Review: The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History- David North & Tom Mackaman-Mehring Books-$24.95

Both ideological and historical myths are a product of immediate class interests.  These myths may be refuted by restoring historical truth—the honest presentation of facts and tendencies of the past.—Vadim Z. Rogovin

"Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies."

― Leon Trotsky

This groundbreaking book adds significantly to the arsenal of Marxist works that have utilised the historical materialist method in examing complex historical questions. This collection of essays and interviews represents the most consistent and sustained attack on the New York Times 1619 Project, released in August 2019. The book's publication is a significant political and intellectual event

The 1619 project denounced two seminal events in American history: the 1776 revolution that founded the United States and the Civil War of 1861–65. In its place, the New York Times put forward a completely new revisionist narrative that stipulated that the rebellion against Britain was a counterrevolution instigated to defend slavery and that the union forces in the Civil War were led by a president, Abraham Lincoln, who was a racist.

The lead writer and Project founder Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones said, "Our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true". For this piece of deep insight, the author was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Hannah-Jones made the preposterous claim that anti-black racism "runs in the very DNA of this country".

As you would expect from a work published by Mehring books, this collection of essays and lectures is based on meticulous research. It thoroughly discredits the 1619 Project's lies and distortions.

One question to book seeks to answer is why would the Times lie. As Leon Trotsky once pointed out the that when one lies about history, it is done to conceal real social contradictions. The Times project was released amidst truly staggering levels of social inequality produced by capitalism. As one writer wrote, "These contradictions can be resolved on a progressive basis only through the methods of class struggle. Efforts to divert and sabotage that struggle by dissolving class identity into the miasma of racial identity lead inexorably in the direction of fascism".[1]

Contained in the book are interviews with the most renowned scholars and specialists in the history of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s — Gordon Wood, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, Richard Carwardine, Clayborne Carson, Adolph Reed Jr., and Dolores Janiewski. Subjects examined are the "complex development of slavery in the New World, the American Revolution, the sectional crisis over slavery and the Civil War, the struggle for social equality in the twentieth century, and the class politics of racial identity in the present".

The most disturbing feature of the Times revisionist project was not so much what it contained, which was easily refuted, but the fact that it was left to the Trotskyist movement and the World Socialist Website(WSWS) to attack this abomination of historical falsehood. The Attack by the WSWS drew immediate media attention and very quickly seriously undermined the whole 1619 project. As one writer put it, it destroyed the Times "new historical narrative" and exposed it as a money-making venture.

In reading this book and its sustained attack on the 1619 project, it is not hard to understand why the stand taken by the WSWS and several leading Historians has altered the political and "intellectual terrain". It has destroyed the 1619 project. It has provided a textbook Marxist approach and has implemented a historical materialist method of historical investigation. One also has to admire the bravery of the historians that collaborated with the WSWS. These historians had "strong reservations about important aspects of the 1619 Project" and were "dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it." It is one thing for a Marxist to launch a polemical attack. After all, it is in their DNA. It is another for world-renowned historians to put their life's work on the line by defending historical truth.

The stand taken by the WSWS and these leading historian has encouraged others to enter the field of battle. One notable book has been Peter W Wood's book 1620. Peter.W.Wood's book is a very useful critique of the New York Times 1619 Project. It has been described as historiography of the debates over the 1619 Project. The Times basic premise is to reset American 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 that 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".

In his book, Wood opposes the 1619 project and offers a different starting point for modern American history, which 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 of the better critiques of the 1619 project, but it does not probe the politics behind 1619. As David 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]

Given that the Trotskyists from the WSWS have led the political and historical fight against the Times deeply right-wing and revisionist historical viewpoint, it is perhaps not surprising that the WSWS has come under sustained attack from not only conservative sources but has been attacked by several Stalinist and Pseudo left individuals and organisations.

