1916 essay summary

The 1619 Project

75 pages • 2 hours read

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-10

Chapters 11-14

Chapters 15-16

Chapters 17-18

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

The 1619 Project is a series of essays, poems, and short fiction about the lasting legacy and implications of slavery in the United States. Named after the year the White Lion anchored and sold the first enslaved African people to the English colonies, these essays rethink the United States origin story to explain how a country founded on ideals of freedom preserved the institution of slavery and the lasting legacy of it. Nikole Hannah-Jones , Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein edited the collection.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the book’s preface and its first and last essays, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and celebrated academic who has won multiple awards for her work, including two George Polk Awards, a Peabody, and three National Magazine Awards. Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and a professor at Howard University; she reports on and studies racial injustice and the persistence of racial segregation in the United States. In The 1619 Project , Hannah-Jones explains that when she learned about the landing of the White Lion in 1619, she began to understand a history that the popular American narrative erased and ignored. As the 400th anniversary of 1619 loomed nearer, she knew it would go uncelebrated, unacknowledged, and unpacked. Hannah-Jones then pitched her idea to The New York Times Magazine —“a special issue that would mark the four-hundredth anniversary [of 1619] by exploring the unparalleled impact of African slavery on the development of our country and its continuing impact on our society” (xxii).

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Published in 2021, this book is a hybrid collection of nonfiction, including essays from writers, academics, journalists, and historians exploring 18 different American institutions and phenomena: Democracy, Race, Sugar, Fear, Dispossession, Capitalism, Politics, Citizenship, Self-Defense, Punishment, Inheritance, Medicine, Church, Music, Healthcare, Traffic, Progress, and Justice. The collection also includes poems and short fiction.

Once published, The 1619 Project garnered praise and criticism alike. This book appeared after a year of political upheaval, nationwide protests, and calls for racial justice after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery—all amid the Covid-19 global pandemic. Some historians challenged and attempted to discredit the arguments presented—especially “the framing, which treated slavery and anti-Blackness as foundational to America” or the “assertion that Black Americans have served as this nation’s most ardent freedom fighters […] or the idea that modern American life has been shaped not by the majestic ideals of our founding, but by its grave hypocrisy” (Hannah-Jones et al. xxv). Congress soon presented legislation to prevent The 1619 Project from being taught in schools and universities. President Trump spoke out against the project, establishing the “1776 Commission” as one of his last acts as President. This sought to discredit the project by “reinforc[ing] the exceptional nature of our country and to put forth a ‘patriotic’ narrative” (Hannah-Jones et al. xxvii).

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This collection includes racial slurs targeting Black people and other mixed-race populations. The editors, however, have purposefully chosen to use the term “enslaved person” rather than “slave,” as the former “accurately conveys the condition without stripping the individual of his or her humanity” (xiii).

Plot Summary

In August 1619, a year before the Mayflower made land , the White Lion anchored in the harbor at Jamestown. This ship carried enslaved Africans stolen from their country and sold to Englishmen in the American Colonies. This sale was the first of enslaved peoples in Anglo-America and marked the beginning of the institution of American chattel slavery. This text reexamines the founding mythology of America and posits that over and over again, Black Americans have been the actual fighters of freedom. To suggest that our country’s founding happened in 1619 rather than with the Mayflower or the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence challenges the ingrained mythology of the United States, which says we are a country built on ideals of freedom and liberty. By contrast, the writers, authors, and scholars in this collection argue that many American establishments derived from the legal institution of slavery with the goal of cementing the status of enslaved people as property.

Perhaps the most radical claim is Hannah-Jones’s contention in “Democracy” that the American Revolution was fought to protect the colonists’ “property”—that is, their claim to an enslaved population—from the British Empire. Not only did slavery provide free labor and serve as property that could be traded, sold, and reproduced, building the wealth of many colonists, but it also provided a way to create a government without an apparent ruling class. Poor white colonists (whose numbers were already limited precisely because the “working class” mostly comprised enslaved people) saw that Black people had no legal rights, and they identified with the wealthier white colonists in power. The colonists built a country off the backs of the enslaved, protecting the institution of slavery through the Constitution, which protected the property rights of enslavers.

Throughout the collection, the authors make it clear that the institution of chattel slavery in the United States was not simply in the background of history but rather at the center. Chapter 2 (“Race”) examines how colonial law “invented” whiteness and Blackness in their current form to safeguard slavery. Chapter 3 (“Sugar”) discusses the pivotal role sugar cultivation played in the development of American chattel slavery. Chapter 4 (“Fear”) documents the fear of Black rebellion that continues to spark white violence. Chapter 5 (“Dispossession”) discusses Indigenous Americans’ relationships to whiteness, Blackness, and slavery. Chapter 6 (“Capitalism”) considers the mutually reinforcing relationship between capitalism and white supremacy. Chapter 7 (“Politics”) explores the racism baked into the US political system.

From here, the book moves on to more specific topics. Chapter 8 (“Citizenship”) recounts Black Americans’ struggles for citizenship. Chapter 9 (“Self-Defense”) questions which US citizens can claim self-defense, especially with regards to gun rights. Chapter 10 (“Punishment”) examines the mass incarceration of Black Americans. Chapter 11 (“Inheritance”) explores the factors that have prevented Black Americans from building intergenerational wealth in the way that white Americans have. Chapter 12 (“Medicine”) discusses systemic racism within the US medical system and its implications for Black Americans’ health. Chapter 13 (“Church”) considers the role religion has played in Black freedom struggles. Chapter 14 (“Music”) traces traditionally Black musical genres back to their origins and discusses their complex relationship to race and racism. Chapter 15 (“Healthcare”) situates the contemporary debate about healthcare in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and the plight of newly “free” Black Americans. Chapter 16 (“Traffic”) explores how seemingly benign infrastructure reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation. Chapter 17 (“Progress”) argues that the idea of progress can act as an impediment to real-world progress. Finally, in Chapter 18 (“Justice”), Hannah-Jones returns to summarize the project’s implications with an eye towards building a more equitable future.

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Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay from ‘The 1619 Project’ wins commentary Pulitzer

Of all the thousands upon thousands of stories and projects produced by American media last year, perhaps the one most-talked about was The New York Times Magazine’s ambitious “The 1619 Project,” which recognized the 400th anniversary of the moment enslaved Africans were first brought to what would become the United States and how it forever changed the country.

It was a phenomenal piece of journalism.

And while the project in its entirety did not make the list of Pulitzer Prize finalists, the introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones , the creator of the landmark project, was honored with a prestigious Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

After the announcement that she has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Hannah-Jones told the Times’ staff it was “the most important work of my life.”

While nearly impossible, and almost insulting, to try and describe in a handful of words or even sentences, Hannah-Jones’ essay was introduced with this headline: “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.”

In her essay, Hannah-Jones wrote, “But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.”

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Hannah-Jones’ and “The 1619 Project,” however, were not without controversy. There was criticism of the project, particularly from conservatives. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich called it “propaganda.” A commentator for The Federalist tweeted the goal of the project was to “delegitimize America, and further divide and demoralize its citizenry.”

But the most noteworthy criticism came from a group of five historians. ln a letter to the Times , they wrote that they were “dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” They added, “These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing.’ They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.”

Wall Street Journal assistant editorial features editor Elliot Kaufman wrote a column with the subhead: “The New York Times tries to rewrite U.S. history, but its falsehoods are exposed by surprising sources.”

In a rare move, the Times responded to the criticism with its own response . New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein wrote, “Though we respect the work of the signatories, appreciate that they are motivated by scholarly concern and applaud the efforts they have made in their own writings to illuminate the nation’s past, we disagree with their claim that our project contains significant factual errors and is driven by ideology rather than historical understanding. While we welcome criticism, we don’t believe that the request for corrections to The 1619 Project is warranted.”

That was just a portion of the rather lengthy and stern, but respectful response defending the project.

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In the end, the 1619 Project — and Hannah-Jones’ essay, in particular — will be remembered for one of the most impactful and thought-provoking pieces on race, slavery and its impact on America that we’ve ever seen.

And maybe there was another reason for the pushback besides those questioning its historical accuracy.

As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in December , “U.S. history is often taught and popularly understood through the eyes of its great men, who are seen as either heroic or tragic figures in a global struggle for human freedom. The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place ‘the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.’ Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different.”

There’s no question that Hannah-Jones’ essay, which requires the kind of smart thinking and discussion that this country needs to continue having, deserved to be recognized with a Pulitzer as the top commentary of 2019. After all, and this is not hyperbole, it’s one of the most important essays ever.

In addition, we should acknowledge the other two finalists in this category: Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins and Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez.

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Jenkins continues to be among the best sports columnists in the country. Meanwhile, has any writer done more to shine a light on homelessness than Lopez? This is the third time in the past four years (and fourth time overall) that Lopez has been a finalist in the commentary category.

In any other year, both would be deserving of Pulitzer Prizes. But 2019 will be remembered for Nikole Hannah-Jones’ powerful essay and project.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Irish Literature › Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s Easter 1916

Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s Easter 1916

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 14, 2021 • ( 0 )

The Easter Rising of 1916 catalyzed the final phase of the Irish struggle for independence and forced Yeats to recant the stinging assessment of “September 1913” that “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.” In the wake of the Easter Rising, Yeats decided that “September 1913” had come to sound “old-fashioned” ( VP 820). “Easter 1916” is dated September 25, 1916, but a May 11 letter to Lady Gregory, written 18 days after the rising began, contains its germ: “I am trying to write a poem on the men executed—‘terrible beauty has been born again’” ( Letters 613). Yeats writes in the same letter, “I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me,” and yet he remained ambivalent about the rising, as reflected in “Easter 1916,” his principal public statement on the event. The poem’s famous refrain may have been inspired by Maud Gonne’s remark in a May letter that the rebels “have raised the Irish cause again to a position of tragic dignity” ( GY 372). Writing to Lady Gregory on May 11, Yeats credits Gonne with the comment that “tragic dignity has returned to Ireland” (613), which artistically elevates Gonne’s actual comment and anticipates the language of his refrain.

The poem’s opening lines—lines of “nerveless syntax onto which the great refrain will drop its iron portcullis,” as Hugh Kenner puts it—have a penitential honesty ( Colder Eye 228). Yeats confesses to just the kind of mockery he disparages in section five of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” He recalls occasionally bumping into the future martyrs of the rising as they came from “counter or desk” at the end of the workday. Even as he exchanged “polite meaningless words”—a phrase twice repeated, indicating the innocuous interchangeability of these encounters—Yeats nursed a “mocking tale or a gibe” to recount around the fire at his club. He may refer to the Arts Club, Upper Merrion Street, Dublin, a venue for dinner and discussion that was not, in Joseph Hone’s estimate, “bookish or particularly intellectual” (W. B. Yeats 233–234; for Yeats at the Arts Club see I&R, I, 51–53). He may alternatively refer to the Stephen’s Green Club ( New Biography 215). The reference to “counter or desk” associates the prospective martyrs with the till-keeping middle class (the “nationalist petite bourgeoisie” in R. F. Foster’s phrase) that Yeats had excoriated in “September 1913” and “Paudeen”: hence his condescension ( AP 59). Their emergence from “eighteenth-century houses” and their “vivid faces,” however, hint at an unguessed spiritual continuity with the generation of Robert Emmet (1778–1803), Edward Fitzgerald (1763–98), and Wolfe Tone (1763–98). Yeats had been convinced that Dublin was a place “where motley is worn,” but the rising exposed the magnitude of his misunderstanding: “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.”

British soldiers at a barricade in Dublin during the Easter Rising. Bettmann / Getty Images

The second stanza namelessly alludes to the leaders of the rising whom Yeats best knew, emphasizing the commonplace humanity out of which, by some miraculous alchemy, came the “terrible beauty” of the poem’s refrain. As Kenner writes, Yeats “silhouettes anonymities, ‘this woman,’ ‘this man,’ ‘this other’ in part 2, against the sunburst of part 4, where names start forth and the poet-mage takes charge” ( Colder Eye 229). The roster of the anonymous includes Constance Markiewicz (1868– 1927) whose fall from youthful feminine grace into the shrillness of politics is recounted in “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz” and “On a Political Prisoner.” She was condemned to death for her part in the rising but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she was released from jail in 1917. There is Patrick Pearse (1879–1916), who founded the St. Enda’s School for Boys in Dublin and proclaimed the birth of the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office. Pearse rode “our wingèd horse”—Pegasus—in the sense that he couched the struggle for Irish independence in mythic and romantic terms. In a letter of May 1, 1916, to his sister Lolly, Yeats called Pearse a “man made dangerous by the Vertigo of Self Sacrifice,” while Ezra Pound reported to John Quinn Yeats’s opinion that Pearse was “half-cracked” and suffering from “Emmet mania, same as some other lunatics think they are Napoleon or God” and that Pearse “wouldn’t be happy until he was hanged” (AP 46). There is Thomas MacDonagh (1878–1916), a poet and playwright whom Yeats described in his 1909 diary as a “man with some literary faculty which will probably come to nothing through lack of culture and encouragement.” He continues in terms that anticipate the critique of “Easter 1916”: “In England this man would have become remarkable in some way, here he is being crushed by the mechanical logic and commonplace eloquence which give power to the most empty mind, because, being ‘something other than human life’, they have no use for distinguished feeling or individual thought. I mean that within his own mind this mechanical thought is crushing as with an iron roller all that is organic” ( Autobiographies . 360; Memoirs . 177–178; see also The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats 760, 782– 784). Finally there is John MacBride (1865–1916), Maud Gonne’s estranged husband. Though a “drunken vainglorious lout,” MacBride is likewise “transformed utterly,” a generous acknowledgment considering Yeats’s hostility to the bluff military man who had bested him briefly but decisively in Gonne’s affections. Pearse, MacDonagh, and MacBride were among 15 leaders of the rising executed by the British: Pearse and MacDonagh were shot on May 3, MacBride on May 5.

