The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History

by David North, Tom Mackaman (Editor)

The definitive refutation of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, this volume includes original essays, lectures, and interviews with historians. Topics addressed include the complex development of slavery in the New World, the American Revolution, the sectional crisis over slavery and the Civil War, the struggle for social equality in the twentieth century, and the class politics of racial identity in the present.The book features interviews with renowned scholars Gordon Wood, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, Richard Carwardine, Clayborne Carson, Adolph Reed Jr., and Dolores Janiewski.This is a powerful resource for college and high school instructors—and a timely response to the 1619 Project’sinterpretation of American history as an endless race struggle between whites and blacks. As Walter Benn Michaels puts it, “Everyone interested in understanding what actually happened then and what’s actually happening now needs to read it.”

Genres: History, Politics, American History

501 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 18, 2021

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the definitive socialist critique of the rewriting of US history from the standpoint of contemporary liberal identity politics. It should be read by anyone seeking to understand the debate over the New York Times' 1619 Project, and more generally anyone who wants to understand the profoundly liberating consequences of the American Revolution and Civil War - a legacy which is now being slandered and falsified by the US media.

The contents include essays from World Socialist Web Site writers David North, Thomas Mackaman and others. There are also interviews with eight historians and scholars including Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum and Clayborne Carson.

The essays provide a Marxist analysis of slavery, the American Revolution and the contemporary race-based politics of the Democrats; and extensive polemics against the New York Times, including an important essay on Nikole Hannah-Jones being sponsored by Shell Oil, and essays defending Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.

This book is being buried by the media, but has been very highly praised by some of the most prominent US historians. William Weeks, for example, says "It may be that the survival of the historical profession as a legitimate enterprise depends on this critique being heard."

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of columns and interviews by the World Socialist Web Site exposing the fraudulence and falsification of history by the 1619 Project is a must read for anyone interested in American history and the future of education in the United States. The crude lies, both of commission and omission (for example, the failure to mention Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or the Harlem Renaissance, to mention just two out of many) are a travesty of history and reflect the bankruptcy of the current ideology of race theory that has taken hold in certain segments of academia. The interviews with the historians are very valuable, indeed. The research is impeccable. This collection is an education in itself and I cannot recommend it too highly.

[Michael Skora · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the book review for "Masterless Men" shared a pretty interesting history, the rest of the pamphlet is a trivial, bad-faith polemic with occasional valid points sprinkled throughout.

[Keith Livesey]

Both ideological and historical myths are a product of immediate class interests. These myths may be refuted by restoring historical truth—the honest presentation of facts and tendencies of the past.—Vadim Z. Rogovin

"Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies."

― Leon Trotsky

This groundbreaking book adds significantly to the arsenal of Marxist works that have utilised the historical materialist method in examing complex historical questions. This collection of essays and interviews represents the most consistent and sustained attack on the New York Times 1619 Project, released in August 2019. The book's publication is a significant political and intellectual event

The 1619 project denounced two seminal events in American history: the 1776 revolution that founded the United States and the Civil War of 1861–65. In its place, the New York Times put forward a completely new revisionist narrative that stipulated that the rebellion against Britain was a counterrevolution instigated to defend slavery and that the union forces in the Civil War were led by a president, Abraham Lincoln, who was a racist.

The lead writer and Project founder Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones said, "Our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true". For this piece of deep insight, the author was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Hannah-Jones made the preposterous claim that anti-black racism "runs in the very DNA of this country".

As you would expect from a work published by Mehring books, this collection of essays and lectures is based on meticulous research. It thoroughly discredits the 1619 Project's lies and distortions.

