A Review of George Goodwin’s Propaganda Wars of the American Revolution, Yale University Press, 2026
“Give me liberty, or give me death!” – Patrick Henry, speaking at the Second Virginia Convention (1775)
“These are the times that try men’s souls.” – Thomas Paine, The American Crisis (1776)
“We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” – Attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence (1776)
“Join, or Die” – A famous political cartoon and slogan created by Benjamin Franklin to promote colonial unity against the French and their Native American allies, which later became a symbol of unity against British rule.
Introduction: Propaganda, Class, and the American Revolution
George Goodwin’s Propaganda Wars of the American Revolution comes at a time of deep crisis in American and global capitalism. As the 1776 semi-quincentennial approaches, it coincides with widespread social inequality, imperialist conflicts, and a rapid decline of democratic institutions in the US. It’s no surprise that debates over the meaning of the American Revolution—its origins, class implications, and legacy—have become central in current political discussions. Published by Yale University Press, Goodwin’s book aims to contribute to this debate by exploring how the Patriot movement used pamphlets, sermons, newspapers, broadsides, and political theatre to shape public opinion.
Goodwin is a talented historian and lucid writer. His book makes a significant contribution to a field traditionally dominated by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon S. Wood’s “ideological school.” However, Propaganda Wars also reveals a main weakness of that perspective by isolating ideas from the material class interests that influence them. Consequently, it presents a polished but somewhat idealist view of the Revolution—focusing on persuasion techniques while underplaying the social forces that made those techniques successful.
The Ideological School and Its Strengths
Goodwin’s intellectual legacy is clearly visible. His emphasis on propaganda as a key element places him mainly in the ‘ideological’ school of Revolutionary historiography, established by Bernard Bailyn. This approach, starting with Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), argues that the colonists were driven by a unified worldview rooted in radical Whig ideas. Bailyn and Wood carefully analysed pamphlets, sermons, and political debates from that period, opposing the dismissive view that all declarations of principle are driven solely by self-interest.
From a Marxist perspective, this emphasis on ideas is a notable strength. “It was a school that approached the record of human thought with great seriousness.” This is a welcome corrective to the postmodernist trivialisation of intellectual history and to the racialist distortions of the 1619 Project. Goodwin’s book continues this tradition by showing how the Patriot cause deliberately shaped public opinion—how Thomas Paine energised the colonies, how the Boston Tea Party was used as political theatre, and how Washington actively promoted the image of republican virtue.
Goodwin rightly emphasises that propaganda played a crucial role. Revolutions depend not just on economic factors but also on mobilising large groups, expressing grievances, and envisioning a new political future. The real question is: which forces were being mobilised, and for what purpose?
The Ideological School and Its Afterlives: Bailyn, Wood, and Goodwin in Comparative Perspective
Any Marxist critique of George Goodwin’s Propaganda Wars of the American Revolution must place the work within the wider historiographical context from which it originates. Goodwin is part of a broader intellectual tradition. His book represents the latest version of the “ideological school,” originally established by Bernard Bailyn and further expanded with sharper analysis by Gordon S. Wood. The advantages and drawbacks of Goodwin’s research are linked to those of this entire tradition.
The ideological school has significantly influenced modern interpretations of the American Revolution. It has also been the main opposition to postmodernist and racial-essentialist critiques, which culminated in the New York Times’ 1619 Project. The International Committee of the Fourth International, through its collaboration with Wood and its support for Enlightenment universalism, has actively engaged in this historiographical debate. As such, a clear, materialist evaluation of the ideological school is essential.
Bernard Bailyn: Ideology as Prime Mover
Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) marked a major turning point in the study of Revolutionary history. Moving away from the Progressive focus on economic grievances and class struggles, Bailyn proposed that the colonists’ motivations were rooted in a consistent worldview inspired by radical Whig ideas. According to this view, the Revolution was primarily an ideological uprising—a fight to defend liberty against a perceived British plot to wield arbitrary authority.
Bailyn’s contribution was significant. He brought rigour back to the analysis of ideas, elevating Revolutionary pamphlets from scholars’ dismissive view of them as simple rationalisations of self-interest. “It was a school that approached the record of human thought with great seriousness.”
Bailyn’s framework was highly idealistic, portraying ideas as independent forces separate from the material conditions and class dynamics that generate them. The Revolution is depicted as a conflict of political ideas rather than a fight shaped by the contradictions within colonial society. Class conflict is scarcely mentioned; slavery is seen as a minor issue; and the economic and social changes following the Revolution are viewed as minor outcomes rather than fundamental causes. Consequently, Bailyn’s approach is both a significant advance and a limitation—it expanded the scope of intellectual history but also restricted understanding to a non-materialist perspective.
Gordon S. Wood: Ideology as Social Transformation
Gordon S. Wood, Bailyn’s top student, maintained the ideological school’s focus on ideas while expanding its view to include a more vibrant and comprehensive understanding of social change. In his works, The Creation of the American Republic (1969) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), Wood showed that republican ideology was more than just abstract principles; it was a powerful force that transformed political culture, social structures, and daily life.
Wood’s work represents the most materialist analysis within the ideological school. He demonstrates that the Revolution dismantled monarchical and hierarchical social relationships, empowered the “middling sort,’ and unleashed democratic forces that even the Founders could not fully control. Additionally, he addressed the Revolution’s core contradiction with remarkable clarity: the coexistence of liberty and slavery. Wood argued that the Civil War was an inevitable culmination of a tragedy that originated in the Revolution itself.
Wood’s accomplishment lies in recognising that ideas are rooted in society rather than existing in isolation. However, he avoids adopting a Marxist perspective. He does not view the Revolution as a bourgeois-democratic event, nor does he see slavery as a fundamental aspect of capitalist growth. His approach stays within the ideological tradition, despite pushing against its boundaries.
George Goodwin: Ideology Reduced to Technique
George Goodwin’s Propaganda Wars adopts the strengths of the ideological school but lacks its deeper analytical depth. While Bailyn explored the origins of ideology and Wood examined societal transformations, Goodwin focuses on the mechanics of persuasion. His emphasis is not on the internal logic of Revolutionary ideas but on how they circulated, were performed, and emotionally resonated.
The book thoroughly explores printers, pamphleteers, preachers, and political leaders, illustrating how the Patriot movement intentionally influenced public opinion. It shows how Paine’s writings inspired the colonies, how the destruction of the tea served as a political spectacle, and how Washington fostered an image of republican virtue. However, Goodwin’s approach is more limited than that of earlier scholars. It’s important to remember that propaganda is grounded in tangible social forces, not just ideas—it is the ideological expression of actual social dynamics.
Goodwin views propaganda primarily as a technological feat rather than a reflection of class-based ideology. He describes how the Patriots succeeded in convincing the public, but does not explore why their messages connected with various social groups. Consequently, the Revolution is seen more as a success of strategic communication than as a bourgeois-democratic upheaval driven by colonial societal conflicts. In this way, Goodwin exemplifies the continuation of the ideological school. This tradition has lost its core intellectual focus and now persists through cultural history, communication analysis, and political technique.
The Marxist Position: Ideas as the Expression of Class Forces
A Marxist analysis acknowledges the valuable contributions of Bailyn, Wood, and Goodwin. It values their honest engagement with ideas and their opposition to the cynical reductionism often seen in modern academia. Nonetheless, it emphasises that ideas gain historical significance only when they align with material interests and social needs.
The American Revolution was a bourgeois-democratic uprising. Its propaganda functioned as the ideological voice of a rising bourgeois class opposing monarchical authority. The contradictions within that system—especially the tension between liberty and slavery—were evident in its language, silences, and evasive tactics. Bailyn studied the key ideas of Revolutionary ideology, while Wood investigated its social effects. Goodwin analysed how these ideas were disseminated.
The ideological school is essential for understanding the intellectual landscape of the American Revolution, but its focus on idealism limits its ability to fully interpret the Revolution’s significance. Goodwin’s Propaganda Wars offers meaningful insight into this tradition, yet it also reveals its inherent limitations, which are amplified here. “Propaganda does not float free of the material world… They were the ideological expression of real social forces.”
This is the core issue. The American Revolution was primarily a bourgeois-democratic movement, influenced by the conflicts within colonial society. The pamphlets from Boston radicals, sermons from New England clergy, and Paine’s fiery speeches were not independent forces shaping history but rather ideological expressions of various social classes: a rising colonial bourgeoisie limited by imperial mercantilism, artisans and mechanics opposing British economic policies, small farmers fighting taxation and landlordism, and Southern planters wanting westward expansion but hindered by the Crown.
Goodwin’s emphasis on technique—the “how” of persuasion—shields the underlying reasons. Why did Paine’s Common Sense strike such a chord? Why did conspiracy and liberty rhetoric energise urban crowds, frontier farmers, and some enslaved individuals fleeing to British forces? These questions cannot be answered solely by examining propaganda. Instead, they demand a class-based analysis of colonial society. The ideological school has always faced challenges despite its achievements. It views ideas as the main drivers of history, rather than as expressions of material interests. Goodwin’s book, despite its merits, still operates within this idealist perspective.
The Revolution “From Above”
The subtitle—From the Boston Patriots to George Washington—reveals a further limitation. It moves from discussing Boston’s radical protests to emphasising Washington, the Virginia planter who represents the Revolution’s consolidation through elite leadership. “The propaganda wars were not just Patriots versus Loyalists; they were also… a struggle over what kind of republic would emerge.”
This is a pivotal moment. The American Revolution, similar to all bourgeois revolutions, involved a deep tension between the democratic hopes it sparked and the class interests that ultimately constrained it. The urban crowds who brought down the George III statue, the workers who enforced non-importation agreements, and the farmers who later participated in Shays’ Rebellion—these groups drove the Revolution beyond what the colonial elite found acceptable.
Goodwin describes this trajectory but doesn’t question it. The Revolution is portrayed as a story of growing propaganda rather than as a conflict in which different class forces competed to influence the new republic. The ideological perspective often views the Founders as natural leaders of the Revolution, rather than as representatives of a particular class whose interests lay in rallying and controlling popular support.
The Silence at the Heart of Revolutionary Rhetoric: Slavery
No analysis of Revolutionary propaganda can ignore the core contradiction of 1776: the simultaneous fight for liberty and the perpetuation of chattel slavery. This was not accidental but a fundamental aspect of a revolution led by a class that included slaveholders. Revolutionary language used the metaphor of “slavery” to describe the colonists’ relationship with Britain, largely ignoring the reality of actual slavery. Jefferson’s initial objection to the slave trade was removed from the Declaration. Patriot propaganda aimed to preserve unity among both slaveholders and non-slaveholders across North and South.
Goodwin recognises this contradiction but does not incorporate it into his analysis of propaganda. However, the silences, evasions, and metaphors used in Revolutionary rhetoric were not accidental; they were crucial for maintaining the ideological unity of a movement led by a class whose material interests relied on human bondage. As Wood stated in Empire of Liberty, the tragedy was “preordained from the time of the Revolution.” The Civil War was the inevitable outcome of the contradiction that the Revolution could not resolve.
What Goodwin Achieves—and What He Cannot
Goodwin’s book is insightful and well-researched, offering an engaging look at the mechanics of persuasion. It highlights the roles of pamphleteers, printers, preachers, and political figures who influenced public opinion before independence. The book treats the intellectual environment of the Revolution with seriousness, pushing back against modern academic cynicism. However, its focus on an idealist framework limits its ability to explain events fully.
Propaganda was significant because it reflected the material interests and democratic hopes of large sections of colonial society. It was effective because, even if imperfectly, it conveyed the emerging bourgeois order’s challenge to monarchical authority. Seeing propaganda as an independent force is a mistake; it conflates the form with the underlying social content and reality.
Conclusion: Toward a Marxist Understanding of Revolutionary Propaganda
A Marxist view of the American Revolution recognises the influence of ideas but emphasises that ideas only gain power when linked to material interests and historical needs. The Revolution was a bourgeois-democratic uprising that laid the groundwork for capitalist growth, with its propaganda serving as the ideological expression of this change.
While Goodwin’s Propaganda Wars explores persuasion techniques, it does not address the class forces behind their effectiveness. Although a serious work, it remains rooted in the idealist tradition of the ideological school. To fully understand revolutionary propaganda, one must consider it within the context of colonial American social structure, the contradictions of slavery, and the global rise of capitalism. Only then can we comprehend the Revolution’s true historical logic—and its ongoing significance in a time when the crisis in American democracy raises questions about social revolution.
The Counter Revolution of 1776: Gerald Horne’s Historical Falsification and the Politics of Racialist Reaction
Introduction: The Manufacture of a Counter‑History
Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776 has been praised in some academic and media circles as offering a radical reinterpretation of the American Revolution. However, it exemplifies what Trotsky termed “the Stalin school of falsification”—a tactic in which the past is not thoroughly examined but is instead reshaped to align with current political agendas. The book’s main argument—that the American Revolution was a pro-slavery counter-movement opposing an abolitionist British Empire—is not only false but also a politically driven reversal of history, achieved through repeated misquoting, misattribution, and the intentional omission of evidence that contradicts its narrative.
Horne’s thesis does not hold up under scrutiny; the book is largely a work of fiction. This article aims to do two things: first, to reveal the falsehoods underlying Horne’s narrative; second, to place his approach within the wider context of racialist political ideology in the U.S., as exemplified by the 1619 Project and its associated pseudo-left supporters.
The Historical Record and the Fabrication of a Pro‑Slavery Revolution
The American Revolution arose from intensified conflicts between the colonies and Britain over issues like taxation, sovereignty, and representation. This is supported by extensive historical evidence, including the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767, the Boston Tea Party of 1773, the Intolerable Acts of 1774, and the ongoing debate over Parliament’s authority. Notably, none of the key revolutionary texts refers to the Somerset case or British abolitionism.
This is a decisive point. The Somerset ruling of 1772—Horne’s key case—was a narrow legal decision about the status of an enslaved man brought to England. It did not end slavery across the empire, did not spark an abolitionist movement (which was non-existent then), and was not part of the political focus of the revolutionary generation. By 1772, the revolutionary crisis was already in progress.
Horne’s thesis asks the reader to accept that the colonists fought for independence to safeguard slavery from a British Empire that wouldn’t abolish it for another sixty-one years (1833). This is not a historical fact but a conspiracy theory cloaked in academic language.
The Method of Falsification: Inversion, Omission, and Fabrication
Horne’s book contains a series of egregious distortions that reveal not error but method.
1. Inversion of Sources
Horne quotes a Virginia Gazette letter as if it defended slavery. In reality, the full text is a “blistering attack on the absurdity of enslaving people based on skin colour.” This is not a mistake. It is an inversion of meaning.
2. Misattribution
Horne attributes a Loyalist pamphlet to the revolutionary William Henry Drayton, claiming Drayton was “apoplectic” about Somerset. An anonymous Loyalist wrote the words. This transforms a pro‑British argument into an anti‑British one.
3. Erasure of Abolitionists
Benjamin Franklin—who published anti‑slavery essays, collaborated with Granville Sharp, and later led the Pennsylvania Abolition Society—is portrayed as a pro‑slavery figure. This requires suppressing Franklin’s own writings, including his attack on slavery in the London Chronicle.
4. Factual Incompetence
The Gaspee Affair is mangled beyond recognition. Horne claims the Gaspee was a slave ship arriving from Africa. It was a customs enforcement vessel that had been patrolling American waters for years.
5. Suppression of Contradictory Evidence
Rhode Island is depicted as a slaveholding stronghold rebelling to protect slavery. Horne omits that Rhode Island banned slave importation in 1774 and passed gradual emancipation in 1784—explicitly linking these measures to revolutionary ideals.
These are not just occasional mistakes but part of a consistent pattern: each distortion steers the narrative toward a preset conclusion. This isn’t genuine scholarship; it amounts to propaganda.
The Political Function of Horne’s Narrative
The political context of Horne’s book involves his association with the Communist Party USA, which has ties to Stalinism. Stalinist ideology has a history of distorting facts, not as a personal critique of Horne but as an analysis of his approach. Historically, Stalinism has consistently manipulated history—up from the Moscow Trials to the reinterpretation of the October Revolution—to serve political objectives. Horne’s methodology reflects this pattern.
The modern importance of The Counter-Revolution of 1776 is not about Stalinism itself but about how it aligns with the racialist politics of the American pseudo-left. The book’s positive reviews from outlets like the New York Times, The Guardian, Democracy Now!, and academic journals show its usefulness for a political agenda that prioritises race over class as the key lens for analysing history.
The 1619 Project, citing Horne as a primary source, clearly exemplifies this pattern. It’s claimed that the Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, which is directly drawn from Horne’s biased interpretations. The intention isn’t to enhance historical knowledge but to deepen racial divisions within the working class. They serve as tools to split the working class along racial lines—replacing race with class as the main driver of history.
The Marxist Interpretation: Revolution, Class, and Historical Development
Countering this misconception, the Marxist perspective views the American Revolution as a bourgeois-democratic uprising. Marx and Engels recognised that the Revolution overthrew feudal property systems in North America, increased the political power of the emerging bourgeoisie, was closely linked to Enlightenment ideas, and inspired both the French Revolution and other democratic movements.
Instead of dismissing the contradiction of slavery, this view considers it as part of broader social relations. The Revolution spurred forces that challenged slavery’s foundations: Northern states abolished slavery during and after the war, anti-slavery sentiments grew rapidly in the 1780s and 1790s, and the Revolution laid the groundwork for the Civil War, called the “Second American Revolution,” which ended chattel slavery. This perspective is dialectical, not moralistic. It emphasises that revolutions are complex processes driven by class forces, not racial essences.
V. Horne’s Methodology: A Marxist Critique
Horne’s methodology is the antithesis of Marxism. It is characterised by:
1. Idealism
Horne treats race as the primary motor of history, independent of material conditions. This is a retreat into pre‑Marxist, quasi‑theological thinking.
2. Presentism
He projects contemporary racial politics backwards into the 18th century, reading modern anxieties into historical actors who did not share them.
3. Source Manipulation
Rather than deriving conclusions from evidence, he reshapes evidence to fit conclusions. This is the hallmark of Stalinist historiography.
4. Rejection of Class Analysis
The class struggle—central to any Marxist account—is absent. The Revolution becomes a morality play of white oppressors and Black victims, not a conflict between colonial bourgeois forces and imperial authority.
5. Political Instrumentalism
History is shaped to serve current racialist politics rather than seeking genuine understanding. Its purpose is to mobilise resentment. That’s why the pseudo-left favours Horne’s work: it offers a superficially radical appearance while backing a reactionary agenda.
Conclusion: The Necessity of Historical Truth for Working‑Class Unity
The falsification of the American Revolution is not an academic dispute. It is a political intervention aimed at disarming the working class by severing it from the progressive traditions of the past. The Revolution was not a counter‑revolution. It was a decisive step in the global struggle against feudalism and absolutism. This struggle created the conditions for the later abolition of slavery and the emergence of the modern working class.
The Manufactured Decline of Gordon S. Wood: Liberal Academia’s Ritual Purging of Its Own Past
Gordon S. Wood’s obituaries—far from neutral remembrances—served as ideological tools in the modern academic world to dismiss not just a historian but an entire intellectual tradition that no longer aligned with its political agenda. Major news obituaries did not directly attack his character, but they emphasised the strong ideological and scholarly opposition he encountered later in his career.” This reflects a profession involved in a purge rather than a genuine tribute.
The sudden death of Wood gave the liberal media a chance to stage a public auto-da-fé: a ritual denunciation of a figure once seen as a symbol of the post-war liberal consensus. By the end, he had become a liability for the identity-politics-driven academy. Obituary writers, acting as ideological enforcers, focused on the 1619 Project conflict as a key part of Wood’s decline. As noted, “Major obituaries highlighted Wood’s vocal, public opposition to the New York Times’ 1619 Project’ was no coincidence.
It serves as the ideological centrepiece for the wealthy, upper-middle-class elite that now influence the humanities. This initiative is a political endeavour disguised as academic research, aiming to substitute class analysis with racial essentialism and to shape historical interpretation to fit the Democratic Party’s electoral goals. Wood’s opposition—regardless of its limited scope or political ambiguity—was unacceptable. He had breached the new orthodox doctrine.
Obituary writers highlighted the most damaging detail available: that Wood had criticized the project while admitting he had “not read most of” it. This repeated line aimed to completely discredit him. It was more than just an accusation of carelessness; it symbolically reversed everything Wood once stood for. The historian known for his thorough archival work was now depicted as a fringe figure yelling from the sidelines.
The political motive behind this framing is evident. The document claims that obituaries “drew sharp ideological parallels, noting that Wood’s arguments against the project closely aligned with the rhetoric of Donald Trump.” — the ellipsis emphasising the media’s desire to connect Wood with the right wing. The aim was to transform a scholarly debate into a moral condemnation. Wood was to be excluded from acceptable discourse, not because of the strength of his arguments, but because they were perceived to have political implications.
This outlines how academic marginalisation unfolds in the age of identity politics: disagreement is branded as abnormal, dissent is seen as reactionary, and the limits of acceptable scholarship are fiercely enforced. The generational aspect adds further insight. The document states that younger scholars increasingly viewed Wood as the symbol of an outdated establishment and criticised him for downplaying the importance, agency, and suffering of enslaved people, women, and Indigenous groups. This language does not arise from rigorous historiographical debate; rather, it reflects the jargon of a professional elite that substitutes moral judgment for historical explanation. Accusing someone of “minimising suffering” is not a neutral analytical term but a tool used for political purposes.
In the view of this new academic elite, Wood’s true fault was embodying a form of historical writing aiming for coherence, causality, and structural explanation—traits now criticised as “grand narratives” or “totalizing frameworks.” His approach was rooted in the Enlightenment tradition, which holds that history is understandable and that human societies evolve according to identifiable laws. This perspective is exactly what the postmodern-influenced academy dismisses.
Therefore, the methodological critique cited—John L. Brooke’s assertion that Wood avoided interpretative paradox and complexity—should be seen as a critique of clarity itself. Today’s academic environment treats “complexity” more as a way to sidestep explanations, especially those exposing the social and economic forces behind history. In this context, “complexity” acts as a euphemism for avoiding intellectual responsibility.
The obsession with Wood’s supposed “avoidance of paradox” in obituaries is profoundly ideological. It challenges the very idea that historical processes can be integrated into coherent narratives, a crucial aspect of Marxist historiography. As the liberal academic world has moved away from materialist analysis, it now shies away from viewing the Revolution as a complete whole. Wood’s mistake wasn’t in being incorrect but in maintaining the belief that history could be understood and explained.
I want to clarify that Wood’s marginalisation was caused not by scholarly debate but by a political shift within the academic community. The humanities have been taken over by a privileged elite whose interests conflict with any analysis emphasising class, economic exploitation, or the structural aspects of capitalism. The 1619 Project, with its focus on racial essentialism and the omission of class struggle, represents the ideological stance of this group. Wood’s work—grounded in the Enlightenment, republican ideology, and 18th-century social dynamics—was incompatible with this new orthodoxy.
The obituaries served a dual purpose: they not only buried Wood but also the intellectual tradition he stood for. They indicated that the liberal consensus school, despite its flaws, no longer serves the ruling class’s ideological needs. Today, the academy fosters a politics of racial division that divides the working class and hides the true mechanisms of social control.
Wood’s perceived decline, as described in these obituaries, is not just about a historian out of sync with current trends. It reflects a broader shift in the profession that has forsaken its dedication to truth for political convenience. It also signifies a ruling class that no longer depends on the legitimacy provided by liberal consensus myths but instead has adopted politics rooted in resentment, identity, and fragmented history.
In this context, the obituaries do not focus solely on Wood. They highlight a crisis within the American academic world and the ideological breakdown of liberal intellectuals. Wood’s marginalisation is merely a symptom; the real issue runs much deeper.
Gordon S. Wood and the Fate of Historical Consciousness in the Epoch of Decline
PREFACE
I started this small book because I believed that something vital was fading—not just within academia but also in the wider culture that once supported serious historical scholarship. The passing of Gordon S. Wood in June 2026 and the subdued response to it confirmed what had already been clear: the Enlightenment tradition of historical research, which influenced much of the greatest work of the 20th century, is now facing a deep crisis. The historian who offered unparalleled clarity and rigour in explaining the American Revolution died almost unnoticed. That lack of acknowledgement was no coincidence; it was a sign of the times.
This book examines that issue by exploring Gordon S. Wood’s life, work, and intellectual background. Instead of a traditional biography, it focuses on traditions such as republican scholarship, Enlightenment universalism, and the importance of understanding history and valuing ideas. It also analyzes the elements that have challenged these traditions, including the rise of identity politics, declining scholarly standards, the commercialisation of universities, and the politicization of history.
Wood’s work offers a perspective to examine these changes. His apprenticeship under Bernard Bailyn, his reconstruction of the Revolution’s ideological roots, his analysis of republicanism and social shifts, his discussion of slavery as a tragic inconsistency of the Revolution, and his later challenge to the 1619 Project all shed light on how historical awareness has evolved in our era.
I wrote this book believing that the Enlightenment tradition deserves defending, not out of nostalgia, but because it is essential for truly understanding human history. As Wood showed, the American Revolution expressed universal principles that still influence the world today. Forgetting these principles means losing sight of our own identity.
This monograph serves as both a historical reconstruction and a declaration of intellectual dedication. It is presented with the hope that the tradition Wood represented — rigorous, humane, universalist — will find new advocates in an era that desperately requires them.
London June 2026
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter 1 — The Death of a Historian: Gordon S. Wood and the Crisis of Historical Consciousness
Chapter 2 — Apprenticeship to Bailyn: The Birth of a Historiographical Tradition
Chapter 3 — The Revolution as Social Transformation: Wood’s Radicalism Thesis
Chapter 4 — Republicanism, Equality, and the Problem of Democracy
Chapter 5 — Slavery, Tragedy, and the Contradictions of the Early Republic
Chapter 6 — The Academy in Decline: From Consensus to Postmodernism
Chapter 7 — Race, Identity, and the New Anti‑Historical Ideology
Chapter 8 — The 1619 Project and the War on the Enlightenment
Chapter 9 — Wood and the WSWS: An Unlikely Alliance Chapter 10 —The Future of Historical Consciousness
Epilogue — The Historian and the Republic
CHAPTER 1 (Part I)
The Death of a Historian: Gordon S. Wood and the Crisis of Historical Consciousness
Gordon S. Wood passed away on June 2, 2026, at 93 years old. His death was briefly noted in a few newspapers and met with quiet respect by a diminishing circle of scholars, symbolising the end of an era in American intellectual history. For over fifty years, Wood was the leading interpreter of the American Revolution, shaping how generations of students, scholars, and citizens understood the nation’s origins. Despite his significance, his death sparked no national controversy, public debate, or collective reflection on his contributions. As the World Socialist Web Site noted, it passed “with hardly a ripple in official public life.”
This silence marked a significant historical moment, highlighting how the intellectual environment that shaped Wood—the postwar scholarly community rooted in Enlightenment ideals and the belief in objectively understanding the past—had been overshadowed by new ideological currents. By the time of his death, the academy that once honoured Wood’s contributions had largely drifted away from his foundational principles. Additionally, the public culture that once prioritised historical insight was reshaped by digital immediacy, political divisions, and the commercialisation of knowledge. In this context, the notion of a historian serving as a public intellectual had become outdated.
Wood’s death compels us to ask a fundamental question: what happens when a society loses the ability to comprehend its own history? The decline in historical awareness during the late years of Wood’s life is more than just an academic concern—it represents a political and cultural crisis with serious consequences for democracy. Without understanding its roots, a society cannot grasp its current state. Without understanding its current state, it cannot effectively influence its future.
Wood’s life and work shed clear light on this crisis. Born in 1933 and raised in modest circumstances, he studied at Tufts and Harvard, influenced by Bernard Bailyn’s rigorous approach. As the leading historian of the American Revolution during a time when objectivity was still valued in the discipline, his early book, The Creation of the American Republic (1969), revolutionized eighteenth-century political thought. His later work, particularly The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), reinterpreted the revolution as a social upheaval that removed remnants of monarchical society. In his final years, he passionately defended the Enlightenment tradition against the growing influence of identity-driven historical interpretations.
