George Will: The malicious, historically illiterate 1619 Project keeps rolling on
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The New York Times is like God, who, if Genesis reported Creation correctly, beheld His handiwork and decided “it was very good.” The Times is comparably pleased with itself concerning its creation, “The 1619 Project.”
This began in August 2019 as aspecial editionof the paper’s Sunday magazine. Now it has becomea bookby which the Times continues attempting to “reframe” U.S. history. In the Times, an advertisement for the Times’s book describes it as “a dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism.” That description damages journalism’s reputation for respecting facts, which the 2019 writing that begot this bookdid not do. The 1619 Project’s tendentiousness reeks of political purpose.
The Times’s original splashy assertion – slightlyfudgedafterthe splash garnered aPulitzer Prize– was that the American Revolution, the most important event in our history, was shameful because a primary reason it was fought was to preserve slavery. The war was supposedly ignited by a November 1775 Britishofferof freedom to Blacks who fled slavery and joined British forces.
Well.
That offer came after increasingly volcanic American reactions to various British provocations: After the 1765 Stamp Act. After the 1770 Boston Massacre. After the 1773 Boston Tea Party. After the 1774 Coercive Acts (including closure of Boston’s port) and other events of “The Long Year of Revolution” (the subtitle of Mary Beth Norton’s “1774”). And after, in 1775, the April 19 battles of Lexington and Concord, the June 17 battle of Bunker Hill and George Washington on July 3 assuming command of the Continental Army.
Writing history is not like doing physics. But event A cannot have caused event B if B began before A.
Addressing the American Council of Trustees and Alumni last month, Gordon S. Wood, today’s foremost scholar of America’s Founding, dissected the 1619 Project’s contentions. When the Revolution erupted, Britain “was not threatening to abolish slavery in its empire,” which included lucrative, slavery-dependent sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean. Wood added:
“If the Virginian slaveholders had been frightened of British abolitionism, why only eight years after the war ended would the board of visitors or the trustees of the College of William & Mary, wealthy slaveholders all, award an honorary degree to Granville Sharp, the leading British abolitionist at the time? Had they changed their minds so quickly? ... The New York Times has no accurate knowledge of Virginia’s Revolutionary culture and cannot begin to answer these questions.” The Times’s political agenda requires ignoring what Wood knows:
“It was the American colonists who were interested in abolitionism in 1776. ... Not only were the northern states the first slaveholding governments in the world to abolish slavery, but the United States became the first nation in the world to begin actively suppressing the despicable international slave trade. The New York Times has the history completely backwards.”
Wood’s doctoral dissertation adviser in 1960 to 1964 was Bernard Bailyn, the title of whose best-known book, “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” conveys a refutation of the 1619 Project’s premise that the Revolution originated from base economic motives. When Bailyn died a year after the 1619 Project was launched, the Times’s obituary noted that he had challenged the “Progressive Era historians ... who saw the founders’ revolutionary rhetoric as a mask for economic interests.” Actually, the rhetoric gave momentum to ideas that were the Revolution.
The 1619 Project, which might already beembeddedin school curricula near you, reinforces the racial monomania of those progressives who argue that the nation was founded on, and remains saturated by, “systemic racism.” This racial obsession is instrumental; it serves a radical agenda that sweeps beyond racial matters. It is the agenda of clearing away all impediments, intellectual and institutional, to — in progressivism’s vocabulary — the “transformation” of the nation. The United States will be built back better when it has been instructed to be ashamed of itself and is eager to discard its disreputable heritage.
The 1619 Project aims to erase (in Wood’s words) “the Revolution and the principles that it articulated – liberty, equality and the well-being of ordinary people.” These ideas are, as Wood says, the adhesives that bind our exceptional nation whose people have shared principles, not a shared ancestry.
The Timessays“nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” flows from “slavery and the anti-black racism it required.”
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"The 1619 Project’s historical illiteracy is not innocent ignorance. Rather, it is maliciousness in the service of progressivism’s agenda, which is to construct a thoroughly different nation on the deconstructed rubble of what progressives hope will be the nation’s thoroughly discredited past."
The 1619 Project isn't about "teaching history" no matter how many times its apologists claim it is.
Thank you for seeding this exceptional article. 1619 propaganda is a clear and present danger along with CRT that must be opposed at all costs.
The MSM has pushed this evil trash as only they could have. We shouldn't even have such nonsense in the public forum.
The msm is the focus of evil when it comes to their bias and pushing an agenda down our throats. We the people stand tall and oppose this Un American propaganda being crammed down our kids throats.
This paragraph is spot on.
"The 1619 Project, which might already be embedded in school curricula near you, reinforces the racial monomania of those progressives who argue that the nation was founded on, and remains saturated by, “systemic racism.” This racial obsession is instrumental; it serves a radical agenda that sweeps beyond racial matters. It is the agenda of clearing away all impediments, intellectual and institutional, to — in progressivism’s vocabulary — the “transformation” of the nation. The United States will be built back better when it has been instructed to be ashamed of itself and is eager to discard its disreputable heritage."
Yes, as Will demonstrates, the 1619 project isn't about history, it's about indoctrination.
The preposterous lie about the desire to protect slavery causing the revolution gives away the game.
Indeed. The attempt to discredit the founding fathers and their founding documents is their end game.
It's certainly not to teach kids accurate history.
This is why so many parents are opposing it vocally at their local school board meetings.
The comments above are perfect examples as to why the US is fucked.
If that's what you think and how you feel you are allowed to leave anytime you wish to anyplace you feel is better. I'll even help you pack.
Can we do a go fund me for the one way passenger jet ticket?
Pulitzer Prize? well Pulitzer invented yellow, fake journalism... It's winning that award is appropriate...
But you do know, if they are now going this far, they figure they have already won the war... so keeping it quiet is non-essential to their purpose...
We are a lot farther down the road to a societal split than even I thought we were...
That's not good.. we need to start planning for what comes next...
Sad but probably true. Where do we go from here? Hopefully the parents protesting school board meetings will stem the tide before it’s too late to save America as one nation under God indivisible.