Debunking 1619: An Interview with Phillip W. Magness

The following is an interview between Senior Correspondent of The Review Jonathan G. Nicastro (TDR) and Phillip W. Magness (PWM), Director of Research at The American Institute for Economic Research. Dr. Magness earned his PhD at George Mason University’s school of public policy by successfully defending his dissertation on the history of 19th century tax policy and has published extensively on the topic of slavery in the United States. 

TDR: What is your academic background and areas of expertise?

PWM: I am an economic historian by background. I’m also the Director of Research at the American Institute for Economic Research. Prior to that, I spent about a decade teaching in higher ed in a variety of different disciplines, including public policy, international trade and economics. 

My main research area, starting when I was an undergraduate, is the 19th century economic history of the United States, and slavery in the United States, slavery in the Atlantic world and the Caribbean. This has been a subject of several books and book chapters that I’ve written. I believe, counting it all up, over two dozen different scholarly articles, book, chapters, peer-reviewed items that I’ve written [are] on the history of slavery and the Civil War era. It’s been a primary research area of mine for several decades.

TDR: What is being taught by the 1619 Project? Did Nikole Hannah-Jones collaborate with academic historians to produce it? 

PWM: Well, this is the interesting thing. What she teaches and what she claims about the 1619 Project seems to change day to day. Sometimes it’s journalism and therefore has a little grace room to bend the truth a bit because she’s telling a narrative and other times it’s being presented as scholarly history.

This really touches on one of the defects of the original 1619 Project that has harshly carried forward in the book. I’ve gone through and reviewed both of them. But if we start with the original 1619 Project, the one that came out in the print edition of the New York times in August of 2019, it’s about a hundred pages and of that hundred pages, it had roughly a dozen feature articles.

There were a few shorter vignettes that were basically topic by topic. Those were not a subject of much controversy at all. But of those 12 feature articles, I think they had two PhD historians, but they were both historians of the 20th century, of later areas of race relations. And when I looked at the way that this was laid out, the entire period in which slavery is at the center of the American political debate is kind of the high water. Of the controversies around slavery, it’s roughly the period between the American founding in 1776 and the end of the Civil War in 1865 and all the articles in the 1619 Project that dealt with that crucial period.

Not a single one was written by a scholarly expert in slavery. Nikole Hannah-Jones took the lead essay herself. And again, this is someone whose background is entirely in journalism. Another article was written by Jamelle Bouie, who’s one of her colleagues at The New York Times, and other journalists. A third one was given to Matthew Desmond who’s a sociologist at Princeton University that works on race relations in the 20th century. And she asked him to write about slavery’s economics, a subject he had no scholarly qualifications in whatsoever. This is kind of the recurring theme of the 1619 Project. So when they claim that it has scholarly input, that scholarly input is from other authors who come later in the timeline, the 20th century and later, where you get actual subject matter experts. The stuff that the 1619 Project is dealing with, the issue of slavery and the core of its controversies, all seems to come from journalists who were at best secondhand disseminators of intellectual works. And non-experts who I’d argue, in Desmond’s case, are completely incompetent in the subject matter. 

TDR: Why has the 1619 Project been met with such critical acclaim from the journalistic community? Why has it received the Pulitzer Prize while receiving so much scholarly criticism from academics such as yourself, Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, Sean Wilentz, James Oakes, and Gordon Wood?

PWM: So this is an interesting question. I think the 1619 Project has certainly gotten its fair share of accolades, including a Pulitzer Prize, and has been championed all over the news. It kind of taps into what the political and cultural intelligentsia of the moment views as a narrative about American history.

And really this comes from its alignment with an early 21st century progressive political narrative than it does with re-examining the history of the United States. I was one of the first people out the gate with something published on the 1619 Project. I think it was a week after the 1619 Project came out, someone from the National Review called me and said, “Hey, you’re a historian who works on the economics of slavery. Can you assess this for us?” So I wrote a short piece, but what I discovered over the next several weeks is that the 1619 Project was drawing all sorts of scholarly criticism from across the political space.