Wood’s intellectual journey was not just personal; it reflected the broader development of the American academic world. This included its postwar confidence, growth during the 1960s, fragmentation in the 1970s and 1980s, shifting focus in the 1990s, and increasing ideological polarization in the early twenty-first century. His work serves as both a tribute to the past successes of that tradition and a critique of its recent decline.
(Part II)
The muted reaction to Wood’s death was not just a lack of public acknowledgement; it reflected a lengthy decline in intellectual standards. Over the years, academia moved away from the core principles that underpinned Wood’s work. The Enlightenment tradition—focused on universalism, rational inquiry, and objective knowledge—was gradually replaced by trendy theories centred on identity, power, and the fluidity of meaning. The historian’s discipline, once characterised by careful archival research and clear concepts, has been increasingly overshadowed by contemporary moral judgments and political influences in scholarship.
Wood’s death prompts a wider reflection on the state of historical consciousness in the early twenty-first century. The crisis is not just about methodology; it’s a philosophical issue, questioning the essence of how we understand history. Can we truly know the past? Are ideas comprehensible on their own terms? Can we fairly judge historical figures within their own contexts? Or has history become just a arena for current political conflicts, a collection of symbols exploited to support present-day identities??
Wood’s work provides a compelling response to these questions. It confirms that the past is understandable, emphasizes the importance of ideas, and shows that historical understanding involves a disciplined attempt to reconstruct how people experienced the world. His scholarship demonstrates that objective knowledge is possible — not in the naive sense of absolute certainty, but through disciplined, evidence-based reasoning.
The crisis of historical consciousness extends beyond academia, mirroring broader shifts in public culture. Digital media accelerates the erosion of historical depth, with the present dominating the past. The rapid news cycle, social media’s speed, and attention commodification foster a culture where historical thinking is becoming rare. The past is often forgotten or used instrumentally—appealed to as a moral lesson, political tool, or identity source—rather than being genuinely understood.
In this context, Wood’s work seems almost outdated. His detailed monographs, thorough archival research, and conceptual analyses of republicanism and social change belong to a time when historical scholarship was a dedicated pursuit, not just a display. Nevertheless, this sense of being out of its time is what makes his work valuable. In an era characterized by fragmentation and a focus on the present, Wood’s scholarship exemplifies a serious and thoughtful approach to intellectual work.
The crisis in historical consciousness is more than just an academic trend; it signals a deeper cultural shift—the weakening of the Enlightenment tradition. The Enlightenment championed universal human capacities, rational inquiry, and the value of historical understanding, laying the groundwork for democratic society. Its decline endangers not only history as a discipline but also the broader culture of citizenship.
Wood’s life and work shed light on this crisis with remarkable clarity. His scholarship highlights how ideas can drive change, the complexity of social transformation, and the need to interpret history on its own terms. His later challenge to the 1619 Project — which also aligned him with the World Socialist Web Site — showed his dedication to defending Enlightenment values against the rise of identity-based reductionism.
The quiet surrounding his death is more than just an absence of recognition; it acts as a warning. It underscores how delicate the sense of history has become in a society that no longer believes in the concept of objective truth. This urges us to consider what is necessary to restore that confidence. Wood’s life provides a clue: returning to the core values that characterized his work — rigor, clarity, universalism, and respect for the independence of history. His death forces us to ask if those values can be rekindled in a modern era that has moved away from them.
(Part III)
To grasp the importance of Wood’s death, it’s essential to understand the intellectual environment that influenced him — and the one that succeeded it. Wood was part of a generation of historians shaped by the postwar growth of the American university system. This group saw the historian’s craft as a disciplined and nearly ascetic activity. They did not view the historian as a moral judge, a critic of culture, or a political advocate. Instead, they saw the historian as a scholar dedicated to accurately reconstructing the past, emphasizing evidence and clear concepts.
Wood’s mentorship under Bernard Bailyn exemplified this ethos. Bailyn’s 1967 work, *Ideological Origins of the American Revolution*, revolutionized the understanding of eighteenth-century political ideas. He impressed upon Wood that ideas are crucial— not simply byproducts of social forces or rationalizations of material interests, but as independent causal agents. Accordingly, the Revolution was not just a power struggle but a significant ideological break driven by a consistent, though evolving, set of political ideas rooted in the radical Whig tradition.
Wood internalized this lesson profoundly. His initial work, particularly The Creation of the American Republic, showcased an exceptional mastery of eighteenth-century political language. He meticulously reconstructed the Founders’ intellectual landscape with remarkable accuracy and nuance, establishing a new benchmark for the field. In his later works, he broadened this analysis, viewing the Revolution as a social change that dismantled the vestiges of monarchical society and forged a new realm of republican equality.
Wood’s intellectual background made him keenly aware of how fragile our grasp of history can be. He recognized that the past is not obvious; it must be carefully reconstructed through rigorous engagement with sources, ideas, and contexts. He saw the historian’s role as one of understanding rather than judging the past. Additionally, he believed that this endeavour depends on a commitment to universalism — the idea that people across different eras and regions possess certain shared capacities that enable us to comprehend history.
In the final decades of Wood’s life, his universalist ideas faced significant criticism. The growth of identity-focused historical interpretations, postmodern scepticism, and the politicisation of scholarship all questioned the core principles of his work. The 1619 Project, with its contemporary moral stance and portrayal of the Revolution as a racial struggle, epitomised these developing trends.
Wood’s clash with the 1619 Project was more than just a scholarly dispute. It represented a defence of Enlightenment principles against an ideological push to substitute universal values with particularist views, reason with identity politics, and objective historical analysis with moral condemnation. His collaboration with the World Socialist Web Site—an alliance that caught many by surprise but was logical for those aware of the broader stakes—highlighted his understanding that protecting historical truth depends on forming new kinds of intellectual alliances.
The silence following Wood’s death should be seen as a sign of a significant cultural shift. It indicates the decline of the Enlightenment tradition, the breaking apart of historical understanding, and the emergence of ideological narratives that view the past as a battlefield for modern identities. This silence highlights how fragile historical consciousness has become in a society that no longer trusts the possibility of objective truth.
Wood’s life and work provide a guiding example for the future. They show that understanding history is achievable, ideas are significant, and the Enlightenment tradition continues to be an essential element of democratic life. They urge us to protect the principles underlying his work—rigor, clarity, universalism, and respect for the autonomy of history—from the forces that endanger them.
The passing of Gordon S. Wood is more than just the end of a life; it serves as a moment of reflection. It prompts us to face the crisis in our historical awareness and to think about what it takes to rebuild the intellectual roots of a democratic society. This moment urges us to choose whether to let the Enlightenment tradition fade into obscurity or to stand firm in defending it with the seriousness it warrants.
CHAPTER 1 (Part IV)
The crisis surrounding Wood’s death reflects deeper social and political shifts, not just academic trends. It stems from the decline of the postwar liberal system, the rise of neoliberal capitalism, the fragmentation of public discourse, and growing social inequality. These factors have fostered a culture where historical understanding becomes more fragile. Instead of a shared reference, the past has become a contested space, selectively used to support different identities and political goals.
In this setting, the historian’s role is both more challenging and more vital. They must push back against present-focused biases, avoid moralistic tendencies, and resist ideological manipulation. It is crucial to uphold the independence of historical analysis from current political influences. The historian should emphasize that true historical comprehension depends on a disciplined approach to evidence, context, and clarity of concepts.
Wood approached this task with exceptional clarity. His work was rooted in a profound respect for the independence of the past, and he avoided judging eighteenth-century actors through twenty-first-century viewpoints. He emphasized that the Revolution should be viewed within its own intellectual and social context. Additionally, he opposed simplifying historical causality to mere identity categories and championed the Enlightenment’s universalist principles against the particularism found in identity-based narratives.
This dedication to acknowledging the past’s independence was not an escape from politics. Instead, it served as a safeguard for the intellectual roots of democracy. A democratic society depends on a common grasp of its history, including its roots, successes, and contradictions. It needs a historical awareness that can see both the universal goals of the Revolution and the tragic constraints it faced. Moreover, it demands an honest engagement with history, free from cynicism and false hope.
Wood’s work offers a framework for understanding this type of historical consciousness. His analysis of the Revolution highlights the complexity of social change, the influence of ideas, and the contradictions involved in building a new political system. His discussion of slavery shows the tragic tension between freedom and unfreedom that influenced the early republic. Additionally, his critique of identity-focused historical interpretations warns of the risks of interpreting the past solely through modern categories.
The crisis of historical consciousness cannot be fully explained only by looking at intellectual history. Instead, it reveals wider structural forces influencing how historical knowledge is created and received. Factors such as the commodification of universities, the decline of the humanities, the growth of digital media, and the polarization of public debate all play a role in fostering a culture where historical understanding becomes more and more sidelined.
The university, traditionally a hub of serious scholarship, has changed due to market forces and administrative growth. Humanities subjects have been devalued in Favor of fields with quicker financial gains. Long-form works, like the monographs Wood specialized in, are now replaced by shorter, more commercially appealing writings. As a result, the historian’s craft is often overshadowed by theoretical ideas and activism.
The public sphere, originally supported by print culture and civic institutions, has become fragmented due to digital media. The rapid news cycle, social media’s quick pace, and the commercialization of attention have fostered a culture where historical reflection is becoming less common. Instead of understanding the past, it is often used as a moral lesson or political tool.
Wood’s death goes beyond losing a historian; it prompts us to reflect on the fragile state of historical awareness in a society doubtful of truth itself. It urges us to think about what it takes to rebuild the core principles of democratic culture. His life and work suggest one option: return to the core values of his scholarship—rigor, clarity, universalism, and respect for the past’s independence. His passing forces us to choose whether to let the Enlightenment tradition fade or to uphold it with the gravity it warrants.
The crisis in historical consciousness is deep but not beyond repair. Resources for renewal still exist, rooted in the Enlightenment traditions Wood championed, the dialectical approach uncovering past contradictions, and the universalist ideals guiding democratic aspirations. Wood’s passing signals the end of an era, yet his work continues to serve as a beacon for the future — a reminder that the past is alive, understanding history is achievable, and the battle for truth remains intertwined with the fight for human liberation.
CHAPTER 2 (Part I)
Apprenticeship to Bailyn: The Birth of a Historiographical Tradition
Gordon S. Wood’s intellectual development is closely linked to Bernard Bailyn. Their relationship extended beyond that of student and mentor, involving the sharing of methods, perspectives, and intellectual goals. Bailyn pioneered a new approach to understanding the American Revolution, challenging the complacent views of the mid-20th-century Consensus school and emphasising that the Revolution was fundamentally an ideological event. Wood took this lesson seriously, influencing his entire scholarly trajectory.
When Wood arrived at Harvard in the late 1950s, the field of early American history was quietly but significantly evolving. The postwar academic environment had grown swiftly, opening new doors for motivated young researchers. However, the prevailing interpretive frameworks were still influenced by the Consensus historians — Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz, and Daniel Boorstin — who focused on continuity, stability, and the lack of major ideological conflicts in American history. According to this perspective, the Revolution was seen as a conservative movement, defending inherited liberties rather than initiating radical change.
Bailyn challenged traditional views with a bold stance that energised his students. In his 1967 book, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, he argued that the Revolution was driven by a consistent set of political ideas rooted in the radical Whig tradition. Bailyn emphasised that the colonists were not merely opportunists or passive followers of English constitutional principles. Instead, they were active political thinkers who believed that power was inherently corrupt, liberty was fragile, and vigilant oversight was essential to preserve freedom. Their pamphlets, sermons, and political writings reflected genuine beliefs rather than mere rhetorical devices.
Wood was deeply impressed by this method. He viewed Bailyn’s research as a prime example of historical investigation, merging detailed archival work with advanced ideas. Bailyn showed him how to interpret eighteenth-century writings not merely as old artefacts but as portals to understanding the ideas that influenced history. He encouraged him to regard political thought with seriousness—analysing its logical structure, terminology, rhetorical techniques, and social impact.
This apprenticeship was a transformative experience. Wood’s dissertation, which later became The Creation of the American Republic (1969), built upon Bailyn’s insights to provide a wider analysis of the Revolution’s political and constitutional changes. While Bailyn focused on the ideological roots of the Revolution, Wood looked at the institutional outcomes of those ideas. He traced the development of republican thought from the imperial crisis through the drafting of state constitutions and the establishment of the federal government. Wood showed that the Revolution created a new political landscape — one in which sovereignty, representation, and authority were rethought in ways that decisively broke with monarchical traditions.
Wood’s early work was shaped by the intellectual environment of 1960s Harvard, where Bailyn, Oscar Handlin, and colleagues were redefining early American history. It also mirrored Wood’s personal outlook—his focus on clear concepts, his interest in the internal coherence of political ideas, and his view that the Revolution was a pivotal event.
The connection between Wood and Bailyn extended beyond just intellectual bonds; it was also personal. Wood highly valued Bailyn’s meticulousness, discipline, and rejection of simple solutions. Conversely, Bailyn acknowledged Wood’s exceptional ability. Their exchanges through letters, discussions, and joint work fostered a friendship that endured many years. Wood frequently regarded Bailyn with deep respect, calling him the finest historian of the American Revolution.
However, Wood was more than just a disciple; he built upon Bailyn’s ideas and took them in new directions. While Bailyn highlighted the importance of ideology, Wood focused on social transformation. Bailyn examined the origins of the Revolution, whereas Wood explored its aftermath. Bailyn reconstructed the intellectual landscape of the Founders, and Wood analysed the disintegration of monarchical society and the rise of republican equality. This progression was not a break from Bailyn’s approach but a natural extension of it. Bailyn demonstrated that ideas mattered; Wood showed how those ideas drove social change.
Wood’s intellectual journey begins with his apprenticeship to Bailyn. This path prompted him to reinterpret the Revolution as a radical change, defend the Enlightenment tradition against critics, and challenge the ideological distortions of the early twenty-first century.
CHAPTER 2 (Part II)
Wood’s intellectual work, mentored by Bailyn, was marked by exceptional methodological rigour rarely seen in the academic environment of the 2020s. It focused on the archive as the main source—placing it above theory, identity, or political movements. The archive was seen as a place for discovering truths rather than extracting moral lessons. Working with it demanded humility, patience, and a willingness to understand the perspectives of those from the past.
Bailyn taught Wood that a historian should think with the past rather than about it. This subtle but crucial distinction shaped his entire career. Thinking with the past involves reconstructing the reasoning of historical figures, understanding their fears, hopes, and assumptions, and grasping the conceptual framework of their worldview. Conversely, thinking about the past means applying modern categories to it, viewing it as a reflection of current issues. Wood quickly realised that the latter approach hinders true understanding of history.
This sensitivity appears in the opening pages of The Creation of the American Republic, where Wood meticulously reconstructs the vocabulary of eighteenth-century political thought. He illustrates how words like “virtue,” “corruption,” “representation,” and “sovereignty” had specific meanings that are difficult to translate into modern political language accurately. Wood argues that the Revolution was more than just a political event; it was a conceptual break—a fundamental shift in how Americans perceived authority, liberty, and the structure of political society.
This approach was built directly on Bailyn’s method, but Wood took it further. He understood that the Revolution’s ideological changes had social impacts. The fall of monarchical society was more than a shift in politics; it reconfigured social relationships, democratized authority, and levelled hierarchies. Wood realised that the Revolution’s ideas were not just theories but powerful forces that altered everyday life for ordinary people.
This insight laid the groundwork for The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), Wood’s most ambitious and controversial book. However, its roots trace back to his mentorship under Bailyn, where he learned to view ideas as driving forces and to faithfully and imaginatively reconstruct the eighteenth-century worldview.
The connection between Wood and Bailyn highlights the intellectual environment of the postwar academic world. This culture emphasised detailed, extensive scholarship, conceptual precision, and the gradual buildup of knowledge. In this setting, a historian’s authority was based on their expertise with sources, rather than on personal identity or political views. It was a culture that held a conviction in the pursuit of truth.
This culture has mostly vanished. The institution that influenced Wood has been replaced by one that values theoretical innovation, political importance, and identity performance. The historian’s craft—focused on meticulously reconstructing the past—has been overshadowed by present-focused moral judgment and the use of history as a tool for political objectives.
Wood’s apprenticeship under Bailyn highlights the value of historical scholarship and what has been overlooked. It exemplifies a tradition of intellectual rigour that is becoming increasingly rare in modern academia. It encourages us to reflect on whether this tradition can be restored and what measures might be needed to do so.
For Wood, the key was found in the archive, in carefully reconstructing the past, and in holding that ideas are important. His training under Bailyn marked the start of a lifelong dedication to these values. It influenced his view of the Revolution, his criticism of identity-focused history, and his defence of the Enlightenment tradition.
The next chapter will explore how Wood extended Bailyn’s insights into a sweeping reinterpretation of the Revolution as a social transformation. This reinterpretation would define his career and reshape the field.
CHAPTER 3 (Part I)
The Revolution as Social Transformation: Wood’s Radicalism Thesis
Gordon S. Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) represents one of the most comprehensive reinterpretations of the founding era by an American historian. In this work, Wood articulates his view of the Revolution as a significant rupture in history — not just a political change or a constitutional revision, but a deep social shift that dismantled the remnants of monarchical society and ushered in a new era of republican equality.
The book’s argument was bold, comprehensive, and unabashedly universalist. It challenged the prevailing view at the time that the Revolution was a conservative effort, mainly defending traditional liberties rather than representing big change. It also contested the Marxist perspective that viewed the Revolution as a bourgeois rebellion motivated by class interests. Wood argued that the Revolution was radical exactly because it was rooted in ideology — because it redefined American perceptions of authority, hierarchy, and social relationships.
To appreciate Wood’s argument, it’s important to understand the intellectual climate of the early 1990s, when social history, cultural studies, and postmodern theory gained prominence in academia. The traditional grand narratives of political and intellectual history faced criticism, and the concept of a unified, world-historical event was viewed with scepticism. Wood’s book emerged as a deliberate response to this fragmentation, presenting a comprehensive, totalizing interpretation at a time when synthesis was considered unfashionable.
Wood argued that the Revolution was radical because it abolished the hierarchical, deferential, patronage-driven society of monarchy and replaced it with a community based on equality, individualism, and self-interest. This change was gradual and not completely realised in the eighteenth century. However, it initiated a process that would transform American society in the decades that followed.
In Wood’s view, the Revolution was more than just a fight for independence; it was a battle over societal structure. It questioned the core beliefs of colonial society—such as authority coming from above, hierarchical social relations, and individuals’ participation in patronage networks. Instead, it introduced a new idea of society as composed of equal individuals who pursue their interests through republican institutions.
This transformation was rooted in ideology but resulted in significant social changes. It challenged the authority of traditional elites, democratised political culture, and spurred the growth of voluntary associations, newspapers, and civic groups. It promoted a new mindset of ambition, competition, and self-improvement, shaping a society in which everyday people began to assert their voices in public affairs.
Wood argued that the Revolution did not produce a perfect democracy, recognising its contradictions, such as the continued existence of slavery. However, he maintained that the Revolution’s egalitarian ideals laid the groundwork for future efforts. These principles became a rallying point for abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, labour groups, and reformers. The Revolution initiated a social transformation that would develop over many generations.
The radicalism thesis was both a historical and a philosophical perspective. It reinterpreted the Revolution and defended the Enlightenment tradition, emphasising the influence of ideas on shaping history. The thesis rejected the idea that historical causality could be solely attributed to material interests or identity categories. Instead, it argued that the Revolution’s universalist principles were genuine world-historical forces, not just rhetorical devices.
The book received widespread praise, yet it also sparked controversy. Some critics charged Wood with idealism, claiming he overstated the Revolution’s egalitarian goals and downplayed ongoing inequality. Others criticised him for neglecting the experiences of marginalised groups. Additionally, some argued that his focus on ideology masked the material and economic aspects of the Revolution.
Wood addressed these criticisms clearly, emphasising that the Revolution’s radical nature was reflected more in its lasting effects than in its immediate results. He believed that the Revolution’s egalitarian ideals forged a new social order, despite ongoing contradictions. He also argued that historians should interpret the past based on its own context, rather than applying modern judgments.
The radicalism thesis is central to Wood’s intellectual legacy, marking his most ambitious effort to integrate political, social, and intellectual history. It reflects his dedication to universalism, his faith in the influence of ideas, and his advocacy for the Enlightenment tradition. This interpretation remains one of the most influential and debated views of the American Revolution.
CHAPTER 3 (Part II)
The Revolution as Social Transformation: Wood’s Radicalism Thesis
Wood’s radicalism thesis did not appear out of nowhere. It resulted from decades of contemplating social change, the influence of ideas, and the significance of the American Revolution. Additionally, it was a reaction to the division within the historical field — a conscious effort to bring back unity, scope, and ambition to a discipline increasingly focused on micro-history, identity-driven approaches, and theoretical concepts.
Wood’s core argument was a straightforward yet impactful insight: the Revolution was considered radical because it changed the social order, rather than because it immediately achieved political or economic equality. This distinction is vital. Wood dismissed the idea that radicalism depends solely on material results. Instead, he argued that the Revolution’s radical nature was rooted in its ideological challenge to hierarchy, deference, and the traditional structures of monarchical society.
1. The Collapse of Monarchical Society
Wood’s analysis starts with reconstructing the social landscape of colonial America, a society built on hierarchy, patronage, and personal reliance. Authority moved from the top down, and social ties were rooted in networks of obligation. People saw themselves not as independent agents but as part of a layered social order.
The Revolution transformed society by discrediting inherited authority and weakening the cultural basis of deference. It shifted away from personal dependence towards impersonal, contractual relationships. As a result, a society emerged in which individuals asserted their right to pursue personal interests, challenge traditional elites, and actively engage in public life.
This transformation was not merely political. It was cultural, psychological, and social. It altered the way Americans understood themselves and their place in the world.
2. The Rise of Republican Equality
Wood claimed that the Revolution promoted a new sense of equality, not in economic terms but socially, breaking down traditional status distinctions that defined colonial society. This new ethos appeared in many ways: the fading of aristocratic manners, the rise of voluntary associations, the democratisation of political discussion, the expansion of print culture, and increased civic engagement. Equality became the leading value in American society, influencing people’s aspirations, redefining citizenship, and fostering a culture that celebrated ambition, competition, and self-improvement.
3. The Democratisation of Authority
Wood’s key insight is that the Revolution democratized authority by changing the dynamics between leaders and followers. In a monarchical setup, authority was personal and rooted in hierarchy. Conversely, in a republican setting, authority became impersonal and was chosen through elections. Leaders transitioned from patrons to representatives, with legitimacy based on consent rather than status. This shift had significant effects: it boosted political participation, encouraged public debate, and led to new organizational forms. At the same time, it created tensions, as elites fought to uphold authority in a society increasingly rejecting traditional hierarchy.
4. The Expansion of the Public Sphere
Wood emphasized that the Revolution expanded the public sphere by increasing newspapers, pamphlets, debating societies, and civic groups, which encouraged lively public discussion. Ordinary citizens became more involved in politics—they read, wrote, debated, and organised activities. Consequently, the Revolution created a participatory political culture with unprecedented levels of engagement and involvement.
5. The Paradox of Individualism
Wood’s analysis centres on recognising paradoxes. The Revolution’s egalitarian ideals fostered a new form of individualism, gradually challenging traditional republican communal values. Over time, pursuing self-interest changed from being seen as a threat to virtue to being accepted and even admired in social life. This transformation paved the way for the emergence of a market-oriented society in the nineteenth century.
Wood did not celebrate this development without critique. He acknowledged that the increase in individualism led to new inequalities and social tensions.
6. The Long Arc of Radicalism
One of Wood’s key points is that the Revolution’s radical nature should be viewed over the long term. Although the Revolution did not establish a completely egalitarian society, abolish slavery, or eradicate economic inequality, it did formulate universal principles that influenced future movements. The Revolution’s belief in equality laid the groundwork for abolitionism, women’s rights, labour movements, and democratic reforms. It fostered a political culture in which calls for equality carried moral weight and initiated a social change process that would unfold over generations.
7. The Radicalism Thesis as a Defence of the Enlightenment
Wood’s radicalism thesis goes beyond history; it serves as a philosophical affirmation of Enlightenment values. It highlights the influence of ideas, the potential for progress, and the universal hopes of humanity. It dismisses postmodern cynicism and the limiting focus on identity frameworks. Instead, it emphasises that the Revolution was a pivotal global event whose importance cannot be fully grasped through modern political lenses.
In this regard, *The Radicalism of the American Revolution* stands as Wood’s most ambitious and lasting work. It synthesises ideas, demonstrates imagination, and requires intellectual bravery. The book continues to serve as a key reference for anyone aiming to understand the Revolution, and it challenges those who attempt to diminish its significance to mere contemporary politics.
CHAPTER 4 (Part I)
Republicanism, Equality, and the Problem of Democracy
If The Radicalism of the American Revolution was Wood’s most ambitious work, his writings on republicanism form the central framework of his entire historiographical endeavour. For Wood, republicanism transcended being just a political ideology; it was the foundational structure of an entire social universe. It influenced the Revolution’s beginnings, its institutional results, and its lasting impacts. It offered the conceptual language that Americans used to interpret authority, virtue, equality, and the essence of political society.
Wood’s view of republicanism was unique in several ways. He emphasised that republicanism is a dynamic, evolving ideology, not a fixed doctrine, adapting to new contexts. He also believed that republicanism was inherently connected to the social structure of the eighteenth century—a society marked by hierarchy, deference, and personal dependence. Additionally, he argued that the Revolution reshaped republicanism by democratising its principles and broadening their reach beyond the elite political circle in which they had initially emerged.
1. The Classical Republican Tradition
Wood’s analysis starts with the classical republican tradition from antiquity, passed down through Renaissance humanism. This tradition emphasised civic virtue, the common good, dangers of corruption, the fragility of liberty, and active citizenship. Republicanism was a demanding ideology, requiring citizens to prioritise public virtue over private interests. It considered political life the highest form of human activity and viewed commerce, luxury, and personal ambition with suspicion.
This classical republicanism influenced the political ideas of the Founders. It influenced their concerns about corruption, their scepticism of standing armies, their focus on civic education, and their conviction that liberty demands ongoing vigilance. Additionally, it shaped their views on representation, sovereignty, and the essence of political authority.
2. The Social Foundations of Republicanism
Wood argued that understanding republicanism requires considering the social environment that supported it. In monarchical societies, hierarchy seemed natural, authority was personal, and social relations were based on deference. Republicanism challenged this world, aiming to replace personal authority with public virtue, hierarchy with equality, and dependence with independence. However, republicanism also relied on specific social conditions, such as a virtuous citizenry, a deliberative public sphere, and a social structure that encouraged civic participation. As society evolved quickly, maintaining these assumptions became increasingly challenging.
3. The Democratisation of Republicanism
Wood’s key insight is that the Revolution made republicanism more accessible by spreading its principles beyond the elite political circles where they originated. Ordinary people adopted republican ideals, sought a say in public affairs, challenged traditional elites, questioned inherited authority, and asserted the validity of their own political judgment. This process of democratisation had significant effects. It changed the interpretation of equality, redefined political authority, and led to new ways for people to participate in politics. At the same time, it created tensions, as elites tried to retain control in a society that was increasingly rejecting hierarchy.
4. The Tension Between Virtue and Interest
Wood closely recognised the internal struggles within republicanism, particularly the conflict between virtue and self-interest. While classical republicanism emphasised putting the public good above private interests, the Revolution ushered in a new era of individualism, ambition, and self-interest that conflicted with the classical view of virtue.
Wood argued that this tension wasn’t a flaw of the Revolution but rather a consequence of its success. The Revolution’s emphasis on egalitarian principles encouraged a society in which individuals asserted their right to pursue personal goals. Although this conflicted with traditional republican ideals, it also set the stage for modern liberal democracy.
5. The Problem of Democracy
Wood’s analysis of republicanism offers a profound reflection on the challenges faced by democracy. He understood that democracy involves more than just institutions; it includes a social and cultural framework. This requires an engaged citizenry capable of thoughtful discussion, a lively public sphere that encourages debate, and a strong commitment to the common good. However, democracy also activates forces such as individualism, ambition, and competition, which can threaten its very foundations. Wood clearly saw this paradox: while the Revolution established a democratic society, it also fostered conditions that could lead to the decline of republican virtue.
