Donald Trump is pledging that his conservative-dominated 1776 Commission, which as critics noted elevated “ignorance about the past to a civic virtue,” and led to book banning and spread chaos in school districts across the country, will be back if he is elected president.
In the summer of 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement as a mainstream movement, President Donald Trump placed a phone call to Betsy DeVos, the then Secretary of Education, wanting to know if the 1619 Project -- a set of essays published in the New York Times that centered slavery in understanding the founding of the nation -- could be banned from classrooms, The Washington Post’s Laura Meckler recently reported.
“I had to remind him that the United States does not have a national curriculum, and for good reason,” DeVos wrote in her 2022 memoir, Hostages No More. She told him directly: “The federal government can’t ban the 1619 Project.”
On July 3, 2020, Trump spoke at an event at Mount Rushmore. “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children,” he said. “Children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe the men and women who built it were not heroes but ... villains.”
Short of banning the 1619 Project, Trump came up with an alternative idea: appoint something called a 1776 Commission, stacked with right-wing culture warriors, and have it, as Meckler noted, tell “a far more patriotic story about the place slavery and racism have played in America’s history,” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/02/trump-1776-commission-education/).
Matthew Spalding, a government professor at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school in Michigan, headed the 1776 Commission. Spalding recruited 18 mostly conservative thinkers, academics and political figures, to serve on the Commission.
While Trump’s 1776 Commission was light on historical facts, it was heavy on culture war issues, a war Trump was more than willing to stoke and benefit from.
According to Meckler, “The commission ultimately produced a 41-page report on patriotic education that was posted on the White House website two days before Trump left office. The Commission was disbanded by President Joe Biden as one of his first acts in office.”
Meckler noted that the short history of the 1776 Commission “offers a granular example of how Trump’s impulse to use federal power expansively to execute his political goals was at times thwarted in his first term by aides who took a more traditional conservative view of the role of government — and what he might achieve should he return to the White House without such guardrails.” Think of the proposals put forth by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
Meckler pointed out that “After he left office, the ideas he tapped into would build, forming the backbone of legislation in at least 23 states limiting how teachers can talk about race, lead to the removal of books about race in school libraries and rip through countless school board meetings where communities would debate whether a discussion of systemic racism was overdue and important or overwrought and harmful.”
The 1776 Commission’s report was rife with errors, and came under attack from mainstream historians, including the American Historical Association, an association of around 11,000 professional historians. Meckler noted that “A statement co-signed by 47 other history and academic organizations said the report elevated ‘ignorance about the past to a civic virtue.’ It called the discussion of the nation’s founders, for one, ‘a simplistic interpretation that relies on falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading statements.’”
Regardless of criticism, the groundwork was laid for “the debate over how to teach about America’s founding and its history of racism was only beginning,” Meckler pointed out. “Soon Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) began enacting legislation and state policies restricting the teaching of race. Other Republican-run states quickly followed suit.”
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt maintains that Trump has always supported “bringing education back to the states, closest to parents and educators, where it belongs” and said the 1776 Commission focused on patriotic education at federal agencies.
“The Harris-Biden Administration shut down the 1776 Commission because the Democrat Party abhors common sense American principles and wants to rewrite our nation’s history with divisive ideologies,” she said.
“In a new Agenda47 video, President Donald J. Trump announced his ten principles for achieving great schools that lead to great jobs,” the website pointed out (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-president-trumps-ten-principles-for-great-schools-leading-to-great-jobs).
“Rather than indoctrinating young people with inappropriate racial, sexual, and political material, which is what we're doing now, our schools must be totally refocused to prepare our children to succeed in the world of work," President Trump said, outlining an expansive education agenda.
