Declaration of Independence Not Just “Overtly Racist,” but also Sexist and Classist, Harvard Insists

Plus, New York Times targets Apollo’s Marc Rowan

The Declaration of Independence lithograph by Napoleaon Sarony after John Trumbull, Harry T. Peters “America on Stone” Lithography Collection, Smithsonian American History Museum.

When the Harvard-central-administration-owned-and-operated Harvard Gazette recently described the Declaration of Independence, inaccurately, as “overtly racist,” I described the Harvard article as “self-destructive.” I wrote:

How does describing the Declaration of Independence as “overtly racist” advance Harvard’s “mission”? It’s not even true. …As it is, the Declaration of Independence book that’s really white-hot this week is by someone with a Harvard undergraduate degree who is now the Leonard Lauder Professor of American History and Values—at Tulane. That is Walter Isaacson, and his book is “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.” While the Harvard of today is busy trashing the Declaration of Independence as “overtly racist,” Isaacson’s title strikes a better tone.

Now, perhaps in response to my criticism (or perhaps to butter up Isaacson, who as a Bloomberg Philanthropies board member alongside Harvard Corporation member Kenneth Chenault has the potential power to redirect back to Harvard some of the $1,605,307 a year that the Harvard Management Company has been paying for Bloomberg terminal rentals), the Harvard Gazette has gone and tried to remedy its error by publishing an interview with Isaacson. Isaacson is excellent, but the Gazette can’t seem to get out of its own way in insisting, ignorantly, on how racist, sexist, and classist the American Founding Fathers were.

Here is the loaded language from the question that the Harvard Gazette posed to Isaacson:

The phrase “all men are created equal” referred only to land-owning white men. Indeed, 41 of 56 of the signers enslaved people. How aware were the signers of the contradiction between this lofty statement and their own reality?

It’s simply not historically accurate that, as the Gazette inaccurately asserts, “The phrase ‘all men are created equal’ referred only to land-owning white men.”

To give but two examples, in Pennsylvania, the 1776 constitution gave voting rights to “Every freemen of the full age of twenty-one Years, having resided in this state for the space of one whole Year next before the day of election for representatives, and paid public taxes during that time.” It said “all free men having a sufficient evident common interest with, and attachment to the community, have a right to elect officers.” As David Reader writes in an article in The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, “The commonwealth’s western counties, which had small populations of free Blacks, tended to allow them to vote.”

In New Jersey, some women and African Americans could also vote, according to the National Park Service. A 2020 article by Campbell Curry-Ledbetter in the Georgetown Journal of Gender & the Law explains, “The 1776 New Jersey Constitution provided that: ‘All Inhabitants of this Colony of full Age, who are worth Fifty Pounds proclamation Money clear Estate in the same, & have resided within the County in which they claim a Vote for twelve Months immediately preceding the Election, shall be entitled to vote for Representatives in Council & Assembly.’ Provided that voters met the financial and residential qualifications, the gender and race neutral word ‘inhabitants’ allowed unmarried women, free Black people, immigrants and white men to vote.” And Jan Ellen Lewis explained in a Rutgers Law Review article, “The fifty-pound requirement could be cash, not land;... Richard P. McCormick estimated that by the mid 1780s, as many as nine out of ten adult white men were eligible to vote.”

The 1777 Articles of Confederation said, “The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different states in this union, the free inhabitants of each of these states, paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from Justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states.”

Even land ownership, in places where it was required, was less of a restrictive limit than the Gazette question-asker seems to think it was. As Gordon Wood (a Harvard history Ph.D. who is now professor emeritus at Brown University) wrote in his book “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” “Americans in 1776 therefore concluded that they were naturally fit for republicanism precisely because they were ‘a people of property; almost every man is a freeholder.’” Wood’s footnotes to those two quotes are to the Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), 26 Nov. 1776 and to the South Carolina and American Gazette (Charleston), 6 Nov. 1777.