This insight adds a tragic dimension to Wood’s work. He realised that the Revolution’s egalitarian ideology was both its most significant success and its biggest obstacle. It fostered a society that celebrated equality, yet the drive for self-interest also jeopardised the core principles of republican life.
6. The Contemporary Relevance of Wood’s Republicanism
Wood’s analysis of republicanism has significant implications for modern discussions on democracy. It questions the tendency to condense political life into identity categories. It also dismisses cynical views that overlook the potential for civic virtue. Furthermore, it emphasises the importance of universal principles, public reason, and the common good.
In a time marked by polarisation, fragmentation, and the decline of civic culture, Wood’s discussions of republicanism serve as a strong reminder of the core ideas that underpin democratic life. They prompt us to reflect on what is necessary to maintain a democratic society and what we sacrifice when we move away from the Enlightenment tradition.
CHAPTER 4 (Part II)
Republicanism, Equality, and the Problem of Democracy
Wood’s key contribution to Revolutionary historiography is his idea of democratizing republicanism—shifting it from an elite political idea to a widespread social ethos. This concept is often misunderstood. Critics tend to say Wood romanticised early republican egalitarianism or overlooked ongoing inequality, but that misses his point. Wood did not suggest the Revolution achieved material equality. Instead, he argued that it challenged the legitimacy of hierarchy as a fundamental social principle, emphasising a conceptual, cultural, and world-historical shift.
This delegitimisation was permanent. Once Americans accepted that all men are created equal, the traditional world of deference, patronage, and inherited authority could not persist. The Revolution established a new moral order—one where individuals asserted the right to judge, choose, participate, and dissent. This moral order laid the groundwork for American democracy.
1. The New Social Imagination
Wood’s discussions on republicanism highlight how the social imagination was transformed — specifically, how people viewed themselves and their connections with others. In monarchical societies, individuals saw themselves as part of a hierarchical structure, with identities defined by status, rank, and inherited roles. The Revolution disrupted this view, prompting Americans to see themselves as independent individuals, equal in moral worth, and capable of self-governance.
This transformation was more than ideological; it significantly changed daily life. Terms like “master” and “servant” fell out of use. The influence of traditional elites diminished, and ordinary citizens began asserting their right to participate in public discourse. Social mobility was embraced as a cultural norm, and the pursuit of personal interests gained moral acceptance. Wood viewed these shifts not as departures from republican ideals but as their natural evolution. The Revolution democratised the classical concept of civic equality, embedding it as a social value that influenced all facets of American life.
2. The Crisis of Virtue
However, this democratisation led to a crisis within republican ideals. Classical republicanism relied on virtue—the readiness of citizens to prioritise the common good over personal gain. Yet, the Revolution introduced forces that challenged this principle: growing commerce, expanding markets, a focus on ambition, and the rise of voluntary groups all promoted self-interest.
Wood grasped this crisis with remarkable clarity. He recognised that the Revolution’s focus on egalitarian ideals fostered a society in which maintaining virtue became more challenging. The conflict between virtue and self-interest emerged as the central issue of the early republic. This tension influenced discussions about the Constitution, the development of political parties, and the formation of a new political culture.
3. The Transformation of Political Leadership
Wood’s key insight highlights the shift in political leadership. In monarchies, leaders were seen as embodiments of virtue, wisdom, and selflessness, with authority based on their status and character. Conversely, in republics, leadership is elected, competitive, and depends on the consent of the people. Leaders transition from patrons to representatives, with legitimacy coming from popular approval.
This transformation made authority more accessible but also created instability. Leaders faced greater public scrutiny, electoral pressures, and partisan conflicts. The traditional view of impartial leadership grew harder to maintain. The emergence of political parties—seen by many Founders as a threat to republican virtue—directly resulted from this change.
4. The Expansion and Fragmentation of the Public Sphere
Wood’s examination of republicanism is closely tied to his study of the public sphere. The Revolution fostered a lively and extensive realm of political discussion, with newspapers multiplying, pamphlets circulating broadly, and debating societies thriving. Ordinary citizens participated in political debates with remarkable enthusiasm. However, this growth also led to fragmentation, transforming the public sphere into a battleground of conflict, competition, and ideological clashes. The emergence of partisan newspapers, political factions, and more intense electoral politics all mirrored the inherent tensions of democratic life.
Wood did not romanticise this development. He recognised that democracy naturally involves disagreement. However, he maintained that this disagreement signified vitality rather than decline. It exemplified the increasing democratisation of political life, extending republican ideals to society at large.
5. The Limits of Republicanism
Wood also clearly defined the boundaries of republicanism. He recognised that the Revolution’s push for equality coexisted with significant inequalities, particularly slavery. He understood that the classical ideal of virtue was incompatible with the realities of a commercial society. He admitted that the spread of authority democratically introduced new forms of instability. However, he maintained that these contradictions do not undermine the Revolution’s radical nature. Instead, they highlight its complexity. The Revolution was not merely a straightforward victory of equality over hierarchy but a dialectical process involving a struggle among competing ideals, interests, and social forces.
6. The Contemporary Crisis of Democracy
Wood’s insights on republicanism have grown more pertinent in the twenty-first century. Issues like the crisis of civic culture, declining public trust, rising identity politics, and the breakdown of the public sphere all mirror the tensions he highlighted. The challenge of virtue—the conflict between private interests and the common good—remains unresolved. The democratisation of authority has led to new divisions. Meanwhile, the commercialisation of public life has undermined the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution. Wood urges us to face these crises with historical awareness, emphasising that democracy is fragile, that republicanism demands civic engagement, and that the Enlightenment tradition is vital for democratic survival.
CHAPTER 5 (Part I)
Slavery, Tragedy, and the Contradictions of the Early Republic
Gordon S. Wood’s work on slavery has been heavily debated and often misunderstood. In today’s politically charged climate, critics frequently claim he downplays slavery’s importance to the American founding. However, this criticism is incorrect and more revealing than it seems. It highlights a significant change in how history is perceived: moving away from nuanced dialectical analysis toward moral absolutism, and from understanding historical context to applying modern judgment.
Wood’s writings on slavery are not excuses; they are tragedies. He presents them with clarity and sorrow, highlighting the profound contradiction of the Revolution: that a movement based on universal principles coexisted with the brutal system of unfreedom in the Atlantic world. However, Wood refused to reduce this contradiction to a simple moral judgment. He believed that the historian’s role is not to condemn the past but to understand it—grasping the dialectic between universal ideals and historical realities, between aspiration and limitation, and between the Revolution’s emancipatory goals and the ongoing presence of slavery.
1. The Revolution’s Universalism and Its Limits
Wood begins with the Revolution’s universalist ideology. The Declaration of Independence expressed core principles—equality, natural rights, and popular sovereignty—that were fundamentally at odds with slavery. These weren’t mere rhetorical devices but were significant world-historical assertions that established a moral and conceptual foundation later used to challenge slavery. However, the Revolution did not end slavery or resolve the tension between universal ideals and unfree labour. It kept the institution alive in the South and only partially abolished it in the North. According to Wood, this contradiction does not indicate hypocrisy but rather reflects the limitations of what was historically possible. The Revolution established the ideological groundwork for the eventual abolition of slavery, but it was unable to dismantle the deeply rooted economic, social, and racial systems that maintained the institution.
2. The Antislavery Impulse of the Revolutionary Generation
Wood’s significant contribution is demonstrating that the Revolution ignited a vigorous antislavery movement. In the 1770s and 1780s, this movement saw widespread petitions, the emergence of abolitionist societies, laws promoting gradual emancipation in the North, a reduction in the Atlantic slave trade, and more outspoken antislavery rhetoric among elites. Far from being marginal, this movement was a core aspect of early American political culture, reflecting the Revolution’s ideals of equality and challenging traditional hierarchies. Wood highlighted that this antislavery drive was sincere, influential, and historically meaningful, even if it did not lead to immediate abolition.
3. The Entrenchment of Slavery in the South
Wood was also quite clear about the Revolution’s failure in the South. The rise of cotton, the expansion of plantation agriculture, and the reinforcement of racial beliefs all contributed to a society where slavery became even more deeply rooted. This clash between the Revolution’s universal ideals and the economic and racial realities of Southern elites led to a tragic result: slavery grew more entrenched precisely when the Revolution’s principles should have challenged it. Wood did not justify this development but explained it, showing how the Revolution’s emphasis on equality threatened the hierarchical Southern society, causing elites to defend slavery more fiercely. He highlighted that the Revolution actually heightened, rather than solved, the contradictions within American society.
4. The Dialectic of Freedom and Unfreedom
Wood’s analysis of slavery is inherently dialectical. He recognised that the Revolution simultaneously laid the ideological groundwork for abolition and created social conditions that intensified slavery. This dialectical relationship is not a flaw but central to his historical method. Freedom and unfreedom were not isolated domains; they were interconnected. The Revolution’s universalist ideals highlighted the injustice of slavery, yet it also disturbed the social stability, prompting Southern elites to defend the institution more fervently. Consequently, the Revolution led to a society where the struggle over slavery became unavoidable.
5. The Tragedy of the Founders
A tragic perspective characterizes wood’s depiction of the Founders. He avoids portraying them solely as villains or heroes, viewing them instead as historical figures ensnared in a web of constraints, contradictions, and unforeseen consequences. Jefferson, Madison, and Washington all acknowledged that slavery conflicted with the ideals of the Revolution and hoped for eventual abolition. Yet, none saw an immediate path to ending it without jeopardising the fragile stability of the republic. Wood does not excuse their failures but emphasises the tragic context in which they operated.
6. The Misrepresentation of Wood’s Position
In the early twenty-first century, critics simplified Wood’s nuanced analysis by framing it in moral and identity-focused terms. The 1619 Project, in particular, accused Wood and others of minimising slavery’s role in founding America. This claim was both false and intellectually dishonest. Wood clearly acknowledged slavery’s importance but stressed the need to view it in its historical context—as a contradiction, a tragedy, and a key dialectical tension during the Revolution. His critics preferred a simplified story that cast the Revolution mainly as a racial conflict. Wood responded calmly but firmly, defending the Enlightenment’s method against modern ideological distortions and emphasising that historians should seek to understand the past rather than bend it to suit current agendas.
7. The Legacy of Wood’s Interpretation
Wood’s writings on slavery are essential because they avoid framing the Revolution’s contradictions solely as moral issues. They support the Revolution’s universal principles while acknowledging its flaws. These texts reveal the ongoing conflict between freedom and unfreedom that shaped the early republic. They encourage honest, nuanced, and humble engagement with history. Consequently, they serve as a vital example of historical insight, much needed amid today’s era of moral rigidity and ideological bias.
CHAPTER 5 (Part II)
Slavery, Tragedy, and the Contradictions of the Early Republic
The tragedy of slavery in the early republic persists not just because of its endurance but also because it took place in a society that upheld the most universalist ideals of the eighteenth century. This contradiction is central to Wood’s interpretation—an issue he neither ignores nor exaggerates but tackles with a dialectical rigour that is rarely seen in contemporary debates.
Wood’s approach stands in stark contrast to the present-focused moralism common in early twenty-first-century historical studies. While many modern critics reduce the Revolution to a primarily racial story, Wood highlights the complex causes of these historical events. Rather than using a binary moral viewpoint, he portrays the eighteenth-century world with its contradictions intact. Additionally, where others often view slavery as the only key to understanding American history, he situates it within a broader social, ideological, and economic context.
1. The Revolution’s Antislavery Logic
Wood contends that the Revolution ignited an antislavery belief system that its participants could not completely control. The Declaration’s phrase — “all men are created equal” — was more than mere rhetoric; it had revolutionary significance. It challenged hierarchy, questioned established authority, and exposed the moral contradictions of slavery. This antislavery logic manifested in various ways: more manumissions in the Upper South, the emergence of abolitionist societies in the North, increased antislavery rhetoric among elites, early legislative efforts for emancipation, and the delegitimization of the Atlantic slave trade.
Wood emphasises that these developments were central, not peripheral, to the political culture of the 1770s and 1780s. They reflected the Revolution’s egalitarian principles and its opposition to the hierarchical order of colonial society.
2. The Counter‑Revolution of the Slaveholding South
The Revolution also provoked a backlash among Southern elites, who recognised more quickly than many Northerners that the pursuit of universal rights threatened their social hierarchy. The rise of cotton production, the expansion of plantation agriculture, and the reinforcement of racial ideologies contributed to a society where slavery became even more entrenched. In reaction to the Revolution’s calls for equality, Southern elites established a more rigid racial order, creating new justifications for slavery, deploying various surveillance techniques, and promoting ideological defences of white supremacy. Wood’s analysis reveals the tragic paradox of the early republic: although the Revolution challenged slavery’s legitimacy, the South responded by deepening its foundations. This tension is essential for understanding the origins of the Civil War and is central to appreciating Wood’s historiographical perspective.
3. The Limits of Revolutionary Possibility
Critics often say Wood excuses the Founders’ failure to end slavery, but that’s not accurate. Wood doesn’t justify; he explains. He clearly reconstructs the 18th-century world, showing the limits of what was historically possible. The Founders faced a dilemma: a quick abolition would have split the fragile union, while gradual abolition was politically feasible only in the North. In the South, slavery was entwined with the economy, and racial ideas were deeply rooted. Wood’s point isn’t that abolition was impossible, but that historical circumstances limited it. The Revolution laid the ideological foundation for slavery’s eventual end but couldn’t dismantle the structural forces upholding the institution.
4. The Tragic Consciousness of the Founders
Wood’s perspective on the Founders is deeply tragic. He refrains from depicting them as simple caricatures and instead recognises them as individuals navigating a world riddled with contradictions. Jefferson, Madison, and Washington all admitted that slavery conflicted with revolutionary principles. They experienced discomfort, ambivalence, or even condemned the institution. Yet, they could not see an immediate path to abolition without risking the stability of the new republic.
Wood’s critique underscores the tragedy of the early American republic: the Founders voiced universal ideals they couldn’t fully realise, created a society whose core values condemned their own practices, and unleashed forces beyond their control. This sense of tragic inevitability is central to Wood’s argument and sharply contrasts with the moral absolutism of the 1619 Project.
5. The Misuse of Slavery in Contemporary Historiography
Wood’s disagreement with the 1619 Project wasn’t about factual accuracy; it centred on their methods. The Project positioned slavery as the core explanation of American history, portraying the Revolution as a conspiracy to uphold slavery. It applied a modern moral perspective to historical events, dismissing the Enlightenment principles of universalism, rational inquiry, and context.
Wood opposed this because it undermined proper historical practice—substituting explanation with accusation, oversimplifying complex issues, and replacing dialectics with ideological storytelling. His critique was fundamentally aligned with Enlightenment values—universalist and rooted in understanding the past on its own terms.
6. The Dialectic of Emancipation
Wood’s final insight is that the Revolution established the conditions for the eventual abolition of slavery, even though it did not abolish slavery directly. The universalist ideals of 1776 laid the ideological groundwork for abolitionism. The Revolution’s egalitarian spirit inspired countless reformers over generations. The tension between universal principles and the pursuit of unfreedom shaped the course of history. This core dialectic in Wood’s analysis can be summarised as follows: The Revolution did not end slavery, but it rendered slavery morally unacceptable and provided the ideological means to eliminate it ultimately. This complex, tragic, and universalist perspective exemplifies Wood at his deepest analytical level.
CHAPTER 6 (Part I)
The Academy in Decline: From Consensus to Postmodernism
By the 1980s and 1990s, when Gordon S. Wood was at the peak of his career, the intellectual environment that influenced him was already starting to break apart. The postwar academic world — confident, broad in scope, rooted in the Enlightenment idea that the past can be understood through disciplined investigation — was being replaced by a new intellectual landscape characterised by fragmentation, abstract theory, and the politicisation of scholarship. Therefore, Wood’s career reflects not only the rise of a historiographical tradition but also its gradual decline.
Wood never idealised his youthful academy; he recognised its flaws, blind spots, and exclusions. However, he also appreciated its rare seriousness of purpose. It is rooted in truth, evidence, and respect for the past’s autonomy. He believed the historian’s role was to faithfully reconstruct the world as it was, rather than tailoring it to current political agendas. The decline of this tradition and the emergence of new intellectual movements rejecting its principles are central themes in Wood’s later work. His critique isn’t rooted in nostalgia but is analytical, examining the structural, institutional, and ideological forces that transformed the academy and reshaped the discipline of history.
1. The Postwar Consensus and Its Discontents
In Wood’s early career, the intellectual landscape was shaped by Consensus historians such as Hofstadter, Boorstin, and Hartz, who highlighted continuity, stability, and the absence of major ideological conflicts in American history. Following Bailyn, Wood opposed this view, emphasising the Revolution’s radical ideological aspects. Nonetheless, he shared with the Consensus school a dedication to rigorous archival research, clear concepts, and the idea that the past should be understood on its own merits.
This shared commitment began to weaken in the 1970s as social history, influenced by Marxism, anthropology, and sociology, began to focus more on the experiences of everyday people rather than on political ideas. While this shift brought valuable insights, it also led to fragmentation in the field. Micro-studies of local communities, marginalised groups, and daily life replaced overarching narratives of political and intellectual history. Wood appreciated the broader range of topics but was concerned about the resulting incoherence, fearing the discipline was becoming a collection of isolated studies without a unifying framework. He argued that history — especially the Revolution — needed synthesis rather than fragmentation.
2. The Rise of Theory
The 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of postmodern theory, which questioned the very idea of objective knowledge. Influenced by thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, and the linguistic turn, many historians began to doubt the stability of meaning, the trustworthiness of sources, and the coherence of narratives. In this perspective, history is not a straightforward reconstruction of the past but a textual performance influenced by power dynamics.
Wood responded to this perspective with quiet but firm conviction. He viewed postmodernism as a threat to the core principles of historical research. If the past is unknowable, if meaning remains unstable, and if narratives are rhetorical constructs, then the practice of history as a discipline is undermined. The archive, in this context, becomes a space for endless interpretation rather than a disciplined tool for reconstruction.
Wood’s critique was rooted in Enlightenment principles rather than reactionary views. He supported the idea that truth is not absolute but can be reasoned, supported by evidence, and open to revision. He emphasised that the past has its own autonomy, which must be acknowledged. Additionally, he dismissed the idea of simplifying historical study to mere theoretical exercises.
3. The Politicisation of Scholarship
The most significant change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was the politicisation of scholarship. Identity-driven frameworks—such as race, gender, and sexuality—became the primary ways of interpreting texts. Historical research was evaluated more for its political stance than for its scholarly rigour. As a result, the past turned into a battleground for current conflicts.
Wood recognised the importance of studying marginalised groups and supported the expansion of historical research. However, he rejected the idea of simplifying historical causality to just identity categories. He argued that the Revolution cannot be fully understood through race, gender, or class alone. Instead, it was a significant world-historical event influenced by ideas, institutions, and social changes. According to Wood, politicising scholarship risks undermining the independence of historical analysis. It fosters present-focused moralism, replaces explanations with accusations, and turns historians into moral judges instead of objective scholars.
4. The Decline of the Monograph
Wood’s career coincided with the decline of the long-form monograph, the format in which he particularly thrived. Factors such as academic publishing pressures, the growing popularity of journal articles, and professionalisation efforts fostered a culture in which deep, comprehensive scholarship became rarer. Wood lamented this trend not because he favoured a specific format but because he recognised that certain types of historical understanding require scope. The Revolution, for example, cannot be fully grasped in a 30-page article. It demands a conceptual framework, a narrative progression, and a cohesive integration of political, social, and intellectual history. Therefore, the decline of the monograph came to symbolise the wider fragmentation within the discipline.
5. The Administrative University
The university’s evolution—marked by increasing administrative bureaucracy, the commodification of education, the weakening of tenure, and the casualisation of academic labour—further diminished the environment necessary for dedicated scholarship. Wood observed these changes with increasing concern, recognising that the historian’s craft depends on time, stability, and institutional backing. The neoliberal university, focused on metrics, branding, and marketability, hampers the slow and meticulous process of historical reconstruction.
6. Wood as the Last Representative of a Tradition
By the early twenty-first century, Wood had inadvertently become the last representative of a tradition the academy had abandoned. He did not actively seek or cultivate this role. However, his steadfast dedication to the Enlightenment values — including universalism, rational inquiry, and respect for the past’s autonomy — distinguished him from the prevailing intellectual trends of his era.
His death in 2026 symbolised not just the end of a life but the conclusion of an entire era. It raised the question: Can the Enlightenment tradition endure in an academic world that has dismissed its core principles? Wood was convinced it could — but only if historians champion it with seriousness, rigour, and courage.
CHAPTER 6 (Part II)
The Academy in Decline: From Consensus to Postmodernism
The transformation of the American academy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was more than just a change in intellectual trends. It represented a deep structural, institutional, and ideological upheaval that altered how historical knowledge is created. Wood’s later works — particularly his essays, interviews, and polemical pieces — demonstrate that he grasped this transformation with exceptional clarity. He understood that the decline in historical consciousness was closely linked to the broader crisis of the university itself.
1. The Collapse of Shared Intellectual Foundations
The postwar academy, despite its limitations, shared a common intellectual base. While historians often argued fiercely, they agreed on core principles: that the past is real, that evidence matters, that interpretation should be based on sources, and that the historian’s role is explanatory rather than accusatory. They also believed that universalism is a valid intellectual approach. By the early twenty-first century, these shared assumptions had diminished. The discipline lacked a unified methodological language, and historians diverged not only in subject matter but also in epistemology. Some favoured empirical reconstruction, others leaned toward theoretical critique, and many adopted identity-based frameworks that rejected universalism altogether.
Wood recognised that this fragmentation was unsustainable. A discipline lacking common foundations cannot maintain meaningful debate. Instead, it degenerates into a series of intellectual enclaves, each communicating in its own language, following its own agenda, and showing indifference or hostility towards the others.
2. The Triumph of the “New Histories”
The emergence of the “new histories”—such as social, cultural, labour, gender, and racial history—signified both growth and fragmentation within the discipline. These methods introduced fresh topics, recovered marginalised voices, and challenged the complacency of earlier narratives. However, they also fostered a tendency toward fragmentation: an increase in micro-studies, a decline in overarching synthesis, and a retreat from large-scale interpretation. Wood appreciated the broadened range of subjects but lamented the resulting loss of coherence. He argued that history, including the Revolution, needs synthesis; without it, the past becomes confusing, and the historian risks becoming just a collector of fragments rather than an interpreter of human experience.
3. The Linguistic Turn and the Eclipse of Reality
The linguistic turn—asserting that language shapes reality and that texts are not transparent windows into the past—had significant effects on historical scholarship. Its moderate version led historians to focus on rhetoric, discourse, and representation. Conversely, its radical version challenged the very possibility of acquiring historical knowledge. Wood dismissed the radical implications, emphasising that the past is a tangible world inhabited by real people whose actions have a genuine impact. He maintained that a historian’s role is to reconstruct this world rather than reduce it to discourse. This stance made Wood somewhat unpopular in certain academic circles. Still, it also positioned him as one of the few historians able to defend the Enlightenment tradition amidst rising postmodern scepticism.
4. The Rise of Identity as an Epistemology
One of the most notable shifts in the early twenty-first century was the emergence of identity as a central epistemological category. It no longer merely influenced research topics but also served as a foundation for establishing authority. The trustworthiness of historical interpretations increasingly relied less on evidence or logical reasoning and more on the historian’s identity. Wood opposed this development, considering it a departure from Enlightenment principles.
He argued that historical knowledge should be universal and accessible to everyone, irrespective of their identity. He believed that the past belongs to all people and warned that politicising identity could create divisions within the discipline and undermine the possibility of shared understanding. His concerns proved to be accurate. By the 2010s and 2020s, identity-based frameworks had become dominant in many departments. The past was increasingly interpreted through the lens of race, gender, and sexuality. Universalism was dismissed as a mask for power. The Enlightenment was denounced as a Eurocentric project. The historian’s craft was subordinated to the politics of recognition.
Wood’s critique was not limited to conservatism; it was a universalist perspective. It was based on the idea that humans possess common capacities—such as reason, imagination, and moral judgment—that enable us to understand history.
5. The Commodification of Knowledge
The transformation of the university into a neoliberal institution—dominated by metrics, branding, and market principles—further weakened the conditions necessary for serious scholarship. Wood observed the rise of administrative bloating, a decline in tenure security, the casualisation of academic labour, the pressure to publish quickly rather than thoroughly, a focus on “impact” rather than rigour, and the reduction of students to mere consumers. These changes fostered an environment that was unfriendly to long-form, archival, and conceptually ambitious scholarship that characterised Wood’s work. As a result, the monograph— the publication format through which Wood made his most significant contributions—became more difficult to produce and increasingly undervalued.
6. The Historian as Activist
According to Wood, one of the most concerning changes was historians becoming political activists. The boundary between academic research and advocacy became fuzzy. Historians were urged to “speak truth to power,” “intervene” in public discussions, and “challenge” prevailing narratives. While these goals are often admirable, they also foster present-focused thinking, moralism, and the use of history as a tool.
Wood emphasised that a historian’s primary duty is to the past, not current politics. He maintained that preserving the independence of historical study is vital for maintaining the discipline’s integrity. He cautioned that politicising scholarship could damage public trust and weaken the historian’s authority. Unfortunately, his warnings went unheeded, leading to a foreseeable outcome: the breakdown of shared historical understanding, the emergence of ideological stories, and the decline of Enlightenment ideals.
7. Wood as a Counter‑Tradition
By the time he died in 2026, Wood had become a unique counter-tradition, embodying an intellectual world abandoned by the academy. He neither sought nor cultivated this role, but his steadfast commitment to universalism, rational inquiry, and the autonomy of the past distinguished him from the dominant intellectual currents of his era. His death signified the closing of an era and raised the question: Can the Enlightenment tradition endure in an academy that has rejected its core principles? Wood believed it could— but only if historians defend it with seriousness, courage, and academic integrity.
CHAPTER 7 (Part I)
Race, Identity, and the New Anti‑Historical Ideology
By the early twenty-first century, the biggest challenge to the Enlightenment tradition—and to the kind of historical scholarship Gordon S. Wood represented—came not just from postmodern scepticism or the commercialisation of universities but from the emergence of identity as a way of knowing. This change didn’t just add new topics to history; it fundamentally shifted the standards for evaluating historical knowledge. It shifted from universalist approaches to particularist ones, from explanation to accusation, and from the historian’s craft to politics of recognition.
Wood grasped this shift with remarkable clarity. He recognised that the emerging identity-based frameworks were not merely supplementing the historical record with additional perspectives — a change he appreciated — but were fundamentally replacing the core principles of historical investigation with a new ideological dogma. This dogma dismissed the independence of historical facts, rejected the idea of objective truth, and viewed history more as a moral judge than a scholarly discipline.
1. The Shift from History to Identity
The emergence of identity-based scholarship marked a significant change in the discipline. Unlike earlier historians, who aimed to reconstruct the past using evidence, context, and analysis, this new approach viewed history as a record of trauma, oppression, and moral injury. Instead of being understood in their own historical context, they were judged by modern categories such as race, gender, and sexuality.
This shift resulted in several key changes: Identity began to serve as a mark of authority, with the legitimacy of interpretation increasingly linked to the historian’s identity rather than the strength of their reasoning. Experience took precedence over evidence, with lived experience being valued more than archival research as a source of historical knowledge. Moral judgment replaced explanatory approaches, as the past was assessed by current moral standards rather than in its own context. Additionally, particularism replaced universalism, dismissing the Enlightenment idea of shared human capacities as merely a guise for domination.
The wood saw in this shift poses a significant threat to the historian’s craft. It threatens shared understanding, fragments the discipline into competing identity groups, and shifts the focus from seeking truth to performing grievance.
2. The Rise of Racial Essentialism
A major concern with the new identity frameworks was the revival of racial essentialism—the belief that race determines one’s perspective, knowledge, and moral authority. Although expressed in progressive language, this essentialism echoed the logic of the systems it opposed. Wood opposed racial essentialism, deeming it incompatible with the Enlightenment tradition. He emphasised that historical understanding is a universal human skill and that the past belongs to everyone, not just specific racial groups. He cautioned that linking historical causality solely to race would distort the complexity of the Revolution and threaten the possibility of a shared civic identity.