One of the more stupid and ignorant attacks came from the predictable Louis Proyect, who wrote," Indeed, nobody has published more "Trotskyist polemics" than them, as long as you are using the term Trotskyist without regard for what Trotsky stood for. An examination of the record will place Trotsky firmly in the Project 1619 camp. When Trotsky was living in Prinkipo, an island near Istanbul, in 1933, he met with Arne Swabeck (who coincidentally was one of the talking heads in Warren Beatty's "Reds"). Swabeck asked, "How must we view the position of the American Negro: As a national minority or as a racial minority?" Trotsky's reply probably would have made both Wilentz and his friends at WSWS beet-red with fury. He urged his comrades to support self-determination for Blacks even if it antagonised white workers, who were far more radical in 1933 than they are today".[3]

Proyect has a history of right-wing attacks on the WSWS. The WSWS called him a professional liar and said, "Proyect's blog—or should we call it blather—lacks all credibility. In his dishonesty, cynicism, and debased vulgarity, he epitomises all that is politically diseased in the milieu of American pseudo-left politics. His attack on the WSWS is the work of a man who has absolutely nothing to do with the politics, principles and culture of the Marxist movement. His blog were it correctly named, would be called "The Unrepentant Liar."[4]

Further attacks on the WSWS have come from the Stalinists of the USA Communist Party who wrote, "Trotskyists have traditionally attacked mainstream Communists and others who have sought to construct centre-left coalitions to defeat the right, attacks that have aided the right. Here, North, London, and the World Socialist Review have acted to support a centre-right backlash against a new history of slavery, a kind of negative United Front with the liberal and conservative celebrators of U.S. history. The author and co-signers of the protest letter, whom they defend, would never put "bourgeois" in front of "democratic" to define the American Revolution. In my experience, they would do what they usually do—reject the work of those like the scholars of the 1619 Project who challenge conventional wisdom and by their rejection prevent the article's publication in mainstream media".[5]

This duplicity has been the trademark of the Stalinists for nearly a century. It has been exposed and refuted by the Trotskyist movement and represents a desperate attempt by the Stalinist to breathe new life into the discredited Democratic party and join forces with the various other Pseudo Left groups that have backed the Project and have attacked the WSWS.

In the past, these Pseudo left organisations would have at least paid lip service to the struggles of the working class, but now this has been replaced by an open acceptance of new forms of non working class forms of struggle. James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose summarise this succinctly in this article[6] "We have moved into a new stage of history. The battles the left fought over the past half-century have largely been won. We cannot go back to focusing on miners' rights and trade unions, or on securing equal pay for women, outlawing racial discrimination, or legalising homosexuality: we have won those wars. Much of the right support these advances now too. We have new battles to fight. These include combating climate change, securing our place on the world stage and within the global economy, and fostering cohesive multiculturalism, free from moral relativism and enforced conformity. The left now finds itself pulled in many directions at once. This is the source of its profound identity crisis".One manifestation of this right-wing shift is the support by the Pseudo Left organisations of the 1619 racialist project.

Conclusion

It is hoped that The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: Essays and Interviews will find a wide audience. Its essays and interviews will be of interest to all readers of American history.

It is an essential aid for all teachers and college professors, students and the general reading public to counter the Times' blatant historical falsifications. It will also be a valuable tool in the struggle of both black and white workers in their struggle against capitalism.

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[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/25/pers-j24.html

[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/04/intr-d04.html

[3] https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/10/project-1619-and-its-detractors/

[4] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/08/proy-j08.html

[5] https://www.cpusa.org/article/the-1619-project-backlash-from-the-left/

[6] The Left is Having an Identity Crisis- https://areomagazine.com/2019/12/18/the-left-is-having-an-identity-crisis/

The Campaign Against Philip Roth: Another Exercise in Historical Amnesia

In recent years, a concerted effort—mainly visible in literary journals and review sections—has sought to portray Philip Roth, a key American novelist of the postwar era, as primarily defined by an alleged hostility toward women. This initiative, which predates Blake Bailey’s biography, has grown stronger, fueled by the modern tendency to view literature as a measure of the author's moral character.