In its third stanza, “Easter 1916” contrasts the stoniness of hearts “with one purpose alone”—the stoniness of the single-minded political fanatic— with the “living stream”: the supple, changing beauty of nature, the subtle shadings that make for poetry. More than this, such hearts “trouble” the living stream, which is to say, awaken the kind of inhuman destructive zeal exemplified by the Easter Rising. As R. F. Foster observes, these lines are implicitly addressed to Gonne and reiterate the plea, mooted six years earlier in the essay “J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time,” against “the morbid persistence of minds unsettled by some fixed idea” and all that “kills intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that must come before all true thought and emotion,” against all that turns the “mind to stone” ( W. B. Yeats: A Life, II: The ArchPoet 61–62; Essays and Introductions 313–314). Yeats worked on the poem while staying at Les Mouettes, the Gonnes’ home in Colleville-sur-Mer, on the Normandy shore, during the summer of 1916, and he unsuccessfully proposed to Gonne on July 1 (YC 186). In September 1916, Yeats read her the poem and implored her, in terms that echo his poem, “to forget the stone and its inner fire for the flashing, changing joy of life” (AP 62; Scattering Branches 32). This was a political and spiritual plea, but also a romantic plea, as Yeats knew he could succeed in his suit only by reconciling Gonne to the apolitical “flashing, changing joy of life.”

In the final stanza, Yeats comes to the central spiritual and philosophical question of the poem. Is the sacrifice of the living heart ever justified? Or rather, as John O’Leary held, are there “things which a man should not do, perhaps even to save a nation” ( Aut. 101, 178; E&I 247; Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats. Vol. 2 36). As in “On being asked for a War Poem,” Yeats skirts the controversy of an answer by invoking the proper bounds of the poet’s role, declaring it his part merely to “murmur name upon name, / As a mother names her child / When sleep at last has come / On limbs that had run wild.” Yeats toys with the further metaphorization of death as nightfall, but not liking the romantic varnish of this—perhaps resisting something of the romantic varnish that had quickly come to surround the rising and especially its martyrs—Yeats reverts to the unvarnished reality of “death” and the matter-offact possibility that, after all, England might have kept its pledge to grant Ireland home rule as soon as the world war had come to an end. “And what if excess of love”—for Ireland—“Bewildered them till they died?” Yeats asks, but again retreats from the critical implication of his own question, and ends with a solemn martyrology that comported with popular sentiment. MacDonagh, MacBride, Pearse, and James Connolly (1870–1916) will be forever remembered wherever the green of Ireland is worn. The transition from motley to green epitomizes the poem’s refrain: “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.”

Predictably, “Easter 1916” elicited a sharp rebuke from Gonne. “No I don’t like your poem,” she wrote on November 8, 1916, “it isn’t worthy of you & above all it isn’t worthy of the subject— Though it reflects your present state of mind perhaps, it isn’t quite sincere enough for you who have studied philosophy & know something of history know quite well that sacrifice has never yet turned a heart to stone though it has immortalised many & through it alone mankind can rise to God. You recognise this in the line which was the original inspiration of your poem ‘A terrible Beauty is born’ but you let your present mood mar & confuse it till even some of the verses become unintelligible to many.” Gonne also rejected the imputation that MacDonagh, Pearse, Connolly were “sterile fixed minds,” insisting that “each served Ireland, which was their share of the world, the part they were in contact with, with varied faculties and vivid energy! those three were men of genius, with large comprehensive & speculative & active brains [. . .]. As for my husband he has entered Eternity by the great door of sacrifice which Christ opened & has therefore atoned for all [. . .].” She allows that the poem contains beautiful language but finds that it fails to be a “living thing which our race would treasure & repeat, such as a poet like you might have given to your nation & which would have avenged our material failure by its spiritual beauty” (GY 384– 385). Harold Bloom perspicuously observes that the poem is highly uncharacteristic, as the visionary element (“A terrible beauty is born”) is “not the strength of the poem, which excels in sober coloring of accurate moral description, a quality normally lacking in Yeats. Easter 1916 is a model of sanity and proportion, and is genuinely Yeats’s eighteenth-century poem [. . .]” (Yeats 314).

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Yeats; Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet; Gwynn, Stephen, ed. Scattering Branches: Tributes to the Memory of W. B. Yeats; Hone, Joseph. W. B. Yeats; Jeffares, A. Norman. W. B. Yeats: A New Biography; Kelly, John S. A W. B. Yeats Chronology; Kenner, Hugh. A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers; Mikhail, E. H., ed. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections (vol. 1); W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats (vol. 4), Essays and Introductions, The GonneYeats Letters 1893–1938, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats (vol. 2), The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats.

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Trans-national America

As World War I unfolded in Europe, intensifying ethnic antagonisms, native-born Americans became increasingly suspicious of the pockets of immigrant culture thriving among them. In 1916, critic and essayist Randolph Bourne challenged such attitudes with an essay—now considered a classic of forward thinking—calling for a new, more cosmopolitan conception of America and a reconsideration of the “melting-pot” theory.

No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the ‘melting-pot.’ The discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among our great alien population has come to most people as an intense shock. It has brought out the unpleasant inconsistencies of our traditional beliefs We have had to watch hard-hearted old Brahmins virtuously indignant at the spectacle of the immigrant refusing to be melted, while they jeer at patriots like Mary Antin who write about ‘our forefathers.’ We have had to listen to publicists who express themselves as stunned by the evidence of vigorous nationalistic and cultural movements in this country among Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians, and Poles, while in the same breath they insist that the mien shall be forcibly assimilated to that Anglo-Saxon tradition which they unquestioningly label ‘American.’

As the unpleasant truth has come upon us that assimilation in this country was proceeding on lines very different from those we had marked out for it, we found ourselves inclined to blame those who were thwarting our prophecies. The truth became culpable. We blamed the war, we blamed the Germans. And then we discovered with a moral shock that these movements had been making great headway before the war even began. We found that the tendency, reprehensible and paradoxical as it might be, has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they became more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous, to cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely real. Just as these clusters became more and more objectively American, did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or Polish.

To face the fact that our aliens are already strong enough to take a share in the direction of their own destiny, and that the strong cultural movements represented by the foreign press, schools, and colonies are a challenge to our facile attempts, is not, however, to admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal has been broad or narrow—whether perhaps the time has not come to assert a higher ideal than the ‘melting-pot.’ Surely we cannot be certain of our spiritual democracy when, claiming to melt the nations within us to a comprehension of our free and democratic institutions, we fly into panic at the first sign of their own will and tendency. We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so far as it neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling class, descendant of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made. This is the condition which confronts us, and which demands a clear and general readjustment of our attitude and our ideal.

Mary Antin is right when she looks upon our foreign-born as the people who missed the Mayflower and came over on the first boat they could find. But she forgets that when they did come it was not upon other Mayflower but upon a ‘Fleur,’ a ‘Fleur de Mai,’ a ‘Fleur di Maggio,’ a ‘Majblomst.’ These people were not mere arrivals from the same family, to be welcomed as understood and long-loved but strangers to the neighborhood, with whom a long process of settling down had to take place. For they brought with them their national and racial characters, and each new national quota had to wear slowly away the contempt with which its mere alienness got itself greeted. Each had to make its way slowly from the lowest strata of unskilled labor up to a level where it satisfied the accredited norms of social success.

We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born, and if distinctions are to be made between us, they should rightly be on some other ground than indigenousness. The early colonists came over with motives no less colonial than the later. They did not come to be assimilated in an American melting pot. They did not come to adopt the culture of the American Indian. They had not the smallest intention of ‘giving themselves without reservation’ to the new country. They came to get freedom to live as they wanted to. They came to escape from the stifling air and chaos of the old world; they came to make their fortune in a new land. They invented no new social framework. Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been accustomed. Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were conservative beyond belief. Their pioneer daring was reserved for the objective conquest of material resources. In their folkways, in their social and political institutions, they were, like every colonial people, slavishly imitative of the mother country. So that, in spite of the ‘Revolution,’ our whole legal and political system remained more English than the English, petrified and unchanging, while in England law developed to meet the needs of the changing times.

It is just this English-Americanconservatism that has been our chief obstacle to social advance. We have needed the new peoples—the order of the German and Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun—to save us from our own stagnation. I do not mean that the illiterate Slav is now the equal of the New Englander of pure descent. He is raw material to be educated, not into a New Englander, but into a socialized American along such lines as those thirty nationalities are being educated in the amazing school of Gary. I do not believe that this process is to be one of decades of evolution. The spectacle of Japan’s sudden jump from medievalism to post-modernism should have destroyed the superstition. We are not dealing with individuals who are to ‘evolve.’ We are dealing with their children, who with that education we are about to have, will start level with all of us. Let us cease to think of ideals like democracy as magical qualities inherent in certain peoples. Let us speak, not of inferior races, but of inferior civilizations. We are all to educate and to be educated. These peoples in America are in a common enterprise. It is not what we are now that concerns us, but what this plastic next generation may become in the light of a new cosmopolitan ideal.

We are not dealing with static factors, but with fluid and dynamic generations. To contrast the older and the newer immigrants and see the one class as democratically motivated by love of liberty, and the other by mere money-getting, is not to illuminate the future. To think of earlier nationalities as culturally assimilated to America, while we picture the later as a sodden and resistive mass, makes only for bitterness and misunderstanding. There may be a difference between these earlier and these later stocks, but it lies neither in motive for coming nor in strength of cultural allegiance to the homeland. The truth is that no more tenacious cultural allegiance to the mother country has been shown by any alien nation than by the ruling class of Anglo-Saxon descendants in these American States. English snobberies, English religion, English literary styles, English literary reverences and canons, English ethics, English superiorities, have been the cultural food that we have drunk in from our mothers’ breasts. The distinctively American spirit—pioneer, as distinguished from the reminiscently English—that appears in Whitman and Emerson and James, has had to exist on sufferance alongside of this other cult, unconsciously belittled by our cultural makers of opinion. No country has perhaps had so great indigenous genius which had so little influence on the country’s traditions and expressions. The unpopular and dreaded German-American of the present day is a beginning amateur in comparison with those foolish Anglophiles of Boston and New York and Philadelphia whose reversion to cultural type sees uncritically in England’s cause the cause of Civilization, and, under the guise of ethical indepenence of thought, carries along European traditions which are no more ‘American’ than the German categories themselves.

It speaks well for German-American innocence of heart or else for its lack of imagination that it has not turned the hyphen stigma into a ‘Tu quoque!’ If there were to be any hyphens scattered about, clearly they should be affixed to those English descendants who had had centuries of time to be made American where the German had had only half a century. Most significantly has the war brought out of them this alien virus, showing them still loving English things, owing allegiance to the English Kultur, moved by English shibboleths and prejudice. It is only because it has been the ruling class in this country that bestowed the epithet that we have not heard copiously and scornfully of ‘hyphenated English Americans.’ But even our quarrels with England have had the bad temper, the extravagance, of family quarrels. The Englishman of to-day nags us and dislikes us in that personal, peculiarly intimate way in which he dislikes the Australian, or as we may dislike our younger brothers. He still thinks of us incorrigibly as ‘colonials.’ America—official, controlling, literary, political America—is still, as a writer recently expressed it, ‘culturally speaking, a self-governing dominion of the British Empire.’

The non-English American can scarcely be blamed if he sometimes thinks of the Anglo-Saxon predominance in America as little more than a predominance of priority. The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first immigrant, the first to found a colony. He has never really ceased to be the descendant of immigrants, nor has he ever succeeded in transforming that colony into a real nation, with a tenacious, richly woven frabric of native culture. Colonials from the other nations have come and settled down beside him. They found no definite native culture which should startle them out of their colonialism, and consequently they looked back to their mother-country, as the earlier Anglo-Saxon immigrant was looking back to his. What has been offered the newcomer has been the chance to learn English, to become a citizen, to salute the flag. And those elements of our ruling classes who are responsible for the public schools, the settlements, all the organizations for amelioration in the cities, have every reason to be proud of the care and labor which they ve devoted to absorbing the immigrant. His opportunities the immigrant has taken to gladly, with almost pathetic eagerness to make his way in the new land without friction or disturbance. The common language has made not only for the necessary communication, but for all the amenities of life.

If freedom means the right to do pretty much as one pleases, so long as one does not interfere with others, the immigrant has found freedom, and the ruling element has been singularly liberal in its treatment of the invading hordes. But if freedom means a democratic cooperation in determining the ideals and purposes and industrial and social institutions of a country, then the immigrant has not been free, and Anglo-Saxon element is guilty of just what every dominant race is guilty of in every European country: the imposition of its own culture upon the minority peoples. The fact that this imposition has been so mild and, indeed, semi-conscious does not alter its quality. And the war has brought out just the degree to which that purpose of ‘Americanizing,’ that is, ‘Anglo-Saxonizing,’ the immigrant has failed.

For the Anglo-Saxon now in his bitterness to turn upon the other peoples, talk about their ‘arrogance,’ scold them for not being melted in a pot which never existed, is to betray the unconscious purpose which lay at the bottom of his heart. It betrays too the possession of a racial jealousy similar to that of which he is now accusing the so called ‘hyphenates.’ Let the Anglo Saxon be proud enough of the heroic toil and heroic sacrifices which moulded the nation. But let him ask himself, if he had had to depend on the English descendants, where he would have been living to-day. To those of us who see in the exploitation of unskilled labor the strident red leit-motif of our civilization, the settling of the country presents a great social drama as the waves of immigration broke over it.

Let the Anglo-Saxon ask himself where he would have been if these races had not come? Let those who feel the inferiority of the non-Anglo-Saxon immigrant contemplate that region of the States which has remained the most distinctively ‘American,’ the South. Let him ask himself whether he would really like to see the foreign hordes Americanized into such an Americanization. Let him ask himself how superior this native civilization is to the great ‘alien’ states of Wisconsin and Minnesota, where Scandinavians, Poles, and Germans have self-consciously labored to preserve their traditional culture, while being outwardly and satisfactorily American. Let him ask himself how much more wisdom, intelligence, industry and social leadership has come out of these alien states than out of all the truly American ones. The South, in fact, while this vast Northern development has gone on, still remains an English colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed culturally scarcely beyond the early Victorian era. It is culturally sterile because it has had no advantage of cross-fertilization like the Northern states. What has happened in states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a new and fertile soil. America has meant liberation, and German and Scandinavian political ideas and social energies have expanded to a new potency. The process has not been at all the fancied ‘assimilation’ of the Scandinavian or Teuton. Rather has it been a process of their assimilation of us—I speak as an Anglo-Saxon. The foreign cultures have not been melted down or run together, made into some homogeneous Americanism, but have remained distinct but cooperating to the greater glory and benefit not only of themselves but of all the native ‘Americanism’ around them.

