Conservative Teacher
The 1619 Project and the Minting of Money
May 2020
1492 is the date Christopher Columbus first brought European civilization and everything that entailed, to South and North America. 1513 was the first date a European set foot on what would become the United States. St. Augustine, founded about 40 years later, became the first European settlement. In 1607 the first British colony was founded named Jamestown in what the British called Virginia. In 1621 the colony on Plymouth Rock was founded. In 1776, the British Colonies declared their Independence from Great Britain. In 1787, the U.S. Constitution was signed and became the framework for governance that exists today.
In October of 2019, the New York Times launched “The 1619 Project.” This is the date upon which the first slave was brought to the future United States. Actually, it wasn’t. In what is endemic about the project, the history itself is slipshod. In actuality, it was the first time an indentured servant was brought to Virginia. Slaves would come later. And the early 1600s was not even the first time that slavery was practiced or carried to the Western Hemisphere. In 1428, some 60 years before the arrival of Columbus, a coalition led by the Aztecs crushed the city of Azcapotzalco, establishing hegemony over much of Mesoamerica. The Aztecs were a slaveholding society using slaves for everything from building projects to ritualized sacrifices. Nor, of course, was slavery something new. There are inscriptions of Sumerian kings dating back to the 25th century BCE discussing the treatment of slaves.
Racism was also not new to the Western Hemisphere. The Incan Empire rested on a single tribe of 100,000 centered on the city of Cuzco that rose to rule nearly 10 million people. The Incan Empire was not quite the Peruvian Eden despoiled by the snakes of Spain. The Incan Empire was built on a caste system based on the ethnicity of the Incans themselves.
Many dates contributed to shaping the nation, but the accurate founding date, as we shall see later, is 1776. And yet The 1619 Project provides a supposedly better explanation of American History. “Understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are,” states Nikole Hannah-Jones, the editor of the project.
Hannah-Jones claims that “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.” The word “true” or “truthfully” comes up a great deal in the project and yet Hannah-Jones also states, “I think my point was that history is not objective,” said Hannah-Jones. “And that people who write history are not simply objective arbiters of facts, and that white scholars are no more objective than any other scholars, and that they can object to the framing and we can object to their framing as well.” So then does this mean that the totality of her project, in her own words, is not objective? If this is the case, then what is the differentiation of history from a historical novel?
One concept around The 1619 Project, is its desire to see greater inclusion of slavery into the national history. Slavery is significant and worthy of historical study. But to say that abolition was a black-only issue is incorrect. Benjamin Franklin wished to abolish slavery in the Constitutional Convention. Washington freed his slaves upon his death. Even Jefferson, with his sordid history, understood the barbarity of the practice. From the Founding until the firing on Fort Sumter, figures ranging from John Quincy Adams to William Lloyd Garrison to John Brown all were active in fighting slavery.
But one of the premises of the project is misconstrued. Slavery is taught in high schools today and has been for the past 30 years. There is a critical difference between a further understanding of slavery as a part of U.S. history, and the concept that it is somehow missing from educational curriculums. In an October 2019 essay, appearing in Commentary and entitled “How the New Times is Distorting American History,” Author Wilfred M. McClay, the current occupant of the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma another historian not a part of the project, states, “There is an implication running through much of The 1619 Project that slavery is a subject that somehow is rarely if ever spoken of in American history,” McClay writes at Commentary. He adds, “The shelves of American libraries groan with books on the subject by many of the greatest American historians, from Oscar Handlin and John Hope Franklin to Winthrop Jordan, Edmund Morgan, Eugene Genovese, Lawrence Levine, David Brion Davis, Stanley Engerman, Gavin Wright, and so on.” Additionally, whole college curriculums, with professors appointed specifically for racial studies, are in almost every university in the country.