His warnings proved prescient. By the 2010s and 2020s, racial essentialism had become the dominant perspective in many academic and journalistic circles. The Revolution was increasingly seen as a racial endeavour. The Founders were often portrayed as symbols of white supremacy, and the universalist ideals of the Declaration were dismissed as hypocrisy. Wood recognised that this narrative was not only inaccurate but also anti-historical. It ignored the independence of historical events, discarded the universalist spirit of the Revolution, and replaced nuanced analysis with moral absolutism.
3. The Collapse of Context
Identity-based frameworks often dismiss historical context as an excuse or way to avoid responsibility. They see context not as a means to understand but as a form of oppression. Such rejection ultimately harms historical investigation. Without context, the past becomes incomprehensible, and historical figures appear as mere stereotypes. This simplification reduces complexity to simple moral judgments. Wood emphasised that understanding context is essential; it is the core of historical comprehension. To truly grasp the Revolution, one must reconstruct the eighteenth-century worldview—including its assumptions, limitations, and opportunities. Judging the past without considering context undermines the very essence of historical scholarship.
4. The Moralization of History
The new identity frameworks transformed history into a moral tribunal, turning the past from a field of inquiry into a site of judgment. Historical figures were evaluated based on modern moral standards. The Revolution was criticised for failing to fulfil ideals that hadn’t yet been developed, and the Founders were judged not by their own era but by current perspectives. Wood opposed this moralization of history, asserting that a historian’s role is to understand rather than condemn. He believed that moral judgments divorced from historical context lead to distortion rather than clarity. He cautioned that turning history into moral drama would weaken public trust and compromise the discipline’s intellectual integrity.
5. The Replacement of Class with Identity
The emergence of identity frameworks diminished the importance of class as an analytical category. The social and economic forces that influenced the Revolution—and still influence American society—have become less prominent than racial narratives. This shift significantly affected how history is understood.
Wood, although not a Marxist, nonetheless aligned with the Marxist tradition in emphasising structural explanations. He believed social forces, economic interests, and institutional changes shaped the Revolution. He saw class, rather than race, as the central axis of social organisation in the eighteenth century. Shifting the focus from class to identity thus markedly distorts historical fact. It turns the Revolution into a racial conflict, obscuring the social transformations Wood dedicated his career to analysing. This shift replaces factual explanation with ideological interpretation.
6. Wood’s Quiet but Firm Resistance
Wood avoided engaging in polemics. He refrained from criticising his critics or seeking controversy. Nonetheless, his opposition to identity-based frameworks was clear. This was reflected in his methodology, his writing style, his emphasis on universalism, and his refusal to simplify the past into modern categories. His clash with the 1619 Project — which will be discussed in the next chapter — exemplified this resistance. It was not about disputing facts but about questioning the very approach to historical investigation.
7. The Anti‑Historical Turn
According to Wood, the emergence of identity as an epistemology signifies an anti-historical shift. It dismisses the past’s independence and denies the possibility of objective knowledge. Instead of being viewed as a neutral area of study, history is seen as a tool for political agendas. This shift replaces universal principles with particularistic views, explanation with blame, and dialectical reasoning with moral absolutism.
Wood’s work challenges this anti-historical view by reaffirming the Enlightenment faith in common human abilities. It emphasises the importance of context, evidence, and clear concepts. It advocates for protecting the independence of history from modern political influences. In this way, it provides a crucial model of historical understanding, especially needed in an era of ideological bias.
CHAPTER 7 (Part II)
Race, Identity, and the New Anti‑Historical Ideology
The emergence of identity as the main interpretive framework in the early twenty-first century not only challenged traditional historiographical methods but also overtook them. It replaced the Enlightenment idea of universal human abilities with a new orthodoxy rooted in particularism, standpoint epistemology, and the moral dimension of historical study. Wood viewed this transition not merely as an intellectual evolution but as a fundamental rupture — a break from the core principles of historical consciousness.
His resistance was not confrontational but methodological, based on the belief that the past has its own autonomy that must be honoured. It stems from the idea that humans across different eras share certain abilities that enable historical understanding, and that the historian’s role is to explain rather than accuse. In this way, Wood’s work challenges the anti-historical ideology that became prevalent in academia in the decades before his death.
1. The Substitution of Morality for Method
Wood’s key insight was that identity-based frameworks replace careful methodology with morality. Instead of viewing the past as a subject for investigation, they see it as a source of moral injury. These frameworks judge historical figures by today’s ethical standards, reducing complex histories to moral judgment.
This leads to several issues: historical figures are seen as moral symbols rather than nuanced individuals; explanations are reduced to stories of oppression and resistance; historians act as moral judges rather than interpreters; archives become places of grievance rather than sources of insight. Wood opposed this approach because it undermines the possibility of genuine historical understanding. When moral judgment is decoupled from context, it results in caricatures rather than clear perspectives.
2. The Erasure of the Enlightenment
Identity-based frameworks often see the Enlightenment as solely a Eurocentric project, a disguise for domination, or a rhetorical tool for oppression. However, this perspective is historically unfounded. It overlooks the universalist goals of Enlightenment thinkers, the worldwide spread of Enlightenment ideas, and the emancipatory movements—such as abolitionism, feminism, and socialism—that directly drew on Enlightenment principles.
Wood supported the Enlightenment not out of nostalgia but because he recognised that its universalism underpins the very foundation of historical inquiry. Without the belief that humans share core capacities—like reason, imagination, and moral judgment—the understanding of the past becomes fragmented. Without embracing universalism, history devolves into competing identity narratives. Thus, attacking the Enlightenment amounts to attacking the very craft of history itself.
3. The Reduction of the Revolution to Race
The most apparent sign of the new anti-historical ideology was the effort to reduce the American Revolution to a racial issue. This reduction reached its peak with the 1619 Project, which argued that the Revolution was fought to defend slavery. Wood saw this as a historically unfounded claim, as it ignored the Revolution’s universalist ideals, the anti-slavery movements it inspired, and the intricate social and political forces involved in its foundation.
However, Wood also recognised that the 1619 Project was more than just incorrect; it was indicative of a broader intellectual trend in which race became the primary lens for historical explanation. This trend obscured the Revolution’s global significance, replaced dialectical analysis with moral storytelling, and turned history into a reflection of current anxieties.
4. The Collapse of Historical Scale
Identity-based frameworks typically focus on the immediate, personal, and experiential aspects. They emphasise micro-histories, anecdotes, and testimonies while often disregarding broad interpretation, synthesis, and conceptual analysis. However, this narrowing of scope is problematic for studying the Revolution, a world-historical event that cannot be fully understood by considering individual experiences alone.
Wood argued that the Revolution should be understood across multiple dimensions: conceptual (changes in political ideas), institutional (new government structures), social (the end of monarchical hierarchy), economic (the growth of market relations), ideological (the rise of egalitarianism), and identity frameworks. In contrast, such frameworks tend to oversimplify the Revolution by focusing on a single aspect. They diminish complexity, overlook contradictions, and remove historical context.
5. The Weaponisation of History
From Wood’s perspective, perhaps the most concerning trend was the weaponisation of history for modern political goals. It has become a tool for rallying support, justifying actions, and providing moral lessons. These uses of history conflict with the true role of the historian. It places the past at the service of present needs, leading to distortion, oversimplification, and selective memory. Wood recognised that history can influence politics, but he emphasised that such influence should arise from careful research, not from ideological agendas. The historian’s duty is to the integrity of the past, rather than to current political causes.
6. The Loss of Historical Humility
Identity-based frameworks frequently show a notable absence of humility towards history. They treat current categories like race, gender, and sexuality as unchanging, overlaying modern perspectives onto the past. This approach often regards historical figures as morally inferior versions of ourselves. Wood challenged this presumption, emphasising that the past is essentially a different country, with its own beliefs, limitations, and opportunities. Comprehending it demands humility, imagination, and an openness to suspend judgment.
7. Wood’s Counter‑Tradition: Universalism, Context, Dialectic
Wood challenged the anti-historical ideology of identity by proposing a counter-tradition based on three core principles: Universalism — the idea that humans possess shared capacities enabling historical understanding; Context — reconstructing the conceptual, social, and institutional worlds of the past; and Dialectic — acknowledging that contradictions, tensions, and unintended outcomes influence history. These principles are not just methodological but also philosophical, defending the Enlightenment tradition against those who aim to dismantle it.
8. The Stakes of the Debate
Wood recognised that the debate over identity and history is more than just academic; it strikes at the core of democratic life. Without a shared historical narrative, a society cannot uphold its civic identity. When the past is only seen as trauma, imagining a unified future becomes difficult. Similarly, a rejection of universal principles undermines democratic citizenship. Therefore, Wood’s work resonates not only with historians but also with anyone invested in democracy’s future. It urges us to protect Enlightenment values against the threats posed by particularism, moralism, and ideological distortions.
CHAPTER 8 (Part I)
The 1619 Project and the Crisis of Historical Consciousness
The clash between Gordon S. Wood and the 1619 Project was not merely an academic debate. It represented a fundamental collision between two opposing views of history—two ways of knowing, two moral outlooks, and two different views of the past and its purpose. This event marked a clear moment when the ongoing crisis of historical understanding in the United States became public, evident, and impossible to overlook.
Wood did not intend to confront this issue. He was reluctantly pulled into it, fighting his natural tendencies. Once involved, he realised that the importance went beyond mere disagreements over dates, interpretations, or academic details. To him, the 1619 Project embodied the peak of an anti-historical ideology that had been growing in academic circles for many years. It marked the point at which identity-centric frameworks, moralised storytelling, and contemporary politics coalesced into a formidable cultural influence.
1. The 1619 Project as a Political Event
The 1619 Project was not intended as serious historical scholarship. Instead, it functioned as a political action — a journalistic effort aimed at altering public perception, redefining what it means to be American, and promoting a new moral story about the country’s history. Its main argument — that slavery was the foundation of the United States, that 1619 marks the nation’s real beginning, and that the Revolution was fought to defend slavery — lacks supporting evidence. Rather, it was a thesis designed to serve political goals.
Wood recognised this instantly. He saw that the Project was not just incorrect but methodologically flawed. It approached history as a moral allegory, applying modern categories to the past. It overlooked the Revolution’s universalist ideals and simplified intricate historical processes to a single explanatory factor: race.
2. Wood’s Intervention: A Defence of the Enlightenment Tradition
Wood, together with James McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes, challenged the 1619 Project publicly, not out of ideological hostility but from intellectual responsibility. Wood recognised that the Project’s assertions breached fundamental principles of historical research: it overlooked evidence, distorted the motives of historical figures, conflated context with moral judgment, substituted explanation for accusation, and favoured racial particularism over universalism.
Wood’s critique was composed of calm, measured, yet devastating points. He argued that there is no proof that the Revolution was fought to defend slavery. Instead, he showed that the anti-slavery movement arose from the Revolution’s egalitarian ideals. He maintained that the Declaration’s universalism was not hypocrisy but a significant world-historical accomplishment.
3. The WSWS Intervention: An Unlikely Alliance
The most striking aspect of the controversy was Wood’s partnership with the World Socialist Web Site. While this alliance surprised many, it was entirely logical. The WSWS, in contrast to the liberal academic community, supported the Enlightenment principles, universalism, and the importance of class in history. It opposed the racial essentialism promoted by the 1619 Project. It also acknowledged that the Project’s story aligned more with current political aims—especially those of the Democratic Party—rather than with historical accuracy.
Wood discovered in WSWS a seriousness of purpose missing from much of the academic world. Their interviews with him stood out as some of the most meaningful discussions of the Revolution that had been published in years. They regarded him not as a relic of an old-fashioned historiography but as a guardian of a tradition worth conserving. This alliance exposed the core divisions of today’s intellectual landscape. The real debate was not about left versus right but about universalism versus particularism, Enlightenment versus postmodernism, and history versus ideology.
4. The Reaction of the Academy: Silence, Hostility, Evasion
The academic community’s reaction to Wood’s critique was revealing. Many historians chose silence, fearing professional repercussions for questioning the Project. Others defended the Project for political reasons, despite recognising its factual inaccuracies. A few even attacked Wood personally, accusing him of promoting “white narratives” or “elite history.”
This reaction validated Wood’s worst fears regarding the discipline: that evidence no longer held importance, political biases overshadowed scholarly standards, universal principles were questioned, and current identity politics were overshadowing historical interpretation. The university’s inability to support Wood—its most renowned living expert on the Revolution—signified a broader intellectual decline.
5. The Revision of the Project: Quiet Retractions, No Accountability
Faced with pressure from Wood and others, the 1619 Project discreetly adjusted some of its claims. The claim that the Revolution was fought to defend slavery was softened, and the phrase “true founding” was removed. These changes were made quietly, without public acknowledgement, correction, or accountability. Wood recognised the importance of this, as it indicated that the Project was more committed to shaping a narrative than to truth. It was less a scholarly effort and more an ideological one, aimed not at understanding history but at reshaping how the public remembers it.
6. The Broader Crisis: The Collapse of Historical Authority
The controversy revealed a deeper issue: the erosion of historical authority in American society. In a divided society, history is often weaponised, with different groups creating conflicting narratives. The past turns into a battleground, and political motives overshadow the historian’s voice. Wood aimed to reestablish the authority of historical scholarship, but he recognised that the crisis was rooted in structural changes. These included the decline of Enlightenment principles, increasing fragmentation within academia, and the emergence of identity-based perspectives that dismiss universalism.
7. Wood’s Final Position: A Defence of Truth in an Age of Ideology
In his later years, Wood emphasised more urgently the risks posed by the anti-historical movement. He cautioned that politicising history could undermine public confidence, asserting that the past should be understood on its own terms. He staunchly defended the Enlightenment tradition against those aiming to undermine it.
His clash with the 1619 Project was thus not just a minor episode in his career but its defining moment—testing the core principles he had championed for over sixty years. Wood successfully met this challenge, but the academic community did not.
CHAPTER 8 (Part II)
The 1619 Project and the Crisis of Historical Consciousness
The clash between Wood and the 1619 Project was more than a disagreement over the American Revolution. It represented two opposing views of history: one rooted in Enlightenment ideals of universalism, rationality, and context; the other rooted in a postmodern, identity-focused belief that history is primarily about trauma, oppression, and moral hurt. The outcome had profound implications for understanding America’s history and the future direction of historical scholarship.
1. The Project’s Method: Narrative First, Evidence Later
Wood’s sharpest critique focused on the Project’s approach. It started with the premise that the United States was founded on slavery and then looked for evidence to back this claim. This reversal of process and conclusion exemplifies ideological history, which uses the past as a source of moral lessons rather than aiming to understand it as a complex world.
Wood recognised that this approach was fundamentally anti-historical because it violated core historical principles: starting with evidence rather than narrative, reconstructing the past before judging it, distinguishing between causal and moral significance, avoiding present-centric categories, and respecting the past’s autonomy. The Project violated all these principles by overlaying a racial oppression narrative onto a complex history, portraying the Revolution as a conspiracy to protect slavery, ignoring the antislavery movements inspired by revolutionary ideals, and conflating the eighteenth century with the twenty-first.
2. The Erasure of the Revolution’s Universalism
The most intellectually damaging aspect of the Project was its erasure of the Revolution’s universalism. The Declaration of Independence — the boldest claim of human equality in the 18th century — was dismissed as mere hypocrisy. The Revolution’s push for egalitarianism was seen as a guise for racial dominance. The Founders’ concept of natural rights was reduced to just a rhetorical cover for slavery. Wood recognised that this erasure was not only flawed but catastrophic. It undermined the core ideas behind abolitionism, civil rights, and democratic reform. It broke the link between the Revolution’s universal ideals and subsequent struggles. Instead, it replaced a nuanced view of history with a moralised narrative focused on racial continuity.
3. The WSWS as the Last Defender of Enlightenment Historiography
The alliance between Wood and the World Socialist Web Site exposed the core ideological divisions of the debate. The WSWS upheld the Enlightenment values, the importance of class, and the universal goals of the Revolution. It opposed the Project’s racial essentialism. The WSWS noted that the Project’s story prioritised current political interests over historical facts. Wood regarded the WSWS as a serious partner for meaningful historical discussion. Their interviews with him were among the most thorough debates on the Revolution in the twenty-first century, treating him not as an outdated historian but as a defender of a valuable tradition. This alliance exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of the liberal academy, which either embraced the Project uncritically or remained silent out of fear.
4. The Academy’s Abdication: Fear, Conformity, and the Loss of Intellectual Courage
The academic community’s response to the 1619 controversy revealed a lack of intellectual courage. While many historians privately recognised the project’s mistakes, they hesitated to speak out publicly. Some supported the project for political reasons, despite admitting it contained factual errors. A few critics targeted Wood personally, accusing him of promoting “white narratives” or “elite history.”
This reaction affirmed Wood’s diagnosis of the academy’s decline: political partisanship had supplanted scholarly rigour, identity politics had overtaken universal principles, and fear had overshadowed intellectual bravery. The historian’s craft was subordinated to ideological agendas. The academy’s inability to defend Wood — its most renowned living historian of the Revolution — signalled its moral and intellectual downfall.
5. The Project’s Quiet Retractions: A Case Study in Intellectual Dishonesty
Under pressure from Wood and others, the 1619 Project quietly revised several claims. The statement claiming the Revolution was fought to preserve slavery was softened, and the phrase “true founding” was removed. These changes were made without public acknowledgement, correction, or accountability. Recognising this, Wood understood that the Project was more focused on shaping a narrative than uncovering the truth. It was not a scholarly work but an ideological one, aimed at reshaping public memory rather than understanding history.
6. The Crisis of Public Memory
The controversy uncovered a deeper issue: the breakdown of shared public memory in the United States. Different groups now craft their own conflicting historical narratives. The Revolution becomes a battleground for ideological competition. The Founders are seen more as symbols than as real historical figures. The past transforms into a site of conflict.
Wood recognised that this crisis was not only cultural but also political. Without a common historical story, a society cannot uphold its democratic identity. A society that views the past solely as trauma cannot envision a unified future. Similarly, a society that rejects universal principles cannot maintain civic equality.
7. Wood’s Final Intervention: A Defence of Truth
In his later years, Wood increasingly emphasised the risks posed by the anti-historical movement. He cautioned that politicising history could undermine public trust and argued that history should be understood on its own terms. Wood advocated for the Enlightenment tradition against those seeking to dismantle it. His clash with the 1619 Project was not just a minor event but the culmination of his long-standing principles, which he ultimately upheld.
CHAPTER 9 (Part I)
Wood’s Legacy: Enlightenment, Universalism, and the Future of Historical Scholarship
By 2026, when he passed away, Gordon S. Wood had become a rare figure in the modern academic world: a historian whose work went beyond the institution that shaped him. His scholarship adhered to a tradition largely neglected by universities—one rooted in universalism, rationality, and the idea that the past has its own independent significance. Wood was not merely the final great historian of the American Revolution; he also embodied a form of historical thought now at risk of fading away.
To understand Wood’s legacy is to understand the intellectual world he defended, the forces that sought to dismantle it, and the possibilities that remain for its revival.
1. The Enlightenment Tradition as a Living Method
Wood’s work was driven by the Enlightenment belief that humans share essential universal abilities—reason, imagination, moral judgment—that enable us to understand history. This belief was more than just a philosophical idea; it was a guiding methodological principle. It influenced every part of his scholarship: he meticulously and empathetically reconstructed the eighteenth-century conceptual landscape; he viewed historical figures as rational agents rather than mere products of race, class, or identity; he emphasised that ideas are significant—they influence institutions, social dynamics, and political results; and he opposed reducing historical causality solely to material interests or identity groups.
In this sense, Wood’s work serves as a critique of the anti-historical ideologies that gained prominence in the early twenty-first-century academy. He showed that the Enlightenment tradition is not merely a historical remnant but a vital, ongoing approach — a method of engaging with the past that remains essential.
2. Universalism Against Particularism
Wood’s defence of universalism was more than just methodological; it was fundamentally political. He recognised that universalism underpins a democratic society. The Revolution’s egalitarian principle — the idea that “all men are created equal” — was not mere rhetoric but a historic milestone. It established the conceptual foundation for movements like abolitionism, civil rights, and democratic reform.
The emergence of identity-based frameworks, emphasising particularism, standpoint epistemology, and racial essentialism, directly challenged this tradition. Wood opposed this shift not by denying the reality of oppression but by recognising that particularism cannot uphold a democratic society. Without universal principles, a polity risks fragmenting into conflicting identity groups. Similarly, a historical discipline lacking universalism risks descending into relativism. Therefore, Wood’s legacy is fundamentally linked to his defence of universalism.
3. The Historian as Interpreter, Not Prosecutor
One of Wood’s key contributions was his belief that the role of a historian is to interpret history, not to judge it. He opposed moralising history — the tendency to view the past as a court where today’s standards judge historical figures. He recognised that moral judgment without considering context leads to caricatures rather than understanding.
This principle influenced his approach to the Founders, slavery, and the contradictions of the Revolution. He avoided labelling figures as villains or heroes, understanding they were products of their time, not ours. He emphasised that the past must be interpreted in its own context. Today, this stance is considered radical. In an era of ideological history, Wood’s rejection of moral judgment serves as a form of intellectual defiance.
4. The Dialectical Method: Contradiction as Historical Engine
Wood’s work is characterised by a dialectical sensibility that is often overlooked. He recognised that contradictions, tensions, and unforeseen outcomes drive history. The Revolution’s universal ideals coexisted with slavery, its egalitarian aims with hierarchical structures, and its push for democracy with emerging inequalities.
Wood did not attempt to resolve these contradictions; instead, he highlighted them, demonstrating how they spurred historical change. He argued that the Revolution’s failure to end slavery was not hypocrisy but reflected the limitations of what was possible at the time—the tension between universalism and unfreedom even became a catalyst for abolitionism. This dialectical approach, unexpectedly, aligns Wood with the Marxist tradition, especially its classical, non-identity-focused version. Notably, the WSWS acknowledged in Wood a kindred intellectual seriousness.
5. The Crisis of Historical Consciousness
In Wood’s later years, he became increasingly aware of the crisis in American historical consciousness. He observed that history was being used as a tool for political agendas and that identity-centred frameworks were undermining shared understanding. He also noted that the academy had moved away from the Enlightenment ideals and that the public’s trust in historians was declining. His critique of the 1619 Project exemplified these concerns, showing how ideological motives had driven scholarship. It also revealed the intellectual cowardice within the academic community and highlighted the weakened state of the Enlightenment tradition amid moralised storytelling.
6. Wood’s Legacy as a Challenge
Wood’s legacy is not merely a monument; it is a call to action. It requires historians to: defend universalism from particularism, uphold evidence versus narrative, protect context from moralism, preserve the autonomy of the past from ideological misuse, and safeguard the Enlightenment tradition from critics. This challenge isn’t rooted in nostalgia but is essential. Without the Enlightenment tradition, historical scholarship fails. Without universalism, democracy falters. Without considering context, understanding fails.
7. The Future: Can the Tradition Be Revived?
Wood argued that the Enlightenment tradition can endure, but only if historians defend it with seriousness, courage, and integrity. The question remains whether the current academy is capable of such a defence. While the answer is uncertain, Wood’s work offers a pathway for renewal. It exemplifies a mode of historical inquiry that is rigorous, humane, universalist, and dialectical. His approach proves that the past can be understood without instrumentalisation. It also affirms that, despite its contestation, truth remains relevant.
CONCLUSION
Gordon S. Wood and the Fate of Historical Reason
Gordon S. Wood’s passing in 2026 signalled the conclusion of a specific historiographical era. More profoundly, it symbolised the loss of a civilizational confidence—the faith that the past can be fully understood, that truth is accessible, and that universal principles can guide human knowledge. Wood was more than a historian of the American Revolution; he epitomised the last prominent proponent of a historical outlook rooted in Enlightenment ideals, characterised by universalism, meticulous archival research, and the belief in the autonomous significance of the past. His influence extends beyond early American history, shaping the future trajectory of historical scholarship.
1. Wood as the Last Enlightenment Historian
Wood’s work embodies the Enlightenment tradition in its fullest form: Universalism—the idea that humans share innate capacities enabling understanding. Rational inquiry—the dedication to evidence, clear argument, and definitional precision. Contextual reconstruction—the refusal to impose modern categories onto historical periods. Dialectical understanding—the recognition that contradictions drive history. Moral humility—the belief that the historian’s role is interpretative, not prosecutorial. Currently, these principles face opposition. Many academic departments dismiss them as “Eurocentric,” “elitist,” or “ideologically biased.” Wood’s work serves as a strong rebuke to this intellectual decline.
2. The Revolution as a Universal Event
Wood’s greatest achievement was elevating the American Revolution to its true global importance. He demonstrated that it was neither a narrow local fight, a racial agenda, nor a bourgeois plot, but a deep transformation of political and social life. The Revolution expressed universal principles that influenced the modern world. Reducing it to race—as the 1619 Project did—erases its universal nature, breaks the link between its ideals and subsequent emancipatory movements, and turns historical cause-and-effect into a moral story. Wood’s work rightly restores the Revolution to its appropriate scale.
3. The Dialectic of Freedom and Unfreedom
Wood’s analysis of slavery stands as one of the most refined in modern historiography. He avoided reducing the Revolution’s contradictions to a simple moral judgment. Instead, he recognised that: the Revolution challenged the legitimacy of slavery, but slavery continued; universal ideals coexisted with oppression; and this inherent contradiction fueled abolitionism. This dialectical perspective—tragic, complex, and rooted in history—is something that contemporary identity-based frameworks struggle to accept.
4. The Academy’s Collapse and Wood’s Solitary Integrity
Wood lived to see the downfall of the intellectual world he helped shape. He observed the rise of identity as an epistemology, the politicisation of scholarship, the abandonment of universalism, the decline of traditional historical methods, the dominance of narrative over evidence, and the transformation of historians into activists. His confrontation with the 1619 Project highlighted the academy’s failure — or refusal — to defend the Enlightenment tradition. Almost alone, Wood stood against this tide. This solitude forms a key part of his legacy.
5. The WSWS and the Unexpected Continuation of Enlightenment Historiography
The most surprising part of Wood’s final years was his alliance with the World Socialist Web Site. It was the WSWS — not the Ivy League, not the historical associations, not the liberal press — that defended: universalism, the Enlightenment, the centrality of class, the autonomy of the past, the necessity of evidence, and the dangers of racial essentialism. This alliance exposed the true intellectual divisions of the twenty-first century. The fundamental conflict is not left versus right, but universalism versus particularism, Enlightenment versus postmodernism, and history versus ideology. Wood aligned himself with the side of history.
6. What Wood Leaves Behind
Wood’s legacy transcends a mere school; it sets a standard. He leaves a legacy of rigorous and humble historical inquiry, advocates for universalism against identity politics, demonstrates how ideas influence history, offers a dialectical view of the Revolution’s contradictions, warns against politicising scholarship, and challenges future historians to uphold the Enlightenment tradition. His work will last not because the academy will safeguard it — which is unlikely — but because the Enlightenment tradition remains alive as long as scholars are committed to defending it.
7. The Future: A Choice, Not a Fate
The crisis in historical consciousness is not final, and Wood’s work offers valuable resources for renewal. It demonstrates that: the past can be understood, universalism is essential, context is important, dialectical analysis uncovers complexity, moralism hinders understanding, and history is a human science rather than a political tool. The survival of this tradition relies on whether historians and society commit to defending it. Wood has contributed his part; the rest is our responsibility.
EPILOGUE
The Last Historian of the Enlightenment
Gordon S. Wood’s life and work now stand before us with the clarity that only death confers. His passing in 2026 did not merely close the career of a distinguished historian; it marked the extinguishing of a particular intellectual temperament — one that believed the past could be known, that truth could be pursued, that universal principles could illuminate human affairs. Wood belonged to a tradition that the contemporary academy has largely repudiated. His death forces us to confront the question of whether that tradition can survive without him.
This epilogue is not a eulogy. It is an accounting. It is an attempt to situate Wood’s life within the crisis of historical consciousness that defined the final decades of his career. It is an effort to understand what his work means now, in an age that has turned against the very principles he embodied.
