"These Deletions Are Not Mere Wording Changes"

"Ms. Hannah-Jones, caught in one lie, doubles down with new and even bigger lies. The Times journalist-celebrity not only denies her project's central argument. In self-contradictory fashion, she also says that the 'true founding' claim was just a bit of a rhetorical flourish. She told CNN that the 1619 Project was merely an effort to move the study of slavery to the forefront of American history."

Tom Mackaman and David North at the World Socialist Web Site declare victory over the The New York Times 1619 Project.

And they provide an update in October.

David Waldstreicher at Boston Review connects the controversy to disputes among historians.

"He Was by Temperament More of a Private Intellectual"

"Coming as it did, after the University had let the campus revolt that spring get violently out of hand, that speech got quickly pigeonholed as some sort of 'conservative' defense of the status quo. Read it again; I expect to include it in a subsequent volume. It is, in many ways, a fitting coda to Anti-Intellectualism and The Paranoid Style: 'The possibility of modern democracy rests upon the willingness of governments to accept the existence of a loyal opposition, organized to reverse some of their policies and to replace them in office. Similarly, the possibility of the modern free university rests upon the willingness of society to support and sustain institutions part of whose business it is to examine, critically and without stint, the assumptions that prevail in that society.'"

At the Journal of the History of Idea's blog, Daniel Wortel-London talks to Sean Wilentz about Richard Hofstadter.

And Jeet Heer at The Nation reviews Wilentz's collection of Hofstadter's writings for the Library of America.

Trump's Bonus

"The early 1930s resembled the present moment in some striking ways. The nation's economy was in free fall, connected to a global economic downturn, with no clear end in sight. Previous years of national prosperity had badly deepened economic inequality, making the crisis all the more severe for those left behind during the boom times. At home and abroad, authoritarian movements were on the march, demonizing ethnic and racial minorities and trashing liberal democratic values. Dissatisfaction was rampant, but it remained unclear who or what would replace the status quo."

Sean Wilentz at Rolling Stone compares Donald Trump to Herbert Hoover.

"That One Sentence About the Role of Slavery in the Founding of the United States Has Ended Up at the Center of a Debate Over the Whole Project"

"Both sets of inaccuracies worried me, but the Revolutionary War statement made me especially anxious. 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."

Leslie M. Harris at Politico discusses her interaction with The New York Times and its 1619 Project.

"A Politically Motivated Falsification of History"

"There are many scholars, students and workers who know that the 1619 Project makes a travesty of history. It is their responsibility to take a stand and reject the coordinated attempt, spearheaded by the Times, to dredge up and rehabilitate a reactionary race-based falsification of American and world history.
"Above all the working class must reject any such effort to divide it, efforts which will become ever more ferocious and pernicious as the class struggle develops. The great issue of this epoch is the fight for the international unity of the working class against all forms of racism, nationalism and related forms of identity politics."

The World Socialist Web Site launches a multi-article attack on The New York Times 1619 Project.

Tom Mackaman includes an interview with Adolph Reed, Jr.

And Sean Wilentz at The New York Review of Books discusses the history of American anti-slavery, while John Clegg at Jacobin points to a different kind of slavery influence.

"Great Historians Are Known for Their Appreciation of Irony"

"But if Wilentz were not so closely associated with the Clintons, he might now be claiming vindication as a Bernie bro ahead of his time. Thirty years ago, he was urging leftists not to give up on electoral politics and calling on Democrats to put working-class solidarity and a critique of corporate power at the center of their agenda. He even was one of America's first Bernie bros, celebrating the Burlington mayor's rise. Admittedly, by the time Sanders entered the Democratic primary in 2015 and began putting this strategy into practice, Wilentz had lined up behind Clinton."

Timothy Shenk at The Nation reviews Sean Wilentz's The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics and No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding.

"Go Back to When It First Came into Political Currency"

"As the political scientist Michael Sandel has pointed out, however, such positive rights are inherently on fragile ground unless they have the support of a strong community consensus, which in a modern liberal society can be achieved only through a civic republican politics. The defining theorists of the Progressive era understood this. Perhaps the most philosophically ambitious among them was John Dewey, who synthesized the liberal and civic republican traditions by way of a new concept of democracy itself: Democracy is not, Dewey argued, merely a mechanism for majority rule; it's an ongoing deliberative process through which bearers of individual rights address issues facing their political community as a whole and chart its future together. He redefined, in other words, the 'negative rights of liberalism and the 'positive rights' of civic republicanism as mutual necessities."

