"Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by
comparing the lies."
― Leon Trotsky
"Lenin refused to recognise moral norms established by slave-owners for their slaves and never observed by the slave-owners themselves; he called upon the Proletariat to extend the class struggle into the moral sphere too. Who fawns before the precepts established by the enemy will never vanquish that enemy!" Leon Trotsky
"I should respectfully suggest that although the
oppressed may need history for identity and inspiration, they need it above all
for the truth of what the world has made of them and of what they have helped
make of the world. This knowledge alone can produce that sense of identity
which ought to be sufficient for inspiration; and those who look to history to
provide glorious moments and heroes invariably are betrayed into making
catastrophic errors of political judgment.—Eugene Genovese [1]
Peter.W.Wood's book is a very useful critique of the New
York Times 1619 Project. It has been described as a historiography of the debates
over the 1619 Project. The Times basic premise is to reset Ameican history by "asserting
that all the laws, material gains, and cultural achievements of Americans are
rooted in the exploitation of African-Americans".
To his credit, Woods does not buy into this absurd and
dangerously wrong assumption. The book is an attempt, to sum up, what critiques
of the Project have written. While many of the most important historians who
have written on the subject have published articles and letters opposing the Times
the political leadership in this fight against this travesty of historical
study has fallen to the Trotskyist's at the World Socialist Website.
While semi acknowledging this in the book, Wood's is not
happy that it was the Trotskyists who first exposed this racialist and revisionist
approach to American history. The fact the Times project has been so discredited
is down to the role played by the Marxists.
As the Marxist writer David North correctly points out "As
a business venture the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical
revision it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in
large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the
support of several distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the
1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and
dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes
racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history"[1].
In his book, Wood not only opposes the 1619 project, but
also offers a different starting point for modern American history, and that is
when the first pilgrims set foot in America in the 1620s. The political and
historical study of the pilgrims is a worthwhile subject.
To some degree, Wood's has a case in point, but American
history has many such starting points, most historians seem to stick with the Declaration
of Independence in 1776 as America's founding.
Wood's book is one to the better critiques of the 1619 project,
but it does not probe the politics behind 1619. As North points out "The "financialisation"
of the Times has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the
newspaper's selection of issues to be publicised and promoted: that is, its
central role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the
Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always tenuous
boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda. The
consequences of the Times' financial and political evolution have found a
particularly reactionary expression in the 1619 Project. Led by Ms Nikole
Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619
Project was developed to provide the Democratic Party with a historical
narrative that legitimised its efforts to develop an electoral constituency
based on the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Party's
decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with the
social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the 1619
Project, by prioritising racial conflict, marginalises, and even eliminates,
class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics".[2]
To facilitate the Times collaboration with the Democratic
Party, its journalists have been given virtual impunity from normal journalist
norms of accuracy and truthfulness. Wood correctly points out that the lead
journalist on the Project Nikole Hannah-Jones has been given free rein to write
what she wants. Jones styles herself as "the Beyoncé of journalism" who
according to Wood, is "exempt from ordinary forms of accountability".
Hannah-Jones has not replied to any criticism from historians or the World
Socialist Website and has since closed her Twitter account.
The unprincipled stance of the many journalists and the few
historians who have signed up to the Times project was summed up by historian
Nell Irvin Painter, who wrote ""I felt that if I signed on to that, I
would be signing on to the white guy's attack of something that has given a lot
of black journalists and writers a chance to speak up in a really big way. So I
support the 1619 Project as kind of a cultural event," Painter said. "For
Sean and his colleagues, true history is how they would write it. And I feel
like he was asking me to choose sides, and my side is 1619's side, not his
side, in a world in which there are only those two sides."[3]
One of the more despicable assertions made by The Times 1619
project was that Abraham Lincoln was a racist and was only motivated by his
hatred of black people. By allowing its journalists to call Lincoln racist, the
Times has sanctioned a second assassination of Lincoln.