One question to book seeks to answer is why would the Times lie. As Leon Trotsky once pointed out the that when one lies about history, it is done to conceal real social contradictions. The Times project was released amidst truly staggering levels of social inequality produced by capitalism. As one writer wrote, "These contradictions can be resolved on a progressive basis only through the methods of class struggle. Efforts to divert and sabotage that struggle by dissolving class identity into the miasma of racial identity lead inexorably in the direction of fascism".[1]

Contained in the book are interviews with the most renowned scholars and specialists in the history of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s — Gordon Wood, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, Richard Carwardine, Clayborne Carson, Adolph Reed Jr., and Dolores Janiewski. Subjects examined are the "complex development of slavery in the New World, the American Revolution, the sectional crisis over slavery and the Civil War, the struggle for social equality in the twentieth century, and the class politics of racial identity in the present".

The most disturbing feature of the Times revisionist project was not so much what it contained, which was easily refuted, but the fact that it was left to the Trotskyist movement and the World Socialist Website(WSWS) to attack this abomination of historical falsehood. The Attack by the WSWS drew immediate media attention and very quickly seriously undermined the whole 1619 project. As one writer put it, it destroyed the Times "new historical narrative" and exposed it as a money-making venture.

In reading this book and its sustained attack on the 1619 project, it is not hard to understand why the stand taken by the WSWS and several leading Historians has altered the political and "intellectual terrain". It has destroyed the 1619 project. It has provided a textbook Marxist approach and has implemented a historical materialist method of historical investigation. One also has to admire the bravery of the historians that collaborated with the WSWS. These historians had "strong reservations about important aspects of the 1619 Project" and were "dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it." It is one thing for a Marxist to launch a polemical attack. After all, it is in their DNA. It is another for world-renowned historians to put their life's work on the line by defending historical truth.

The stand taken by the WSWS and these leading historian has encouraged others to enter the field of battle. One notable book has been Peter W Wood's book 1620. Peter.W.Wood's book is a very useful critique of the New York Times 1619 Project. It has been described as historiography of the debates over the 1619 Project. The Times basic premise is to reset American history by "asserting that all the laws, material gains, and cultural achievements of Americans are rooted in the exploitation of African-Americans".

To his credit, Woods does not buy into this absurd and dangerously wrong assumption. The book is an attempt, to sum up what critiques of the Project have written. While many of the most important historians who have written on the subject have published articles and letters opposing the Times, the political leadership in this fight against this travesty of historical study has fallen to the Trotskyist's at the World Socialist Website. While semi acknowledging this in the book, Wood's is not happy that it was the Trotskyists who first exposed this racialist and revisionist approach to American history. The fact that the Times project has been so discredited is down to the role played by the Marxists.

As the Marxist writer David North correctly points out, "As a business venture, the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision, it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the support of several distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history".

In his book, Wood opposes the 1619 project and offers a different starting point for modern American history, which is when the first pilgrims set foot in America in the 1620s. The political and historical study of the pilgrims is a worthwhile subject. To some degree, Wood's has a case in point, but American history has many such starting points. Most historians seem to stick with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 as America's founding.

Wood's book is one of the better critiques of the 1619 project, but it does not probe the politics behind 1619. As David North points out, "The "financialisation" of the Times has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the newspaper's selection of issues to be publicised and promoted: that is, its central role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always tenuous boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda. The consequences of the Times' financial and political evolution have found a particularly reactionary expression in the 1619 Project. Led by Ms Nikole Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619 Project was developed to provide the Democratic Party with a historical narrative that legitimised its efforts to develop an electoral constituency based on the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Party's decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the 1619 Project, by prioritising racial conflict, marginalises, and even eliminates, class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics".[2]

Given that the Trotskyists from the WSWS have led the political and historical fight against the Times deeply right-wing and revisionist historical viewpoint, it is perhaps not surprising that the WSWS has come under sustained attack from not only conservative sources but has been attacked by several Stalinist and Pseudo left individuals and organisations.

