A Trumpet of Sedition.Org : Comment: Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present-James H. Sweet

The historian David Motadel recently wrote an article for the BBC History Magazine called Should historians interpret the past through the prism of the present? His article somewhat tamely examined one of the fiercest and one-sided debates to explode last year.

The historical controversy arose over an essay entitled ‘Is History History? Written by James H Sweet, then president of the influential American Historical Association, it was printed in that organisation’s magazine in August 2022. Sweet’s article was intended to open up a discussion on the relationship between the present and the past. This is an important and complicated subject. It raises questions about both methods—the way sources are used and interpreted—and philosophy. Sweet raised legitimate concerns and should not have offered an apology or retraction when he was heavily critiqued.

Sweet said little new in the article that had not been written about over the last two decades. He noted that looking at history “through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism,” has diminished “the values and mores of people in their times”.

Historian Lynn Hunt made similar points as Sweet in 2002,[1] with little fuss being made about it. But today, Sweet’s article caused a “global social media backlash”. It was branded “crap”, and he had a “smug condescension”. He was even called a “white supremacist,” and as a “white man,” he had no right to comment on black or African history. The New York Times called it “one of the confusing messes that pop up from time to time in the highest reaches of academia”, while The Washington Post called it “academia’s most recent pratfall”. The AHA was forced to take its Twitter account private.

Instead of challenging this witchhunt, Sweet issued a grovelling apology, saying, “My September Perspectives on History column has generated anger and dismay among many of our colleagues and members. I take full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused. I had hoped to open a conversation on how we “do” history in our current politically charged environment. Instead, I foreclosed this conversation for many members, causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association. A president’s monthly column, one of the privileges of the elected office, provides a megaphone to the membership and the discipline. The views and opinions expressed in that column are not those of the Association. If my ham-fisted attempt at provocation has proven anything, the AHA membership is as vocal and robust as ever. If anyone has criticisms that they have been reluctant or unable to post publicly, please feel free to contact me directly.”[2]

However, as the Marxist writer Tom Mackaman points out, “Sweet did not explain what it was, concretely, that had caused all the “damage” and “harm” he now confesses to have inflicted. If he were to explain, he would have to admit that his column hurt no one, that there was nothing offensive about it. Instead, he would have to say that his column violated the unspoken rules of censorship that hold sway over academia and circumscribe American intellectual life. Having stepped out of line—the president of the AHA, no less!—Sweet needed to be brought to heel, and it was no less essential that he flog himself before his censors. The problem for Sweet is that the embrace of identity politics, which is a religion of the phoney “progressive wing” of the Democratic Party (and also the main route to funding and career opportunities for many academics), must be totally—observed in public statements as well as private thought. He will remain suspect![3]

What was Sweet’s first sin? He made the cardinal error of attacking the current fixation with Presentism. As was said above, Sweet’s attack on Presentism was principled but not new. All Sweet did was repeat Hunt’s warning and attack “short-termism and identity politics defined by present concerns,” He asked, “Wouldn’t students be better served by taking degrees in sociology, political science, or ethnic studies instead? History suffuses everyday life in many places as Presentism; America is no exception. We suffer from an overabundance of history, not as a method or analysis, but as anachronistic data points for articulating competing politics. The consequences of this new history are everywhere.”

His second sin was to critique the New York Times 1619 project, albeit very mildly. He wrote, “When I first read the newspaper series that preceded the book, I thought of it as a synthesis of a tradition of Black nationalist historiography dating to the 19th century with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent call for reparations. The project spoke to the political moment, but I never thought of it primarily as a work of history. Ironically, it was professional historians’ engagement with the work that seemed to lend it historical legitimacy.

Then, the Pulitzer Center, in partnership with the Times, developed a secondary school curriculum around the project. Local school boards protested the characterisations of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison as unpatriotic owners of “forced labour camps.” Conservative lawmakers decided that if this was the history of slavery being taught in schools, the topic shouldn’t be taught. For them, challenging the Founders’ position as timeless tribunes of liberty was “racially divisive.” At each of these junctures, history was a zero-sum game of heroes and villains viewed through the prism of contemporary racial identity. It was not an analysis of people’s ideas in their own time, nor a process of change over time.”[4]

Sweet was not the only historian to attack the 1619 project. However, the Trotskyist movement, through the vehicle of the World Socialist Website, examined the true class nature of this falsification of history by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times. It said, “The 1619 Project,” published by the New York Times as a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine on August 19, presents and interprets American history through the prism of race and racial conflict.”

In a Major article published both on the website and in book form, The website wrote, “The methodology that underlies the 1619 Project is idealist (i.e., it derives social being from thought, rather than the other way around) and, in the most fundamental sense of the word, irrationalist. All of history is to be explained from the existence of a supra-historical emotional impulse. Slavery is viewed and analysed not as a specific economically rooted form of the exploitation of labour but, rather, as the manifestation of white racism. But where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.”

Bottom of Form

Sweet’s capitulation before social media was not a pretty sight. There has been no precedent for such an act of public contrition by the president of the AHA, not even in 1950s America. But deeper forces are at play than Sweet’s abject surrender. The witchhunt of Sweet indicates the advanced level of censorship and decline in American intellectual life. As David North and Tom Mackaman wrote in a letter published in the April 2020 issue of the American Historical Review: “It is high time for an intense and critical examination of the politics and social interests underlying the contemporary fixation with the unscientific category of racial identity, and its use as a battering ram against genuine historical scholarship. The Sweet Affair reveals that the time for this critical examination is well past due.”