By Samuel Damren
The emigration of British colonists to North America and the events leading up to the country’s founding is one of our most well-worn conventional narratives.
The American origins story typically contains a healthy dose of uplifting themes: indominable perseverance in the face of hardship, the chance for freedom from religious persecution, escape from the class structure of the Old World, and a celebration of the success of hard work in a meritocracy.
As recounted in student textbooks over generations, this glowing portrayal masks various faults of our ancestors and institutions. It does so by suggesting that those faults while real were destined to be overcome by an American spirit that was part of the people from the country’s inception.
Critics of this version have long been a part of our heritage with notable contributions from American literature and other fields.
But when criticisms were recently published by African American educators and journalists in book form, titled “The 1619 Project,” the extreme response from MAGA Republicans was anything but proportional to the tenor and substance of the actual criticisms.
Instead of engaging the critics, MAGA legislators and executives enacted laws that excluded the book, as well as the teaching of “critical race theory,” from the curricula of various schools in their states.
In a similar display of MAGA vitriol, two African American legislators in Tennessee were recently expelled from the state legislature for having the temerity to offend the legislature’s embrace of assault weapons with a proposal to ban them.
The two reactions are symptomatic of racist sentiment to “put” African Americans in their “place.”
Instead of delving into the controversy involving “The 1619 Project,” let’s look at the events of America’s founding from yet another perspective.
In 1584, Richard Hakluyt presented his “Discourse Concerning Western Planting” to Queen Elizabeth I. Hakluyt was a prominent clergyman who was connected to ambitious investors hoping to profit from England’s entry into colonial enterprise. He was also a well-known author of the travel adventures of English explorers.
Through what many in England regarded as a creative proposal in “Western Planting,” Hakluyt sought to convince the Crown to back colonization efforts in America by means that would also relieve England of costs associated with its over-populated underclass.
Hakluyt’s proposal was to ship the underclass out of the country on one-way tickets to populate risky, dangerous colonial settlements. Rather than continuing to burden the Commonwealth, under this model for colonization and in Hakluyt’s own words “thousandes of idle persons in this realm” who “stuff” our prisons full, “where either they pitifully pyne awaye, or els at lengthe are miserably hanged,” could be put to honest labor as indentured workers.
It was the 16th century version of a “win-win” solution.
The full story of America’s settlement by what Hakluyt referred to as the “waste” people of England and how they were overseen by privileged Englishmen and merchant associations is detailed in Nancy Isenberg’s 2016 book titled “White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.”
Conservative criticism of this alternative version of American history was muted and focused on less-persuasive connections drawn by Isenberg elsewhere in the book between these Pre-Revolutionary War events and the composition of present-day America.
MAGA Republicans ignored the book. That may be precisely because the critique of American society offered in “White Trash” requires an examination of the effect of class in present-day America not just in the past.
Such an inquiry would be challenging for MAGA loyalists given that their leader is a man who was not only born on third base, but thinks he is privileged to steal home even after election umpires repeatedly called him out at the plate.
History is composed of narratives flowing from different perspectives. To the extent a narrative is composed of facts, it provides benefit. To the extent it ignores relevant facts or substitutes fiction for fact, it does not.
If there is a “conventional narrative” about “conventional narratives,” it is that they can serve agendas having little to do with actual history.
(This is the second commentary in a series.)
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