Leo Robson’s review in the Literary Review exemplifies this type of critique. Instead of engaging deeply with Roth’s fiction—such as its innovative structure, candid exploration of American Jewish identity, and themes like mortality, sexuality, political hypocrisy, and the decline of postwar liberalism—Robson focuses largely on anecdotes and personal grievances. He treats a casual remark by an actress about Roth’s behaviour on a film set as if it resolves a significant literary-historical issue. This is not genuine criticism; rather, it amounts to gossip dressed up as judgment, replacing thoughtful analysis with moral certainties of the moment.

The Method Behind the Moralism

This approach is intentional. The shift away from in-depth social and historical analysis of literature toward moralising about individual writers' conduct and psychology reflects broader intellectual trends over the past forty years. As identity politics has become the main interpretive lens in many academic and media circles, serious discussion of the class structures and historical forces that influence artistic creation has declined.

In this setting, literature is often seen more as a tool for diagnosing personal flaws than as a historical artefact shaped by specific social contexts. The critic takes on the role of prosecutor; the novel serves as evidence; and the author becomes a case study. This approach significantly limits the scope of the critical imagination.

Roth as a Historical Figure, Not a Moral Allegory

Roth, despite his limitations, was shaped by a specific American context: the Cold War era, the unique pressures of postwar bourgeois culture, the internal struggles of assimilation and rebellion within American Jewish communities, the decline of mid-century liberal ideology, and the transformation of the American middle class following World War II. His fiction did not develop in isolation. It reflects the contradictions of a society that celebrated unlimited personal freedom but enforced strict ideological conformity, lauded upward mobility, yet often ignored the radical roots of many immigrant communities.

Reducing that body of work to a simple test of whether its author was sensitive to later generations' sensibilities dismisses any genuine historical perspective on literature. It turns Roth from a novelist dealing with the issues of his era into a moral symbol for our own.

Criticism Without History Is Not Criticism

Roth’s work can be critiqued, especially regarding his portrayal of female characters. However, such critique should be grounded in an understanding of the social and historical contexts that influenced both Roth and his critics. His depictions of gender, sexuality, and power reflect a specific era in American history—a time marked by the decline of the New Deal, the rise of therapeutic culture, and changes in the American family due to suburban growth and Cold War influences. Analysing Roth without considering this background risks misunderstanding his work, and judging him without acknowledging these factors risks forgetting history.

The Larger Intellectual Drift

Roth's case highlights a broader intellectual shift: moving from historical analysis to moral judgment, favouring personal anecdotes over critical analysis, and treating moral virtue as the main standard of artistic value. This trend reflects a culture that has lost confidence in interpreting literature through its historical background, instead seeking moral clarity in the here and now. As a result, critics are becoming less able to understand the social factors that influence art and more prone to blame writers for not foreseeing future sensitivities they could not have predicted.

 

Selina Todd, Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution, Chatto & Windus, 304 pp., £18.99, August 2019, 978 1 78474 082 5

Shelagh Delaney was only nineteen when she wrote A Taste of Honey, a play that established her as one of the most compelling voices to emerge from working-class Britain after World War II. Selina Todd's new biography, *Tastes of Honey*, aims to correctly situate Delaney within cultural history as a writer whose work predicted, more than a decade in advance, the themes later central to the Women's Liberation Movement. This effort matters because Delaney's writing, which critically examines marriage and motherhood as expected paths for working-class women, remains relevant today. The key question of this review is not whether Delaney merits recognition beyond historical stereotypes- she clearly does- but whether Todd's approach effectively honours her memory or instead imposes present-day political concerns in her stead.

