played on unsuspecting Indians by the director of the Dutch West India Company, Peter Minuit. In 1626 he purchased the island of ‘Manna-hatin’ for sixty gilders worth of trinkets, about twenty-four dollars. What Minuit did not know at the time, however, was that his masterful real estate deal had been struck with the Canarsie tribe, residents of Long Island; they held no title to the land they sold to the Dutch. In due course, the intruders from Amsterdam who thought they had pulled a sharp one on the locals were forced into negotiating a second, more costly deal with the true landlords of Manna-hatin,’ which is what it was called then: Manna-hatin. But it was the Canarsie tribe that pulled one over on us. They have since located to Brooklyn.
I’m just setting you up for The True Story of Thanksgiving, which — I’ll give you a heads-up — is essentially about the failure of socialism.
That’s really what it’s about.