But The 1619 Project is not just about slavery. Had it been so, it might have been a useful section and companion piece about the challenges of our nation. Instead, The 1619 project explains, well, everything, “that the country’s defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619…Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet, and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, it’s great penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day.” About the only thing missing is American’s love of hotdogs and Daniel Steel novels, but given time, I am confident that the editors could find a link. Given this level of scope, it is necessary first to debunk the history behind this effort, then explore the (to use Hannah-Jones favored term) real goal of The 1619 Project, and why it takes its controversial and all-encompassing approach.
Regarding the history, George Will in a May 2020 column entitled, “A Pulitzer Rewarding Slovenliness and Ideological ax-grinding,” Will notes, “Because the Times ignored today’s most eminent relevant scholars — e.g., Brown University’s Gordon Wood, Princeton’s James McPherson and Sean Wilentz and Allen Guelzo, City University of New York’s James Oakes, Columbia’s Barbara Fields — the Project’s hectoring tone and ideological ax-grinding are unsurprising.”
Hannah-Jones is not a historian but an investigative journalist whose self-stated goal is to “discover and expose the systematic and institutional racism perpetuated by official laws and acts.” The writer on an essay that claims slavery is capitalism, “American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation,” is sociologist Matthew Desmond. The writer on the segment linking slavery to a lack of universal healthcare, “Why Doesn’t America Have Universal Healthcare? One word: Race”, Jeneen Interlandi, is a feature writer for leftist magazines, including The New Yorker. The writer of “Why American Prisons Owe Their Cruelty to Slavery,” Bryan Stevenson, is an activist lawyer. At least, the writer of “The Barbaric History of Sugar in America” Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor, albeit not only of history but also of race and public policy.
Aside from Muhammad, the ONLY other history professor is Kevin Kruse of Princeton. It is indicative of the project that Princeton claims two professors who are acknowledged experts on these subjects. But The 1619 Project would select a third Princetonian professor who is not. Historical knowledge or insight was not the goal of this project. Looking at the careers and published works of the 12 editors of this project is not a who’s who of history but first activists in the social justice movement.
This is shown in the various arguments presented. One of the contentions is that the American Revolution was not the overthrow of tyranny but rather so that southerners could keep their slaves. After all, in 1775, the British Army offered refuge for runaway slaves. The 1619 Project conveniently leaves out that the battles of Lexington and Concord had ALREADY been fought before this offer. It would be another 60 years before the British banned the slave trade, and even after Wilber Wilberforce, they had no qualms about trading with the South up to and during the Civil War. The British made this offer as a wartime contingency.
Also not fully explained is why did Boston, located in the free state of Massachusetts, the so-called “hotbed of rebellion,” produced so many leaders of the Revolution. One of the incidents that were to prove incendiary to the colonists was the 1770 Boston Massacre, in which British soldiers killed five Bostonians. A black man, Crispus Attucks, was among the dead. This also does not include the various taxation schemes such as the Stamp Act that was to prove so onerous to Northern colonists such as John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. All of this before 1775. To the British, the signing of the Declaration of Independence was a traitorous act and had the British captured figures such as John Adams; they would believe they had the right to hang him. Is it the contention of The 1619 Project to consider that Adams would have put his life, his cousin, and his friends, on the principle that Southerners could have retained their slaves?
Absent rebellion, Britain would not have forbidden the slave trade nor the ownership of slaves. Therefore if the goal was to retain their slaves, why would Washington, Monroe, Jefferson, and Madison, join the cause of Independence? If it were about slavery, these Virginians would have stayed loyal throughout the period.
Then there is the article on capitalism and slavery entitled “American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation.” This article features not a historian, but sociologist Mathew Desmond, who wrote two books and co-written two more books, but none on Southern agriculture. Desmond, using a single plantation as a source, constructs the link of capitalism to slavery by noting “via vertical reporting systems, double-entry record-keeping, and precise quantification.” Those “management techniques” became a model for “union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs, and normalized insecurity.” Slavery’s “violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous,” but instead “rational, capitalistic.” The use of modern terms such as “gig jobs” exemplifies a common issue with the academy today; the concept of viewing history through the conventions and prisms of today’s societal norms, or at least the criteria as defined in faculty lounges.