What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity. Already we have far too much of this insipidity,—masses of people who are cultural half-breeds, neither assimilated Anglo-Saxons nor nationals of another culture. Each national colony in this country seems to retain in its foreign press, its vernacular literature, its schools, its intellectual and patriotic leaders, a central cultural nucleus. From this nucleus the colony extends out by imperceptible gradations to a fringe where national characteristics are all but lost. Our cities are filled with these half-breeds who retain their foreign names but have lost the foreign savor. This does not mean that they have actually been changed into New Englanders or MiddleWesterners. It does not mean that they have been really Americanized. It means that, letting slip from them whatever native culture they had, they have substituted for it only the most rudimentary American—the American culture of the cheap newspaper, the ‘movies,’ the popular song, the ubiquitous automobile. The unthinking who survey this class call them assimilated, Americanized. The great American public school has done its work. With these people our institutions are safe. We may thrill with dread at the aggressive hyphenate, but this tame flabbiness is accepted as Americanization. The same moulders of opinion whose ideal is to melt the different races into Anglo-Saxon gold hail this poor product as the satisfying result of their alchemy.

Yet a truer cultural sense would have told us that it is not the self-conscious cultural nuclei that sap at our American life, but these fringes. It is not the Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his who is dangerous to America, but the Jew who has lost the Jewish fire and become a mere elementary, grasping animal. It is not the Bohemian who supports the Bohemian schools in Chicago whose influence is sinister, but the Bohemian who has made money and has got into ward politics. Just so surely as we tend to disintegrate these nuclei of nationalistic culture do we tend to create hordes of men and women without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those of the mob. We sentence them to live on the most rudimentary planes of American life. The influences at the centre of the nuclei are centripetal. They make for the intelligence and the social values which mean an enhancement of life. And just because the foreign-born retains this expressiveness is he likely to be a better citizen of the American community. The influences at the fringe, however, are centrifugal, anarchical. They make for detached fragments of peoples. Those who came to find liberty achieve only license. They become the flotsam and jetsam of American life, the downward undertow of our civilization with its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook, the absence of mind and sincere feeling which we see in our slovenly towns, our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in the vacuous faces of the crowds on the city street. This is the cultural wreckage of our time, and it is from the fringes of the Anglo-Saxon as well as the other stocks that it falls. America has as yet no impelling integrating force. It makes too easily for this detritus of cultures. In our loose, free country, no constraining national purpose, no tenacious folk-tradition and folk-style hold the people to a line.

The war has shown us that not in any magical formula will this purpose be found. No intense nationalism of the European plan can be ours. But do we not begin to see a new and more adventurous ideal? Do we not see how the national colonies in America, deriving power from the deep cultural heart of Europe and yet living here in mutual toleration, freed from the age-long tangles of races, creeds, and dynasties, may work out a federated ideal? America is transplanted Europe, but a Europe that has not been disintegrated and scattered in the transplanting as in some Dispersion. Its colonies live here inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but they do not fuse.

America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men. To seek no other goal than the weary old nationalism,—belligerent, exclusive, inbreeding, the poison of which we are witnessing now in Europe,—is to make patriotism a hollow sham, and to declare that, in spite of our boastings, America must ever be a follower and not a leader of nations.

If we come to find this point of view plausible, we shall have to give up the search for our native ‘American’ culture. With the exception of the South and that New England which, like the Red Indian, seems to be passing into solemn oblivion, there is no distinctively American culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of cultures. This we have been for half a century, and the war has made it ever more evident that this is what we are destined to remain. This will not mean, however, that there are not expressions of indigenous genius that could not have sprung from any other soil. Music, poetry, philosophy, have been singularly fertile and new. Strangely enough, American genius has flared forth just in those directions which are least understanded of the people. If the American note is bigness, action, the objective as contrasted with the reflective life, where is the epic expression of this spirit? Our drama and our fiction, the peculiar fields for the expression of action and objectivity, are somehow exactly the fields of the spirit which remain poor and mediocre. American materialism is in some way inhibited from getting into impressive artistic form its own energy with which it bursts. Nor is it any better in architecture, the least romantic and subjective of all the arts. We are inarticulate of the very values which we profess to idealize. But in the finer forms—music, verse, the essay, philosophy—the American genius puts forth work equal to any of its contemporaries. Just in so far as our American genius has expressed the pioneer spirit, the adventurous, forward-looking drive of a colonial empire, is it representative of that whole America of the many races and peoples, and not of any partial or traditional enthusiasm. And only as that pioneer note is sounded can we really speak of the American culture. As long as we thought of Americanism in terms of the ‘melting-pot,’ our American cultural tradition lay in the past. It was something to which the new Americans were to be moulded. In the light of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future. It will be what we all together make out of this incomparable opportunity of attacking the future with a new key.

Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, it is certain to become something utterly different from the nationalisms of twentieth-century Europe. This wave of reactionary enthusiasm to play the orthodox nationalistic game which is passing over the country is scarcely vital enough to last. We cannot swagger and thrill to the same national self-feeling. We must give new edges to our pride. We must be content to avoid the unnumbered woes that national patriotism has brought in Europe, and that fiercely heightened pride and self-consciousness. Alluring as this is, we must allow our imaginations to transcend this scarcely veiled belligerency. We can be serenely too proud to fight if our pride embraces the creative forces of civilization which armed contest nullifies. We can be too proud to fight if our code of honor transcends that of the schoolboy on the playground surrounded by his jeering mates. Our honor must be positive and creative, and not the mere jealous and negative protectiveness against metaphysical violations of our technical rights. When the doctrine is put forth that in one American flows the mystic blood of all our country’s sacred honor, freedom, and prosperity, so that an injury to him is to be the signal for turning our whole nation into that clan-feud of horror and reprisal which would be war, then we find ourselves back among the musty schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and not in any pragmatic and realistic America of the twentieth century.

We should hold our gaze to what America has done, not what medieval codes of dueling she has failed to observe. We have transplanted European modernity to our soil, without the spirit that inflames it and turns all its energy into mutual destruction. Out of these foreign peoples there has somehow been squeezed the poison. An America, ‘hyphenated’ to bitterness, is somehow non-explosive. For, even if we all hark back in sympathy to a European nation, even if the war has set every one vibrating to some emotional string twanged on the other side of the Atlantic, the effect has been one of almost dramatic harmlessness.

What we have really been witnessing, however unappreciatively, in this country has been a thrilling and bloodless battle of Kulturs. In that arena of friction which has been the most dramatic—between the hyphenated German-American and the hyphenated English-American—there have emerged rivalries of philosophies which show up deep traditional attitudes, points of view which accurately reflect the gigantic issues of the war. America has mirrored the spiritual issues. The vicarious struggle has been played out peacefully here in the mind. We have seen the stout resistiveness of the old moral interpretation of history on which Victorian England thrived and made itself great in its own esteem. The clean and immensely satisfying vision of the war as a contest between right and wrong; the enthusiastic support of the Allies as the incarnation of virtue-on-a-rampage; the fierce envisaging of their selfish national purposes as the ideals of justice, freedom and democracy—all this has been thrown with intensest force against the German realistic interpretations in terms of the struggle for power and the virility of the integrated State. America has been the intellectual battleground of the nations.

The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great American democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun. Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it will have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto encompassed. In a world which has dreamed of internationalism, we find that we have all unawares been building up the first international nation. The voices which have cried for a tight and jealous nationalism of the European pattern are failing. From that ideal, however valiantly and disinterestedly it has been set for us, time and tendency have moved us further and further away. What we have achieved has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed. America is already the world-federation in miniature, the continent where for the first time in history has been achieved that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun. Nowhere else has such contiguity been anything but the breeder of misery. Here, notwithstanding our tragic failures of adjustment, the outlines are already too clear not to give us a new vision and a new orientation of the American mind in the world.

It is for the American of the younger generation to accept this cosmopolitanism, and carry it along with selfconscious and fruitful purpose. In his colleges, he is already getting, with the study of modern history and politics, the modern literatures, economic geography, the privilege of a cosmopolitan outlook such as the people of no other nation of to-day in Europe can possibly secure. If he is still a colonial, he is no longer the colonial of one partial culture, but of many. He is a colonial of the world. Colonialism has grown into cosmopolitanism, and his mother land is no one nation, but all who have anything life-enhancing to offer to the spirit. That vague sympathy which the France of ten years ago was feeling for the world—a sympathy which was drowned in the terrible reality of war—may be the modern American’s, and that in a positive and aggressive sense. If the American is parochial, it is in sheer wantonness or cowardice. His provincialism is the measure of his fear of bogies or the defect of his imagination.

Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day. He breathes a larger air. In his new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide. His new friends have gone through a similar evolution. America has burned most of the baser metal also from them. Meeting now with this common American background, all of them may yet retain that distinctiveness of their native cultures and their national spiritual slants. They are more valuable and interesting to each other for being different, yet that difference could not be creative were it not for this new cosmopolitan outlook which America has given them and which they all equally possess.

A college where such a spirit is possible even to the smallest degree, has within itself already the seeds of this international intellectual world of the future. It suggests that the contribution of America will be an intellectual internationalism which goes far beyond the mere exchange of scientific ideas and discoveries and the cold recording of facts. It will be an intellectual sympathy which is not satisfied until it has got at the heart of the different cultural expressions, and felt as they feel. It may have immense preferences, but it will make understanding and not indignation its end. Such a sympathy will unite and not divide.

Against the thinly disguised panic which calls itself ‘patriotism’ and the thinly disguised militarism which calls itself ‘preparedness’ the cosmopolitan ideal is set. This does not mean that those who hold it are for a policy of drift. They, too, long passionately for an integrated and disciplined America. But they do not want one which is integrated only for domestic economic exploitation of the workers or for predatory economic imperialism among the weaker peoples. They do not want one that is integrated by coercion or militarism, or for the truculent assertion of a medieval code of honor and of doubtful rights. They believe that the most effective integration will be one which coordinates the diverse elements and turns them consciously toward working out together the place of America in the world-situation. They demand for integration a genuine integrity, a wholeness and soundness of enthusiasm and purpose which can only come when no national colony within our America feels that it is being discriminated against or that its cultural case is being prejudged. This strength of cooperation, this feeling that all who are here may have a hand in the destiny of America, will make for a finer spirit of integration than any narrow ‘Americanism’ or forced chauvinism.

In this effort we may have to accept some form of that dual citizenship which meets with so much articulate horror among us. Dual citizenship we may have to recognize as the rudimentary form of that international citizenship to which, if our words mean anything, we aspire. We have assumed unquestioningly that mere participation in the political life of the United States must cut the new citizen off from all sympathy with his old allegiance. Anything but a bodily transfer of devotion from one sovereignty to another has been viewed as a sort of moral treason against the Republic. We have insisted that the immigrant whom we welcomed escaping from the very exclusive nationalism of his European home shall forthwith adopt a nationalism just as exclusive, just as narrow, and even less legitimate because it is founded on no warm traditions of his own. Yet a nation like France is said to permit a formal and legal dual citizenship even at the present time. Though a citizen of hers may pretend to cast off his allegiance in favor of some other sovereignty, he is still subject to her laws when he returns. Once a citizen, always a citizen, no matter how many new citizenships he may embrace. And such a dual citizenship seems to us sound and right. For it recognizes that, although the Frenchman may accept the formal institutional framework of his new country and indeed become intensely loyal to it, yet his Frenchness he will never lose. What makes up the fabric of his soul will always be of this Frenchness, so that unless he becomes utterly degenerate he will always to some degree dwell still in his native environment.

Indeed, does not the cultivated American who goes to Europe practice a dual citizenship, which, if not formal, is no less real? The American who lives abroad may be the least expatriate of men. If he falls in love with French ways and French thinking and French democracy and seeks to saturate himself with the new spirit, he is guilty of at least a dual spiritual citizenship. He may be still American, yet he feels himself through sympathy also a Frenchman. And he finds that this expansion involves no shameful conflict within him, no surrender of his native attitude. He has rather for the first time caught a glimpse of the cosmopolitan spirit. And after wandering about through many races and civilizations he may return to America to find them all here living vividly and crudely, seeking the same adjustment that he made. He sees the new peoples here with a new vision. They are no longer masses of aliens, waiting to be ‘assimilated,’ waiting to be melted down into the indistinguishable dough of Anglo-Saxonism. They are rather threads of living and potent cultures, blindly striving to weave themselves into a novel international nation, the first the world has seen. In an Austria-Hungary or a Prussia the stronger of these cultures would be moving almost instinctively to subjugate the weaker. But in America those wills-to-power are turned in a different direction into learning how to live together.

Along with dual citizenship we shall have to accept, I think, that free and mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native land again which now arouses so much prejudice among us. We shall have to accept the immigrant’s return for the same reason that we consider justified our own flitting about the earth. To stigmatize the alien who works in America for a few years and returns to his own land, only perhaps to seek American fortune again, is to think in narrow nationalistic terms. It is to ignore the cosmopolitan significance of this migration. It is to ignore the fact that the returning immigrant is often a missionary to an inferior civilization.

This migratory habit has been especially common with the unskilled laborers who have been pouring into the United States in the last dozen years from every country in southeastern Europe. Many of them return to spend their earnings in their own country or to serve their country in war. But they return with an entirely new critical outlook, and a sense of the superiority of American organization to the primitive living around them. This continued passage to and fro has already raised the material standard of labour in many regions of these backward countries. For these regions are thus endowed with exactly what they need, the capital for the exploitation of their natural resources, and the spirit of enterprise. America is thus educating these laggard peoples from the very bottom of society up, awaking vast masses to a new-born hope for the future. In the migratory Greek, therefore, we have not the parasitic alien, the doubtful American asset, but a symbol of that cosmopolitan interchange which is coming, in spite of all war and national exclusiveness.

