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Trump’s 1776 Commission Critiques Liberalism in Report Derided by Historians

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The White House on Monday released the report of the presidential 1776 Commission, a sweeping attack on liberal thought and activism that calls for a “patriotic education,” defends America’s founding against charges that it was tainted by slavery and likens progressivism to fascism.
President Trump formed the 18-member commission — which includes no professional historians but a number of conservative activists, politicians and intellectuals — in the heat of his re-election campaign in September, as he cast himself as a defender of traditional American heritage against “radical” liberals. Not previously known for his interest in American history or education, Mr. Trump insisted that the nation’s schools had been infiltrated by anti-American thought and required a new “pro-American” curriculum.
The commission formed part of Mr. Trump’s larger response to the antiracism protests, some of them violent, that followed the May killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
In his remarks at the National Archives announcing the commission’s formation, Mr. Trump said that “the left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools.”
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The commission’s report charges, in terms quickly derided by many mainstream historians, that Americans are being indoctrinated with a false critique of the nation’s founding and identity, including the role of slavery in its history.
“Historical revisionism that tramples honest scholarship and historical truth, shames Americans by highlighting only the sins of their ancestors, and teaches claims of systemic racism that can only be eliminated by more discrimination, is an ideology intended to manipulate opinions more than educate minds,” the report says.
The report drew intense criticism from historians, some of whom noted that the commission, while stocked with conservative educators, did not include a single professional historian of the United States.
James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, said the report was not a work of history, but “cynical politics.”
“This report skillfully weaves together myths, distortions, deliberate silences, and both blatant and subtle misreading of evidence to create a narrative and an argument that few respectable professional historians, even across a wide interpretive spectrum, would consider plausible, never mind convincing,” he said.



“They’re using something they call history to stoke culture wars,” he said.
The commission’s report depicts a nation where liberals are seething with hatred for their own country, and whose divisions over its history and meaning recall those leading to the American Revolution and the Civil War.
It portrays an America whose institutions have been infiltrated by leftist radicals whose views echo those of recent totalitarian movements and argues that progressives have created, in the so-called administrative state, an unchecked “fourth branch” or “shadow government.”
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And American universities, the report contends, “are often today hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country.”
The report likens the American progressive movement of the early 20th century to the fascism of leaders like Benito Mussolini, who it said “sought to centralize power under the management of so-called experts.”
“The biggest tell in the 1776 report is that it lists ‘Progressivism’ along with ‘Slavery’ and ‘Fascism’ in its list of ‘challenges to America’s principles,’” Thomas Sugrue, a historian at New York University, wrote on Twitter. “Time to rewrite my lectures to say that ending child labor and regulating meatpacking = Hitlerism.”
Released on Martin Luther King’s Birthday, the report even takes aim at the legacy of the Civil Rights movement, saying that it “was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders.”
Some of the strongest criticism was for the report’s treatment of slavery, which the report suggests was an unfortunate reality throughout the world that was swept away in America by the forces unleashed by the American Revolution, which is described as marking “a dramatic sea change in moral sensibilities.”
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The report’s authors denounce the charge that the American founders were hypocrites who preached equality even as they codified slavery in the Constitution and held slaves themselves.


Joseph R. Biden Jr. will become president of the United States at noon on Jan. 20 in a scaled-back inauguration ceremony. While key elements will remain traditional, many events will be downsized and “reimagined” to better adapt the celebration to a nation battling the coronavirus. Mr. Biden will be sworn in by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on the Capitol’s West Front sometime before noon. The new president is then expected give his inaugural address and conduct a review of military troops, as is tradition. But instead of a traditional parade before cheering spectators along Pennsylvania Avenue as the new president, vice president and their families make their way to the White House over a mile away, there will be an official escort with representatives from every branch of the military for one city block.




“This charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric,” they write. Men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, while they owned hundreds of enslaved people, abhorred slavery, the report contends.

 
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“The White House 1776 Report seems to regard calling the Founders hypocritical about slavery as worse for the country than actual slavery,” Seth Masket, a professor of political science at the University of Denver, wrote on Twitter.
And in a line that drew particular fire from historians, the report calls John C. Calhoun “perhaps the leading forerunner” of identity politics.
“Like modern-day proponents of identity politics,” it claims, “Calhoun believed that achieving unity through rational deliberation and political compromise was impossible; majority groups would only use the political process to oppress minority groups.”
The commission is led by Larry Arnn, a Trump ally and the president of the conservative Hillsdale College. Its co-chairwoman is Carol Swain, a prominent Black conservative and former Vanderbilt University law professor. Other members include Mississippi’s Republican former governor Phil Bryant; the conservative activist Ned Ryun; Mr. Trump’s former domestic policy adviser Brooke Rollins; and Charles Kesler, the editor of the influential conservative publication The Claremont Review of Books.
The commission and its report are in part a rebuke to The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which reframes American history around the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans. The report denounces the project, as did Mr. Trump in his September speech announcing the commission.
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“This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom,” Mr. Trump said at the time.
Mr. Trump’s commission produced its report just four months after it was created and less than a month after Mr. Trump publicly announced its members. By contrast, a commission on race created by President Bill Clinton in June 1997 issued its first report 15 months later.
While billed by the White House as “definitive,” the report included no scholarly footnotes or citations, nor was it clear who its primary authors were.
 
