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“There are two things that I believe to be true. First, that America has a long history of brutal and shameful mistreatment of racial minorities — with black Americans its chief victims. And second, that America is a great nation, and that American citizens (and citizens of the world) should be grateful for its founding. Perhaps no nation has done more good for more people than the United States. It was and is a beacon of liberty and prosperity in a world long awash in tyranny and poverty.”
— David French, The National Review
History is always a battleground. Ideologues mine it for raw materials that can be fashioned into weapons to deploy in contemporary culture wars. Given how intense our political and cultural conflicts have grown in the past few years, it’s not surprising that there is furious dustup underway over what history is taught to young people.
In this corner, we have the 1619 Project; in the opposite corner we have the 1776 Commission.
The 1619 Project was launched in August 2019 by The New York Times and framed thus:
“In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. In the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.”
The 1619 Project was hailed in some quarters as a long-overdue refocusing on the centrality of slavery and the Black experience in the creation of America. Critically, the Project asserts that this past is not dead — and not even past — that the legacy of slavery is part of the warp and weft of the American fabric, tainting its culture and all of its institutions.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the reporter who conceived of the Project and wrote its framing essay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. The Project is being proposed in some quarters as foundational material for teaching American history.
The 1619 Project has been heavily criticized — and not just by people who are ideologically hostile to its premise. It took particularly telling hits for distorting the influence of slavery in motivating the American Revolution. Hannah-Jones acknowledged that her essay’s bald assertion to that effect was too strong.
“I think someone reading that would assume that this was the case: all 13 colonies and most people involved,” she told an Atlantic reporter. “And I accept that criticism, for sure.”
The 1619 Project’s focus on the continuity and persistence of racism creates a fundamental pessimism that shortchanges the truly radical nature of the moment in 1776 when the American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. In writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, set a bar that he himself failed to meet — recognizing that all men are created equal. But the fact remains that the bar was set.
Whatever progress we have made in racial justice can be laid to the imperative to — as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it — “be true to what you said on paper.”
As Gordon S. Wood, author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution points out:
“The notion of equality was really crucial. When the Declaration says that all men are created equal, that is no myth. It is the most powerful statement ever made in our history, and it lies behind almost everything we Americans believe in and attempt to do.”
There is no question that there is a deep ideological tinge to the 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones is an advocate for reparations for the descendants of slaves. Many of the essays are loaded with a profound hostility to capitalism.
This inevitably has led to a no less ideologically freighted backlash. President Trump announced last month the formation of a “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education” and a “pro-American” curriculum.
He stated that:
“Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.”
I don’t take issue with that statement on its face. But we need to be careful here. Simply returning to the kind of triumphalist narrative that once fed Americans a heavily sanitized, feel-good version of our history is no antidote to pessimism. It’s a recipe for cynicism, because we can no longer hide from the darkness in our past. There is no honest version of American history that can step around the original sins of chattel slavery and the displacement of indigenous peoples in the ethnic cleansing of the North American continent.
But we should be at a point where we grasp hold of paradoxes, like that outlined by David French above, without melting down.
In an op-ed for The Scotsman, Professor Richard Finlay and Dr. Alison Cathcart wrote of the Scots (who have their own contemporary battles over history):
“One feature of a mature democracy is the respect it accords to its past, which means accepting it in its entirety, warts and all. There are good points and bad points in all national histories and accepting both is vital to avoiding the pitfalls of narrow, triumphalist chauvinism or debilitating defeatism. Neither of which is healthy.”
There’s a question as to whether the United States qualifies as a “mature democracy.” The republic certainly is venerable in age — but our current conduct of its business cannot be described as “mature.” Perhaps according respect to the past would improve our efforts — but that means truly engaging with it. Teachers need to be deeply versed in it — and themselves taught to know the difference between education and indoctrination.
American public school students get maybe a couple of years of U.S. history instruction. Maybe they need a lot more, plumbed to far greater depth. That’s not so easy to deliver in an educational climate that is short on time and resources — but it’s worth it. I’m biased by my love for the subject, but, truly, it provides knowledge and insight you can use every single day.