1. The Historian in an Age of Unhistory
Wood’s career spanned the rise and decline of the Enlightenment paradigm within the American academic world. He began his career when historical scholarship emphasised: the autonomy of the past, the universality of human reason, the possibility of objective knowledge, the centrality of ideas, and the importance of context. By the time he left, these principles were met with suspicion or hostility.
At his departure, the academy was characterised by identity as epistemology, narrative as a political tool, the collapse of shared standards, the moralization of historical research, and the fragmentation of the discipline into separate enclaves. Wood’s life thus bridges two intellectual eras: one focused on understanding, the other on judgment.
2. The Revolution as a Mirror of the Historian
Wood’s view of the American Revolution went beyond academic analysis; it reflected his core intellectual beliefs. He perceived the Revolution as a victory of universal ideals over particular ones, the breakdown of inherited social hierarchies, the rise of a new collective social vision, and the development of principles that went beyond their immediate context. These ideas were not mere abstractions; they underpinned his method of interpretation. They explained why he rejected narrowing the Revolution to issues of race, class, or identity. They also clarified why he regarded the Revolution as radical — not solely because it achieved equality, but because it made the idea of equality imaginable.
Wood’s interpretation of the Revolution was personal and reflective. It conveyed his belief in the Enlightenment ideals, the strength of ideas, and his conviction that humans can rise above their birth circumstances.
3. The Tragedy of the Enlightenment Historian
Wood’s career carries a tragic note. He dedicated himself to upholding a tradition that was unravelling around him. He saw the academy move away from universalism, abandon historical context, and adopt identity-based frameworks that hindered the understanding of history. He observed the emergence of a moralised, politicised, present-focused approach to history that used history as a weapon rather than a field for research. His clash with the 1619 Project marked the peak of this tragedy, exposing how the Enlightenment tradition had been pushed aside, highlighting the academy’s failure to defend its standards, and revealing that the crisis in historical awareness is not distant but happening now.
Wood did not retreat. He did not compromise. He defended the Enlightenment tradition with the same quiet rigour that had defined his entire career. But he knew that he was fighting a rearguard action.
4. The Unexpected Alliance
The most significant moment in Wood’s later years was his partnership with the World Socialist Web Site. It was WSWS — not the Ivy League, historical associations, or liberal media — that understood the importance of the 1619 controversy. WSWS championed universalism, Enlightenment ideals, and the primacy of class. They regarded Wood as a thoughtful intellectual rather than just a historical figure.
This alliance was intentional, exposing the true divisions in modern intellectual life. The core conflict isn’t simply between left and right but involves universalism versus particularism, Enlightenment versus postmodernism, history versus ideology, and explanation versus accusation. Wood firmly supported universalism, Enlightenment values, history, and explanation. The WSWS acknowledged this stance, but the academic community did not.
5. What Remains
What remains of Wood’s legacy? It’s not a school — the academy has drifted too far from his principles. It’s not a consensus — the discipline is too divided. What remains is something more lasting: a model of historical inquiry based on rigour and humility, a defence of universalism against identity politics, a demonstration that ideas influence history, a dialectical view of the Revolution’s contradictions, a warning about politicised scholarship, and a challenge for future historians to uphold the Enlightenment tradition.
Wood’s work endures because it is rooted in principles that transcend academic trends. It endures because it addresses the core questions of historical awareness. It remains relevant because it affirms that, despite ongoing debates, truth remains meaningful.
6. The Future of Historical Reason
The crisis of historical consciousness is genuine, with the academy in turmoil and public trust diminished. Identity now overshadows universalism, narrative replaces evidence, and moralism takes precedence over understanding. However, the Enlightenment tradition persists wherever historians uphold: the independence of the past, the universality of human reason, the importance of context, and the potential for truth. Wood’s work offers resources for revitalisation, presenting a model of historical inquiry that is rigorous, humane, universalist, and dialectical. It shows that the past can be understood without instrumentalisation and affirms that history is a human science rather than a political tool. Whether this tradition endures depends on choice, not fate.
7. Final Reflection
Gordon S. Wood’s life exemplified the power of historical reason. His work stands as a tribute to the Enlightenment tradition, especially now when that tradition faces challenges. His legacy isn’t mere nostalgia but a call to action — for historians, citizens, and all who value truth. He demonstrated that the past is knowable, that universal principles are essential, and that ideas influence history. He showed that democracy depends on understanding history. His work affirms that the Enlightenment isn’t a bygone era but a vital inheritance. His passing signifies the closing of a chapter. Yet, his contributions continue to inspire those committed to preserving the past from ideological distortion. The Enlightenment legacy endures; it awaits new champions.
Bibliography
(Chicago Notes & Bibliography style; alphabetised; final‑manuscript format)
Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. (Quoted in manuscript: Bailyn’s book “revolutionized the understanding of eighteenth‑century political ideas.”)
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Genius of American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. (Referenced collectively with Hofstadter and Hartz as the “Consensus historians.”)
Bynum, Victoria. The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. (Named among historians who challenged the 1619 Project.)
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. (Referenced implicitly in the manuscript’s discussion of “postmodern scepticism.”)
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. (Referenced implicitly in the manuscript’s discussion of the “linguistic turn” and identity‑based epistemology.)
Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966–69. (Supports the manuscript’s extended treatment of Enlightenment universalism.)
Hannah‑Jones, Nikole, ed. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. New York: Random House, 2021. (Central to the manuscript’s discussion of identity‑based reinterpretations of the Revolution.)
Hartz, Louis. The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955. (Referenced as part of the Consensus school.)
Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. (Referenced as part of the Consensus school.)
Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. (Supports the manuscript’s analysis of Enlightenment universalism.)
Morgan, Edmund S. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. (Relevant to the manuscript’s treatment of republicanism and sovereignty.)
Oakes, James. The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. (Named among historians who challenged the 1619 Project.)
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. (Supports the manuscript’s discussion of republican ideology.)
Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. (Implicitly referenced in the manuscript’s critique of identity‑based historiography.)
Wilentz, Sean. No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. (Named among historians who challenged the 1619 Project.)
Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (Explicitly referenced in the manuscript’s historiographical comparisons.)
Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969. (Quoted in manuscript: Wood’s work “revolutionized eighteenth‑century political thought.”)
———. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. (Quoted in manuscript: the Revolution as “a deep social shift that dismantled the remnants of monarchical society.”)
World Socialist Web Site. The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2021. (Quoted in manuscript: Wood’s death passed “with hardly a ripple in official public life.”)
Gordon S. Wood and the Fate of Historical Consciousness in the Epoch of Decline
I. Introduction: A Historian at the Threshold of a Vanishing World
The death of Gordon S. Wood in June 2026, barely noticed in public life, occurred just before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The obituary carried by the World Socialist Web Site viewed this not merely as the loss of a scholar but as an indicator of a deeper cultural and political crisis. The obituary’s opening remark—“It speaks to the degradation of democratic consciousness, intellectual life and culture in the United States that Wood’s death… has gone largely unnoticed”—is more than a rhetorical flourish; it serves as a diagnosis.
Wood’s life and work illustrate the trajectory of American academic culture from its postwar peak through its later decline into postmodernism, identity politics, and the commercialisation of historical memory. His career offers a perspective on the future of historical objectivity, the Enlightenment tradition, and the possibility of viewing the American Revolution as a global historical event.
This brief article presents Wood’s historiographical legacy not as a mere antiquarian study but as a final, contested safeguard of the Enlightenment’s universalist ideals against the destructive influences of contemporary cynicism and racialist mystification.
II. The Formation of a Historian: Bailyn, the Archive, and the World of Ideas
Wood’s intellectual growth at Harvard under Bernard Bailyn in the 1960s positioned him as a leader in a major historiographical shift. Bailyn’s 1967 book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, argued that the Revolution was more than an elite power move; it represented a profound ideological transformation. Building on this, Wood’s 1968 *Creation of the American Republic* delved deeper into the changing ideas of sovereignty, representation, and constitutionalism. The obituary highlights Wood’s remarkable archival mastery: “He seemed to carry the entire world of eighteenth-century America in his head… the pamphlets, the newspapers, the sermons, the diaries, the account books.”[1]
This encyclopaedic mastery was not just antiquarianism; it laid the groundwork for a methodological belief: understanding the past on its own terms, using its own categories, without being distorted by modern moralism or identity-based reductionism. Wood’s statement—“The past cannot see the future”—encapsulates this approach. It opposes the teleological arrogance of today’s culture, which judges historical figures by standards they could not have known and criticises them for failing to anticipate twenty-first-century sensibilities.
III. Against Anachronism: Wood’s Defence of Historical Objectivity
Wood’s opposition to anachronism was rooted both methodologically and philosophically. He held that history should focus on reconstructing past consciousness, rather than projecting current identities onto the past. The obituary reflects this view: “Such an approach… flattered the present at the expense of the past… and made true historical understanding impossible.”
This constitutes the core of Wood’s historiographical contribution. In a time when history is frequently viewed through a moral lens, Wood highlighted the importance of viewing the past independently. He opposed reducing the Revolution to a conspiracy by white male elites, a view common among identity-centric historians. He rejected the postmodern claim that the Revolution was just a ‘non-event,’ and also opposed racist assertions that a historian’s skin colour affects their historical interpretation. In this way, Wood’s work defends the Enlightenment principles: that reason, evidence, and universal human traits—rather than race, identity, or power—underpin historical understanding.
IV. The Radicalism of the American Revolution: Wood’s Masterwork
Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) stands as the highlight of his body of work. It contends that the Revolution was more than a political separation from Britain; it was a social upheaval that dismantled the vestiges of monarchical society and ushered in a new era of republican equality.
The obituary encapsulates this thesis: “What was at stake was the erosion and eventual collapse of a monarchical society.” Wood’s dialectical argument states that the Revolution dismantled the hierarchical, deferential, patronage-centred world of the eighteenth century, replacing it with a society of autonomous citizens. Nonetheless, this change was accompanied by contradictions. The rise of a “middling type” of democratic politician—characterised as energetic, ambitious, and vulgar—supplanted the Founders’ vision of disinterested republican leadership.
Wood’s tragic sensibility shows in his view of Jefferson: “He always sensed that his ‘empire of liberty’ had a cancer at its core…” This cancer was slavery, the contradiction that would eventually cause the Civil War. Wood’s awareness of this tragedy challenges the notion that he was indifferent to oppression. Instead, he saw slavery as the unresolved tension within the Revolution, not its core.
V. Wood and the WSWS: A Convergence of Principles
The obituary clarifies that Wood was not a Marxist. However, the WSWS saw him as a kindred spirit. Their connection wasn’t based on ideology but shared values: a dedication to objectivity, universalism, and the revolutionary importance of 1776. Wood acknowledged this bond, and in 2021, he told the WSWS, “You seem to be the only historian who understands what I was saying in my Radicalism book.”
This is a significant admission, showing Wood’s recognition that the academic world had moved away from the Enlightenment principles he upheld. Meanwhile, the WSWS viewed Wood as a protector of historical accuracy in opposition to the racialist distortions spread by the 1619 Project.
VI. The 1619 Project and the Crisis of Historical Consciousness
The obituary highlights Wood’s involvement in opposing the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which is key to understanding his significance later in his career. The WSWS describes how Wood, McPherson, Oakes, and Bynum were criticised as “white historians” whose race allegedly prevented them from interpreting American history. The obituary includes the racialist reasoning: Hannah-Jones accused these scholars of being “white historians who could never understand American history…”, emphasising the racial bias used against them.
This runs counter to Wood’s entire intellectual effort. It shifts from universalism to racial essentialism, from evidence to identity, and from historical analysis to moralised tribalism. His collaboration with the WSWS—through interviews, webinars, and public letters—demonstrated intellectual bravery. Even later in life, he defended the Revolution’s global importance against efforts to portray it as merely a conspiracy to sustain slavery.
VII. Wood as the Last Representative of a Vanishing Tradition
The obituary’s closing judgment is comprehensive: “He belonged to a generation of historians who believed that the past could be understood objectively, that ideas mattered, and that significant revolutions changed the trajectory of human history.” Wood’s passing marks the conclusion of an era, representing the last prominent figure from a tradition tracing back to the Enlightenment and earlier twentieth-century historians like Trevelyan, Namier, Bailyn, and Hill, who held that history is a rational investigation into the human past. In today’s intellectual climate—marked by cynicism, identity politics, and postmodern relativism—Wood’s work serves as a counterpoint, emphasising that the American Revolution was a pivotal event in the development of democracy rather than a racial plot or a bourgeois myth.
VIII. Conclusion: Wood’s Legacy and the Future of Historical Understanding
The obituary ends with a prediction: “It will be read long after the racialist falsifications and postmodernist evasions… have been discredited.” This is more than just a tribute; it’s a declaration of faith in history. The Enlightenment tradition that Wood championed is not dead. Although under attack, it persists wherever scholars, workers, and students strive to understand and consciously change the world.
Wood’s legacy extends beyond academia, belonging to the future and especially to the working class, whose fight for emancipation depends on a clear grasp of the revolutionary past. It also belongs to all who oppose the degradation of historical awareness and believe in the possibility of truth.
[1] A tribute to Gordon S. Wood (1933-2026), historian of the American Revolution-Tom Mackaman and David North 9 June 2026-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/06/10/nbsd-j10.pdf
Gordon S. Wood (1933–2026): The passing of a major historian of the American Revolution
I. A historian of the American Revolution whose work shaped half a century
Gordon S. Wood, who passed away Sunday at age 92 after being hit by a car, was a highly influential historian of the American Revolution and early American history. As noted in the WSWS, he was “a leading historian of the American Revolution,’ with a career at Brown University and key publications—The Creation of the American Republic, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and Empire of Liberty—that became essential references for many scholars.
Wood was part of the final cohort of prominent postwar American historians educated in Bernard Bailyn’s liberal-republican tradition. His work reflected a serious purpose, meticulous archival research, and the view that the American Revolution was a true turning point in global history. As noted, his scholarship focused on “the far-reaching social and political transformations unleashed by the break with monarchy,” a perspective that, although not Marxist, still captured the Revolution’s inherent dynamism. Wood’s death marks the passing of a figure whose work helped define the terrain on which debates over the Revolution have been fought for more than five decades.
II. The contradictions of a liberal historian in an age of reaction
Wood was not a Marxist. His approach focused on ideology, republicanism, and political culture instead of the material conditions and class struggles behind the Revolution. He viewed ideas as independent forces and often overlooked the economic and social conflicts that influenced the revolutionary process.
Wood’s strengths were inherently linked to his limitations. He was part of a generation of liberal historians who, despite their theoretical flaws, genuinely engaged with the Enlightenment, the democratic ideals of the eighteenth century, and the universalist principles of the Revolution. He opposed the cynical, postmodern, and racialist reinterpretations that have emerged over the past twenty years.
Tom Mackaman’s obituary will highlight that Wood recognised a crucial point: the American Revolution was genuinely revolutionary—a significant global shift. This perspective unexpectedly and firmly set him against the prevailing ideological trends that now shape elite academic and media circles.
III. Wood and the WSWS: A principled stand against the 1619 Project
A key political moment in Wood’s later career was his open opposition to the New York Times’ 1619 Project. When the Times promoted the inaccurate idea that the American Revolution was fought to maintain slavery, Wood was among the earliest and most notable historians to dispute this. His 2019 interview with the WSWS, conducted by historian Tom Mackaman, remains a significant reference in the fight against racialist distortions of American history.
Wood described the Project as a “displacement by ideology” and considered the Times’ refusal to correct factual errors as “an assault on historical integrity.” These were deliberate statements, reflecting a principled stance by a historian who recognised that rewriting the Revolution with racialist perspectives served current political interests.
Wood’s intervention was important not just because of his reputation but also because of the core principles he upheld. His life’s work showed how the Revolution “shattered the hierarchical, deferential social order” and introduced “a new world of egalitarian aspiration.” The 1619 Project aimed to erase this legacy by framing the Revolution as a reactionary plot by slaveholders. Wood refused to allow this falsification to pass unchallenged.
IV. The broader political context: Identity politics and the assault on historical truth
Wood’s conflict with the 1619 Project should be viewed in the wider political landscape of the past ten years. During this period, identity politics has grown among America’s ruling elite, accompanied by deliberate attempts to undermine the Enlightenment and Revolution’s universalist and egalitarian ideals. The goal is to substitute class analysis with racial essentialism and to hide the revolutionary legacy that challenges capitalist dominance.
Wood, although a liberal, understood the peril involved. His involvement in the WSWS’s online panel on July 4, 2020—during a period of severe political upheaval—showed his readiness to stand by historical facts, even when it meant opposing influential institutions. Mackaman’s obituary will surely note that Wood’s position “deserves acknowledgement and respect,” reflecting his intellectual integrity at a time when many scholars yielded to ideological influence.
V. Assessing Wood’s legacy from a Marxist standpoint
From a historical materialist perspective, Wood’s work has notable strengths and some limitations. He emphasised the revolutionary nature of 1776, describing the fall of monarchical hierarchy and the emergence of democratic equality. He also opposed racialist reinterpretations that dismiss the Revolution’s progressive aspects and upheld the historian’s duty to pursue truth.
Wood acknowledged his limitations, especially in his tendency to see ideology as the primary factor in historical change. He overlooked the role of class forces in driving the Revolution and did not fully grasp the period’s international and socioeconomic dimensions. Despite these gaps, his research remains highly valuable. Wood’s analysis remains essential to understanding the ideological and political transformations of the late eighteenth century. His claim that the Revolution was progressive is largely consistent with the Marxist interpretation of bourgeois revolutions as key stages in the development of modern society.
VI. Conclusion: A historian who stood for truth in an age of falsification
Gordon S. Wood’s passing represents a significant loss for the field of history. He was part of a generation of historians who held that the past is knowable, that truth holds importance, and that the American Revolution was a pivotal moment in the fight for human liberation.
In the last years of his life, Wood was compelled into a political conflict he had neither pursued nor escaped. Confronted with the racialist distortion of the Revolution, he decided to uphold historical truth. As a result, he aligned—impartially—with the World Socialist Web Site in a struggle that goes beyond scholarly debate and addresses core issues of historical awareness.
Tom Mackaman will publish a more extensive assessment of Wood’s life and work. For now, it is enough to say that he was a serious historian, a principled opponent of ideological distortion, and a defender of the revolutionary legacy of 1776. His contributions will endure.
Gordon S. Wood and the 1619 Project: A historian’s stand against racialist falsification
I. Introduction: A confrontation forced by history
Gordon S. Wood generally avoided political controversy. Throughout his career, he focused on the liberal-republican tradition of American historiography, creating detailed analyses of the ideological and institutional changes during the Revolutionary era. However, in the last ten years of his life, Wood became involved in a political conflict that extended well beyond academic circles.
That struggle involved confronting the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Wood saw it as a “displacement by ideology” and believed the Times’ refusal to correct factual errors was “an assault on historical integrity.” These words reveal a historian who recognised something fundamental was at stake: the ability to write truthful history amid ideological manipulation.
II. The 1619 Project and the rewriting of the American Revolution
The 1619 Project argued that the main purpose of the American Revolution was to preserve slavery. This claim was not only false but also historically unfounded. It reversed the correct timeline of the eighteenth century, overlooked the significant social changes brought by the Revolution, and turned a major historical event into a racial conspiracy.
Wood quickly saw the danger. His career had shown that the Revolution “shattered the hierarchical, deferential social order” and began “a new world of egalitarian aspiration.” Suggesting that this upheaval was driven by a desire to defend slavery dismisses the Revolution’s democratic essence and reduces history to racial essentialism.
Wood’s critique was based on evidence, not ideology. He was familiar with the archives and the political debates of the 1760s and 1770s. He understood that the Revolution’s leaders—despite their contradictions—weren’t rallying the population to defend slavery but to overthrow monarchy and hereditary privilege.
III. Why Wood’s intervention mattered
Wood’s opposition to the 1619 Project goes beyond academic disagreement. It must be understood within the wider political landscape of the past decade. During this time, the ruling class has increasingly used identity politics to divide the working class and hide the core class conflicts in American society. The 1619 Project served as a key ideological tool in this effort. By framing American history primarily as a racial story, it aimed to undermine the universal and egalitarian ideals championed during the Enlightenment and the Revolution.
Wood’s intervention was notably politically explosive. According to the uploaded document, “What made Wood’s participation in this debate significant was not merely his prestige, but the substance of what he was defending.” He supported the view that the Revolution was a progressive event with global significance. Additionally, he defended the Enlightenment and emphasised the historian’s duty to pursue truth. And he did so publicly, on the record, in an interview with the World Socialist Web Site.
IV. The WSWS interviews: A turning point in the controversy
The 2019 interview between WSWS and Wood, led by historian Tom Mackaman, marked a crucial turning point. It represented the first major public critique of the 1619 Project by a well-known historian. The interview highlighted the Project’s inaccuracies, methodological flaws, and political biases. Wood’s relationship with WSWS was more than casual; he had been interviewed earlier in 2015 and later participated in their online panel on the American Revolution on July 4, 2020. This ongoing involvement indicated a deep intellectual connection based on a shared commitment to uncovering historical truth. The Times responded to Wood and other historians with arrogance and evasiveness, but the damage was already done. The Project was compelled to quietly revise key claims, implicitly admitting that its main thesis was indefensible.
V. Wood’s stand and the crisis of the historical profession
Wood’s involvement in the controversy highlighted a profound crisis within the American historical community. Many scholars, either intimidated by the current political environment or supporting the racialist ideas of the Project, chose to stay silent. Others defended the Project even while aware that its claims were inaccurate. Wood stood firm, refusing to compromise. He emphasised that historians have a duty to pursue the truth, not to popular ideological trends. As the document notes, “Wood took the obligation of the historian seriously to truth.”
This position inherently put him at odds with the prevailing ideological trends of the American ruling class. Simultaneously, it aligned him with the Marxist support for the Enlightenment and the revolutionary tradition.
VI. Conclusion: A historian who refused to falsify the past
Gordon S. Wood’s clash with the 1619 Project is a key moment in his later career. It highlighted the enduring significance of his scholarship, his intellectual integrity, and the political importance of defending the revolutionary legacy of 1776. In a time when racist ideology and postmodern relativism threaten historical truth, Wood’s stance—like that of the WSWS—was brave. It confirmed that the American Revolution was genuinely a revolution, a progressive, globally significant event whose meaning cannot be erased by current political trends.
His role in this struggle will remain an essential part of his legacy.
The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter (Penguin Modern Classics) Paperback – 28 May 2026
“Trump is proceeding now completely illegally. The constitutional framework does not exist for him. He is not restrained by any sort of constitutional norms or legal norms. He is working off of the conceptions which were associated with the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the so-called ‘state of exception.’ The Führer makes the laws. He has the power. He does with them what he wants.”
David North
“Tocqueville saw that the life of constant action and decision which was entailed by the democratic and businesslike character of American life put a premium upon rough and ready habits of mind, quick decision, and the prompt seizure of opportunities – and that all this activity was not propitious for deliberation, elaboration, or precision in thought.”
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
“In the eyes of a philistine, a revolutionary point of view is virtually equivalent to an absence of scientific objectivity. We think just the opposite: only a revolutionist… is capable of laying bare the objective dynamics of the revolution.”
Leon Trotsky-In Defence of Marxism
Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay remains one of the most frequently cited analyses of American liberal politics. It’s worth examining carefully because, despite its deeply flawed and class-hostile framework, it contains a valuable insight. Hofstadter accurately notes a recurring pattern in American political history: movements that attribute social grievances to concealed conspiracies—such as Masonic plots, Jesuit infiltration, and Communist subversion. He correctly observes that this tendency has persisted for centuries and spans the entire political spectrum.
However, Hofstadter’s analysis primarily serves as a tool of the liberal establishment to suppress popular discontent. His approach is largely psychological and cultural, viewing ‘the paranoid style’ as a mental disorder, a tendency to perceive enemies and conspiracies. This perspective conveniently avoids addressing a more critical issue: why do millions of people lose trust in official institutions and seek out conspiracy theories?
From a Marxist view, the fundamental causes are social and historical, not psychiatric. Conspiracy beliefs stem from a distorted perception of genuine alienation. Workers feel invisible, unacknowledged, and subjected to uncontrollable forces that influence their lives. Their wages are affected by obscure market forces, and distant financial decisions harm their communities. They perceive their government as serving the rich, their unions as failing, and the mainstream media as spreading misinformation.
When people sense that powerful hidden forces influence their lives but lack the scientific tools of Marxist class analysis, conspiracy theories often fill this gap. The “paranoid style” distorts class analysis that never materialised, serving as a personalised, often racialised alternative to understanding capitalism as a system. Hofstadter, a Columbia University historian, wrote during the Cold War liberalism, in an environment that aimed to discredit both McCarthyism and socialist politics by depicting political “extremism” on both sides as pathological. This reflects the logic of the “vital centre” referenced in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s 1949 manifesto, which claimed that capitalist liberal democracy was the final, rational stage of history and viewed challenges from the left or right as irrational.[1]
This framework aims to discredit working-class radicalism by associating it with right-wing conspiracy theories, which are viewed as demonstrations of “status anxiety” and psychological projection. Unlike Marxists, who recognise the ruling class and advocate its overthrow, Hofstadter considers such thinking paranoid. The critical point Hofstadter overlooks, due to the limitations of his framework, is that conspiratorial politics arise from a political vacuum. When the working class lacks independent political parties, a socialist press, and revolutionary leaders, and when its official organisations, like unions and the Democratic Party, are fully integrated into capitalism, discontent cannot develop rationally; instead, it becomes irrational.
The Long Shadow of History
Richard Hofstadter plays a key role in the intellectual history outlined by David North in his lecture “The Long Shadow of History.” Hofstadter was arguably the most influential academic historian in shaping the ideological landscape after World War II. North highlights the transition of American liberal and left-leaning thinkers from critically examining capitalism to adopting the “consensus” approach associated with Cold War liberalism.
Hofstadter began his academic journey with genuinely radical ideas, authoring The American Political Tradition (1948) from a critical perspective. However, he quickly became the leading figure of the so-called ‘consensus school’ in American historiography, which asserts that American history is defined more by shared liberal-capitalist values than by class conflict. This shift represents the same intellectual move North describes, removing class struggle as a meaningful category in historical analysis. Unlike progressive historians like Charles Beard, who highlighted economic conflict, Hofstadter framed political radicalism as a result of “status anxiety”, a psychological disorder among declining social groups rather than a rational reaction to class exploitation.
Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform (1955) further discounted the Populist movement as a true agrarian revolt, arguing that it was fueled by status resentment, nativism, and conspiracy theories. This perspective enabled him to restore the mainstream narrative of American capitalism as a benign and progressive system, temporarily sidetracked by the irrational passions of marginalised social groups.
Hofstadter’s most famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964), offers important insights. Initially, it seems to criticise right-wing irrationalism. Still, its underlying goal was to frame all anti-establishment politics as psychological issues, turning serious critiques of capitalism into signs of mental illness rather than rational debates. This view aligned with Cold War ideology, allowing liberal intellectuals to appear rational and objective while dismissing both the socialist left and the McCarthyite right as equally paranoid. According to North, this approach was the simplest option for liberals after they felt discredited by Stalinism, shifting from Marxist critiques of Stalinism and capitalism to a smug, depoliticised centrist stance that considered ideology a mental disturbance.
North’s lecture highlights the social foundation of this intellectual development. Hofstadter and other postwar academics were petty-bourgeois thinkers whose material interests were linked to their roles within capitalist institutions. North notes that this social layer often exhibits traits such as egotism, selfishness, and cowardice, which influence individuals’ participation in this process. As postwar prosperity returned and McCarthyism threatened academic careers, many sought comfort in consensus liberalism instead of engaging in the challenging, risky, and academically rigorous pursuit of true Marxism.
The irony lies in his characterisation of political radicalism as “paranoia” or “status anxiety,” which itself reflects the Cold War era’s suppression of socialist ideas. His work remained within ideological boundaries, effectively supporting them by providing an academic justification for the ruling class’s efforts to delegitimise class-based politics. The phrase “paranoid style” aptly describes Hofstadter’s academic setting, a group of well-paid scholars who genuinely struggled to understand why workers might rightly believe capitalism causes their hardships.
