Correcting 1619’s Falsehoods About the American Founding

A new book published by Robert Woodson’s ‘1776 Unites’ debunks the project’s dubious claims

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"Last week, Mr. Woodson released “Red, White and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.” The book is a collection of essays by 1776 Unites participants, and its publication is a public service. In one essay, the Rev. Corey Brooks, who runs a gang-intervention and prisoner re-entry program in Chicago, knocks the 1619 Project’s “over-emphasis on slavery as the defining institution before and during our nation’s founding.” He adds: “The writers who participated in the project jettisoned facts in favor of a fictitious recounting of why our Founders formed a new nation.”

In another essay, John McWhorter, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, says the problem is not merely the project’s numerous and well-documented inaccuracies but also its simpleminded approach to a complicated subject. “The 1619 kind of perspective, for all of its elaborate terminology and moral passion vented in serious media organs and entertained by people with PhDs, demands that we abjure complexity,” he writes. “It is a call for dumbing ourselves down in the name of a moral crusade.”"

"Mr. Woodson understands that pointing out the moral shortcomings of others might prove cathartic, but it will do little if anything to facilitate black upward mobility. And he flatly rejects the notion that “the destiny of black Americans is determined by what whites do—or what they have done in the past,” which is otherwise known as critical race theory."

"Slavery “was nothing new to the New World,” Mr. Wood writes. “It was an institution familiar to many native societies in both North and South America. These populations had been enslaving one another, as far as we can tell, from time immemorial.” Local Indians captured and enslaved European would-be conquistadors and traded them from tribe to tribe, Mr. Wood notes."

"Mr. Magness’s book examines the 1619 Project’s assertion that slave labor powered the U.S. economy, an argument that rests on “dubious statistical claims and shoddy research practices,” which have been refuted empirically in peer-reviewed journals. “The thrust of these exaggerations is to recast slavery as a distinctly capitalist enterprise, which, in turn, services the 1619 Project’s political message,” Mr. Magness writes. “The worthy historical task of documenting the horrors of American slavery has been cynically repurposed into an ideological attack on free-market capitalism.”"