‘The 1619 Project’ Tells a False Story About Capitalism, Too

The following article is being shared in response to Matthew Desmond's speaking engagement at Davidson College as this year's Vann lecturer on Racial Justice. The numerous critiques of his work by historians and economists--like the following one by Allen Guelzo--indicates the importance of having divergent views on controversial issues equally represented in Davidson's program of external speakers.

By Allen C. Guelzo

Wall Street Journal

May 8,  2020


The awarding of a Pulitzer Prize for commentary to the New York Times magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of “The 1619 Project” will serve as an additional selling point as the Times and the Pulitzer Center (unaffiliated with the prize) seek to market their 1619 Project Curriculum. It’s hard not to see the prize as an attempt to deflect the criticisms the paper has taken from historians across the country.


Jake Silverstein, the magazine’s editor, waved away those objections as differences of “interpretation and intention, not fact” in a letter responding to a dozen concerned historians, including me. Historians do argue over interpretations, but parts of the 1619 Project are sloppy, at best, with the facts. Consider the essay on capitalism by sociologist Matthew Desmond.


Mr. Desmond asserts that Americans live in an environment of “low-road capitalism,” a “peculiarly brutal economy” where “inequality reigns and poverty spreads.” The fountain from which a “uniquely severe and unbridled” capitalism springs is not Adam Smith or even the Robber Barons, but the cotton plantation, Mr. Desmond claims. There, in the American South, enslaved laborers produced “the nation’s most valuable export.” Their productivity created “a capitalist economy.”


Slaves were whipped and tortured into clearing fields, planting and harvesting crops whose yields increased, Mr. Desmond writes, by 400% over the 60 years before the Civil War. But Mr. Desmond also contends that every aspect of the plantation was ruthlessly rationalized to enhance profits, “via vertical reporting systems, double-entry record-keeping and precise quantification.” Those “management techniques” became a model for “a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity.” Slavery’s “violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous,” but instead “rational, capitalistic.”


Yet the numbers do not substantiate this thesis. Mr. Desmond asserts that “New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City.” But New York alone had more banks in 1858—294—than the entire future Confederacy, home to 208. The entire region’s “banking capital” in 1858 amounted to less than 80% of that held by the New York banks.


Cotton was the single biggest export commodity of pre-Civil War America—but only as a percentage of production that was exported. New York, in 1856-57, overshadowed every other state in the Union in the value of total exports and accounted for almost twice as much as all slave states combined except Louisiana, whose major port also exported goods produced in free states.


Mr. Desmond’s essay dwells at length on the plantation record-books of Thomas Affleck—“a one-stop-shop accounting manual, complete with rows and columns that tracked per-worker productivity”—as extended evidence of slavery’s capitalist rationality. But Affleck was unrepresentative of Southern plantation owners.


As historian Erin Mauldin has written, Southern agriculture before the Civil War was a sloppy, chaotic affair. Acidic soils discouraged intensive cultivation and pushed landowners toward wasteful land usage and constant movement westward to new territory. Much of what looks like capitalist innovation was a use-and-abandon process of land expansion only a few levels above hunting and gathering. Even Southern railroads were, as John Majewski has shown, built largely with public funding, not private investment, and mostly with a view of moving Southern militias to suppress slave revolts.


Nor was the uptick in cotton production necessarily driven by the lash. Economists Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode analyzed 150 plantations between 1800 and 1860. They attribute the increases in the volume of cotton production not to beatings and torture but to the “introduction and perfection of superior cotton varieties.” The quality of Southern cotton also drove up cotton profitability, as producers in Brazil, India and Egypt were unable to match it.


None of this is to deny the obvious fact that slavery was inhumane or brutal. But brutality has never been an effective incentive for productivity, much less improvements in quality.


The clinching refutation of the slavery-is-capitalism theory comes from the mouths of the slave owners themselves. They would have been aghast at the idea they were presiding over Yankee capitalism. Capitalism, complained slavery’s paladin, John C. Calhoun, “operated as one among the efficient causes of that great inequality of property which prevails in most European countries. No system can be more efficient to rear up a moneyed aristocracy. Its tendency is, to make the poor poorer, and the rich richer.”