Only America, by reason of the unique liberty of opportunity and traditional isolation for which she seems to stand, can lead in this cosmopolitan enterprise. Only the American—and in this category I include the migratory alien who has lived with us and caught the pioneer spirit and a sense of new social vistas—has the chance to become that citizen of the world. America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision. I do not mean that we shall necessarily glut ourselves with the raw product of humanity. It would be folly to absorb the nations faster than we could weave them. We have no duty either to admit or reject. It is purely a question of expediency. What concerns us is the fact that the strands are here. We must have a policy and an ideal for an actual situation. Our question is, What shall we do with our America? How are we likely to get the more creative America—by confining our imaginations to the ideal of the melting-pot, or broadening them to some such cosmopolitan conception as I have been vaguely sketching?

The war has shown America to be unable, though isolated geographically and politically from a European world-situation, to remain aloof and irresponsible. She is a wandering star in a sky dominated by two colossal constellations of states. Can she not work out some position of her own, some life of being in, yet not quite of, this seething and embroiled European world? This is her only hope and promise. A trans-nationality of all the nations, it is spiritually impossible for her to pass into the orbit of any one. It will be folly to hurry herself into a premature and sentimental nationalism, or to emulate Europe and play fast and loose with the forces that drag into war. No Americanization will fulfill this vision which does not recognize the uniqueness of this trans-nationalism of ours. The Anglo-Saxon attempt to fuse will only create enmity and distrust. The crusade against ‘hyphenates’ will only inflame the partial patriotism of trans-nationals, and cause them to assert their European traditions in strident and unwholesome ways. But the attempt to weave a wholly novel international nation out of our chaotic America will liberate and harmonize the creative power of all these peoples and give them the new spiritual citizenship, as so many individuals have already been given, of a world.

Is it a wild hope that the undertow of opposition to metaphysics in international relations, opposition to militarism, is less a cowardly provincialism than a groping for this higher cosmopolitan ideal? One can understand the irritated restlessness with which our proud pro-British colonists contemplate a heroic conflict across the seas in which they have no part. It was inevitable that our necessary inaction should evolve in their minds into the bogey of national shame and dishonor. But let us be careful about accepting their sensitiveness as final arbiter. Let us look at our reluctance rather as the first crude beginnings of assertion on the part of certain strands in our nationality that they have a right to a voice in the construction of the American ideal. Let us face realstically the America we have around us. Let us work with the forces that are at work. Let us make something of this trans-national spirit instead of outlawing it. Already we are living this cosmopolitan America. What we need is everywhere a vivid consciousness of the new ideal. Deliberate headway must be made against the survivals of the melting pot ideal for the promise of American life.

We cannot Americanize America worthily by sentimentalizing and moralizing history. When the best schools are expressly renouncing the questionable duty of teaching patriotism by means of history, it is not the time to force shibboleth upon the immigrant. This form of Americanization has been heard because it appealed to the vestiges of our old sentimentalized and moralized patriotism. This has so far held the field as the expression of the new American’s new devotion. The inflections of other voices have been drowned. They must be heard. We must see if the lesson of the war has not been for hundreds of these later Americans a vivid realization of their trans-nationality, a new consciousness of what America meant to them as a citizenship in the world. It is the vague historic idealisms which have provided the fuel for the European flame. Our American ideal can make no progress until we do away with this romantic gilding of the past.

All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all can participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment of the Beloved Community. No mere doubtful triumphs of the past, which redound to the glory of only one of our transnationalities, can satisfy us. It must be a future America, on which all can unite, which pulls us irresistibly toward it, as we understand each other more warmly.

To make real this striving amid dangers and apathies is work for a younger intelligentsia of America. Here is an enterprise of integration into which we can all pour ourselves, of a spiritual welding which should make us, if the final menace ever came, no weaker, but infinitely strong.

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Easter Rising

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 25, 2019 | Original: November 9, 2009

On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, a group of Irish nationalists proclaimed the establishment of the Irish Republic and, along with some 1,600 followers, staged a rebellion against the British government in Ireland. The rebels seized prominent buildings in Dublin and clashed with British troops. Within a week, the insurrection had been suppressed and more than 2,000 people were dead or injured. The leaders of the rebellion soon were executed. Initially, there was little support from the Irish people for the Easter Rising; however, public opinion later shifted and the executed leaders were hailed as martyrs. In 1921, a treaty was signed that in 1922 established the Irish Free State, which eventually became the modern-day Republic of Ireland.

1916 Easter Rising: Background

With the Acts of Union in 1800 (ratified in 1801), Ireland (which had been under some form of English control since the 12th century) merged with Great Britain to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. As a result, Ireland lost its parliament in Dublin and was governed by a united parliament from Westminster in London. During the 19th century, groups of Irish nationalists opposed this arrangement in varying degrees.

Did you know? After the Easter Rising, one of the rebels, American-born Eamon de Valera, was sentenced to death. However, he ended up serving only a brief prison term and went on to become one of Ireland’s leading political figures, with a career spanning half a century.

Some moderate nationalists advocated for home rule, under which Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom but also have some form of self-government. Several home rule bills were defeated in Parliament in the late 1800s before one finally passed in 1914. However, implementation of home rule was suspended due to the outbreak of World War I (1914-18).

Meanwhile, members of a secret revolutionary organization called the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), who believed home rule wouldn’t go far enough and instead sought complete independence for Ireland, began planning what would become the Easter Rising. They hoped their rebellion would be aided by military support from Germany, which was fighting the British in World War I. Roger Casement (1864-1916), an Irish nationalist, arranged for a shipment of German arms and ammunition for the rebels; however, shortly before the insurrection began, the British detected the ship and it was scuttled by its captain. Casement was charged with treason and executed in August 1916

Easter Rising: April 1916

The Easter Rising was intended to take place across Ireland; however, various circumstances resulted in it being carried out primarily in Dublin. On April 24, 1916, the rebel leaders and their followers (whose numbers reached some 1,600 people over the course of the insurrection, and many of whom were members of a nationalist organization called the Irish Volunteers, or a small radical militia group, the Irish Citizen Army), seized the city’s general post office and other strategic locations. Early that afternoon, from the steps of the post office, Patrick Pearse (1879-1916), one of the uprising’s leaders, read a proclamation declaring Ireland an independent republic and stating that a provisional government (comprised of IRB members) had been appointed.

Despite the rebels’ hopes, the public did not rise to support them. The British government soon declared martial law in Ireland, and in less than a week the rebels were crushed by the government forces sent against them. Some 450 people were killed and more than 2,000 others, many of them civilians, were wounded in the violence, which also destroyed much of the Dublin city center. 

1916 Easter Rising: Aftermath

Initially, many Irish people resented the rebels for the destruction and death caused by the uprising. However, in May, 15 leaders of the uprising were executed by firing squad. More than 3,000 people suspected of supporting the uprising, directly or indirectly, were arrested, and some 1,800 were sent to England and imprisoned there without trial. The rushed executions, mass arrests and martial law (which remained in effect through the fall of 1916), fueled public resentment toward the British and were among the factors that helped build support for the rebels and the movement for Irish independence.

In the 1918 general election to the parliament of the United Kingdom, the Sinn Fein political party (whose goal was to establish a republic) won a majority of the Irish seats. The Sinn Fein members then refused to sit in the UK Parliament, and in January 1919 met in Dublin to convene a single chamber parliament and declare Ireland’s independence. The Irish Republican Army then launched a guerrilla war against the British government and its forces in Ireland. Following a July 1921 cease-fire, the two sides signed a treaty in December that called for the establishment of the Irish Free State, a self-governing nation of the British Commonwealth, the following year. Ireland’s six northern counties opted out of the Free State and remained with the United Kingdom. The fully independent Republic of Ireland (consisting of the 26 counties in the southern and western part of the island) was formally proclaimed on Easter Monday, April 18, 1949.

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The New York Times

Magazine | the 1619 project, the 1619 project.

AUG. 14, 2019

In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.

Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. black americans have fought to make them true., if you want to understand the brutality of american capitalism, you have to start on the plantation., myths about physical racial differences were used to justify slavery — and are still believed by doctors today., america holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others., for centuries, black music has been the sound of artistic freedom. no wonder everybody’s always stealing it., ‘i slide my ring finger from senegal to south carolina & feel the ocean separate a million families.’, what does a traffic jam in atlanta have to do with segregation quite a lot., why doesn’t the united states have universal health care the answer begins with policies enacted after the civil war., slavery gave america a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment. both still define our prison system., the sugar that saturates the american diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery., a vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates black and white america., a re-education is necessary., most americans still don’t know the full story of slavery. this is the history you didn’t learn in school., ‘we are committing educational malpractice’: why slavery is mistaught — and worse — in american schools., the 1619 project continues, the 1619 podcast.

An audio series from The Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.

Live at the Smithsonian

Watch highlights of a symposium about how history is defined — and redefined — featuring historians, journalists and policymakers.

Reader Responses

We asked you to share photographs and stories of your enslaved ancestors. The images and stories helped paint a picture of a too-often-erased American history.

We asked you how you learned about slavery in school. You told us about degrading role play, flawed lessons and teachers who played down its horrors.

Race/Related

The 1619 Project was conceived by Nikole Hannah-Jones. In this interview, she talks about the project and the reaction to it.

In the N.B.A., the very term “owner” has come under fire, as players, most of whom are black, assert self-determination.

Behind the Scenes of 1619

Since January, The Times Magazine has been working on an issue to mark the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved people arriving in America.

For teachers

Looking for ways to use this issue in your classroom? You can find curriculums, guides and activities for students developed by the Pulitzer Center at pulitzercenter.org/1619 . And it’s all free!

More on NYTimes.com

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The Easter Rising – A brief overview

The Easter Rising was an insurrection, mostly in Dublin city, that lasted from April 24 th until April 30 th 1916.

The insurgents in Dublin amounted to 1,200 men and women from the nationalist militia the Irish Volunteers, the socialist trade union group Irish Citizen Army and the women’s group, Cumman na mBan.

The Irish Volunteers  had been founded in 1913 in response to the blocking of Home Rule, or self government for Ireland by the Ulster Volunteers. The Citizen Army (with around 300 members) was formed during the Dublin Lockout of 1913 to protect strikers from the police. James Connolly afterwards directed it towards pursuit of an Irish socialist republic.

The Volunteers split after the outbreak of the First World War into the National Volunteers and the Irish Volunteers.

The National Volunteers, over 120,000 strong, led by Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond, were pledged to support the British war effort and over 30,000 of them joined the British Army. The remaining 13,000 Irish Volunteers, led by Eoin MacNeill, were committed to keep their organisation intact and in Ireland until Home Rule was passed.

The Rising was planned in secret by seven men, mostly of the Irish Republican Brotherhood or IRB, who had formed a “Military Council” to this end just after the outbreak of the First World War. They were, Tom Clarke, Sean McDermott, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, James Connolly and Eamon Ceannt.

Their plans were not known to the membership of the Volunteers at large or to the leaders of the IRB and Volunteers, Dennis McCullough, Bulmer Hobson and Eoin MacNeill.

They had arranged with the Germans for a large importation of arms to be delivered on Good Friday, April 21 st , but this shipment was discovered by the British off Kerry and its cargo lost.

At the last minute, the plans for the Rising were revealed to Eoin MacNeill who tried to call off the rebellion by issuing a “countermanding order”, but actually just postponed the outbreak from Easter Sunday to the next day, Monday.

The insurgents proclaimed an Irish Republic with Pearse as President and Connolly as commander in chief. They occupied positions around Dublin at the General Post Office (GPO), the Four Courts, the South Dublin Union, Boland’s Mill, Stephen’s Green and Jacobs’ biscuit factory.

Over the following week, the British deployed over 16,000 troops, artillery and naval gunboat into the city to suppress the rising. In the week’s fighting, about 450 people were killed and over 2,000 wounded.

The rebels’ headquarters at the GPO was bombarded into surrender, which Patrick Pearse ordered on Saturday, 29th April. However the fiercest fighting took place elsewhere, at Mount Street Bridge , South Dublin Union and North King Street .

There were also risings in county Galway , Enniscorthy in Wexford and Ashbourne in county Meath, but apart from an action at Ashbourne that killed 11 police, these caused little bloodshed.

Sixteen of the rebel leaders were executed, 15 in a two week period after they had surrendered and one, Roger Casement, in August.

Over 3,000 people were arrested after the rebellion and over 1,400 imprisoned. The Rising was not widely supported among the Dublin public and was condemned by the Irish Parliamentary Party and much of nationalist as well as unionist opinion. However, combined with other factors, such as the continued postponement of Home Rule, the growing casualties of the First World War and the threat of conscription, the Rising and its repression helped to increase the strength of the radical nationalists in Sinn Fein.

This party, which had not participated in the rebellion, was adopted as a vehicle by the veterans of the Rising and pledged to withdraw from the Westminster Parliament and set up an Irish one.

Sinn Fein went on to win three by-elections in 1917 and a general election in 1918 , leading to their proclamation of an Irish Republic  in January 1919 and the start of the Irish War of Independence .

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Fact Checking the 1619 Project and Its Critics

• Daily Economy

The New York Times’ 1619 Project entered a new phase of historical assessment when the paper published a scathing criticism by five well-known historians of the American Revolution and Civil War eras. The group included previous critics James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes, along with a new signature from Sean Wilentz. The newspaper’s editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein then responded with a point-by-point rebuttal of the historians, defending the project.

Each deserve to be taken seriously, as they form part of a larger debate on the merits of the 1619 Project as a work of history and its intended use in the K-12 classroom curriculum. While the project itself spans some four centuries, devoting substantial attention to racial discrimination against African-Americans in the present day, the historians’ criticism focuses almost entirely on the two articles that are most directly pertinent to their own areas of expertise. The first is the lengthy introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times journalist who edited the project. The second is a contentious essay on the relationship between slavery and American capitalism by Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond.

How should readers assess the competing claims of each group, seeing as they appear to be at bitter odds? That question is subject to a multitude of interpretive issues raised by the project’s stated political aims, as well as the historians’ own objectives as eminent figures – some might say gatekeepers – in the academic end of the profession.

But the debate may also be scored on its many disputed factual claims. To advance that discussion, I accordingly offer an assessment for each of the main points of contention as raised by the historians’ letter and Silverstein’s response.

1 .  Was the American Revolution fought in defense of slavery?

