The Coup on Cape Fear - Part Two: Red Shirt Riot

It is no secret that prominent conspiracy theorist and erstwhile U.S. President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud, proven to be without merit in court case after court case, were the main impetus propelling the Capitol Rioters in their attempted coup on January 6th, 2020. And such claims were nothing new from Trump. He was telegraphing his intentions to make these claims throughout the 2020 campaign, using this lie as a means of suppressing votes by casting suspicion on the perfectly legal and secure mail-in voting protocols that many states relied on during the first year of the pandemic. Indeed, Trump had told this lie many times before. He blamed Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012 on voter fraud, he blamed his own defeat by Ted Cruz in the 2016 Iowa caucus on cheating, and when he was projected to lose the presidential election that year, he suggested he could only lose if the election were stolen. Even after winning, he doubled down on his voter fraud claims, seemingly in a desperate effort to save face over having lost the popular vote, and he organized the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, appointing to it people like J. Christian Adams, who had been making false claims about voter fraud for years through his conservative legal group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, or PILF. The voter fraud commission was not long lived, but PILF has continued to make claims about non-citizens voting and dead people voting, all of which have been investigated by journalists and election supervisors and disproven, but conservative media amplifies these claims and not their eventual disproof or PILF’s quiet retractions of claims. It is propaganda, pure and simple. Certainly, voter fraud exists, but it is not the epidemic they claim. In fact, it is frequently conservatives themselves who are guilty of committing it in the occasional genuine cases that are proven. Take for example, some of the only real cases of voter fraud to have been turned up after all the scrutiny over the 2020 election, a cluster of incidents all in the same Florida retirement community, The Villages, where four different residents have been arrested for voting more than once for Trump. It shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise; after all, in his rhetoric before election day, Donald Trump had said that, in order to counteract the cheating he said would be happening, his supporters should vote more than once. Essentially, he said there’s voter fraud, so the solution is more voter fraud! Absurd as it may seem, this is actually more common than you might think. Let us return to North Carolina, the scene of our story, for a further example. 120 years after the post-election insurrection in Wilmington, a definite case of voter fraud occurred. Conservative proponents of the widespread voter fraud conspiracy theory like to point to this case because it involved absentee ballots, but it was the Republican candidate for congress, Mark Harris, or more specifically, his political operative McCrae Dowless, who was guilty of the fraud. In Bladen County, northwest of Wilmington, a Black get-out-the-vote group had previously seen great success with an absentee ballot initiative. Many conservatives suspected that group, The Bladen Improvement Association, of voter fraud, but they never produced any evidence of wrongdoing because the Improvement Association’s use of absentee ballots appears to have been completely above board. Unable to confirm their conspiracy theories about voter fraud favoring the Left, the Right just went ahead and committed voter fraud themselves, with McCrae Dowless found guilty of organizing an elaborate ballot fraud operation, in which they would collect blank ballots, fill them out in support of Republicans, forge witness signatures using different colored pens and different names to prevent detection, and deliver them in small batches to avoid suspicion. NPR’s Serial Productions made a fantastic podcast about the whole affair, called The Improvement Association, which I encourage everyone to check out. The takeaway here is that we see a pattern among reactionaries: point your finger in voter fraud accusation with one hand while the other is stuffing fraudulent ballots into the box. We can see the pattern all the way back in the 19th century, when the progressive and reactionary parties had opposite names. On Cape Fear in 1868, after Abraham Galloway mustered newly freed Black residents and stood up to the voter intimidation of the KKK, their subsequent legitimate victory at the polls, making universal male suffrage a reality in North Carolina, was blamed on voter fraud by white supremacists. Yet thirty years later, white supremacists would gleefully resort to voter intimidation and fraud and even armed insurrection to achieve their own political ends.

Numerous times on this podcast, I have spoken about the supposed and the real influence of secret societies on changes in government. When it is the claim of a vast conspiracy, such as the idea that the Illuminati was behind the French Revolution, or that the Jesuits intrigued to assassinate kings and reverse the Reformation or the Revolution, it is a disprovable and untenable fallacy. However, there have been clear instances of secret societies influencing political change through electioneering. In Bourbon Restoration France, the secret society of the Chevaliers de la Foi, or Knights of the Faith, were instrumental in achieving Ultramontane Catholic domination of the government. I spoke about this in part two of my series on the Rise and Fall of the Society of Jesus. And in the mid-nineteenth century, the Order of the Star Spangled Banner in America, about whom I have released a Patreon exclusive podcast episode, swore their members to secrecy as they worked to stir resentment of Catholic immigrants and eventually launch the nativist Know-Nothing Party into political power, their party’s name a direct reference to the secrecy of the society that started their movement. After the Civil War, Southern Confederate veterans formed the Ku Klux Klan, another effort to influence the social and political order through secret combination, and more specifically through violence. Thus it should come as no surprise that, as the newspaper editor Josephus Daniels and the Democratic chairman Furnifold Simmons developed their White Supremacy campaign in 1898, it relied on the clandestine scheming of more than one secret society in Cape Fear country. Some of these secret societies, operating as compartmentalized cells of the White Supremacy campaign in Wilmington, were called Group Six and the Secret Nine. They did much of the on-the-ground planning for the coup to take place after the election, establishing safehouses and organizing the “citizen patrols” and “vigilance committees” that would act as death squads when the violence erupted. Some among them may have truly believed the false news about an impending Black uprising that Josephus Daniels was purposely spreading, but many of them were in it for the sake of hate and just out for blood, as evidenced by the fact that the men commanded by these secret societies, most already sporting the red shirts symbolic of white supremacist anti-Reconstruction violence in the South, had to be held back and talked down from commencing with their planned reign of terror before election day. They were champing at the bit to strike at Alexander Manly, the offending Black newspaperman who had dared to suggest that whites raped Black women just as much or more than Black men raped white women and, even more offensive to their sensibilities, that it was possible for white women to welcome the amorous advances of Black men and even made such advances themselves. The Red Shirts wanted to lynch Manly, as they had wanted to do since the day his controversial editorial was printed, and they wanted to burn his newspaper, the Daily Record, to the ground. The leaders of the White Supremacy campaign had to reassure their Red Shirts that they would be set loose on Manly and the Record after the election, and that it benefitted them and their cause to keep the peace for the time being.

Alexander Manly. Photo Courtesy of the J.Y. Joyner Library, Special Collections, East Carolina University

With their newspapers creating the false impression that the Black citizens of Wilmington were planning some kind of uprising, they justified their mustering of a standing army of Red Shirt white supremacists who were ready at any moment to strike first and thereby create the race riot they said they feared. Indeed, Red Shirts were already assaulting Black residents in the streets with impunity. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the White Supremacists had full control of the situation, which they made clear to the Fusionist Governor of North Carolina, Daniel Russell. In their first bid to undermine the forthcoming election and seize power, the White Supremacists threatened Russell. First, they said that he couldn’t make a campaign stop in Wilmington because a speech from him would set off a race war. When Governor Russell canceled his visit, they pressed further, knowing that Russell feared being blamed for the outbreak of a race war. So they strong-armed Governor Russell into removing all the Fusionist and Republican candidates for county offices. Election Day was still weeks away, and already White Supremacists in Wilmington had threatened and bullied their way to victory in all county offices up for election. Then Election Day came, and lo and behold, there was no uprising of Black residents. Instead, Black and white men alike went to the polls early, hoping to cast their votes and avoid trouble. Red Shirt “vigilance committees” stopped and searched black men wherever they saw them, certain they would find them armed or carrying kerosene intent on setting the city ablaze, but of course they found nothing of the sort. Their harassment certainly dissuaded many Black citizens from even attempting to vote though, and in some precincts, Red Shirts actually turned Black voters away in flagrant acts of voter intimidation. Many Red Shirts wanted to attempt far more on Election Day, pushing to move in force on the Daily Record offices and Black newspaper editor Alexander Manly, but they were again kept in check by their leaders, who assured them that they would be set loose like attack dogs in the aftermath of the election. Governor Russell was obliged to travel to Wilmington, his hometown, to cast his vote, but he was on alert that Red Shirts might attack him. In fact, as he was escorted to the polls by White Supremacists who wanted to avoid such a scandal, he suffered nothing worse than some insults about his corpulence. Afterward, the governor suffered the indignity of having to switch trains and finally having to hide away in the baggage car to avoid Red Shirts who were hunting him throughout his return journey. Finally, that evening, as votes were being tallied, the White Supremacists carried out the most brazen part of their plan to steal the election. They surrounded polling stations in predominately Black and Fusionist precincts, turned off the streetlights outside, stormed inside shoving people over and upending tables, knocking lamps aside. In the ensuing confusion, as poll workers scrambled and fled in darkness or stamped out fires spreading from the overturned lanterns, the White Supremacists stuffed the ballot boxes before escaping. Some of their opponent candidates had already stepped down at the governor’s request due to the corrupt bargain they’d made, and now their voter intimidation and fraud resulted in White Supremacist Democrats illegitimately winning the rest of the races. By the time all the ballots were counted, the so-called “White Man’s ticket” had swept the election of 1898 in Wilmington.

On November 9th, the day after the election, the absolute domination of the White Supremacists was trumpeted in newspapers that did not give any hint that their victory was illegitimate. The day was quiet, and many believed the White Supremacists might cease their reign of terror, having gotten what they wanted, but their secret societies and other orchestrators of the campaign knew that more was to come. They had pent up the hatred and violence of their Red Shirt army as long as they could and could postpone its full expression no longer. One white supremacist newspaper printed a notice inviting the white men of Wilmington to a meeting at the courthouse, at which White Supremacists approved a statement they called the “Wilmington Declaration of Independence.” Their declaration resolved that they would no longer be “ruled by Negroes,” nor by whites “affiliating with negroes.” They denounced the right of Black men to vote, suggesting that they used the franchise only to antagonize the interests of whites, who “paid 95 percent of taxes.” They claimed that employing Black workers had somehow harmed Wilmington’s economy and resolved that those jobs must be “handed over to white men,” and that the Daily Record was to be shut down, its editor, Alexander Manly, banished from the city. But more than this, these seditionists resolved that the rest of the city’s Fusionist government was to be overthrown. The Mayor and the Chief of Police were to be forced to resign, and the entire board of aldermen likewise would be unceremoniously ejected from office. One man emerged from this meeting, rather against the preferences of the White Supremacy campaign orchestrators and the members of its secret society leadership, as the de facto leader of the mob. Alfred Moore Waddell, a Confederate veteran, skilled orator, and former congressman, had become something of a drunk with gambling debts. Over the last year, he had seen in the White Supremacy campaign an opportunity to restore his political career, and had wormed his way in by volunteering to give speeches, one speech in particular, declaring that they would “choke the Cape Fear with carcasses” in order to overturn the current social and political order, having stuck in the minds of many Red Shirts. Waddell had only heard about the meeting at the courthouse on November 9th last minute, but once he rushed over, he was called on to speak, much to the chagrin of the campaign’s leaders. After that, he was selected to lead a committee of 25 men to plan their overthrow of the government and to further ensure that no Black man would ever again hold a position of authority in Wilmington. Waddell’s Committee of Twenty-Five started by summoning the men they thought of as the leaders of the Black community. With little time to prepare, these Black leaders, all of them lawyers and business owners, answered the summons and came to the committee, hats in hand, terrified.

Alfred Moore Waddell. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpbh.04294

Alfred Waddell gave these Black leaders an ultimatum, reading the white men’s “Declaration of Independence” aloud and insisting that the Back leadership reply in writing, agreeing to use their influence to meet the demands or face consequences. These summoned Black community leaders left the meeting and immediately wrote their letter of response, capitulating entirely and agreeing to do everything in their power to help ensure white supremacy in the city. But their capitulation would mean nothing. The young man tasked with delivering the letter to Waddell’s house became afraid of the Red Shirts who filled the streets, firing their rifles into the air, and instead chose to drop the letter off at the Post Office. After all, word had already been sent to Waddell that the Black leaders had acquiesced in writing. Waddell, however, was hoping for any reason to escalate the situation and in the process further elevate himself. The next day, November 10th, he emerged from his home after the deadline he had given to the Black leaders to respond, and despite knowing that their response was in the mail, he declared that they had failed to respond to the Committee’s demands. Taking command of some five hundred white gunmen who had gathered in Wilmington, spoiling for a riot, he marched them to the Daily Record office and politely knocked before breaking down the door and destroying the place. Broken piece of the printing press as well as fixtures and pieces of furniture flew out of the office’s windows, and then came smoke as the Red Shirts set the place on fire. A Black fire crew quickly responded as the fire spread to adjacent buildings, but the white rioters kept them at bay until the newspaper offices were entirely burned down. Many were disappointed that the office was empty and that Alexander Manly, the truth-telling Black newspaper editor, was not there for them to lynch. Apparently he had read the writing on the wall and had already fled the city for his life. According to one story passed down in his family, Manly, who often passed for white, was stopped by White Supremacist gunmen outside of Wilmington, who believing him white, confided that they were planning “a necktie party” for the Black newspaper editor Alexander Manly. Supposedly they even gave Manly a rifle and told him to keep an eye out for himself. For the rest of his life, Alexander Manly, who had shown great courage and principle in publishing his inflammatory editorials, would blame himself for what happened next in Wilmington.