The 1619 Project imagines Southern slaveholders were practicing “capitalism” simply because they made money. But slavery had been around since antiquity—long before anything resembling capitalism existed. And what the South saw in its plantations wasn’t capitalism but the opposite. Writing in 1854, the pro-slavery propagandist George Fitzhugh described slavery as “a beautiful example of communism, where each one receives not according to his labor, but according to his wants.”


“Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written,” reads the headline of Ms. Jones’s prize-winning essay. “Black Americans have fought to make them true.” The latter part is true, but the former isn’t, and attempting to replace the nation’s ideals with a false and destructive story is no way to do history. The 1619 Project can wave its Pulitzer as credibility insurance, but credibility isn’t the same as truth. Pulitzers have been handed out before—to the Times’s Walter Duranty and the Washington Post’s Janet Cooke—only to collapse under the weight of falsehood.


Mr. Guelzo is a senior research scholar at Princeton University and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation.




https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1619-project-tells-a-false-story-about-capitalism-too-11588956387

Davidson College Republican and Davidson College Libertarian Presidents: We stand for free speech at Davidson

March 19, 2025
By Gabriel Russ-Nachamie ’27 and Stephen Walker ’26 The Davidsonian March 19, 2025 Davidson’s public commitment to free expression is admirable, but recent anti-speech actions by the College contradict its guarantees to students and set dangerous pro-censorship precedents. This paradox threatens to stifle the open discourse we as a community all grow and benefit from. For context, a 2021 press release announcing Davidson’s commitment to freedom of expression states the College intends “to build a culture where everyone can participate and be heard” and acknowledges that “freedom of expression can’t exist when some people are barred from the conversation” solely on account of allegations that their speech is seen as wrong or offensive. Davidson’s pledge in the free expression statement itself commits the College to upholding protections of student expression for all because “Dissenting voices cannot and should not be censored.” Recent actions against the College Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter and its president, Cynthia Huang ‘25, threaten to undo these efforts in ways harmful to each and every one of us. In a letter published by YAF’s Davidson chapter, the College accused Huang of “Harassment” for publishing political content online and distributing pamphlets that “allegedly includes misinformation” promoting “Islamophobia” and “Transphobia” that made students report feeling “threatened and unsafe on campus.” Davidson offered to “resolve” the matter by forcing Huang to either admit responsibility for the alleged violation and agree to an “Accountability Plan” demanding action to avoid further sanction or a “Code of Responsibility Council Hearing,” which is reserved for actions constituting “serious prohibited conduct in a single incident or a persistent pattern of less severe prohibited conduct,” according to Davidson’s student handbook. The content that triggered this response was political material responding to ideas and policies the YAF chapter disagreed with. It is wrong to classify disagreement as harassment simply because the disagreement “offended” students. The content in question was meant to spark discourse surrounding certain political policies and ideologies. According to Davidson’s own standards, this content should be protected speech. The content that Huang faces potential sanctions for did not explicitly or implicitly promote any action against specific people or groups on account of their identities. For example, the pamphlet from YAF notes the link between Islamic fundamentalist theology and Hamas. However, this is not “Islamophobic” but a historical and scholarly argument about justifications of violence that rely upon religious interpretations. In fact, Hamas is an acronym that stands