Historians responded with dismay and anger Monday after the White House’s “1776 Commission” released a report that it said would help Americans better understand the nation’s history by “restoring patriotic education.”

“It’s a hack job. It’s 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 commission was created in September with a confusing news conference featuring Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. The 45-page report is largely an attack on decades of historical scholarship, particularly when it comes to the nation’s 400-year-old legacy of slavery, and most of those listed as authors lack any credentials as historians. While claiming to present a nonpartisan history, it compares progressivism to fascism and claims the civil rights movement devolved into “preferential” identity politics “not unlike those advanced by [slavery defender John C.] Calhoun and his followers.”
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“I don’t know where to begin,” said public historian Alexis Coe. “This ‘report’ lacks citations or any indication books were consulted, which explains why it’s riddled in errors, distortions, and outright lies.”
Kali Nicole Gross, a history professor at Rutgers and Emory universities and the co-author of “A Black Women’s History of the United States,” said it was “dusty, dated” and “the usual dodge on the long-lasting, harmful impacts of settler-colonialism, enslavement, Jim Crow, the oppression of women, the plight of queer people … as the true threat to democracy.”
Boston University historian Ibram X. Kendi tweeted: “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.”

“It’s very hard to find anything in here that stands as a historical claim, or as the work of a historian. Almost everything in it is wrong, just as a matter of fact,” said Eric Rauchway, a history professor at the University of California at Davis. “I may sound a little incoherent when trying to speak of this, because the report itself is not coherent. It’s like historical wackamole.”
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He pointed to sections misinterpreting Puritan John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” speech, and to a section claiming the civil rights movement “came to abandon the nondiscrimination and equal opportunity of colorblind civil rights in favor of ‘group rights.’ ”
“Group rights is not anathema to American principles,” he said, recalling the formation of the Senate. “Why do Wyomingers have 80 times the representation that Californians have if not for group rights?”
Coe, who published a biography of George Washington last year, pointed to a section of the report that claims the first president had “freed all the slaves in his family estate” by the end of his life. In fact, he freed only one enslaved person upon his death; the 254 other enslaved people at Mount Vernon had a much more complicated fate.
George Washington owned slaves and ordered Indians killed. Will a mural of that history be hidden?
Hilary Green, a history professor at the University of Alabama, tweeted a list of books on American history people could read “instead of a certain report.”
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Several historians said it was particularly offensive that the report was released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and included several photos King and quotes they said were taken out of context.
“The suggestion that affirmative action programs are somehow antithetical to the vision of Martin Luther King Jr. is simply ludicrous,” said Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse. “King was alive when the Johnson administration launched its affirmative action programs and publicly declared his support, specifically noting that it was a logical extension of the struggle for black equality. The document ignores King’s record of support for affirmative action, lamely pointing to the one line conservatives know from his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and ignoring the rest of his radical record. The fact that this historical distortion of King’s life and work was released on MLK Day makes it even worse.”
Martin Luther King Jr.’s scorn for ‘white moderates’ in his Birmingham jail letter

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech to thousands on Aug. 28, 1963, in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (AP)
“It is fitting that this president, who was impeached again, this time for inciting an insurrection in the nation’s capital, would mark his last Martin Luther King Jr. Day in office by attacking the very movement Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader of,” Coe said.
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“To say that the racial divisions that have existed for the last half century are due to insistence by African Americans on ‘group rights’ rather than to the depth and breadth of racism, to say that on a page where you have a photograph of Dr. King is offensive to Dr. King’s legacy,” Grossman said.
The commission began in part as a response to the New York Times’s 1619 Project, a group of essays by historians and journalists about the way slavery has shaped the nation.








Trump claims the 1619 project distorts and ‘rewrites’ American history









At the National Archives Museum on Sept. 17, President Trump criticized a New York Times project focused on the first arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia. (The Washington Post)
Five professors say the 1619 Project should be amended. ‘We disagree,’ says the New York Times.
Even historians who have been critical of the 1619 Project, including Princeton’s Sean Wilentz, dismissed the 1776 report.
“It reduces history to hero worship,” Wilentz wrote in an email. “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. It's basically a political document, not history.”
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Historian Kevin M. Levin, author of several books about the Civil War, said: “The 1776 report views students as sponges who are expected to absorb a narrative of the American past without question. It views history as set in stone rather than something that needs to be analyzed and interpreted by students.”
The White House also released Monday a long list of historical figures to be featured at Trump’s proposed “National Garden of American Heroes.” Georgetown history professor Adam Rothman compared the report to the list, saying it was “nothing but the National Garden of Heroes in prose form, a stiff and lifeless history of America on a pedestal.”
Grossman, the AHA executive director, said: “This is written as if no historical scholarship has been produced in nearly 70 years, so it’s bereft of any professional historical sensibility at all. There are no historians on this commission. Would you take your car to a garage where there’s no mechanic?”
 
Are conservatives 99.9% full of shit because they lack any understanding or do they lack any understanding because they are 99.9% full of shit and have no further capacity for understanding? I think Biden should establish the 75 IQ Commission to figure it out.
 
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Well, I'm just SHOCKED that Trump's team came up with the exact opposite conclusion as the 1619 project.

And I say that as someone who thinks the 1619 people took it too far in how they tied slavery to everything that happened. Integral certainly, but they also didn't allow for much nuance in my opinion. It was predictable of what the conclusion of the 1776 people would be.
 
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