At a cotton compress that employed many Black laborers, the workers’ wives showed up, telling them that the White Supremacists were attacking, and the workers left their tasks, begging their employer to let them off work in order to protect their families and homes. Waddell’s Red Shirts, hearing the rumor that a Black mob was forming at the compress, hurried there and begged Waddell to issue an order to shoot all the black workers present. Before that situation got out of hand, though, rumor of an armed Black mob drew the Red Shirts away. A small crowd of Black men had gathered in front of a saloon, dismayed at the burning of the Record and the threats of the Red Shirts. A few of them were armed with what few old weapons they could find, and the Red Shirt mob, believing the long foretold Black uprising had begun, converged on them, amassing across the street and cursing them. Finally, the white rioters unleashed a barrage of gunfire, and some of the Blacks fired back, though they were hopelessly outgunned. White Supremacists would afterward claim that the Blacks fired first, but this seems very unlikely. Twelve Blacks and only two whites were afterward delivered to the hospital with gunshot wounds following this first skirmish, and it is very telling that all of the Black patients had been shot in the back, whereas none of the white patients had been, which certainly would seem to indicate the whites were the aggressors. Regardless, though, the Red Shirts would go on to raise absolute hell that day, marching from place to place around the city, chasing after the ghosts of rumored Black mobs that didn’t exist and shooting down Black men in the streets along the way. Telegraphs were sent to Governor Russell claiming that the Black residents of Wilmington had started the race war they had long warned about, prompting Russell to declare martial law, activate the Wilmington Light Infantry, and send in the state militia. The problem was, many of the Red Shirt rioters were part of the Light Infantry and were commanded by White Supremacy campaign leaders, and the militia detachments sent in were full of white supremacists as well. They now had a mandate from the state to put down an uprising that didn’t exist. In other words, they had the go-ahead to freely massacre the Black people of Wilmington. They hitched the rapid-fire guns that they had obtained in anticipation of this day, and they rode through the streets in machine gun death squads, mowing down any Black citizens who were not already in hiding, and afterward they went to their churches and then to their homes, shooting up the walls of their refuges and demanding they surrender, whereupon they were more likely to be summarily executed than taken prisoner. Before the massacre was over, at least 60 Black residents had been murdered, but many think the number of dead is likely much higher, counting in the several hundreds. A multitude of the Black residents of Wilmington disappeared after the White Supremacist riot, and it is unclear whether they simply fled the city or were buried in the ditches that reports say Red Shirts filled with Black corpses.

White Supremacists posing in front of Alexander Manly’s Daily Record newspaper office after burning it down. Public domain.

 That evening, as the Black families of Wilmington left their homes and hid in cemeteries and swamps to avoid the death squads, Alfred Waddell, now the undisputed leader of the White Supremacist campaign of terror, convened his Committee of Twenty-Five and plotted the completion of their coup. They sent letters to the Fusionist Police Chief, the Mayor, and the Board of Aldermen, demanding that they gather at City Hall for an emergency session. Then they simply drew up a list of names for who would replace the current officeholders. Unsurprisingly, Waddell was selected as the new Mayor of Wilmington, and the rest of the offices would likewise be filled by staunch White Supremacists. When the time came, Waddell and his Committee, as well as a huge mob of Red Shirts, stormed City Hall, shouting taunts and curses as they entered the seat of local government and made their way through its corridors to the main chamber in a scene that should seem exceedingly familiar to us in the 2020s. The purpose of the emergency session was made very clear to all the remaining Fusionist government. They were being asked to resign, and the aldermen had no illusions about whether there was any real choice in the matter. Red Shirt gunmen leaned from the rails in the gallery, scowling and scorning them. Each duly elected board member resigned in turn, and their replacement was “nominated and elected,” though election had nothing to do with it. They were being installed by insurrectionists in a blatant coup. Afterward, Waddell would claim the whole process had been perfectly legal, and astoundingly, even Northern magazines and newspapers, like Collier’s and the New York Times, would report it as such. Northern journalists had been present in town both before and during the riot because of all the anticipation of a race war, but they invariably interviewed whites rather than Blacks about the troubles and took their word for what was going on. After the overthrow of Wilmington’s government, the Times shamefully reported that the city’s Board of Aldermen had simply “resigned in response to public sentiment.” Thus the lies of seditionists and insurrectionists were recorded as truth and became the accepted historical narrative for what happened on November 10th, 1898. The lies proliferated through the years in pamphlets and even textbooks. It was not until 1951 that a historian rejected the White Supremacist version of events. Now, for the most faithful accounting of what really happened, you can read my principal source for this episode, the Pulitzer Prize-winning work by David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy.

In the days after the coup, while the working class Black residents of Wilmington stayed hidden in the forests and swamps outside of town, the Black business owners and white Fusionist leaders remained, confident that the White Supremacists would relent after getting what they wanted. The White Supremacist insurrectionaries, though, were not satisfied. They rounded up Black and Fusionist pillars of the community and directed them to depart from the city and never return. The choice was banishment or certain death, and they were not even given enough time to put their affairs in order. Even among those who complied, some still did not make it out alive, like a Black barber, Carter Peamon, who got onto a train that also carried a group of Red Shirts and was later found dead in the woods with numerous gunshot wounds. Even one white Fusionist, a deputy sheriff the White Supremacists had forced to resign, would likely have been murdered by a gang of Red Shirts during his attempt to leave town if it weren’t for the fact that he gave the Masonic distress call and some whites among his attackers were oathbound to protect him. Eventually, Mayor Alfred Waddell was obliged to get his Red Shirts under control, as it reflected poorly on him when they swarmed the city jail and attempted to lynch the Black men being held there. Waddell slowly but surely leashed his war dogs, and he even made attempts to reassure the Black families hiding in the forests and swamps that it would be safe for them to return, since the city relied on their labor despite their intentions to give as many jobs as they could over to whites. Meanwhile, the white newspaper propaganda continued to churn out falsehoods, pretending everything that had happened was perfectly lawful, and minimizing the violence that had occurred. And among the Northern newspapers that did criticize the methods of Southern Democrats, many nevertheless praised the outcome, tacitly accepting that the city was in better hands than it had been under the Fusionists. It was clear enough that even in the North, most white supporters of emancipation and universal male suffrage still did not feel that Black men were competent to hold public office and wield authority.

Top: a group of Black residents in the Wilmington community. Bottom: a group of the White Supremacist Red Shirts who massacred and banished people like those in the above photo.

Republican President William McKinley was a son of abolitionists who had campaigned against Democrat intimidation of black voters, and yet, he did little to address the insurrection in Wilmington, North Carolina, despite the Afro-American Council beseeching him to present the matter to Congress. Instead, his Attorney General directed a U.S. attorney in North Carolina to investigate the matter with a view to indict. The attorney dutifully undertook the investigation, but in the end, he found no political will in Washington to organize a grand jury. So much as I fear will the orchestrators of the Capitol insurrection of January 6th, 2020, the North Carolinian organizers and perpetrators of the White Supremacist campaign to steal the 1898 election, commit wholesale massacre, and overthrow the government ended up getting away with it scot-free. And if there is one further lesson to drive home why we cannot let the orchestrators of even a failed coup attempt get off without penalty again, it’s the terrible harm that these White Supremacists went on to do while in power. The following year, White Supremacist Democrats took control of North Carolina’s legislature, and they immediately set about enacting policies that would suppress the Black vote. The coup de grace came when they established a poll tax and required a literacy test to vote, but with the caveat that men whose fathers or grandfathers had voted prior to 1867—which of course was the year just before Black men received the right to vote—would be exempt from the requirement. So essentially poor, illiterate whites could still vote without taking the literacy test and paying the poll tax, but most poor, illiterate Blacks could not. This Grandfather Clause was one of the early examples of Jim Crow laws, a law designed to privilege whites and ensure that Blacks remained forever an underclass. Anyone who suggests that there never has been systemic racism can hardly respond to this, and those who claim there no longer remains such systemic racism simply don’t understand how these actions reverberate even today through class divisions, geographic segregation, educational disparity, and enduring racial inequality. These policies and structures spread across the U.S. North Carolina took the idea of the Grandfather Clause from Louisiana, where a similar constitutional amendment had been passed, and in the same way, other Southern states after 1898 used the North Carolina playbook to intimidate and suppress black votes. In the end, this is why we must hold the ringleaders of the January 6th insurrection to account. This is why not only civilians must be prosecuted, but elected representatives who were directly involved, including and especially the former President. They must at the very least be barred from ever again holding office under the 14th Amendment. If they are not held responsible, then their failed coup will only invite further attempts, and when the enemies of democracy seize power, who knows what authoritarian systems and structures they may attempt to establish.

 Further Reading

Bump, Philip. “The Villages sees a voter-fraud outbreak — with a MAGA twist.” The Washington Post, 5 January 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/05/villages-sees-voter-fraud-outbreak-with-maga-twist/.

DeSantis, John. “Wilmington, N.C., Revisits a Bloody 1898 Day and Reflects.” The New York Times, 4 June 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/us/04wilmington.html.

“Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.” Reveal, 24 Oct. 2020, https://revealnews.org/podcast/remembering-a-white-supremacist-coup/.

Solender, Andrew. “All The Elections Trump Has Claimed Were Stolen Through Voter Fraud.” Forbes, 29 Nov. 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2020/11/29/all-the-elections-trump-has-claimed-were-stolen-through-voter-fraud/?sh=214fed9d1d30.

Zucchino, David. Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020.

The Coup on Cape Fear - Part One: The Dark Scheme

They marched in a raucous throng, shouting and chanting, making their way inexorably toward the building that housed the seat of their government. Their intentions were clear. Manipulated and roused to action by an inundation of fake news during the recent election year, they were set on overthrowing officials who had been lawfully elected to represent them. They meant to drive them out, by coercion or by violence, if necessary, for they had not shrunk from violence that day. This was a message to the whole of the country, that men such as they, white men who felt keenly that political change had taken from them the power they felt they deserved, the supremacy to which they felt entitled, that they would not be governed by those they despised, even if they had to defy the laws they claimed to love in order to make sure of it. So with the recent election still fresh in their minds, they stormed the hall of government, kicking up a riot as they made their way through its corridors, shouting out insults as they flooded into the main chamber, pouring into the room and heaping abuse on the duly elected representatives for whom they had come searching. Innocent lives were lost in their historic insurrection, yet afterward, when the dust settled, they and the journalists who had helped to incite them would present these insurrectionists as victims, and as patriots. In the end, there would be no real accountability for the orchestrators of this coup, but the date would be long remembered and live in infamy . . . November 10th 1898.

What’s that? Oh you thought I was talking about January 6th, 2020? I suppose they do have some striking similarities, now that you mention it, but I’m referring to a different insurrection, which occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, 123 years ago. They’re quite different, I assure you. The Wilmington coup was deadly… well, yes, so was January 6th, but I mean deadlier, taking far more lives. And it was perpetrated by white supremacists… well, I mean explicitly, like ALL the insurrectionists were white supremacists, as in self-professed and proud, rather than on January 6th when it was just a good portion of the insurrectionists. Well, if nothing else, the insurrectionists of 1898 North Carolina were at least different in that they were staging a coup following an election they actually won, or rather, stole, and perhaps the biggest difference is that, they actually succeeded in their coup that day, and got away with it afterward, too. Surely those who incited the attempted coup of 2020 won’t also get away with such brazen sedition. OK, you’ve convinced me. Maybe the story of the Wilmington insurrection is indeed the perfect historical lesson we need to better understand how we must respond to the insurrection that took place in Washington, D.C., a year ago.

*

It has now been a full year since Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen election encouraged Qanon conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and true believer Trumpers to lay siege to the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., in an effort to overturn the election results by coercing then Vice President Mike Pence not to accept the electoral vote tally. In marking a year since the Capitol attack, I want to shed some light on the event by looking to the past. The Capital attack of 2020 was hardly the first insurrection or attempt to overthrow the government in the U.S. Not counting numerous slave rebellions, the most famous of which I will have more to say about later, there remains a laundry list of failed insurrections like the one that occurred a year ago. There is Shays’ Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Fries’ Rebellion, and the Dorr Rebellion. There was the State of Muskogee in Florida, the German Coast Uprising in Louisiana, and the Anti-Rent War in Upstate New York. Of course, John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry would count as one, though that too was a slave revolt, and the secession of the Confederate States can be counted as the most significant. Several insurrections occurred following the end of the Civil War as a response to Reconstruction, and these typically involved white supremacists, like the White League in Louisiana, which tried to rise up against their state government in 1874. The Wilmington Coup that I will be discussing has been called the only successful insurrection or coup in American history, but that’s not quite accurate. One white supremacist, anti-Reconstruction insurrection, the Election Massacre of 1874 in Alabama, was quite successful in driving out the Reconstruction government and suppressing Black voters, and was also, as its name indicates, very deadly. Indeed, it might even have been viewed as an example to follow by the orchestrators of Wilmington’s insurrection decades later. The reason I will focus on the Wilmington insurrection as a precedent and a lesson warning us against letting the leaders of such an insurrection go unpunished is because of some striking similarities. Like the previous insurrection in Alabama and like the Capitol attack of 2020, the Wilmington coup involved a reactionary minority, outnumbered at the polls, who sought to take back power illegitimately. As with every major insurrection in the 21st century, both the Alabama insurrection of 1874 and the one we’ll focus on in 1898 North Carolina were perpetrated by right-wing extremists, and much like the Capitol attack, which has seen hundreds of participants prosecuted but none of its orchestraters, including media figures, congressional representatives, and the former president, held accountable, the leaders of these anti-Reconstruction coups were never prosecuted. However, unlike on January 6th, these insurrections succeeded, creating illegitimate, unelected governments, and encouraging similar violence in other Southern states to intimidate and disenfranchise Black voters. In fact, it can be argued that it was in this time, as white supremacists sought to illegally fortify their control of civil government and limit the political influence and economic opportunities of free Blacks that the kind of structural, systemic racism we see today first began to take shape. But what makes the Wilmington insurrection especially relevant today is the way that it was propelled by fake news propaganda, and the way its orchestrators afterward projected guilt onto their opponents. Just as apologists on the Right have claimed a false equivalence between Capitol insurrectionists and racial justice protestors, or attempted to gaslight the country by saying it was actually far-left provocateurs in disguise who stormed the Capitol, after the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, its leaders assured the rest of the nation that their seizure of power was all perfectly lawful and that their violence was actually warranted to quell a race riot initiated by Black residents of the city. The scary part is that most seem to have believed them, and this false narrative of their massacre was accepted as accurate history for more than fifty years.

This Thomas Nast cartoon depicts anti-Reconstructionist white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White League combining forces to restore a “white man’s government” and redeem the “lost cause” by brutally oppressing free Citizens.

