The 1619 Project (in the New York Times Magazine)

[David Lockmiller]

(05-07-2020 09:55 AM)Amy L. Wrote:  I must say, if this is really an issue that is being precisely and philosophically hashed out today, it's mighty interesting.
An editorial voicing some concerns:
The ‘1619 Project’... and ideological ax-grinding

A portion of this “opinion” reads as follows:

Confidence in institutions declines when they imprudently enlarge their missions. Empty pews rebuke churches that subordinate pastoral to political concerns. Prestige flows away from universities that prefer indoctrination to instruction. And trust evaporates when journalistic entities embrace political projects. On Monday, however, the New York Times — technically, one of its writers — received a Pulitzer Prize for just such an embrace.

Last August, an entire Times Sunday magazine was devoted to the multiauthor “1619 Project,” whose proposition — subsequently developed in many other articles and multimedia content, and turned into a curriculum for schools — is that the nation’s real founding was the arrival of 20 slaves in Virginia in 1619: The nation is about racism. 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. Herewith three examples of slovenliness, even meretriciousness, regarding facts:

To establish that the American Revolution was launched to protect slavery, the Times’s project asserts that a November 1775 British offer of freedom to slaves fleeing to join the British army was decisive in the move to independence. But this offer was a response to the war that had been boiling since April’s battles at Lexington and Concord and simmering for a year before that, as detailed in Mary Beth Norton’s just-published “1774: The Long Year of Revolution” . . . .

Misdescribing an 1862 White House meeting with African American leaders, the project falsely says that President Abraham Lincoln flatly “opposed black equality” and adamantly favored colonization of emancipated slaves. Actually, Lincoln had already decided on an Emancipation Proclamation with no imperative of colonization. In Lincoln’s final speech, his openness to black enfranchisement infuriated a member of his audience: John Wilkes Booth.

The project asserts that in the long struggle for freedom and civil rights, “for the most part” blacks fought “alone.” This erases from history the important participation of whites, assiduously enlisted by, among others, Frederick Douglass and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The ferocity of arguments among professors often is inversely proportional to the arguments’ stakes. Not, however, those about “The 1619 Project,” because, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Has this, the slogan of the party governing Oceania in George Orwell’s “1984,” supplanted “All the news that’s fit to print” as the Times’s credo?

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This morning, at 7:03 AM, Pacific Time, I sent the following email to George Will at the Washington Post.

Dear Mr. George Will,
Thank you for writing your column yesterday on The ‘1619 Project’ in the Washington Post. Your beginning and ending paragraphs were critical observations:

[T]rust evaporates when journalistic entities embrace political projects. On Monday, however, the New York Times — technically, one of its writers — received a Pulitzer Prize for just such an embrace.

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Has this, the slogan of the party governing Oceania in George Orwell’s “1984,” supplanted “All the news that’s fit to print” as the Times’s credo?

In the New York Times “Editor’s letter” published on April 19, 2020, one paragraph unfairly and unjustly attacked the character and reputation of President Abraham Lincoln. The Editorial Board implied that President Abraham Lincoln was himself a hypocrite in signing the Homestead Act in 1862. The offending paragraph reads as follows:

The purpose of the federal government, Lincoln wrote to Congress on July 4, 1861, was “to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial burdens from all shoulders, and to give everyone an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.” The Homestead Act in particular was a concrete step in that direction: 10 percent of all the land in the United States was ultimately distributed in 160-acre chunks. But Lincoln’s conception of “everyone” did not include everyone: The Homestead Act rested on the expropriation of Native American lands.

Implicit in this one paragraph statement made by the Editorial Board of the New York Times is that President Abraham Lincoln himself had done something morally wrong. In my opinion, the “cheap shot” denigration of the character and reputation of Abraham Lincoln in the Editorial pages of the New York Times in this manner (without President Abraham Lincoln being able to defend himself) is unwarranted and should not be permitted to go unchallenged.

I have done quite a bit of research to counter the statement of facts and argument made by the person I actually believe to be the true author of that single paragraph, Nikole Hannah-Jones, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

The counter facts, in chronological order, are as follows:

On May 28, 1830, the Indian Removal Act was signed by President Jackson. The Act allowed the government to divide land west of the Mississippi to give to Indian tribes in exchange for the land they’d lost. The government would pick up the cost of relocating the Indians and helping them resettle.

