“An informed citizenry is the bulwark of our democracy.” The words, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, raise an important question: What are the consequences to our democracy of a misinformed citizenry?
That is the question we parents of school-age children must ask about The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Its overall theme is that “out of slavery grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system.”
This distorted reading is an educational virus, engineered to infect schoolchildren and warp their understanding of our history — to make that history seem poisonous and evil rather than complex, tragic and noble.
The Pulitzer Center (not related to the Pulitzer Prizes) has designed an entire curriculum based on 1619: “The 1619 Project is more than a magazine issue. It’s a national conversation that demands analysis, reflection and insight from students.”
The material invites students to “come together as a class to create a new timeline of US history. Your timeline should start with the year 1619; work with your classmates to order the rest of the events you compiled.” Yes, students who don’t know anything about US history are being tasked to “create a new timeline” of it. This is what propaganda is. This is what propaganda does.
What exactly is being propagandized here? If the root fact of the United States is slavery rather than a centuries-long and tortuous journey toward a new nation, based, for the first time in human history, in liberty — then the country is irredeemable, likely beyond salvation.
Futzing around with history to serve present-day fashions is an enduring feature of the ideologically warped. But the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith.
It incriminates generations who bear no guilt. No one now living was alive when slavery existed, and enormous numbers of Americans didn’t have forebears here when it did. I am one of maybe 100 million people whose ancestors came to this country long after slavery was abolished. How exactly are people like me implicated?
The 1619 argument is that America became an economic powerhouse largely if not exclusively because of slavery, and, therefore, slavery was the lure that led my grandparents to immigrate here. A key academic text used to further that argument, Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told,” claims that 50 percent of all economic activity in the United States in 1836 was due to slavery.
But as the eminent historian Wilfred McClay points out, Baptist’s figure is based on statistical bungling, and the correct number should have been closer to 5 percent, rather than 50. “Now, 5 percent is not an insignificant amount by any means,” McClay grants, “but it’s vastly different from half.”
Even if it were true, 25 years after Baptist’s misunderstood year, the Civil War began — and as it was winding down, President Abraham Lincoln spoke these words about the conflict that killed more than half a million: “Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said: ‘The judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’ ”
Lincoln’s words about God’s justice being visited upon America for the sin of slavery are America, too. In fact, they are more American than the America of the 1619 Project.
The Times project is an effort to alter the composition of the culture’s amniotic fluid, to bathe its most innocent creatures in something they will have no way of knowing is a slander.
The effort is led by a massive corporation comfortably housing writers who are preaching the villainy of the United States on six-digit salaries. What we have here are people at the summit of the elite talking without irony about the injustices of the nation that has garlanded them with fame, influence and power.
In misinforming the citizenry and thereby making it vastly more difficult for parents to raise their children as proud Americans who must continue the great experiment in liberty that began in 1776, the elite hypocrites behind the 1619 Project are damaging the very republic that has made them first among equals.
(Oh, and by the way: That Thomas Jefferson quote … there’s no evidence he ever said it. History is tricky.)
jpodhoretz@gmail.com