One of the nation’s leading Lincoln scholars criticized the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project for its “historical sloppiness” and claimed journalists typically lack the expertise to consider themselves historians.
Dr. Allen C. Guelzo, who is the senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University and director of the James Madison Program’s Initiative in Politics and Statesmanship, refuted three major claims of the New York Times Magazine’s “The 1619 Project” during a recent interview on The Buck Sexton Show.
New York Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary for her essay, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.” The Pulitzer Prize Board described it as “a sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution.”
Guelzo, who was less impressed, said, “The 1619 Project, to put it in a short compass, is an attempt to re-center our understanding of American history. What they mean by ‘re-center’ is to see the presence of slavery and race as the central narrative of American history.”
The 1619 Project tries to posit that “American history has really been a history of oppression,” Guelzo continued, explaining how the project was named for the year slave ships first appeared on the shores of colonial Virginia. “Everything in American history can be understood as flowing downstream from that, whether it’s the American Revolution, whether it’s the Civil War, whether it’s Abraham Lincoln, whether it’s the American economy, whether it’s even patterns of rush-hour driving.”
Guelzo said the 1619 Project, which is “being adopted by school systems across the country” as mandatory instruction for K-12 students, is “a journalistic initiative which has been severely and publicly criticized by at least two groups of historians and by numerous other individuals,” for which reason he claims the idea of awarding it a Pulitzer Prize is questionable.
After rebutting the project’s assertions that the American Revolution was “motivated by the urge to protect slavery” and that plantation slavery was the model for modern American capitalism, Guelzo took particular issue with their portrayal of former President Abraham Lincoln.
Guelzo, who has won the Lincoln Prize three times for his books on the 16th president, said, “Abraham Lincoln, in the way the 1619 Project presents the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln was a racist; a racist who planned the deportation of black people because black people were, as they put it, ‘a problem; a worrisome problem.'”
“The one invocation of Abraham Lincoln is that he’s a racist who regards blacks as a problem,” he said, but pointed out Lincoln’s “worrisome problem” quote had, in fact, been lifted from Henry Clay.
“What we are dealing with is historical sloppiness that pushes things to an absurd degree,” Guelzo asserted. “Every one of these things that I’ve mentioned … are questions of enormous complexity, but they’re treated by the 1619 Project with a wave of the hand and no research.”
“Part of me wants to say this is what happens when journalists presume on the credulity of the public because we trust what the press says,” Guelzo said. Explaining how “journalists sometimes think that they are writing ‘the first draft of history,'” he warned that often they are not trained to be meticulous historians, but instead “operate under pressure to write dramatic copy that will fill the space of a 40-page newspaper or a 24-hour news cycle.”
“And it’s no surprise that we have seen a rash of journalistic hoaxes, some of which have gone up to the level of the Pulitzer Prize,” he continued, referencing Jayson Blair and the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalistic fabrication of Janet Cooke in 1980.
Guelzo said these false stories were written not because they were true, but because they “would be politically applauded, even if the material was, shall we say, invented.”
“But that’s not the way to do history,” he added. “That’s carelessness, that’s a lack of intellectual integrity. And what is surprising about the 1619 Project is that, even after all the criticism, it’s surprising that there should even be serious consideration for a Pulitzer Prize.”