In order to grasp the motivations of the insurrectionists in Wilmington, North Carolina, at the end of the 19th century, we must look further back, at the struggle for political power in this important coastal city beginning during the Civil War. Wilmington, as with all of North Carolina, had always been a contested state, split between the pro-slavery Democratic Party and the anti-slavery Republican Party. The state was among the very last to secede and join the Confederacy, and after the Confederacy’s collapse and the end of the Civil War, Wilmington was something of a Mecca for free Blacks. There had always been a relatively large population of free Black people living in North Carolina even before the war between the states, and from the nation’s independence until 1835, the state actually permitted free Black men to vote. And at Wilmington, a bustling trade hub on Cape Fear, there were many port jobs available to Black workers, loading and hauling shipments of fruits and vegetables, rice and corn, peanuts and cotton, tar and guano. Out in the forests, they worked in the timber industry, or harvesting sap to process into turpentine. In 1868, after more than 30 years denied the vote, free Black men who lived and worked around Wilmington were again given the opportunity to exercise the franchise, and even to campaign as delegates to the state’s constitutional convention. With the state under the control of Union forces following the end of the war, and Confederates who refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the Union being denied the right to hold office or vote, it was no surprise that Republicans took the majority of delegate positions in the convention. More surprising and galling to the unreconstructed rebels, though, was that 13 Black men won their races and became delegates. The new state constitution being voted on might guarantee universal male suffrage, which, with the growing population of eligible Black voters around Cape Fear, meant that the party of slavery might never hold power again in cities like Wilmington. This was unacceptable to white supremacists, so unsurprisingly, the presence of the Ku Klux Klan, only recently formed in Tennessee, increased in that area and commenced a voter intimidation campaign. A month before the election, the KKK placed placards around the city, warning that “When darkness reigns, then is the hour to strike,” and publishing notices in newspapers stating that “THE AVENGER COMETH WITH THE NIGHT.” They even went so far as to parade ominously through the streets in their hoods, hauling a cart full of dry bones behind them. What the KKK did not count on, however, was the leadership of one delegate, a relentless campaigner for Black suffrage named Abraham Galloway, who roused his fellow Black men to patrol the streets with pistols and fence posts in hand, ready to combat any white-clad terrorist attempting to intimidate Black voters. Galloway’s resistance campaign was successful, the Black vote was not suppressed, Black men in North Carolina regained the right to vote under its new constitution, and the Ku Klux Klan, as such, did not come back to Wilmington again for several decades.

After the passage of the new constitution, the anti-slavery Republican Party, bolstered by the Black vote and the disenfranchisement of former Confederates, kept control of the state for only a couple years. In 1870, former Whigs and white supremacists formed the Conservative Party and took back the legislature. Eventually the Conservative Party merged with the dominant Democrats, who by fearmongering and race-baiting were able to muster their white base enough to retake power in North Carolina through the 1870s and 1880s, during which time they rigged the game, making it so that certain county official positions that had been going to Black candidates were appointed by them instead of elected, and finding procedural excuses to suppress the Black vote. However, following a recession, many white farmers left the Democratic Party and joined the Populist Party in the early 1890s. A new alliance between the Republicans and the Populists, called Fusionism, would eventually retake the legislature and restore the election of county officials. By this time, sixteen counties in eastern North Carolina boasted Black majorities, and starting back in 1880, Wilmington had had the highest percentage of Black citizens of any city in the South, with a staggering 60 percent of the city’s population. The result was Fusionist domination in local politics, and Black residents winning election to office and earning appointment to positions typically reserved for white men. Wilmington, North Carolina, between 1894 and 1898, was ahead of its time as a truly racially diverse community. In addition to the majority white Republican and Populist officials, like the mayor, the police chief, and the deputy sheriff, there were several Black officials, including magistrates, aldermen, and police officers. In the end, this is what chafed Wilmington’s white supremacists the most. It wasn’t the loss of their party’s political influence, or even being outnumbered by free Blacks, who mostly kept to their own neighborhoods or to the poor, wooded areas outside town. Certainly the poor, jobless whites resented when employers hired a Black laborer instead of them, but the real impetus for the white supremacy campaign mounted in 1898 was the fact that some Black men had been elevated to positions of authority over white men. The mere thought that a white man might be arrested by a Black police officer and convicted by a Black magistrate led white supremacists to bemoan so-called “negro domination.” Of course, this was classic race-baiting. Black officials were still in the minority among the Republican leaders in Wilmington and across the state, and white Republicans were sensitive to the racial resentments of Democrats, and maintained an informal segregation, such that Black magistrates decided cases for Black residents, and Black police arrested only Black offenders. After all, despite many liberal and even radical Republicans in favor of racial equality before the law, many white Republicans still shared the same notions that Black and white should not be social equals. But these first gestures toward Jim Crow segregation were not enough for white supremacist Democrats, who would not be happy unless the Black residents of the Cape Fear area were stripped of any power and made as subservient and afraid as they once had been under the lashes of harsh overseers and cruel slave patrols.

A North Carolina newspaper cartoon spreading propaganda about “negro domination.”

Here, before I go further and discuss the inception of Wilmington’s White Supremacy Campaign of 1898, I feel I must digress to clarify something about the Civil War–era and postbellum Democratic and Republican parties. You’ll sometimes hear conservative commentators today criticize the modern-day Democratic Party as being the party of slavery and the KKK. Usually, it’s in defense of the modern-day Republican Party, which has become the favored party of white supremacists—a kind of whataboutism or tu quoque fallacy, a hurling of the same charge back at the accuser… y’know: classic “no puppet, you’re the puppet” rhetoric. But those who try to use the history of the Democratic Party against them like this are either ignorant or arguing in bad faith. First of all, it’s a conspiracy theory at heart, arguing that Democrats have somehow made the world forget that they used to be pro-slavery white supremacists and that they probably still secretly are. And if you accepted this, then you would have to accept that Republicans also must have taken on a kind of secret façade, one that actively promotes voter suppression, denies the existence of systemic racial injustice, rejects the grievances of racial justice protesters, and appears to actively be courting the support of white supremacists. So if Democrats today are secretly the party of racism, this must mean that the GOP secretly supports universal suffrage, stands behind BLM, actually wants schools to teach the history of racism despite all their protests, and only draws the support of white supremacists because those stupid racists have failed to see through the mutual ruse of both parties. It’s absurd, and such gaslighting relies on historical blindness; it only works on someone who doesn’t understand how our dominant political parties changed over the course of the 20th century. Some will try to simplify this change by saying that the two parties are just different parties with the same names, which is inaccurate, or that they merely “switched” or just swapped platforms, but that is not strictly true either. The change was gradual, called a realignment. At the same time as the Populists in North Carolina were giving Republicans the majority they needed, elsewhere, they were allying with Democrats and beginning to change the party. While previously, Republicans had been the party of a strong central government and Democrats campaigned against it, the populist William Jennings Bryan, who would eventually come to control the Democratic Party, argued instead that the federal government should have different priorities, focusing more on social justice. Bryan put Democrats on the path toward Progressivism, and after the Great Depression, the party was nearly unrecognizable. Meanwhile, Republicans were, at the same time, gradually losing Black voter support, and eventually moved away from arguing for a stronger federal government. Surely this was partly rhetorical, to move in opposition to their political rivals, who now advocated for federal programs, but it was also practical. As historian Eric Rauchway has pointed out, the Republican Party has always been the party of big business interests. Early on, those business interests profited from the federal programs the Republicans pushed for, like the creation of a national currency and the institution of protective tariffs, but later, their big business supporters favored a less intrusive federal government, and the Republicans adjusted their principles accordingly. The realignment according to racial justice issues can be most clearly observed in the politics of the 1950s and ’60s, when it was Democrats who finally delivered significant civil rights legislation, and when Republicans achieved increased political influence in the South through their Southern Strategy, effectively becoming the new party of Southern white supremacy. So to sum up in a simplistic way, Republicans used to be socially progressive, but now Democrats are, and Democrats used to be the party of racism, but now Republicans are. Through it all, however, Republicans have remained the party of the rich. So when someone suggests that you should decide which party’s candidates to support based on what their parties used to represent, remember that it makes a lot more sense to support a party because of what it stands for now, or better yet, to support candidates based on their personal convictions.

Back to Wilmington in 1898, we have Democrats looking for a path to reclaim power from the Fusionist alliance of Populists and Republicans, and we have white residents resenting the social and political equality awarded to the city’s Black majority. Having learned from the actions of anti-Reconstructionists elsewhere in recent decades, some Democrats planned out a White Supremacy Campaign ahead of the election that would deliver them everything they had lately lost to the Fusionists. And I’m not just calling it a “white supremacy campaign” because it was white men wanting to take free Blacks and their allies down a few pegs. No, that’s what its orchestrators called it, proudly, in capital letters. Devised by North Carolina’s Democratic Party chairman, Furnifold Simmons, and Raleigh newspaper publisher Josephus Daniels, the plan was first and foremost to inflame resentment among white residents throughout what they called the “Negroized East” of North Carolina, with especial focus on the Black Belt counties, including Wilmington. This meant a focused propaganda campaign in his and other white supremacist newspapers, lamenting the suffering of poor Southern whites under so-called “Negro domination,” and arranging for public speakers to whip up the white populace to a fever pitch. If their propaganda campaign was successful, they correctly surmised that they would be able to command their own private army of enraged white supremacists come election day and would be able not only to carry the day through intimidation and fraud, but could even go further than that in the days after the election. As they commenced with their plan, using the printed word as well as political cartoons, what Simmons and Daniels found was that they needed to stir up more than just resentment over Black residents voting and holding positions of authority. They needed to spread fear throughout Cape Fear country, make it live up to its name. Following Daniels’s lead, white supremacist newspapers fell back on the age-old specter of the Black man as a beastly rapist. They printed story after lurid story about affairs between Black men and white women, which they presented as rapes, for the prevailing sentiment was that intercourse between the races cannot possibly be consensual. It got so ridiculous that he would report on complete non-events, like a white woman noticing a Black man cross her yard or a teen girl who felt uncomfortable in passing two Black teen boys in the street, and he would report them as narrow escapes from rape with headlines like “No Rape Committed; But a Lady Badly Frightened by a Worthless Negro.” He focused his reporting on Wilmington in order to demonstrate what he called “the result of Negro control in the city.” And make no mistake: he was not in earnest. Josephus Daniels knew what he was doing. In a later memoir, he admitted “that the Democrats would believe almost any piece of rascality,” remarking that, “The propaganda was having good effect.” It succeeded in winning white Populists and even some Republicans to their cause because of deeply ingrained racial tensions, but also because the manipulative and false reporting was not robustly challenged. In one case, a Black newspaper editor did have the courage to challenge the propaganda, and it cost him everything.

White supremacist newspaper propagandist and orchestrator of the Wilmington massacre and coup of 1898, Josephus Daniels.

Alexander Lightfoot Manly was the publisher of a respected weekly Black newspaper in Wilmington, the Record, and he had long tried to follow in the tradition of Abraham Galloway before him, advocating for equality and justice for the Black citizens around Cape Fear. When he stirred the pot, he even made some enemies with certain ministers and upstanding figures in the Black community who preached accommodation, urging the Black residents of Wilmington to keep their heads down and avoid confrontation with whites at all costs. And none of Manly’s editorials upset them and enraged white supremacists as much as his challenges to the notion of Black men as insatiable, beastly rapists. Manly had the courage and honesty to point out the double standard, remarking on how frequently white men raped Black women without consequence. He suggested that if they were to condemn all rape, and seek to prosecute rapists whether they were Black or white, they would find the Black residents of Wilmington their greatest allies in such a crusade against this heinous crime. And he further challenged claims about the frequency with which Black men raped white women, rejecting the doctrine that white women could not possibly be consensual paramours of the Black men who may be caught with them. While Manly may have believed his editorials could do some good, speaking truth to power as good journalists should, in the hands of Josephus Daniels’s and Furnifold Simmons’s White Supremacy Campaign, it became little more than fuel for the white hot fire they were stoking. They reprinted his most damning editorial over and over, suggesting that it was a provocation and an admission that Black men openly intended to ravage their white women. White supremacists threatened to haul Manly out of his newspaper office and lynch him, but Josephus Daniels discouraged such mob action. After all, it was only August. He much preferred to keep stoking resentments until Election Day, so he pressured the Republican Governor, Daniel Russell, to condemn Manly’s editorial. With white advertisers ceasing to do business with him, this was the beginning of the end for Alexander Manly in Wilmington.

During the next leg of his White Supremacist Campaign, Josephus Daniels kicked his fake news propaganda machine into high gear. He began to report on supposed rumors that the Black residents of Wilmington were planning an uprising. Never mind the fact that he and Furnifold Simmons and certain secret societies in Wilmington were planning their own uprising, which of course he did not report on. No, he reported unconfirmed rumors about Black women intending to burn down the white homes in which they were servants, of the entire Black populace intending to embark on a murder campaign house to house if the Democrats won the day. It was all part of the white supremacists’ plan to gaslight, to obfuscate, to project. Such that, when they finally chose their moment to enact violence, they could say they were defending themselves. And it worked. The white citizens of Wilmington began to stockpile an arsenal of revolvers and Winchester rifles. They even acquired a rapid-fire gun that they placed on a tugboat just off shore, and they invited certain Black leaders to a demonstration of their artillery piece just to intimidate them. Unsurprisingly, some Black citizens, fearing for their safety, also attempted to acquire guns, and the white gun sellers refused to fulfill their orders and informed Josephus Daniels, who reported on it as proof of the Black conspiracy to rise up in armed revolt, writing, “The Dark Scheme Has Been Detected.” In October, at a white supremacist rally called the Great White Man’s Basket Picnic, Red Shirt brigades from other regions travelled to put on a show. These mounted terrorists in red shirts showed how a terrifying brigade of armed white supremacists could intimidate Black and Republican voters. And the keynote speaker, Pitchfork Tillman, former governor of South Carolina and rabid white supremacist, spoke of his successful campaign to intimidate Black residents in his home state. He wore a scowl and an eyepatch as he recounted his involvement in the Hamburg Massacre, in which he and his Red Shirts oversaw the murder of six Black men, an event that set off a series of similar attacks and an estimated 100 further murders leading up to the election of 1876, in which the Democrats took power, or “redeemed” the state. Following the Great White Man’s Rally and Picnic, the white supremacists of Cape Fear began wearing red and forming brigades of their own, and the lynchings of Black men steadily increased.

