Indeed, Morton’s book was banned because it told his side in one of the pivotal battles for the cultural soul of the New World. Morton, a perpetual thorn in the side of the great Puritan patriarch William Bradford, represented the untamable “other” of colonial America. When Morton set up his rival colony of Merry Mount in close proximity to Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation and invited the Indians and escaped indentured servants to join him, all hell broke loose.

As scholar John Beckman tells us in his recent book American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt, “William Bradford was nobody’s democrat.” In fact, “He was the first in a long line of American fortress builders—from slave owners and Klansmen to corporations and country clubs—elites,