As writer James Carlos Blake notes:
“History is human nature writ large, and the better you understand the past, the better you’ll understand people in general, including those of our own day.”
And knowing our history helps us think critically about the narratives we’re fed by culture warriors working agendas that may threaten the integrity of that “beacon of liberty and prosperity in a world long awash in tyranny and poverty.”
Matthew says
Great piece. Glad to see RIR is back.
If history is human nature writ large than it is essentially contradictory and sometimes hypocritical. Jefferson was both a man who created one of the great documents of liberty and a slave owner. You face up to both facts.
Yep.
Thanks for the kind word. Both Craig and I have been buried deep in other projects, but we’re still committed to RIR — eventually they’ll all tie in.
Matthew says
I look forward to those new projects!
Fletcher Vredenburgh says
Lord almighty, children indeed need way more and way deeper American history (and civics!) taught them. Interesting side note, listening to Damon Root guest on The Fifth Column podcast, he pointed out how Frederick Douglass became a big proponent of the Constitution and demanding America live up to its ideals, and that it was ideological theoretician of slaver, John C. Calhoun, who was determined to destroy any idea of human equality
Yep. It was Calhoun who said there was no truth to the phrase “All men are created equal.” We have the framework for liberty and justice for all. It does not need to be “fundamentally transformed.” We simply need to adhere to it.
Matthew says
Amen.
When I hear people talk about “fundamentallly transforming” something, I think “transform into what?”
Fletcher Vredenburgh says
Rarely something good
J.F. Bell says
The first rule of understanding humanity is to allow that people can be real bastards. I don’t think that’s a radical thought, especially in this company. Hard times and strife make for survivors. Survivors aren’t necessarily driven by their better angels.
I suspect a good swath of the populace has no real aversion to adding to the story as we know it. What galls them is not the idea of adding to the account. What galls them is the burn-the-houses-salt-the-earth nature of calls to erase the memory of forebears (flawed and incomplete though it may be) and reset to Year Zero.
The brilliance and and foresight of our Founders can’t always be made separate from their flaws. Their achievements don’t negate their failings. Then again…their failings don’t negate their achievements.
Or, to steal from a perennial favorite:
“It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sumbitch or another.”
As always… well stated. The seeking of Year Zero disturbs the hell out of me. I “get” what that’s about, but it’s so alien to me on a cellular level that it givesm me the creeps.
J.F. Bell says
On the surface I get the appeal; you identify issues with your current operating protocols, and the easy rationale is to build a system where those either don’t occur or don’t occur as often. It’s an avoidant mechanism that allows the designer to evade a problem rather than finding a workable fix.
Thing is…building from the ground up is hard. Real hard.
Looking at the politics in play at the Founding it’s easy to forget that this system didn’t spring from the ether. The men who kickstarted the American nation by and large viewed themselves as Englishmen, American by birth. The heavier notes of English culture and tradition provide the underpinnings for the system they were building — to them, an improved version of familiar laws that put the Citizen above the Crown. Had King George honored their rights as men of the British Empire we might know history somewhat differently.
But the English didn’t go from scratch, either. They took their cues from the Romans. The Romans borrowed from the Greeks. Every empire since has borrowed from somebody else. You take what works. You scrap what doesn’t. Along the way you patch, reinforce, and reconfigure as needed.
The trouble with Year Zero is that it’s chief proponents are often as not useful idiots screaming lines from books they’ve never read, written in times in they haven’t studied and circumstances they can’t grasp.
We often forget, too, that the Articles of Confederation were an important false start and the Bill of Rights an afterthought created out of ratification pressure. A LOT of work, grounded firmly in lived experience as well as rigorously thought out political philosophy. Truly a remarkable and perhaps providential outcome for a revolution.
Matthew says
You know I cannot think of another revolution that turned out as well as the American one. And that was a pretty hard birth. Why some people think that you could go to Year Zero and just start over from scratch I don’t know.
Even if you destroyed the system, I am pretty sure that whatever you built would be effected by what went before. Even putting aside the fact that human nature does not change, there are always reverberations from the past.
Well said, sir.