Todd is a serious and accomplished historian, and this biography is the product of genuine archival labour. She was given access to what remains of Delaney's personal papers, held by her daughter, and the book benefits from this unusually close material. Todd traces Delaney's roots in Salford's working-class culture with evident care, and she is right to insist that Delaney's early success was neither accident nor aberration but the product of a wider, if short-lived, opening for working-class voices in postwar British theatre and film. Delaney belonged to a generation of writers  Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, Bill Naughton among them whose work once formed the backbone of English literature teaching in the comprehensive schools, before a narrower and more fashionable curriculum displaced it. That generation deserves better than to be forgotten, and Todd's book is a genuine contribution to keeping it alive.

The trouble begins with the interpretive frame Todd builds around her subject. As one reviewer for the Los Angeles Review of Books observed, Todd is chiefly concerned with repositioning Delaney as a forerunner of second-wave, 1970s-style feminism, and the success of a biography built on that kind of claim depends entirely on how well the evidence from the subject's own life and work actually bears it out. Delaney was a complicated figure who, by her own director's account, struggled to produce work at all, let alone work organised around a coherent political programme. To read her retrospectively as a proto-feminist icon risks doing to Delaney exactly what Todd accuses earlier critics of doing: flattening a complex working-class woman into a symbol that serves someone else's argument.

That argument, it should be said plainly, is not incidental to the book but central to it, and it has been sharpened by the political climate in which Todd has been writing. The #MeToo movement, which began in the United States and has since become a global phenomenon, presents itself as a vehicle for social progress against sexual harassment and assault. Its actual methods, however- reliance on anonymous and unsubstantiated denunciation, and a corrosive disregard for the presumption of innocence mark it as something closer to a movement of moral panic than one of democratic reform, one whose effect, intended or not, has been to divert attention from the deeper social questions of inequality, the assault on working-class living standards, and the danger of war. This climate, more than anything in Delaney's own writing, gives Todd's reframing of her subject its present urgency.

Todd's politics are not hidden; she sets them out plainly on her website, describing herself as a socialist opposed to "dog-eat-dog capitalism" and a longstanding advocate of free, comprehensive education. She also identifies as a feminist who distinguishes firmly between sex and gender, rejects the idea of an innate gendered identity, and is active in the campaigning group Woman's Place UK. This stance has made her, as the LA Review of Books piece notes, something of a lightning rod within the gender-critical wing of feminism, sometimes labelled "Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism," itself a direct descendant of 1970s second-wave politics. Whatever one makes of that particular controversy, the underlying political current is the same one shaping her portrait of Delaney: a socialism refracted almost entirely through the lens of gender, rather than class.

At bottom, this is watered-down reformism. Todd's own account of female emancipation locates the source of women's oppression in the fact of being treated as biologically different and inferior to men, an analysis that, however sincerely held, points not towards the unity of working people but towards the separation of women workers from their male class brothers, and towards reform of capitalism rather than its overthrow. Yet it is only through the revolutionary reorganisation of society on a socialist basis that the material conditions producing women's oppression, poverty, the unequal burden of unpaid domestic labour, the precariousness of working-class family life can actually be abolished. As Rosa Luxemburg insisted more than a century ago, the winning of women's rights was never a task for women alone, but a common concern of the working class as a whole, men and women together.

Shelagh Delaney's writing endures because it captured, with unusual honesty for its time, the real texture of working-class life: its deprivations, its longing, its "taste of honey" glimpsed and denied. She deserves a biography that does justice to that honesty. Selina Todd has written a well-researched and often illuminating book, but one that ultimately tells us as much about the feminist politics of 2019 as it does about the Salford of the 1950s. Readers who come to Tastes of Honey looking for Delaney herself would do well to read her plays alongside it, and to draw their own conclusions about what she actually longed for, and why.