In 1838, President Martin Van Buren sent federal troops to march the remaining southern Cherokee holdouts 1,200 miles to Indian Territory in the Plains. Disease and starvation were rampant, and thousands died along the way, giving the tortuous journey the nickname “Trail of Tears.”

In 1851, Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act which created the Indian reservation system and provided funds to move Indian tribes onto farming reservations and hopefully keep them under control. Indians were not allowed to leave the reservations without permission. For Indians, reservation life was restraining, and the land Natives were forced to occupy were often too small to raise animals or hunt on and not viable agriculturally.

Yes, it is true as stated in the offending New York Times paragraph that the expropriation of Native American lands made the Homestead Act possible. But what role, if any, does the Editorial Board of the New York Times now legitimately believe that Abraham Lincoln played in “the expropriation of the Native American lands?” None, I presume would be their correct answer.

Abraham Lincoln became President of the United States on March 4, 1861. What does the New York Times Editorial Board now believe that the new President of the United States should have done at the time? Obviously, President Lincoln did not believe at that moment that he had the constitutional right to emancipate all of the slaves in the United States.

Does the Editorial Board now believe that President Lincoln had the right and authority to declare the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 unconstitutional? I don't think so.

Does the Editorial Board now believe that President Lincoln had the right and authority as President of the United States in 1862, when he signed the Homestead Act, to return all of the Native American lands to their rightful owners by Executive Order? I don't think so.

If the Editorial Board of the New York Times actually now believes that President Abraham Lincoln had the constitutional right to take either Executive action, why did not the Editorial Board write this or similar statement in their one paragraph spurious attack on President Abraham Lincoln’s character and reputation?

Regarding the treatment of American Indians by President Lincoln, there is the following information:

Episcopal Bishop Henry B. Whipple lobbied the President to reform the corrupt Indian agency system. In the spring of 1862, the bishop had recommended more humane treatment of the Minnesota Sioux. Lincoln promptly asked the secretary of the Interior to investigate, which he did and suggested numerous reforms.

The President told a friend that Whipple "came here the other day and talked with me about the rascality of this Indian business until I felt it down to my boots."

In reply to Whipple's appeal, Lincoln characteristically recounted a story:
"Bishop, a man thought that monkeys could pick cotton better than Negroes could because they were quicker and their fingers smaller. He turned a lot of them into his cotton field, but he found that it took two overseers to watch one monkey. It needs more than one honest man to watch one Indian agent."

[President Lincoln] pledged to Bishop Whipple that "[i]f we get through this war, and if I live, this Indian system shall be reformed."

(Henry B. Whipple, "Light and Shadows of a Long Episcopate, etc.," pages 136-137.)

In his 1862 Annual Message to Congress, President Lincoln asked the legislature to investigate this issue and take action.

Also, in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln came to the rescue of hundreds of Sioux Native Americans. 303 Sioux Indians were convicted of war crimes in the Minnesota Indian uprising and sentenced to death.

President Lincoln ordered General Pope to "forward, as soon as possible, the full and complete record of these convictions" and to prepare "a careful statement." As President Lincoln and two Interior Department lawyers scrutinized the record of the trials, they discovered that some had lasted only fifteen minutes, that hearsay evidence had been admitted, that due process had been ignored, and that counsel had not been provided the defendants.

President Lincoln authorized the execution of only 37 of the 303 condemned men (35 were found guilty of murder and 2 were convicted of rape). Lincoln explained his reasoning: "Anxious not to act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak on one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty on the other, I caused a careful examination of the records of the trials to be made, in view of first ordering the execution of such as had been proved guilty of violating females." He further sought to discriminate between those involved in massacres and those involved only in battles. At the last minute before the executions, President Lincoln pardoned Round Wind, who had helped some whites to escape.

On December 26, 1862, the convicted rapists and killers died on the gallows while a peaceful crowd of more than 5,000 looked on. In 1864, Minnesota Governor Ramsey told President Lincoln that if he had executed all 303 Indians, he would have won more backing for his reelection bid. “I could not afford to hang men for votes," came the reply.

In 1864, Lincoln pardoned two dozen of the 264 Sioux who, after being spared the death penalty, had been incarcerated. The same year, he intervened to spare the life of Pocatello, chief of a Shoshoni band in Utah.

(Source: "Abraham Lincoln: A Life” Volume II, pages 480-84, by Professor Michael Burlingame, 2008.)

In short, at least two things would have been different had President Abraham Lincoln lived: 1) Reconstruction and 2) the government’s treatment of native American Indians.

Yours truly,
David Lockmiller