Hofstadter’s Revival
Hofstadter’s essay has seen a significant resurgence during the Trump era, often invoked by liberal commentators to frame MAGA as a form of collective mental illness. This interpretation is even more politically naive than the original. It enables the Democratic Party and the broader liberal establishment to avoid responsibility for social issues such as deindustrialisation, the opioid crisis, the 2008 financial collapse, and ongoing wars, which fuel Trump’s anger. Labelling it “paranoia” is a dismissive stereotype that shields the ruling class from accountability. Hofstadter identified the symptom but wrongly diagnosed it as a mental disorder, recommending liberal rationalism as the remedy.
When Trump descended the escalator in 2015 and eventually won the presidency in 2016 and again in 2024, the American liberal intelligentsia swiftly turned to Hofstadter’s work. His essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, was extensively reprinted, cited, and regarded as essential for understanding the Trump phenomenon. The dominant perspective was that Trump embodies a modern expression of America’s irrational, conspiratorial, and “paranoid” tendencies with QAnon, birtherism, and MAGA mythology viewed as contemporary equivalents of McCarthyism and anti-Masonic movements. Prominent outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, and many liberal commentators articulated this interpretation with apparent satisfaction.
In March 2016, David North examined Trump’s Super Tuesday surge. He questioned not why millions of workers hold skewed or irrational beliefs, but why the genuine, justified anger of the working class has been directed towards a right-wing demagogue instead of a socialist movement. North stated, “More than any other Republican candidate, Trump has tailored his message to resonate with the intense anger and frustration of tens of millions of Americans who feel quite rightly neglected and scorned by a political system that overlooks their daily issues.”
Hofstadter’s framework aims to discourage this kind of statement. Labelling a Trump supporter as “paranoid” shifts the debate from social and political issues—like deindustrialisation, wage stagnation, the opioid crisis, the 2008 financial collapse and bailouts, and ongoing conflicts—toward alleged mental flaws within the working class. This effectively redirects attention away from objective problems, serving as a strategy used by the ruling class.
North asked , “Why haven’t workers turned left despite all this suffering?” The answer isn’t in their minds but in the deliberate dismantling of political tools that could have offered them a left alternative. The Democratic Party had long neglected the working class. Under Obama, who promised “change,” the administration bailed out Wall Street, expanded drone strikes, deported more immigrants than any previous president, and oversaw the largest wealth transfer upward in U.S. history. Corporate interests co-opted Unions. The pseudo-left, including the DSA, the Sanders campaign, and the NGO-industrial complex, diverted political energy back into the Democratic Party and suppressed it. As North observed: “The essential characteristics of this political milieu are complacency, self-absorption, and, above all, contempt for the working class.”
When the working class has no party, no press, no socialist leadership, and every official institution claiming to represent it has betrayed it, a right-wing demagogue who at least names the enemy (even if he names it falsely) will find an audience. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is a distorted, nationalist, scapegoating substitute for a class analysis that was never provided. The Hofstadter framework, by calling this “paranoia,” performs exactly the function it is meant to perform: it insulates the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment from accountability.
The slogan “Make America Great Again” fits within a long tradition of fascist-style national mythology. As North notes, “one of the critical elements of all fascist movements is extreme nationalism and the promotion of miraculous cures to capitalism’s problems on a national scale.” Hitler aimed to restore Germany’s greatness after the Treaty of Versailles; Trump seeks to revive America’s greatness after decades of deindustrialisation and imperial decline. In both instances, the “restoration” is a nationalist myth that masks the true cause of workers’ struggles — the capitalist system itself — and shifts blame onto scapegoats such as immigrants, minorities, foreign powers, and “globalists.”
The ideological function of the “paranoid style” revival in the Trump era can be stated plainly: It pathologises the working class rather than analysing the social conditions that produce political irrationalism. It transforms a political and economic crisis into a cultural or psychological one, thereby making it invisible to social analysis and immune to socialist remedy.
It rehabilitates liberalism as the rational alternative as though the “vital centre” of Clinton, Obama, and Harris hadn’t produced the very conditions that generated Trump. Hofstadter’s framework always points back to the defence of existing institutions, existing parties, and the existing economic order. “Extremism” on both ends is pathological; the centre is healthy. This is ideologically indistinguishable from the Cold War liberalism that Hofstadter himself served.
It disarms the working class by teaching workers that their own anger is a symptom of disease rather than a legitimate response to exploitation. Millions of workers who correctly understand that powerful, hidden forces control their lives — that decisions are made in Wall Street boardrooms that destroy their communities, that politicians lie to them, that wars are launched for interests other than theirs — are told their perception is “paranoid.” The Marxist response is to say: your perception is correct, but your analysis of who is responsible and what must be done is wrong. That is a political task, not a psychiatric one.
As North insisted from the moment Trump emerged, the answer to the far right is not a return to the liberal centre it is the construction of a revolutionary socialist party capable of giving the working class a scientific understanding of its situation and a program for fighting back. Trump is not an aberration from American capitalism; he is its product. He is the political form capitalism takes when its contradictions reach a breaking point, and the working class has been left without a genuine alternative. Defeating fascism requires abolishing the conditions that produce it which means abolishing capitalism itself.
Hofstadter’s liberal rationalism has never built a single rank-and-file committee, never organised a single strike, never told a single worker the truth about who actually runs the country and why. As an analytical tool for the left, it is worse than useless it is a weapon pointed in the wrong direction.
[1] Revisiting The Vital Centre by Kevin Mattson- http://www.csun.edu/~twd61312/mattson.htm
“The Crooked Path To Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution,” by James Oakes. £21.99-WW Norton & Co
We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.
Karl Marx[1]
“Scratch beneath the surface of any debate about race in American history, and there you will find a struggle for power, ultimately political power.”
Scorpion’s Sting James Oakes
“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours
The relationship between Abraham Lincoln and the institution of slavery is very complex. To Oakes’s credit, he has written a book that is not only well-researched but, as David Holahan writes in USA Today. “ brings clarity and insight to a political conundrum of bewildering complexity.”
As James Oakes’s book The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution suggests, there is not an easy path to understanding the relationship between Lincoln and the question of slavery. From an early age, Lincoln hated slavery but was not an abolitionist. According to James Oakes, Lincoln “never called for the immediate emancipation of the slaves. He never denounced slaveholders as sinners and never endorsed the civil or political equality of Blacks and whites… He never opened his home to fugitive slaves. He endorsed voluntary colonization of free Blacks… He certainly spoke at colonization meetings… but never at an abolitionist meeting.”[2] Although not a Marxist historian, Oakes believes a dialectical relationship exists between Lincoln and the struggle to end slavery.
Oakes is a historian who is careful with the words he uses. Again, as the title suggests, there was no straightforward path to the abolition of slavery. Oakes spends a significant part of the book examining the United States Constitution, which perhaps unsurprisingly does not contain the word “slavery”. Slaves are referred to euphemistically as “persons” who are “held to service.” As Oakes further points out, the Constitution contains much that is useful to both slaveholders and abolitionists who point out that words “persons” and “liberty” support their cause. Oakes does not sugarcoat the fact that at the time the Constitution was written, slavery was on the ascendency, with 13 American states still practising chattel slavery.
Oakes does not see the Constitution through rose-tinted glasses, and his book attempts to place it in a more objective light, writing, “Parse every clause of the Constitution, peer into the minds of its authors, and you may never find the antislavery document revered by so many ordinary men and women, Black and white.”
As the Marxist writer Tom Mackaman points out, “The American Revolution made incarnate the thought of the Enlightenment, the period of intellectual rebirth that undermined the divinely sanctioned feudal order of the Middle Ages, and that grew in tandem with the incipient capitalist economy. Just as scientists—natural philosophers as they were then called—such as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton challenged the feudal-religious conception of the natural world, so Enlightenment political philosophers began to raise questions about the political world—but not the social, which was only dimly understood prior to Marx. Why did kings rule? What was the purpose of government? What were the rights of man? Ultimately, in answer to these questions, the Enlightenment established that there existed natural rights—that is, rights that preceded government or that existed in a state of nature. [3]One natural right identified was the right to private property. Another was the right to freedom of self-ownership. However, the right to property, as James Oakes has pointed out, was increasingly viewed to be the outcome of self-ownership and the right to dispose of one’s labour. “The property which every man has in his labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable,” This political conundrum that Oakes mentions in the book was one that Lincoln would grapple with until his political murder in 1865.
In his review of Oakes’s book, Richard Kreitner concurs, writing, “This explication of the antislavery reading of the Constitution represents Oakes at his best, showing how clauses that seemed to protect slavery also opened, for a growing number of antislavery politicians, doors to its potential abolition. The Constitution was a mess of contradictions; it limited the possibilities of antislavery politics but offered opportunities, too. Competing interpretations of the Constitution “emerged in reaction to each other,” Oakes writes, adapting to new issues and claims by the other, each invoking the founders to support its view. The South’s increasingly aggressive twisting of the Constitution and demands for slavery’s protection developed as much in response to growing antislavery assertiveness as the other way around.”[4]
Like all of Oakes’s books, The Crooked Path educates and increases one’s knowledge. He brings a clarity of thought, which is rare among historians of his subject matter. I like reading his books, but from my standpoint, his most important contribution to historical clarity has been his decision to take to the battlefield against what he called the “new consensus history”[5]. Over the last five years, Oakes has been sharply critical of the various revisionist narratives, including the historical racialism of the 1619 Project.
Oakes believes most contemporary scholarship offers only “a history or politics and of hopelessness.” Oakes wrote in above mentioned article in 2017, “The new consensus history has shaped large swaths of the American past, from the American Revolution of the eighteenth century to the “long” Civil Rights movement of the twentieth century. Here, I focus primarily on my field of inquiry—slavery, antislavery, and the Civil War—where the drift toward consensus has been startling. Everywhere you look, historians are collapsing fundamental social distinctions—between slavery and racial discrimination, for example, between being married and being enslaved, between the free labour system of the North and the slave labour system of the South. The social bases of political conflict thus erased, consensus historians go on to suppress the significance of antislavery politics, even to the point of denying that politics played any role whatsoever in the destruction of slavery. These crucial erasures are once again explained by a reference to a broad political consensus—not the liberal consensus of Hofstadter and Hartz, but the smothering, all-consuming consensus in favour of “white male supremacy.” It’s still consensus history; it’s just a different consensus.”
One revisionist narrative Oakes is particularly hostile to has been the racialist viewpoint emanating from the New York Times 1619 Project. For readers unfamiliar with the Vergangenheitsbewältigung, visit the wsws.org[6]. This website has extensive coverage from a Marxist perspective. In a recent interview with the historian Tom Mackaman on wsws.org, Mackaman asked the following: “ Another aspect of the way the 1619 Project presents history is to imply that it is a uniquely American phenomenon, leaving out the long history of chattel slavery, the history of slavery in the Caribbean. Oakes answered, “ And they erase Africa from the African slave trade. They claim that Africans were stolen and kidnapped from Africa. Well, they were purchased by these kidnappers in Africa. Everybody’s hands were dirty. And this is another aspect of the tendency to reify race because you’re attempting to isolate a racial group that was also complicit. This is conspicuous only because the obsession with complicity is so overwhelming in the political culture right now, but also as reflected in the 1619 Project. Hypocrisy and complicity are basically the two great attacks. Again, not a critique of capitalism. It’s a critique of hypocrisy and complicity. Here, I agree with Genovese, who once said that “hypocrites are a dime a dozen.” Hypocrisy doesn’t interest me as a critique, nor does complicity.[7]
Notes
1. February 1, 1959, issue of Commentary John Higham “The Cult of the ‘American Consensus’
2. The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History- Edited by David North and Thomas Mackaman-Mehring Books.
3. Slavery in White and Black-Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese
Books by James Oakes
The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of antislavery Politics (2007);
Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012).
The Scorpion’s Sting: antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (2014).
[1] Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm
[2] “The Crooked Path To Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution,” by James Oakes. £21.99-WW Norton & Co
[3] Slavery and the American Revolution: A Response to the New York Times 1619 Project- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/01/amer-n01.html
[4] Did the Constitution Pave the Way to Emancipation?- https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/james-oakes-crooked-path/
[5] The New Cult of Consensus- https://nonsite.org/the-new-cult-of-consensus/
[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619
[7] An interview with historian James Oakes on the New York Times’ 1619 Project
James M. McPherson. Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xiv + 253 pp., index.
“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
Abraham Lincoln
“The Civil War mobilized human resources on a scale unmatched by any other event in American history except, perhaps, World War II. For actual combat duty the Civil War mustered a considerably larger proportion of American manpower than did World War II.”
James Macpherson
“There is a big idea which is at stake”–Corporal in the 105th Ohio, 1864
“Lincoln’s significance lies in his not hesitating before the most severe means, once they were found to be necessary, in achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of a young nation.”
― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours
Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance—an average person of goodwill, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organization, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 41 (New York: International Publishers, 1985),
Drawn With the Sword is an excellent work of historical study and contemplation. It is a book of the highest historical standard. It is not one continuous book but a collection of 15 essays on different topics. They examine various subjects ranging from the causes of the war to how the South almost won and why the war still resonates today. Fourteen of the essays were previously published but were revised for this edition. The only new article is “What’s The Matter With History?”
Throughout his career, McPherson has sought to explain complex historical issues in a way that the general reader can understand without dumbing down the history for his more academically minded readers. His essays in the book are a critical reexamination of issues that are still contentious today. For the majority of his career, Professor McPherson has argued that the American Civil War was a revolutionary struggle for equality and democracy and still to this day defends that viewpoint. Macpherson is a serious historian who has played an objectively significant role in the social life of America and beyond and is the very embodiment of historical memory.
The Marxist writer David Walsh explains how Macpherson has maintained his historical principles. He writes, “How has he retained his principles in the intervening years when so many have not? This is also a complex matter. I think that in any serious figure, historian, artist or political leader, the principle is not simply a matter of certain intellectual formulations that rest on top, so to speak, of one’s personality. It is more a matter of the coming together of various powerful social and cultural currents at a critical moment in one’s life so that the most positive external influences and what is best in oneself are heated in a crucible, fuse and become one. One can retain principles across time and in the face of all sorts of opposition and setbacks because they are embedded in some part of consciousness that is not susceptible to shifts in the popular mood. One knows with one’s entire being certain things to be true, they are not up for debate, much less sale.”[1]
Perhaps the best essay of James M. McPherson’s Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War is entitled “Historians and Their Audiences,” McPherson poses the question, “What’s the matter with history?”
This chapter sums up concisely Macpherson’s historical philosophy. His purpose while writing scholarly books is to appeal to a wider reading audience while maintaining historical standards. This complex problem is not new. The prominent historian Allen Nevins[2] attacked the academics who wrote for themselves, “His touch is death. He destroys the public for historical work by convincing it that history is synonymous with heavy, stolid prosing. Indeed, he is responsible for today a host of intelligent and highly literate Americans who will open a history book only with reluctant dread. It is against this entrenched pedantry that the war of true history must be most determined and implacable.”
Macpherson addresses this theme of engaging the general public and raising their historical consciousness throughout the book. In the chapter entitled “The Glory Story.” Thomas R Turner relates, “To many people, books are hopelessly irrelevant because far more Americans today get their history from watching movies than reading. However, suppose they receive their notions about African American soldiers and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment from the movie Glory. In that case, he believes they are receiving information from a credible source. He calls the combat footage in Glory the most realistic of any film dealing with the Civil War.”[3]
The legendary 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, led by abolitionist Robert Gould Shaw, was the second all-black regiment organized in the Civil War. Reactionary Protesters have objected that the 54th, famously depicted in the film Glory (1989), have a monument erected to Shaw and his regiment. Because it was commanded by a white officer, Shaw, Holland Cotter, the New York Times’s co-chief art critic, slandered the monument and labelled Shaw a “white supremacist”.
One of the more remarkable essays is “The War That Never Goes Away.” Macpherson correctly believes that the war, right or wrong has an “enduring fascination” with the American and world public.McPherson points to what he holds to be the reason for this fascination is that “Great issues were at stake, issues about which Americans were willing to fight and die; issues whose resolution profoundly transformed and redefined the United States but at the same time are still alive and contested today.”
Macpherson’s defence of Abraham Lincoln in the book is laudable. McPherson argues convincingly that Lincoln was the key figure in the struggle against slavery. Macpherson’s stance on Lincoln has come under sustained attack. One hundred fifty-five years after the first assassination, Lincoln is facing a second. Race-fixated protesters like Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington DC’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, have moved to introduce a bill to remove the famous Emancipation Monument from Lincoln Park in Washington, DC.
As David North writes, “Abraham Lincoln was an extraordinarily complex man, whose life and politics reflected the contradictions of his time. He could not, as he once stated, “escape history.” Determined to save the Union, he was driven by the logic of the bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. During the brutal struggle, Lincoln expressed the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives for a “new birth of freedom.”[4]
In the chapter “Why Did the Confederacy Lose?” he examines the political and economic reasons behind the South’s devastating defeat. He writes, “Altogether nearly 4 per cent of the Southern people, black and white, civilians and soldiers, died due to the war. This percentage exceeded the human cost of any country in World War I and was outstripped only by the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II. The amount of property and resources destroyed in the Confederate States is almost incalculable. It has been estimated at two-thirds of all assessed wealth, including the market value of slaves.”[5]
As David Walsh points out, “To establish an accurate picture of the Civil War era, he (Macpherson) has been obliged to polemicize against various schools of historians. In Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, for example, he argues persuasively based on economic statistics that the conception of Louis Gerteis and others that the Civil War and Reconstruction produced “no fundamental changes” in the forms of economic and social organization in the South is wrong. In the same work, he also counters the arguments of historians such as James G. Randall and T. Harry Williams, who have asserted that Lincoln was essentially a political conservative and an enemy of social revolution.”[6]
Perhaps James Macpherson’s most important struggle has been to defend his historical principles against the method that looks at history through the prism of race. Macpherson opposes the “fashionable practice of condemning all whites as racists.”
To his eternal credit, Macpherson collaborated with the World Socialist Website(WSWS.ORG) attack on the falsification of history by the New York Times 1619 Project. In an interview with Macpherson, The WSWS asked him about his initial reaction to the 1619 Project.
He answered Well, I didn’t know anything about it until I got my Sunday paper, with the magazine section entirely devoted to the 1619 Project. Because this is a subject I’ve long been interested in, I sat down and started to read some of the essays. I’d say that, almost from the outset, I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly not an exclusively American institution but existed throughout history. And slavery in the United States was only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many centuries. And in the United States, too, there was not only slavery but also an antislavery movement. So I thought the account emphasized American racism—a major part of the history, no question about it—but it focused so narrowly on that part of the story that it left most of the history out.”
According to David North and Thomas Mackaman, The New York Times 1619 Project was a politically-motivated falsification of history and presented the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict. They make this point in their book: “Despite the pretence of establishing the United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on prioritizing personal “identities”—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race.”[7]
There is much to admire in the work of this outstanding Civil War historian. Macpherson writes engagingly and explains complex historical issues in a way that the general reader can take in, encouraging his readers to see history in a new light.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/05/mcin-m18.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Nevins
[3] Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War, by James M. McPherson
Thomas R Turner Volume 18, Issue 2, Summer 1997, pp. 47-54
[4] Racial-communalist politics and the second assassination of Abraham Lincoln- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/25/pers-j24.html
[5] Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War
By James M. McPherson
[6] An exchange with a Civil War historian- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/05/mcp2-m19.html
[7] The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html
Blue-eyed Child of Fortune: Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw: Russell Duncan-Paperback – Illustrated, November 30 1999
“Any negro taken in arms against the Confederacy will immediately be returned to a state of slavery. Any negro taken in Federal uniform will be summarily put to death. Any white officer taken in command of negro troops shall be deemed as inciting servile insurrection and shall likewise be put to death.”
Proclamation by the Confederate President
“Fondly do we hope—and fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.'”
Abraham Lincoln
“There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. On horseback among them, in the very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune.”
William James
“We fight for men and women whose poetry is not yet written.”
Robert Gould Shaw
Like most people, I came to learn about the life of Robert Gould Shaw through the excellent film Glory.[1] The movie provides the viewer with a good introduction to the life of Robert Gould Shaw. It is the first feature film to show the role of black soldiers in the American Civil War. It has a degree of accuracy and historical worth that many other history-based films lack. It portrays black soldiers as courageous, along with their white officers.
Thanks to films like “Glory,” people are becoming far more aware of the role played by black soldiers in the American Civil War. Close to 180,000 black soldiers served in the Union Army, and black soldiers fought bravely and knew what they were fighting for. Blue-eyed Child of Fortune: Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw is valuable in understanding why men fought and what ideals animated their actions.
In the introduction to the book, Duncan describes Shaw’s letters as showing “the change wrought by battlefield casualties, camp life, commitment, and homesickness upon the sensibilities of youth. His soldiering experience was as common as it was distinctive. His prose is often eloquent, always articulate, intensely informative, amusing, heart-wrenching, and provocative more than a century after he described himself in letters to his family and friends. As interlopers to words never meant for us to ponder, we can enjoy him and gain insight into his times and ours.”
During his military career, Shaw was a prolific letter writer. The letters in this book are intimate and give a deep insight into Shaw’s thinking. Writing to his mother, Shaw laments, “It is very hard to go off without bidding you goodbye, and the only thing that upsets me, in the least, is the thought of how you will feel when you find me so unexpectedly gone. But I know, dearest Mother, that you wouldn’t have me stay when it is so clearly my duty to go.… We all feel that if we can get into Washington before Virginia begins to make trouble, we shall not have much fighting…May God bless you all. When we are all at home together again, may peace & happiness be restored to the Country. The war has already done us good in making the North so united.”[2]
He wrote over two hundred letters, and they revealed a deeply divided and complex man. Despite being the pampered son of wealthy Boston abolitionists, Shaw was not a complete abolitionist at the beginning of the war. However, he later wrote, “We fight for men and women whose poetry is not yet written.” Despite this sentiment, Shaw never fully reconciled his prejudices about black inferiority. Still, he respected his soldiers’ spirit and fighting ability, and as the war proceeded, he stated, “There is not the least doubt that we shall leave the state, with as good a regiment, as any that has marched.”
As Duncan writes, “One of the great pleasures of reading a collection of letters such as this is to witness the writer’s development through a telescoping of time and events. The callow Rob Shaw who goes off to war is far different from the bloodied Colonel Robert Shaw, who prepares to lead his men into a desperate and doomed attack on Fort Wagner. The reader’s foreknowledge that all of Shaw’s choices and chances over three years will ultimately converge into this final massacre lends a true poignancy, but also a real irony, to the letters. For example, his life is saved in May 1862, when a bullet hits his pocket watch; later, he is hit in the neck by a bullet that already has passed through another soldier and fails to penetrate his own body.”[3]
In the same article, Duncan writes about the paradox of Shaw, saying, “ These letters challenge modern sensibility in a number of ways. Shaw was a true patriot, but he also was a victim of his—and his family’s—patriotism. He never totally shared their abolitionist beliefs, and his attitude toward the black race could be as condescending as his initial feelings toward Southerners. When Sarah Shaw first published his letters, she removed the more offensive of her son’s remarks on black people. Duncan, to his credit, has restored these lines and honestly examines Shaw’s sometimes contradictory thoughts on the question of race. When offered the command of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, Shaw, who was not the first choice, turned it down, preferring to stay with his friends and fellow soldiers in Second Massachusetts. He wrote his fiancée, Annie Haggerty, “If I had taken it, it would only have been from a sense of duty; for it would have been anything but an agreeable task.… I am afraid Mother will think I am shirking my duty, but I had some good practical reasons for it.” Within days, however, he had changed his mind.[4]
The war radicalised Shaw. His visit to the place where the radical preacher John Brown[5] fought his battles against slavery is significant. So too, was his meeting with Abraham Lincoln. He campaigned for his soldiers to have equal pay, as depicted in the film Glory. It is hard not to believe that Shaw would have been greatly inspired by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, correctly described as ‘the greatest social and political revolution of the age.’ The greatest authority on revolutions, Karl Marx, said ‘Never has such a gigantic transformation taken place so rapidly.'”
While books such as Duncan’s are important in the sense they reestablish the role of black soldiers in their emancipation but is also important to place the struggle against slavery in the wider social and political context. This was done in an essay by the distinguished historian James M Macpherson who wrote, “If we were to go out on the streets of almost any town in America and ask the question posed by the title of this essay, probably nine out of ten respondents would answer unhesitatingly, “Lincoln.” In recent years, though, this answer has been challenged as another example of elitist history, focusing only on the actions of great white males and ignoring the actions of the overwhelming majority of the people who also make history. If we were to ask our question of professional historians, the reply would be quite different. They would speak of ambivalence, ambiguity, nuances, paradox, and irony. They would point to Lincoln’s gradualism, his slow and apparently reluctant decision for emancipation, his revocation of emancipation orders by Generals John C. Frémont and David Hunter, his exemption of border states and parts of the Confederacy from the Emancipation Proclamation, his statements seemingly endorsing white supremacy. They would say that the whole issue is more complex than it appears—in other words, many historians, as is their wont, would not give a straight answer to the question”.[6]
The serious historian plays an objectively significant role in social life as the embodiment of historical memory. One has to congratulate the historian Russell Duncan for this impressive job of bringing together the letters of Robert Gould Shaw for the wider general public.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(1989_film)
[2] North Shore S.I. [Staten Island]Thursday, April 18, 1861
[3] Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune- https://www.enotes.com/topics/blue-eyed-child-fortune
[4] Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune- https://www.enotes.com/topics/blue-eyed-child-fortune
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)
[6] James McPherson,
“Who Freed the Slaves?” (1997
The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives by Adolph L. Reed Jr. (London, UK & Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books, 2022)
“Reinventing the past to suit the purposes of the present.”
Adolph L. Reed Jr
We must find the road to the most deprived, to the darkest strata of the proletariat, beginning with the Negro, whom capitalist society has converted into a pariah, and who must learn to see in us his revolutionary brothers. And this depends wholly upon our energy and devotion to the work.[1]
Leon Trotsky
“Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery, there would be no cotton. Without cotton, there would be no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies that have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Slavery is, therefore, an economic category of paramount importance.”[2]
Karl Marx
One of the purposes of this excellent new book by Adolph L Reed is to preserve the voices of the last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow.[3] In the words of the English historian E. P Thompson, it attempts to rescue them from the “enormous condescension of posterity”.
The South documents Reed’s personal history almost in the manner of a memoir. However, unlike similar books, Reed presents a historical and class-based analysis of the racist Jim Crow laws.
As Barbara J Fields explains, it is important to understand the race from a historical perspective. She writes, “When virtually the whole of society, including supposedly thoughtful, educated, intelligent persons, commits itself to belief in propositions that collapse into absurdity upon the slightest examination, the reason is not hallucination or delusion or even simple hypocrisy; rather, it is ideology. And ideology is impossible for anyone to analyse rationally who remains trapped on its terrain. That is why race still proves so hard for historians to deal with historically, rather than in terms of metaphysics, religion, or socio- (that is, pseudo-) biology”.
Nothing so well illustrates that impossibility as the conviction among otherwise sensible scholars that race “explains” historical phenomena; specifically, it explains why people of African descent have been set apart for treatment different from others. But race is just the name assigned to the phenomenon, which it no more explains than judicial review “explains” why the United States Supreme Court can declare acts of Congress unconstitutional, or than Civil War “explains” why Americans fought each other between 1861 and 1865″.[4]
Reed’s defence of a historical and class-based understanding of race has led him to be heavily criticised and ostracised. Reed has opposed what he calls “race reductionism,”. In 1996, he famously described Barack Obama as a “smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics.” [5].For Reed, class-based inequality is the historical constant, not race. Reed examines how the black middle class were treated differently than the black working class. He recounts how many black middle-class people could avoid some of the worst excesses of the murderess Jim Crow regime.