At The New Republic, Win McCormack presses "for progressive to be truly meaningful again."

"Represents a Sharp Break in Our National Political History"

"Never before has American democracy been so debased that roughly one-third of the nation can dictate its politics. (Even the slave power oligarchy of the 1850s managed to mobilize electoral pluralities and majorities.) Never before has an American Administration lied as continuously and as brazenly as Trump and his minions have, not simply as self-protection but as calculated insults to reason, gaslighting not just the nation but the entire world. Never before has an Administration’s supporters—today, the ruling one-third of the country—shown such an ardent willingness not merely to accept its mendacity but to get off on it, to the point of thrilling to possible criminal interference in our national elections by a hostile nation, so long as it gives the finger to the other side. Finding similarities in our past to this state of affairs brings to mind the French proverb, that to understand everything is to pardon everything—only, in this case, to analogize too much is to understand too little."

Sean Wilentz at Democracy says that Donald Trump is sui generis.

"An Idea of Who We Would Like Hamilton to Be"

"While the most recent critiques of 'Hamilton' have focused on race, some scholars have also noted that it's an odd moment for the public to embrace an unabashed elitist who liked big banks, mistrusted the masses and at one point called for a monarchal presidency and a Senate that served for life.
"Alexander Hamilton 'was more a man for the 1 percent than the 99 percent,' said Sean Wilentz, a professor at Princeton and the author of 'The Politicians and the Egalitarians,' to be published in May."

Jennifer Schuessler in The New York Times looks at historians' reactions to Hamilton.

Annette Gordon-Reed continues at the National Council on Public History's blog.

"Something Meritorious—Historical and Literary—Was Going On in the Writing of American History During the Mid- to Late Twentieth Century"

"Along with Richard Hofstadter, Schlesinger and Woodward were among the most influential and certainly the best-known members of an extraordinary generation of American historians, by which I mean historians of the United States and its colonial antecedents. Born between 1900 and 1920, the cohort included, among other luminaries, David Herbert Donald, John Hope Franklin, John Higham, Edmund S. Morgan, David M. Potter, and Kenneth M. Stampp. They shared neither a common subject inside American history nor a single point of view. All of them wrestled creatively with the legacy of the so-called Progressive historians who preceded them, including Charles A. Beard, Vernon L. Parrington, and 
Frederick Jackson Turner. That wrestling opened lines of investigation and reinterpretation that changed fundamentally the way historians and their readers think about 
the American past."


In The New Republic, Sean Wilentz reviews The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and The Letters of C. Vann Woodward .

The Constitutional Option

"As the wording of the amendment evolved during the Congressional debate, the principle of the debt’s inviolability became a general proposition, applicable not just to the Civil War debt but to all future accrued debts of the United States. The Republican Senate leader, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, declared that by placing the debt 'under the guardianship of the Constitution,' investors would be spared from being 'subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress.'"

Sean Wilentz in The New York Times advises President Obama on how to counter House Republicans.

At Reuters, Garrett Epps joins in.

"A Commitment to Democracy as Process"

"O’Brien is right that Obama represents an American political tradition, though there’s no need to go back to seventeenth-century Rotterdam to find it. The focus on democratic process, reform, and an ideal of deliberative democracy has been shared by many of the less successful Democratic candidates (and a few Republicans, like Representative John Anderson in 1980) since the 1950s. It’s the tradition of what historian Sean Wilentz called the 'beautiful losers,' beginning with Adlai Stevenson, and journalist Ron Brownstein called 'wine track' candidates (people who talk about 'new politics') as opposed to the more electable 'beer track' candidates like Bill Clinton (who focus more on basic economics than on the nature of politics). Obama’s passion has always seemed to be more for a richer and more collaborative form of politics than for any particular vision of economic justice.
"Obama’s presidency has been the first real test of a politics focused on reform and democratic participation rather than traditional bipartisan bargaining—and it has failed. Over the last four years, American politics split sharply into the two primary traditions: the first a sort of hyper-Lockeanism represented not just by the Tea Party but even by Mitt Romney’s division of the country into 'makers and takers,' the second a demand—driven by circumstances and crisis—for a much more active, expansive government role in the economy. Economic issues, once a natural zone of compromise, began to seem more like social issues, matters of irreconcilable absolutes. There wasn’t much room in the middle, and for a period, Obama’s discursive strategy seemed wholly irrelevant."