for the “Islamic Resistance Movement” and the group uses Islamic theology to justify their actions. Discussing the impact of religion on violence, whether it be Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, is protected speech and not bigotry. The club did not in any way target students and the material was freely available for anyone to engage with or ignore. Serious political disagreement on issues always has and will continue to offend individuals who dislike competing opinions. However, a small group of students being “offended” never justifies institutional backlash against political speech. We are not the only individuals or groups concerned about this restriction on speech. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan national organization dedicated to protecting free speech for all Americans, recently sent a letter to President Doug Hicks ‘90. FIRE urged Davidson to drop the charges against the YAF chapter and change its policies to align with the Chicago Principles of free speech, commonly known as the Chicago Statement which Davidson has allegedly committed to upholding. Adjudicative bodies should not base their decisions purely on perceptions motivated by personal feelings and biases. These actions by the college against YAF risk violating Davidson’s commitment to ensuring free speech and robust debate among students. No threats or harassment against students were included in YAF’s content, and anybody who does not like what they have to say is not being forced to engage with their content in any way. The only discernible motivation for going forward with sanctions is that YAF is a political minority that has questioned political orthodoxies in a way that is upsetting to others. The College’s Commitment to Freedom of Expression was made to protect this type of conduct. The Commitment directly states, “Davidson College’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate, discussion, and deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even most members of the college community to be offensive or unwise.” Sanctioning YAF for political arguments violates our rights as students and has dangerous implications. The aforementioned press release announcing Davidson’s commitment identifies “self-censorship” as a problem for Davidson and a motivator for its creation of the Commitment to Freedom of Expression statement. When students see that the only person who has spoken out against the majority in a political debate is facing sanctions because others did not like the content that student shared, said administrative action sends a message that dissent is unacceptable. This potentially triggers more self-censorship among all those who may disagree with this and countless other political ideas. As the presidents of the Davidson College Republicans and the Davidson College Libertarians, we stand for the free speech rights of all Davidson students. As a leading liberal arts school receiving taxpayer dollars, Davidson has publicly committed itself to upholding free speech rights for students and faculty. We call on the College to uphold its proclaimed principles and reject punishing students and political clubs for speech that some might disagree with or find offensive. We call on the College administration to change the Code of Responsibility to align with the Chicago Statement, as FIRE argued is crucial for Davidson in its letter to President Hicks. Finally, we firmly reject the anti-intellectual, adolescent mindset that has motivated the support for YAF’s censorship. Unwillingness to coexist with peers you may disagree with is unbecoming of students at such a prestigious institution like Davidson. You can’t take away your peers’ rights just because people’s feelings are hurt. Gabriel Russ-Nachamie ‘27 is an economics and mathematics double major from Lincolnton, NC and can be reached for comment at garussnachamie@davidson.edu. Stephen Walker ‘26 is a political science and English double major from Philadelphia, PA and can be reached for comment at stwalker@davidson.edu. https://thedavidsonian.news/1063/perspectives/davidson-college-republican-and-davidson-college-libertarian-presidents-we-stand-for-free-speech-at-david son/