Of Desmond himself, he was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.” Exactly. It is influencing the political debate. Because, after all, that is the goal of a historian. Right?
Regarding the Desmond essay, Allen C. Guelzo, author of over ten books on the Civil War and pre-Bellum society, states, “Southern agriculture was a sloppy, chaotic affair. Acidic soils discouraged intensive cultivation and pushed landowners toward wasteful land usage and constant movement westward to new territory. Much of what looks like capitalist innovation was a use-and-abandon process of land expansion only a few levels above hunting and gathering. Even Southern railroads were, as John Majewski has shown, built largely with public funding, not private investment, and mostly with a view of moving Southern militias to suppress slave revolts.”
Peter Coclanis, an economic historian, the Albert Ray Newsome Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina; Director, Global Research Institute, publisher of 10 books on economics, and another historian NOT featured in The 1619 Project, wrote a piece in 2000 entitled “Tracking the Economic Divergence of North and South.”
In this essay, Coclanis notes, “It is not surprising that the Southern colonies were marked by extreme inequality, not merely in landholding, income and wealth, but the political, social, and cultural realms as well.” But does not Coclanis contention fit into Desmond’s view of Southern inequality? It would excepting that Coclanis does not believe that the South was capitalist. “Such economic and social inequality, in turn, helped to confine if not to lock the South into an overly specialized, low tech, rigid, and inflexible strategy of development predicated on plantation agriculture, relatively unskilled slave labor, and exports. This strategy would increasingly take the region out the American mainstream,” adds Coclanis. As a comparison, the North embraced a different culture that “emerged out the vigorous and enterprising business communities of the Mid-Atlantic area, especially Pennsylvania and New York, and New England. Having faced enormous entrepreneurial challenges-uncertain, constantly changing markets… these communities were more or less inclined to embrace economic change.” So, which description sounds more like capitalism, and which sounds more like socialism? The inherent nature of capitalism is the choice. The consumer is free to choose the product, the producer is free to select the product, and labor is free to decide whether to produce the product. None of that was evident in the pre-Bellum Southern economy.
Another of Desmond’s contentions is that rather than the stagnancy described above by Coclanis, Southern agricultural production grew after 1800, suggesting that the South had perpetuated slave labor under the belief that it is a significant profit generator. This was not due to some capitalist system but rather by new strains of cotton and cotton gin used. As Coclanis states, “the production of cotton locked the south further into its inherent inequality.”
Finally, Desmond attempts to paint New Orleans as a financial center to prove his South was capitalist contention, “New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City.” John Steele Gordon, another prominent historian, left out of the project, states in his book Empire of Wealth, “capital poured in from Europe…much of this new capital was brokered through Wall Street, which cemented its position as the financial center of the country in the 1850s.” Guelzo also notes that “New York alone had more banks in 1858—294—than the entire future Confederacy, home to 208. The entire region’s “banking capital” in 1858 amounted to less than 80% of that held by the New York banks.”
There is an insinuation in The 1619 Project that Lincoln, and by extension the North, were complicit in slavery. The minimization of the role of white Northerners is a gross dereliction on the part of the more than 300,000, mostly white, Northerners who fought and died to end slavery. But the Civil War was not won by superior generalship. It was won by superior economics and superior manpower-both a result of the North featuring a market economy as opposed to the stagnant plantation system of the South.
The North had over three times the people of the South, even when counting the slave population. Though there was limited industrial activity in the South, the vast majority of industrial manufacturing was in the North. The South had almost 25% of the country’s free population, but only 10% of the country’s capital in 1860, which belies Desmond’s contention that New Orleans was a banking mecca. The North had five times the number of factories as the South, and over ten times the number of factory workers and 90% of the nation’s skilled workers were in the North. Northern valor, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th amendment were a part of freeing the slaves. But in the end, it was capitalism and industrial might that emancipated African Americans.