One of the more stupid and ignorant attacks came from the predictable Louis Proyect, who wrote," Indeed, nobody has published more "Trotskyist polemics" than them, as long as you are using the term Trotskyist without regard for what Trotsky stood for. An examination of the record will place Trotsky firmly in the Project 1619 camp. When Trotsky was living in Prinkipo, an island near Istanbul, in 1933, he met with Arne Swabeck (who coincidentally was one of the talking heads in Warren Beatty's "Reds"). Swabeck asked, "How must we view the position of the American Negro: As a national minority or as a racial minority?" Trotsky's reply probably would have made both Wilentz and his friends at WSWS beet-red with fury. He urged his comrades to support self-determination for Blacks even if it antagonised white workers, who were far more radical in 1933 than they are today".[3]

Proyect has a history of right-wing attacks on the WSWS. The WSWS called him a professional liar and said, "Proyect's blog—or should we call it blather—lacks all credibility. In his dishonesty, cynicism, and debased vulgarity, he epitomises all that is politically diseased in the milieu of American pseudo-left politics. His attack on the WSWS is the work of a man who has absolutely nothing to do with the politics, principles and culture of the Marxist movement. His blog were it correctly named, would be called "The Unrepentant Liar."[4]

Further attacks on the WSWS have come from the Stalinists of the USA Communist Party who wrote, "Trotskyists have traditionally attacked mainstream Communists and others who have sought to construct centre-left coalitions to defeat the right, attacks that have aided the right. Here, North, London, and the World Socialist Review have acted to support a centre-right backlash against a new history of slavery, a kind of negative United Front with the liberal and conservative celebrators of U.S. history. The author and co-signers of the protest letter, whom they defend, would never put "bourgeois" in front of "democratic" to define the American Revolution. In my experience, they would do what they usually do—reject the work of those like the scholars of the 1619 Project who challenge conventional wisdom and by their rejection prevent the article's publication in mainstream media".[5]

This duplicity has been the trademark of the Stalinists for nearly a century. It has been exposed and refuted by the Trotskyist movement and represents a desperate attempt by the Stalinist to breathe new life into the discredited Democratic party and join forces with the various other Pseudo Left groups that have backed the Project and have attacked the WSWS.

In the past, these Pseudo left organisations would have at least paid lip service to the struggles of the working class, but now this has been replaced by an open acceptance of new forms of non working class forms of struggle. James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose summarise this succinctly in this article[6] "We have moved into a new stage of history. The battles the left fought over the past half-century have largely been won. We cannot go back to focusing on miners' rights and trade unions, or on securing equal pay for women, outlawing racial discrimination, or legalising homosexuality: we have won those wars. Much of the right support these advances now too. We have new battles to fight. These include combating climate change, securing our place on the world stage and within the global economy, and fostering cohesive multiculturalism, free from moral relativism and enforced conformity. The left now finds itself pulled in many directions at once. This is the source of its profound identity crisis".One manifestation of this right-wing shift is the support by the Pseudo Left organisations of the 1619 racialist project.

Conclusion

It is hoped that The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: Essays and Interviews will find a wide audience. Its essays and interviews will be of interest to all readers of American history.

It is an essential aid for all teachers and college professors, students and the general reading public to counter the Times' blatant historical falsifications. It will also be a valuable tool in the struggle of both black and white workers in their struggle against capitalism.


[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020...

[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020...

[3] https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/...

[4] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015...

[5] https://www.cpusa.org/article/the-161...

[6] The Left is Having an Identity Crisis- https://areomagazine.com/2019/12/18/t...

[Steven H · Rating 4 out of 5]

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS CRITIQUING THE 1619 PROJECT

Editor David North wrote in the Foreword to this 2021 collection, “As a business venture the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the support of a number of distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history. In support of its claim that American history can be understood only when viewed through the prism of racial conflict, the 1619 Project sought to discredit American history’s two foundational events: The Revolution of 1775-1783 and the Civil War of 1861-65. This could only be achieved by a series of distortions, omissions, half-truths, and false statements---deceptions that are catalogued and refuted in this book.” (Pg. xii)

