Nikole Hannah-Jones - Photograph by Arturo
Holmes / Getty
The 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary was awarded Monday
to Nikole Hannah-Jones for an essay in the New York Times that
falsely claimed the American Revolution was fought primarily to protect
slavery.
The essay, titled “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false
when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true,”
launched the Times‘ controversial 1619 project.The
essay incorrectly claimed that the Declaration of Independence was signed
on July 4, 1776 (signing began weeks later, on August 2).
However, the far more egregious error was Hannah-Jones’s
claim about the cause for which the Revolution was fought. She wrote:
“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the
primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from
Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
That passage, which appeared in the original text, has since been updated to include the word
“some” (emphasis added): “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is
the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided
to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect
the institution of slavery.”
Historians were outraged by Hannah-Jones’s false claim.
One of them, Northwestern University Professor Leslie Harris, was enthusiastic
about the 1619 Project, but furious about the inaccurate
claim. Harris recalled in Politico:
On
August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a
reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued
against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution
in large part to preserve slavery in North America.
…
I vigorously disputed the claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.
…
Overall, the 1619 Project is a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories that once dominated our understanding of the past—histories that wrongly suggested racism and slavery were not a central part of U.S. history. I was concerned that critics would use the overstated claim to discredit the entire undertaking. So far, that’s exactly what has happened.
The current version of Hannah-Jones’s essay preserves other controversial statements, such as the claim that “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” which repeats (almost verbatim) a claim then-President Barack Obama made in 2015 to National Public Radio that racism is “still part of our DNA.”
The Times also shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for its reporting on the
“Russia collusion” narrative, which was later disproven (albeit reluctantly) by
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election.
In August 2019, Times editor Dean Baquet told
the newsroom that the newspaper intended to shift its coverage from Russia to
race. With the collapse of Russia conspiracy theories, which the Times
had used to attack President Donald Trump from the day of his inauguration, the paper needed a new
narrative. The 1619 Project is the centerpiece of that new
narrative — with Trump, implicitly, the inheritor of America’s racist past.
The Pulitzer Prize committee described Hannah-Jones’s essay as “sweeping, deeply
reported and personal.” The Poynter Institute, which lists George
Soros’s Open Society Foundations as a major funder, also gushed over Hannah-Jones’s essay, calling it “nearly
impossible, and almost insulting, to try and describe in a handful of words or
even sentences.”
Yet two corrections — technically, one “correction” and
one “editors’ note” — below the essay suggest that while perhaps heartfelt, the
prize-winning piece is also, fundamentally, wrong about American history.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at
Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on
Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7
p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner
of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at
@joelpollak.
_______________
RELATED STORY
‘The 1619 Project’ Tells a False Story About Capitalism, Too
By Allen C. Guelzo | The Wall Street Journal
New
York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones attends the Peabody Awards in New York,
May 20, 2016. Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Peabody
Award
Writing in 1854, George Fitzhugh described slavery as ‘a
beautiful example of communism.’
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 prize as an
attempt to deflect the criticisms the paper has taken from historians across
the country.
Jake Silverstein, the magazine’s editor, waved away those
objections as differences of “interpretation and intention, not fact” in a
letter responding to a dozen concerned historians, including me. Historians do
argue over interpretations, but parts of the 1619 Project are sloppy, at best,
with the facts. Consider the essay on capitalism by sociologist Matthew
Desmond.
Mr. Desmond asserts that Americans live in an environment
of “low-road capitalism,” a “peculiarly brutal economy” where “inequality
reigns and poverty spreads.” The fountain from which a “uniquely severe and
unbridled” capitalism springs is not Adam Smith or even the Robber Barons, but
the cotton plantation, Mr. Desmond claims. There, in the American South,
enslaved laborers produced “the nation’s most valuable export.” Their
productivity created “a capitalist economy.”
Slaves were whipped and tortured into clearing fields,
planting and harvesting crops whose yields increased, Mr. Desmond writes, by
400% over the 60 years before the Civil War. But Mr. Desmond also contends that
every aspect of the plantation was ruthlessly rationalized to enhance profits,
“via vertical reporting systems, double-entry record-keeping and precise
quantification.” Those “management techniques” became a model for “a union-busting
capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity.” Slavery’s
“violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous,” but instead “rational,
capitalistic.”
Yet the numbers do not substantiate this thesis. Mr.
Desmond asserts that “New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking
capital than New York City.” But 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.
Cotton was the single biggest export commodity of
pre-Civil War America—but only as a percentage of production that was exported.
New York, in 1856-57, overshadowed every other state in the Union in the value
of total exports and accounted for almost twice as much as all slave states
combined except Louisiana, whose major port also exported goods produced in
free states.
Mr. Desmond’s essay dwells at length on the plantation
record-books of Thomas Affleck—“a one-stop-shop accounting manual, complete
with rows and columns that tracked per-worker productivity”—as extended
evidence of slavery’s capitalist rationality. But Affleck was unrepresentative
of Southern plantation owners.
As historian Erin Mauldin has written, Southern
agriculture before the Civil War 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.
Nor was the uptick in cotton production necessarily
driven by the lash. Economists Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode analyzed 150
plantations between 1800 and 1860. They attribute the increases in the volume
of cotton production not to beatings and torture but to the “introduction and
perfection of superior cotton varieties.” The quality of Southern cotton also
drove up cotton profitability, as producers in Brazil, India and Egypt were
unable to match it.
None of this is to deny the obvious fact that slavery was
inhumane or brutal. But brutality has never been an effective incentive for
productivity, much less improvements in quality.
The clinching refutation of the slavery-is-capitalism
theory comes from the mouths of the slave owners themselves. They would have
been aghast at the idea they were presiding over Yankee capitalism. Capitalism,
complained slavery’s paladin, John C. Calhoun, “operated as one among the
efficient causes of that great inequality of property which prevails in most European
countries. No system can be more efficient to rear up a moneyed aristocracy.
Its tendency is, to make the poor poorer, and the rich richer.”
The 1619 Project imagines Southern slaveholders were
practicing “capitalism” simply because they made money. But slavery had been
around since antiquity—long before anything resembling capitalism existed. And
what the South saw in its plantations wasn’t capitalism but the opposite.
Writing in 1854, the pro-slavery propagandist George Fitzhugh described slavery
as “a beautiful example of communism, where each one receives not according to
his labor, but according to his wants.”
“Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they
were written,” reads the headline of Ms. Jones’s prize-winning essay. “Black
Americans have fought to make them true.” The latter part is true, but the
former isn’t, and attempting to replace the nation’s ideals with a false and
destructive story is no way to do history. The 1619 Project can wave its
Pulitzer as credibility insurance, but credibility isn’t the same as truth.
Pulitzers have been handed out before—to the Times’s Walter Duranty and the
Washington Post’s Janet Cooke—only to collapse under the weight of falsehood.
Mr.
Guelzo is a senior research scholar at Princeton University and a visiting
fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