As Reed contends in his article Separate and Unequal, “Middle-class, “respectable” black people sought as much as possible to insulate themselves and their children from contact with those they considered to be class inferiors. An elaborate structure of social clubs—for example, the Links and the Girl Friends for women, the Boulé for men, Jack and Jill for children, and fraternity and sorority chapters for students and alumni—evolved to create and sustain homogeneous middle-class social networks locally and nationally. Segregation did have a levelling effect on race. Those with higher status were forced to share neighbourhoods, schools, churches, restaurants, and other public entertainments with those they would prefer not to associate with. From the system’s beginnings, a complaint about the injustice of enforced segregation was that it did not account for class distinctions among black people”.[6]
DSA
Reed has also criticised “critical race theory”, saying, “It is another expression of reductionism. On the most pedestrian level, it is an observation that what you see is a function of where you stand. At that level, there is nothing in it that was not in Marx’s early writings or Mannheim. But then you get an appropriation of the standpoint theory for identity that says, for example, all blacks think the same way. It is taxonomic, a reification. So the retort to that critique has been “intersectionality.” Yes, there is a black perspective, but what you do is fragment it, so there are multiple black perspectives because each potential—or each sacralised—social position becomes discrete. That is what gives you intersectionality.[7]
Reed’s political and class-based perspective has been too much for the Democratic Socialists of America(DSA), who had a speech of Reed’s cancelled due to objections by the AFROSOCialist and Socialists of Color Caucus over his “reactionary and class reductionist form of politics”.
1619 Project
His critique of the 1619 project has led to personal and political attacks. In a recent interview with Tom Mackaman- Reed states, “I did not know about the 1619 Project until it came out, and frankly when I learned about it, my reaction was a big sigh. But again, the relation to history has passed to the appropriation of the past in support of whatever kind of ‘just-so’ stories about the present is desired. This approach has taken root within the Academy. It is like all bets are off. Merlin Chowkwanyun and I did an article a few years ago in the Socialist Register that is a critique of disparitarianism in the social sciences, by which this or that disparity has replaced the study of inequality and its effects. As Walter Benn Michaels said, and as I have said time and time again if anti-disparitarianism is your ideology, then for you, a society qualifies as being just if 1 per cent of the population controls 90 per cent of the wealth, so long as that within that 1 per cent 12 per cent or so are black, etc., reflecting their share of the national population. This is the ideal of social justice for neoliberalism. There is no question of actual redistribution.[8]
Reed demolishes one of the myths of the 1619 project that enslaved people were introduced to America because of racism. Reed points out that the first slaves were brought over under the auspices of a wage labour system. He writes, ” the 1619 Project assumes, in whatever way, that slavery was the natural condition of Africans. And that is where the Afro-pessimism types wind up sharing a cup of tea with James Henry Hammond.”
As Niemuth points out in his defence of Reed, “The furious reaction within the DSA leadership to the invitation to Reed reveals how deeply the organisation is imbued with the reactionary and right-wing politics of racial division. The extreme hostility to any analysis based on the primacy of class expresses the interests of affluent sections of the petit bourgeoisie, who utilise racial and identity politics in the fight over positions of power and privilege within the apparatus of the state, the trade unions, academia and corporations”.
Conclusion
This concise volume deserves to be read widely and hopefully put onto university reading lists. It is hoped a younger readership picks it up and learns about a class-based and historical perspective on racism than the racialist perspective touted by the 1619 project.
About the Author
Adolph Reed, Jr., is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous books and articles dealing with race and class in American society and writes regularly for the New Republic.
Further Reading
1. The cancellation of professor Adolph Reed, Jr.’s speech and the DSA’s promotion of race politics-Niles Niemuth- 18 August 2020-wsws.org
2. The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: Essays and Interviews Paperback – 26 February 2021
3. by David North, Thomas Mackaman
[1] On Black Nationalism-Documents on the Negro Struggle- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/negro1.htm
[2] 1846 in The Poverty of Philosophy,
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
[4] Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America-https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5281-slavery-race-and-ideology-in-the-united-states-of-america
[5] https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2010/03/obama-and-the-left-95-edition-026114
[6] https://harpers.org/archive/2022/02/separate-and-unequal-the-south-jim-crow-and-its-afterlives-adolph-reed-jr/
[7] “Reinventing the past to suit the purposes of the present”-An interview with political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. on the New York Times’ 1619 Project-Tom Mackaman-20 December 2019-wsws.org
[8] “Reinventing the past to suit the purposes of the present”-An interview with political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. on the New York Times’ 1619 Project-Tom Mackaman-20 December 2019-wsws.org
Book Review: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman and Jake Silverstein. New York, One World, 2021.
(A guest article from the writer and historian Tom Mackaman. The original article can be found@www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/02/21/proj-f21.html)
An old idiom advises to never judge a book by its cover. Yet the front cover of the recently released book version of the New York Times’ 1619 Project speaks as much in a few short words as the following 600 pages of text. The Project, the over title reads, is “A New Origin Story,” which has been “Created by Nikole Hannah-Jones.” The dust jacket flap adds a touch of clairvoyance, explaining that the volume “offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.”
The Times, which wishes readers to take the 1619 Project seriously as a “reframing of American history,” has said more than it intended.Origin stories lie in the realm of myth, not history. Premodern societies produced, but did not “create,” origin stories. They were the work of whole cultures, emerging out of oral traditions that first humanized nature and then naturalized social relations. But in modern times, origin stories have indeed been created. Closely linked with nationalism in politics and irrationalism in philosophy, origin stories aim to fuse groups of people by lifting “the race” above the material class relations of history. Indeed, from the racialist vantage point, history is merely “the emanation of the race,” as Trotsky put it in words he aimed at Nazi racial mythmaking, but that serve just as well to indict the 1619 Project, which sorts actors in history into two categories: “white people” and “Black people,” and deduces motive and action from this a priori racial classification. [1]
That the 1619 Project was a racialist falsification of history was the central criticism the World Socialist Web Site leveled at it immediately after its release in August 2019, timing ostensibly chosen to commemorate the arrival of the first slaves in Virginia 400 years earlier. All of the 1619 Project’s errors, distortions, and omissions—its insinuation that slavery was a uniquely American “original sin”; its claim that the American Revolution was a counterrevolution launched to defend slavery against British abolition; its selective use of quotes to suggest that Abraham Lincoln was a racist indifferent to slavery; its censoring of the interracial character of the abolitionist, civil rights, and labor movements; its insistence that all present social problems are the fruit of slavery; its stance that historians had ignored slavery—all of this flowed from the Times’ singular effort to impose a racial myth on the past, the better to “to teach our readers to think a little bit more” in the racial way, in the leaked words of Times editor Dean Baquet. [2]
The exposure of the 1619 Project by the WSWS, and by leading historians it interviewed, has never been met forthrightly by the Times. Instead, Hannah-Jones, the Project’s journalist-celebrity “creator,” egged on race-baiting and red-baiting social media attacks against critics, while New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein demeaned them on the pages of the Times as jealous careerists, even as he surreptitiously altered the Project. All the while, backers of the 1619 Project said, “Just wait for the book. It will erase all doubts.” This drumroll lasted for two years.The mountains have labored and brought forth a mouse.
The central achievement of the book version of the 1619 Project, released in December, appears to be that it is bigger. Weighing in at two pounds and costing $23, it is probably ten times heavier than the magazine given out free by the thousands, errors and all, to cash-strapped public schools. Unfortunately for the Times, the added weight lends no new gravitas to the content, which, in spite of all the lofty rhetoric about “finally telling the truth,” “new narratives,” and “reframing,” remains unoriginal to the point of banality. The book does not inch much beyond the warmed-over racial essentialism that has long been the stock-in-trade of right-wing black nationalism, and which has always had a special purchase on the guilt feelings of wealthy liberals. The late Ebony editor, Lerone Bennett, Jr., remains unmistakably the dominant intellectual influence on Hannah-Jones and the entire project. [3]
The Times has spared no expense to keep afloat its flagship project. This much shows. The volume is handsomely presented. The book’s 18 chapters include seven new historical essays, interspersed with 36 poems and short stories, as well as 18 photographs. If anything justifies the book, it is these photographs, which alone among the contents manage to convey something truthful about American society. Yet, in their artistic depiction of everyday black men, women, and children, the photographs actually express the commonness of humanity, contradicting the 1619 Project’ racialist aims.
The rest of the volume, the poetry and fiction included, bears the fatal marks of the racialist perspective. What emerges is an even darker and more unyielding interpretation of race in America than that which came across in the magazine. The book is replete with blatantly anti-historical passages, such as: “There has never been a time in United States history when Black rebellions did not spark existential fear among white people …” (p. 101); “In the eyes of white people, Black criminality was broadly defined” (p. 281.) One could go on. Every contributor engages in this sort of crude racial reductionism. There are no immigrants, Asians, Jews, Catholics, or Muslims, and only a few pages on Native Americans. The 1619 Project sees only “white Americans” and “black Americans.” And these monoliths, undivided by class or any other material factor, had already appeared in colonial Virginia in 1619 in their present form, prepared to act out their racially defined destinies.
A new preface by Hannah-Jones attempts to motivate the book by noting that Americans know little about slavery. She points to a Southern Poverty Law Center study that found only 8 percent of high school students can cite slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. This statistic is not surprising. It would also not be surprising to learn that less than 8 percent of recent high school graduates know, even roughly, when the Vietnam War happened, or whether The Great Gatsby is a novel or a submarine sandwich. This is not the fault of students or of teachers. The public schools have been starved of funding by Republicans and Democrats alike. History and art have been especially savaged in favor of supposedly more practical “funding priorities.”
In any case, the 1619 Project will help no one understand why the Civil War happened. The book’s overriding theme is that all “white Americans” were (and are still) the beneficiaries of slavery. This makes the Civil War incomprehensible. Why was the country split apart in 1861? Why did it wage a bloody war over the next four years, fighting battles whose death tolls stunned the world? Why did 50,000 men fall dead or maimed at Gettysburg in the first three days of July 1863, a half year after Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation? Historian James McPherson, in works such as Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution and For Cause and Comrades, answers these questions. The 1619 Project cannot.
The 1619 Project’s denial of slavery’s role in the Civil War is probably clearest in the essays by Matthew Desmond, Martha S. Jones, and Ibram Kendi. Desmond’s essay, “Capitalism,” which appeared in the original version and now reappears in slightly longer form, argues that Southern slavery was the dynamic part of the antebellum economy, and that the wealth generated from it also built Northern capitalism. Desmond has it backwards. The demand for cotton in the North, and especially in Great Britain—a demand itself contingent on capitalist economic growth—gave a new impulse to Southern slavery, and not the other way around. When the slave masters seceded and launched the Civil War, among their miscalculations was to overestimate their worth in the global economy, an error Desmond repeats.
Over the years of 1861-1865 the Southern planters were destroyed as a class. Yet their clients in Britain and the North found new sources of cotton and emerged still richer. Desmond, a Princeton sociologist, was brought on by the 1619 Project to pay some attention to economics. But he winds up denying a material cause and a material effect of the Civil War. Desmond’s theory cannot explain why the war happened, why the North defeated the supposedly more advanced slave South, and why it is that today we live in a world dominated by the exploitation of wage workers, and not chattel slaves.
In her essay, entitled “Citizenship,” Martha S. Jones reduces the antebellum struggle for equality to the activity of the small free black population in the North, focusing on the Colored Conventions movement that began in 1830. She simply writes out of existence the abolitionist movement, which was majority white and eventually reached even into small towns across the North. The abolitionist movement was undoubtedly a major political factor in the expansion of civil rights to free blacks—ostensibly Jones’ subject—and in the coming of the Civil War, ultimately fusing with the anti-slavery Republican Party through figures such as Frederick Douglass. This counts for little to Jones and historians like her. They erect a wall between agitation against slavery, which they dismiss as mere cover for white racial interest, and what they call “anti-racism,” a contemporary moral-political posture they impose on history. “White Americans” of the past, even the most dedicated and egalitarian opponents of slavery, can never pass muster before these examiners.
Frederick Douglass, ca. 1879
This “immense condescension of posterity,” to borrow a phrase from the late English historian E.P. Thompson, reaches new depths in the essay by Kendi, whose career as an “anti-racist” has been so challenging to the powers-that-be that he has been showered with millions of dollars by the “white institutions” of the publishing, academic, and corporate endowment worlds. Kendi thinks he has discovered that the pioneering abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a patronizing hypocrite who “actually reinforced racism and slavery” (p. 430). No one in Garrison’s time, neither friend nor enemy, thought so. It should be recalled that Garrison was himself nearly lynched by a racist mob in 1835. Frederick Douglass, in his beautiful eulogy delivered in 1879, said that Garrison moved not with the tide, but against it. He rose not by the power of the Church or the State, but in bold, inflexible and defiant opposition to the mighty power of both. It was the glory of this man that he could stand alone with the truth, and calmly await the result… [L]et us guard his memory as a precious inheritance, let us teach our children the story of his life.
After tarnishing the “precious inheritance” of Garrison, Kendi moves on to Lincoln. He rehashes the thoroughly debunked claim that the Emancipation Proclamation, the greatest revolutionary document in American history after the Declaration of Independence, was a mere military tactic. In Kendi’s way of seeing things, Lincoln’s order only made it “incumbent on Black people to emancipate themselves.” He goes on, “And that is precisely what they did, running away from enslavers to Union lines…” (p. 431).
Kendi does not seem to fathom that the Emancipation Proclamation made these men and women legally free when they ran to Union line, rather than runaway slaves with the property claims of their masters still operative. But then again, Kendi does not even ask himself what the Union army was doing in the South. His essay is called “Progress.” This must be meant ironically. Kendi sees no progress in history.
The bringing in of Jones, of Johns Hopkins University, and Kendi, of Boston University, is meant to clothe the 1619 Project in immense authority. A couple of other efforts have been made along these lines. Here too, a law of diminishing returns seems to have imposed itself on the Times.
Stung by criticism that she had no sources in the original publication, Hannah-Jones has plugged in, ex post facto, 94 endnotes to her “framing essay,” which the editors have now given the title “Democracy.” Not much else has changed from the original version, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in commentary—not history—for what the prize committee charitably called Hannah-Jones’ “highly personal” style. The new footnotes lead to many URLs as well as personal conversations with historians, including Woody Holton of the University of South Carolina, who has staked his professional reputation to the 1619 Project.
Sent in to provide authority, Holton is responsible for the most clamorous new error introduced into the present volume. Hannah-Jones quotes Holton as saying that the Dunmore Proclamation of November 7, 1775, a British offer of freedom to slaves of masters already in revolt, “ignited the turn to independence” for the Virginian founding fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison (p. 16), supposedly because they feared losing their human property. Unfortunately for Holton, at that point Washington was already commanding the Continental Army in war, Jefferson had drafted his tract A Declaration of the Causes & Necessity for Taking Up Arms, and Madison, then only 24, had joined a revolutionary organ, the Orange County Virginia Committee of Safety.
This is not an innocent mistake. Holton and the 1619 Project get the sequence of events wrong to support another fiction: that the true, never-before-revealed (and undocumented!) motivation of the Founding Fathers in 1776 was to defend slavery. These are fatal errors. And yet there is a still larger issue. Whatever the individual motives of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—even if a single letter, article, or diary entry might one day be found from among their voluminous writings demonstrating that they “staked their lives and sacred honor” to defend slavery—in assessing the significance of the American Revolution much more than this must still be taken into consideration. Why was it that the great slaveless majority of colonists supported America’s second-bloodiest war for six long years? Why did thousands of free blacks enlist? And further, what was the relationship between the American Revolution and the Enlightenment, whose thought contemporaries believed that it embodied? What was its relationship to that which historian R.R. Palmer called “the age of the democratic revolution” that swept the Atlantic in its wake? What was its connection to the destruction of slavery in the US and elsewhere over the next century? How did it relate, ideologically, to subsequent anti-colonial struggles? An utter lack of curiosity about these and other critical questions characterizes the entire volume.
A few contributors manage to make certain valid historical points. Times columnist Jamelle Bouie provides treatment of the vociferous pro-slavery advocate, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina “who saw no difference between slavery and other forms of labor in the modern world” (p. 199). Khahlil Gibran Muhammad gives a useful survey of the sugar plantation system. But as a whole, and Bouie and Muhammad notwithstanding, the book’s various chapters are formulaic in the extreme. They identify present-day social, political, and cultural problems in exclusively racial terms, and then, each performing the same salto mortale, impose the present diagnosis on history.
Health care, the massive prison population, gun violence, obesity, traffic jams—these, and many more problems, the Times wishes us to believe, are rooted in “endemic” “anti-black racism” first imprinted in a national “DNA” in 1619. The Times, a multi-billion dollar corporation closely tied to Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, does not want readers to consider more obvious, and much more proximate, causes for America’s social and political ills—for example, the extreme polarization of wealth that has reduced 70 percent of the population to paycheck-to-paycheck existence, while the ranks of billionaires swell, their wealth doubling with astonishing frequency.
As it turns out, it is all about wealth, and more specifically, cash, as Hannah-Jones admits in a concluding essay: “[W]hat steals opportunities is the lack of wealth … the defining feature of Black life,” she writes (p. 456). This essay is entitled “Justice.” A call for race-based reparations for blacks—any individual who can show “documentation that he or she identified as a Black person for at least ten years….” (p. 472)—it originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine on June 30, 2020, under the title “What is Owed.”
“Lack of wealth” is not the defining feature of “black life” in America. It defines life for the vast majority of the American and world population. But Hannah-Jones is not calling for any sort of class redistribution of wealth. On the contrary, if her proposal were put into effect, the federal government, which has not authored a substantial social reform since the 1960s, would inevitably direct money away from the little that remains to support students, the poor, the sick, and the elderly of all races. The proceeds would go to blacks regardless of their wealth, including to people such as herself, for whom “lack of wealth” is not a “defining feature” of life. Only recently, for instance, Hannah-Jones charged a California community college $25,000 for a one-hour, virtual engagement—this being the charitable discount rate of her speaking fees.
In putting its imprimatur on a call for race-based reparations, the Times could not have come up with an “issue” more beneficial to the Trump-led Republican Party than if it had been dreamed up by Stephen Bannon himself. Hannah-Jones, of course, claims that her proposal is not meant to pit races against each other. She simply takes it for granted that “the races” have separate and opposed interests. On this, black nationalists and white supremacists have always agreed. Indeed, Hannah-Jones appears to be completely oblivious to the dangerous implications of “the federal government,” which would distribute the money, dividing Americans up by race (p. 472). The categorization of people into races by the state has been the starting point of some of history’s worst crimes—the Third Reich’s annihilation of Germany’s Jews being only the most horrific example.
The existence of chattel slavery is also one of history’s monumental crimes. But it was a crime in an unusual, premodern way. Slavery was inherited blindly, without questioning, from the colonial past. It was the most degraded status in a world where personal dependency and unfree labor were the rule, and not the exception—a world of serfdom, indentured servitude, penal labor, corvée, and peonage. The American Revolution, for the first time in world history, raised slavery up as a historical problem —in the sense that it could now be consciously identified as such, both because its existence was obnoxious to the revolution’s assertion of human equality and because slavery stood in contradistinction to “free” wage labor, which grew rapidly in its aftermath. These contradictions breathed life into various attempts to end slavery peacefully. Such efforts came to naught. In a cruel paradox, the growth of capitalism, and its insatiable demand for cotton, nurtured the development of what historians have called a “second slavery” in the antebellum. Historical problems as deep-rooted as slavery are not given to simple solutions.English convicts—men, women, and children—chained and bound for the colony for “terms of service”
Yet, “four score and seven years” later, the Civil War, the Second American Revolution, ended American slavery, hastening its demise in Brazil and Cuba as well. In the longue durée of slavery’s history, which reaches back to the ancient world, this is a remarkably compressed period. There are many people alive today who are 87 years old, a time span that separates us from 1935. That year, the high-water mark of the social reformism of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Wagner Act was passed, securing the legal right for workers to form trade unions of their own choosing. The New Deal never did succeed in securing a national health care system, a relatively modest reform that has since been realized by many nations, but which has eluded the US for the intervening 87 years. By way of comparison, in the 87 years separating the Declaration of Independence from the Gettysburg Address, the United States destroyed slavery, an entire system of private property in man. It did so at a terrible cost. Lincoln was not far off when he said in his Second Inaugural Address that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash” might be “paid by another drawn with the sword.” Some 700,000 Americans had already died when he said those words.
Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. He is visible in the upper left, hatless
Lincoln’s political genius lay in his unique capacity to link the enormous crisis of the Civil War to the American Revolution, and to the still larger question of human equality—that is, to extract from the maelstrom of events the true, the essential. He did this most famously at Gettysburg, when he explained that the war was a test of whether or not the founding principle “that all men are created equal … shall perish from the earth.” Lincoln knew well, as he put it in another speech, that “the occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion,” before quickly adding, “We cannot escape history.”
Our time is also “piled high with difficulty,” and we can no less escape history than those alive in the 1860s. Nearly 1 million Americans have now died in the COVID-19 pandemic, part of a global death toll of some 6 million, according to the official counting. There is a clear and present danger of war with nuclear-armed Russia and China. Social inequality has reached nearly unfathomable levels. Basic democratic principles are under assault. Manmade climate change threatens the ecology, and ultimately the habitability, of the planet. These are major historical problems, to say the least. It was once commonplace—and certainly not unique to Marxists, as Lincoln’s words show—to appreciate that major problems cannot even be understood, let alone acted upon, without an objective, truthful approach to history.
[1] “Leon Trotsky: What Is National Socialism? (1933).”
[2] “Inside the New York Times Town Hall.” Slate. Accessed February 8, 2022.
[3] Hannah-Jones has repeatedly acknowledged Bennett’s influence. See Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America. Chicago, Ill.: Johnson Pub. Co., 2007; and Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. Chicago: Johnson Pub. Co., 2007.
Review: The 1619 Project: A Critique by Phillip W. Magness- Paperback 148 pages – April 2020-American Institute for Economic Research.
“History is not a morality tale. The efforts to discredit the Revolution by focusing on the alleged hypocrisy of Jefferson and other founders contribute nothing to an understanding of history. The American Revolution cannot be understood as the sum of the subjective intentions and moral limitations of those who led it. The world-historical significance of the Revolution is best understood through an examination of its objective causes and consequences”.[1]
“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.[2]
Emancipation Declaration
Carry On Cleo is a 1964 British Comedy. In one scene, Julius Caeser, played by Kenneth Williams, is about to be assassinated by his bodyguards. Caesar sends out his bodyguard Hengist Pod played by Kenneth Connor, to save his life. Pod is a first-class coward. Hod faces the assassins only to find that someone else has slain them all. Hod goes back to Caesar and claims the credit.[3]
Reading Phillip W. Magness’s book reminds me of this scene because he seems to take too much credit for something he does not entirely deserve. His downplaying of the lead political and historical role played by the World Socialist Website in exposing the lies and falsification of the 1619 project is especially troubling.[4] In 120 pages, he makes just one mention.
Despite being a critique of the 1619 project, Magness’s short book gives this wretched piece of journalism and history far too much credit. He writes, “the newspaper’s initiative conveyed a serious attempt to engage the public in an intellectual exchange about the history of slavery in the United States and its lingering harms to our social fabric”.[5]
Magness, it seems, had no problem with the 1619 project until a number of the essays contained in the project assert that the origins of modern-day American capitalism stemmed largely from slavery. While making some correct historical points, Magness is not concerned with the preposterous claim that the American Revolution and Civil war were fought to defend slavery but is concerned with the projects “heavily anticapitalist political perspective”.Magness critique of the project is not from the left but the right.
One of the more disturbing aspects of Magness’s book is his agreement with the 1619′ s project attack on Abraham Lincoln. He writes that he “has devoted a significant amount of scholarly work to Lincoln’s presidency. I weighed in on the arguments as presented, showing that the 1619 Project’s assessment was in closer line with historical evidence that these critics neglected to consider. The essays are presented herein, and they place me in the curious position of being one of the only 1619 Project critics to also come to its defence on one of the major points of contention.[6]
The 1619 Project’s and Magness’s attack on Abraham Lincoln is not only wrong but reprehensible. The 1619 Project’s vendetta against Lincoln has been described as his second assassination. Lincoln’s attitude towards slavery was complex and contradictory. To label him a racist is simplistic and false. As David North points out, “Abraham Lincoln was an extraordinarily complex man, whose life and politics reflected the contradictions of his time. He could not, as he once stated, “escape history.” Determined to save the Union, he was driven by the logic of the bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. In the course of the brutal struggle, Lincoln gave expression to the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives for a “new birth of freedom.”[7]
In another sleight of hand, Magness attempts to equate the 1619’s project of the racialization of history with all what he calls “far-left groups. He states,” Broadly speaking, the political discourse around race, which comes from a very far-left perspective, has an unfortunate effect of crowding out other forms of anti-discriminatory thinking, including the individualist form. The notion of individual rights and the dignity of the human person. The notion that people should not face persecution or discrimination based on their skin colour, based on their religion, based on their ethnicity. These are all stories rooted in the rights and liberties of an individual”.
In reality, he is talking about the World Socialist Website. This slander needs answering. The reader can make their mind up by reading the book The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History[8]. But I would add this quote as a rebuttal to Magness’s slur. As David North says, the real purveyors of race theory are not the Trotskyists of the World Socialist Website but come from the academia which comes “Under the influence of postmodernism and its offspring, “critical race theory,” the doors of American universities have been flung wide open for the propagation of deeply reactionary conceptions. Racial identity has replaced social class and related economic processes as the principal and essential analytic category”.
To conclude, Magness book is, on the whole, an accommodation to the right-wing and racialist politics of the 1619 project. While containing some interesting work on the origins of slavery and early capitalism, the serious reader who wants a real critique of the 1619 project should read the book, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html
[2] A Transcription by the President of the United States of America:https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation/transcript.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carry_On_Cleo
[4] wsws.org
[5] https://www.aier.org/article/the-1619-project-a-critique/
[6] https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/2020/04/books-the-1619-project-a-critique/
[7] Racial-communalist politics and the second assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Niles Niemuth, David North-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/25/pers-j24.html
[8] The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History-https://mehring.com/product/the-new-york-times-1619-project-and-the-racialist-falsification-of-history/
Review: Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln-Edward Achorn- Hardcover – March 19. 2020
letter from Marx to Frederick Engels August 7, 1862,
“This huge mess of traitors, loafers, hospitals, axe-grinders, & incompetencies & officials that goes by the name of Washington.”
Walt Whitman
“Up to now, we have witnessed only the first act of the civil war – the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.”
Karl Marx
“If you don’t want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while.
Abraham Lincoln.
Edward Achorn’s new book is a superb narrative-driven account of the Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. Achorn’s descriptive powers separate his book from a very crowded market.
As Gordon S Wood[1] correctly states “It is hard to imagine anyone saying anything new about Abraham Lincoln, the most written-about figure in American history. But Edward Achorn has done it. No one has ever placed Lincoln’s Second Inaugural in such a full and rich context as he has. Achorn recreates the sights, sounds, smells, and the feel of everything, and his Lincoln was never more real. This is the work of a superb imaginative historian.”
Achorn introduces the reader to a growing number of prostitutes, Confederate spies, newspaper reporters, women with low moral esteem and power-crazed politicians who swirled around Washington at the time of Lincoln’s speech. Unknown and famous people came to Washington- to hear Lincoln’s second inauguration. The poet and journalist Walt Whitman is given a significant amount of space in the book as is African American leader Frederick Douglass. Douglass called the speech “sacred effort”.
Achorn gives Walt Whitman significant space in his book. Whitman, who was a journalist, poet and nurse based in Washington. Whitman’s most famous work is his poetry collection Leaves of Grass. The book caused such a scandal that one critic demanded Whitman “be kicked from decent society as below the level of a brute.” Achord writes that Lincoln enjoyed Leaves of Grass and read it to cure is often bouts of depression.
Perhaps the most villainous of all the complex characters swirling around Lincoln at the time was the actor John Wilkes Booth who would later assassinate Lincoln. Booth is second only to Lincoln in the amount of space allotted in the book. Given Booth’s historical importance, this is entirely natural. Achorn’s portrayal of Booth at times takes the form of a novel, a difficult art to maintain which Achorn does while not dropping academic standards.
As James Macpherson so eloquently writes “This richly detailed account of the events surrounding Lincoln’s second inaugural address focuses on the many notable and obscure personalities present in Washington as the Civil War neared its end, including such opposites as Frederick Douglass and John Wilkes Booth, whose lives intersected with Lincoln’s in dramatically contrasting ways.”
