Disputed History
Notes on Patriotic Hagiography, Establishment Resistance, and the 1619 Project
Notes on Patriotic Hagiography, Establishment Resistance, and the 1619 Project
History has always been contested terrain. As the cliche goes, history is told by the winners — though, I think a more accurate statement might be to claim that the powerful get to control how history is presented, to raise up the myths that govern our understanding of ourselves, and that control our politics.
Battles over history implicate our self-described identities and belief systems. When Donald Trump calls for the teaching of patriotic history, what he is advocating is indoctrination into the myth of American exceptionalism — America the great and infallible — while the symbols and historical he chooses to extol and defend — Confederate heroes, slave holders, racists — tell us that his exceptionalism is also a form of White supremacy.
Trump, during a speech at the National Archive, announced that he planned to sign an order creating “a national commission to promote patriotic education.” This “1776 Commission,” as he called it, would “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding.”
This is not a benign effort, nor is it a new idea. It is consistent with the efforts that have taken place for decades to whitewash American history, to erase any mention of the harm we have caused globally or domestically, to create an approved narrative that defines what American means and who gets to claim that label.
“Our mission,” Trump said, “is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character.” This is patriotic boilerplate, except for the word “defend.” Trump and the conservatives in his circle — and many of those who proclaim themselves never-Trumpers but were on board with similar efforts during the Reagan and both Bush administrations — view critical histories as a “twisted web of lies” that must be cleared away.
We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. To grow up in America is to live in a land where anything is possible, where anyone can rise, and where any dream can come true — all because of the immortal principles our nation’s founders inscribed nearly two and a half centuries ago.
Trump specifically called out The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which attempted to recast the story of American democracy through its history of slavery and Jim Crow laws, and which has weathered attacks from right and left, often for mostly political reasons.
The project was published in August and makes several claims, the most notable of which is that American’s true founding occurred in 1619 when the first indentured blacks were landed on American soil. The argument, fostered by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times journalist that marshaled the project to publication, ties all of the failures of American democracy to the 246 year as of American slavery that followed — an argument that is not new.
The project is compelling, if flawed. But the debate over the project tracks with the fissures and fault lines in American politics. On the right, at least among the pundit class, there is an unsurprising unity in its reaction, which has its clearest expression in Trump’s accusation of that the “left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies,” with the 1619 Project “rewrit(ing) American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.”
This is not exactly true — and it is no different than the criticism leveled at President Obama when he acknowledged the misdeeds of our past. How dare he apologize? We are never wrong, the right huffed — and the right continues to huff and puff, denying that American history is anything other than a direct line to greatness. What Trump and his allies want to restore is not a factual and nuanced historical narrative, but a version of history that functions as national hagiography, history as patriotic prop, as indoctrination.
The project has faced criticism from liberal historians, as well, with some of the most important and renowned academics questioning its use of facts and the conclusions it draws — and some of the same through lines making an appearance. While there are criticisms of the project’s relative silence on class issues (a legitimate line of argument), the liberal pushback has centered on 1619’s more pessimistic tone, on its assertion that racist thinking undergirded many of the decisions made by history’s Great Men. And these criticisms have been met by a cohort of centrist-liberals with a kind of glee that echoes the debates during the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries between the moderates and the party’s left wing, with establishment candidates attempting to portray Bernie Sanders and his supporters (along with Elizabeth Warren) as out of step and too extreme even though many of the policies the left was pursuing are actually quite popular with the public.
The historical debate may have different contours, but the lines being drawn do not seem all that dissimilar — establishment vs. upstarts, defenders of the historical record vs. critics, optimism vs. pessimism, white vs. black. The debate on the left over 1619 reached is apotheosis in December when a letter to the Times signed by five eminent historians was published as a response by the paper, after each had made their critiques known in other places. Their criticism, which they frame as factual but that other historians view somewhat differently, was rebutted in a letter from Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein.
I’m not qualified to judge this debate. There apparently are errors of fact, at least according to critics, and legitimate questions about its broader conclusions. This should not be a surprise. History, as I said, is always contested, with new perspectives and interpretations leading to debate and changes in the way we view the past. That happened with the Reconstruction Era, for instance, which for decades was viewed as a failure but is now seen by most historians (thanks, in part, to Eric Foner’s book Reconstruction) as a success that reinvigorated the national political system.
From what I can see from my decidedly unexpert perch, the debate on the left is less about fact than about interpretation of information. It is no accident that there is little consensus on the project in the history world, because — as this fine piece from The Boston Review points out — there is not even much consensus among historians about the issues being debated. There are fault lines here that are generational, racial, gender-based, and political, and they mirror the fault lines that divide liberals and have divided liberals for decades.
“These are perennial issues in the history of emancipation and civil rights,” the historian David Waldstreicher writes in The Boston Review.
It is no coincidence, though, that the first claim, about the American Revolution, has proved the most controversial. This dispute reflects deep fault lines in the field of U.S. history over interpretations of the Revolution, particularly in terms of its relationship to slavery and the status of African Americans. Though it rarely spills out into public view in quite the way it has recently, there is a longstanding debate within the academy over just how revolutionary the American Revolution really was.
Waldstreicher describes two loose sets of historians, one “espousing what we might call the establishment view” of a revolutionary revolution that planted the seeds of emancipation, and a younger group that sees a “multi-sided struggle in an American Revolution that was about colonizing and winning power and authority.”
The establishment group, represented by the letter writers, sees the American Revolution as “fundamentally antislavery, since it led to what Bernard Bailyn called in his 1967 study The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution a ‘contagion of liberty’ that made it possible for Americans to think critically about ending the institution.”
