Today, Explained - Party in the USA?

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

How do you talk about colonialism and slavery at a birthday party? New York City is trying to tackle that question this year as it turns 400, and the US will soon have to do the same for its 250th. This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen and Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noam Hassenfeld. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

New York City just turned 400 years old, but the city isn't doing too much to celebrate. I wanted to mark the occasion, so I went down to the southern tip of Manhattan to find this monument, which commemorates the first Dutch settlers that came here back in 1624. And it's not here. There's a huge construction project happening. Either the monument is gone or it is under what looks like a nondescript wooden shack. If New York is struggling this much to celebrate its birthday, what does that mean for America? America's turning 250 in 2026, and it's already shaping up to be a battle. So how do we celebrate a city or a country this complicated?

And should we even be celebrating it to begin with? Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. I'm in a New York state of mind. It's Today Explained. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, filling in as host today. Hey! I'm walking here! I'm walking here!

Oh, sorry about that. But we are here to talk about... New York, New York. It's the city that gave us James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Biggie Smalls, Alicia Keys. New York! It's been the setting for classics like The Godfather, West Side Story, Coming to America. Good morning, my neighbors! Hey, fuck you! Yes!

Anyway, in a lot of ways, New York has shaped how America describes itself. And it's actually shaped America. Almost half of all Americans have an ancestor that came through Ellis Island. So you'd think a city like this turning 400 would be cause for celebration. Where, you know, even 20 years ago, people might have celebrated things like this. Now we look at it more nuanced. We see the negative, the darks and the lights, and we're trying to come to terms with it. Russell Shorto is the director of the New Amsterdam Project at the New York Historical Society,

and he just curated an exhibit to mark New York's 400th. It's called New York Before New York. So we wanted to talk to him about the anniversary and why we should use it as an opportunity to acknowledge the good, the bad, and everything else in New York's history. We started with the events that happened 400 years ago, when, of course, there

were plenty of people already living here when the Dutch showed up. This area, meaning the area that's now New York City, the five boroughs, was the territory of the people variously known as Lenape, or Delaware, or Muncie, and sometimes Leni Lenape. And how are these kind of first European immigrants integrating themselves? For those first years, they wanted to trade. They wanted to do business. One thing that really takes off and becomes a status of wealth is having a really nice beaver fur hat. Hunting the beaver to use this waterproof thick fur to create top hats.

Hey, cool hat. After two years, one of the first things they did, we think, was negotiate a deed with, presumably, the Lenape people. We don't have that deed anymore. The deed for Manhattan Island does not exist. What does, however, is a letter that a government official in the Netherlands wrote to his bosses, essentially saying, our people in our New World colony are in good health and they've planted crops and some of the women have given birth and oh by the way they purchased the island of

Manhattan. Do you happen to have the text of that letter? Yeah you want me to read the whole thing? How long is it? It's a couple of paragraphs and it's a list of animal skins. Maybe we might not need a list all the skins. Okay. Received 7 September 1626. High and mighty lords. Yesterday the ship Arms of Amsterdam arrived here. They report that our people are in good spirit and live in peace. The women have also born some children there. They have purchased the grains and they list the animal skins and so on. As we all know, the native people did not have a concept of real estate and, you know, here, give me this money and this land is yours. They were saying, oh, you new people want to come here.

All right, we'll let you stay here. We're going to continue to use this island, but we'll let you use it too. And in exchange, we'll get something out of it. Quid pro quo, Mr. Powers. Yes, squid pro ro. So, okay, so this is this moment that's kind of going to end up being pretty pivotal, that the Dutch are saying they purchased the land, the Lenape, we have reason to believe, are not feeling like they are actually selling the land.

As we move forward, as more Dutch settlers come, what kind of ideas are the Dutch bringing with them? What kind of culture are they building here? Ironically, one of its foundations is tolerance. The Dutch had established an official policy of religious toleration. There are 18 languages being spoken in New Amsterdam at a time when there were only about 500 people or so living there. So New York was New York even before it was New York. Yeah, sounds like Queens.

