’Twas founded be th’ Puritans to give thanks f’r bein’ presarved fr’m th’ Indyans, an’… we keep it to give thanks we are presarved fr’m th’ Puritans.

This line comes from Finley Peter Dunne’s long-running “Mr. Dooley” newspaper sketches, in which the Irish-American saloonkeeper Martin Dooley comments on public life in a phonetic brogue. Dunne frequently used holidays as occasions for satirizing American civic pieties and inherited myths. Here, in a Thanksgiving-themed reflection, Dooley jokes that the holiday began as gratitude for deliverance from Native Americans, but that later generations observe it as gratitude for deliverance from the Puritans themselves—turning a revered origin story into a comic critique of Puritan severity and moral self-importance.

In Dunne’s Irish-dialect voice (typically Mr. Dooley), the line satirizes the conventional Thanksgiving origin story. The first clause repeats the familiar claim that the holiday began as gratitude for survival in early colonial America; the punchline flips the target, suggesting modern Americans should be grateful to be “preserved from the Puritans” themselves. The joke depends on Puritans as a cultural shorthand for severity, moral policing, and joyless piety. By turning Thanksgiving into a celebration of escaping that legacy, Dunne critiques sanctimony and the tendency to wrap national holidays in self-congratulatory myth. The dialect spelling also signals a working-class, outsider perspective puncturing official history.