The 1619 Project is based on nonsense. Allen Guelzo writes:
The 1619 Project is not history: it is polemic, born in the imaginations of those whose primary target is capitalism itself and who hope to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery. Slavery made cotton profitable; but profitability is not capitalism. Profit-seeking has been around since Abraham bought the cave at Machpelah in the book of Genesis. If profitability were capitalism, then the Soviet Union’s highly profitable sales of natural gas and other commodities would surely make it one of the great success stories of capitalism – which, of course, it was not. Ask any worthwhile Marxist: capitalism is about the creation of class, and especially the bourgeoisie. And one thing the South never developed was a bourgeoisie. Which is why no single American, North or South, before 1861 ever imagined that slavery and capitalism were anything but mortal enemies. The proslavery apologist, George Fitzhugh, frankly declared that slavery was a form, not of capitalism, but feudal socialism; the antislavery president, Abraham Lincoln, explained the war on slavery as a war on behalf of free labor.
The 1619 Project commits, moreover, the Supply Chain Fallacy—that slavery was necessary for capitalism and as a result inhabits every level of capitalism’s subsequent development. This is the same reasoning that suggests that if a scientist receives a grant from the National Science Foundation for research, the result of the research is a production of the government. As economic historian Deirdre McCloskey comments, “It’s a legal way of thinking, not economic.” And not much in the way of historical thinking, either.
Again: the 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory.
[Allen Guelzo, “Preaching a Conspiracy Theory,” City Journal, December 8]