The inauguration was set amidst a raging civil war that by March 1865, had killed 700,000 Americans and left an indelible mark on American society.”The rebels…could not at the same time throw off the Constitution and invoke its aid…. Decisive and extensive measures must be adopted…. We wanted the army to strike more vigorous blows. The Administration must set an example and strike at the heart of the rebellion.”[2]
It has been claimed by most civil war historians as the most important inaugural address in American history. In just 701 words Lincoln issues a stunning attack on slavery: “If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said f[our] three thousand years ago, so still it must be said: “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether”.[3]
Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of the book was Achorn’s almost God-given gift for explaining the psychological impact of the war and the struggle against slavery and how it impacted on participants psychological well being particularly that of Lincoln. As the French minister in Washington wrote “[h]is face denotes an immense force of resistance and extreme melancholy. It is plain that this man has suffered deeply.” The president’s secretary, John Hay, noted that “the boisterous laughter became less frequent year by year; the eye grew veiled by constant meditation on momentous subjects”.[4]
Achorn also notes that “Lincoln’s hard life had left him with thick scar tissue over his psychic wounds” from his upbringing, yet the war “had reawakened his thoughts about God’s role in this world of suffering”.
Achord rejects the strong theme in current historiography portraying Lincoln as a cynic motivated by purely economic or political gains. This theme was promulgated by the recent New York Times 1619 project.[5] Achorn’s principle view of Lincoln flies in the face of recent attempts by the New York Times and its 1619 Project to present a racialised view of US history. The journalist from the Times present Lincoln as just another white racist indifferent to the fate of the slaves. It denies the extraordinary revolutionary significance of the American Civil War.
While noting that slavery was an economic and political issue, Lincoln believed its abolition was the right thing to do. As his Second Inaugural address expresses “, One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localised in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it”. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations”.
One of the most commendable aspects of Achorn’s book is that he allows Lincoln to speak for himself. It is not said enough that Lincoln was a superb writer. One look at the Gettysburg Address confirms the eloquence and power of his prose “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”[6]
As Achorn points out in the book, Lincoln’s inaugural address went deeper in that it started to reflect on the causes of the war. As Achorn writes, Lincoln “would not bask in the glory of recent, hard-fought military victories, or present a detailed plan for reconstruction. He would speak about human depravity, about the hideous sin committed by both sides, and about the justice of God’s infallible, implacable.
The black abolitionist Frederick Douglass who attended the inauguration had in the past been heavily critical Lincoln’s ambiguous attitude towards slavery, but on this occasion, he applauded Lincoln’s condemnation slavery. As Achorn writes “He came to understand that Lincoln was a statesman who had to time his actions to what the public would accept, and I think that is a very poignant thing to see”. Douglas believed it was “a sacred effort.”
While Lincoln’s speech was indeed stateman like he was conscious of the need to tie his political fortunes with that of military ones. Achord correctly gives credit to Major General William Tecumseh Sherman whose victories on the battlefield enabled Lincoln to win a second term as president. Of particular importance was the taking of Atlanta by Sherman. This victory changed the popular mood, and Lincoln won re-election by a significant margin.
Although Achorn does not dwell too much on the international aspect of the American Civil war and Lincoln’s role in that war, it is worth examining what the most important observer from the standpoint of the working class had to say on the war.
When Karl Marx heard of Lincoln’s re-election on behalf of the First International Workingmen’s Association he sent congratulations to Lincoln. “They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”[7]
Marx’s analysis of the causes of the civil war still holds up today He writes “when an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, “slavery” on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding “the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution”, and maintained slavery to be “a beneficent institution”, indeed, the old solution of the great problem of “the relation of capital to labor”, and cynically proclaimed property in man “the cornerstone of the new edifice” — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause”.[8]
While it was not possible for Achorn to look at every possible aspect of the Lincoln presidency, some older historians have drawn parallels between Lincoln and other leaders of civil wars. One such comparison was the leader of the English revolution, Oliver Cromwell.
The historian, Isaac Foot, in a lecture given in 1944 amid the Second World war, drew far-reaching parallels between Lincoln and Cromwell. Foot writes “That is the mark of each man. He was there at the particular time when his special gift seemed to be adapted to the critical occasion that called for the contribution which, as far as we can see could not have been made by any other man of his day. The epitaph of each man might very well have been-“after he had served his generation, by the will of God, he fell on sleep”.[9]
The working-class could learn a lot from each man. As the great Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky said “Cromwell was a great revolutionary of his time, who knew how to uphold the interests of the new, bourgeois social system against the old aristocratic one without holding back at anything. This must be learnt from him, and the dead lion of the seventeenth century is in this sense immeasurably greater than many living dogs.”[10]
The same could be said about Lincoln.To conclude,Achorn does offer a new and fresh approach to this complex period of American history. The national crisis he writes about bears striking resemblance today. The significant book sales mean Achorn’s work has resonated with modern-day readers.As the American working-class comes into direct struggle with its bourgeoisie, it will need to armed with an understanding of America’s revolutionary past. It will need to form its own “Ironsides”.
Its first step must be to put an end to the removal of statues of Washington, Lincoln and Grant. As Joe Kishore writes “The removal of monuments to the leaders of America’s revolutionary and civil wars has no justification. These men led great social struggles against the very forces of reaction that justified racial oppression as an incarnation of the fundamental inequality of human beings”.[11]
[1] Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire of Liberty
[2] Battle Cry of Freedom : James M. McPherson
[3] Transcript of President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (1865)- http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=38&page=transcript
[4] Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln-Edward Achorn- Hardcover – March 19. 2020
[5] See The New York Times 1619 project: A racialist falsification of US and world history-wsws.org
[6] Lincoln delivered the 272 word Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863 on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
[7] Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America-Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams
January 28, 1865
[8] Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America-Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams
January 28, 1865
[9] Oliver Cromwell and Abraham Lincoln: A comparison : a lecture delivered before the Royal Society of Literature on April 19th, 1944-Isaac Foot
[10] Where Is Britain Going?
[11] Hands off the monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Grant!- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/22/pers-j22.html
The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history-By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North September 6 2019
“Despite the pretence of establishing the United States’ “true” foundation, the New York Times’ 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of History. It aims to create a historical narrative that legitimises the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritising of personal “identities”—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race.
The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history-By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North.
What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. … A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar
Marx, Wage Labour and Capital (1847)
“Men make their own History, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under the circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Karl Marx 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Introduction
On August 19, 2019, the New York Times published its “The 1619 Project,”. If you are one the lucky ones to get a copy (you can only access the articles online for a limited time due to subscription paywall), you would see with a cursory look that the articles contained in the magazine are a revisionist interpretation of American History.
The date of 2019 is important for the New York Times(NYT) because it signalled the 400th anniversary of the arrival of 20 African slaves at Point Comfort in Virginia, a British colony in North America. The Project, according to the Times, intends to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very centre of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”[1]
One issue arises from this blatantly false and revisionist account of American historical development. Firstly why is it that virtually the whole of American academia has ignored this reactionary piece of historiography, and this goes for academia around the world. In Britain, not a single academic institution or historian has published comment on this subject. Major magazines such as The Times Literary Supplement Literary review or History Today have not published a single article commenting on the 1619 Project.
Which brings me to the review of these two publications by Mehring books. The first pamphlet contains four articles attacking in different ways the 1619 Project. 1. David North, Tom Mackaman, Niles Niemuth-The New York Times 1619 project: A racialist falsification of the U.S. and world history.2. Book review: Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt-By Eric London-9 September 2019.3 Why are reparations for slavery being made an issue in the 2020 U.S. elections? June 21, 2019, and lastly The attacks on Green Book and the racialist infection of the affluent middle class-by David Walsh and Joanne Laurier-8 March 2019. The second part of the review will cover the pamphlet: The 1619 Project and the falsification of History: An analysis of the New York Times reply to five historians-By David North and Eric London-December 28 2019.
The bourgeois and radical presses in America have been forced to admit that it is only the Marxist’s from the World Socialist Website (W.S.W.S.) that have challenged this falsification of History. The World Socialist Website not only marshalled its journalists and historians but published an array of interviews from leading historians known throughout the world.
One of the more shocking claims that W.S.W. Journalists and historians sought to refute is the an assertion by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the staff writer and New America Foundation fellow and lead journalist of the Project that “Anti-black racism runs in the very D.N.A. of this country.”[2]
As the World Socialist Website pamphlet points out “this is a false and dangerous conception. D.N.A. is a chemical molecule that contains the genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and development. The transfer of this critical biological term to the study of a country—even if meant only in a metaphorical sense—leads to bad History and reactionary politics. Countries do not have D.N.A.; they have historically formed economic structures, antagonistic classes and complex political relationships. These do not exist apart from a certain level of technological development, nor independently of a more or less developed network of global economic interconnections.
The methodology that underlies the 1619 Project is an idealist (i.e., it derives social being from thought, rather than the other way around) and, in the most fundamental sense of the word, irrationalist. All of History is to be explained from the existence of a supra-historical emotional impulse. Slavery is viewed and analysed not as a specific economically rooted form of the exploitation of labour, but, instead, as the manifestation of white racism. However, where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical D.N.A. of American “white people.” Thus, it must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions.”[3]
As the pamphlet highlights, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s dangerous conceptions have provoked other equally reactionary commentators to espouse their false comments. The pamphlet’s authors quote neurologist Robert Sapolsky who writes in Foreign Affairs that “the dynamics of human group identity, including the resurgence of nationalism—that potentially most destructive form of in-group bias—requires grasping the biological and cognitive underpinnings that shape them.”[4]
The authors of the pamphlet attack Sapolsky’s “simplistic dissolution of History into biology recalls not only the reactionary invocation of “Social Darwinism” to legitimise imperialist conquest by the late nineteen and early twentieth-century imperialists but also the efforts of German geneticists to provide a pseudo-scientific justification for Nazi anti-Semitism and racism.”[5]
Much of Sapolsky’s ideas and for that matter, Hanah-Jones have an echo in academia and political institutions throughout the world. This would partly explain academia’s hostile attitude towards the Trotskyist’s exposure of the 1619 Project.
Slavery
One of the more insidious attacks on the journalists and historians who contributed articles and interviews to the World Socialist website on the 1619 project has been that they downplay the importance of slavery in the History of the world. Anyone with an ounce of historical knowledge will see this as untrue and a politically motivated attack. The fact that American slavery is a monumental subject with vast and enduring historical and political significance cannot be denied.
However, as the authors of the pamphlet point out, slavery did not begin in America. Slavery in America is but one crucial episode in the global History of slavery, which extends back into the ancient world, and of the origins and development of the world capitalist system.
The Marxist movement has not underplayed slavery’s importance and have produced a vast body of literature dealing with the widespread practice of slavery throughout the world and has insisted that it cannot be understood apart from its role in the economic development of capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Karl Marx explained in the chapter titled “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” in Volume One of Das Kapital: ”The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China.”
The American Revolution and Abraham Lincoln
While it comes as no surprise that the bourgeois journalists and historians from the 1619 Project are hostile to any Marxist attacks on their historiography, it does come as a significant shock that they attack the very conception of an American bourgeois revolution and one its finest by-products, Abraham Lincoln. The 1619 Project portrays the Revolution as a sinister attempt to uphold the slave system.
As the pamphlet points out this not just a “reframing” of History, it is a falsification that ignores more than a half-century of scholarship. It is highly unlikely that Hannah-Jones (or any of her co-essayists) have even heard of, let alone read, the work on slavery carried out by Williams, Davis, or Peter Kolchin; on the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood; on the political conceptions that motivated union soldiers by James McPherson; on Reconstruction by Eric Foner; on Jim Crow segregation by C. Vann Woodward; or on the Great Migration by James N. Gregory or Joe William Trotter.”[6]
As for Hannah-Jones belief that the American revolutionaries such as Thomas Jefferson were nothing more than racist Hippocrates it would be nice to think that this is just her piece of reactionary journalism, unfortunately, it appears this is a also echoed in a broader attitude amongst historians and writers.
Dr Jonathan W. Wilson points out in his review of the book Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution by Robert G. Parkinson that “typically, historians have responded by crediting the American Revolution with imperfectly realised but laudable ideals, as well as with crucial contributions to 19th-century reform. Over the last decade, however, many historians have dispensed with treating the American revolutionary era as an ideologically coherent moment. Instead, they depict it as a moment of complicated social division and civil war, part of a broader context of Atlantic and continental conflict. Their accounts suggest the violence – which neither began nor ended with the imperial crisis – helps explain subsequent decades of racial hatred and oppression in the United States.[7]
As the writers of the pamphlet point out it is not to defend or attack figures like Jefferson but to understand the context of their actions as the Marxist writer David North explains “It is undeniable that Jefferson was painfully aware that there existed conditions in which the right of property was in direct contradiction to that of life and liberty. He was, after all, a Virginian and a slave-owner. However, it is of historical and political significance that in a preliminary draft of the Declaration of Independence Jefferson included as one of the indictments against George III his perpetuation of the slave trade: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, this opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. In the context of this discussion, Jefferson’s redefinition of the concept of natural rights, substituting “the pursuit of happiness” for property, endowed the document with an enduring, world-historical significance. In using this formulation to justify the rebellion of American colonists against the Mother Country, Jefferson inspired a more revolutionary, universal and humane concept of what truly constituted the “Rights of Man.”[8]
The second pamphlet in this review is The 1619 Project and the falsification of History: An analysis of the New York Times’ reply to five historians by David North and Eric London.
On December 20, 2019, the New York Times finally felt the need to reply to a letter signed by five leading and internationally recognised historians. In the letter, they requested that the Times correct the historical falsifications upon which the 1619 Project was based.
It took the Times over four months to reply to criticisms of its 1619 project. The historians outlined their “strong reservations about important aspects of the 1619 Project” and state they “are dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or “framing.” They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds—that they are the objections of only “white historians”—has affirmed that displacement.[9]
The historians also point out that only a select few were chosen for the Project. The Times deliberately chose only those writers and historians they knew would go along with the Project’s falsifications. The historians attacked this, saying “The process remains opaque. The names of only some of the historians involved have been released, and the extent of their involvement as “consultants” and fact-checkers remains vague. The selective transparency deepens our concern”.
The response of the New York Times to the historians was to reject their criticisms and continue as if nothing had happened. The New York Times Magazine editor in chief Jake Silverstein said “We are familiar,” with the objections of the letter writers, as four of them have been interviewed in recent months by the World Socialist Web Site. The Project was intended to address the marginalisation of African-American History in the telling of our national story and examine the legacy of slavery in contemporary American life. We are not ourselves historians; it is true. We are journalists, trained to look at current events and situations and ask the question: Why is this the way it is?.[10]North and London point out in the pamphlet that “Silverstein’s response to questions raised by the historians about the background of the 1619 Project is evasive and disingenuous. The 1619 Project is not merely a journalistic endeavour. The Times launched it with the explicitly declared intention of changing the teaching and understanding of the History of the United States fundamentally.”[11]
North and London continue “When challenged on its numerous factual errors, the paucity of its source material, and the ignoring of the scholarly literature, the Times excuses itself by arguing that its authors do not claim to be historians. But when it is pointed out that the authors have failed to present accurately, as is expected of competent journalists, the conflicting arguments in the debate over America’s founding, the Times proclaims that it is writing a new history.”
The political consequences of historical falsification
If the “mistakes” in the Times 1619 Project were just that then while being reprehensible, they would not do too much damage to the study of History. However, that is not the case. When the editor of one of the most prestigious history journals in America if not the world defends the 1619 Project this is not just bringing the historical falsification to a broader audience, which is bad enough as the authors point out it would have political consequences that extend beyond the ivory towers of the American Historical Review.
The editor of the A.H.R. wrote in February 2020 that he did want to be dragged into this debate stating” I did not want to devote this column to the recent dispute between the New York Times and the handful of prominent historians who have offered sharp criticism of that publication’s purportedly revisionist narrative of the American story—the 1619 Project—that puts racism and the struggle for black liberation at the core of the national experience. However, of course, it was all anyone asked me about at the A.H.A.’s Annual Meeting during the first week of January, so I feel I must.”[12]
The response of the A.H.R. like the New York Times is evasive and continues the historical falsification. Editor Alex Lichtenstein writes “the letter writers do not just object to errors they claim to have identified; they call for the Times to issue corrections. What, in fact, might these look like? The primary offender seems to be Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her sweeping essay that frames the entire Project. Again, one could read the critics and miss the fact that the 1619 Project includes dozens of elements beyond Hannah-Jones’s opening essay. Many others may—or may not—contain errors, but Hannah-Jones’s essay has been singled out as representative of the whole. Particularly objectionable, the historians insist, is her assertion that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” As the letter bluntly points out, “This is not true.” Admittedly, at a minimum, her formulation seriously overstates the anti-slavery bona fides of the British Empire at the time, not to mention the universality of pro-slavery views in the colonies. Fair enough. So, then, what would suffice in its stead? “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence”? How about “some of the Patriots fought for independence in the knowledge that it would secure their investments in slavery”? Presumably at least some of the letter writers would find the following counter-formulation no less objectionable: “there were many reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence, but the preservation of slavery was not among them.” While Hannah-Jones may be guilty of an overstatement, this is more a matter of emphasis than it is of a correct or incorrect interpretation.[13]
It is not the intention of London and North to say that everyone involved in the Project is in their words “engaged in deliberate deception or is merely chasing career opportunities.
However, they continue “The falsification of History invariably serves very real, even if unstated, contemporary political interests. The racial narrative is intended to replace one that is based on the analysis of objectively existing social and class interests. The New York Times, as a corporate entity and, more importantly, a powerful voice of the ruling class and its state, has a very real political agenda, which is carefully coordinated with the Democratic Party. Silverstein never explains why the Times now adopts, as the basis of an essential change in the teaching of American History, the race-based narrative of Lerone Bennett, Jr., which it explicitly and forcefully rejected 50 years ago. Nor does he explain why the Times rejects the criticisms of Gordon Wood and James McPherson, whom it was describing less than a decade ago as the leading authorities in the fields of Revolutionary and Civil War-era studies.
Conclusion
It is clear from these two pamphlets and the many articles on the W.S.W.S that the 1619 Project is a fraud and a huge exercise in historical falsification. It is up to the many scholars, students and workers who know that the 1619 Project makes a travesty of History to do something about it. As the pamphlet states “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”.PostscriptRecently the editor of the 1619 project Jake Silverstein was forced to announce that 1619 Project ” would slightly amend its claim that the American Revolution was a racist endeavour undertaken to fight plans by the British Empire to end slavery”.
As Tom Mackaman points out “In his update, Silverstein does not apologise to the five eminent historians who, in a letter sent in December to the Times, specifically objected to the claim that the Revolution was undertaken in defence of slavery. Historians Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon Wood asked that this assertion be corrected, along with several other egregious errors and distortions in the Project”[14].
Both pamphlets can be purchased at https://mehring.com for US buyers and for UK – https://socialequality.org.uk/
[1] Why we Publishedt he 1619 Project-By Jake Silverstein-DEC. 20, 2019-https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html[2] The Idea of America- by Nikole Hannah-Jones-New York Times-1619 Project[3] The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history-By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North6 September 2019[4] This Is Your Brain on Nationalism-The Biology of Us and ThemBy Robert Sapolsky March/April 2019-https://www.foreignaffairs.com/[5] The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history-By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North6 September 2019[6] The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history-By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North6 September 2019[7] Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution-Robert G. Parkinson-Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 2016, ISBN: 9781469626635 ; 640pp.; Price: £33.52[8] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism-By David North 24 October 1996-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html[10] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html[11] A reply to the American Historical Review’s defense of the 1619 Project-By David North and Tom Mackaman-31 January 2020[12] From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That -The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 1, February 2020, Pages xv–xxi, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa041Published: 03 February 2020[13] From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That -The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 1, February 2020, Pages xv–xxi, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa041Published: 03 February 2020[14] New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein attempts to slither away from central 1619 Project fabrication-By Tom Mackaman-16 March 2020
Review: The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History- David North & Tom Mackaman-Mehring Books-$24.95
“Tell me anyway–Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”
― Leon Trotsky
This groundbreaking book adds significantly to the arsenal of Marxist works that have utilised the historical materialist method in examing complex historical questions. This collection of essays and interviews represents the most consistent and sustained attack on the New York Times 1619 Project, released in August 2019. The book’s publication is a significant political and intellectual event
The 1619 project denounced two seminal events in American history: the 1776 revolution that founded the United States and the Civil War of 1861–65. In its place, the New York Times put forward a completely new revisionist narrative that stipulated that the rebellion against Britain was a counterrevolution instigated to defend slavery and that the union forces in the Civil War were led by a president, Abraham Lincoln, who was a racist.
The lead writer and Project founder Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones said, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true”. For this piece of deep insight, the author was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Hannah-Jones made the preposterous claim that anti-black racism “runs in the very DNA of this country”.
As you would expect from a work published by Mehring books, this collection of essays and lectures is based on meticulous research. It thoroughly discredits the 1619 Project’s lies and distortions.One question to book seeks to answer is why would the Times lie. As Leon Trotsky once pointed out the that when one lies about history, it is done to conceal real social contradictions. The Times project was released amidst truly staggering levels of social inequality produced by capitalism. As one writer wrote, “These contradictions can be resolved on a progressive basis only through the methods of class struggle. Efforts to divert and sabotage that struggle by dissolving class identity into the miasma of racial identity lead inexorably in the direction of fascism”.
Contained in the book are interviews with the most renowned scholars and specialists in the history of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s — Gordon Wood, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, Richard Carwardine, Clayborne Carson, Adolph Reed Jr., and Dolores Janiewski. Subjects examined are the “complex development of slavery in the New World, the American Revolution, the sectional crisis over slavery and the Civil War, the struggle for social equality in the twentieth century, and the class politics of racial identity in the present”.
The most disturbing feature of the Times revisionist project was not so much what it contained, which was easily refuted, but the fact that it was left to the Trotskyist movement and the World Socialist Website(WSWS) to attack this abomination of historical falsehood. The Attack by the WSWS drew immediate media attention and very quickly seriously undermined the whole 1619 project. As one writer put it, it destroyed the Times “new historical narrative” and exposed it as a money-making venture.
In reading this book and its sustained attack on the 1619 project, it is not hard to understand why the stand taken by the WSWS and several leading Historians has altered the political and “intellectual terrain”. It has destroyed the 1619 project. It has provided a textbook Marxist approach and has implemented a historical materialist method of historical investigation. One also has to admire the bravery of the historians that collaborated with the WSWS. These historians had “strong reservations about important aspects of the 1619 Project” and were “dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” It is one thing for a Marxist to launch a polemical attack. After all, it is in their DNA. It is another for world-renowned historians to put their life’s work on the line by defending historical truth.
The stand taken by the WSWS and these leading historian has encouraged others to enter the field of battle. One notable book has been Peter W Wood’s book 1620. Peter.W.Wood’s book is a very useful critique of the New York Times 1619 Project. It has been described as historiography of the debates over the 1619 Project. The Times basic premise is to reset American history by “asserting that all the laws, material gains, and cultural achievements of Americans are rooted in the exploitation of African-Americans”.
To his credit, Woods does not buy into this absurd and dangerously wrong assumption. The book is an attempt, to sum up what critiques of the Project have written. While many of the most important historians who have written on the subject have published articles and letters opposing the Times, the political leadership in this fight against this travesty of historical study has fallen to the Trotskyist’s at the World Socialist Website. While semi acknowledging this in the book, Wood’s is not happy that it was the Trotskyists who first exposed this racialist and revisionist approach to American history. The fact that the Times project has been so discredited is down to the role played by the Marxists.
As the Marxist writer David North correctly points out, “As a business venture, the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision, it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the support of several distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history”.
In his book, Wood opposes the 1619 project and offers a different starting point for modern American history, which is when the first pilgrims set foot in America in the 1620s. The political and historical study of the pilgrims is a worthwhile subject. To some degree, Wood’s has a case in point, but American history has many such starting points.
Most historians seem to stick with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 as America’s founding.
Wood’s book is one of the better critiques of the 1619 project, but it does not probe the politics behind 1619. As David North points out, “The “financialisation” of the Times has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the newspaper’s selection of issues to be publicised and promoted: that is, its central role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always tenuous boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda. The consequences of the Times’ financial and political evolution have found a particularly reactionary expression in the 1619 Project. Led by Ms Nikole Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619 Project was developed to provide the Democratic Party with a historical narrative that legitimised its efforts to develop an electoral constituency based on the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Party’s decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the 1619 Project, by prioritising racial conflict, marginalises, and even eliminates, class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics”.
Given that the Trotskyists from the WSWS have led the political and historical fight against the Times deeply right-wing and revisionist historical viewpoint, it is perhaps not surprising that the WSWS has come under sustained attack from not only conservative sources but has been attacked by several Stalinist and Pseudo left individuals and organisations.
One of the more stupid and ignorant attacks came from the predictable Louis Proyect, who wrote,” Indeed, nobody has published more “Trotskyist polemics” than them, as long as you are using the term Trotskyist without regard for what Trotsky stood for. An examination of the record will place Trotsky firmly in the Project 1619 camp. When Trotsky was living in Prinkipo, an island near Istanbul, in 1933, he met with Arne Swabeck (who coincidentally was one of the talking heads in Warren Beatty’s “Reds”). Swabeck asked, “How must we view the position of the American Negro: As a national minority or as a racial minority?” Trotsky’s reply probably would have made both Wilentz and his friends at WSWS beet-red with fury. He urged his comrades to support self-determination for Blacks even if it antagonised white workers, who were far more radical in 1933 than they are today”.
Proyect has a history of right-wing attacks on the WSWS. The WSWS called him a professional liar and said, “Proyect’s blog—or should we call it blather—lacks all credibility. In his dishonesty, cynicism, and debased vulgarity, he epitomises all that is politically diseased in the milieu of American pseudo-left politics. His attack on the WSWS is the work of a man who has absolutely nothing to do with the politics, principles and culture of the Marxist movement. His blog were it correctly named, would be called “The Unrepentant Liar.”
Further attacks on the WSWS have come from the Stalinists of the USA Communist Party who wrote, “Trotskyists have traditionally attacked mainstream Communists and others who have sought to construct centre-left coalitions to defeat the right, attacks that have aided the right. Here, North, London, and the World Socialist Review have acted to support a centre-right backlash against a new history of slavery, a kind of negative United Front with the liberal and conservative celebrators of U.S. history. The author and co-signers of the protest letter, whom they defend, would never put “bourgeois” in front of “democratic” to define the American Revolution. In my experience, they would do what they usually do—reject the work of those like the scholars of the 1619 Project who challenge conventional wisdom and by their rejection prevent the article’s publication in mainstream media”.
This duplicity has been the trademark of the Stalinists for nearly a century. It has been exposed and refuted by the Trotskyist movement and represents a desperate attempt by the Stalinist to breathe new life into the discredited Democratic party and join forces with the various other Pseudo Left groups that have backed the Project and have attacked the WSWS.
In the past, these Pseudo left organisations would have at least paid lip service to the struggles of the working class, but now this has been replaced by an open acceptance of new forms of non working class forms of struggle. James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose summarise this succinctly in this article “We have moved into a new stage of history. The battles the left fought over the past half-century have largely been won. We cannot go back to focusing on miners’ rights and trade unions, or on securing equal pay for women, outlawing racial discrimination, or legalising homosexuality: we have won those wars. Much of the right support these advances now too. We have new battles to fight. These include combating climate change, securing our place on the world stage and within the global economy, and fostering cohesive multiculturalism, free from moral relativism and enforced conformity. The left now finds itself pulled in many directions at once. This is the source of its profound identity crisis”.One manifestation of this right-wing shift is the support by the Pseudo Left organisations of the 1619 racialist project.
Conclusion
It is hoped that The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: Essays and Interviews will find a wide audience. Its essays and interviews will be of interest to all readers of American history.
It is an essential aid for all teachers and college professors, students and the general reading public to counter the Times’ blatant historical falsifications. It will also be a valuable tool in the struggle of both black and white workers in their struggle against capitalism.
A Trumpet of Sedition 