The Most Controversial Maypole in American History
In the modern United States, May Day traditions of dancing around a maypole are seen as the height of innocence. If the first of May has any controversial implications, it's for the date's association with labor movements, socialism and communism. But things were very different in the 17th century, when May Day was seen as downright sinister. According to the New England Historical Society, it all started when a man named Thomas Morton arrived in the New England colony from England in 1624. Unlike the puritans who had come to escape religious persecution, Morton was part of a trading expedition that set up shop in what's now Quincy, Mass. MORE The Bloody Story of How May Day Became a Holiday for Workers, Here's what happened next, as TIME told it in a 1970 essay, Though he may have been busted, Morton made his side of the story known, in a text called New English Canaan that contrasted the "harmless mirth made by young men" and the strict ordinances of the Puritans who "trouble their brains more than reason would require about things that are indifferent.", Get your history fix in one place sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter, The episode inspired the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story The Maypole of Merrymount a 1930s opera written by Richard Leroy Stokes and Howard Hanson, called Merry Mount and a 1960s Robert Lowell theater piece called Endecott and the Red Cross.