One of the most hotly contested claims of the 1619 Project appears in its introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who writes “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

Hannah-Jones cites this claim to two historical events. The first is the 1772 British legal case of Somerset v. Stewart, which reasoned from English common law that a slave taken by his owner from the colonies to Great Britain could not be legally held against his will. England had never established slavery by positive law, therefore Somerset was free to go.

The second event she enlists is a late 1775 proclamation by Lord Dunmore, the colonial governor of Virginia, in which he offered freedom to slaves who would take up arms for the loyalist cause against the stirring rebellion. The measure specified that it was “appertaining to Rebels” only, thereby exempting any slaves owned by loyalists.

Hannah-Jones argues that these two events revealed that British colonial rule presented an emerging threat to the continuation of slavery, thereby providing an impetus for slave-owning Americans to support independence. The American Revolution, she contends, was motivated in large part to “ensure slavery would continue.” The five historians vigorously dispute this claimed causality, indicating that it exaggerates the influence of these events vis-à-vis better known objects of colonial ire, as stated in the Declaration of Independence.

There is a kernel of truth in Hannah-Jones’s interpretation of these events. Somerset’s case is traditionally seen as the starting point of Britain’s own struggle for emancipation, and Dunmore’s proclamation certainly provoked the ire of slaveowners in the southern colonies – although they were more likely to interpret it as an attempt to foment the threat of a slave revolt as a counterrevolutionary strategy than a sign that Britain itself would impose emancipation in the near future.

Curiously unmentioned in the dispute is a much clearer case of how the loyalist cause aligned itself with emancipation, albeit in a limited sense. As part of his evacuation of New York City in 1783, British commander Sir Guy Carleton secured the removal of over 3,000 slaves for resettlement in Nova Scotia. This action liberated more than ten times as many slaves as Dunmore’s proclamation, the earlier measure having been offered as part of an increasingly desperate bid to retain power long after colonial opinion turned against him. Carleton’s removal also became a source of recurring tensions for U.S.-British relations after the war’s settlement. Alexander Hamilton, representing New York, even presented a resolution before the Confederation Congress demanding the return of this human “property” to their former owners.

That much noted, Hannah-Jones’s argument must be assessed against the broader context of British emancipation. It is here that the five historians gain the stronger case. First, despite both its high symbolic importance and later use as a case precedent, the Somerset ruling was only narrowly applied as a matter of law. It did not portend impending emancipation across the empire, nor did its reach extend to either the American colonies or their West Indian neighbors where a much larger plantation economy still thrived.

It is also entirely unrealistic to speculate that Britain would have imposed emancipation in the American colonies had the war for independence gone the other way. We know this because Britain’s own pathway to abolition in its remaining colonies entailed a half-century battle against intense parliamentary resistance after Somerset.  

Simply securing a prohibition on the slave trade became a lifetime project of the abolitionist William Wilberforce, who proposed the notion in 1787, and of liberal Whig leader Charles James Fox, who brought it to a vote in 1791, only to see it go down in flames as merchant interests and West Indian planters organized to preserve the slave trade. Any student of the American Revolution will recognize the member of Parliament from Liverpool who successfully led the slave traders in opposition, for it was Banastre Tarleton , famed cavalry officer under General Cornwallis on the British side of the war.

Tarleton’s father and grandfather owned merchant firms in Liverpool, and directly profiteered from the slave trade. When Fox and Wilberforce’s slave trade ban came to a vote he led the opposition in debate. The measure failed with 163 against and only 88 in favor.

After more than a decade of failed attempts Fox eventually persevered, steering a bill that allowed the slave trade ban through the House of Commons as one of his final acts before he died in 1806. It would take another generation for Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, invested in a decades-long public campaign that highlighted the horrors of the institution and assisted by a large slave uprising in Jamaica , before a full Slavery Abolition Act would clear Parliament in 1833.

Nor was Tarleton the only loyalist from the revolutionary war with a stake in slavery as an institution. Lord Dunmore, whose 1775 proclamation forms the basis of the 1619 Project’s argument, comes across as a desperate political opportunist rather than a principled actor once he is examined in light of his later career. From 1787 to 1796 he served as colonial governor of the Bahamas, where he embarked on a massive and controversial building project to fortify the city of Nassau against irrational fears of foreign invasion. Dunmore used more than 600 enslaved laborers to construct a network of fortifications, including a famous 66-step staircase that they hand carved from solid rock under the threat of whipping and torture. Responding to a parliamentary inquiry on the condition of the colony’s slaves in 1789, Dunmore absurdly depicted them as well cared for and content with their condition.

Curiously enough, a British victory in the American Revolution would have almost certainly delayed the politics of this process even further. With the American colonies still intact, planters from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia would have likely joined their West Indian counterparts to obstruct any measure that weakened slavery from advancing through Parliament. Subject to greater oversight from London, the northern colonies would have had fewer direct options to eliminate the institution on their own.

These state-initiated measures came about through both legislative action and legal proceeding, including a handful of “freedom cases” that successfully deployed reasoning similar to Somerset to strike against the presence of slavery in New England. The most notable example occurred in Massachusetts, where an escaped slave named Quock Walker successfully used the state’s new post-independence constitution of 1780 to challenge the legality of enforcing slavery within its borders.

Although they had significantly smaller slave populations than the southern states, several other northern states used the occasion of independence to move against the institution. The newly constituted state governments of Pennsylvania (1780), New Hampshire (1783), Connecticut (1784), Rhode Island (1784), and New York (1799) adopted measures for gradual but certain emancipation, usually phased in over a specified period of time or taking effect as underage enslaved persons reached legal majority. Vermont abolished slavery under its constitution as an independent republic aligned with the revolutionaries in 1777, and officially joined the United States as a free state in 1791. Antislavery delegates to the Confederation Congress were similarly able to secure a prohibition against the institution’s extension under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, ensuring that the modern day states of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana entered the Union as free states.

While these examples do not negate the pernicious effects of slavery upon the political trajectory of the former southern colonies, they do reveal clear instances where the cause of emancipation was aided – rather than impeded – by the American revolution. Britain’s own plodding course to emancipation similarly negates an underlying premise of Hannah-Jones’ depiction of the crown as an existential threat to American slavery itself in 1776. Indeed, the reluctance of the slaveholding West Indian colonies to join those on the continent in rebellion despite repeated overtures from the Americans reveals the opposite. The planters of Jamaica, Barbados and other Caribbean islands considered their institutions secure under the crown – and they would remain so for another half-century.

The Verdict: The historians have a clear upper hand in disputing the portrayal of the American Revolution as an attempt to protect slavery from British-instigated abolitionism. Britain itself remained several decades away from abolition at the time of the revolution. Hannah-Jones’s argument nonetheless contains kernels of truth that complicate the historians’ assessment, without overturning it. Included among these are instances where Britain was involved in the emancipation of slaves during the course of the war. These events must also be balanced against the fact that American independence created new opportunities for the northern states to abolish slavery within their borders. In the end, slavery’s relationship with the American Revolution was fraught with complexities that cut across the political dimensions of both sides.

2.  Was Abraham Lincoln a racial colonizationist or exaggerated egalitarian?

In her lead essay, Nikole Hannah-Jones pointed to several complexities in the political beliefs of Abraham Lincoln to argue that his reputation as a racial egalitarian has been exaggerated. She points specifically to Lincoln’s longstanding support for the colonization of freed slaves abroad as a corollary feature of ending slavery, including a notorious August 1862 meeting at the White House in which the president pressed this scheme upon a delegation of free African-Americans.

Elsewhere she points to grating remarks by Lincoln that questioned the possibility of attaining racial equality in the United States, and to his tepid reactions to the proposition of black citizenship at the end of the Civil War. Hannah-Jones’s final assessment is not unduly harsh, but it does dampen some of the “Great Emancipator” mythology of popular perception while also questioning the extent to which Lincoln can be viewed as a philosophical egalitarian, as distinct from an anti-slavery man.

The historians’ letter contests this depiction, responding that Lincoln evolved in an egalitarian direction and pointing to his embrace of an anti-slavery constitutionalism that was also shared by Frederick Douglass. Hannah-Jones, they contend, has essentially cherry picked quotations and other examples of Lincoln’s shortcomings on racial matters and presented them out of context from his life and broader philosophical principles.

Although the historians’ letter to the Times only briefly discusses the particular details of Hannah-Jones’s essay, several of the signers have individually elaborated on these claims. McPherson, Oakes, and Wilentz have all advanced various interpretations that imbue Lincoln with more radical sentiments – including on racial equality – than his words and actions evince at the surface.

These arguments usually depict an element of political shrewdness at play in which Lincoln is forced to obscure his true intentions from a racist electorate until emancipation was secured or the Civil War was won. When Hannah-Jones points to policies such as colonization, or to problematic speeches by Lincoln that suggest a less-than-egalitarian view of African-Americans, the historians respond that these charges miss a deeper political context. And in their telling, that context largely serves an exonerative purpose.

The historians’ treatment of colonization is probably the foremost example of how they deploy this argument around Lincoln. McPherson was one of the main originators of what has become known as the “lullaby thesis” (a term that I helped to coin in a historiographical examination of the colonization literature). According to this thesis, Lincoln only advanced racially charged policies such as colonization to lull a reluctant populace into accepting the “strong pill” of emancipation. Once emancipation was achieved, McPherson and the other lullaby theorists maintain, Lincoln promptly retreated from these racially fraught auxiliary positions – a claim supposedly evidenced by Lincoln’s omission of colonizationist language from the final version of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. Colonization is therefore reduced to a political stratagem, insincerely advanced to clear the way for emancipation.

Wilentz echoes McPherson on this claim, and at times presses it even further. In 2009 he published a vicious and dismissive attack on Henry Louis Gates, Jr., after the eminent African-American scholar called upon historians to update their consideration of Lincoln’s colonization policies and consider the possibility that they sincerely reflected his beliefs.

Gates’s interpretation was far from radical or disparaging of Lincoln. He correctly noted that the evidentiary record on Lincoln’s colonization programs had substantially expanded since the time that McPherson and others posited the lullaby thesis in the second half of the 20 th century ( I was one of the principal co-discoverers of the new materials, including several large caches of diplomatic records from Lincoln’s efforts to secure sites for freedmen’s colonies in the West Indies that are now housed in Great Britain, Belize, the Netherlands, and Jamaica). Wilentz’s counterargument offered little to counter the new evidence, relying instead on invocations of authority from leading scholars including himself.

When viewed in light of these and other recent archival discoveries, the lullaby thesis and similar variants as espoused by the signers of the letter may be conclusively rejected.

Lincoln’s sincere belief in colonization may be documented from the earliest days of his political career as a Henry Clay Whig in Illinois to a succession of failed attempts to launch colonization projects during his presidency. Furthermore, the claim that Lincoln abandoned colonization after the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 is directly belied by another year of sustained diplomatic negotiations with the governments of Great Britain and the Netherlands as Lincoln sought to secure suitable locales in their Caribbean colonies .

Lincoln’s proactive support for colonization kept it alive until at least 1864 when a series of political setbacks induced Congress to strip away the program’s funding against the president’s wishes. A fair amount of evidence suggests Lincoln intended to revive the project in his second term, and new discoveries pertaining to long-missing colonization records from Lincoln’s presidency continue to be made.

I won’t belabor the point further, save to note that the evidence of Lincoln’s sincere support for colonization is overwhelming ( a brief summary of which may be found here ).

This finding carries with it the substantial caveat that Lincoln did not pursue this course out of personal racial animosity. Quite the contrary, his public and private statements consistently link the policy to his personal fears that former slaveowners would continue to oppress African-Americans after the Civil War. The colonization component of his solution was a racially retrograde and paternalistic reflection of its time, but it also revealed Lincoln’s awareness of the challenges that lay ahead in his second term. Given that Lincoln’s presidency and life were cut short, we will never know what that term would have brought. And while there are subtle clues of Lincoln’s migration toward greater racial inclusivity in other areas – for example, the extension of suffrage to black soldiers – the record on colonization is in clear tension with the arguments advanced by the 1619 Project’s critics.

The Verdict: Nikole Hannah-Jones has the clear upper hand here. Her call to evaluate Lincoln’s record through problematic racial policies such as colonization reflects greater historical nuance and closer attention to the evidentiary record, including new developments in Lincoln scholarship. The historians’ counterarguments reflect a combination of outdated evidence and the construction of apocryphal exonerative narratives such as the lullaby thesis around colonization.  

3.  Did slavery drive America’s economic growth and the emergence of American Capitalism?

Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project contribution has been at the center of the firestorm since the day it was published. The main thrust of this article holds that slavery was the primary driver of American economic growth in the 19 th century, and that it infused its brutality into American capitalism today. The resulting thesis is overtly ideological and overtly anti-capitalist, seeking to enlist slavery as an explanatory mechanism for a long list of grievances he has against the Republican Party’s positions on healthcare, taxation, and labor regulation in the present day.

The five historians directly challenged the historical accuracy of Desmond’s thesis. By presenting “supposed direct connections between slavery and modern corporate practices,” they note, the 1619 Project’s editors “have so far failed to establish any empirical veracity or reliability” of these claims “and have been seriously challenged by other historians.” The historians’ letter further chastises the Times for extending its “imprimatur and credibility” to these claims.

Each of these criticisms rings true.

Desmond’s thesis relies exclusively on scholarship from a hotly contested school of thought known as the New History of Capitalism (NHC). Although NHC scholars often present their work as cutting-edge explorations into the relationship between capitalism and slavery, they have not fared well under scrutiny from outside their own ranks .

For those wishing to review the details, I have written extensively on the historiographical debate around the NHC literature . Other scholars, including several leading economic historians, have reached similar conclusions, finding very little merit in this body of work. The NHC camp frequently struggles with basic economic concepts and statistics , has a clear track record of misrepresenting historical evidence to bolster its arguments, and has adopted a bizarre and insular practice of refusing to answer substantive scholarly criticisms from non-NHC scholars – including from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

While most criticisms of Desmond’s thesis focus upon these broader problems in the NHC literature, the Times has done practically nothing to address the issues involved. Hannah-Jones herself admitted to being unaware of the controversy surrounding the NHC material until I pointed it out to her shortly after the 1619 Project appeared in print. From that time until the present the 1619 Project has almost intentionally disengaged from the problems with Desmond’s essay – and so it remains in Silverstein’s response.