He continues, “the 1619 Project was concocted without consulting the works of the preeminent historians of the [American Revolution and the Civil War. This was not an oversight, but rather, the outcome of a deliberate decision by the New York Times to bar, to greatest extent possible, the participation of ‘white’ scholars in the development and writing of these essays… the Times informed its readers, ‘Almost every contributor in the magazine and special section… is black, a nonnegotiable aspect of the project that helps underscore its thesis…’ In fact, despite the color barrier favored [Nikole] Hannah-Jones, essays included in the 1619 Project were written by ‘whites.’ These efforts… are no better than the rest. This only goes to prove that the racialist viewpoint is rooted not in the racial identity of the author, but rather, in his or her class position and ideological orientation.” (Pg. xvii)

Eric London wrote in his essay, “The 1619 Project is a politically motivated attack on historical truth. Through this initiative the Democratic party seeks to present race, and not class, as the essential dividing line in American and world society. This historical falsification has a clear political value for the American financial aristocracy… Only an oligarchic society such as this one could product a figure like Donald Trump, who epitomizes in his reactionary politics and personal depravity all the characteristics of the degenerate and financial aristocracy.” (Pg. 29)

London cites a book by Keri Leigh Merritt, arguing that “This slaveholding class, enriching itself through trade with the ruling classes of aristocratic Europe, threatened to destroy the egalitarian and democratic principles of the American Revolution Secession, which the oligarchy carried out in the face of broad opposition among poor whites, was not a popular movement from below. It was a counterrevolutionary rebellion from above against the principle enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal.’ What were conditions for the majority of whites under slavery? The antebellum South was defined by extreme inequality, not only between slaveholders and their human ‘property,’ but also among whites…” (Pg. 41)

Joseph Kishore asserts, “Toward the end of her essay, Hannah-Jones declares that over the past half century ‘black Americans have made astounding progress…’ The vast majority of ‘black Americans,’ as with the vast majority of the working class as a whole, have, in fact, suffered a historical retrogression in their conditions of life. A small section, however, has made significant ‘progress.’… The conditions of life for the black elite have risen to levels that massively eclipse those that prevailed in the time of [E. Franklin] Frasier… the Obama administration … oversaw the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich in American history.” (Pg. 67-68)

James Oakes notes, “that slavery is the uniquely American ‘original sin’ … [is wrong]. The other is that slavery or racism is built into the DNA of America. These are really dangerous tropes. They’re not only ahistorical, they’re actually antihistorical. The function of those tropes is to deny change over time… They say… Nothing changes. There has been no industrialization. There has been no Great Migration. We’re all in the same boat we were back then… If it’s in the DNA, there’s nothing you can do. What do you do? Alter your DNA?” (Pg. 97)

Gordon Wood suggests, “In 1776, Great Britain… was certainly not the great champion of antislavery that the 1619 Project suggests. Indeed, it is the Northern States in 1776 that are the world’s leaders in the antislavery cause. The first antislavery meeting in the history of the world takes place in Philadelphia in 1775…” (Pg. 115)

Richard Carwardine states “the idea that the 1619 Project’s lead essay is a rounded history of America---with relations between the races so start and unyielding---I find quite shocking. I am troubled that this is designed to make its way into classrooms as THE true story of the United States, because… it is so partial. It is also wrong in some fundamentals. I’m all for recovering and celebrating the history of those whose voices have been historically muted and I certainly understand the concerns of historians… that the black contribution to the United States has not been fully recognized. But the idea that the central, fundamental story of the United States is one of white racism and that black protest and rejection of white superiority has been the essential, driving force for change---which I take to be the central message of that lead essay---seems to me to be a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past.” (Pg. 137-138)

Later, Gordon Wood notes, “I have spent my career studying the American Revolution and cannot accept the view 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.’ 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… There is no evidence in 1776 of a rising movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, as the 1719 Project erroneously asserts, nor is there any evidence the British government was eager to do so. But even if either were the case, ending the Atlantic slave trade would have been welcomed by the Virginia planters, who already had more slaves than they needed. Indeed, the Virginians in the years following independence took the lead in moving to abolish the despicable international slave trade.” (Pg. 199-200)

This book will be of keen interest to those studying the 1619 Project.