The 1776 Commission, established by President Trump's executive order last year to promote the teaching of "patriotic" history, issued its first (and most likely final) report earlier this week [link updated since the original has since been removed by the Biden administration]. The document is a powerful articulation of America's founding principles and how they should be regarded in the education of young Americans.
The report is not, however, a "whitewashing" of American history, as alleged by Kentucky Education Commissioner Jason Glass in a tweet, nor is it "racist" as claimed by a CNN headline. In fact, The 1776 Report directly confronts slavery and racism as pernicious threats to America's founding ideals, even as it shows how the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence - by design - helped usher in the eventual abolition of slavery and energized the struggle for civic rights against the long history of racial discrimination suffered by Black Americans and others throughout our national history.
Neverthless and unsurprisingly, President Biden plans to abolish the 1776 Commission as part of his first executive orders to "advance racial equity." It is certainly the President's prerogative to issue executive orders establishing or abolishing such commissions. But is grossly dishonest on his part and the part of so many others to paint this report as somehow denying the sins of our national past.
In fact, the 1776 Report lays an excellent foundation for a more honest and comprehensive study of American history, and an antidote to the ferociously anti-American attitudes that have increasingly shaped the way history is treated in American classrooms. As I wrote after President Trump announced the formation of this commission, there is nothing wrong with instilling patriotism in our children, along with a critical eye toward our nation's failures to live up to its own ideas. The 1776 Report gets this balance right.
I strongly encourage teachers and school leadership teams to consider using the 1776 Commission Report in designing lessons and curriculum in their social studies classrooms, and I urge parents and local citizens to use the report as a template for what they should expect in their local schools.
In follow up posts I'll have more to say about the report's recommendations on the teaching of history, but for now I just want to summarize its key points, and especially note how it addresses problematic areas of our past like slavery.
After a brief introduction, the report offers two longer sections on the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The Declaration articulates the core principles of American democracy: that there are eternal, knowable truths, and that among these is the principle that all human beings are endowed by God with dignity and rights which no government can rightfully usurp, and that representative democracy - consent of the governed - is the best way to ensure the preservation of those rights. The framework of the Constitution logically follows from these values. The new American state would be limited in scope and a system of checks and balances would ensure that no coalition, not even a majority, could easily impose its will on the rest of their citizens.
The 1776 Report then acknowledges that there have been threats to both the Founding principles and the American structure of self-government and equality before the law from the very beginning. In turn, the report addresses the institutions and ideologies that have sought to undermine the Founding and deny Americans their rights, including the 20th century evils of fascism and communism. But first the authors confront the most glaring contradiction in American history - slavery and racism. How could it be that America's Founding is worth defending when slavery was not only tolerated but many of the Founders themselves were slaveholders?
This issue has been explored at great length by many other scholars who have challenged the pernicious assertion of the historically inaccurate 1619 Project that America is an irredeemably racist country because of its history of slavery. I won't try to articulate all of the points of response to this claim here, except to note that such false narratives are designed to serve a larger purpose - the demolition of the American experiment itself.
The 1776 Report lays out the argument for how the Founders were fully aware of the contradiction between the Declaration and the existence of slavery and how they deliberately created a unified national government committed to principles that would eventually lead to slavery's abolition, which is exactly what happened. These facts of history do not in any way excuse the evil of slavery or the personal moral culpability of those who participated in it, including the Founders themselves. But just as Americans bear the shame of this past, we should acknowledge and celebrate the core values of the American Founding itself that made slavery completely unsustainable for long. The Commission writes:
Comprising actions by imperfect human beings, the American story has its share of missteps, errors, contradictions, and wrongs. These wrongs have always met resistance from the clear principles of the nation, and therefore our history is far more one of self sacrifice, courage, and nobility. America’s principles are named at the outset to be both universal—applying to everyone—and eternal: existing for all time. The remarkable American story unfolds under and because of these great principles.
Of course, neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice, and government by consent. But no nation before America ever dared state those truths as the formal basis for its politics, and none has strived harder, or done more, to achieve them.
Only a Leftist driven by the divisive and destructive ideology of critical theory could consider this measured and balanced presentation of American history to be racist.
But the 1776 Report does include other material that Americans on the political left will dislike, for other reasons. The authors explore how communism, which American progressives since the 1960's have made light of, posed an existential threat to America's core values of individual dignity and human rights. They also argue - accurately - that political progressivism itself is based on a fundamental abhorrence of the idea that the Constitution is itself worthy of defense and preservation, but rather must be constantly re-interpreted (in the image of the Progressive mindset, of course) with each new generation, an idea the Founders would have rejected as inevitably leading to mobocracy and tyranny.
Finally, the 1776 Report identifies critial race theory and identity politics of all kinds as the most contemporary and dangerous threat to America's Founding principles:
As American history teaches, dividing citizens into identity groups, especially on the basis of race, is a recipe for stoking enmity among all citizens. It took the torrent of blood spilled in the Civil War and decades of subsequent struggles to expunge [John C.] Calhoun’s idea of group hierarchies from American public life. Nevertheless, activists pushing identity politics want to resuscitate a modified version of his ideas, rejecting the Declaration’s principle of equality and defining Americans once again in terms of group hierarchies. They aim to make this the defining creed of American public life, and they have been working for decades to bring it about.
Finally, the 1776 Report affirms the place that religion - and religious liberty - has played in shaping the national character and how stable, strong, intact families and vibrant local communities have provided the structure that makes American democracy work. For those who reject the idea of eternal truths, traditional values, or that Americans have much to be proud of and believe that there is more that unites than divides us, the 1776 Report will indeed be divisive and challenging. But for Americans who still believe that the Founding principles are exactly what our divided and uncertain times need, the 1776 Commission has done extremely valuable work.
This is precisely what our schools need right now - an approach to history that nurtures both memory of our shared past, including its failures - and a living hope for the future based on the promises our Founders made that are just as true and inspiring today.
In future posts I'll explore this document in greater depth, and discuss its applications in classrooms and beyond. Read the 1776 Commission Report for yourself, here.
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