Senator Cotton, “Necessary Evil,” and Correcting the Correction

Curmie has been doing a different kind of writing of late—you know, like… his job—so the blog hasn’t been active for a couple of weeks. There have obviously been a lot of potential subjects: the continuing COVID-19 response incompetence; the misreporting of events in (especially) Portland and the still not completely identified goon squads (feds? mercenaries?) trampling on the Constitution; the upcoming election… But what interests me most, for a variety of reasons, is Senator Tom Cotton’s comment about slavery as a “necessary evil.” Well, sort of.

Senator Cotton

The brouhaha—or at least this manifestation of it—began with the New York Times’s controversial 1619 Project, a revisioning of American history which treats the de facto beginning of the country not as of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but rather with the arrival in the New World of the first slave ship in… well, 1619. Senator Cotton, to say the least, is not a fan. He recently proposed legislation to withhold federal funding from schools which use the 1619 Project. Of course, like “defund” in the unfortunate slogan “Defund the Police,” “withhold” in the previous sentence really means “reduce.” The proposal would make schools adopting the 1619 Project ineligible for federal professional development funds. The logic of preventing the biology teacher from getting better because the history teacher chooses to partake of a free resource that a politician in another state doesn’t like is not readily apparent, but there you go.

According to an article in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, federal funds would also be reduced on a pro-rated basis, according to “cost associated with teaching the 1619 Project, including in planning time and teaching time.” Given the fact that use of the Project per se is free, we’re talking about… what? Curmie can’t predict how much time an individual school would spend on the 1619 Project, but he did a little rough guessing based on his old high school’s faculty size and current budget. Assuming every American History course spent two weeks doing nothing else but the 1619 Project, and we pro-rate the salaries of those teachers accordingly, we’re looking at about 2/100 of 1% of the district’s budget. In other words, a penny per $50.00. Even if Curmie’s guesses are off by a factor of 10, he doubts that many districts would file for financial exigency on this basis alone. Moreover, the legislation appears to have little traction even in the Republican Senate; it would be DOA in the Democratic House.

Indeed, Senator Cotton admits that the exercise, even if by some miracle it were to be signed into law, is little more than symbolic: “It won’t be much money. But even a penny is too much to go to the 1619 Project in our public schools.” So Senator Cotton is, depending on your point of view, standing up for principle… or just grandstanding. But what really caught headlines this summer was a statement Senator Cotton made in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat Gazette (linked above). Here’s the full paragraph:

We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.

And now the fun begins. A lot of media, especially but not exclusively of the left-leaning variety, seized on the “slavery was a necessary evil” phrase, attributing it to Cotton. Here are links to CNN, The Guardian, even Business Insider, for example. Trouble is: he didn’t say that. He said that the Founding Fathers said it. Actually, of course, they didn’t actually say that, but some may well have believed it.  Of course, they weren’t exactly of a single mind. The Southerners—Washington, Jefferson, Lee, et al.--may have thought in those terms; indeed, over 70% of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave-owners. Others, however, not only didn’t own slaves themselves, but were, either at the time of the Declaration or thereafter, active abolitionists. President Lincoln did indeed make an argument akin to what Senator Cotton attributes to him. In one of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, he says this:

I say in the way our fathers originally left the slavery question, the institution was in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind rested in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. I say when this government was first established it was the policy of the founders to prohibit the spread of slavery into the new territories of the United States, where it had not existed.

It’s quite a step from there to argue that the Founding Fathers intentionally put slavery on the path to extinction, but we’ll let that slide. And, of course, Senator Cotton was righteously indignant that anyone would accuse him of arguing in favor of that necessity, tweeting: “More lies from the debunked 1619 Project. Describing the *views of the Founders* and how they put the evil institution on a path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln, is not endorsing or justifying slavery. No surprise that the 1619 Project can't get facts right.” Perhaps Senator Cotton will someday learn not to bring a peashooter to a knife fight. That time has not yet arrived.

We turn now to Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-winning journalist behind the 1619 Project. Here’s her reply tweet: “You said, quote: ‘As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built.’ That ‘as’ denotes agreement. Further, if by path to extinction you mean growing the enslaved poP from 500k to 4 million at Civil War, a war fought over slavery, then, ok.” And, since Ms. Hannah-Jones beats me to this argument: yes, “as” does indeed denote agreement. Leaving that word out would have rendered Cotton’s arguments merely historically problematic. As it is, whether he has sufficient command of English grammar and rhetoric to realize it or not, what he’s actually doing is using the alleged beliefs of the Founding Fathers as authority for his assertion of “necessary evil.”

To be fair, Tom Cotton’s intellectual superiority to wilted lettuce is not statistically significant, so he might just not be able to write coherently: a failure that would link him even more closely with a certain other Twittering twit. It may be that “as” was a misprint (Curmie often neglects to delete all the remnants of an abandoned sentence structure; he understands). Or maybe it’s a Freudian slip: a little truth about Cotton’s own attitude that slipped out unconsciously while he was desperately grasping for high moral ground. Or maybe, just maybe, Senator Cotton said exactly what he meant, making him a lousy historian, a racist asshole, and an opportunist pol in a party looking for its next generation of despicable “leaders.” Oh, and a liar. Mustn’t forget that.