Amexander Manly, editor of the Black newspaper the Daily Record, and a courageous voice against white supremacist propaganda in late 19th-century North Carolina.

This was not the first time that false rumors of a forthcoming Black rebellion resulted in indiscriminate violence in North Carolina. Back in 1831, just north of North Carolina’s border with Virginia, Nat Turner initiated his bloody rebellion, killing more than fifty white residents of Southampton County, including women and children. While he and his followers remained at large, similar rumors began to spread south of the border, in North Carolina, that slaves were planning a large scale uprising. As in Wilmington more than 60 years later, the newspapers fanned the flames of this panic, falsely reporting that armies of fugitive slaves were marching into North Carolina, murdering white families and freeing their slaves to add to their numbers. It was the most horrific nightmare of slaveholders throughout the South, every Southern white man and woman’s secret terror, and whites in North Carolina, including Wilmington, reacted to their worst fear coming true without questioning its veracity. They rounded up Black people who had the misfortune of being out on the street or away from their plantations, many of whom had not even heard about Nat’s Fray, as it was called, and they whipped them, tortured them, burned them at the stake, beheaded them and placed their heads on posts as warnings to the other rebel slaves, who didn’t actually exist. In fact, there was not a single instance of a slave killing a white person in North Carolina at the time, or for some time afterward. The newspapers, in warning about a massacre of white residents, had incited the massacre of Black men and women instead. In 1898, when Josephus Daniels ratcheted up his White Supremacy Campaign to lie to the public about Black plans for an armed uprising, he was tapping into that same fear. And he certainly was knowingly misreporting, for accomplices in his campaign had hired Black detectives to infiltrate the community and report back on what the Black residents of Wilmington were up to, and these detectives had reported that the Black residents were not up to anything besides fearing for their lives. By this time, Daniels’s and Simmons’s White Supremacy Campaign had determined to foment real violence after Election Day, so we can assume that when he began to spread rumors of this so-called Dark Scheme on Cape Fear, he was counting on his white readers having the very same reaction as they’d had in 1831. He would not be disappointed. Join me for Part Two to hear more about how this disinformation campaign led to voter intimidation, election fraud, armed insurrection, and massacre.

 Further Reading

“Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.” Reveal, 24 Oct. 2020, https://revealnews.org/podcast/remembering-a-white-supremacist-coup/.

Rauchway, Eric. “When and (to an extent) why did the parties switch places?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 May 2010, www.chronicle.com/blognetwork/edgeofthewest/when-and-to-an-extent-why-did-the-parties-switch-places.

Zucchino, David. Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020.

A Very Historically Blind Christmas Carol

The year is 1888, and the city of London is gripped by terror because of the ripper murders. This serial killer mutilated at least five women at night around certain impoverished districts of the city, though other killings were also believed by many to have been committed by the same person. Newspaper coverage of the murders turned into one of the first true media frenzies, and the result has been a lasting legacy of myths and pseudohistory surrounding the murders. The story of Jack the Ripper is one I’d certainly like to tell one day on this podcast, but this Christmas season, I want to focus on another story that is said to have occurred in this time, while all of London was locking their doors, afraid of the bloody phantom killer stalking the streets. That year, during the week before Christmas a young girl named Carol Poles went missing. When the authorities failed to find young Carol, her family and others from her community banded together to find her, terrified that she might become the victim of the Ripper, if that wasn’t already her fate. However, as they went from house to house, knocking on doors and asking about their dear Carol, few would open their doors and talk to them, fearing that it was the Ripper lurking outside their door. Therefore, as a signal that they meant no harm to the occupants of each home they visited, they sang Christmas songs outside each door, and only when the residents opened up did they inquire whether little Carol Poles had been seen. Alas, they never found young Carol, but every year, they kept up the tradition in her memory, singing songs from door to door, and that is why we call Christmas songs sung from door to door Christmas Carols. Isn’t that a fascinating story. Too bad it’s utter nonsense. It’s unclear where this urban legend originated, but it’s very clear that it is hogwash. If they first called Christmas songs carols in 1888, it’s rather hard to explain why Charles Dickens called his novella A Christmas Carol in 1843. So where does the word “carol” come from? Some identify John Awdlay, a chaplain in Shropshire, as being the author of the earliest known English usage of this word when he compiled a list of 25 “caroles of Cristemas” in 1426. Certainly the Oxford English Dictionary confirms it was well in use by the 1500s. As for its origin, some, like Andrew Gant, author of one of my principal sources for this episode, The Carols of Christmas, claim that its derivation is murky and that it is said to have been borrowed from many different languages. The Oxford English dictionary tells us the English word was in use as far back as the 1300s referring to songs or dances generally, and not necessarily those associated with Christmas, and it traces the word etymologically to Old French. However, from there the origins do indeed become obscure, and there is debate over whether it may be derived from the Greek-Latin chorus or some other ancient derivation, such as the Latin corolla, or little crown, referring to the ring-dances also called “carols.” So as we begin to look closely at these famous songs of Christmas, we already see a patchwork of myths, misinformation, and historical blind spots.

We cannot begin our study of the little known history and surprising facts behind certain well-known Christmas carols without first properly delving into the true history behind the tradition of caroling from door to door, as we hear in the classic carol “Here We Come a-Wassailing.” This tradition has its roots in the older forms of Christmas that I spoke about in my first Christmas special, when it was more of a midwinter bacchanal that saw the norms of society, from gender to class, upended topsy-turvy style, which of course I also spoke further about in my second Christmas special. If you haven’t listened to those, you’ve got plenty of fun seasonal listening in store this holiday. The word “wassail” can be traced to an Old Norse toast to one’s health. “Waes hael,” was toasted, essentially meaning “Be healthy,” and the response was “Drinc hael,” whereupon the toasters drank. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote in the 12th century that it entered the English language when the Anglo-Saxon chieftain’s daughter Rowena taught it to Vortigern, King of the Britons, though this is pure mythologizing. How this toasting became specifically associated with Christmas is unclear. The toast was commonly shouted at coronations, some of which occurred in Christmas time during the 11th and 12th centuries, including those of William the Conqueror and Stephen of Blois. However, it may simply be because people did a lot of drinking during the wild old Christmas festivities. Since then, though, the toast has evolved in meaning. A wassail is a drink, typically some kind of spiced ale, commonly drunk in Christmas and Twelfth Night festivities, and the verb, wassailing, refers to the nocturnal visits of the poor to houses of the affluent. These house-to-house visits were not the mannered and lovely caroling of today, however, but rather a kind of drunken form of panhandling in which wassailers asked for money or food. Often the singing was more of a threat. If the occupants did not treat them generously, they would annoy them with their intoxicated caterwauling until they got what they wanted. This, the true nature of Christmas caroling, may surprise some of you listeners, but Christmas carols are full of surprises like this. When you look into them, you find that lovely songs may not be about what you think they’re about, may not even be about Christmas at all, and may have a surprising history behind them.

A Christmas Eve 1842 issue of the Illustrated London News, depicting Father Christmas in a wassail bowl.

Ever since the premiere of A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, watching it has become something of a national tradition in the U.S. In 1992, the Peanuts gang returned with an all-new Christmas special, It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown. Just as the first special had encouraged a more traditional Christian view of the holiday, the new special once again had Linus turn to the Bible for some insight, this time seeking an understanding of the classic repetitive song The Twelve Days of Christmas. “That song drives me crazy,” says Sally. “What in the world is a calming bird?” In response, Linus cracks open a Bible and says, “A calling bird is a kind of partridge. In 1 Samuel 26:20, it says: ‘For the king of Israel has come out to seek my life...just as though he were hunting the calling bird.’ There's a play on words here, you see? David was standing on a mountain, calling. And he compared himself to a partridge being hunted.” In reality, “calling birds” are not “a kind of partridge.” In fact, the original English version of this song, first published in the 18th century as a children’s rhyme, actually describes the 4th day’s gift as “colly birds,” which referred to European blackbirds. Oddly, among the many translations of this verse in 1 Samuel, none matches what Linus reads, and most translate it as a partridge, not a “calling bird.” It’s very strange then that they didn’t just have Linus talking about the first day’s gift, the iconic partridge in a peartree. But this line too sparks debate among ornithologists, since a partridge is a ground bird that would not typically be found in a tree. Some have looked to an alternate version of the song which says that on the first day of Christmas, the true love gives “a part of a juniper tree,” suggesting some corruption has turned it into a partridge in a peartree. However, most of the gifts in the song are game birds, so it would stand to reason that it is a partridge. Another explanation lies in the fact that the original English version was a translation of an older French rhyme, Les Douze Mois, The Twelve Months, not a Christmas rhyme at all. It is pointed out that the Old French word for a partridge was un perdrix, which sounds very much like a peartree. However, if the line was originally bilingual, “A partridge and un perdrix,” that would make it a gift of two birds on day one, spoiling the whole structure of the song. Regardless of what the original line was and how it was corrupted, one thing is certain. The song is absolutely not derived from that verse in 1 Samuel that Linus implies it is from.
Charles Schulz would not be the last to suggest that this classic Christmas song, which had evolved like so many others from earlier versions that were not about Christmas at all, actually has some religious meaning that it doesn’t really have. Since the 1990s, a claim has been circulating the Internet that the Twelve Days of Christmas was actually a secret coded Catholic catechism dating to the English Reformation, when Catholics could not openly practice their faith. However, this claim, often credited to 20th century Canadian hymnologist Hugh McKellar, doesn’t make much sense on a number of levels. First, the code itself is asinine. It says the twelve drummers drumming represented the twelve points of the Apostles Creed; the eleven pipers piping were actually the eleven apostles (minus the Twelfth Apostle, Judas Iscariot); the lords a-leaping clearly must represent the 10 Commandments; the ladies dancing were the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit; the maids a-milking stood for the eight beatitudes; the swans a-swimming represented the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit; the geese a-laying were the six days of creation, the five golden rings really the five Books of Moses or Pentateuch; the four calling birds could be the four gospels; three French hens were the three gifts of faith, hope, and love; two turtle doves stood for the Old and New Testaments; and the partridge in a pear tree symbolized Jesus Christ on the cross, with God himself as the “true love” that gives all these things. The clearest refutation of this claim was given by Snopes, which pointed out that there is simply no support for this claim beyond the simple repeating of the claim itself. If we look at all these supposed symbolic connections, there is no correlation beyond the numbers of the things. There is no clear reason to associate Christ with a partridge, or leaping lords with commandments, or milkmaids with beatitudes. Also, besides the fact that there were varying levels of toleration of Catholicism in the centuries between Henry VIII and the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, most of these secretly coded symbols, with the exception of the 12 points of the Apostle’s Creed, are just Christian things, not explicitly Catholic things. It’s not as though the Reformation did away with all talk about Christ, his Apostles, the Holy Spirit, and the books of the Old Testament. In fact, the time when the contents of the song might have been forbidden would have been during the English Civil War, when Puritans briefly outlawed Christmas, but in that case, it would have been the carol itself that was banned, not the mere mention of certain Christian concepts. While this Christmas carol myth is altogether ridiculous, it is perfectly representative of the way people simply don’t understand the origins of their favorite seasonal songs and sometimes choose to completely invent a fictional origin that suits their worldviews.

Statue of Saint Wenceslaus in St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague

One classic Christmas song, with an earworm melody and an uplifting message of Christian charity in the face of a harsh winter, is Good King Wenceslaus, but the history behind this popular Christmas song reveals that it is not quite what it seems. First, there is the ancient history of King Wenceslaus himself, who was actually a 10th century Duke of Bohemia, named Václav. According to the legend that that would see him later venerated as a saint and remembered as a king by Czechs, he was an honorable and virtuous ruler, devoted to Catholicism despite the pagan beliefs of much of his family, and he was known for his great charity to the lowliest of his subjects. This is the legend that would inspire the songwriter who would further immortalize him, but the reality of his life was rather more violent than the song lets on. When his father died, his grandmother became regent, but his pagan mother resented her and had her murdered, strangled with her own veil, it is said. When his mother took control, she suppressed Christianity, leading to a rebellion and coup by Christian noblemen who ended up exiling her and installing a teenage Václav as duke. His duchy was beset on all sides by enemies, from Magyars to Saxons, as well as from within, by conspirators who had gathered around his pagan twin brother, the resentful Boleslav who wanted power for himself. Duke Václav was eventually killed by his brother’s supporters, and supposedly run through by his own brother with a lance while celebrating the birth of Boleslav’s son. This has been portrayed in the many biographies and hagiographies of Václav as a trap laid by his brother, who had invited the duke to celebrate his son’s birth all the while planning to assassinate him, but this may very well be an embellishment meant to further portray the Catholic duke as a martyr of his faith, killed by pagan usurpers. In truth, the invitation may have been a genuine peace offering that only turned violent when a drunken argument broke out. It’s impossible to tell because the history of Václav comes to us principally through the aforementioned hagiographies, the purpose of which are to encourage the elevation of their subjects to sainthood, and thus are inherently unreliable.

Thus the image of Good King Wenceslas as a barefoot penitent who gave everything to the poor, the so-called “father of all the wretched,” is unlikely to have much relationship to the true character of the man. But it was just such hagiography that inspired Victorian clergyman John Mason Neale to write the famous hymn about him. Of course, the story that Neale describes in the hymn, of Wenceslas and his page trudging through the snow and risking frostbite to carry food and firewood to a poor subject living up a mountain, is pure fiction, a bit of further hagiography. Neale wrote the lyrics to the tune of an old Latin hymn, “Tempus adest floridum,” which in translation means, “Spring has unwrapped her flowers.” And he wrote it not as a Christmas song, but as a hymn for St. Stephen’s Day, observed in the liturgical calendar on December 26th. This much is clear from the first lines of the song, “Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even…” So we have a hymn adapted from a song about spring to celebrate St. Stephen’s Day, all about a Bohemian duke whose pagan family made a habit of bloody coups. Where is Christmas here? Is it enough simply to talk of snow? Or is it the least mention of Christian charity? And what of the beliefs of the hymn writer, John Mason Neale? Does it spoil his song entirely that he chose as his subject a Catholic saint for song to be sung by choristers in the Church of England? Many of his contemporaries certainly thought so, accusing him of idolatry and crypto-Catholicism because of his high church sympathies, leading even to mobs threatening to stone him and burn his home to the ground. Once, at the funeral of a nun, he was physically assaulted for his encouragement of Anglo-Catholicism. So the question, very relevant to the history of other Christmas carols, becomes this: how much might the biography of a songwriter cast different light on a well-known Christmas song?

