Fatherhood Quote by E. E. Cummings

Cummings lands this line like a slap: a joke with blood on its hands. The syntax sets up a grotesque “at least,” as if genocide could be scored for honesty. That’s the trap. By pretending to praise the Pilgrim Fathers for shooting Indians, he forces the reader to notice how casually American myth has always laundered violence into virtue. The ugliness is the point; it yanks the sanitized Thanksgiving diorama back into history.

Then he pivots to the “Pilgrim Children,” and the target widens. The descendants don’t carry muskets; they carry lunch pails. “Merely punch time clocks” sounds gentler, almost wholesome, until you hear the contempt in “merely.” Cummings isn’t romanticizing the frontier. He’s saying modern America has traded explicit brutality for institutionalized obedience: the violence of dispossession becomes the quieter violence of industrial routine, where bodies are disciplined by schedules and wages. The time clock is a machine for turning life into units, and the “Pilgrim” label mocks how national identity gets recycled to sanctify whatever the current economy demands.

Context matters: Cummings wrote in an era when mass production, corporate work culture, and patriotic storytelling were tightening into a single script about progress. His modernist bite isn’t just anti-capitalist; it’s anti-myth. He strips “Pilgrim” of its halo and shows continuity between conquest and compliance. The line dares you to ask which is more damning: a past that killed openly, or a present that keeps people docile enough to call their own servitude freedom.