Although the Times editor attempted to answer most of the other specific criticisms from the historians, he was conspicuously silent on the subject of Desmond’s thesis. Hannah-Jones has similarly shown little interest in revisiting this piece or responding to specific criticisms of the NHC literature. Meanwhile, the Times continues to extend this defective body of academic work its imprimatur and credibility, exactly as the historians’ letter charges.

The Verdict: This one goes conclusively to the five historians. Echoing other critics, the historians point to serious and substantive defects with Matthew Desmond’s thesis about the economics of slavery, and with the project’s overreliance on the contested New History of Capitalism literature. By contrast, the Times has completely failed to offer a convincing response to this criticism – or really any response at all.

4.  Did the 1619 Project seek adequate scholarly guidance in preparing its work?

Moving beyond the content of the project itself, the historians’ letter raises a broader criticism of the scholarly vetting behind the 1619 Project. They charge that the Times used an “opaque” fact-checking process, marred by “selective transparency” about the names and qualifications of scholars involved. They further suggest that Hannah-Jones and other Times editors did not solicit sufficient input from experts on the subjects they covered – a point that several of the signers reiterated in their individual interviews.

Silverstein takes issue with this criticism, noting that they “consulted with numerous scholars of African-American history and related fields” and subjected the resulting articles to rigorous fact-checking. He also specifically identifies five scholars involved in these consultations who each contributed a piece to the 1619 Project. They are Mehrsa Baradaran, Matthew Desmond, Kevin Kruse, Tiya Miles, and Khalil G. Muhammed.

Each of these scholars brings relevant areas of expertise to aspects of the larger project. The listed names, however, are noticeably light when it comes to historians of the subject areas that the critics describe as deficient, namely the period from the American Revolution to the Civil War or roughly 1775 to 1865.

Of the five named academic consultants, only Miles possesses a clear scholarly expertise in this period of history. Her contributions to the project – three short vignettes about slavery, business, and migration – are not disputed by the five historian critics, and do not appear to have elicited any significant criticism. Rather, they have been well-received as abbreviated distillations of her scholarly work for a popular audience.

The true oddity of the group remains Matthew Desmond, a sociologist who specializes in present day race relations. Although Desmond was given the task of writing the 1619 Project’s main article on the economics of slavery, he does not appear to have any scholarly expertise in either the economics or history of slavery. None of his scholarly publications are on subjects related to the period between 1775 and 1865. Indeed most of his work focuses on the 20 th century or later. As a result, Desmond approaches his 1619 Project essay entirely as a second-hand disseminator of the aforementioned claims from the problematic New History of Capitalism literature.

The other three named consultants – Kruse, Baradaran, and Muhammad – all specialize in more recent areas of history or social science, so none of them could plausibly claim an expertise in the period that the five historians focus their criticisms upon.

Barring the revelation of additional names, it appears that the 1619 Project neglected to adequately vet its material covering slavery during the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Its editors also appear to have assigned the primary article on this period to a writer who may possess expertise in other areas of social science involving race, but who is not qualified for the specific task of assessing slavery’s economic dimensions.

Although Silverstein attempted to defuse this angle of the historians’ criticism, he ended up only affirming its validity. Since the period in question encompasses several of the most important events in the history of slavery, this oversight harms the project’s credibility in the areas where the five historians are highly regarded experts.

The Verdict: The historians have a valid complaint about deficiencies of scholarly guidance for the 1619 Project’s treatment of the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. This comparative lack of scholarly input for the years between 1775 and 1865 stands in contrast with the Times’ heavy use of scholars who specialize in more recent dimensions of race in the United States. It is worth noting that the 1619 Project has received far less pushback on its materials about the 20 th century and present day – areas that are more clearly within the scholarly competencies of the named consultants.

Phillip W. Magness

Phillip W. Magness works at the Independent Institute. He was formerly the Senior Research Faculty and F.A. Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research. He holds a PhD and MPP from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, and a BA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston). Prior to joining AIER, Dr. Magness spent over a decade teaching public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions including American University, George Mason University, and Berry College. Magness’s work encompasses the economic history of the United States and Atlantic world, with specializations in the economic dimensions of slavery and racial discrimination, the history of taxation, and measurements of economic inequality over time. He also maintains an active research interest in higher education policy and the history of economic thought. His work has appeared in scholarly outlets including the Journal of Political Economy, the Economic Journal, Economic Inquiry, and the Journal of Business Ethics. In addition to his scholarship, Magness’s popular writings have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Easter, 1916 Summary & Analysis by William Butler Yeats

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

"Easter, 1916," was written by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats to commemorate the Easter Rising in 1916, in which Irish nationalists led a rebellion to win independence from British rule. The leaders of the Rising were ultimately executed, and Yeats's poem balances critique of the rebellion and its political extremism with admiration for the rebels' dedication and bravery.

• Read the full text of “Easter, 1916”

The Full Text of “Easter, 1916”

1 I have met them at close of day

2 Coming with vivid faces

3 From counter or desk among grey

4 Eighteenth-century houses.

5 I have passed with a nod of the head

6 Or polite meaningless words,

7 Or have lingered awhile and said

8 Polite meaningless words,

9 And thought before I had done

10 Of a mocking tale or a gibe

11 To please a companion

12 Around the fire at the club,

13 Being certain that they and I

14 But lived where motley is worn:

15 All changed, changed utterly:

16 A terrible beauty is born.

17 That woman's days were spent

18 In ignorant good-will,

19 Her nights in argument

20 Until her voice grew shrill.

21 What voice more sweet than hers

22 When, young and beautiful,

23 She rode to harriers?

24 This man had kept a school

25 And rode our wingèd horse;

26 This other his helper and friend

27 Was coming into his force;

28 He might have won fame in the end,

29 So sensitive his nature seemed,

30 So daring and sweet his thought.

31 This other man I had dreamed

32 A drunken, vainglorious lout.

33 He had done most bitter wrong

34 To some who are near my heart,

35 Yet I number him in the song;

36 He, too, has resigned his part

37 In the casual comedy;

38 He, too, has been changed in his turn,

39 Transformed utterly:

40 A terrible beauty is born.

41 Hearts with one purpose alone

42 Through summer and winter seem

43 Enchanted to a stone

44 To trouble the living stream.

45 The horse that comes from the road,

46 The rider, the birds that range

47 From cloud to tumbling cloud,

48 Minute by minute they change;

49 A shadow of cloud on the stream

50 Changes minute by minute;

51 A horse-hoof slides on the brim,

52 And a horse plashes within it;

53 The long-legged moor-hens dive,

54 And hens to moor-cocks call;

55 Minute by minute they live:

56 The stone's in the midst of all.

57 Too long a sacrifice

58 Can make a stone of the heart.

59 O when may it suffice?

60 That is Heaven's part, our part

61 To murmur name upon name,

62 As a mother names her child

63 When sleep at last has come

64 On limbs that had run wild.

65 What is it but nightfall?

66 No, no, not night but death;

67 Was it needless death after all?

68 For England may keep faith

69 For all that is done and said.

70 We know their dream; enough

71 To know they dreamed and are dead;

72 And what if excess of love

73 Bewildered them till they died?

74 I write it out in a verse—

75 MacDonagh and MacBride

76 And Connolly and Pearse

77 Now and in time to be,

78 Wherever green is worn,

79 Are changed, changed utterly:

80 A terrible beauty is born.

“Easter, 1916” Summary

“easter, 1916” themes.

Heroism and Bravery

• See where this theme is active in the poem.

Personal Fulfillment vs. Public Sacrifice

Death and Mourning

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “easter, 1916”.

I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club,

Lines 13-16

Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

Lines 17-23

That woman's days were spent In ignorant good-will, Her nights in argument Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful, She rode to harriers?

Lines 24-30

This man had kept a school And rode our wingèd horse; This other his helper and friend Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought.

Lines 31-35

This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song;

Lines 36-40

He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

Lines 41-44

Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream.

Lines 45-50

The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute;

Lines 51-56

A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all.

Lines 57-62

Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? That is Heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child

Lines 63-69

When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death; Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said.

Lines 70-74

We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse—

Lines 75-80

MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

“Easter, 1916” Symbols

• See where this symbol appears in the poem.

Sleeping child

“easter, 1916” poetic devices & figurative language, rhetorical question.

• See where this poetic device appears in the poem.

Climax (Figure of Speech)

Extended metaphor, “easter, 1916” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Rode to harriers
• Wingèd horse
• This other man
• Vainglorious
• Some who are near my heart
• England may keep faith
• See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Easter, 1916”

Rhyme scheme, “easter, 1916” speaker, “easter, 1916” setting, literary and historical context of “easter, 1916”, more “easter, 1916” resources, external resources.

Other Poems on the Easter Rising — A collection of 10 poems written on the occasion of the Easter Rising, all with commentary by Dr. Lucy Collins of University College Dublin.

The Easter Rising — Resources on the Easter Rising from the BBC.

Reading of "Easter, 1916" —  A moving reading of "Easter, 1916" by Northern Irish actor Liam Neeson.

Dublin Rising 1916-2016 — A virtual tour of Dublin, narrated by Irish actor Colin Farrell, that overlays the contemporary city with the city as it was in 1916, and provides historical background on the Rising.

W.B. Yeats Biography — An account of W.B. Yeats's life, with a focus on his development as a poet.

LitCharts on Other Poems by William Butler Yeats

Adam's Curse

Among School Children

An Irish Airman Foresees his Death

A Prayer for my Daughter

In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz

Lapis Lazuli

Leda and the Swan

Sailing to Byzantium

September 1913

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

The Second Coming

The Song of Wandering Aengus

The Wild Swans at Coole

When You Are Old

Everything you need for every book you read.

Easter, 1916

By william butler yeats, easter, 1916 essay questions.

How does the speaker show his ambivalent attitude towards the nationalist rebels?

At the beginning of the poem, the speaker admits that he knew many of the rebels before the Easter Rising (he shared "polite meaningless words" with them) but that he did not take them seriously ("And thought before I had done/Of a mocking tale or a gibe"). In the second stanza, he admits that he had serious personal grievances against some of them: "He had done most bitter wrong/To some who are near my heart." Yet even this "drunken, vainglorious lout" has been changed by the events of the Easter Rising. The effects caused by this event are more important than the individual faults of the people who were involved in it. Therefore, though the speaker does not idealize these people, he respects what their sacrifice means.

What is the significance of the lines "All changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born" in the context of the poem?

The lines "All changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born" are among Yeats's most famous verses. In the context of the poem, they refer to the effects of the Easter Rising. This rebellion for an independent Ireland has transformed the course of history. However, it has not only transformed it for good. The results are beautiful, but this "beauty" is also "terrible."

What does the stone symbolize in the poem?

The stone symbolizes the steadfast commitment of the revolutionary. A stone appears unmoving and unchanging. Similarly, the heart of a revolutionary neither bends nor changes. The poem describes this form of consistency as unnatural or inhuman. If the "stream" symbolizes the constant movement of nature, the stone "trouble[s] the stream" and upsets the balance of nature.

What is the significance of the questions and repetitions in the fourth stanza?

The questions and repetitions in the final stanza show the speaker's ambivalent relationship to the Easter Rising and its principal participants. He first asks "O when may it suffice?" This question shows that the speaker is uncomfortable with the heavy sacrifice imposed on the rebels: they die for the sake of their cause. He wonders when and if this will be enough to actually create the change they want. The second question suggests that the death of the rebels may be able to be compared to sleep or night: "What is it but nightfall?" However, the next line rejects this softening of these violent executions by repeating the word "no": "No, no not night but death." The third question is: "Was it needless death after all?" Here the speaker wonders whether Ireland would have been granted independence even without the violent uprising.

Why does the speaker name the fallen nationalist rebels in the poem?

The speaker argues that only heaven knows when the sacrifices made by the rebels will be enough to change history: "That is heaven's part." In contrast, "our part," as mortals, is to keep alive the names of the dead. He compares this recitation of the names to a mother "murmur[ing]" the name of her child as she lulls it to sleep. Similarly, the speaker declares that he will include the names of the rebels to lovingly immortalize them: "I write it out in a verse/MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connolly and Pearse."

Easter, 1916 Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Easter, 1916 is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for Easter, 1916

Easter, 1916 study guide contains a biography of William Butler Yeats, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Easter, 1916
• Easter, 1916 Summary
• Character List

Lesson Plan for Easter, 1916

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Easter, 1916
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Easter, 1916 Bibliography

Easter 1916 by William Butler Yeats : Summary, Analysis and Solved Questions

Table of Contents

Easter 1916 by William Butler Yeats

Introduction of Easter 1916

The poem Easter 1916 is set in the aftermath of the Easter uprising. A small group of Irish nationalists led a rebellion to overthrow British rule and they wanted to establish an independent Ireland. The protest was mainly team placed by the poets and the philosophers but actually the rebellion was seen to be a failure and as each would put it a casual comedy but it would still go down in Irish history as a turning point. Irish public opinion changed from hostile towards the rebellion. At first they weren’t in favour of the rebellion but this changed when the British leaders executed some of those who had rebelled and this then turned Irish opinion against Britain and in favour of the Nationalists and those people who had started the rebellion.