Now, let’s address the taint on Lincoln. As Will notes, “Misdescribing an 1862 White House meeting with African American leaders, the Project falsely says President Lincoln flatly “opposed black equality” and adamantly favored colonization of emancipated slaves. Lincoln had already decided on an Emancipation Proclamation with no imperative of colonization. In Lincoln’s last speech, his openness to black enfranchisement infuriated a member of his audience: John Wilkes Booth.”
There is also the calumny about the Founding being about slavery. Will eloquently states, “The Constitution was written in 1787 for a nation conscious of its youth. It would grow under a federal government whose constituting document did not acknowledge “property in man,” and instead acknowledged slaves as persons. This gave slavery no national validation. It left slavery solely a creature of state laws and, therefore, susceptible to the process that occurred — the process of being regionally confined and put on a path to ultimate extinction. Secession was the South’s desperate response when it recognized this impending outcome that the Constitution had facilitated.”
And what of the merit of the date in and of itself? Writing for The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf, in an essay entitled, “1776 Honors America’s Diversity in a Way 1619 Does Not,” states, “That substitution centers a story of white oppressors and black victims while overlooking groups as numerous and varied as indigenous Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and almost everyone whose ancestors got here after the Civil War (not to mention confounding characters like African slave traders and white abolitionists.” As much as the perpetrators of the 1619 project wish to claim the United States a denizen of hate and brutality, the nation was truly founded on an idea and remains the only nation to have ever been conceived as such. Though slavery was not eliminated in 1776, nor the year of the Constitution, 1787, the seeds for its destruction were wrought at the beginning. There is a conceit on the part of 21st-century academics that the early Republic leaders were blithely unaware of the discrepancy of the “right to liberty” extolled in the Declaration and the actions on the ground. This is false. A history of the early Republic is replete with an ongoing contest between those in the North searching for a way to end slavery without destroying the Republic itself. A historian could cite the Northwest Ordinance laws that barred slavery being imported into the North. In the 1830s, the possible secession of South Carolina showed the fault lines already inherent. The compromises of 1820 and 1850, one for each generation, culminated in the civil war in which leaders such as Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, Republicans, held sway. All of these looked back to “inalienable rights” espoused in 1776.
As with so much of history, all of the gymnastics performed to link their ideology to history says more about the essayists in The 1619 Project than about history itself. Guelzo states, “The 1619 Project is not history: it is polemic, born in the imaginations of those whose primary target is capitalism itself and who hope to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery.” And for all this twisting and dissimulation, Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize, but not for history, for Commentary. Now it is easy to chock up the Pulitzer, with its inherent virtue signaling, to other prominent, left-leaning awards such as the Nobel Peace Prize. The challenge is that in the minds of the target audience of The 1619 Project, such awards do matter because its competition is all of the other leftist criteria being perpetuated.
That the New York Times would sponsor this, and in fact, be an owner in a venture might say more about declining ad revenue and catering to their targeted digital subscriber base as much as about their belief in the curriculum. Just as with the Green New Deal, The 1619 Project is, in a sense, a smokescreen of its true intentions. It is not a history of slavery or African-American society but rather an ideological menu of leftist desires, including the elimination of capitalism, criminal justice reform, educational curricula, energy policy, and even food stamp programs. This should have been “The 2020 Project” because that is the year of which these writers, and The New York Times, are most interested.
As McClay states, “Perhaps they (the essays) are best understood as flights of fancy. But it would not be overly cynical to suspect that they are better understood as part of the Times’ journalistic battlefield preparation for the 2020 election. That interpretation is given fairly incontrovertible support by a revealing leaked transcript of a recent meeting between Times executive editor Dean Baquet and his staff writers, in which it becomes clear that some Times reporters are itching to inject the theme of America’s endemic racism into virtually all of the Times’ reporting, as a way of tilting public opinion toward whichever candidate the Democratic Party ends up nominating—and that Baquet is not the least bit inclined to resist his staff’s desires,” states McClay.
