HOW THE NEW YORK TIMES DISTORTS AMERICAN HISTORY: Commentary Magazine relies on logic and facts to resist the NYT‘s distorted “1619 Project.”
Considered strictly as an exercise in historical understanding, and in deepening the public’s understanding of a profound issue in our national past, the Project represents a giant missed opportunity. It passes over the complex truth in favor of an exaggeration bordering on travesty. And if it has any influence, that influence will be as likely as not to damage the nation and distort its self-understanding in truly harmful ways—ways that will perhaps be most harmful of all to Americans of African descent, who do not need to be supplied with yet another reason to feel cut off from the promise of American life.
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…what we are to make of the New York Times’ decision to take on this project in the way that it has. Is it the proper role of a journalistic organization, especially one as powerful as the Times, to promote and advocate for a particular interpretation of American history? Do such actions constitute responsible journalism? Do they contribute to the solution of our current problems through the introduction of honest, unflinching, and fair-minded consideration of the issues raised by the American experience with slavery?
Or are they doing something far less creditable, less balanced, and more polemical, using a distorted and one-sided account of our history to intervene in our current political wars, in ways that can only broaden and deepen those conflicts, and turn them into far worse forms of warfare?
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It seems fairly clear that, to the extent that the Times’ assessment draws upon slavery scholarship, its sources have been scholars associated with the so-called new history of capitalism. They seek to link the alleged productivity of slavery to the triumph of capitalism in America—and thereby seek to transfer the stain of slavery to every malady of present-day American life, from income inequality to climate change to the decline of unions to the Great Recession of 2008.
Far from downplaying the effects of the legacy, these scholars play it up, finding it to be massive and all-determinative. In the process, as economic historian Philip Magness has brilliantly pointed out, they have virtually rehabilitated the claims of antebellum Southern planters that “Cotton is king,” and that slavery was the true source of the bulk of the nation’s wealth. For example, Cornell historian Edward Baptist’s 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told argues that the wealth piled up by the minutely managed institutions of slavery was the source of all subsequent American wealth. Baptist asserts that almost half of the economic activity of the United States by the year 1836 was a product of slavery. That stunning statistic was cited recently by the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates in his testimony before Congress, in favor of reparations for slavery.
The only problem is that Baptist’s statistic is demonstrably wrong…
The article, written by Wilfred M. McClay (a professor at Oklahoma University), absolutely eviscerates the NYT‘s 1619 Project. At one point McClay says the it is part of the “Times’ journalistic battlefield preparation for the 2020 election.” So perhaps we should call it the Desperate Democrats’ 2020 Political Propaganda Project?