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Context and Background of the Poem

In order to understand Yeats’ work, it is essential to have a thorough understanding of his character and key influences. An understanding of Gaelic Legend and the events of history are also vital to the understanding of Yeats thoughts, images and symbols. Yeats’ philosophy was influenced by a variety of factors including the occult Neoplatonism, Hinduism, Christianity, Nietzsche, William Blake and many more. Yeats’ fondest childhood memories are in the northwest Irish countryside of Sligo where he would visit his grandparents. He was interested in the stories of the local people. Much of his early poetry is based in Irish myth and Celtic legend. He continued to crave for Sligo, long after his family moved away. He missed his cousins and uncle dreadfully and longed for the intangible magic of its wild dark earth and changing skies. This place was one of many key influences on the poet. Yeats was also largely influenced by the people he met. In 1885, he met John O’Leary-a Fenian leader. O’Leary was so significant that Yeats claims that “From O’Leary’s conversation and from the Irish books he lent or gave me has come all I have set my hand to since” In his writing, Yeats presents a series of contradictions most notably between romanticism and modernism. By the accident of his date of birth, Yeats lived into the modern age which arrived violently after World War 1 and the civil war in Ireland at the same time. He was both one of the first moderns in poetry and one of the last romantics. However, he always saw himself as a romantic. This is clear from his own statement where he says “We Irish born into that ancient sect But thrown upon the filthy modern tide”. He was openly opposed to modernism which he saw as a slide downward into material chaos brought about by a neglect of spiritual values. He believed that modernism encouraged habits that undermined imagination. He believed dislocated people from idealism and value which he saw as still within Ireland. However, Yeats was also contradictory in his relationships with Ireland. This love-hate relationship stemmed from a variety of influences. Nationalism was widespread in all its forms in Ireland at the time but Yeats preferred romantic literary nationalism to the new insectary nationalism of his great love more gone. He saw Irish history from two perspectives. While he supported Irish independence from Britain he was appalled at the violence which achieved it. While he was inspired by the idealism of the heroes of his time he was maddened by the complications and hypocrisy of politics and the narrow mindedness and imperfection of leaders. His father came from a strong tradition of devotion to the arts and spirituality whereas his mother came from a heritage of vigorous action and Yeats admired both approaches. Due to the influence of the 19th-century thinker and poet Matthew Arnold whom he admired he saw the Irish as not English or opposite to English. However, it is important to note that Yeats was not only reacting against England but the Irish middle classes. He saw their values as antithetic to ideals of community and our aristocracy. He shows disdain towards the mercantile middle-class whom he saw as her not having values. These fascinating tensions and conflicts are reflected in his work.

Yeats first published his work in 1888 and soon began to be accepted as an authority on Irish folklore and a poet of importance. Some would even say the foremost writer of the Irish Renaissance and a prime supporter of Irish nationalism. Yeats’ greatest achievement was the party played in the Irish literary revival. We must remember that Yeats lived through a tumultuous period of history. He lived through war, revolution and violence and understandably the Romantic wistfulness, the dreamy decorative quality of much of his earlier verse eventually gave way to a matter at once more terse astringent and masculine.

During Holy Week in 1916, a group of Irish rebels seized the general post office in Dublin and held it for several days. They were fighting for the establishment of an independent Irish Republic. Yeats composed Easter 1916 within a few weeks of the execution of leaders after uprising. Ironically, Yeats is in London where the been secured he couldn’t ignore these critical events as much as he wanted to. The subsequent crushing of the rebellion and the harsh sentencing of its leaders united public opinion behind the aspiration of Irish independence like nothing before. It was the ferocity of the British reaction, an immediacy of the deaths by firing squad of the rebels which turned the tide of public opinion. They were executed on the 9th May and they had already started riding on the 11th. The principals were mostly people he knew personally and his own future hundred abilities. Due to the wholesale execution Yeats became sharply critical of the British government. However, due to a variety of influences Yeat’s attitude towards the event remained ambivalent. In a letter to lady Gregory he writes, ” I feel that all the work of years has been overturned or the bringing together of the classes or the freedom of Irish literature and criticism for politics”. While Yeats condemned the approach of the rebels he strongly supported William Blake’s concept that our positions were necessary to human existence and Blake’s famous words were hard contraries is no progression. This accounts for his reaction to what the lives of the martyrs were and what they became as it’s ghosts in his home. Through Easter 1916, Yeats exposed the difference between history and mythology and tries to find meaning from all this upheaval inhales. In his poem who seeks a way of mythologizing historical events. We witness his shifting attitude towards perfect self in the heroes. We see a developing an appreciation of the way that the rebels transformed his world. The poem can be seen as a tribute to the rebels or an indictment of fanaticism. He recognized that everything has changed maybe for the better or maybe for the worse. Ultimately Yeats is trying to come to terms with this historic tragedy.

ABOUT EASTER RISING Easter 1916 is a poem in the which the poet commemorates the Easter rising in Dublin on 24 April 1916. The Irish people stood up in rebellion against the British for independence. The uprising was crushed by the British army. A large number of people were executed; their leaders were arrested and shot dead. Yeats’ attitude towards most of the Irish revolutionaries was complex since many of them were his friends and he was skeptical of the violent measures they adopted for political change. The Irish parliament was abolished in 1800 with the Act of Union; Great Britain now had control over Ireland. Nationalists feared that Ireland would be exploited. In 1885, Parnell started a Parliamentary movement for Irish Home Rule. Ireland had witnessed frequent riots. The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) was created to counter British rule. The Supreme council of the IRB convened on September 5, 1914, which was the day after Britain had declared war on Germany. They decided to have a rebellion before the end of the war. The IRB smuggled German weapons into Ireland, in 1914. On April 21, 1916, Britain became aware of the impending uprising. The British arrested Sir Roger Casement for arms running for the IRB. The leaders of the Irish Volunteers, Eoin MacNeill, tried to cancel the rebellion, which was to take place on April 24, but Pearse did not get the message in time. The rebels seized Dublin’s General Post Office and other strategic sites throughout Dublin. British troops invaded Dublin to squash the insurrection. Fighting lasted for about a week; the rebels surrendered on April 29. Pearse and fourteen other leaders were arrested and later executed. Most Irish had been against the insurrection, but the execution of these men incited a negative attitude towards Britain. The executed men were regarded as martyrs and heroes. The Irish government collapsed, and on December 6, 1921, the Irish Free State was established. Though Yeats was a committed nationalist he was against violence and as a result, he had strained relations with some of the figures who eventually led the uprising. But the event impressed Yeats very much; not for its appropriateness but for the brevity and heroism shown by the revolutionaries. Unlike many other Irish writers, he was not a revolutionary but a true patriot. The deaths of these revolutionary figures at the hands of the British, however, were as much a shock to Yeats and these ordinary people became no more ordinary leaders, and this idea has been expressed in the poem through the refrain “ a terrible beauty is born”

MEANINGS AND EXPLANATORY NOTES

Heaven’s part – —-God’s decree Murmur name upon name —-Call their name softly like an affectionate mom calls her kid even after his mischievous pranks. Nightfall ——-defeat Dream —a free Ireland. Bewildered—puzzled James Connolly —an organizer and leader of Irish transport workers, who formed Citizen Army. A staunch nationalist who had involved in the Easter Rebellion. He has been executed on 12th May 1916. Green —Irish flag

ANALYSIS OF THE POEM EASTER 1916

Section one

The poem opens in a casual tone. Yeats recalls his meeting with some of those people who later involved in 1916 Rising. He has often met them in the evening; he has often exchanged polite meaningless words with them, sometimes he had made fun of them. They seemed so ordinary. They worked all day at ‘counter or desk’ emerging from the ‘eighteenth-century houses’ where they resided. Their faces are ‘vivid’, in contrast to the old grey buildings which were constructed during the British reign, and Yeats may be comparing the quiet elegance and restraint of the aristocratic world of the Anglo-Irish and British to the pompous, gaudy world of these new patriots whom he despised. He believed that they were only playing at being revolutionaries and would never do anything meaningful in their struggle for an Irish republic. Yeats thought little of these people, not considering them worthy of his time. He often laughed at them when at his club, believing them to be fools. The reference to ‘motley’ means mixed colours, such as were worn by medieval jesters. Even while speaking to the revolutionaries, he would be storing up a ‘mocking tale or gibe’ to tell his friends at the club. As in ‘September 1913’, there is a refrain at the end of the opening section which is repeated throughout the poem. The refrain shows Yeats’ shock at the incidents of Easter 1916. The people he mocked and considered foolish and powerless rose up against the British, and as a result, many of them lost their lives. He must now face the fact that he was completely wrong in scorning the new revolutionaries and thinking they were incapable of any sort of heroism. The men he despised have become like the dead patriots he revered. In this poem, Yeats is reminding us that he expressed his distaste for the new breed of Irishman, but he acknowledges now that he completely misjudged them. Another interesting point is the way the poem is structured: there are 16 lines (for 1916) in the first and third stanzas, 24 lines (for April 24, the date the Rising began) in the second and fourth stanzas, and four stanzas in total (which refers to April, the fourth month of the year). The ‘beauty’ of this heroism is not without a cost. The oxymoron ‘terrible beauty’ is Yeats’ attempt to reconcile the heroism and the bravery of the Rising with the brutal death and execution of many of the revolutionaries. Yeats sees the complexity of the Rising, and he does not attempt to portray it as an entirely romantic or glorious event.

Section Two The second stanza is devoted to a sharp sketch of the chief actors. The first of these democratic spirits was a woman- Countess Markievicz. His initial description of her is not flattery. He believes that she was well-intentioned but misguided: ‘ignorant goodwill’. Her voice is ‘shrill’ from nights spent ‘in argument’, and Yeats seems to feel that her political views descended into a sort of hysterical fanaticism. However, he also remembers how she had a sweet voice ‘When young and beautiful / She rode to harriers’. It appears that Yeats would have preferred her to stay on her estate in Lissadell, remaining a symbol of beauty and elegance instead of becoming involved in militant nationalism. The second person Yeats describes is Patrick Pearse, a teacher and poet. The ‘winged horse’ he rode is a reference to Pegasus, a figure in mythology which represents poetry. Next, Yeats talks about Pearse’s ‘helper and friend’ Thomas Mac Donagh, who was a poet, English lecturer and dramatist. Yeats feels that Mac Donagh was a man who could have gone on to great things in the literary world: ‘He might have won fame in the end’. The description of MacDonagh as ‘sensitive’ and with thoughts ‘so daring and sweet’ makes him seem less suited to warfare than to literary pursuits. The final person in this list is the most interesting; John MacBride married Maud Gonne, the woman Yeats loved for many years, despite her repeated refusal to marry him. Yeats despised MacBride, calling him a ‘drunken, vainglorious lout’ and alluding to his violence towards his wife and her daughter Iseult: ‘did most bitter wrong / To some who are near my heart’. However, the word ‘dreamed’ tells us that Yeats now knows that his view of MacBride was not a complete one and that MacBride too has been ‘changed’ by his part in the Easter Rising. He has ‘resigned his part in the casual comedy’ of life and has become a hero. This reference to the ‘casual comedy’ reminds us of Yeats’ earlier view of men like MacBride; men he laughed at and believed to be a part of society ‘where motley is worn’.

Section Three This section analyses the impact of the Rising and the type of people who played their part in it. He sees in their action a fanaticism not quite desirable. Such men are like stones in a stream, standing firm against the flow of public opinion. The stone symbolizes strength and courage but it is also a symbol of stillness of death. They are devoted to ‘one purpose alone’ and are somehow under the spell of their dream, or ‘Enchanted’ by it. The events of 1916 are an unchangeable reality in the middle of an ever-changing world. They have transcended time and their deeds will mark as an unremarkable event in Irish history. All the images of nature in this section are connected with movement and change. Birds fly ‘from cloud to tumbling cloud’ and a horse splashes through the stream while moorhens dive. The repetition of ‘minute by minute’ reminds us that this change is constant. Nothing stays the same.

(The ancient Greek philosopher used the idea of water – a river – to suggest change. He said that no man can stand in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.)

Section Four The final stanza continues the imagery of hearts of stone. Men who devote themselves entirely to one purpose can become incapable of engaging with the lively, colourful world. They have sacrificed the other aspects of their lives and are totally committed to the cause. Yeats does not judge them for this, saying that it is ‘Heaven’s part’ to decide whether the men were right or wrong. Our only duty is to remember these men and keep their names alive by speaking of them. In a beautiful and gentle image, Yeats compares those who have died to a child falling asleep after great exertion. He continues to explore this idea, wondering if their fate was really like falling asleep at night. He quickly says that it was not and that we cannot soften the reality of their brutal deaths by cloaking them in metaphor. The stone image becomes rather complex as the stone represents the doggedness and steadfastness of the revolutionaries as well as their hard-heartedness.

SHORT ANSWER QUESTIONS

1) Who was ‘the drunken vainglorious lout’ who had “done most bitter wrong to some who are near my heart” according to Yeats? John McBride, the Irish nationalist who married Maud Gonne, the love of Yeats’ life.

2) Who was the woman whose nights were spent in argument until her voice grew shrill? Constance Markiewicz (nee Gore Booth). She was the second in command during the uprising.

3) Who was the man who “kept a school And rode our winged horse”? Patrick Pearse, a leader of the uprising and commandant General of the Irish Republican Army. He also founded the St Edna’s School. He was also a poet and the winged horse refers to Pegasus, who was the favourite of the Muses in Greek Mythology.

4) To what does Yeats compare the revolutionary? Yeats compares the revolutionary to a stone in the midst of the stream of life. Too long a sacrifice according to him will make a heart of stone. 5) “We know their dream”. What is the dream referred to? The dream that is referred to by Yeats in Easter 1916 is the Irish nationalist’s dream of an Ireland free from the rule of Britain.

PARAGRAPH QUESTION Imagery of the poem The poem is remarkable for the depth and intensity of symbols which have three characteristic features: “Directness of expression illuminated by sudden unexpected symbols, a tone of tragic solemnity and thirdly a professional quality”(Dr.B.Chaterjee). In the first stanza, ‘the close of the day’ conveys the image of an evening sky, of pale dusk and is thus linked to ‘grey eighteenth-century houses’, then follows a stream of images telescoped into one another. The whole poem is really focused on a single phrase- ‘terrible beauty’. According to Dr.B.Chaterjee “the two images are mixed up and reconciled, anew beauty is evoked, something like a red rose emerging out of a blood saturated ground”. Like this the stream which represents change and the stone, immobility are antithetical symbols which grasp the ambivalence of the poet regarding the actions of the heroes. “In the final process hearts are changed utterly, the petrified stone dissolves and new beauty is born”, observes Dr.B.Chaterjee.

Yeats’ attitude towards revolutionaries. Although earlier Yeats had disapproved of many of the actions of the revolutionaries, this uprising impressed him and this poem is a sincere if ambiguous tribute to the leaders of the movement. This event moved him deeply not for its appropriateness but for the brevity and heroism shown by the people participated in it. The poem begins with a note of self-criticism for Yeats had been guilty of complacent detachment from his fellow Irishmen. But now he recognizes that through the events of Easter week, his fellow countrymen have achieved admirable heroic intensity. Constance Markiewing, Padriac, the poet, Thomas Macdonagh, a poet and critic who shared Pearse’s fate; and John Macbride who had hurt Yeats by marrying Maud Gonne, the great love of his life have been changed utterly and have become part of the terrible beauty of Ireland after the uprising. These people were obsessed with one purpose alone – the liberation of Ireland. This obsession made them unchanging objects in a world of change and flux. Yeats was not quite persuaded to believe that all that bloodshed was wise. It was possible that England might keep her promise and give freedom to Ireland but for the Irish, it was enough to know that they dreamed of the liberation of their country and died because of their dreams. Yeats celebrates in his poetry, the heroic intensity that Macdonagh and Macbride and conneley and Pierse had achieved.