James Pierpont, the unsavory character who wrote “The One Horse Open Sleigh,” better known today as “Jingle Bells.”

The perfect example of a carol-writer’s life completely changing a Christmas carol can be found in one of the most upbeat, light-hearted, and seemingly innocent of all Christmas songs: Jingle Bells. Since learning more about its composer, I personally have not been able to listen to this previously lovely song without some distaste. There is actually some debate over where the song was written, with both Medford, Massachusetts, and Savannah, Georgia, claiming to have been its birthplace. In truth, both have some rightful claim, since its composer, James Pierpont, was surely writing about his memories of snowy Massachusetts when he wrote the lyrics, for the city in which he actually wrote it, Savannah, is not known for snow. James Pierpont came from a family of Unitarian preachers, but he wasn’t very pious himself. At fourteen, he ran away from boarding school and went to sea, where he seems to have picked up some poor character traits. Returning to his family’s hometown of Medford, Mass., seven years later, he took a wife and fathered three children, but he promptly abandoned them to seek his fortune Out West, in San Francisco. After losing everything to a fire and then losing his wife, who remained back east, to tuberculosis, he did not return home to raise his children. Instead, hearing that his brother John had started a church in Savannah, he left his children in his father’s care and went south to play the organ. There in Savannah, as his brother preached an increasingly unpopular anti-slavery doctrine to his Southern congregation, James seems to have fallen into scandal. He took a new bride, fathering a child with her years before their nuptials, according to one census, and thereafter begetting more, a second brood, seemingly without much thought for the three children he had left behind in Massachusetts. Looking at his most popular song, the Christmas song he titled “The One-Horse Open Sleigh,” we can see that it’s not really about Christmas. Once again, it’s simply the presence of snow that has made it a Christmas standard. Rather, the song is about wooing ladies, and may illustrate James Pierpont’s reputation as something of a rake. Its full lyrics are about taking a young lady out for a sleigh ride, and then being shown up and humiliated by another “young gent.” The message of the song seems to be that you get more girls with a more impressive sleigh, as summed up in its final stanza, “Go it while you’re young. Take the girls tonight.” Think of it like a more modern song that might talk about impressing one’s conquests with a flashy car.

Besides this song, Pierpont’s other lyrics further betray his low character. He wrote more than one song complaining about having to pay his debts. And his numerous minstrel songs betray his drifting away from his Unitarian roots toward a more Southern and racist mindset, especially one titled “The Colored Coquette.” Finally, when his abolitionist preacher brother returned home to Massachusetts at the outbreak of the Civil War, James showed his true colors. He remained in Savannah, and he joined the Confederate army, serving in a cavalry regiment for two years, and he wrote numerous Confederate war songs, including “Strike for the South,” the lyrics of which unironically argue that Confederates fought for liberty; “We Conquer or Die,” whose lyrics suggest that defeat (read: the end of slavery) was a fate like unto death; and “Our Battle Flag!” which told Confederate soldiers that if they died in battle, they went to a “hero’s grave.” So there you have it. Next time you hear Jingle Bells, you, like me, may have a hard time not thinking about the child-abandoning, debt-evading, womanizing, white supremacist secessionist who wrote it. And ironically, his nephew, John Pierpont Morgan, or J.P. Morgan, the famously ruthless banker of the Gilded Age, has been unfavorably compared to that iconic Christmas film villain, Henry Potter, of It’s a Wonderful Life. Now, I’m not suggesting that the art cannot be separated from the artist, that this classic Christmas carol, so simple and popular among children, should be canceled. Rather, I’m saying that, if knowing this kind of spoils the song for you, as it does me, then maybe you delete it from your Spotify Christmas playlist. And there is a contemporary alternative with which you might replace it. “Up on the Housetop,” a jaunty and genuinely Christmas-y song about Santa Claus’s visit, was also written during the Civil War, but its composer, Benjamin Hanby, was an abolitionist through and through, whose family is said to have worked the Underground Railroad. Like Pierpont, he too wrote other songs, like “Darling Nelly Gray” and “Ole Shady,” which unlike other songs about slavery in that era actually highlighted the cruelty of the institution with a focus on its separation of families.

The Illustrated London News's illustration of the Christmas Truce.

Much as Jingle Bells was never really about Christmas, so too another iconic Christmas carol, Oh Christmas Tree, was never really about Christmas trees per se. Nevertheless, it plays a central role in one of the most cherished modern Christmas stories, which itself may be somewhat embellished. Many have heard the story of the Christmas Truce of 1914, when during an unofficial ceasefire on the Western Front, German and British soldiers crossed the trenches, sang Christmas carols, and played football, or soccer as Americans like me would call it, all of it to the chagrin of their sternly disapproving generals. Like most stories in history, this one too has gathered a variety of myths and misconceptions on its way through the years. For example, it was not so general a truce as some might believe, with hostilities continuing in many places, and the military leadership was not so disapproving as the legend would have it. They did not angrily take action to halt the armistice or discipline those soldiers who had participated in it or censor news about it afterward, as would later be claimed. Even the soccer matches seem to have been greatly exaggerated, with most accounts of them originating from rumors or reports that games of football had been proposed but never actually played because the soldiers didn’t actually have a ball handy. The carol-singing does appear to have been accurate though, and the song they often as not sang together was one well known in both their languages: “O Christmas Tree” to the British, and “O Tannenbaum” to the Germans. But the two were not really singing about the same thing. Tannenbaum more accurately translates to fir tree; turning this song into an ode to Christmas trees was a bit of creative mistranslation.

The song and its melody both evolved from different folk traditions. When Bavarian composer Melchior Franck wrote the lyrics in the 17th century, praising the evergreen tree for its hardy survival through the harsh cold of winter—a lesson on perseverance and stoicism in the face of cruel hardship—he was taking part in a long folk tradition of poetry and song that used evergreens as metaphors. But the lyrics would not be set to its recognizable melody until arranged by another German composer, Ernst Anschütz, in 1824. The tune he used can also be traced back to an old Westphalian folk song, the lyrics of whose later iteration, popular as a drinking song among German students in the Middle Ages, spoke of Roman poet Horace, his romance of women, his drunken merrymaking, and his intention to live in the moment and enjoy life, or carpe diem, as Horace would have said. In some sense, the song’s association with Christmas seems natural: the imagery of greenery in the winter lends itself well to the seasonal festivities, which have always been about celebrating the persistence of life in the midst of the winter’s cold lifelessness, and even its melody’s now lost association with merrymaking connects perfectly with the true Saturnalian origins of the holiday. But it occurs to me that, during the Christmas Truce, while the British might have sung the song with visions of Christmas trees festooned with gaudy decorations in mind, the Germans may have been thinking more about the intended meaning of the song, about precious life surviving in a cruel world and the need to persevere like the evergreen through this ghastly, numbing time. And unknowingly, all of them were acting in accordance with the old theme associated with the song’s melody, seizing the day, plucking some few moments of joy for themselves before time marched them on, many of them to their deaths.

Publicity photo of American entertainers Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien, who played her little sister in Meet Me in St. Louis

Even the meanings of more modern Christmas songs are not always what many think they are, or what they were at first meant to be. For example, my father’s favorite Christmas song is “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” because, according to him, it’s so hopeful and uplifting. Dad, I know you listen to the podcast occasionally, so first, Merry Christmas, and second, you know I’m going to explode your understanding of this song. I’ve talked to you before about how this classic Judy Garland showtune is not hopeful but bleak and not uplifting but rather devastating. Well, now let’s go even further into why this song only seems positive because it was more than once revised to alter its tone. The song was originally written for the musical Meet Me in St. Louis, a classic that I recommend everyone view this season. In the musical, a family’s patriarch has decided to move them all from St. Louis to New York, and none of his girls is happy about it. The song is sung by Garland’s character, Esther, to her little sister Tootie, who is afraid that Santa won’t be able to find her in New York. Esther is melancholy herself in the scene, looking pensively out a window at the snow and thinking about the young man she’ll have to leave behind because of their cross-country move. This is the context of the song, full of pain because of a major life change that seems to be the end of their lives in the city they love, and its lyrics’ talk of having a merry Christmas is ironic and even rueful. When the song was first written, the lyrics better reflected this tone. Esther was to sing “Have yourself a merry little Christmas; it may be your last; next year we will be living in the past.” We have Judy Garland to thank for the somewhat brighter tone of the song in the film. She had been performing USO tours and had seen firsthand how another sad and yearning song of hers, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” had taken on greater meaning to troops who saw in it a song about their eventual return home from service. She felt that a revision of the lyrics to this song could make it similarly meaningful on more than one level. That and she thought her character came off a bit mean singing the harsh original version to an already tearful child. So the lyrics were changed from “No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who were dear to us will be near to us no more” to the more familiar “Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who are dear to us gather near to us once more.” Yet still the song retained its melancholic heart, with a line at the end that “we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” The song did not see its final, joyful sanitization until 14 years after it was written, when Frank Sinatra wanted to include it in his album and came to the original songwriter, complaining that the “muddle through somehow” line still made it too sad. “'The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas,” he said “Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?” And thus was born the line “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough,” and the original tone of the song was finally lost to any who hear it divorced from its intended context. Only the pathos in Judy Garland’s original performance of the song hints at the utter despair that the sung was meant to evoke.

In my previous Christmas specials I have spoken at length about the problems with the biblical nativity story, as well as the numerous myths and mysteries that derive from it. These include the true date of Christ’s birth, the time of year when he was born and the likelihood of shepherds tending their flocks at night during that season, the legend of the Christmas star, and the mythos of the Three Magi. Many of these elements of Christmas mythology owe their immortality to their inclusion in more than one Christmas carol. One example of a carol portraying the nativity, whose depiction has caused some controversy and debate, is Away in a Manger. One line in this song mentions “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” and its critics have gone so far as to call the song heretical. This innocent line about a placid babe, they said, suggests that Christ did not display human qualities, like a full range of emotion, and as such the song took part in the notorious heresy called Docetism. But whatever one thinks of this terribly serious debate, the song “Away in a Manger,” formerly called “The Cradle Song,” serves as a final apt example of the mystery and misconception that surrounds so many Christmas carols. The song is popularly attributed to Martin Luther, the famed church reformer. It was said that he wrote the song as a lullaby for his children. It’s feasible enough. Luther is known to have written hymns. But in fact, it does not appear to be true at all, having only first been claimed in 1884 by a Universalist newspaper whose editors regarded Martin Luther very highly. The true author of the lyrics remains unknown, and even harder to pin down is the composer of its melody, for it has been sung to many different tunes through the years. In a 1951 article, music scholar Richard S. Hill identified no less than 41 distinct tunes that have been used for the song. As with “Away in a Manger,” it seems the history of most Christmas carols is confounded by blind spots and myths. In this way, it reflects well on the history of the holiday generally. Those who bloviate like Linus about the “true meaning” of Christmas, or demand some adherence to a perceived original tradition of the holiday, fail to understand that the original meaning is mislaid in a confusion of misconceptions and mysteries, and that today’s traditions are just a jumble of whatever stuck through the years, their original forms lost to time. Such is the case with all folk tradition.

Further Reading

"carol, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/28123.

Collins, Ace. Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas. Zondervan, 2001.

Gant, Andrew. The Carols of Christmas: The Celebration of the Surprising Stories Behind Your Favorite Holiday Songs. Nelson Books, 2015.

Montgomery, Bob. “Four Calling Birds.” American Ornithological Society, 25 Dec. 2017, americanornithology.org/four-calling-birds/.

A Defense of the 1619 Project

In the early 17th century, the port city of Luanda on the western shore of Africa, in what is today Angola, was a Portuguese colony established through the invasion and decades-long subjugation of the Kingdom of Ndongo. An estimated 50,000 Angolans, many of them captured as prisoners of war, were shipped to foreign ports as chattel slaves, often via the Middle Passage to the New World. One ship, the San Juan Bautista, carried 350 slaves bound for the Spanish colony of Veracruz, but along the way, two English privateers attacked the vessel and seized some of the Africans aboard. These two privateer ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer, landed, carrying “twenty and odd” of these enslaved Africans at the English settlement of Jamestown in Virginia in late August of 1619. Some of these men and women are recorded as having been sold to prominent settlers in Jamestown—including the colonial governor of Virginia, George Yeardley—and they are viewed as the first African slaves in the United States. Some may quibble, though. Their being the first African slaves must be specified, as some Native Americans had previously been enslaved by settlers. And some may point to African slaves in Spanish colonies in what is today Florida to argue that the slaves brought to Virginia in 1619 were not the first Africans enslaved on land that today is part of the continental United States, and this of course is true. Nevertheless, the date 1619 has long stood as the beginning of African slavery in English colonial America, and certainly as the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade in Virginia, which can be viewed as the birth of the Southern institution of slavery. Despite my caveats, recognition of 1619 as the beginning of American slavery is not controversial. Search any academic database—JSTOR, EBSCO, Gale—and you’ll see scholarly articles and books almost universally identifying 1619 as the birth of American slavery. In fact, you’ll see more disagreement about the end date, with some choosing 1862, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, or 1865, the end of the Civil War, and some suggesting slavery did not truly end until as late as 1877, the end of Reconstruction. The point is, such milestones will always be matters of emphasis and interpretation. The only reason that the beginning date of 1619 is so quibbled over now is that 400 years later, in 2019, the New York Times Magazine published a special issue launching The 1619 Project, an initiative that sought to “reframe the country’s history” with a central focus on the lasting repercussions of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans, and it approached this simply by asking readers to consider “what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” Since then, the project earned its creator, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, both a Pulitzer Prize and enough criticism that this series of articles and the educational resources it inspired are now buried beneath a stinking pile of controversy.

