Friday Night Raw: Academic historian edition
By 
I hope Erik has something to say about this (I’m nowhere near knowledgable enough about the subject to have any useful opinion on the debate between historians regarding the 1619 Project).
Here was no history-nerd sidebar, no Father’s Day review of yet another soothing founder bio. A media company with a uniquely powerful legacy was launching a cross-company branding play by committing itself to a controversial position on a subject that the target audience was predisposed to recognize as the most important subject: the history of race in America. By awards season, the Times was running an ad for the project during the Oscars starring the singer, songwriter, and actress Janelle Monáe, wearing an 18th-century-style white dress on the beach in Virginia where the ships brought the enslaved Africans. “America was not yet America,” she said. “Yet this was the moment it began.” The ad’s tagline, “The truth can change how we see the world,” faded to that of the overarching Times campaign promoting the newspaper for the anti-Trumpian moment: “The truth is worth it.” The paper thus associated its project, in the most glamorous way, with Hollywood liberalism and resistance to Trump.
This “truth” tag, an effective bit of marketing, contradicted Hannah-Jones’ insistence that the project tells one origin story, not the only true one (the forthcoming book, too, is subtitled “A New Origin Story”—not claiming to be the one and only tale). But the combined corporate and intellectual ambition has been plain. A sense that the project reveals the truth, about race, about us, directly and accessibly to the public for the first time, lent it enormous charisma, backed by the Times’ hegemonic force in liberal culture. Lesson plans, books, and curricula were announced. The idea seemed to be to stage a takeover—from a media base, not an academic one—of the national consensus on what makes America, axiomatically, exceptional.
Such a big, fast, unpredictable move clearly upset some historians of the U.S., but not all—far from it. Well-regarded scholars were among the authors of the project’s essays, for one thing. Excitement naturally prevailed. Coming on the heels of Hamilton: An American Musical, the 1619 Project continued to popularize, if in a more serious and academic way than that Lin-Manuel Miranda show, areas of study once widely perceived as dry. And many had been objecting for a long time to what seemed the complacency, at best, of Wilentz, Wood, and others regarding the history of slavery and racism in America. Historians’ public support for the project, especially when Twitter-enabled, could be fervent. Reactions to the five letter writers’ objections ranged from eye rolls to body slams.
And so, last weekend, when the Holton-Wood debate reached its most intense sequence, the drama brought two and a half years of internecine conflict to a climax. Wood was doubling down. He didn’t blame Hannah-Jones, he said: She’s a journalist, taking her cues from the past 50 years of historical scholarship, which Wood characterized as a blanket condemnation of the American founding for failing its ideals. Wood has been waging that particular war, within the profession and at times in the press, for decades. He persistently rules out on its face, as presentist and politically biased, any interpretation that dissents from celebrating the U.S. founding as a world-changing, liberalizing transformation, or that subjects the Founders’ values to close criticism. As he made clear in the debate, he’s not going to budge on that now. Wood is digging in.
At the other extreme, some historians who support the 1619 Project, including Holton, have begun calling the five historians who criticized it in 2019 and 2020 personally responsible for the political attacks on Hannah-Jones; for the rejection of the 1619 curriculum by school districts; and for some states’ moving to ban from the classroom, by legislation, honest discussion of race and racism in American history. From this angle, criticism of the project has become, in itself and on its face, illegitimate regardless of intention, because of the effect: right-wing seizure of the historians’ criticisms in enacting bans on the free exchange of ideas. Liberal criticism of the 1619 Project, from this point of view, has enabled the rise of Trumpian authoritarianism.
In the debate, Holton made that idea abundantly clear when calling out Wood, again and again, for placing Hannah-Jones, as Holton put it, “beyond the pale,” and thus giving aid and comfort to censorship in America. Hence all the talking-over, all the sputtering. Holton was forcing on a bemused Wood dozens of printouts of primary sources, supposedly proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that preserving slavery was a major cause of declaring American independence. In virtually the same breath, he was demanding that Wood prove his commitment to the principle of free speech by doing what Holton and everybody else know Wood, of all people, is never going to do: write a new open letter, renouncing the position originally taken and condemning the right wing for misappropriating his opinions. Not intellectually, but in a sense rhythmically, melodically, dramatically, Holton’s push to obtain from Wood the unobtainable concession that preserving slavery motivated the Revolution became inextricably enmeshed with his push to obtain from Wood something equally unobtainable: public disavowal of the terms in which Hannah-Jones’ essay was criticized by the five historians’ December 2019 letter to the Times.
I will say I don’t like the posturing inherent in these sorts of “open letter” debates, especially when they involve demands for recantations, mea culpas etc.
On a vaguely related note, I was reminded by Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland of something I had more or less forgotten, which is what a huge deal the televising of the Roots mini-series was in January of 1977. He recounts how ABC got cold feet about the project at the last minute, and decided to air it on eight consecutive nights instead of over eight weeks. The series turned into a massive hit — it was by far the most viewed television show of the year — and a cultural phenomenon. All of a sudden (white) Americans were talking about slavery, as if it were a relevant topic to the present of all things (Rick also relates how one viewer didn’t like the series at all, as he complained that all the good people were black and all the bad ones were white. This was some guy named Ronald Reagan).
Roots must have made a lot of other reactionaries besides Reagan very unhappy, but in that era before social media there was no obvious immediate outlet for that unhappiness to be manifested. (I would bet a half dozen donuts that there was some bitching about it in the National Review and in a Pat Buchanan column or two but I’m not going to check).
Anyway, the point here is that America was a land of contrasts in a simpler more innocent time.