Mark Schmitt in the Washington Monthly reviews Ruth O’Brien's Out of Many, One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition.

Unlearned

"Although the book by Stone and Kuznick is heavily footnoted, the sourcing, as the example of Wallace’s 1952 article suggests, recalls nothing so much as Dick Cheney’s cherry-picking of intelligence, particularly about the origins and early years of the cold war. The authors also devote many thousands of words to criticism of such destructive American policies as Ronald Reagan’s in Central America and George W. Bush’s in Iraq, but much of this will be familiar to readers of these pages, as will their objections to Barack Obama’s use of predator drones. This book is less a work of history than a skewed political document, restating and updating a view of the world that the independent radical Dwight Macdonald once likened to a fog, 'caused by the warm winds of the liberal Gulf Stream coming in contact with the Soviet glacier'—but now more than twenty years after the dissolution of the Soviet empire."

Sean Wilentz in The New York Review of Books reviews Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's The Untold History of the United States.

An End for the "Peddlers of Paranoia"?

"The current round of paranoid politics got started in the 1990s, with bizarre stories about drug-running, murder plots, and other pseudo-scandals committed by Bill Clinton, the president who first targeted bin Laden and narrowly missed killing him in Afghanistan in 1998. But the paranoia ramped up after September 11, as the so-called architect of permanent Republican domination, Karl Rove, then President George W. Bush’s White House aide, informed the Republican National Committee that its strategy for political power centrally involved exploiting terrorism. Only the GOP should be depicted as serious about terrorism, while the Democrats should be cast as weak and soft. In the 2002 midterm elections, Republicans campaigned with a vengeance on the stark appeal to fear—remember the attacks on Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a triple amputee Vietnam veteran?—and they regained the Senate in 2002. Paranoia was gold."

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic wonders if Osama bin Laden's death will end "the long cycle of outrageous attacks, innuendo, and conspiracy-mongering" in American politics.

But Ed Kilgore disagrees.

"Maybe I'd Be a Failed Rock Musician or a Boring Old Guy Who Tells Stories about the Good Old Days"

"The move from seemingly hard-left labor historian to defender of traditional political history—notably in the New Republic essay about Lincoln scholarship—has caused some head-scratching in the academic world. (Wilentz has also written a sweeping work of contemporary history, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008; and a short biography of Andrew Jackson.)
"But Foner says Wilentz's career simply 'reflects an evolution that is going on in the American historical profession generally.'"

Christopher Shea in The Chronicle Review profiles Sean Wilentz.

"The New Nullifiers"

"After four years of Civil War, in a 'new birth of freedom' that resurrected the Union, Calhoun’s states’ rights doctrines were utterly disgraced—but they did not disappear forever. Nearly a century later they were exhumed to justify the so-called 'massive resistance' of the segregationist South against civil rights and, in particular, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The current rage for nullification is nothing less than another restatement, in a different context, of musty neo-Confederate dogma."

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic attacks "the current wave of enthusiasm for 'states’ rights,' 'interposition,' and 'nullification.'"

Disinterred

"If indeed justice is done and truth is served, those visitors will be inspired by far more than certain particular dimensions of Grant. A superb modern general who, with Lincoln, finally unleashed the force required to crush the slaveholders’ rebellion, Grant went on, as president, to press vigorously for the reunification of the severed nation, but on the terms of the victorious North and not of the defeated South. Given all that he was up against—not simply from Confederates and Southern white terrorists but, as president, from high-minded factional opponents and schismatics from his own Republican Party—it is quite remarkable that Grant sustained his commitment to the freedmen for as long and as hard as he did. The evidence clearly shows that he created the most auspicious record on racial equality and civil rights of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson."

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic reviews Joan Waugh's U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth.

Flip Your Whig

"In the era Wilentz describes, far more Americans than today remained outside democracy's boundaries. Yet in some ways, that democratic system was more robust than our own. Voter participation was far greater, popular involvement with political parties and leaders far more intense. Questions then thought to be subject to democratic control--currency and banking policy, public regulation of the economy, how to combat economic inequality--are now off the agenda. Today, only half the eligible population bothers to vote, no one is sure if his or her ballot will be accurately counted and the people's representatives are widely held in disrepute. As in the nineteenth century, we still grapple with the question of what kind of democracy America is and ought to be."

Eric Foner reviews Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy in The Nation, and Wilentz compares current conservatism with the antebellum Whig Party in The New York Times Magazine.