Whether or not you believe that our national narrative can be reasonably said to have begun in late August 1619, the beginning of this controversy undoubtedly began in late August 2019, when the Times launched The 1619 Project with the publication of numerous articles by journalists, legal scholars, and historians, as well as pieces by literary artists. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay argues that the country’s founding principles about inalienable rights and equality were not genuine until Black Americans, to whom said equality was not extended and such rights were denied, struggled to make them real. Additional articles included sociologist Matthew Desmond’s argument that cruel labor practices representative of American capitalism had their start in the treatment of slaves on plantations, journalist Jamelle Bouie’s tracing of obstructionist partisan politics and counter-majoritarianism to the efforts of Southern politicians to preserve slavery, historian Kevin Kruse’s piece on segregation and its connection to white flight and suburban sprawl, and journalist Linda Villarosa’s discussion of some medical stereotypes and myths previously used to justify slavery that persist even today. There was significant fanfare at the time for the project’s launch, and it was viewed as an admirable undertaking by many scholars, even if they felt it wasn’t exactly breaking new ground with its claims. As Alex Lichtenstein, editor of the American Historical Review explained, it struck him “as laudable, if unexceptional.” Certainly the Times and the writers involved in the project must have expected some criticism and controversy, considering the provocative tone taken by Hannah-Jones and other contributors and the central conceit of the entire project, which suggests the popular view about our nation’s founders and their principles may be a myth and that something more distasteful lies rotting in our roots, poisoning the whole tree. However, building as they were on the sentiments of much modern historical scholarship and sociology, they likely expected opposition to arise from the Right, from conservative think tanks, whose talking points would filter out to politicians and Fox New talking heads. And certainly that opposition would come in time. But imagine their surprise when strong criticism arose first from the Left.

Leon Trotsky, modern followers of whom were the first to object to The 1619 Project on ideological grounds. Public Domain.

The first major criticism of The 1619 Project came from the International Committee of the Fourth International, on their website, the Word Socialist Web Site. If you are not familiar with the ICFI and their website, they are an organization of Trotskyists, that is, a movement that follows the Marxist philosophy of Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. In their first attack on the project, they called it “a politically motivated falsification of history.” In their view, it was an effort to further leverage “identity politics” and forge an exclusive political alliance between voters of color and the Democratic Party. This accusation really reeks of conspiracy theory, since the Democratic Party was not an official sponsor of the project and the writers who contributed to it, while liberal and progressive, are not explicitly affiliated with the party and may indeed lean farther left than many Democrats or may even have some sympathy for certain Trotskyist views and share some of their criticisms of the Democratic Party. It’s hard to tell, since journalists and historians typically try to steer clear of working directly for any political party, since it could undermine their authority and/or credibility. Regardless, though, the accusation is pretty rich, considering the central criticism that the Trotskyists leveled at The 1619 Project was itself politically motivated. They took especial umbrage with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s characterization of racism being “in the DNA” of the United States. According to the Trotskyist criticism, The 1619 Project is too pessimistic, and it fallaciously suggests that racism is an inescapable part of the fabric of American culture. In other words, the Marxists think that the Times didn’t go far enough in advocating for a change in political or economic conditions, even though such advocacy is implicit throughout the Project. To the Trotskyists, drawing attention to the ubiquity of racism is akin to throwing up one’s arms and saying there’s nothing to be done about it, and by their reckoning, the Project is problematic because it did not seek to foment an overthrow of the entire economic order. And how did they further their argument? By publishing a series of interviews with historians who also criticized The 1619 Project, though none of them on the same ideological grounds.

Among the larger group of historians interviewed on the World Socialist Web Site, only four of them, James McPherson, Victoria Bynum, Gordon Wood, and James Oakes, signed a letter penned by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz that demanded corrections be made to the articles thus far published. The letter insisted that it was only a matter of keeping the Times accountable and seeing factual inaccuracies retracted and corrected. Their complaints mostly focused on Nikole Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, and their biggest sticking point, the inaccuracy they have spent the most time rebutting is Hannah-Jones’s 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.” These historians, and many others, refute this notion, arguing that anti-slavery activism was not prominent enough in Britain at the time for it to seem like a threat to slave holders in America, and anti-slavery principles were actually very prominent in New England, where the Revolution began, and were even proclaimed by certain revolutionaries, like Thomas Paine and John Adams. However, others have pointed out the way that the Constitution made definite concessions to slave-holders in the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Slave Insurrection Clause, and the Fugitive Slave Clause, and actually ensured the continuation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in America for another 20 years with the Importation Clause. This can be viewed two ways: as proof that the country was already moving swiftly toward the banning of slavery and thus is not racist at its roots, or as evidence that the slaveholders here saw the world swiftly moving toward abolition and by their participation in the founding of this new country, sought to negotiate the preservation of slavery. Certainly it had that effect, and the existence of slavery was ensured in America for a half a century longer than it would exist in Britain. So the argument of Wilentz and his co-signatories that this assertion was simply not true has been vigorously challenged as well, with concessions that while Nikole Hannah-Jones may have overstated anti-slavery sentiment in Britain at the time as well as pro-slavery sentiment in colonial America, it is otherwise a matter of interpretation and could be simply corrected by removing the word “primary” from the phrase “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain.” Likewise, the letter signers took issue with Hannah-Jones’s argument that Black Americans struggled for their freedom “largely alone,” suggesting that this erases the historical contributions of white abolitionist allies, but here Hannah-Jones’s modifier exonerates, for she did not claim that they struggled entirely alone, only “largely,” and certainly this too must be conceded as a matter of perspective and interpretation, since throughout the centuries of slavery and segregation, it certainly was a lonely struggle for most who endured it. A further objection the letter signers raise is Hannah-Jones’s focus on Abraham Lincoln’s support of colonization, or the removal of freed African Americans from the country, and that while he opposed slavery he also opposed black equality. But this is not so much a matter of factual inaccuracy as it is an argument that Hannah-Jones is making, and which she supports convincingly. Indeed, it is an argument that, as Alex Lichtenstein says in his American Historical Review editorial, “many historians will find…persuasive,” and one shared by Lincoln’s esteemed contemporary, Frederick Douglass, who asserted that Lincoln “shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro.” So in the end, while these leading scholars claimed to be correcting factual errors, they were instead disagreeing with her interpretations and, at most, quibbling over some misstatements.

16th U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, claims about whose persistent prejudices, made in The 1619 Project, some historians have argued against. Public Domain.

While Wilentz and his co-signatories are certainly well-respected historians, the fact is that Wilentz approached far more than four other historians to join his crusade against The 1619 Project, but everyone else refused to be a part of such an attack, and some have gone on record to explain that, while they may have had similar objections to specific claims made in the Project, they declined to sign Wilentz’s letter because its tone, seeming more like an attempt to discredit the entire undertaking rather than a good faith correction of facts, was unwarranted and its approach unprofessional. Nikole Hannah-Jones agrees that the letter was not a good-faith suggestion for corrections. She has herself conceded that the revision of some overstatements could improve her essay and address genuine concerns, but she points out that neither she nor the Times were approached about these concerns by the historians before or during their efforts to find other historians to sign on to the letter, which makes it seem like these critics were not interested in having a real conversation about corrections but rather were engaged in a campaign to discredit the project. And this is certainly strange, since if we take these historians at their word, they actually admire the purpose behind the project. According to Sean Wilentz, speaking to The Atlantic, “Each of us, all of us, think that the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it's just urgently needed. The idea of bringing to light not only scholarship but all sorts of things that have to do with the centrality of slavery and of racism to American history is a wonderful idea.” If that is the case, and as Wilentz also said, “Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project, our letter is intended to help it,” then why has it been almost universally regarded as discrediting? Probably because of its tone, identified as problematic by Thavolia Glymph, one of several black historians that Sean Wilentz failed to convince to sign his letter, among others. And why is its tone so dismissive? It has been suggested that these historians are gatekeeping, protesting the mere idea of journalists spearheading a reframing of American history. Is has been further suggested that their criticisms all boil down to the central complaint that they would have written the articles differently, the perpetual grievance of the toxic nerd. As Lichtenstein points out, Gordon Wood, in his criticism of the project, “seems affronted mostly by the failure of the 1619 Project to solicit his advice.” And according to the aforementioned Thavolia Glymph, “They think they're trying to fix the project, the way that only they know how.” Furthermore, Nell Irvin Painter, another Black historian who refused to sign the letter, has stated that “For Sean and his colleagues, true history is how they would write it.” These historian critics cannot really object that no true historians were consulted in the making of the project, though, as numerous respected historians contributed to it, including Mary Elliott, the curator of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture; Tiya Miles, a History professor at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School; and New York Times bestselling historian Kevin Kruse. And perhaps the prominence of Kruse and his Twitter celebrity can explain the intensity of principal opponent Sean Wilentz’s criticism, for Wilentz and Kruse both teach in the same department at Princeton. Could jealousy that the Times asked Kruse to contribute and not Wilentz lay at the heart of this debacle?

Ironically, Wilentz has expressed fear that not correcting these few errors could provide fodder to conservative critics. “One of the things I’m worried about,” Wilentz said, “is…people on the other side, politically, I suppose, who are going to use this as an event to show how corrupt the left is. Unfortunately, you’re giving them the sword to kill you with.” As true as this might have been, Wilentz’s letter did worse than handing a sword to the project’s opponents; it gave them a cannon. As would always have happened, conservative commentators and politicians criticized The 1619 Project, but with the added ammunition of well-respected historians calling the Project a distortion, they turned it into a major Republican strategy, which dovetailed with the misplaced outrage over Critical Race Theory and has further evolved into the reactionary movement to censor discussion of racial inequity in the classroom. So let’s address some of the less intellectual arguments originating from rather more expected precincts. One of the most vociferous critics actually sounds rather academic, the National Association of Scholars. If you look further into this organization, though, they are an explicitly conservative advocacy group bent on combating what it sees as a liberal bias in academia, with especial focus on opposing affirmative action and multiculturalism. Not really surprising that this group would dislike The 1619 Project, especially after Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on it and the Pulitzer Center rolled out its 1619 Project Curriculum. In its eagerness to counter the project and find their own alternative anniversary to suggest was the true birth of the nation, they started the 1620 Project, memorializing the signing of the Mayflower Compact as a more appropriate true beginning of the country. What’s ironic is that, far from discrediting The 1619 Project, this impulse to find an alternative early 17th century origin of the country only legitimizes what the Times was doing, showing that it’s all simply a matter of interpretation and argument. I, for example, would argue that while it’s useful to point to the Mayflower Compact as an indication of the growing tendency toward democratic self-government, holding up the radical Puritans that we have come to call the Pilgrims and the document they drew up, permeated as it is by Christian imagery and language, does not really stand as a good representation of the birth of America for any who are not Christian. Moreover, to view the Puritans of Plymouth Colony as the true exemplars of America, rather than the settlers in Jamestown, is rather selective. Plymouth was a decidedly unusual colony among early settlements. If you view extreme piety as an American ideal, they’re you’re go-to, but their religious devotion was unusual compared to most early settlers. And of course, they did not murder women accused of witchcraft like some other Puritan settlements, but whether that makes them more representative of America and its entire history really depends on how pessimistic or optimistic your view of the country is. And more to the point of The 1619 Project, the fact that the Puritans of Plymouth colony did not keep slaves certainly stands as a counterpoint to the settlers in Virginia, but the sad fact is that, in 1614, 6 years prior to the arrival of the Puritans there, an Englishman abducted dozens of Native Americans from the area, including the man who would later serve as the Pilgrims’ own interpreter, Tisquantum, or Squanto, and sold them into slavery in Spain. So, search as we might for some sunnier and less squalid idea of our nation’s beginnings, perhaps, as The 1619 Project asserts, slavery is always there, rearing its ugly head.

The signing of the Mayflower Compact, 1620, proposed as an alternative foundational event for American history by critics of the 1619 Project. Public domain.

Predictably, amid the continuing George Floyd protests, the 45th President decided not to seek any redress for the demonstrators’ very real grievances, and instead promoted further division, latching onto The 1619 Project as an issue to run on in his reelection campaign. On September 17th, he convened the first so-called White House History Conference at the National Archives, and he laid the responsibility for recent unrest not on police violence or systemic injustice but rather on progressive indoctrination in schools, explicitly blaming the 1619 Project, which by that time, a year after its publication, had seen some use in classrooms. His solution was to establish by executive order a 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education.” The irony abounds with this commission. Trump and the GOP attack the 1619 Project for being a distortion of history and liberal propaganda, yet to correct the historical record, he established a commission whose membership is completely devoid of actual historians and instead is filled rank and file with conservative activists and politicians and even some of Trump’s own policy advisers. Of course, Trump then went on to lose the election and rushed the release of the report only a month after assembling the commission, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, making one of his final acts in office the release of a report on history scholarship that lacks any scholarly source documentation and doesn’t even properly credit any of its own authors. Without any apparent struggle with the cognitive dissonance, this report decries progressive propaganda while simultaneously propagandizing by likening progressivism to fascism and listing it alongside slavery as one of the “challenges to America’s principles.” It warns of the dangers of progressive indoctrination in schools while recommending a kind of government-sponsored indoctrination program to ensure traditional hero worship of the country’s founders, seeking to regress history education back to the myth-making curriculum of the 19th century. While Sean Wilentz could only find 4 other respectable historians to put their names on his letter censuring The 1619 Project, the American Historical Association’s condemnation of the 1776 Commission’s report has been endorsed by 47 highly credible historical and scholarly organizations. On his first day in office, just a couple days after the report’s release, President Biden saw fit to disband the commission and take down its report’s official webpage.

