Zhou Deyu, Editor of Observer.com Ph.D., Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh; Postdoctoral Fellow, School of History, Renmin University of China
Zhou Deyu, Editor of The Observer
Ph.D., Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh; Postdoctoral Fellow, School of History, Renmin University of China
Outside of all the amazing maneuvers Trump has made since taking office, one lesser-appreciated area is Trump’s renewed grip on patriotic education. Inside his latest batch of executive orders, one of them is to revive the 1776 Commission 1776 Commission, once abolished by Biden, to promote patriotic American history education.
This 1776 Commission is not the first time it has come out, it was established by Trump in his first term in 2020, only to be canceled by the Biden administration, and now it has been pulled out and resurrected again. When Trump created the 1776 Commission it was directly aimed at countering a multimedia history project called the 1619 Project 1619 Project launched by the New York Times in 2019.
The year 1619 is generally considered to be the point at which the first slaves arrived in North America, though not strictly so , and is also seen as the origin of slavery in the United States. And the primary intent of the 1619 Project is not just to commemorate the 400th anniversary of slavery in the United States in 2019, but to place slavery at the center of American history.The 1619 Project reshapes the American founding narrative, linking the origins and development of the United States to slavery, arguing that the United States began with slavery from its founding and has systematically discriminated against and oppressed minorities to the today.
Although I agree with the thematic idea of the 1619 Project, that the United States is of course a country that started by oppressing minorities, from a historiographical point of view, the 1619 Project, in order to conform to this theme, has more or less wrapped up a plate of dumplings for a plate of vinegar in the historical narrative, and there are also many arguments that probably do not hold water. Therefore, the 1619 Project has been subjected to a lot of controversy from the historiographical circles since its birth. But the biggest controversy is not academic, but political.
For the Democratic side, the 1619 Project was in line with their concept of history, so it was supported by all sectors of the Democratic Party, and soon won the Pulitzer Prize and received official support after the Biden administration came to power. For the Republican side, on the other hand, the 1619 Plan is a big poisonous weed that vilifies America. Especially after the race riots of 2020, when Trump even briefly stayed in the White House bunker, any historical research related to racism in the United States was given special care.
Here’s what Trump had to say at a White House press conference on September 17, 2020
The left has warped distorted and defiled the American story with deceptions falsehoods and lies There is no better example than the New York Times totally discredited 1619 Project This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression not freedom Critical race theory the 1619 Project and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda ideological poison that if not removed will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us to the 1619 Project. the civic bonds that tie us together It will destroy our country
The left is twisting, distorting and desecrating the American story with deception, falsehoods and lies. The best example of this is the discredited 1619 program of the New York Times. This program rewrites American history and teaches our children that our country was founded on the principles of oppression, not freedom. Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and the expropriation of American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed soon, will dissolve the civic bonds that bind us together. It will destroy our nation.
What is Trump’s solution in the face of such a terrible threat? It is to write a patriotic historical narrative endorsed by him through the 1776 Commission, created by executive order. And so in the final days of Trump’s first term, this 1776 Commission finally rushed out a report.
This report is basically the antithesis of the 1619 Project, and it basically avoids and whitewashes the issue of slavery since the founding of the United States. If the history of the United States told by the 1619 Project is considered to be historically controversial, the history of the United States in the 1776 report can only be called a founding myth.
In the section on slavery, the 1776 Report is stated as follows
The most common charge levelled against the founders and hence against our country itself is that they were hypocrites who didn’t believe in their stated principles and therefore the country they built rests on its own. The most common charge levelled against the founders and hence against our country itself is that they were hypocrites who didn’t believe in their stated principles and therefore the country they built rests on a lie This charge is untrue and has done enormous damage especially in recent years with a This charge is untrue and has done enormous damage especially in recent years with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric
The most common charge leveled against the Founding Fathers, and therefore against our nation itself, is that they did not believe in the principles they were telling and therefore the country they built rests on a lie. This charge is false and has done serious damage in recent years, with devastating effects on our civic unity and social fabric.
Then there is the total whitewashing of early American political figures, such as how men like Jefferson and Madison repeatedly proclaimed that they were against slavery, that slavery was a hopeless choice, that they did a great deal of work, etc.
Objectively speaking, there were some of the Founding Fathers of the United States who were consistent in their words and actions, such as the second president, John Adams, who was against slavery himself and never owned a slave. But most people did oppose slavery while enjoying the benefits of slavery. People like Washington and Franklin, who took the initiative to free their slaves in their wills, were good enough. Someone like Madison had to be more typical, with a family of a hundred or so slaves, who depended on them for financial support, and so refused to voluntarily abolish slavery.
Jefferson, not to mention, wrote the Declaration of Independence’s most famous line, “All men are created equal,” but he clearly believed that some people were more equal than others. Not only did Jefferson think that blacks were an inferior race, but he also owned a large number of slaves and even had a slave mistress. What is not a hypocritical verbal revolutionist when the abolitionists didn’t suffer at all and the benefits of slavery didn’t fall at all?
Of course, the founding fathers of the United States didn’t do nothing about abolition; they passed the 1808 resolution banning the importation of slaves, in the wisdom of leaving the issue of slavery to posterity, and in the expectation that slavery would die out when the slave trade ended.
