To begin this review of Peter Wood’s book, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, we must first understand the premise of the 1619 Project and what its aim is in the context of American history. The 1619 Project is the initiative to “reframe the nation’s history” by altering the birth year of the United States from 1776 to 1619. 1619 was the year in which two ships arrived in Jamestown, Virginia from West Africa carrying slaves. The goal of this project was to embed slavery into the core principles of which our country is built upon and transform the way we think about the United States. This project was delivered to the public in August of 2019 by Nikole Hannah-Jones and a group of intellectual journalists and historians to back up her argument in The New York Times magazine. This article gained traction right away from all people, whether that be intellectual or lay people in society, even though it had almost no documentation or “rigorous scholarship”, as Wood describes in his book. Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Wood took it upon himself to respond to such an abrasive and seemingly controversial article released by one of the most prestigious and influential news platforms in the world. Wood attempts to argue that the actual year that set the stage for how our country was laid out and core beliefs and principles on which we stand should be 1620: the year in which the pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower on Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. He argues that the Mayflower Compact was the major document and dictator in steering our country to self-government and to ultimately separate from the King across the Atlantic. Throughout this book he aimed to clarify the history of America and expose the falsehoods and hypocrisies within the language of the 1619 Project.
Wood begins his critique of the 1619 Project by setting the stage with his argument of 1620 being the first influential year within American history. He begins by citing the Mayflower Compact by depicting the specific wording and historical context in which they wrote this document. The forty-one signers of the document utilized Old Testament scripture and their religious background to fortify and combine themselves into what they call “a civil body politic”. This united, single civil body politic is simply a cohort of people that agree to govern themselves under a common set of rules and laws through peaceful debate. The 1619 Project however, claims the actual start year of our nation begins when English pirates landed in Jamestown, Virginia with thirty some African slaves. The New York Times declared that the arrival of these slaves established the institution of chattel slavery in the Americas that would have not been present had these ships never landed there. Wood attempts to refute this claim by stating that the 1619 Project authors did not take into account historical context of slavery and its role in the world. He writes that slavery was not a novel institution in the Old World nor the New World, it had been present long before the year 1619. He explains that many African tribes willing sold their people into slavery in return for goods. By this, Wood means that indentured servitude and slavery were common practice for much of history and although most would agree it is immoral, it did serve its purpose during that time. Slavery was a much different institution from the time of the Pilgrims to prior to Civil War slavery. Wood defends this further by denouncing the vernacular term “dehumanization” and its misuse in regard to treatment of black slaves. He claims that slave owners did not deny that slaves were human and that people do not need to deny someone their humanity in order to perform hateful acts towards them.
With the inability to put history into context and the cultural landscape at the time, post-modernism takes hold in the argument of the 1619 Project. Wood defines postmodernism as the idea that all facts and truths of society are up for interpretation based on a person’s background. People who ascribe to this mentality believe there are no universal truths in the world and one’s own truth is just as valid as another’s. As we have learned from early on in the semester, intellectuals base their entire existence on finding and deducting the truth. They also pride themselves in that they frown upon ambiguity and believe all things have one meaning and one meaning only, as Gouldner describes it in Chapter 6 of his book. During our discussion with Peter Wood, he claimed that this idea of post-modernism has a Marxist edge to it in that one interpretation can be favored more heavily than another. This idea favors the interpretation made by intellectuals that the oppressed must be liberated from the shackles of society by shutting down the privileged class. In the context of the 1619 Project, recognize that black Americans and their enslaved ancestors are the foundation of our country and must be given reparations for their suffering over all others. Along with that narrative, those white Americans are the privileged class that must be shut down and provide those reparations to the oppressed class of black Americans. Those who oppose this interpretation of the 1619 Project are labeled as white supremacists and racists, as Wood points out in his book.
Peter Wood criticizes the 1619 Project in several other manners that would be difficult to cover in this one review. He brings up five main points of contention, such as the American Revolution being fought to protect the rights of American slave owners from abolition by the British, that Lincoln was a racist whose intent was to keep blacks and whites separate, that “black Americans fought back alone”, that plantation slavery was the foundation for American capitalism, and that our nations history is best thought about as a struggle by black Americans against white supremacy. Each of these points he refutes in their own chapter by breaking down the history and context of culture during that period of American history. He disputes these claims through consultation with the Declaration of Independence and the inalienable rights each human being has, the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement that brought all races together to fight for equal rights, and that slavery did not make America wealthier in the capitalist system, it decreased GDP of all things.
One main argument he makes throughout the book however is that the 1619 Project simply has no scholarly backing. Much of these claims made by Nikole Hannah-Jones and others were reviewed by other historians who openly stated that much of their interpretation was false and meanwhile gave no footnotes or research citations for any of their claims. As an example, Wood states that Leslie Harris, a well-versed historian on slavery and black history, distinctly told the writers they were wrong but they did nothing to change it. As a basic intellectual piece of literature this in itself should pose some concern and warrants criticism, Wood writes. Open discourse forms the groundwork for intellectual analysis of any issue as we learned from Gouldner’s piece on the Culture of Critical Discourse. There must be a level of clarity and scholarly evidence to back up a claim no matter how small. The claim must also be subject to severe scholarly scrutiny and discourse to decipher its validity and truth. Wood finishes out his book by stating that slavery is a complex issue that Americans should understand and should be discussed in schools. However, the notion of reframing an entire historical basis is not logical or practical and may lead to generations of animosity toward our country.