As with Critical Race Theory, the central objection to The 1619 Project has been that it is being taught to our youth. Unlike CRT, though, which isn’t really being taught outside of academia, The 1619 Project actually has inspired a high school curriculum presented by the Pulitzer Center. However, as the editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine, Jake Silverstein, has observed, “[T]here is a misunderstanding that this curriculum is meant to replace all of U.S. history.” In fact, Silverstein points out, “It's being used as supplementary material for teaching American history." And as Alex Lichtenstein, the previously cited editor of the American Historical Review, has noted, “[N]o specific, detailed analysis of the proposed K-12 curriculum accompanying the 1619 Project has yet been offered by teachers or scholars of history-teaching,” calling this blind spot “puzzling and ultimately inadequate to the vigor of the objections.” What seems to be a universal assessment among scholars and teachers of American history is that The 1619 Project’s purpose is worthy because history education about slavery and its lasting effects is sorely lacking. The Southern Poverty Law Center found in its 2018 report “Teaching Hard History” that “[s]chools are not adequately teaching the history of American slavery, educators are not sufficiently prepared to teach it, textbooks do not have enough material about it, and – as a result – students lack a basic knowledge of the important role it played in shaping the United States and the impact it continues to have on race relations in America.” More specifically, they discovered that “few American high-school students know that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, that the Constitution protected slavery without explicitly mentioning it, or that ending slavery required a constitutional amendment.” Hofstra University’s director of social studies education Alan Singer, a historian of slavery in New York, has detailed how, in New York State, high school social studies curriculum “minimizes the role of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the sale of people, and the sale of slave-produced commodities in global and United States history.” Meanwhile, among the teachers who are actually choosing to use the Project in their classes, it is clear that the project’s chief merit is that it has started a sorely needed discussion, despite or even because of all the controversy surrounding it. As explained by John Duffy, faculty fellow of the University of Notre Dame’s Klau Center for Civil and Human Rights, when he teaches The 1619 Project in his English classes, he uses the controversy to encourage critical thinking: “While I encourage students to draw their own conclusions about the controversies, we do not attempt to decide collectively which perspectives are more accurate. Instead, we discuss reasons historians disagree, how such disagreements are argued and what this suggests about historical truths. We consider who gets to tell the story of a people and what is at stake in the telling.” And this is how the project should be used, and how I imagine any teacher worth anything would use it. So what does this tell us about Republican laws to cripple the discussion of race in the classroom, some of which mention The 1619 Project by name? Either that the legislators lack a fundamental understanding of modern pedagogy, or that they are simply afraid such frank and critical discussions will lead to students developing viewpoints opposed to theirs.

Further Reading

“The 1619 Project.” The New York Times Magazine, August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html.

“The 1619 Project Curriculum.” Pulitzer Center, pulitzercenter.org/lesson-plan-grouping/1619-project-curriculum.

“AHA Condemns Report of Advisory 1776 Commission (January 2021).” American Historical Association, 20 January 2021, www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/aha-advocacy/aha-statement-condemning-report-of-advisory-1776-commission-(january-2021).

Anderson, James. “U. professors send letter requesting corrections to 1619 Project.” The Princetonian, 6 Feb. 2020, www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/02/u-professors-send-letter-requesting-corrections-to-1619-project.  

Autry, Robin. “Trump's '1776 Commission' tried to rewrite U.S. history. Biden had other ideas.” NBC News, NBC Universal, 21 Jan. 2021, www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-1776-commission-tried-rewrite-u-s-history-biden-ncna1255086.

Crowley, Michael, and Jennifer Schuessler. “Trump’s 1776 Commission Critiques Liberalism in Report Derided by Historians.” The New York Times, 18 Jan. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/us/politics/trump-1776-commission-report.html.

Kazin, Michael. “The 1776 Follies.” The New York Times, 1 Feb. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/opinion/trump-1776-commission-report.html.

Lichtenstein, Alex C. “From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That.” American Historical Review, vol. 125, no. 1, Feb. 2020, pp. xv–xxi. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/ahr/rhaa041.

Serwer, Adam. “The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts.” The Atlantic, 23 Dec. 2019, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/.

Shuster, Kate. “Teaching Hard History.” Southern Poverty Law Center, 31 Jan. 2018, www.splcenter.org/20180131/teaching-hard-history.

Silverstein, Jake. “We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued The 1619 Project.” The New York Times, 20 Dec. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html.

Singer, Alan J. “Defending the 1619 Project in the Context of History Education Today.” History News Network, The George Washington University, 20 Dec. 2020, historynewsnetwork.org/article/178586.

Strauss, Valerie. “Professor: Why I teach the much-debated 1619 Project — despite its flaws.” The Washington Post, 14 June 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/14/professor-why-i-teach-controversial-1619-project/.

Waxman, Olivia B. “The First Africans in Virginia Landed in 1619. It Was a Turning Point for Slavery in American History—But Not the Beginning.” TIME, 20 Aug. 2019, time.com/5653369/august-1619-jamestown-history/.  

Wulf, Karin. “Why the Myths of Plymouth Dominate the American Imagination.” Smithsonian Magazine, 24 Nov. 2020, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-myths-plymouth-dominate-american-imagination-180976396/.

Curriculum Controversies in America

Over the last year, a conservative talking point has emerged that a new and dangerous kind of “woke racism,” originating from an arcane and supposedly nefarious ideological academic discipline called Critical Race Theory, is being taught to children in schools, amounting to a kind of un-American indoctrination. If you’ve paid attention, this view has garnered a lot of traction and become a favorite grievance on the right, resulting in many local school board meetings devolving into a venue for the breathless protests of ill-informed parents. The result has been recent legislation in states like Oklahoma, Tennessee, Iowa, and Idaho, with Republican-controlled legislatures, banning the discussion of Critical Race Theory, or CRT for short, in schools, a dreadful development indeed for free speech and academic freedom. As many have pointed out, though, CRT is not actually taught in public elementary or secondary schools. It’s an approach to legal scholarship that emerged in academia in the ‘70s and ‘80s, in which the inherent discrimination of public policies is analyzed with a view toward improving equity under the law. This scholarly subject has become the chief bogeyman to conservatives, who conflate it with all efforts to address systemic racism and cultivate anti-racist views and approaches in various fields, in both the public and private sector. In the wake of the George Floyd protests last year, many organizations began, admirably, to acknowledge the fact that the long history of racism in America may be present in their own administrations and bureaucracies, and to hold seminars and meetings to educate themselves about systemic racism and how they might be able to effect change within their domains. Of course, some fragile attendees at these meetings, when asked to examine the possibility that they may have benefited from privileges others are denied, balked and became defensive and suggested that such frank discussions of racism amounted to another kind of racism, one targeting them. Some even recorded their Zoom sessions, thinking of themselves as heroic whistleblowers on this new woke culture invading their safe spaces, and sent the footage to journalists to blow the whole thing wide open. Of course, one conservative journalist obliged. His name is Christopher Rufo, and he wrote a series of articles supposedly “exposing” these anti-bias seminars in Seattle, even though they were not closely held secrets or anything that the organizations who held them were embarrassed about. But Rufo believed he was uncovering a vast conspiracy. In the materials leaked to him, he unsurprisingly found references to some well-known books on anti-racism by authors like Ibram Kendi and others, and then, examining those books, he found further references to the legal scholarship of Kimberlé Crenshaw, who originated Critical Race Theory. Rufo shows his lack of experience in performing academic research in that, rather than understanding the nature of academic scholarship as a conversation between texts and authors over decades and centuries, in which supportive materials are cited to strengthen arguments, just as they would be by those who assert an opposing view, Rufo saw this as some kind of insidious conspiracy, fancying himself a kind of Robert Langdon, uncovering evil power structures through his rather cursory readings of a few works, all of whose points he seems to have missed entirely.

Christopher Rufo on Fox New, starting the CRT controversy. Image may be subject to Copyright.

Rufo believes that the perennial specter of Marxism lies at the root of Critical Race Theory and all anti-racist activism, mostly because of some anti-capitalist comments made by certain of the authors frequently cited, who recognize that discriminatory public policies are deeply enmeshed in our economic system, but he entirely disregards the more obvious cultural basis of these works in the Civil Rights Era struggles of Martin Luther King Jr. and others. He proposes that this activism started in academia and is now deeply embedded in our bureaucracies—again, taking a conspiratorial view, as if these anti-bias seminars were somehow foisted on unwilling organizations rather than sought out by administrators who may actually agree there are deeply entrenched problems in our society that they don’t want to be a part of. In Rufo’s view, anti-racist activism, and by extension CRT, which he paints as the evil puppet master, is simply about overturning the system by humiliating and shaming White people. If he had actually managed to grasp the message of Ibram Kendi’s work, though, he would understand that’s not what anti-racism is about. Perhaps it would have been better if Rufo had read Kendi’s simplification of anti-racism in the form of his children’s book, Anti-Racist Baby, which spells out for still developing minds the fact that anti-racism is not “reverse racism,” a term which itself is wildly racist, in that it suggests racial discrimination and bias is meant to be directed at only non-White people. Instead, as Kendi’s children’s book states, anti-racism celebrates our differences and identifies policies rather than people as the problem. But it’s Kendi’s suggestion that we use our words to actually talk about racism that seems to be the problem for Rufo and others. The backlash against Critical Race Theory, which is actually a backlash against anti-racism activism generally, is at its heart a resistance to talking about racism at all. Think about it in terms of gun violence. In the aftermath of a mass shooting, there are calls to address the issue and talk about gun control, and there is always a resistance, suggesting, “Now is not the time,” when clearly there is no better time. After the George Floyd protests, now clearly is the time to talk about systemic racism, and the protests against teaching Critical Race Theory are a clear attempt to squelch such conversations. Rufo recognized that Critical Race Theory was the perfect term to spark conservative outrage. The word “critical” being inflammatory to defenders of the status quo, the word “race” being outrageous to those who refuse to recognize that they may have been born privileged because of the color of their skin, and the word “theory” suggesting that it is not fact and can therefore be vigorously refuted. Rufo and his views were welcomed onto Fox News Channel by Tucker Carlson, and his calls for the President to issue an executive order were answered by Trump, who signed an order coauthored by Rufo limiting speech about race in seminars delivered to federal employees. But this was just the beginning. Even though Critical Race Theory is not taught in public schools, Rufo’s activism has sparked a huge push from the right to ban it, and these laws, in effect, seem to outlaw the candid discussion of race in classrooms generally. The vague contours of some of these laws seem to suggest that classic literature that explicitly addresses racism, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird could be banned from English classrooms. Especially hard hit would be American history classes, for how can students and teachers honestly discuss colonialism, slavery, the decimation of Native American tribes, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Era, or really any aspect of American history without acknowledging and openly discussing racism? This legislation is little more than a ban on ideas, and it is not the first time that the classroom has become a theater in which to wage the culture war.

To suggest that the current furor over discussing systemic racism with students in the classroom originated with Rufo’s conspiracist view of Critical Race Theory would be to turn a blind eye to the fact that he is capitalizing on long-standing sentiments among conservatives that liberals control academia (when in fact, perhaps, progressive ideas just stand up better to scholarly scrutiny), that the history of America is being distorted and falsified by the Left (when in fact historical revision to achieve better accuracy and understanding is a central tenet of historical research, without which we may today still believe falsehoods like that the women executed in 17th-century Salem really were Satan-worshipping sorceresses), and that changes to elementary and high school curricula represent indoctrination (when it actually represents efforts to improve education and prepare students for the academic rigor of college, which will in turn help them succeed in life and become better citizens generally). It is pretty hard to indoctrinate through the teaching of critical thinking, which is what lies at the core of historical revision and recent changes in curricula, and which serves as the foundation of all efforts to recognize the systemic racism that has been ignored or denied for so long. As I try to emphasize in this podcast, critical thinking encourages every individual to analyze and evaluate received information, to sift through it for falsehoods and errors in logic and reason, and to try to achieve a more perfect understanding of the truth, as far as it can be discerned. This is something that even conspiracy theorists and denialists claim to value. For example, take Glenn Beck, currently a vocal opponent of what he calls Critical Race Theory in schools (which again, seems to just be just be any acknowledgement of racism’s existence and the systemic preservation of privileges for some and not others). He likes to encourage critical thinking too! However, when he disagrees with where critical thinking leads students, he calls it indoctrination. In fact, back in 2012, ridiculously enough, the Republican Party of Texas actually made opposition to critical thinking a plank in their platform! When this resulted in controversy, they tried to claim that they actually only opposed a specific teaching approach called Outcome-Based Education which they argued was simply relabeled as higher order thinking and critical thinking. Here again, they rely on the argument that a relabeling has occurred, just as they say anti-bias training and anti-racism activism is actually repackaged Critical Race Theory, which is really Marxism, they’ll say. But the Texas GOP platform was clear about what they found offensive in critical and higher order thinking skills: that they “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs.” So already we see the aversion to having students exposed to what they view as ideas that may challenge the status quo.

Lynn Cheney on Charlie Rose amid the History Standards controversy. Image may be subject to copyright.

The political battle over how history is taught itself has a long history. Before the uproar over anti-racist approaches to education and so-called Critical Race Theory, there was outrage over the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to place slavery and its effects at the center of our understanding of America’s founding and subsequent history. In response to this series of publications, the Trump administration even founded a commission to defend a more traditionalist view of American history, to denounce progressivism in education as indoctrination, and to promote “patriotic education,” despite the fact that it is not the federal government’s place to control instructional programs or curriculum. However, the controversy over the 1619 Project deserves an entire episode, or at least a minisode, in its own right, so suffice it to say here that Christopher Rufo was latching onto this controversy when he conjured the specter of CRT. This more recent controversy over approaches to the teaching of American history echoes the controversy over National History Standards in the mid-1990s. In the fall of 1994, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife Lynne Cheney, who served as the chair for the National Endowment of the Humanities, sparked a lengthy political controversy by writing a rebuke of the forthcoming national standards which her organization had funded, developed by the National Center for History in Schools at UCLA, which again her organization had chosen for the task. Her central complaints, which were thereafter parroted by conservative talk radio hosts, talking heads, and politicians, were that the new standards focused too much on injustices related to race and gender and not enough on the traditional hero worship of former textbooks. It was all so negative, she whined, and she even resorted to score-keeping, counting the number of times that McCarthyism and the Ku Klux Klan were mentioned and bemoaning that Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers didn’t receive equal page space. While critics derided the proposed standards as an example of political correctness run amok, historians defended them as rigorous and dismissed the backlash as a reactionary attack on modern historical scholarship, which had for some time sought to bring the marginalized and underrepresented further into focus and do away with insupportable myths about our country. In the end, though, since these were just voluntary standards, and since most of the complaints stemmed from the numerous teaching examples provided, which were confused for curriculum, and not from the actual standards themselves, whose criteria were universally praised, a few simple revisions sufficed to appease the detractors and dampen the fires of controversy.

