History it ain’t
Here’s how to sum up the saddest thing about “The 1619 Project” as promoted by The New York Times Magazine: what might have been.
It’s a catchy name, signifying a program focused on the origins and legacy of slavery on the 400th anniversary of the first Africans’ arrival in Virginia.
It was a great idea for a special issue in August last year. In the tradition of provocative thinking, the contributing writers offered up some highly innovative perspectives on race in America.
But in the same way that any opinionated person who publishes a blog doesn’t magically acquire the training of a journalist, any activist journalist who purports to revise history doesn’t automatically obtain the acumen of a historical scholar. Consequently, some scholarly historians with impeccable credentials flat-out rejected The 1619 Project’s central premise.
Five distinguished signatories put their name to an objectionary letter in December to The New
York Times Magazine demanding corrections to errors of fact.
Most specifically, the quintet took great exception with the following claims made in Nikole Hannah-Jones’ main essay:
“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
Huh?
“By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. …”
Says who?
“In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.”
Does she mean founders like John Adams, the undisputed leader of the independence movement, who hated slavery and owned no slaves?
The five historians’ letter called out Hannah-Jones unceremoniously.
“These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing.’ They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism,” the historians wrote.
“They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.”
The letter concluded with three requests: that The Times “issue prominent corrections of all the errors and distortions presented in The 1619 Project”; that it also remove “these mistakes from any materials destined for use in schools, as well as in all further publications.”
“We ask finally,” the letter concluded, “that The Times reveal fully the process through which the historical materials were and continue to be assembled, checked and authenticated.”
The Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein published a long-winded reply, littered with lofty ambiguities and nebulous dodges, which essentially amounted to this: No, No and No Way.
Acknowledging that “we may not be historians,” he argued nevertheless that Hannah-Jones’ statement as fact that slavery was a primary reason for American independence was “grounded in the historical record.”
Whatever that’s supposed to mean, it sounds like the sort of thing said when the aim is to muddy a subject, not clarify it.
One of the five historians, Gordon Wood, wrote a scathing rebuttal letter a day later, providing clarification based on his half-century of study and Pulitzer- and Bancroft Prize-winning works about the American founding.
“I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776,” he wrote.
“There is no evidence in 1776 of a rising movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, as the 1619 Project erroneously asserts, nor is there any evidence the British government was eager to do so.”
Silverstein’s defense of the authentication process—“our researchers carefully reviewed all the articles in the issue with subject-area experts”— also fell flat when another historian who was one of the experts contacted by a Times research editor recalled listening “in stunned silence” at learning that Hannah-Jones’s attempt to qualify her opinions as facts had been retained as a core truth in The 1619 Project.
“I vigorously disputed the claim,” said Northwestern University professor of history Leslie Harris in a Politico article. “Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.
“Despite my advice,” Harris continued, “The Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway.”
It’s a pity that truth and facts should have been enough for The 1619 Project, but weren’t. Increasingly, agenda-driven journalists begin with a headline and then look only for supporting evidence.
In the case of The 1619 Project, when evidence proved nonexistent, Hannah-Jones and Silverstein simply decided the ideological message was more important than the historical truth.
Silverstein said as much in his letter, contending that the paramount need was “a greater variety of voices doing the telling” of history in order to fully understand it.
That might work so long as every voice starts by telling the truth. Starting with something false, as Harris and Wood both warned, will taint and discredit all that follows.
And that’s a shame.