So you named the five historians who wrote a fairly famous letter to the New York Times calling attention to the defects in its treatment of that crucial period between 1776 and 1865: the early United States, when slavery is ascendant and a dominant political issue. These are all experts in that area. Gordon Wood is a leading historian of the American founding. James McPherson’s a leading historian of the Civil War, and the other three all work on that period in between those two. The other interesting thing is they’re all probably on the center left of the political spectrum.

I’m not going to go in and purport to know exactly what their politics are. But, they are a good distance from my own. I’m a free-market, classical liberal. I mean, if you want to call it libertarian, that’s the end of the spectrum I come from. But I’m first and foremost an economist in that sense. These are political and social historians that are to the center left.

You also had people from the far left jumping in. Some of the heaviest criticisms came from a website called the World Socialist Website, which has a Trotskyist Marxist perspective, but they’re old school historians. These are people that bring a left-wing perspective to history, but they use a methodology that’s rooted in evidence. That’s rooted in factual analysis, following the data and following the facts and the archives to where they lead. So they give a spin on it that’s very different from my own, but their evidentiary approach is very similar.

So I’m in the middle of a very strange coalition. And there’s also conservative historians that jumped in, but a very strange coalition across the political spectrum that looked at this thing and said, “There are defects.”

TDR: What is the central claim of the 1619 Project and The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story?

PWM: This is a complex set of questions. The core claim, which was the one that the 1619 Project kind of launched itself off with, was that 1619 represented the true founding of the United States rather than 1776. And this is both a metaphor and an intellectual move that Jones is trying to make. 1619 is the year that the first ship carrying slaves arrived off of the coast to Jamestown, Virginia. She’s claiming that this is what infuses American history with its driving moment. Now, the controversy here is that, although this was front and center in the print edition of the original 1619 Project when it came out in August of 2019, saying we’re aiming to displace 1776 with 1619 as our true founding, then that line suddenly disappeared off of The New York Times as a website around December of 2019, January of 2020. Right when it was going into contention for the Pulitzer Prize. And that line had been a major point of criticism. They just made it disappear, sent it down the memory hole.

TDR: Did they note that revision? 

PWM: Absolutely not. It’s journalistic malpractice. And this is why I’ve gone so far. I was one of the ones that discovered this edit had been made to the website. And Nikole Hannah-Jones suddenly denies that she ever made that claim, but fast-forward a year and the new book comes out and that claim is back front and center. The subtitle of the book is a new origin story of the United States, which is 1619, not 1776. More broadly, the historical problems with her narrative derive from how she places slavery in the American story. And note that I’m not saying slavery should be pushed to the side. Quite the contrary. I’ve made an entire career digging into the deep details and nuances of slavery as a problem in American political history, and have written dozens of articles on this subject. She hasn’t.

What she does is try to give this kind of superficial, flimsy narrative of the American founding that says that slavery was a major motivating factor for the American Revolution. And she really overstated this claim in a haphazard way. She said that basically one of the main reasons that the colonists revolted against the Crown is because they thought that England was about to abolish slavery, which is utter historical nonsense.

England doesn’t end slavery itself until 1834. There’s a very heavily-invested interest group in support of the slave trade in England. You also find what’s really happening in the American revolution is that slavery cuts across both sides, both the Patriot and the Loyalist side, but also especially in the Northern colonies.

The revolution itself becomes an impetus for abolition. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Vermont, that whole region of the country across the next several years, beginning in the late 1770s through about 1800, all of these colonies abolished slavery within their borders because they saw slavery is inconsistent with the principles of 1776. And that’s completely missing from The New York Times 1619 Project narrative. It’s a really complex issue that she butchers and badly misshapes.

