2001 Times Magazine 1619 Project Does a History Makeover
2001 – The 1619 Project Is Less History Than It Is Propaganda
There seems to be one common if not dominant tool used by revolutionary movements. It is used by every type, no matter what the label is – Fascist, Socialist, Marxist, or what is now known as the New Historians of Capitalism (NHC). The tool, really a weapon, is the systematic revisionist re-telling of history in order to match a cause, grievance, or worldview. The concept is quite simple; change a heritage to change an identity to make a new identity.
2019 was the 400th “anniversary” of the arrival of the first African slaves to the English colonies at Jamestown (founded, 1607) in 1619. The New York Times Magazine officially put a campaign into full swing dubbed the 1619 project. It contains stories and poems and is intended to end up in public school curriculums. The 1619 effort openly and unapologetically uses the “re-telling” tool. The Times’ efforts are not an innocent rebranding of historic labels or a simple re-focusing of some historical details over others. “1619” is a remaking of America’s founding. It posits the idea that America’s founding has erroneously been attributed to 1776. The claim is that the real beginning was in 1619 when the first African slaves were off-loaded on New World soil and used as barter for “victualle” (survival supplies) as the Jamestown colonists put it.
In an interview in 2017 (“The Clear Connection Between Slavery and American Capitalism”) by Dina Gerdeman (Harvard Business School – HBS) with one of the leading “lights” of the NHC movement, Sven Beckert summarizes the overall agenda well. Gerdeman introduced her interview this way: “Now 16 scholars are helping to set the record straight by exploring the true ties (italics mine) between 19th century economic development and a brutal system of human bondage”.
Beckert and associates make several claims that they use as historical and economic facts which they say mainstream experts have, either knowingly or through racial blindness, neglected to properly use in the shaping of America’s story. To advance their purpose to reshape U.S. history into a shameful past with an enduring DNA of racism, they must establish an American pre-Civil War dependence on cotton and therefore slavery. Those assumptions simply have no bases in fact.
All of this has met with praise by the Left and substantial criticism from the majority of historians and economists. In typical fashion, the Left blames criticisms on fear, racism, or blind allegiance to the historical status-quo. On the other hand, historians such as Pulitzer Prize winner James McPherson in addition to Gordon Wood of Brown University, and James Oakes among many others, have described 1619 as unbalanced, anti-historical, filled with factual errors, and some of its assertions ridiculous.
One of the most detailed analyses of NHC theory and claims has been offered by economists Alan Olmstead (University of California, Davis) and Paul Rhode (University of Michigan) in a paper entitled “Cotton, slavery, and the New History of Capitalism”. The work of Olmstead and Rhode spans the spectrum of over 90 scholarly sources. They carefully document distortions, inaccurate citations, unsupported inferences, mishandled evidence, and mischaracterizations of events.
Rhodes and Olmstead analyze the NHC case through critiques of three books written by three of the movement’s leading proponents (Sven Beckert, Walter Johnson, and Edward Baptist) who build their case on three pillars of thought; Cotton, slavery, and the Industrial Revolution.
New Historians of Capitalism claim that cotton was central to the entire economic system of the South, if not the United States as a whole, and that slavery was its essential foundation. If that were true, the cotton industry should have struggled after the slaves were emancipated and the vast majority of blacks should have been shoved into sharecropping. The fact is that after the Civil War cotton production reached twice its highest level ever achieved. Not only that, in many geographic areas whites actually outnumbered blacks within the sharecropping system. Furthermore, corn, hay, swine, and cattle were far more important to the nation than cotton.
The next claim follows from the first that in order for the cotton industry to survive, it needed the “cheap labor” of slaves. In essence, slavery had to be the brutal power behind cotton’s supremacy. As such, slavery is represented as defining the development of America capitalism. In reality, American slavery was actually very expensive compared to other forms of slavery that existed in the world at that time. In many cases, plantations and farmers had to subsidize cotton and their fixed-expense slavery by raising other cash crops. In 1850, slaves represented only 14.1% of national wealth and Southern slaves cost, for example, 10 times that of slaves in India.
Finally, if King Cotton survived on slavery and slavery undergirded capitalism, then the innovations and explosive growth of the free market industrial revolution ultimately rested on slavery. The problem is that even though cotton was the leading U.S. export before the Civil War, it was less than 10% of the nation’s total income and only 5% of what we now call the Gross National Product. By the way, the Industrial Revolution was well-established long before cotton’s supposed predominance.
The 1619 project is a naked attempt to shanghai history for leftist purposes. Among myriads of other offenses, its entire agenda is based on false data, unfounded conclusions and, from a very important perspective, its own racism. In all of world history, slavery has never been exclusively about racism. It has always been an exercise of brutal subjugation of weaker peoples for national and/or economic gain on the backs of others or for trophies of war. The idea that American racism is unique and part of its DNA is nothing more than a self-interested abuse of reality.