LONG ANSWER TYPE QUESTIONS

An Appreciation of “Easter 1916” . William Butler Yeats is one of the prominent British Poets of the twentieth century. An Irish poet, he was closely associated with the Irish Literary Revival and the Abbey Theatre. But unlike many other Irish writers like Sean O’Casey, Yeats was not revolutionary in his attitudes. He was not quite persuaded to believe that all that bloodshed was wise and he did not think of patriotism as a very good or suitable subject of poetry. On 24th of April, 1916 an Easter Sunday the Irish revolutionary leaders occupy the General Post Office in Dublin and proclaimed Ireland a free republic. However, their forces were defeated by the British army within a week. Sixteen of the leaders were court-martialed and shot dead. Although militarily, the uprising was insignificant, it captured the imagination of the Irish People. The literal meaning of the poem is easy enough to grasp. The poem possesses a remarkable lyrical intensity. It has no metaphysical level and the poet is seen devoted to the expression of his vision of abstract reality. Even though Yeats had much in opposite with many of the actions of the revolutionaries, this uprising moved him deeply and this poem is a sincere ambiguous tribute to the leaders of the movement. The poem begins with a note of self-criticism for Yeats had been guilty of complacent detachment from his fellow Irishmen. But now he recognizes that through the events of Easter week, his fellow countrymen have achieved admirable heroic intensity; they have achieved permanence, he recognizes and confirms by including them in his song. He contrasts “the polite meaningless words’ which constituted the “Casual Comedy” of pre-revolutionary Ireland. Ireland had been mortally warned with the tragic “terrible beauty” that was born of the Easter rising. Yeats goes onto catalogue the men and women whom he had previously undervalued; Constance Markiewing acknowledged to be the loveliest girl in country Sligo and an expert rider and hunter, whose voice had grown shrill in political argument: Padriac, the poet and founder of St. Edna’s school who was shot by the British; ThomasMacdonagh, a poet and critic who shared Pearse’s fate; and John Macbride who had hurt Yeats by marrying Maud Gonne, the great love of his life. Yeats bitterly refers to him as a drunken vainglorious lout, but all of them even Macbride have been changed utterly and have become part of the terrible beauty of Ireland after the uprising. However, after paying tributes to these leaders, Yeats, the poet of mixed emotions, goes on to ruminate on the nature of revolutionary heroism. These people were obsessed with one purpose alone – the liberation of Ireland. This obsession made them unchanging objects in a world of change and flux. Rock like in this unchanging determination, they also become stone-like impeding the flow of life. Yeats brings in images of change-horses splashing in water, moorhens calling to moorcocks, the clouds that cast shadows on the stream but the stone in the middle of the stream remains unchanging. The revolutionaries although heroic are also like the unfeeling hard stones in the river of life. A prolonged sacrifice can harden the heart. At what stage can we say that the sacrifice already made will suffice. Yeats opines that it is not for human beings to decide this but for God. All we can do is mutter the names of those who have sacrificed themselves just as a mother utters a child’s name when the child is lulled to sleep. But then Yeats realizes that these people are not asleep but dead and he wonders if the sacrifices of the martyrs are necessary. It was possible that England might keep her promise and give freedom to Ireland but for the Irish, it was enough to know that they dreamed of the liberation of their country and died because of their dreams. Yeats celebrates in his poetry, the heroic intensity that Macdonagh and MacBride and Conneley and Pierse had achieved. The poem is an ambivalent celebration of the heroism of Easter, 1916. The doubts and misgivings in the poem are characteristically Yeatism. He is, in a sense, the poet of mixed feelings. It is this uncertainty that gives the poem its intension and complexity and makes it one of the finest of all political poems.

Explanation of the Poem Easter 1916

I am now just going to explain the poem stanza by stanza.

Stanza 1describes the Dublin streets and the lives of himself and The Dubliners in an almost dreamlike comedy of errors. It conveys his belief about these ordinary men before the extraordinary events of the rebellion. You will notice that a dramatic motif runs throughout the poem starting off as a comedy and transforming into a tragedy as the events unfold. You can see from the use of the first-person pronoun “I”. From the very outset that this will be a personal poem and about more than just the events. It is not simply a recount of the rising itself. It is about Yeats’ personal response. The present perfect tenses have met, have past and have lingered is cleverly chosen by Yeats. This particular tense as opposed to past simple tense who could have said I passed, I met, I lingered makes a link between past and present and suggests that Yeats present response has changed as a result of his experience. The contemptuous use of the third person pronoun “them, they” and the small talk of polite meaningless words suggests Yeats initial apathy that changed after the Easter events. Consonants that are letter D and I have passed them with a nod of the head almost mimicking the action of nodding and the repetition of polite meaningless words conveys the mundane meaningless, emptiness of his past interactions with these people. This is reinforced by the way that he describes how he wouldn’t entertain his other friends at the club with a mocking tail or a jime about these encounters. This mocking tail and jime it can be contrasted with his use of song and verse later in the poem. He seems to be in this first answer condemning his past actions and there is a sense of transformation which is why the present perfect tense is so effective. Herewith it is uniting of the past and the present. In this opening stanza, the readers are in the presence of a modern metropolis in this case Dublin. Yeats likens the Dubliners vivid faces to those of actors and their backdrop is the counters desks and eighteenth-century houses. It is reinforcing that theatrical motif likening of The Dubliner’s clothes, to motley, alludes to the fools or the jester’s clothes in a comedy the costume that the fool will wear.

The imagery of drama being used again. You are known as later that these ordinary citizens are transformed into revolutionaries. The reference to Motley might also be giving an insight into the perspective of the rebels. This might convey that he was thinking that maybe their actions were foolish and that is the reference to Motley that it was a meaningless sacrifice. I think he is still coming to terms with these ideas. This stanza, the first one, closes with the sonorous powerful refrain all changed, changed utterly a terrible beauty is born.

The overstressing of the syllables and that the places in change in terrible and beauty emphasized the dramatic nature of the event and how sudden violent and abrupt the change was yes world had been utterly transformed. There’ is a total break with all past ideals beliefs and concepts. The rebels in Ireland have changed utterly because of the actions of the rebels. The oxymoron terrible beauty is exemplary of his ambivalence towards their sacrifice in the tragedy. It might also be an allusion to the Christian tradition of Easter which represents both sacrifice of Jesus’s life and resurrection or hope but I will let you decide whether you think there is a connection there.

Stanza 2 We now turn our attention to the second stanza. It talks about the list of leaders of the uprising and describes their pre uprising behaviour. Yeats was more interested in art than politics and their possibilities as artists and writers and this comes through really strongly stanza. This stanza suggests how difficult it is for Yeats to reconcile what he knew of them with what they have become. These four characters who he refers to were not the most obvious figures from the rebellion. Marjorie Perloff who wrote the article entailed Easter 1916 asserts that their inclusion was because of Yeats personal connection and describes the poem as more mythography than realistic document. We notice in this stanza that the Yeats becomes a little bit more particular rather than the vague and distant ‘them’ and ‘they’, he personalizes the roles and gives descriptions of them. That woman is Markovic, this man refers to Pierce, this other McDonough and finally this other man Mcbride. That woman countess Markovic was one of the leaders of the rebellion but she wasn’t executed. She was from County Sligo and a childhood friend of Yeats. He describes her charitable work for the poor. That woman’s day is spent ignorant goodwill. She was renowned for her beauty and we get a sense that Yeats regrets her change. He chastises her for arguing politics so vehemently that her voice grew shrill. The once beautiful aristocratic horsewoman from his sacred Sligo has been destroyed by revolutionary zeal. This shrillness of her voice is contrasted with her sweet singing that he remembers from his youth. He describes how this man Pierce rode winged horse. This is an allusion to Pegasus-the Greek mythological winged horse and muse of poetry. This other John MacDonald was a teacher at Pierce’s school St. Enders where Yeats attended. He laments over the tragic loss of this poet scholar and author who in his view was approaching his best work or as he puts it coming into his force. Of both of these poets Pearse and McDonagh.Yeats observes that they might have been better off remaining educators and writers. Finally, this other man John McBride was executed. He had married .Yeats has loved Maud Gonne in 1903 but they separated a few years later and were estranged at the time of his execution. He was abusive to her and this explains Yeats description of McBride as loathsome and a drunk vainglorious slapped. The conjunction yet in the line “yet I number him in this song” shows us that he is struggling with his past conceptions and ambivalent feelings about the rebels and the rising itself. Yeats description of Mcbride is very significant because it signals to the reader the transformation from comedy to tragedy that I referred to earlier. He writes that too has resigned his part in the casual comedy. He too has been changed in his turn. Then finally comes the refrain at the end of the stanza reminding us of Yeats’ sense of awe recognition and humility in response to the rising as he recognizes the power of the actions of these individuals.

The third stanza is very different from the rest of the poem. There is an absence of refrain but it is still a beautiful and melodic stanza. The musical quality is created by the rhyme, rhythm and repetition of the stanza. The focus is on the natural world rather than the socio-political world of the other stanzas. Yeats departs from realism into symbolism. Another significant difference is there is active change in this stanza through the use of active present tense verbs rather than passive ones. Yeats’ love of the past rule is evident in this stanza. The material world bent little to his imagination. So he found the sources of his imagery in Anima Mundi or World Soul. The intrinsic connection between all living things, an idea which originated with Plato and we see this through his visual imagery of the stone, the stream, the horse, the clouds and the more hymns and more cocks. There is a beauty and fluidity in the movement of the natural elements. The tumbling cloud, the horse hooves slides, the horse splashes, the more hens died, the more cocks caught. Our eyes are drawn up and down the landscape and around from the stream to the horse, to the rider, to the birds, to the clouds and back to the stream. This forward and backward movement is reinforced by Yeats use of cazness in minute by minute. They change and then later changes minute by minute. The most important symbol in this stanza, however, is the stone which represents that implacable will that chooses death instead of life. The unnaturally fixed stone causes violence. It troubles the flowing water. It is connected yet it disrupts the stream. The pastoral environment is meant to convey. It conveys above all the peacefulness of the natural world. The natural order encompasses movement and transformation. This stanza is about change. The world of change, movement, history which he sees fanaticism and rebellion the fix stones as blocking. The meter and rhythm of the stanza represent change. They drive us forward but the rhyme and repetition remind us of the fixed. The petrification of the stone contrasts with the movement of the rest of the features of the landscape. This can be seen as an indictment of fanaticism. He writes that the stone troubles the stream. On the other hand, Cubed is in inventing Island literature of a modern nation asserts that without the stone the stream which can represent society or government is inactive. He claims that without that stone in its fixity, no ripples could vibrate at all. The stone symbolizes the firmness of all the purpose of strength and mind of the Patriots. The troubling of the revolution is necessary if there is ever to be real change in the life of the nation or the stream. Thus yeats’ stance is ambivalent. Is he supporting or opposing the rebels? It seems that this stanza conveys his own admiring that troubled assessment of the value of the rising. Interestingly, Wendla observes that Yeats is drawing a contrast between himself and the rebels. She describes it as a contrast between ideological fixity and mobility of mind.

Stanza 4 We now move to the fourth and final stanza which can be seen in two very different ways. It could be seen as a condemnation of the actions of the rebels or an immortalizing of the rebels. Perloff asserts that Yeats immortalized the rebels, not as heroes in the abstract but agents of change. I will allow you to decide. Yeats uses the interesting poetic device of rhetorical questions. There is a temptation for the reader to answer these but we can’t. He has deliberately placed this series of rhetorical questions in the final stanza where he should be coming to conclusions but instead, he is asking more questions or when may it suffice :

What is it but nightfall wasn’t needless death after all? What if access of love bewildered them until they died.

This shows his ability to question himself and the change and to change the way he thinks. Yeats is prepared to consider the beauty not previously recognized. He is not afraid to ask these challenging questions reminding us again of endless mobility of the imaginative mind. Terry Eagleton states that these are the questions that have to be asked of all war poetry and can never truthfully be answered. This reinforces Yeats’ ambivalence and his questioning of whether or not it was worth it. This is the question that plagues him. Were their lives sacrificed for a reason or would Home Rule have been passed anyway and it was all for nothing. For this reason, while he aims to mythologize the rebels he is concerned about celebrating these events. He states that too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. Here, he is referring to the long history of the Irish plate. He is implying that this patriotism, this total dedication petrifies the heart and creates a coldness and inhumanity. He asks when may it suffice the interjection or intensifies his concern and sounds almost like a prayer. He is asking when will the British rule end. In this stanza, Yeats makes a personal connection with the rebels when he asks what if excess of love bewildered them until they died. Something he understood too well because of his unreciprocated passionate love of Maude Gonne. Yeats uses the cliche of sleep as death but then decides not to sweeten it. When he writes no no not night but death in the next line, he asks was it meaningless death after all. He then goes on to say that he may keep faith for all that is said and done referring to the home rule which will be put in place after World War 1. These two lines imply that this change was already occurring and the sacrifices of the rebels were not necessary. Island was there already heading towards independence. There was enormous patronizing tone in the image of the mother murmuring her child’s name at the end of a rigorous day of play when they are safely asleep the limbs that had run wild referred to a foolish child out of control in play. Perhaps the way he views the fanaticism of the rebels. But the murmuring of their names suggests that he believes that they ought to be remembered and he later gives them more weight. I ride it out in a verse McDonough and McBride and Connolly and Pierce. The delay caused by the – preceding the names gives them, even more, weight and importance. We also notice that the jesters Motley has now turned to green, the symbolic colour of Irish patriotism and Gaelic heritage. After hearing that analysis I returned to the question I posed at the beginning do you believe that Yeats was glorifying the rebels or condemning them. That concludes my analysis of Easter 1916.

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