And yet, there were two huge exceptions to it. One is the treatment of Native Americans, and the other is almost from the start, a couple of years after the founding, enslaved Africans start arriving. The famous wall at Wall Street, there are enslaved Africans who were participating in the building of that wall. So, I think when you talk about tolerance, you have to look at it in terms of other white European Christians. While the Dutch Republic was founding this colony, they were also inventing the building blocks of capitalism. The concept of a corporation, a permanent corporation, the concept of shares of stock and of anybody can buy a piece

of this company. Elements of this kind of, you know, very modern trading practice they bring as well. So this is what's really interesting to me because New York clearly becomes this foundational city. But if you flash forward to today, it seems like it retains a lot of the hallmarks of the Dutch settlement. Like it retains a lot of this religious liberty. It retains a lot of the focus on capitalism. It clearly retains a lot of the issues of racism that we talked about. Yeah. And I guess I wonder, has the city acknowledged any of those less good aspects?

Oh, I think in a lot of different ways we have been wrestling with how do we look at our past? How do we look at our history? Looking ahead to in 2026, we're going to have the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of American Independence. And, you know, it used to be like when I was a kid, you know, you celebrated things like that. The bicentennial celebration of America's independence, 200 years of liberty celebrated in a glorious birthday party. Parades of square rigged sailing ships, each over 200 feet in length, streaming past the Statue of Liberty and massive fireworks. Now people are saying is celebrate, is that really what we want to do?

So I'm going to tell y'all how many presidents had slaves and how many did they have? We started with George Washington. George Washington. We know that a lot of the founding fathers owned slaves. How do we deal with these conflicting aspects of our history? So the year 1619 marks the year that the first Africans were sold into the colony of Virginia. And through this series of essays, we really argue that very little about modern American life has been left untouched by this foundational institution. Nicole Hannah-Jones calls the 1619 Project the most important work of her life. She says that's because instead of confronting the truth about the way our country was built,

we're taught a story of American exceptionalism. To me, the only common sense way to approach our past, we have to look at it all. We have to try to understand it all. I think it's just as important to acknowledge these, what we see as clear failures, moral failures. It's also important to look at other elements that we see as foundational, as creating our values, and say that as well. No people had a greater claim to the American flag than we do. I wonder, has something recently changed? I mean, people have been saying this forever. A lot of people have been saying, we've had these problems going back. I mean, that's what the Civil War was, part of an attempt to solve these problems that were baked into the country's founding.

And the way the Civil War was settled didn't solve them at all. We didn't really uncover all of the rot. So I think there have been a number of things that have gotten a huge amount of attention in the past five or 10 years that has really started to make people reassess and ask these questions about how do we approach the past? You know, I feel kind of torn about it because, you know, I live in Brooklyn. It's not too hard for me to see the Statue of Liberty. I feel often like New York is the reason that I have the life that I have. Like my grandparents came here fleeing the Holocaust. Other of my grandparents came as survivors afterwards. They would tell stories about seeing the Statue of Liberty, like stuff that sounds like cliche, but I'm sure has applied to thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And I also recognize the stuff that we've talked

about. And I guess I, how do you weigh the two? How can you talk about one and the other in the same breath? I think everybody has to do that for themselves. I think one of the main problems of our era is that nuance is seen as like a bad word. You know, you have to be able to hold two conflicting things in your head at the same time. That's part of being a grown-up. 400 years old. Yeah, exactly. So let's grow up. That's the message. If we're only looking at our failures, then we've got nothing to stand on. Who even are we? You know, there are some people who don't want to look at them at all and only want to celebrate heroes and their achievements.

