I have focused on the interviews with Bynum, McPherson, Oakes, and Wood because these four scholars became the protagonists in the subsequent, and far less enlightening, act of the drama. On December 20, the New York Times Magazine published a letter to the editor circulated by Princeton’s Sean Wilentz and signed by these four interviewees, “to express [their] strong reservations about important aspects of The 1619 Project.” In particular, the letter objected to “the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” This was followed by a spirited rebuttal from Times editor Jake Silverstein, and then rapidly spiraling coverage in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and elsewhere, including follow-ups on the WSWS. More than a few people have asked me if perhaps the Times didn’t invite the historians’ letter, as it has certainly put a second wind in the 1619 Project’s media sails. No doubt, the Trotskyists who lit the match that started this fire—with whom I confess I am often intellectually sympathetic—achieved Internet traffic beyond their wildest dreams, and more press than they have enjoyed since they opposed American entry into World War II.
The letter itself is, it must be said, signed by a motley crew. If it was the Trotskyists who brought these folks under the same banner, they have managed to give a whole new meaning to “Popular Front.” The animus of the Fourth International types seems clear—in placing race at the center of history, 1619 elides the central role of class and class conflict in the history of settler colonialism, continental dispossession, and rapacious capitalism. But that is probably not the same hill that Wilentz and the gang of four are planting their flag on. So what gives?
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. Reading only the WSWS interviews and the subsequent historians’ letter, one might be surprised to learn that several well-respected historians actually contributed material directly to the Times project: Anne Bailey, Kevin Kruse, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Tiya Miles, and Mary Elliott (who curated a special supplementary Times “broadsheet” for the 1619 Project organized around objects in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture). So clearly it is not that the editors at the Times shut out the voices of historians; it seems that they consulted with the wrong historians. Given the qualifications of the scholars who did work on the project, that is a most unfortunate impression to convey.
The letter writers do not just object to errors they claim to have identified; they call for the Times to issue corrections. What, in fact, might these look like? The primary offender seems to be Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her sweeping essay that frames the entire project. Again, one could read the critics and miss the fact that the 1619 Project includes dozens of elements beyond Hannah-Jones’s opening essay. Many others may—or may not—contain errors, but Hannah-Jones’s essay has been singled out as representative of the whole. Particularly objectionable, the historians insist, is her assertion 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.” As the letter bluntly points out, “This is not true.” Admittedly, at a minimum, her formulation seriously overstates the anti-slavery bona fides of the British Empire at the time, not to mention the universality of pro-slavery views in the colonies. Fair enough. So, then, what would suffice in its stead? “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence”? How about “some of the Patriots fought for independence in the knowledge that it would secure their investments in slavery”? Presumably at least some of the letter writers would find the following counter-formulation no less objectionable: “there were many reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence, but the preservation of slavery was not among them.” While Hannah-Jones may be guilty of overstatement, this is more a matter of emphasis than it is of a correct or incorrect interpretation.
