What to “The New York Times” is the Fourth of July?
by
On The 1619 Project & the Declaration of Independence.
The editors and journalists at The New York Times are fixing to celebrate the Fourth of July in a few days. One has to wonder why.
After all, the newspaper of record has declared, through its sponsorship of The 1619 Project, that July 4 is a bogus holiday and that the Declaration of Independence was (and is) a fraud. The real birth of the country occurred not on July 4, 1776, with the separation from Great Britain, the Times says, but in 1619 when the first slaves arrived on American shores. While most Americans will celebrate the nation’s independence on July 4, there appears to be little reason for the Times to do so.
In 2019, The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to The 1619 Project, organized and edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones and published to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of these slaves’ arrival. The essays included in that issue asserted several controversial propositions. For example: the American Revolution was fought mainly to defend the institution of slavery; slavery was the original source of American wealth and the cornerstone for the development of American capitalism; and, for these reasons, the “real” founding of the United States occurred in 1619, not 1776. The project was quickly packaged into a book, a television series, and a history curriculum for high-school students. Ms. Hannah-Jones received a Pulitzer Prize for her introductory essay and her work in organizing the project. In cooperation with the Times, she continues to promote the project.
The 1619 Project has come in for withering criticism from distinguished historians who maintain that many of its claims are false or wildly exaggerated. In a letter to the Times in 2019, Gordon Wood, James McPherson, and several other renowned historians specified many errors in the essays and asked the Times to consider correcting some of the project’s more specious claims. They pinpointed the dubious assertion that the American Revolution had been fought to maintain the institution of slavery, and they suggested that the Times seemed to be promoting leftist ideology over historical accuracy. Other historians noted another obvious truth the Times ignored: it was the spread of capitalism, along with ideals about free labor and individual rights, that spurred the anti-slavery movement and eventually doomed slaveholding. These ideals were inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, which served as a banner for critics of slavery. If the words of the Declaration are true, then it follows that slavery must be wrong.
In fact, The 1619 Project says little about the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution that was not also expressed by supporters of slavery in the antebellum era. In a bizarre way, Ms. Hannah-Jones and her colleagues have been repeating arguments originally advanced to defend slavery.
In the slavery debates during the 1840s and 1850s, many Southerners pointed out (much like Ms. Hannah-Jones) that the authors of the Declaration could not have meant what they said because Thomas Jefferson and other signers owned slaves at the time. Senator John C. Calhoun went further when he declared that there was “not a word of truth” in the claim that “all men are created equal.” A colleague of his said that this “self-evident truth” was in fact a “self-evident lie,” much in keeping with the claims of The 1619 Project. The Supreme Court, repackaging these claims, held in the Dred Scott decision (1857) that the words of the Declaration were not meant to apply to blacks—another contention advanced by The 1619 Project. Others argued that the principles announced in the Declaration were never meant to have universal application, but rather served only to justify the separation of the American colonies from Great Britain. This idea reappears in The 1619 Projectin order to “reconstruct” the American Revolution as an event carried out to protect economic interests (including slavery) rather than a noble campaign to advance the causes of liberty, equality, and representative government. This in turn leads back to the central idea of The 1619 Project—that the “real” founding of the United States occurred in 1619, not 1776.
The authors of The 1619 Project try to weasel out of the implications of their claims by asserting that the words of the Declaration were not true at the time they were written or for generations afterwards but are being “made true” today in various campaigns for civil rights and equality. The argument is false. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence are being “made true” today, as they have been in the past, because they in fact are true—they were equally true in 1776, 1857 and 1861, in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed, and are true today. They are being “made” true because they are true. And if they were false in the past, then neither The New York Times nor Ms. Hannah-Jones possess the power to make them true.
Abraham Lincoln refuted the attacks on the Declaration better than anyone in the years leading up to the Civil War. His words apply with equal force to the misrepresentations by The 1619 Project. The ideals expressed in the Declaration, that “notable instrument,” he said, set forth the basic principles of a free society. Lincoln declared in response to the Dred Scott decision and in his debates with Senator Stephen Douglas in 1858 that the authors of the Declaration
The words intended, as he said, to set up liberty as a standard to apply to all people at all times, such that it might be continually realized in practice as circumstances change.
If this had not been so, if Lincoln and others had not believed the words of the Declaration to be true, then slavery would not have ended as it did, immigrants from around the world would not have come to America in search of liberty and opportunity, the various civil-rights acts would not have been approved, and the United States would have developed as just another state in a world of states, lacking distinctive ideals to guide and animate it. The United States is an exceptional nation and is widely understood to be an exceptional nation, in large part thanks to the Declaration of Independence. In this sense, the critics have a chosen their target wisely: by discrediting the Declaration of Independence, they also discredit the idea of American exceptionalism.