Well, that gives you this fake sense of history. Russell Shorto is the author of the book The Island at the Center of the World and the director of the New Amsterdam Project at the New York Historical Society, where you can catch his exhibit New York Before New York. Coming up, if New York can't even toast itself, how messy is it going to get when the whole country turns 250? Seems like it's going to get messy. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management

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legal action against the first Trump administration 434 times. And they will do it again to protect immigrants' rights, defend reproductive freedom, fight discrimination, and fight for all of our fundamental rights and freedoms. This Giving Tuesday, you can support the ACLU. With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. I'm Theodore R. Johnson, or Ted, and I am a senior advisor at New America and a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. In the first half of the show, we talked about New York's

upcoming birthday, the 400th birthday. But New York is not the only big birthday we've got coming up here. America is turning 250 years old in a couple of years. That's right. How big a deal is 250? Well, it depends on who you ask. You know, there are lots of historical foundations, museums, the federal government, frankly, that are putting a lot of resources or at least a lot of thought into how to celebrate this semi-quincentennial in 2026. Semi-quincentennial? That's right. Yeah. I always do a little language arts here.

So, centennial, we know that. Okay, that's 100. Quincentennial, quin is the five. So, 500. Got it. Semi-quin, half of 500, 250. And that gets us to Semi-Quinn Centennial. That seems overly complicated.

I've written before that it's we're due a Gen Z intervention here. This should be the quarter milli. It's a quarter of a millennium. Quarter milli, I like it. Quarter milli works. So we got a fun name, quarter milli. What's the plan? What's in the works here?

The federal government some years ago passed legislation around the semi-quincentennial to establish a commission mostly comprised of former members of Congress, former cabinet-level secretaries that would engage the nation, the states, nonprofits, businesses, et cetera, to come up with the best ways to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the United States of America. Fact is, there have been challenges since the very beginning.

A lot of it looks a lot like you would expect it to. Exhibits, local history contests, you know, sporting events, bringing ships into harbors, showcasing the Liberty Bell. The Philadelphia Historic District Partners will launch the Red, White, and Blue to-do. A patriotic celebration. Those are the kinds of things, essentially trying to tell an updated story of America

that isn't just backwards looking, but one that also imagines what could be next. We're launching America's Invitation, a chance to share your thoughts on our past, the heroes you love, and your dreams for the road ahead. We just spent the first half of the show talking about how the 400th birthday of New York City is this moment where people are kind of grappling with how to mark progress and also how to weigh this massive historical baggage. How's that factoring into plans for the 250th? Quite a bit, actually. You know, I've looked at every 50-year anniversary since the founding of the country. And the one common thread is sort of the recitation of the national gospel.

The founding fathers, you know, came up with this amazing idea. No country has ever existed like this one before because we're founded on an idea, et cetera, et cetera. All good, but it leaves out so many of the people who contributed to making this country what it is today at 250 years. So I think one of the prime focuses of America at 250 and at New America, we're calling it us at 250, is incorporating the experiences, the histories, the stories of lots of Americans whose stories were not incorporated into previous celebrations in the same way. Yeah, tell me a little bit more about the people who are left out of that story. Yeah, so, I mean, like, you, me, and everyone listening, essentially, you know, at the first presidential election of 1790, Jill Lepore has written, a historian has written that only 6% of the people in these United States were eligible to participate in the first presidential election, and only half of them did so.

Those are the people left out of the origin story of the United States. Women only got the right to vote 100 years ago. And if you were Black or a Black woman or an immigrant, you know, maybe that wasn't until the Voting Rights Act of 65. So all of the people left out of democracy have essentially been left out of the story of America. We were sort of objects in the story instead of subjects, you know, people to be acted on instead of people really using their agency to whatever extent they had it to compel the nation

to be a truer version of who it proclaimed itself to be in the Declaration and in the Constitution. Yeah, yeah, talking about people who are left out, it makes me think of even the moment we decide where to start this count is really important. You know, like there's all these years that could start, that could serve as the original birthday for America. How do you think where we point as the start dictates what kind of story we tell about America? It's a big question. And I think what the federal government's doing and what we're doing at New America is focusing on the independence of the nation state, the United States of America. So when July 4, 1776 shows up and we have, you know, that's sort of the date we recognize as the date the United States begins, there are already many nations here. And never mind, you know, France, England, Spain, I'm talking about Native American tribes, black folks, immigrants from all over the place. So the nation was quite established before the

nation state was. So for 250, it's about the ratification of the declaration. July 2nd, the real date, July 4th is sort of the recognized one. And that is what we anchor it to with the understanding that the people that comprised the new nation states were not new people, that they were old people with long stories. Because what we've accomplished as a nation state with all of these different nations of people is remarkable and something to be celebrated instead of something to sort of be washed aside just to, you know, shoot fireworks and eat hot dogs. Yeah, I mean, this whole kind of debate about where we start the history of this country has led to a lot of controversy, right? Like, in response to the 1619 Project, there was the 1776 Commission.

