Europeans who emigrated to the colonies in America had a dream of religious freedom, denied to them by European elites and government-mandated beliefs, and legal equality, absolutely impossible in England if you were poor, but they also believed in an economic Utopia.
That last belief nearly cost them their lives. William Bradford, the first leader of that Massachusetts Bay colony, eventually conceded their socialist ideal failed. Free riders who chose not to work nearly doomed them. By 1621, a year after landing in Massachusetts, they had changed from socialism to a system where each family owned their land and worked it for their family.
The switch from socialism to initiative changed the fortunes of the colony a lot. Things began to take off and in autumn of 1621 the first harvest celebration to celebrate their work, what would later be called Thanksgiving, was held. Using individual initiative, some caught lobster, some shot geese and ducks, while 90 natives brought venison. The popular narrative that natives rescued starving pilgrims is a just-so story, humanities scholars have to engage in revisionism to get published, that is just the way their system works, but the written accounts of the time dispute it soundly. Natives were intrigued that Europeans had been able to prosper so the first Thanksgiving was a giant Friendsgiving pot luck.
Jean Leon Gerome Ferris "The First Thanksgiving, 1621" from 1912. Coastal natives didn't wear feather headdresses but science gets pushed out of the way a lot when it comes to Thanksgiving, that is why cranberries can be blamed for the modern chemophobia that infects anto-science progressives and enables predatorts suing over everything, while organic food is believed to be healthier but actually leads to higher toxic chemical levels in people.
Modern cultural activists have ironically marginalized natives out of that story by claiming they are helping natives get recognition.
Natives outnumbered pilgrims by nearly double at the first harvest celebration because the Europeans had been reduced by half due to the socialism modern revisionists claim natives used.(1)
Natives did not use socialism in food production and it had failed pilgrims too, just like it failed in Russia and China three centuries later. Morale became low because people didn't like working hard while their family had less. There was no point in telling them they were better off than they would have been working their own land and trading what they grew in excess, they knew better. That has a lot in common today, where poor people made a drastic choice because more centralized control while being told it was essential to their freedom just left them with really expensive bread.
A year after they landed, they got rid of communal land and 'work if you want, take what you want' idealism and things were good. All it took was a leader who saw that academic beliefs about human behavior remained just for books and made a smarter choice.
NOTE:
(1) They did not. Not only were natives a meritocracy, they were colonizers long before Europeans arrived. Archaeological history shows war and violence had caused 900 tribes to become extinct due to other natives. And those are just the ones we know about. They never developed writing so history is limited to how they changed land, evidence from buried artifacts, and mass graves of their enemies.