Despite Lincoln’s words, Ms. Hannah-Jones and her colleagues have said that Lincoln was in fact a bigot, because at various points in his career he supported the expatriation of newly freed slaves back to Africa. He harbored doubts, because of slavery’s legacy, that the races could live in harmony with one another. But, as the Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo points out, this suggested expatriation was part and parcel of the campaign to bring slavery to a peaceful end—and was roundly rejected by the slave-owning class. In addition, Lincoln never did anything to pursue the idea as president, eventually dismissing it as a “hideous and barbarous humbug.”
But what Lincoln did do was enact what was needed to end slavery in practice. In addition to the above statements about the Declaration, he asserted more than anyone the equal rights of all Americans. He rejected slavery from an early age. He denounced the Dred Scott decision and called for it to be overturned. He said that Congress must restrict the export of slaves into the western territories. As president he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. He armed black soldiers and let them participate in battle, declaring later that by doing so they had earned the rights of full citizenship. He named slavery as the cause of the Civil War in his Second Inaugural Address and said that the struggle must continue until the institution was destroyed. He rallied support for ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, banning slavery in the United Sates. He declared in the Gettysburg Address that the United States was founded in 1776 on the basis of the Declaration of Independence. The nation was dedicated, he said, “to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Sojourner Truth, after meeting with Lincoln, proclaimed that the president was “a great and good man.” Frederick Douglass said that he was “emphatically the black man’s president.” Lincoln’s deeds, combined with the judgments of black Americans at the time, should absolve him of all these tortured accusations.
The 1619 Project should be viewed as but another step in the march of folly set in motion by new leftists in the 1960s who hoped to discredit the United States as a functioning polity and international power. They disliked everything about the United States: its European heritage; its great wealth and power; and most of all, its market economy and respect for property rights. From this standpoint, it makes perfect sense to view The 1619 Project as another hoax perpetrated by new leftists who have achieved power at The New York Times and in similar institutions.
One inspiration for The 1619 Projectwas probably a manifesto published in 1974 by the leaders of Weather Underground (WU), an offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society, among them Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn (former terrorists, now retired university professors). Titled Prairie Fire (a reference to Mao’s aphorism that “a single spark can ignite a prairie fire”), the book called upon radicals to adopt a two-pronged strategy: a march through the institutions paired with occasional acts of targeted violence in the form of riots, strikes, bombings (including of the Capitol and the Pentagon), and demonstrations in order to rally allies and weaken the “imperial United States.” In the manifesto, the group articulated its revolutionary goal of overthrowing the American system, though it later concluded that its campaign of violence would not work. Still, the manifesto has had shockingly wide influence, circulating radical doctrines and inserting them into mainstream institutions.
Prairie Fire anticipated the key idea behind the Times’sproject when it identified 1619 as the year the first slaves landed on North American shores, labeling that event as the original source of racism and white supremacy in the United States. As the WU authors wrote:
These were two of the key claims made in the WU manifesto—that slavery was the cornerstone of American history and the original model for American capitalism.
The key themes in The 1619 Project were plainly anticipated fifty years ago by the WU radicals, and it is not a stretch to suggest that the key authors the Times’s project lifted these ideas from Prairie Fire. After many decades, the Times appears to be recirculating ideas into the mainstream that were first articulated by WU terrorists in the 1960s and 1970s.
All of which brings us back to the question raised at the beginning of this essay: why should the Times, the authors and promoters of The 1619 Project, bother with celebrating the Fourth of July in view of what they have said about the Declaration of Independence and the origins of the United States? From their perspective, July 4 is just another day on the calendar.
Abraham Lincoln raised just this question in his response to critics of the Declaration of Independence: As he said: “I understand you are preparing to celebrate the ‘Fourth,’ tomorrow of next week. What for? The doings of that day had no reference to the present; and quite half of you were not even descendants of those who were referred to on that day.” If the critics of the Declaration were correct, then there was little point in continuing to celebrate the date on which it was released to the world. Lincoln called on his listeners to reject arguments that would turn the Declaration of Independence into “an interesting memorial of the dead past, shorn of its vitality and practical value, and left without the germ or suggestion of the individual rights of man.” That document expressed, as he said, the standard maxims of a free society—and without them there was little chance that such a society could endure.
In two years, 2026, the United States will celebrate the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and our founding as a free and independent nation. One hopes that by that time The New York Times will have come to see the folly embedded in The1619 Project—and will then have renewed reason to celebrate the Fourth of July.
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