Historians Outraged By 1776 Commission “Hack Job”
By Ray Cunneff
January 19, 2021
President Donald J. Trump’s ‘1776 Commission’ released its final report on Monday, Martin Luther King Day, outlining a new proposed curriculum for “restoring patriotic education”, proclaiming American exceptionalism, while downplaying or simply ignoring those episodes in American history which are at odds with the nation’s laws, stated principles or ideals.
The commission, was formed by President Trump in September as a counter-offensive to the New York Times’ ‘619 Project’ which sought to reframe the narrative of how slavery shaped America. But the report was also a response to the Black Lives Matter protests following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor (among others), contending that America is "the most just and glorious country in all of human history."
Despite an unprecedented two House votes for impeachment and awaiting trial in the Senate, the Trump White House has touted the release of the report two days before the president’s departure in disgrace as offering “a definitive chronicle of the American founding.”
However, there were no actual historians on the commission, just a gathering of conservative writers and educators offering a sanitized, revisionist account of the nation’s founding that largely justifies slavery, rejects science, pragmatism and societal advancement, and equates progressivism with fascism.
Professional historians expressed outrage at what one called a “hack job”, “riddled with lies”, and “not a work of history”. American Historical Association executive director James Grossman told The Washington Post: “It’s a work of contentious politics designed to stoke culture wars.”
The built-in irony of a report that insists that the US is exceptionable because, “No one is above the law”, is made grotesque by Trump’s efforts to pardon himself, his family and criminal cronies, two weeks after his supporters stormed and defiled the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 election.
The 45-page report is essentially an attack on decades of historical scholarship, particularly when it comes to the nation’s ‘original sin’, the 400-year-old legacy of slavery and the uncomfortable history of America’s founders as slaveholders.
While claiming to present a nonpartisan view of history, it claims the civil rights movement devolved into “preferential” identity politics “not unlike those advanced by [slavery defender John C.] Calhoun and his followers.”
Princeton’s Sean Wilentz, a critic of the 619 Project, nonetheless dismissed the 1776 Report. “It reduces history to hero worship. It's the flip side of those polemics, presented as history, that charge the nation was founded as a ‘slavocracy’, and that slavery and white supremacy are the essential themes of American history”.
Boston University historian Ibram X. Kendi responded: “This report makes it seems as if slaveholding founding fathers were abolitionists; that Americans were the early beacon of the global abolitionist movement; that the demise of slavery in the United States was inevitable.”
The 1776 Report is, quite literally, a “whitewashing” of American history.