The New York Times Magazine is greeting America’s 250th birthday with a vast animated project that cartoonishly depicts the American founders as motivated by “Anti-Native sentiment” and a desire to seize “Native land.”
Cartoonish applies not only to the crudeness of the history but to the graphics. The project is illustrated by a British artist, Tim McDonagh, whose website says his style is “inspired by old comics, gig posters and tattoos,” and whose other work includes a celebration for the BBC of women wheelchair athletes and a tour backdrop for an Australian comedian and musicians that featured zebras, pink flamingos, dinosaurs, and a “pig’s willy.” McDonagh also did an anti-drunk-driving campaign for the British government, which is ironic, because the American Revolution was fought against the British government.
An unsigned introduction to the project as published online—reminiscent of the oft-corrected though Pulitzer-winning Times 1619 Project, which argues we should be celebrating America’s 407th anniversary rather than its 250th—claims, “The story starts in 1763 … King George III sought to limit westward expansion into Native territories to avoid expensive new frontier wars and protect the fur trade, while colonial farmers felt entitled to the soil that had just been won. Land, not taxes, was the first grievance that sparked conflict between Britain and its colonies.”
That interpretation, fashionable though it is in certain circles, just doesn’t hold up under logical analysis or the full weight of the historical record, and the Times does readers a disservice by elevating it so prominently as a primary cause of the revolution.
I understand that part of what academics in the history business do, driven in part by creative curiosity and in part by the incentives of academic careers, is devise new and provocative interpretations. I even appreciate that new scholarship can add to understanding by illuminating previously neglected dimensions. Yet even allowing generous latitude for such interpretations, the idea that the American Revolution was primarily motivated by frontiersmen seeking Lebensraum just doesn’t match the empirical reality, any more than did the 1619 Project’s preposterous claim that the goal of the revolution was to preserve slavery. Many of the key players in the revolution—Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock—either lived happily in cities and didn’t need more land or, in the cases of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Richard Henry Lee and Arthur Lee and Charles Carroll, already owned vast tracts, thousands of acres.
Taxes were significant. So too, though, was the higher-level ideological principle that the colonists shouldn’t be subjected to rule by a faraway Parliament in which they were not represented. Among the grievances of the colonies were the Declaratory Acts, which weren’t taxes but merely statements that Parliament has the right to impose taxes. The colonists found that unacceptable. This “ideological” origin of the American Revolution, as historian Bernard Bailyn described it, may seem abstract, but it applied whether the issue was westward expansion or taxes. The Declaration text describes it as governments “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” By far that’s the key point, not any land grab. To the extent land was a factor on the westward edges, the key dynamic was consent of the governed—frustration about the injustice that Parliament and the king, rather than the colonists themselves, were the decision makers.
And the story did not begin in 1763 but has its roots much earlier, with the Puritans who left England between 1625 and 1649 and who, in Boston in 1689, led by Cotton Mather, had already rebelled against the Governor, Captain-General and Vice Admiral of His Majesty’s Dominion of New England, Sir Edmund Andros.
If the Times wants to claim that the founders were just dressing up an anti-Native land grab in the guise of a lot of highfalutin’ rhetoric about consent of the governed, it can, but the evidence for such a claim is thin verging on nonexistent. The founder I know best, Samuel Adams, appealed in 1775 to the Mohawk Indians to join the revolution: “We therefore earnestly desire you to whet your hatchet and be prepared with us to defend our liberties and lives.” In 1790 he wrote to John Adams: “Even Savages might, by the means of Education, be instructed to frame the best civil, and political Institutions with as much skill and ingenuity, as they now shape their Arrows.”
The Times’s language about “Native land” is itself anachronistic; the Native Americans didn’t really have a concept of land ownership. And if some colonists had some “anti-Native sentiment” it wasn’t always entirely inexplicable; in his The Barbarous Years Bailyn recounts how an English settler “was tortured to death in ways familiar to the Indians but not to Englishmen. At a leisurely pace, his extremities were cut off with mussel shells and tossed into the fire before him; he was flayed—the skin was torn from his face and head—then disemboweled while still alive; and finally burned to ashes.”
What’s the agenda? The Times magazine account intersects—suspiciously conveniently—with the political mood at the moment on the extreme left. Clare Valdez, a socialist who, with Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s endorsement, just won the Democratic primary for a New York City congressional seat, is out publicly claiming, “Look, this nation was founded on genocide, on the mass displacement of people. This is, it’s just the history.”
The Times project identifies and profiles seven founders—Good Peter, Herman Husband, Mercy Otis Warren, John Leland, Lemuel Haynes, Joseph Plumb Martin, and Elizabeth Freeman—while giving no such attention to Washington, John Hancock, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Arthur Lee, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or other iconic Founding Fathers.
It’s ironic, because an introductory essay to the project, by Jane Kamensky, who left a position teaching history at Harvard to become president and chief executive of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, explicitly warns against the perils of this approach.
“All pluribus and no unum does not a national narrative make, any more than a war can be won without generals,” she writes, denouncing those who account for the founding with what she calls “a graveyard of mustachioed villains: toppled statues of figures so often excoriated by today’s progressives, who insist that the moral depravity of the founding fathers was so profound that they can teach us nothing — indeed that the founding itself was irredeemably corrupt, as the nation remains.” That approach, she writes, misleads just as does depicting the founders as “a garden of unblemished alabaster heroes, a sanitized portrait.” Never mind that the Times just substitutes its own new class of alabaster heroes, these ones blacks, women, and Native Americans.
Engaging with readers in the comments section, Kamensky even goes so far as to advise readers to “find their patriotism.” She says, “Patriotism, as I wrote in this article, means belonging to the nation. Finding each of ours is essential. None is not an answer.”
Not bad advice, but the Times is making it harder, not easier, by distorting the story.
The whole thing was too much for even some Times readers to stomach.
“The modern progressive discourse is completely dominated by the themes of slavery, racism and indigenous genocide,” wrote one Times reader, in a comment upvoted by more than 100 others. “The problem with this approach is that it ignores the experiences of the vast majority of the people who actually lived in the past and settled this country, leaving a hollow and one-sided conception of history… If you think America was bad, you really don’t know enough about the rest of the world during the 18th and 19th centuries.”
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