Fatherhood Quote by Chauncey Depew

Depew’s line is cruelty in a tuxedo: a parlor joke built on the fantasy of annihilating America’s founding saints with a chunk of geology. The elegance is in the grammatical flip. By swapping subject and object - not the Pilgrims landing on the Rock, but the Rock landing on them - he turns a canonical origin story into slapstick and, more pointedly, into critique. It’s not just that the Pilgrims were annoying; it’s that the culture built from their myth has become insufferably self-righteous.

The “pity” is doing heavy lifting. Depew frames the wish as regretful civility rather than open hostility, which lets the audience enjoy the taboo without owning it. That’s classic late-19th-century political wit: aggressive sentiment smuggled through decorum, the kind of after-dinner line that can wound while pretending to charm.

The subtext targets Puritan moralism and the sanctification of Plymouth Rock as civic scripture. By Depew’s era, the Pilgrims had been mass-produced into national branding - sermons, schoolbooks, commemorations - while the country was wrestling with immigration, industrial capital, and a tightening notion of who counts as “American.” The joke punctures that piety. If your legitimacy depends on a curated landing story, maybe your legitimacy is fragile.

Depew, a Gilded Age Republican power broker, wasn’t an outsider railing against the system; he was the system showing it could laugh at its own wallpaper. That’s why the line lands: it’s irreverence from inside the club, a reminder that national myths are persuasive not because they’re true, but because they’re useful.