Again this viewpoint of Lincoln has not been sanctioned by
any leading scholars of Lincoln as the writer and historian, Ed Achorn writes "Lincoln
was also a politician running for office in Illinois. Lincoln declared during
his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858 that he would not support making
blacks full citizens, members of juries and that sort of thing. So Lincoln said
things we would deem today to be white supremacy. But he also argued that
blacks deserved the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. Frederick
Douglass also noted that Lincoln seemed to show absolutely no racial prejudice
in their meetings. That was something remarkable at the time. I write in Every
Drop of Blood about the reception at the White House. Lincoln calls out, "Here
comes my friend Douglass," when he sees him in line. Lincoln was not
someone who disparaged other people of any race or background. He viewed people
as fellow Americans, and that is how he treated them. You can target anyone
from the past and cherry-pick comments. I try to look at the world in which he
lived. Lincoln ended 250 years of brutal bondage. I do not think anyone else
could have had the political skill and the determination to do that. Lincoln
had to win this terrible war, and in doing that, he rid this nation of slavery.
To dismiss that is to dismiss one of the most powerful stories of American
history". [4]
While there are many aspects of the 1619 project to deal
with one of the most important ones identified by Woods, is the 1619 projects
assertion that slavery was the prime mover in American capitalism's development.
In an interview with the World Socialist Website, the distinguished
historian James Oakes answered this attempt by the Times to re-establish the “King
Cotton” theory of American capitalism. Historian Tom Mackaman asks Oakes "can
you discuss some of the recent literature on slavery and capitalism, which
argues that chattel slavery was, and is, the decisive feature of capitalism,
especially American capitalism? I am thinking in particular of the recent books
by Sven Beckert, Ed Baptist and Walter Johnson. This seems to inform the
contribution to the 1619 Project by Matthew Desmond".
Oakes answers "collectively their work has prompted
some very strong criticism from scholars in the field. My concern is that by
avoiding some of the basic analytical questions, most of the scholars have
backed into a neo-liberal economic interpretation of slavery. However, I think
I would exempt Sven Beckert somewhat from that because I think he has come to
do something somewhat different theoretically. What you have with this
literature is a marriage of neoliberalism and liberal guilt. When you marry
those two things, neo-liberal politics and liberal guilt, this is what you get.
You get the New York Times, you get the literature on slavery and capitalism".[5]
Wood's raises other minor points such as The Times refusing
to have its articles fact-checker by its employees. Or that it produced a
special font to give the Project a gravitas it did not deserve. Wood also
points out that "the Pulitzer Prize Board erred in awarding a prize to
Hannah-Jones's profoundly flawed essay, and through it to a Project that,
despite its worthy intentions, is disfigured by unfounded conjectures and
patently false assertions".
Perhaps the most dangerous aspects of the 1619 project have
been to seek to overturn centuries of the historiography of the revolutionary nature
of the American Revolution and the American Civil War. As North points out that
the assertion by the Times that the American revolution was not a revolution at
all has serious implications he writes "This
claim—that the American Revolution was not a revolution at all, but a counterrevolution
waged to defend slavery—is freighted with enormous implications for American
and world history. The denunciation of the American Revolution legitimises the
rejection of all historical narratives that attribute any progressive content
to the overthrow of British rule over the colonies and, therefore, to the wave
of democratic revolutions that it inspired throughout the world. If the
establishment of the United States was a counterrevolution, the founding
document of this event—the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the
equality of man—merits only contempt as an exemplar of the basest hypocrisy.[6]
To conclude, Wood's book is a very good introduction to the numerous
critiques of the 1619 project. I somehow doubt it will be reviewed in the
Times. Alongside this book, I would recommend Mehring books publication
entitled The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of
History[7].
Wood's is correct in his belief that the proper historical education of
children is a factor in their growth as properly rounded human beings. They
should not be taught that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S.
Constitution or the American Revolution or the Civil War were cynical plots to
perpetuate slavery. I would recommend this book, and it is hoped that it is read
in all schools that have taken copies of the Times 1619 project literature.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/04/intr-d04.html
[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/04/intr-d04.html
[3] The Fight Over the 1619
Project Is Not About the Facts-https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/
[4] An interview with Ed
Achorn, author of Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of
Abraham Lincoln-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/10/linc-j10.html
[5] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/18/oake-n18.html
[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/04/intr-d04.html
[7] https://mehring.com/product/the-new-york-times-1619-project-and-the-racialist- falsification-of-history/
