By Rich
Lowry
Tuesday,
February 07, 2023
A recent episode
of a Disney+ cartoon has woke kids performing a skit around the theme: “Slaves
built this country.”
The
installment of “The Proud Family” series — in which the kids find out the
founder of their town was a slave owner — is a cartoon version of the 1619
Project, although the 1619 Project is cartoonish in its own right.
Hulu has
just released a documentary (using the word loosely) version of the New
York Times’ production, hosted by the 1619 Project’s creator, Nikole
Hannah-Jones.
A new
episode is devoted to the idea that slavery created American capitalism and is
about as subtle as the Disney+ cartoon, relying extensively on the commentary
of the Marxist academic Robin D. G. Kelley.
If there
were any doubt about the radical agenda of the 1619 Project — which has made a
pretense of a neutral pursuit of the historical truth — the Hulu show should
remove it.
It
argues that, as Hannah-Jones puts it, our “economic system was founded on
buying and selling black people.” Imprinted by this legacy, American capitalism
is brutish and exploitative to this day. In fact, there is a direct line from
antebellum cotton plantations to 21st-century Amazon warehouses.
Yes,
there’s very little difference between, say, Joshua John Ward, “the king of the
rice planters” who owned more than a thousand slaves in South Carolina, and
Jeff Bezos.
The
point is that the only way to fully reject racism and the legacy of slavery is
to reject American capitalism. QED.
This is
poisonous dreck.
Slavery
has been a fact of human existence throughout recorded history. Why did it
suddenly create capitalism a couple of centuries ago in a few select places,
namely the Netherlands, Britain, and the American colonies? Why didn’t the
Romans create it? The Vikings? The Spanish?
It is
true that slavery and cotton production played a large role in the American
economy, but they weren’t determinative. As Phillip Magness of the American
Institute for Economic Research points out, slave-produced cotton and its derivatives
accounted for 5 or 6 percent of GDP before the Civil War.
Are we
supposed to believe that absent this sector of the economy, the growing
financial and industrial might of the United States would have evaporated?
Important
voices in both the rapidly developing North and relatively stagnant South saw a
stark contrast between the economic systems of the two regions.
In the
North, Abraham Lincoln observed, free workers made the most of themselves,
while the mandarins of the slave South undertook “to shift their share of the
burthen” of labor “on to the shoulders of others,” and work itself was
considered “vulgar and ungentlemanly.”
Radical
Republican Thaddeus Stevens believed “if the South is ever to be made a safe
republic, let her lands be cultivated by the toil of the owners, or the free
labor of intelligent citizens.”
For his
part, the influential apologist for the slave South George Fitzhugh argued that
the doctrine of laissez faire is “at war with all kinds of slavery.”
If
slavery was the basis of capitalism, one wonders, why did the capitalist North
dare wage a war to destroy the seedbed of its own prosperity? Why didn’t the
region that was the great source of capitalism win the war based on its
superior economic wherewithal rather than getting ground down by a more
financially proficient and productive North? Finally, how did American
capitalism survive the end of chattel slavery?
For the
anti-capitalists, the answer to the last question is easy. Slavery, in effect,
never went away.
Whatever
one thinks of working conditions or wages at Amazon, though, obviously people
working there are free to work elsewhere, free to start their own businesses,
free to quit the workplace altogether.
That
would seem a stark difference from chattel slavery, but it’s not necessary to
grapple with these or any other challenging questions, if the show you are
producing is, in essence, a cartoon.
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