Quote of the Day

This past week, Beck aired a show that was so preposterous in conception — and so emblematic of what’s wrong with American conservatism — that I couldn’t resist giving it a detailed analysis. The unlikely subject of the program was America’s Black Founding Fathers.

In this episode, part of his “Founding Fathers’ Fridays” series, Beck begins by informing his audience that much of what they learned in school is wrong and that for at least a century, American scholars have been suppressing (consciously, I presume) the grand history of African-American achievement. These sins of omission are grave. Forgotten black heroes include, Peter Salem, who was, according to Beck, the “hero of Bunker Hill,” and James Armistad, who, Beck reveals, “may have won the Revolutionary War” through his daring-do.

To back up these revisionary claims, Beck brings on David Barton, a man who made headlines recently in Texas’s “textbook wars” (more on that below). Barton is the president of the “WallBuilders” think-tank, which is dedicated to documenting the religiosity of the Founding Founders and the achievements of African Americans. Reading through Barton’s website, one gets the impression that he all but equates African-Americans’ participation in government with Christian righteousness.

Then comes Lucas Morel, a professor with a doctorate from the Claremont Graduate Program, the hotbed of Jaffa-ite and Straussian conservatism, who declares that “American history can be described as one long Civil Rights struggle,” which, I gather, includes not only the past 45 years of socially uplifting legislation but various world wars.

One could get bogged down deconstructing the assertions of the pair, so, I’ll focus on just one. Beck became particularly giddy over Barton’s tale of the “Black Paul Revere,” Wentworth Cheswell, a brave African-American New Hampshirite who was elected as his town’s constable in 1768 and in 1775 made an all-night ride from Boston to declare to his community “The British are coming!”

Did you know that Wentworth Chesswell was black? No? You’re not alone, because neither did his constituents, who were under the mistaken assumption that they were governed by an Anglo-Saxon. There’s also no mention of an African in the Cheswells’ authorized family tree, though historians have located a 17th-century Negro, “Richard Chesswell,” who was likely Wentworth’s grandfather, making the later, at the very most, a quadroon. Put simply, the “Black Paul Revere” probably could have gained admission to the 18th-century version of a WASP country club. Even PBS, which one wouldn’t expect to discount Cheswell’s blackness, writes that the Chesswell genealogy stands as an example of “the ‘passing’ process”…

(Also lionized in the Black Founders pantheon was an 18th-century “African-American preacher” of a white congregation, Lemuel Haynes.” Does this man look African to you?)