Who’s Telling “Yarns” Now? Grim Fairy Tales about America

One of the greatest things President Trump has done for the country is to begin the long project of stripping our national parks and museums of anti-American bile.

Earlier this year, I wrote about The New York Times’s special Fourth of July interview with Jia Lynn Yang, former national editor — and apparently quite an expert on U.S. history. Her main point was that Americans who are proud of their country are simpletons who believe in fairy tales. She then proceeded to emit a firehose of made-up stories of her own. (Someone needs to do a deep dive into those SAT statistics produced in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.)

She claims we should discount inspiring stories about our founding because back then, history was nothing but “great stories that people like to tell over and over” that gave Americans “a sense of meaning.”

Yang is confusing us with Africans. As we have been repeatedly told, “storytelling” is a primary source of African history. Indeed, the Western obsession with written records and documentation is a well-known example of “white supremacy.”

But according to Yang, in the early days of our country, historians were just “rich guys … with a lot of time” on their hands, making up “great yarns.”

Yes, like that slouch Justice John Marshall, who wrote a five-volume biography of George Washington, based on thousands of pages of public documents, privates diaries and the president’s original letters. Or the story of Paul Revere’s ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord based on 23 depositions signed by 94 eyewitnesses, including local minutemen, bystanders, alarm riders, and even three captured British soldiers, as well as Revere’s eight-page account of his evening.

Today, we have much more serious historians, like C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost, who wrote the book “A Black Queer History of the United States.” (A hint for those of you looking to do some early Christmas shopping!)

To be fair, Yang doesn’t cite Snorton and Bost as examples of the “professional historians” she respects. The ones she cites are worse. They are Charles Beard and Annette Gordon-Reed.

In 1913, Beard wrote “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,” a Marxist analysis of the founding, portraying it as a capitalist-versus-proletarian struggle between the Federalists, who were allegedly rich property owners, and the Anti-Federalists, who were supposedly debtors and farmers.

It made America’s founders look like greedy, unprincipled louses, so Beard’s book is must-reading at the Times. According to Yang, it’s solid history because conservatives’ only comeback was to say: “whoa, whoa, whoa. You can’t talk like that about the Founders. You can’t talk like that about George Washington, the guy with the cherry tree.”

(Yang’s obsession with the harmless children’s story about Washington and the cherry tree is pathological. She cites it over and over again to prove that patriotic Americans are hopelessly naive.)

Um, actually, that wasn’t the comeback at all. In the 1950s, historian Forrest McDonald examined tax documents and Treasury records and guess what? There was no difference in the percentage of property owners on each side. Beard’s entire thesis was based on a lie (or, to be charitable, shoddy research).

The other historian Yang cites favorably is Annette Gordon-Reed, whose 1997 book, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” claimed that Jefferson fathered all six of Hemings’ children.

Considering Yang’s view of people who spin “yarns” and call it history, Gordon-Reed is an odd choice. The entire premise of “An American Controversy” is that racist white historians refused to credit the black tradition of “oral history” — AKA, “great yarns” that give people “a sense of meaning.” (In Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s case, her family’s oral history about being Cherokee not only gave her a sense of meaning, but a tenure-track position at Harvard.)

Gordon-Reed’s book was based on the Hemings family’s “oral history” that two of Sally’s children, Thomas and Madison, were fathered by the former president — though whether Thomas even existed remained an open question. From there, she leapt to the conclusion that all of Hemings’ children were fathered by Jefferson.

In Yang’s telling: “And then a year later, there’s even DNA testing to prove that she’s completely right.” This is correct if by “completely right” she means, “completely wrong.”

In fact, the DNA proved that Sally’s son “Thomas” was definitely not fathered by any Jefferson male. The DNA could prove nothing about Madison because the family refused to allow DNA testing on a deceased male relative.

The genetic evidence established only that one of Hemings’ children, the last-born Eston, was the son of some Jefferson male, but could not possibly determine whether it was the president or any of the other 25 adult male Jeffersons living in Virginia at the time, eight of them at or near Monticello.

Among the many, many reasons historians never credited the Jefferson-Hemings baby mama drama are these [WARNING: DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE COMING]:

There are no letters, diaries or records supporting the idea that Jefferson was intimate with Hemings and quite a bit of written documentation to refute it.

Private correspondence from those living at Monticello, for example, pointed to others as likely culprits, specifically Jefferson’s much younger brother, Randolph. One slave, Isaac Granger Jefferson, described Randolph in his dictated memoirs thus: “Old Master’s brother, Mass Randall, was a mighty simple man: used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.”

By contrast, there is not a single account of Thomas Jefferson visiting the slave quarters.

When Eston was conceived, Randolph was an unmarried widower. Jefferson was president, spending the majority of his time in Washington, D.C. After Randolph remarried, Hemings had no more children.

So why is the entire country humoring the Hemings family — and liberals — by pretending to be unaware of what the DNA actually shows? What happened to our reverence for “The Science”? Where’s Anthony Fauci?

I presume the Times would say that at least the Jefferson yarn is not as bad as that vicious lie about the cherry tree. A simpler explanation is that the left refuses to believe anything good about America, while billboarding preposterous fictions that make the country look bad.

Trump can’t move fast enough to excise this nonsense from our public spaces. Burn down our cities, but leave our history alone.