But this is not just about ideological goals though that is a big part of the project. It is also about money. A few years ago, during a teacher-parent conference, this author happened upon the textbook sitting on the economics teacher’s desk. The editor was Paul Krugman. I was thinking, could it be that Krugman? This is an economist who equates conservative economists to zombies and Sarah Palin rallies to the Oklahoma bombings, “I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008 campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again,” explains Krugman. Of course, no books by Milton Friedman or Marvin Feldstein graced the high school teacher’s desk. The 1619 Project is just a more straightforward example of what Krugman was doing. In Krugman’s case, it was using economics to perpetuate leftist orthodoxy and make serious money by selling thousands of expensive textbooks to school districts. In the case of The 1619 Project, it is using history to do the same thing.
Yet a school district would not use Krugman’s book to assuage feelings of white guilt, nor to virtue signal to the rest of Big Education just how moral they are. The 1619 Project can accomplish two goals at once; provide a ready set curriculum for their school districts and prove to the world how these schools are rejecting their privilege and becoming woke to the use of the parlance. Milton Friedman once stated that “intellectuals are people with something to sell.” The selling here is the collection of essays to school districts; therefore, the essays themselves are bent and even fabricated to most appeal to those constituencies. As Guelzo notes, “The awarding of a Pulitzer Prize for commentary to The New York Times magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of “The 1619 Project” will serve as an additional selling point as the Times and the Pulitzer Center (unaffiliated with the prize) seek to market their 1619 Project Curriculum. It’s hard not to see the award as an attempt to deflect the criticisms the paper has taken from historians across the country.” The irony here, lost on the perpetrators of this project, is that they are practicing capitalism themselves. They have identified a market, and they have built a product most geared towards that market. Whether this is real history or not is beside the point. A well balanced, thoroughly researched, “objective,” project would be competing with too many other curricula. By its radicalism, based on shoddy research and innuendo, the project stands out, it has a competitive advantage, just as a capitalist would hope. Yet, the difference with most of capitalism is that if the product is shoddy, it will get surpassed by alternatives. But not in this case because The 1619 Project was explicitly constructed to work on the virtual signaling of the New York Times readership, and school administrators.
As of the writing of this critique, David French, former National Review Editor and current Senior Editor for The Dispatch, stated, “Activists constantly overstate their case because—if they don’t—no one will pay attention to them.” To date, prominent writers and historians ranging from George Will to Colin Friedersdorf to actual historians such as Sean Wilentz have commented on the project. Mission Accomplished. Attention received. The concern is not that this project is debunked. That mission is accomplished as well. It is instead that being the loudest, most strident example of African-American history masquerading as an ideology will work. The winners are twofold; Hannah-Jones and The New York Times. The losers are legion. Academics who would have provided a better history. Those who like history fooled into thinking this project contains veracity. But foremost include the parents and students of whatever school district buys into this ideology masquerading as history. The Conservative Historian asks any parents or taxpayers who would pay for this, find out if your district is accepting this, and then ask some serious questions of the administration and school board.
5 Alternative Historical Videos for Students
August 2019
As we find ourselves in a video age in which YouTube continues to grow as one of the most popular sites on the Internet, some parents and teachers are curious about video content around history. One of the challenges is that like so much else in the K through 12 curriculum, it is undergoing the transformation mirrored in the academy. This is the movement from fact based, broad history, to ideological history in which American ceases to be a vast collection of stories and movements and becomes something pernicious and perhaps even evil.
One of the more popular examples of this is John Green’s Crash Course which features over 9 million subscribers. Green, a famous Young Adult author, features a PC that says “This PC Kills Fascists.” Nothing about communism of course though between Mao, Pol Pot and Stalin, tens of millions died in the name of that ideology. In one such video Green uses terms such as “first peoples” and commentary stating “wealth was much more equally distributed” and “women had more rights.” In other words, pre Columbian peoples had the society of which dreams are made.