That’s why that 1776 committee humorously wrote that the founding of our republic planted the seeds of the demise of slavery in the Americas. However, let’s not mention the fact that slavery could have died out much faster if the United States had not become independent, as Britain abolished slavery much earlier than the United States. Put into historical perspective, American slavery neither died out naturally, as Madison and the others envisioned, nor was it incompatible with American ideals, as the 1776 Commission glossed it, but it flourished economically and politically after the founding of the United States.
Is it a coincidence that 10 of the 12 presidents of the United States before the Civil War were slave owners, and that the capital city of Washington, D.C., built in the middle of two slaveholding states never abolished slavery? Was it an institution that looked like it was going to die out naturally, with the number of slaveholding states increasing before the Civil War and slaveholders interfering more and more in the affairs of the free northern states?
You also wonder if those people during the founding of the United States were really stupid or just pretending to be stupid, thinking that if slaves weren’t imported from abroad slave owners would have no one to use them. Yet as long as the children of slaves remained slaves, slave owners could rely on the natural growth of slaves, or buy slaves from elsewhere in the country
We can note that this map of the domestic slave trade even shows trade flowing from free states to slaveholding states. A common misconception about slavery in the United States is that it was only the American South that upheld slavery, and that the North was icy clean and always opposed to slavery. The reality, however, is that while the North nominally abolished slavery early on, slaves gained their freedom in a gradual process, with many having to redeem their freedom or wait until a certain number of years had elapsed. So until slaves in free states were fully free, slave owners could sell them directly to the South.
And why was the domestic slave trade so robust? Because the price of slaves climbed year after year and demand was high. And why was the demand for slaves high? Because the cotton plantations in the South were so profitable.
So slavery was much more than cotton plantations in the American economy. In many slaveholding and free states, even cotton plantations, which did not rely on slave labor, could breed and buy and sell slaves as an industry in itself. Not to mention that the economic benefits generated by the cotton plantation industry fed back and spread elsewhere, and the cotton produced by cotton plantations was used in northern commerce and industry in addition to export.
It may be too radical to think that the slave economy was all that was left of early American economic development, but there is no question that slavery was an important foundation of the American economy.
It is worth noting that many people in economics in the United States who engage in econometric historiography are still trying to prove that the slave economy was not as efficient as the free and open economic system in the North, and therefore arguing that the slave economy was not the driving force behind the growth of the U.S. economy. Yet the question was never whether the slave economy in the South was stronger or weaker than in the North, but rather how much slavery in the South was alive and how much it contributed to the economic growth of the United States.
It is important to realize that many people in the North at the time opposed the expansion of slavery not because they thought slavery was unprofitable, but precisely because the plantation economy was so lucrative that it would squeeze out other industries and take jobs away from free laborers. Slavery was seen by people at the time, especially in the free states, as not too weak but too strong and dangerous.
Many of the people who denied the economic significance of slavery, both then and now, were in the economics profession and believed that a free capitalist economy should be more efficient than slavery. Yet historically, the Southern slavery economy was also a free choice for a capitalist economy… How is the buying, selling and exploiting of people themselves as commodities not capitalism?
In the end, this, like the 1776 Commission, is still a way of thinking that wants to cut slavery off from the development of the United States, that wants to divide the development of the United States into a part that is liberal and democratic and civilized and a part that is oppressive and despotic and barbaric, and that thinks that the entire history of the United States has been a process in which the former has been hostile to the latter and has triumphed over the latter.
History, however, is not so simple and linear, but rather a process of twists and turns.
By the time of the Civil War, although the intensification of the conflict between the North and the South, the revolt of the slaves, the spread of the abolitionist ideology, and the changes in the economic structure of the North were all moving history in the direction of favoring abolition, abolition was never an option for the mainstream American public and politicians. In the end, it was Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency with only 40 of the popular vote, in the face of internal divisions within the Democratic Party, that led the United States toward civil war and eventual abolition.
So, not to mention economically or politically, there has never been an icy clean part of America that had nothing to do with slavery. And even if there did exist an America that was purely anti-slavery, it didn’t triumph through its own moral or economic superiority, not by any kind of market or democracy, but by a bloody civil war in which 600,000 people died in order to nominally eliminate slavery. Not to mention the fact that slavery and discrimination against blacks and other people of color were still widespread after the Civil War, which has nothing to do with the markets and democracy that Americans are so proud of.
So both historically and logically, the United States is of course a nation founded on the principle of oppression as described in the 1619 plan.
But the Democratic Party’s support and promotion of the 1619 Project isn’t really concerned with historical fact per se either, nor does it recognize the inherent hypocrisy of the American system, but rather it’s an attempt to promote their own set of narratives about the triumph of good over evil, except that the protagonists have been switched out for the minorities who are constantly fighting back against white oppression and the spirit of civil rights, as well as the Democrat progressives who are behind them. So the 1619 Project, while going in the right general direction, does a lot of twisting and simplifying for the sake of dumplings in various historical details.
So Trump’s accusation that the 1619 Project is unpatriotic is clearly incorrect; the 1619 Project is also a form of patriotism, it’s just that the America that is loved is not the same as Trump’s America.
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