Peter W. Wood. 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. Encounter, 2022.

1620 was recommended by a friend, and it is worth reading. As the subtitle suggests, it is a critique of the “Woke” 1619 Project promoted by the New York Times. While it does challenge a number of the assertions made by the various publications associated with the 1619 Project, it is, as the subtitle also suggests looking at it from the perspective of a critic.

The author is a professor and an anthropologist, so he is particularly focused on human relations. As a counterpoint, the author makes a case that 1620 is more of a watershed year for American history. It is the year of the Mayflower Compact which set the model for a diverse “body politic” with a republican non-aristocratic model. 1620 notes that the black captives sold in Virginia were not treated as chattel. We know some became working free members of the settlement, and that both black men and women married white settlers. The chattel slavery would come later.

The author notes other authors—mostly reputable historians—who have challenged many of the so-called facts of the 1619 project. He is more interested in the conclusions drawn and the ramifications of those conclusions. A major conclusion of the 1619 Project is that the Declaration of Independence was made to counteract the abolitionist movement in England. The problem is that in 1776 there were more abolitionists in North America than England. Indeed, Jefferson and his committee wrote a paragraph condemning the British support of the slave trade. That paragraph was omitted from the final draft because of the objections of three states, the two Carolinas and Georgia. Even delegates from Virginia supported it.

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 & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobium of INFIDEL Powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another. (Read the full draft here.)

Wood’s basic thesis is that the United States is no Utopia—there has never been one in the history of the world—but it is a work in progress striving to live up to its ideals. Key critics of the 1619 Project Wood points out are Socialists. While they might agree with some of the critiques of capitalism in the Project, they point out the project is very loose with historical facts and promotes division, while the goal of Socialists is to promote a classless society.

Wood clarifies one source of confusion. The 1619 Project gets some of its funding and support from an organization called the Pulitzer Center. This kind of like the term Webster’s Dictionary. The Pulitzer Center is not affiliated with the Pulitzer Prizes or Joseph Pulitzer, but the name of this left-wing advocacy group adds some gravitas which is probably unwarranted.

There is a lot more more. 1620 is very quotable. If you are looking for specific details, there are other works and writers out there like David McCullough, historians who have detailed criticisms. This is more a questioning of the whole purpose and goals of the 1619 Project. The Project seems to be following the trajectory of European radicals of eighty to a hundred years ago. The problem is that such a “utopia” reduces most of its citizens to mere chattels of the state.