Green has read his leftist literature but failed to read Steve LeBlanc’s Constant Battles. LeBlanc uncovers endemic warfare throughout the world but this particular case involved an Anasazi people living around 1275 CE, “throughout the entire Southwest, with attendant massacres, population decline, and areal abandonments.” One pueblo featured the destruction of all inhabitants. So much for sharing the abundance. If European historians over simplified the successes of indigenous peoples, today’s leftist historians paper over the failings to paint modern America in a bad light.
So what is a discerning parent or teacher to do in order to find a more balanced video history? Here is a selection of possibilities:
History Channel (https://www.history.com/classroom): At times the history channel veers left (hard not to given the dominance of leftist historians) but they know that much of their audience desires political, and yes, military history. That means they have walk a much more fine line than a rich author such as John Green and keep some semblance of balance.
Prager University (www.Prageru.com): Let’s be clear, Dennis Prager is not a moderate but let’s face the facts. If your student is not home schooled they are going to get the leftist ideology from their teacher’s or the content presented. Prager’s videos merely provide an alternative way to approach history and current events that no student will see in a public school.
Thinker Academy (https://thinkeracademy.com/world-history-videos-for-kids/): This website is really a location to teach teens superior study skills but it also includes a list of possible world history video companions. These videos vary in quality and focus but they are not history masking as indoctrination.
Learn Our History (https://learnourhistory.com/): Like Prager University, not something found often in the schools and with Mike Huckabee as its founder, its rightward tilt is fairly evident. Yet with Lessons from “Ladies of Liberty” to Civil Rights” to the “Great Recession” it is not as if this some throwback to orthodox history.
The Kids Should See (https://thekidshouldseethis.com/): For something a little different, along the lines more of science than of history, but still contains historical elements, is the Kids Should See This. Though there are occasional ecological undertones, they are based on logic rather than ideology.
I realize that we said five and we have delivered but one bonus item: RightNow media, which works primarily with Bible stories also has an American History series.
How many classes?
For a student who was wise enough in their college courses to take educational classes in addition to their “content” specialty (math, English, social sciences, chemistry), they can anticipate to use their course work to get through. But let’s say that someone was a business major and in their 30s, made the fateful decision to leave a given profession and pursue a certification. Though it depends on the state, in Illinois the potential teacher is looking at six to 10 courses for total completion. Please keep in mind that these courses can range anywhere from $600 to often $2,500 in the more reputable (read known) education schools in the state. So if you have a spare $25,000 laying around, you are ready to begin. Some of these classes are not necessary if you can test out of the content areas and there are exams for this. For example, if one was a history expert, the potential student can take the history test. But this only applies to content area, not to teaching classes themselves.
What about those who once taught and were certified previously, but let their licenses lapse. The contention of the State Certification Boards is that so much has changed in education that it is necessary to retake all of these courses. It is a contention about how much education and teaching actually has changed – this reporter does not see it – but what is not in dispute is that the Education Colleges, who are tied directly to the State Boards, get a HUGE amount of revenue from making the pre-certified retake all of their classes.
So now that we have raised the thousands of dollars necessary to begin, we will next review what classes are required.
Additional Post from the Conservative Teacher Project
A Consistent theme of the Conservative Historian is that the academy is dominated by liberal academicians. The same argument can be made for the teachers of secondary education as well. Even those in possession of conservative opinions in the high school are in some part in thrall to the ubiquity and power of the teacher’s unions.
One of the ways this stranglehold is maintained is through a detailed, often Byzantine “certification” process in which prospective students are put through a rigorous process that the healthcare professions would admire. Yet a parent, paying for these teachers might note that “yes, but these are our students and the role of teacher is critical.” The Conservative Historian does not doubt the importance of teachers. Rather we question the necessity of an overly large certification process. Unwilling to simply denigrate a process of which we do not have firsthand knowledge, one of our own here at the CH is going to go through the entire certification process in the state of IL. And we will discover whether this system is truly creating more effective teachers, or whether it is simply creating an artificial barrier to entry to make it harder for potential competitive teachers to challenge incumbent instructors.