Historians rail against Trump administration's 1776 Commission
Historians have railed against the 1776 Commission following the Monday release of its report of what it called “a definitive chronicle of the American founding”.
The report, commissioned by the Donald Trump administration, urged America to return to an era of “patriotic education” amid what it called “reckless ‘re-education’ attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one”. But historians saw it differently. “The 1776 report is a puerile, politically reactionary document,” stated David Blight, author of the biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. He tweeted: “It doesn’t really use evidence except to employ founding documents and too many quotations out of context.”
Blight wrote that the report’s use of the abolitionist’s historic quote from a 4 July speech on the complications of its celebration for Black people was “so mis-used [he couldn’t] stop laughing.
“Trumpians will eat it up as may Fox News,” he wrote to the Guardian. “No legitimately trained historian or teacher will even be able to read through it all without nausea.”
The 45-page report is a rebuke of decades of historical scholarship on the legacy of American slavery, but primarily was created as a response to the New York Times’ Pulitzer prize-winning 1619 Project, a deep unpacking of the origins and legacy of institutional racism in American history.
The commission, created in September, offered what they claimed to be a non-partisan review of American history.
However, that analysis included excusing the nation’s founders for owning slaves and defending the racist Three-Fifths Compromise – when in 1787 white lawmakers from northern and southern states agreed to count Black people as three-fifths of a person for congressional representation – as necessary to form a “durable union”.
Most of the authors listed at the commission lacked credentials as historians, and scholars noted the report was missing citations, bibliographies and scholarly references – resources typical of research commissioned by the federal government and its agencies, or regarded among academics.
Others chided serious lapses in critical thinking or inaccurate comparisons of historical periods and terms.
“The biggest tell in the 1776 report is that it lists ‘progressivism’ along with ‘slavery’ and ‘fascism’ in its list of ‘challenges to America’s principles’,” Thomas Sugrue, a historian at New York University,
wrote on Twitter. “Time to rewrite my lectures to say that ending child labor and regulating meatpacking = hitlerism.”
Academics and scholars also noted the timing of the release. Published on Monday, it coincided with the US holiday recognizing the civil rights leader the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr on what would have been his92ndbirthday.
Following a live panel marking the holiday, the historian Margo Jefferson told the Guardian the 1776 report was “blatant in its insults and provocations”.
“It’s propaganda masquerading as a serious document with intellectual content,” she lamented. “It continues decades of rightwing attacks on progressive, probing American history and, by extension, politics, law and culture.”
Jefferson went on to call it “another useful document for virulently conservative educators and politicians; more grievance and paranoia fuel for true believers”.
Blight wrote to the Guardian that the commission used “King’s words and image so inappropriately”, insisting the timing was “taken in “advantage of [King Day] in the US” and was “an insult aimed directly at it”.
Following the release, commission member Mike Pompeo garnered additional backlash in the finals day of the Trump administration. The former secretary denounced multiculturalism as “not who America is”, implying that diversity in America distorts its “glorious founding and what this country is all about”.
“Our enemies stoke these divisions because they know they make us weaker,” Pompeo tweeted, posting a graphic of himself asserting “censoring, wokeness, political correctness
– it all points to one direction: authoritarianism cloaked as moral righteousness”.
Critics argue the remarks are another thinly veiled attack at the 1619 Project, which has since been adopted into school curriculums across grade levels and is cited as an educational resource for reform in institutions across the country.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, tweeted in response that Pompeo “unwittingly confirms the argument” made in the project by making the claim that “the founders set forth a government of white rule”.
Pompeo echoes the report’s challenges to any curriculum centering diversity, including critical race theory targeted by the president in September. Calling it “identity politics”, it argues the study “teaches that America itself is to blame for oppression”.
Critical race theory examines society and culture relative to race, law and power.
The White House confirmed it would immediately revoke the 1776 commission report. While an archived version remains online, the report came down soon after Biden officially took office at noon Wednesday.
Susan Rice, who will lead the White House domestic policy council, told reporters on Wednesday that Joe Biden’s administration would work to immediately “root out systemic racism from our institutions”, including ordering “a baseline review of systemic inequities in their programs and policies”.
As part of a range of executive actions, she said the president would “rescind [Donald] Trump’s harmful 1776 Commission and overturn his executive order limiting the ability of federal government agencies contractors, and even some grantees from implementing important and needed diversity and inclusion training”.