It gets even more complicated because we found out later that Wesley Harris, who’s a historian of the American Revolution at Northwestern University, had apparently been contacted to fact-check this claim by The New York Times before it came out in print. And then Harris revealed in early 2020 that she told them, “No, don’t print it. Abolitionism was not an existential threat in the United States in 1776. You’re misleading your readers. This is an error.” She revealed that they basically ignored her. They ignored their own fact-checker and ran with this claim. At the cost of this controversy, they added a minor edit. And it changed from the colonists revolted over slavery to some of the colonists revolted over slavery. This was the correction that The New York Times made. That’s been the big point of controversy.

The second component of it comes down to the economics of it. This is the one that I focused on much more heavily and is Matthew Desmond’s essay. I argued that it’s probably at least at parity with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s intro essay as the most important framing piece of the entire project. 

Why? Because it provides the ideological impetus for what the project is seeking. Nikole Hannah-Jones has stated multiple times that this is a political project aimed at the present day and is calling for a radical restructuring of the American economy. Basically, what she means is slavery reparations plus the whole litany of the interventionist economic policies, the progressive left ones. So, higher taxes, socialized healthcare, Green-New-Deal-style stuff. They’ve been very clear that they are trying to make an argument for that by linking American history and slavery into that argument. So they take slavery, a very tragic and horrific history, and try to weaponize the past as a political message in the present.

And what do they mean by that? Anti-capitalism. A big claim of the Desmond component of the 1619 Project, which Nikole Hannah-Jones fully endorses and probably came up in the event that she did at Dartmouth, is that capitalism is irreparably tainted by the history of slavery: that it’s linked at the hip, that American capitalism became a success story, that the United States became one of the wealthiest countries in the world because it was all built off of the labor of slaves. And this goes back to an old 19th century theory that said that plantation-produced cotton was the linchpin of both the United States and the global economy.

TDR:  What percentage of GDP did this actually comprise? 

PWM: If you ask the junk historians the 1619 Project relies on, they claim 50% of the American economy’s linked to cotton. The actual numbers? It’s 5% of GDP before the Civil War. So it’s a big industry, but it’s a very small portion of the American economy, and they say this is the thing that drove the American economy to become wealthy.

One thing I pointed out was that this was the exact same argument that the Confederacy used in 1861 when they declared independence from the United States. They called it at the time the King Cotton argument. The declarations of the Southern states basically held that cotton was such a central part of the global economic system that none would dare make war upon it.

And by making war upon it, that means making war upon slavery, which sustained it [the global economic system], or else they drive the world into a global economic ruin. And the Confederacy thought that, “Hey, we’ve got this Trump card. The fact that we’re the cotton producing region of the country and our cotton depends on slavery. The European powers are going to look at the war in the United States and they’re going to come rushing to our aid because otherwise their economies are gonna be wrecked.”

Well, it turns out that doesn’t happen. It was one of the great miscalculations of the Confederate political strategy. They thought Britain and France were going to rush to their aid and instead Britain and France say, “Well, we can get our cotton elsewhere. It doesn’t have to be produced by slaves.”

There’s no huge economic disruption. So King Cotton theory was false and known to be false in the mid-19th century. And yet here’s Matthew Desmond reviving it as kind of the underlying basis of his claim that capitalism and slavery are linked together. Then he goes into a really silly direction. One of the claims he makes is that slavery and capitalism are linked because when you use a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet today in 2022, you’re using a tool that derived from the accounting books of plantations.

It’s kind of a head-scratcher when you’re reading this. And you read the line over and over again and he absolutely says that Microsoft Excel derives from the accounting books of the plantation. So his argument is basically plantation owners used accounting books. Therefore accounting books are tainted by slavery. Therefore accounting today is tainted by slavery. Therefore we must overturn capitalism…

And it gets worse from that. What you see in Desmond’s expansion of this thesis and the book, the one that Nikole Hannah-Jones completely buys into and is repeated in her own concluding chapter, is that he’s really not so much concerned about slavery as for the wellbeing of the slaves themselves; he’s not an individualist.