Right. Which was basically saying, no, no, no, the real start was 1776. This is the moment that made America, America. To combat the toxic left-wing propaganda in our schools, I announced last week that we are launching a new pro-American lesson plan for students called 1776 Commission. The 1776 Commission was essentially a counter-1619 project narrative endeavor. We will teach our children the truth about America,

that we are the most exceptional nation on the face of the earth and getting better every single day. We're not going to let it fail. My sense of it was that they're trying to re-center the national mythology about the origins of the nation as a way of countering the historical work that was in the 1619 Project. And, you know,

it should be said that a lot of the terminology from that commission's work served as fuel for a lot of the anti-DEI, anti-CRT, anti-racism state bills that we've seen across the country where educators now can't talk about certain books, certain authors at newspapers or magazines. So it was not a super patriotic way of reestablishing a narrative where there's consensus agreement on this is the story of the country. Rather, it was explicitly, in my view, a counter-narrative to the 1619 Project. Critical race theory distorts the reality of American history. The 1619 Project, for example, advances the totally fabricated claim that a primary motivation for the American Revolution was a desire to preserve slavery. I guess they had the impression that if people don't hear the

good news love story of America first, they may fall out of love with the place. But, you know, have you met a Black person recently? You know, this is, we are people who serve in the military, who have believed in all the aspirations and dreams and promises and ideas of America, and were not only left out of it at the founding, but were enslaved in service of it against our will at the founding, and yet insist on not gaining power and sort of vengeance, but rather just compelling the country to be who it says it is. And so if folks can grow up in that sort of environment, if you are, you know, descendant from a Japanese American who was interned during World War II, or you're a woman who couldn't vote to 100 years ago, or a white immigrant who 100 years ago from Ireland wasn't even considered white and was, you know, the N-word in a different way was used

for them. If all of these folks could find a way to stay here, to work in their communities, to die in war, to lead protest movements, to compel a more inclusive, multiracial, liberal, constitutional, democratic republic, then I think it's okay if we tell the truth about our origin and not paper over it with, you know, fables and mythologies. It's interesting because I think another response to this whole conversation we're having is to just be like, let's not celebrate the 250th. There's so many shameful aspects here and it's next to impossible to bake this into a celebration to make something like this reflective. What would to impossible to bake this into a celebration, to make something like this reflective. What would you say to someone who's just like,

I don't think we should commemorate this. We shouldn't celebrate a country that had this many flaws baked in from the start. Yeah, well, you know, we could run down the list of federal holidays, and I can tell you why each one probably isn't perfect. I mean, even Juneteenth is celebrating the fact that years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Black people in Texas finally find out they're not enslaved anymore. And that's a celebration. It is a reason to celebrate the end of slavery. But why are we celebrating that date when it's basically the last people to be enslaved got the word too late? Memorial Day is about service members that have died in service of the country, but a lot of those service members weren't brought home with honors,

weren't buried with honors, their families didn't get survivor's benefits, the pensions, etc. So why are we serving Memorial Day when the country hasn't lived up to its promise to all of those who have served since the beginning, holidays are political, period. They become what we make them. And if we want to honor those who have died for the country, and we should, then the holiday is what we make it, not a co-signing on all the nation has done since its founding or beforehand. So celebrating the country at 250

is not an endorsement of every action the nation has taken since its founding. In my view, it's a commemoration of the growth, the evolution, the progress the nation has made since its inception. And that is to be celebrated because that is celebrating the work of Americans, not celebrating a nation that's without fault. That was New America's Ted Johnson. This episode was produced by Peter Balanon-Rosen and Halima Shah. It was edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Patrick Boyd. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this is Today Explained.