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Notes

1. See My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, reviewed by Jenn Shapland, 29 April 2021. 2–4. Simon Lee, "A Progenitor of Second-Wave Feminism: On Selina Todd's Tastes of Honey," Los Angeles Review of Books.
2. David Walsh, World Socialist Web Site, 19 October 2018.
3. Selina Todd, "Policy and Politics," selinatodd.com.
4. Rosa Luxemburg, "Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle," May 1912.

 

The Bailey Affair and the Politics of Cancellation

Blake Bailey's situation is not an isolated case; it reflects a broader shift in the publishing industry. Historically, publishers served as guardians of literary culture, bridging writers and readers with legitimacy rooted in editorial judgment, intellectual independence, and a dedication to the longevity of printed works. Today, their role has shifted toward risk management, with a focus on safeguarding brands rather than supporting literature.

This change did not happen suddenly. Over decades, publishing houses were merged into larger corporate groups, editorial teams were reduced, margins were squeezed, and decision-making was increasingly controlled by marketing and legal departments. In this setting, the logic is clear: a book is an asset until it turns into a liability. Once it does, the book is not protected; it is sold off.

The Bailey affair exemplifies this pattern, showing how quickly a publisher can go from praising a work to condemning it, often with minimal trigger—such as a headline, a social media backlash, or the perception that protecting its reputation matters more than economic loss. This isn’t genuine accountability; it’s corporate self-interest disguised as moral certainty.

The New Mechanism of Control

What is notable is not only that Bailey’s book was withdrawn but also the speed and thoroughness of its removal. The biography wasn't merely paused; it was completely erased. This highlights how digital platforms manage literature: when controversy arises, contentious content is wiped out as if it never existed. Essentially, the book becomes an unperson—neither challenged nor discussed, just vanished.

This represents the purest form of cancellation politics. It's not centred on justice for victims or authors' moral integrity. Instead, it concerns control over the cultural record—determining who decides what content stays accessible for reading, citing, teaching, or criticising. Increasingly, these decisions are made not by editors or readers, but by corporate risk officers managing reputational risks.

The irony, as you observe, is almost too fitting. Roth spent years warning that charges of misogyny served as a form of ideological censorship — intended to silence debate instead of fostering it. Now, his biographer has fallen victim to that very tactic, and his book has been ruined by the forces Roth warned about. The biography unintentionally exemplifies Roth’s main argument.

The Collapse of Due Process into Public Relations

The fundamental problem is the merging of accusation and judgment. In a healthy civil society, claims are scrutinised, evidence is evaluated, and decisions are made through proper procedures. Today, in the publishing world, allegations are not thoroughly tested; instead, they are managed. The focus shifts from understanding "what happened" to questioning "what this will cost us." This change is not neutral; it signifies a major shift in cultural authority. When publishers treat accusations as final judgments, they delegate their editorial responsibility to the most unpredictable part of public discourse: social-media outrage. The loudest accusation often appears most credible. The most harmful claim gains the most influence. Consequently, publishers become enforcers of the prevailing moral panic.

The impact on literary culture is real and pressing. If publishers begin to pre-emptively erase content, all controversial authors become at risk. Any biography, novel, or memoir hinges on the author's reputation, turning literature into a hostage to individual morality. This environment discourages daring writing, fostering caution, conformity, and self-censorship. Consequently, the literary landscape shrinks. Topics that involve risks are avoided, complex figures go unexamined, and authors with complicated personal lives—most of them—are seen as liabilities. This thins the archive, creating a fragmented historical record. Future scholars will encounter gaps in our literary history, making it harder to fully understand our era.

What Is at Stake

The Bailey affair isn't solely about Bailey; it's about whether literature can endure in a world where publishers act like crisis managers. It's also about whether books can stand apart from their authors' reputations. It also asks whether the crucial boundary between accusation and proof—a fundamental civil society safeguard—will be maintained or discarded. If this line blurs, the impact won't be limited to a single biography but will influence the entire landscape of cultural creation. A society that views allegations as verdicts will discourage fearless writing, leading to literature that is self-censoring and fearful.