Wood goes on in the next paragraph to write:

Yet in the end equality meant more than even this to the revolutionaries. Indeed, if equality had meant only equality of opportunity or a rough equality of property-holding, it could never have become, as it has, the single most powerful and radical ideological force in all of American history. Equality became so potent for Americans because it came to mean that everyone was really the same as everyone else, not just at birth, not in talent or property or wealth, and not just in some transcendental religious sense of the equality of all souls. Ordinary Americans came to believe that no one in a basic down-to-earth and day-in-and-day-out manner was really better than anyone else. That was equality as no other nation has ever quite had it.

The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence that the Harvard Gazette is delivering is an ideologically driven Howard Zinn-style caricature of it, not the empirically accurate historical reality.

At some point you have to wonder what is motivating it.

Is it political bias of the Gazette reporter on the Isaacson story, Christina Pazzanese, who federal election records show has made 16 campaign contributions, 15 to Democrats and one to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project?

Is it political bias of the Gazette reporter—sorry, “Harvard staff writer”—on the article calling the Declaration of Independence “overtly racist,” Christy DeSmith? Federal election records show DeSmith has made 13 campaign contributions, all of them to Democrats. (DeSmith was also responsible for the pre-election Harvard Gazette article respectfully quoting a Harvard lecturer assuring people that “some Israel critics like New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani have been unfairly tarred as antisemites.”)

Is it political bias of Harvard’s vice president for public affairs and communications, Paul Andrew, who federal records show has made three campaign contributions, all of them to Democrats, and who is a native of the United Kingdom, where he made a career in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party? Maybe Andrew has some sort of ax to grind against the American Revolution dating back to his British government service?

Despising the founding fathers need not go automatically with giving money to Democrats; in fact, some of the anti-Trump “no kings” protests that prominent Democrats like American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten have shown up at have styled themselves as the true descendants of the Lexington-and-Concord revolutionaries. But the Gazette coverage overall has such a stridently partisan tilt that I checked the campaign donations just to make sure.

I chalk it up to the Kultursmog that has set in around places like Cambridge Massachusetts that has made it somehow a sophisticated take to despise the American founders as a bunch of racist elitist male chauvinist pigs. Even when I call the Harvard Gazette out on it and they do a make-up story on Walter Isaacson as a way of balancing the original smear, they manage to double down and compound the inaccuracy.

Again, I’m totally willing to concede that some of the founding fathers were racist or sexist or elitist. Some of them may even have been gun-owning evangelical Christians, which might seriously panic the Harvard types if they ever got wind of it. Samuel Adams’s biggest bigotry was his anti-Catholicism, which was strong, and which rarely gets mentioned by the contemporary founder-bashers because discussing it might require some actual non-superficial familiarity with the era’s primary sources. Yet the eagerness to emphasize the supposed narrowness of the founders’ vision risks ruining the opportunity of properly appreciating their achievement. It also overlooks the empirical reality of the situation at the time in places like Pennsylvania and New Jersey. That reality was more egalitarian than the ignorant, Howard Zinn-Harvard Gazette stereotype.

Harvard used to be a leading academic institution for the fact-based academic study of history, with a reputation burnished by professors with offices next door to one another in the stacks of Widener Library, Bernard Bailyn and Richard Pipes. Bailyn’s great scholarly contribution was to debunk the idea that the American Revolution was economically, rather than ideologically, motivated. Pipes’s great scholarly contribution was to debunk the idea that the Russian revolution was economically motivated rather than being a coup by Bolshevik thugs. (Both of them were Jewish, which may have subtly influenced their point of view; as Pipes put in his his 1999 book “Property and Freedom,” “In the Jewish legal tradition, wealth honestly acquired was considered a blessing: the rabbis forbade people to give away their wealth, or to engage in excessive alms-giving, so as not to become themselves a burden to the community. In contrast to the Christian Gospels, the Hebrew Bible extols neither poverty nor the poor.”)

Alas neither Bailyn nor Pipes are still with us. Fortunately at least some of their students are, including your editor. One thing I am thankful for in this Thanksgiving season was that I learned enough at the Harvard of the early 1990s to know that the Harvard of 2025 is spreading falsehoods about America’s founding.