Jeff Bezos Note to the Washington Post

February 26, 2025
"I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:"

Former Governor Weighs In on the Future of DEI at Davidson

February 26, 2025
By James (Jim) Martin '57 The Davidsonian February 26, 2025 As a loyal alumnus, I love Davidson College. There are few things here that I don’t love. Perhaps you feel the same, for similar or different reasons. While privileged to teach chemistry here for twelve years, I got into politics as a Mecklenburg County Commissioner. For five decades since retiring from the faculty to become a member of the US Congress, I followed Davidson mostly in passive ways. My annual giving was modest until I was in a position to increase my donation and deliver a significant gift from Duke Energy while on its Board. This and generous friends endowed Professor Malcolm Campbell’s multidisciplinary Genomics Program and a chair in chemistry honored to support Professor Erland Stevens. While Governor of North Carolina, I received an honorary degree and spoke at graduation. All this is a self-aggrandizing way to say I’m part of Davidson College and fully committed to helping it become the best it can be. This was tested when our Trustees decided that the President and the majority of Trustees need no longer be Christian. I joined eleven other former Trustees in a statement objecting to what we believed would undermine Davidson’s tradition and Statement of Purpose. This angered some alumni, especially recent graduates. You might be amused at how many defended the change simply by denouncing us as “old white men.” This trifling trifecta of accursed identity was true, but ignored thoughtful reasoning. This drew me to an even smaller, unofficial group of concerned alumni, Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse ( www.dftdunite.org ). Since 2018, its founders had petitioned Davidson College to adopt the Chicago Principles on Freedom of Expression. Pleading from a conservative viewpoint, they got little respect. Even with support from hundreds of alumni representing a wider range of interests, ages and viewpoints, DFTD continued to be disregarded. In 2021, President Carol Quillen heeded a similar appeal from several faculty members, whose interests weren’t aligned with ours. She appointed me to a group of six chaired by Professor Issac Bailey to compose a Davidson vision for academic freedom of expression reflecting Davidson’s commitment to ideals of diversity. The resulting document containing every element of the Chicago Principles was deferred until the arrival of new President Doug Hicks. With his calm inspiration, earnest discussions among faculty won growing acceptance. In early 2023, “Davidson’s Commitment to Freedom of Expression” was affirmed by a nearly unanimous vote. DFTD found ways to support greater diversity of viewpoints on campus. A student chapter of Free Speech Alliance was founded and DFTD was pleased to provide funding for their and others’ invited speakers. This led individual students to entrust us with suspected violations of their academic freedom. Most alarmingly, we heard about several dozen academic courses with syllabi requiring students to confess themselves “oppressors,” repent and atone . . . religious conditions irrelevant to the subject matter. Ironically, DEI is Latin for “gods.” We learned from other students about an astonishing “mandatory” order that all Davidson athletes attend a one-sided, provocative documentary entitled, “I’m not Racist…am I?” Its message? If you are white, you are racist. If you’re non-white, you can’t be racist. Melanin matters. While we don’t object to anyone studying such controversial notions, we protested the coercive way highly partisan objectives were imposed as a condition for participating. After several months with no assurance that our concerns were taken seriously, we reported this to our subscribers. Our purpose was to bring about a remedy, not punish or accuse any individual as was making national headlines at other schools. We figured some may have felt they were doing what was expected of them. One of us mentioned this campus issue in an interview on Fox News. This exploded into far wider circulation than we had foreseen or intended. Faculty and administration were flooded with vile communications from hundreds of anonymous individuals. At the time, this threatened to damage the reputation of Davidson College as well as DFTD, likely among opposing factions. I see no consequent injury against the College today, and DFTD’s standing has become more respected or tolerated even among some who dispute us. We made a point to welcome Dr. Chloe Poston as DEI Vice President at Davidson. She listened to our encouragement to explore ways to reform those abuses. Was it fair, in the cause of including diversity, to blame students for past discriminatory practices for which they bore no personal responsibility? We were pleased to discover, not long after the fall term began, that every course whose syllabus had defamed students as “oppressors” had dropped the insulting indoctrination. To us, this was good news, reflecting a less divisive and more welcoming attitude on campus. We commend those among faculty, administration, and students whose thoughtful contributions led to these corrections. Other reforms may need attention. Do any departments still require DEI allegiance in ways that filter out conservative scholars? Do students or faculty still feel intimidated to self-censor their thoughts and questions? Will Davidson adopt institutional neutrality for ideological controversies? There’s now the question whether Davidson‘s more welcoming, less doctrinaire approach to inclusion of a wider diversity of attributes, cultures and viewpoints will survive the national backlash against DEI. The federal government has declared a campaign to eradicate any trace of it. Among our DFTD membership we’ve learned to respect divergent views among friends, but I can tell you there is division over this. Some are convinced the same old divisive malpractices will simply be continued behind new titles, concealing the enforcement of identity politics. Others trust that Davidson’s new approach can be a positive model for others. Davidson can demonstrate a standard of healthier assurance that every student, without regard to their culture, religion, attitude, politics or appearance, will be genuinely welcomed and encouraged to grow intellectually, socially and spiritually. Large universities with massive DEI staffing must choose to fold or fight. If Davidson can restore diversity’s original ideals without the partisan excesses, other elite colleges might choose to defend this more sensible approach. The Davidsonian 2/26/25 by Davidsonian - Issuu
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