By Mary Grabar
Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2021
Pp. 324. $29.99 hardcover.
The New York Times’s 1619 Project has sparked numerous responses since its publication three years ago—including Phillip Magness’s The 1619 Project: A Critique (Great Barrington, Mass.: American Institute for Economic Research, 2020) and Peter Wood’s 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (New York: Encounter Books, 2020). Now, Mary Grabar, a scholar at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, sets out not only to refute the Project’s factual assertions but to resist the rhetoric it employs—a rhetoric that depends more on ignoring relevant facts than making overtly false claims. Grabar brings to this task an impressive array of scholarship on everything from the lives of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to the structure of the slave trade in eighteenth-century Africa and slave revolts in nineteenth-century America.
Yet her book misses the mark, not because the 1619 Project’s claims are true, but because her “debunking” is pitched in such a partisan tone that is virtually certain to leave unpersuaded anyone not already convinced of the Project’s faults. Consider the paragraph in which she sets out her thesis: “In spite of the laurels bestowed upon it by progressive politicians,, indoctrinated students, and Hollywood,” she writes, “the 1619 Project is a polemic, steeped in ideology” (p. 38). Perhaps so—but swipes at “woke” “educrats,” not to mention the book’s blurbs from Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro, operate as flashing “Do Not Enter” signs to anyone on even the moderate political left.