The classical liberal approach to the problem of slavery dates all the way back to Adam Smith. Smith’s an abolitionist, but he’s a methodological individualist. He sees this as a violation of human dignity. It’s a violation of your own self-ownership, as a human being, to be enslaved. This is why this entire institution is corrupt and needs to be stamped out. It needs to be abolished. That was the old classical liberal argument against slavery. And it was the argument that you trace all the way from the earliest abolitionists up to Frederick Douglas. That’s the case he makes against slavery.

Well, that’s not Matthew Desmond’s case, Desmond instead draws deep into an offshoot of Marxian theory. [A theory] that comes from an early 20th century economist-sociologist by the name of Werner Sombart, who was something of a successor to a branch of Marxian thought, corresponded with Frederic Engels, and later becomes a Nazi. The new history of capitalism crowd that Desmond relies on has some very deep connections to Sombart. But the gist of Sombart’s thesis was that slavery in the United States disrupted the march of history toward a proletarian revolution…

So what this all comes down to is that Desmond and the 1619 Project are saying slavery is bad because they think it got in the way of the natural order of a socialist emergence of a labor movement in the United States.

They think slavery has disrupted collective class consciousness and the reason why it’s a problem is not because it violates individual dignity–although they may occasionally pay lip service to that– but because it collectively divides the political interests of the working class on racial lines. And that means it’s impossible to get to the socialist outcome, the socialist revolution that this branch of Marxist theory has put forward.

TDR: Do you have any articles or publications you’d like to share that are germane to Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project?

PWM: Yes. My most recent piece on the 1619 Project is a lengthy review essay on the book, and it focuses on what’s changed between the original 1619 Project and the new book version. That came out in Reason magazine a couple of weeks ago, and I’d encourage everyone to take a look at that. 

The second thing I’d like to share is my book-length critique of the original version of the 1619 Project, The 1619 Project: A Critique, in which I give credit to Nikole Hannah-Jones on some points.

In the original version of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, actually to her credit, summarized the complexities of Abraham Lincoln’s positions and policies on race. One of the things she was doing was examining Lincoln as the great emancipator, the version we all hear in junior high school, and saying, “Wait a minute, he’s a much more complex figure.”

One of the things he wanted to do is, after he ended slavery, he was aiming to colonize the African-American population in the United States, newly freed, abroad. Whether it’s going to Liberia or central America, this was a part of Lincoln’s political position. It wasn’t so much racist as it was paternalist, because he thought that the former slaves are going to be oppressed in the South so we need to give them a new home abroad. It’s very much a 19th century throwback kind of philosophy. And she acknowledged this correctly in the original version. 

Well, I know quite a bit about Abraham Lincoln and colonization because I wrote an entire book on it. It came out a decade ago, Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement. It deals with Abraham Lincoln’s approach to resettling the African-American community in the United States and really digs into the subject matter. It’s a controversial subject because some of the older historians had been trying to deny this about Lincoln.

When Nikole Hannah-Jones came under fire for repeating this fact of Lincoln, she started citing my book. And she started tweeting out links to articles I had written in 2013 in the New York Times on this exact subject, documenting Lincoln’s colonization. She had not put two and two together that the author of the book she was citing was also me, the critic of the 1619 Project.

And a couple of months later, when she finally figured that out, she does an about-face, deletes all the tweets and starts trashing me and saying I’m not qualified to comment on the 1619 Project. It gets worse than that. In the new book, she changed that exact section on Abraham Lincoln and removed acknowledgement she had previously made and now, in its place, cites Ibram X Kendi’s book.

It’s a very bizarre kind of sending things you don’t like down the memory hole because she’s politically opposed to it. So that’s the oddity of it. And this is why I do have a personal stake in this. She used my own work, credited it, then deleted the credit, and then changed her narrative because she doesn’t like what I say about the 1619 Project.

From my own perspective, this speaks to her intellectual bankruptcy as an author. And it speaks to major severe ethical problems with the way that she approaches her journalism.