Wayne O'Leary

Another Woke Travesty

The “woke” sensibility, focused intently on the horrors enumerated by Black Lives Matter and MeToo, has branched out; it’s now being applied to all aspects of American life. In the process, every action taken and every utterance made, particularly by older-generation white males (special objects of suspicion, it seems), is being scrutinized by the self-appointed moral arbiters of the radical social left, who also double in many cases as judge and jury, summarily applying sanctions to those found culpable.

I’m not speaking here of obvious high-profile offenders — the Jeffrey Epsteins and Derek Chauvins of the world — but the hundreds, maybe by now the thousands, of victims unfairly caught up in a whirlwind of accusation and cancellation not unlike the McCarthy witch-hunt of the 1950s. This McCarthyism of the cultural left, which assumes those named are guilty of racism or sexism (regardless of absent corroborating evidence) until they prove their innocence, is as bad in its own way as the antidemocratic, white-supremacist fascism currently being practiced by the political right.

Moreover, it’s not just contemporary racial and gender transgressions that are at issue here. Deviations from the new woke orthodoxy by innumerable figures from the historical past are being condemned retrospectively; the dead can also have their names and reputations destroyed on the basis of simplistic evaluations or unbalanced interpretations arrived at by taking things out of context.

The latest prominent example of applied woke historiography (if we can call it that) is the pending removal, in the name of ideological purity, of a famous 19th century statue of the nation’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, from New York City’s Council chamber, where it’s resided for over a century, to an obscure location in the New York Historical Society. There, the “hurtful” Jefferson visage will no longer look down upon the Council’s offended Progressive, and Black, Latino and Asian caucuses, some of whose members have agitated for its removal.

It should come as no surprise that Jefferson’s symbolic banishment derives from his status as a slaveholder, a fact considered in the post-George Floyd environment to be by definition offensive to “people of color” — or POC in proper woke newspeak (lately expanded to BIPOC to specifically encompass black and indigenous individuals). In the New York instance, negative commentary was scathing; Jefferson was castigated as the embodiment of the most shameful aspects of American history, a massively flawed figure whose public image and memory should be permanently erased. This followed on calls a year ago for dismantling the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Lost in the emotional hullabaloo was the real Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia statute for religious freedom and church-state separation, as well as the founder of America’s first liberal political party (the Democratic-Republicans, forerunner of today’s Democrats), and the visionary signer of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty with France that doubled the size of the republic overnight.

None of this matters to the purveyors of wokeness, who see Jefferson only as the heartless enslaver of 600 people — a media-driven exaggeration. (He inherited his initial slaves and never held more than 100-200 at one time, far fewer than Washington.) Stories that he fathered slave children by one of his servants also remain current, though DNA confirmation remains iffy and period testimony cloudy.

Nevertheless, Jefferson was undeniably a slaveholder and, given his prominence in the national narrative, offers an irresistible target for cancellation to those who’ve decided that race (and racism) is the central fact of American history, eclipsing all others. The heralded, but flawed, “1619 Project” sponsored by the New York Times, which absurdly claims the American Revolution Jefferson’s words inspired and justified was fought to preserve slavery, is the ultimate expression of that mindset.

Since all of the leading Founding Fathers except John Adams owned slaves (at some point), along with almost all presidents up to 1850, the only logical recourse for woke purists would seem to be sanitizing American history prior to that date by disappearing all objects of their displeasure, starting with the hated third president — a far easier task than contextualizing it to account for Jeffersonian inconsistencies.

Jefferson, the most liberal of the Founders, was atypical among his slave-owning contemporaries and morally conflicted over the issue. Evidence suggests he actively sought to compensate, and eyewitnesses portrayed him as unusually indulgent toward his slaves. House servants were treated as family; overseers abusing field hands were dismissed. Families were kept together if sold, and individuals sometimes purchased to reunite kinfolk. On occasion, individual slaves with marketable skills were freed. Meanwhile, Jefferson the reluctant slaveholder did what he could, within the constraints of time and place — his Virginia was a slave economy and society — to terminate or moderate the “peculiar institution.”

To that end, he unsuccessfully proposed gradual emancipation for his state as a young legislator in the 1770s, criticized the refusal of King George III to end the American slave trade in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence (later deleted at the insistence of Carolina and Georgia planters), attempted to persuade Virginia to outlaw its own slave trade in 1776, advocated phasing in emancipation after 1800 in his 1783 draft of a new state constitution, tried to get slavery banned from the Northwest Territory in 1784 as a member of the Continental Congress, and attacked slavery as a corrupting influence in his “Notes on Virginia” published in 1785. In 1814, he wrote a friend that “the hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come.”

Still, the “most distinguished politician of our history,” as Lincoln called him, continued to hold slaves. Not to do so would have been to court personal bankruptcy — he was often in debt — and social ostracism, and to abandon his ill-prepared slaves, his “people,” to an uncertain fate. This can be interpreted as a moral failure, but the true Southern believers in antebellum slavery, led by South Carolina’s reactionary anti-democrat John C. Calhoun, knew where Jefferson was coming from and knew he had never been one of them. They derisively rejected his principle that “all men are created equal” out of hand.

Two centuries later, however, the woke movement of today lumps all figures from America’s slave past, the Jeffersons and the Calhouns, together in a false equivalence. That’s not just ahistorical; it’s willfully stupid.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2022

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