Woman protesting textbooks in Kanawha County, West Virginia. Via West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Curriculum controversies have not been exclusive to History, either. One of the most egregious examples of political scrimmage over teaching materials centered on literature reading lists. The story of the Kanawha County Textbook War sounds extremely similar to the protests seen this year in school board meetings. In April 1974, the Board of Education assembled in this West Virginia county to discuss how they would meet a mandate to include in their curriculum “multiethnic and multiracial literature.” One board member, Alice Moore, who had campaigned for her seat by protesting sex education, a curriculum controversy that has been consistent and ubiquitous in its own right. She seems to have seen in the new lit curriculum another opportunity for outrage. She found the poetry of e. e. cummings pornographic, the writings of Sigmund Freud atheistic, the Autobiography of Malcom X un-American, and generally complained that works by Black authors like James Baldwin were too depressing in their description of life in ghettoes. “[T]extbooks should show life as it should be,” she argued, “not life as it is.” Her rhetoric enflamed the resentments of parents, who boycotted county schools. Thousands marched in protest against these “dirty books.” They circulated pamphlets that claimed the new reading material contained sexually explicit passages, but these assertions proved to be false. In fact, unsurprisingly, neither Alice Moore nor any of her followers had read the literature they were railing against, which they openly admitted, claiming that they didn’t need to subject themselves to such radical propaganda to know it was harmful. The protests quickly turned violent. Property was destroyed as protesters shot firearms at empty school buses and firebombed an empty school building. They even set off dynamite at the district offices. Beatings and shootings occurred, board meeting broke out into riots, and people were arrested, and not only the violent protestors; Alice Moore managed to get other school board members arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Even though the violence eventually subsided and the books being protested were added to the curriculum, this conservative terrorism accomplished somewhat the outcome desired: it had a definite chilling effect on academic freedom and freedom of speech in the classroom, as for some time afterward, teachers censored themselves for fear of stoking controversy, avoiding potentially divisive books like 1984 and even skipping over biology lessons about animal reproduction for fear that it came too close to sex education. At the time, Alice Moore presented herself as just a concerned parent, but since, historians have suggested that she was more of a right-wing provocateur with connections to other organizations that had been protesting progressive curriculum since the 1960s, including the Christian Crusade, which focused on removing sex education from schools, and even that far-right anti-communist group who saw socialist conspiracies everywhere, including in curriculum that they believed was little more than Marxist indoctrination, our old friends, the John Birch Society.

Protest to progressive curriculum as Communist indoctrination was, unsurprisingly, common during the Second Red Scare, in the era of McCarthyism. Indeed, the House Unamerican Activities Committee, well known for its investigation of Hollywood, which resulted in so many careers ruined because of blacklisting, also went after teachers that they suspected of indoctrinating youth. In 1959, the HUAC planned to hold one of its dreaded hearings in San Francisco, California, where it subpoenaed dozens of teachers. In response, local college professors organized San Franciscans for Academic Freedom and Education, or SAFE, and solicited a broad base of bi-partisan support even among moderate and conservative organizations on the grounds that the federal government has no place in controlling local education. This public resistance led to the HUAC canceling its hearings for the first time, but they came back the next year with a new spate of subpoenas. They were met by thousands of demonstrators, representing a wide range of San Francisco society, including students, politicians, and other activists, in a significant protest movement that prefigured the anti-war protest movement of the 1960s. The response of authorities on the second day of the protest was much the same as would be encountered in later years as well, with truncheons and fire hoses wielded against the protestors. But on the third day, some 5,000 protestors marched in downtown San Francisco, and this display helped to encourage nationwide opposition to the HUAC, whose spell of fear over the country was finally breaking.

Anti-HUAC protesters at San Francisco City Hall, with seated Anti-HUAC protesters, after being doused with fire hoses. Via Zinn Education Group.

The absurdly paranoid John Birch Society and the witch-hunting HUAC were not the only groups to fear the creeping influence of Marxist thought into classrooms. One organization was the veterans association, the American Legion, which had for decades made it their mission to criticize and reject any textbooks they found to be “un-American.” One major target of the American Legion was the work of Harold Rugg, whose social studies textbook series, Man and His Changing Society, sought to highlight both the strengths and the weaknesses of America in order to demonstrate to younger generations where social change may be beneficial. The books sold widely and were adopted in many school districts, becoming a standard for years. However, the encouragement of change was viewed suspiciously, and the depiction of America as anything less than perfect was seen as unpatriotic. In the mid-1930s, some parents complained that they were communistic, and during World War II, the controversy expanded to the point that the books were being derided as treasonous propaganda. In fact, the books simply encouraged students to think critically about social problems and come to their own conclusions. Familiarly, protestors gleefully condemned the books without having bothered to read them, saying that they didn’t need to read them because they had heard all they needed to hear about the author. After enough sustained controversy, school administrators banned the texts in many districts despite their admiration for them simply because they did not want to deal with the anti-Communist crusaders, and not content to see Rugg’s books simply removed from the schools, the protestors, Nazi-like, held numerous public book burnings. This controversy did more than just remove and destroy Rugg’s books; it set back progressive education decades, as for years afterward, other textbook authors shied away from addressing social issues and avoided any implication that America could improve in any way.

This inclination among many on the right to desire a white-washing of America and our history finds its apotheosis in the efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to recast the history of the South and promulgate the Lost Cause Myth that I spoke about in my episode Jubal Early’s Lost Cause. The United Daughters of the Confederacy are perhaps best known today for their efforts to erect monuments to white supremacists, monuments regularly targeted by racial justice advocates who continue working to get them removed. To those who might protest that Confederate monuments aren’t monuments to white supremacists, first I would point out that in 1926, the United Daughters of the Confederacy actually erected a monument to the Ku Klux Klan in Concord, North Carolina. But that blatant evidence aside, any who might protest that a monument to the Confederacy or its leaders does not itself represent a monument to white supremacy has accepted the false notion of the Lost Cause Myth that the South was fighting for anything other than a social order based entirely on the patrician rule of elite white families over the poor and their exploitation of Black chattel slaves as forced labor. I have refuted the Myth of the Lost Cause before and won’t retread the same ground here, but suffice it to say that the success of the Lost Cause Myth, the reason it is still so commonly repeated today, can be attributed to the efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to remove textbooks they felt portrayed the Southern Cause in a negative light and install curriculum that exalted the South and distorted the truth about the war and about slavery.

A North Carolina chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, via Encyclopedia Virginia.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, or the UDC, took up their crusade to indoctrinate Southern youth with the Myth of the Lost Cause from other organizations, namely the United Confederate Veterans and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who in the 1890s balked at the portrayal of Southern planters and the Confederacy in histories written by Northern writers, which understandably condemned their treatment of slaves and their entire economic and social system, and further blamed them for the war. Motivated by their desire to maintain the dominance of patrician families in the postbellum South, they undertook a campaign to systematically vindicate themselves through propaganda and indoctrination. They removed Northern textbooks from their schools, accusing even the Encyclopedia Britannica of malicious distortion, and then wrote, published, and installed their own history texts onto school bookshelves. Their books, and others afterward promoted by the UDC, maintained the idea that the Confederacy did not secede in order to preserve the slavery on which their economy and social hierarchy was built but rather because of dignified and honorable ideals about state sovereignty, and more than this, they perpetuated the even older lies that slave owners were “kind and lenient” to their slaves and that “[t]hey in turn loved their master.” They even went so far as to suggest that, without the guidance of an overseer, slaves would have turned to cannibalism, which they claimed was their natural tendency in Africa. Meanwhile, they glorified white Southerners, describing the idyllic mansions of the plantation system and calling it “a civilization that gave us brave and true men and pure and noble women.”

The taking up of the cause to indoctrinate Southern youth with these ideas was the natural evolution of the UDC’s efforts to memorialize the Confederacy. Rather than just inanimate statues, they sought to create “living monuments,” as historian Karen Cox puts it. And their campaign was extremely effective. Beyond expunging history textbooks they disliked and getting Confederate-friendly texts adopted, they went after teachers and administrators who resisted and drove them out of schools. They sponsored essay contests that required students to use their texts, they filled the schools with teachers from among their own ranks, and they composed lesson plans for the rest. They put up portraits of Confederate figures in the schools, hung Confederate battle flags in classrooms, and even petitioned to have schools named after Confederate “heroes.” Perhaps most disturbingly, like the formation of the Nazi youth, the UDC organized Children of the Confederacy auxiliaries, grooming the kids for later membership in the UDC and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, having the children themselves cut the cord to unveil each new monument. This is what we must fear when conservative voices protest progressive curriculum. They will cry “Indoctrination!” but true to their nature, it is just projection, for what they really object to is any challenge to the status quo. They recognize that a progressive curriculum prevents them from propagandizing in schools and brainwashing young minds.

Those who protest anti-racist approaches to education, or what they have been told is Critical Race Theory, inevitably resort to the criticism that progressive curriculum is itself biased, or even racist. However, the lessons they protest often involve just the simple acknowledgement of racism’s continued existence or any encouragement for students to openly discuss and analyze disparities in representation and the systems of privilege at work in the world. Any calls for fairness or teaching both sides may seem reasonable, but you must consider what they’re saying. Even the United Daughters of the Confederacy claimed to want “impartial” history, but how is it edifying or moral to give equal time and emphasis to a point of view that exonerates and exalts white supremacy? The entire notion of “teaching the controversy” is always only a demand that inarguable or harmful ideas be unduly recognized or accorded merit they do not possess. Take the idea of “creation science.” It was not taught in science classrooms because it is not science. There is not controversy about it among actual scientists. Christian fundamentalists only attempted to portray evolution as controversial in order to put religion in science classrooms. Likewise, today, opponents of CRT argue that equal time must be awarded to any opposing view when it comes to racism in society and history. This has led to suggestions that any lesson on the Holocaust, for example, may need to be balanced with equal time given to Holocaust denial. The simple fact is that not all controversies have two equal sides, and hate should not be presented to children as an acceptable view to take. And the entire notion that teaching about racism is biased doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Trends in progressive curriculum, which as I’ve shown are not new, actually are an effort to redress cultural bias and one-sidedness in education, acquainting students with the experiences of underrepresented and marginalized groups that have previously been excluded from textbooks. To claim this inclusion is biased or exclusionary is exactly the same as refusing to explicitly acknowledge that Black lives matter and instead insisting only on repeating that all lives do. It reveals a fundamental, racist aversion to recognizing the struggles of any group other than one’s own.

Further Reading

Appleby, Joyce. “Controversy over the National History Standards.” OAH Magazine of History, vol. 9, no. 3, [Oxford University Press, Organization of American Historians], 1995, pp. 4–4, www.jstor.org/stable/25163026.

Bailey, Fred Arthur. “The Textbooks of the ‘Lost Cause’: Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 3, Georgia Historical Society, 1991, pp. 507–33, www.jstor.org/stable/40582363.

Camera, Lauren. “Federal Lawsuit Poses First Challenge to Ban on Teaching Critical Race Theory.” U.S. News and World Report, 20 Oct. 2021, www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-10-20/federal-lawsuit-poses-first-challenge-to-ban-on-teaching-critical-race-theory.

Carbone, Peter F. “The Other Side of Harold Rugg.” History of Education Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 3, [History of Education Society, Wiley], 1971, pp. 265–78, doi.org/10.2307/367293.

Cox, Karen L. “The Confederacy’s ‘Living Monuments.’” The New York Times, 6 Oct. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/the-confederacys-living-monuments.html.

Gershon, Livia. “How One Group of Teachers Defended Academic Freedom.” JSTOR Daily, 29 Dec. 2019, daily.jstor.org/how-one-group-of-teachers-defended-academic-freedom/.

Huffman, Greg. “The group behind Confederate monuments also built a memorial to the Klan.” Facing South, 8 June 2018. www.facingsouth.org/2018/06/group-behind-confederate-monuments-also-built-memorial-klan.

---. “TWISTED SOURCES: How Confederate propaganda ended up in the South's schoolbooks.” Facing South, 10 April 2019, www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/twisted-sources-how-confederate-propaganda-ended-souths-schoolbooks.

Paddison, Joshua. “Summers of Worry, Summers of Defiance: San Franciscans for Academic Freedom and Education and the Bay Area Opposition to HUAC, 1959-1960.” California History, vol. 78, no. 3, [University of California Press, California Historical Society], 1999, pp. 188–201, doi.org/10.2307/25462565.

Ravitch, Diane. “The Controversy over National History Standards.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 51, no. 3, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 1998, pp. 14–28, doi.org/10.2307/3824089.

Skinner, David. “A Battle over Books.” HUMANITIES, vol. 31, no. 5, Sep./Oct. 2010, www.neh.gov/humanities/2010/septemberoctober/statement/battle-over-books.

Stanley, William B. “Harold Rugg and Social Education: Another Look.” Journal of Thought, vol. 18, no. 4, Caddo Gap Press, 1983, pp. 68–72, www.jstor.org/stable/42589033.

Kay, Trey. “The Great Textbook War.” West Virginia Public Broadcasting, 17 Oct. 2013, www.wvpublic.org/radio/2013-10-17/the-great-textbook-war.

Wallace-Wells, Benjamin. “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory.” The New Yorker, 18 June 2021, www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory.

Waxman, Olivia B. “Trump's Threat to Pull Funding from Schools Over How They Teach Slavery Is Part of a Long History of Politicizing American History Class.” Time, 16 Sep. 2020, time.com/5889051/history-curriculum-politics/?amp=true.

Winters, Elmer A., and Harold Rugg. “Man and His Changing Society: The Textbooks of Harold Rugg.” History of Education Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, [History of Education Society, Wiley], 1967, pp. 493–514, https://doi.org/10.2307/367465.