The younger historians, he writes, “question the establishment view of the Revolution and the founders.”
They see slavery as more than a peripheral matter. They do not take for granted that the story is primarily one of uncovering the motives and beliefs of the founders. Their work has considerably undercut the glass-half-full version of the narrative, which sees the end of slavery as a long-term consequence of American idealism and independence.
The debate over 1619 is a “pre-existing argument between historians themselves,” he adds.
The arguments made by the 1619 Project are largely based on the work of scholars such as Horne, Holton, Taylor, myself, and others…. By bringing the critical ideas of these scholars to a wide audience, the 1619 Project essentially drew back the curtain on a vital debate within the field of U.S. history. By responding with such force, critics of the project have helped define the contours of this debate. It is an important one for us to have, in part because this is an argument that goes all the way back to the founding itself.
Adam Lichtenstein’s From the Editor’s Desk column in the February issue of The American Historical Review makes a similar point. The essay, titled “1619 and All That,” makes it clear that much of the debate is about interpretation and that, if Jones (as opposed to the larger 1619 Project) is guilty of anything, it is engaging in hyperbole — as are the big-foot historians who signed a letter to the Times.
Lichtenstein writes that the historians’ letter focuses on “Three examples of disputable errors, or perhaps overstatements, in a single essay,” that, “Even if bolstered by what the letter refers to as ‘verifiable fact,’” do not support a full “dismissal of the entire project.”
“Historians,” he adds, “would be justified to complain that the Times presents as a radical reorientation an interpretation that differs little from a long-term, if still incomplete, trend to move African American history to the center of the American narrative.”
This is due, in part, to the flaws in the journalistic project. Journalism and popular history differ in their objectives and audience from academic histories. Journalists have been taught to focus on the new and novel, even as so much of what has come to pass for political reporting has the whiff of stale narrative and cliche. We write for a broad audience and compete for attention with celebrity news and Monday Night Football. Academic historians work in a very different world with very different incentives.
“Reasonable interpretive disagreements can stem from the bad habit some journalists have of substituting dramatic overstatement for historical analysis, and there is no shame in pointing these out,” he writes. The 1619 Project’s
treatment of American slavery in isolation from the presence of the so-called “peculiar institution” in the larger Atlantic World is out of step with current historiography. The project’s emphasis on continuity (especially in economic history), rather than change, deserves to be challenged.
I think this helps contextualize Nell Irvin Painter’s response. Painter, author of The History of White People and former director of African American Studies at Princeton, declined to sign the letter. She told Adam Swerwer of The Atlantic last year that she “objected to the 1619 Project’s portrayal of the arrival of African laborers in 1619 as slaves,” a point she had made in a Guardian essay that ran almost concurrently with the Times’ special edition.
She told Swerwer that essays in the 1619 Project were not history “as I would write it,” but she “felt that if I signed on to that, I would be signing on to the white guy’s attack of something that has given a lot of black journalists and writers a chance to speak up in a really big way.”
The letter writers, she said, see “true history” as “how they would write it,” and that they were asking her “to choose sides, and my side is 1619’s side … in a world in which there are only those two sides.”
This, I think, is what this debate is largely about — the cleaving of this discussion into two sides and the protection of a kind of privilege earned through years of study, but that has become entrenched. “What is odd about the letter is that it implies that the singular problem with the 1619 Project is that journalists are practicing history without a license,” Lichtenstein writes. Yet, it is not odd at all. It is a dynamic we see in economics, in foreign affairs, in discussions of policy, where certain ideas that may have seemed radical, or that made sense at a certain point in the recent past, are elevated to dogma, and where those who profess those ideas eventually come to be seen as the protectors of a kind of received wisdom.
Again, I’m not a historian, nor do I possess a comprehensive understanding of the scholarship, nor do I mean to imply that Wilentz, et al, are engaged in anything but the most sincere effort to ensure that accurate history is presented. My argument here should be seen as less about the historians who signed the letter, and more about the rift that exists between centrist-liberals and those farther left — a split that is real, and that shows itself in many of the criticisms being leveled at the so-called renegade Democrats in “The Squad.”
It has become fashionable among liberals to use the word “woke” as an epithet, an attack that has little to with rational debate and everything to do with privilege and access. To attack one as “woke” is to say that one is not serious, that one perhaps is starry-eyed and utopian, that one misunderstands politics. The focus on race in the 1619 project and the reaction it engendered from liberal historians played into this fashionable dismissal — see, even the left is criticizing 1619, a line of argument that ignores the substance of the debates, who the players are, and how they are lining up. This is old-fashioned hippie punching in a different guise.
The debate over the 1619 Project is one that we should be having, both about the details and the interpretation. The glee over the Wilentz letter does little to address the issues raised by the writers involved in the 1619 Project or the criticisms being leveled. The glee among what I’ll call the “anti-woke left” has a lot in common with Trump and the right-wing’s attacks, because it is dismissive of new interpretations and defensive when it comes to the historical mythology we constantly hawk in the public sphere. This defensiveness is how privilege stamps itself on the historical imagination, how it preserves a mistaken American exceptionalism and the false notion that the American nation is always moving forward, always progressing toward a more open and tolerant society. Donald Trump’s presidency and the damage he is doing should be enough evidence that the arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend, but must be bent, that the expansions of rights, the inclusion of vulnerable populations, the progress we like to loudly proclaim is not inevitable.
No, the 1619 Project is not perfect, but it was necessary and the arguments it made need to be part of the larger public debate over who we were, who we are, and who we might become in the near and distant future.