Rick Schwertfeger says
Damn what a fine essay! So well described that neither the “Burn down the house” nor the “The house is a glorious white temple” versions of American history are accurate. Keeping in mind what J.F. Bell said of human nature while not becoming cynical IS a challenge to and a skill of a mature mind. Glad to see the quote from my prof Gordon Wood, who is a great scholar and teacher.
And I absoutely love the quote from Professors Findlay and Cathcart: “One feature of a mature democracy is the respect it accords to its past, which means accepting it in its entirety, warts and all. There are good points and bad points in all national histories and accepting both is vital to avoiding the pitfalls of narrow, triumphalist chauvinism or debilitating defeatism. Neither of which is healthy.” As you imply, however, it takes mature and facile minds to do that.
Wonderful job, Jim. This is a keeper.
Thanks Rick.
Rick Schwertfeger says
Just reread this quote:
“Our most widely accepted version of history…tends to be a tidier and more consistent version of events than what actually happened.”
— Karl Jacoby, Brown University Class of ’87 and Professor of American History, Columbia University.
(Jacoby also mentioned regretfully that he never took a class from Gordon Wood.)
Ugly Hombre says
https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/09/national-association-of-scholars-calls-for-revoking-the-1619-project-pulitzer-prize/
**The National Association of Scholars charged, “The duplicity of attempting to alter the historical record in a manner intended to deceive the public is as serious an infraction against professional ethics as a journalist can commit.” These scholars added, “Hannah-Jones has falsely put forward claims that she never said or wrote what she plainly did, the offense is far more serious.” The scholars have a point. This is not award-winning behavior.
The primary and clearly articulated thesis of the 1619 Project was that our nation’s “true founding” was not 1776 but 1619, when some 20 African slaves were shipped to these shores at Jamestown. Thus, the 1619 Project asserts that “our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written,” because slavery was “at the very center of the story” of our nation’s founding.
As Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, explained, “[I]t turns out the article itself was false when written, making a large claim that protecting the institution of slavery was a primary motive for the American Revolution, a claim for which there is simply no evidence.” Even the World Socialist Web Site denounced the 1619 Project early on as a “racialist falsification of American and world history.”**
The 1619 project is a anti American giant bag of proven bull chit- No American alive today ever owned a slave, and no American alive today bears any guilt for what their ancestors did.
“Blood guilt” is a Communist Bullchit story.
https://nypost.com/2020/01/24/scholars-are-eviscerating-the-new-york-times-1619-project/
**“I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves,” he wrote in a separate letter to the Times’ editor-in-chief, as reported by the World Socialist website. “No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776.”
McPherson, the leading scholar of the Civil War, said he was “disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery.” Oakes, a leading historian of Reconstruction, calls the idea that “slavery or racism is built into the DNA of America” one of several “really dangerous tropes.”
He adds: “They’re not only ahistorical, they’re actually anti-historical. The function of those tropes is to deny change over time.”**
I never owned a G.D. slave neither did you.
https://www.heritage.org/american-founders/impact/new-york-times-quietly-edits-1619-project-after-conservative-pushback
**“The online version of The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project” was quietly edited after considerable pushback from conservatives, including multiple Heritage Foundation scholars.
Sections of the online publication were scrubbed for controversial language without even an editor’s note to explain the changes. The edits focus mainly on the thesis that America’s true founding was August 1619, marking the arrival of the first slaves in present-day Virginia.
Originally the leading text on the landing page for the digital version of the project read: “The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
The original reference to the “true founding” was subsequently removed to read: “The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
The Heritage Foundation has been tireless in its efforts to debunk the radical and anti-American positions taken by The New York Times and the “1619 Project” since it was first published. Heritage experts have thoroughly documented the factual errors, appeared on numerous radio and television interviews, and published dozens of commentaries.”**
The people running the NYT are proven liars caught in yet another proven lie.
The 1619 Project is I repeat- a giant bag of anti American bullchit. The red diaper doper babies who fabricated it had to back track fast..
To late jive @$$- yer busted.
That’s the primary purpose, methinks. If the system cannot change, it must be overthrown…
Ugly Hombre says
“That’s the primary purpose, methinks”
You are right Amigo.
Very sad times we are living in those days.