New York Times targets Apollo’s Marc Rowan: The chairman of the board of the UJA-Federation of New York, Marc Rowan, who is also a co-founder and CEO of Apollo Global Management, Inc., is the target of a hit piece from the New York Times. It appears under the headline, “Wealthy People Have Always Shaped Universities. This Time Is Different.” The subheadline is “A new set of billionaires with an interest in higher education has helped oust college presidents and even assisted the Trump administration in its effort to overhaul the industry.” The “even” is an editorial nudge from the Times to its readers to get worked up over the issue.

It’s a total double standard. The senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, Penny Pritzker, is reportedly a billionaire and she was even assisting the Biden-Harris administration as U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine’s Economic Recovery (and before that as Commerce Secretary in the Obama administration), yet the Times had no problem with that.

The Times reports, “Mr. Trump’s approach represents a shift in how wealthy people are shaping higher education. Some of the moneyed voices Mr. Trump has elevated have, in the name of encouraging open debate, sought to expunge progressive orthodoxy from academia and tilt campuses rightward.”

When wealthy people try to move higher education leftward, the Times makes not a peep about it. For example, when Harvard got a gift from a donor complaining about “the trend toward excessive wealth concentration,” not a peep of complaint came from the Times.

The most comical part of the Times article is this passage:

“Anyone is entitled to express their feelings about universities, to condemn universities,” said Lee C. Bollinger, who led both Columbia University and the University of Michigan. “But at some point, the level of influence is just way out of proportion to the merits of their claims.”

In circles like Mr. Bollinger’s, no Trump-aligned billionaire may be of greater concern and consequence than Mr. Rowan.

Bollinger is a person who was out plumping publicly for Al Jazeera—”critically valuable” to “our democracy” and to “America’s understanding of the world”—while fundraising from the Qatari royal family that owns it. In fact, as a recent paper from the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israeli Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center found, “many journalists who worked for Al Jazeera in the Gaza Strip were simultaneously operatives in Hamas’ military wing. Some of them accompanied the waves of infiltration into Israeli territory during the October 7, 2023 attack and massacre.” As the Israeli Foreign Ministry put it, “Qatar’s Al Jazeera gives Hamas a propaganda and psychological warfare platform. Hamas operatives, from rocket launchers to hostage takers, work for Al Jazeera. Terror propaganda is not journalism.”

I reported in August 2023 that Columbia gave Bollinger a $6 million home loan on his way out the door as president: “The New York Times reported matter-of-factly in February 2022 that Bollinger and his wife had paid $11.7 million for a three bedroom, four and a half bathroom apartment in the Beresford at 211 Central Park West. The Times kept the word “Bollinger” out of the headline, which was simply “A Limestone Mansion on the Upper East Side Sells for $56 Million” and aggregated the top-priced New York City real estate deals of the month. (I put in a query to Columbia about Bollinger’s mortgage rate and haven’t yet heard back.) Columbia gives out the Pulitzer Prizes, so most news organizations treat it with kid gloves, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, which investigated Columbia for leaving students mired in debt and noted that one financially struggling student was floated a job walking Bollinger’s yellow Labradors.”

The Times doesn’t ask Bollinger any hard questions about how Columbia became an antisemitic cesspool under his leadership, how the university slid downward in the U.S. News rankings under his leadership, why he was lobbying so hard for Al Jazeera, how he can justify the student debt or the dog-walking job or the $11.7 million apartment with the $6 million loan. Instead it lets him crap all over Marc Rowan, who has done more to improve American higher education as an amateur kibbitzer than anything Bollinger did in years as a full-time professional. What a joke.

The audience for this stuff? The Times readership of Israel-haters. The top Times reader-pick comment on the article is this: “These billionaires don’t care about education. Their issue is Israel. They want to force universities to silence their students so that Israel can do whatever it wants to the Palestinians without student protests.” That won a “recommend” upvote from 424 Times readers. Another top Times comment, with 201 upvotes, is “Risking getting labeled ‘anti-semitic’ here, but it looks like some ardent supporters of Israel with very deep pockets are trying to stifle any criticism of Israel on university campuses. And they are succeeding!”