Responding to: A Visit to America in 1905 — Peggy Noonan · 2026-06-04

What the Piece Argues

Peggy Noonan’s column uses the memoirs of Sergei Witte — the last czar’s finance minister who negotiated the 1905 Portsmouth peace treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War — to paint a portrait of an America that was already, at the turn of the twentieth century, something singular and world-moving: prosperous, technologically advanced, socially fluid, religiously tolerant, and possessed of a democratic spirit so powerful it could move even a cynical old Russian diplomat to tears in a New Hampshire church. The piece argues, through Witte’s eyes, that America’s greatness is a long-standing fact, rooted in its Christian character and its open, egalitarian culture, and that this greatness announced itself on the global stage when Theodore Roosevelt brokered peace and won the Nobel Prize. The column is presented as a sweet historical vignette, but its payload is a ratification of American exceptionalism — the claim that America is uniquely good, uniquely blessed, and its power is fundamentally benevolent.

Receipts

The column launders American exceptionalism through nostalgia by taking a foreign visitor’s selective impressions as evidence of systemic goodness, so the reader mistakes a protected elite gaze for the whole truth about a racial-apartheid state.

  • The framing wants you to believe that America in 1905 was a “prosperous country exploding with joy” where religious tolerance and social equality were organic features of everyday life.
  • But the historical record shows that the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling had constitutionalized racial segregation across the South, legally mandating subordination for Black Americans.
  • The framing wants you to believe that Jewish refugees fleeing Russian oppression “enjoyed full liberty and equal rights” as proof of America’s universally applied freedoms.
  • But the historical record shows that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred a specific race from entry, and the Dawes Act was actively dispossessing Native nations of their lands, proving liberty was tiered.
  • The framing wants you to believe that America’s global emergence was the benign diplomacy of a Christian nation bringing peace.
  • But the historical record shows that the U.S. was simultaneously prosecuting the Philippine-American War, a brutal colonial counterinsurgency killing hundreds of thousands, rendering Christian unity at home a diorama masking imperial violence.

Anchor Source: Tuskegee Institute Lynching Archives (documenting a regime of racial terror enforcing the Jim Crow caste system that defined “America in 1905”).

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: with persuadable moderates, a good-faith family discussion, or anyone who reads Noonan’s column and finds it genuinely sweet rather than ideologically load-bearing.

Martha was born in Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1898. By the time Sergei Witte arrived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, she was seven years old. She could not yet read, because the Black school in her district was open three months a year and the state of Alabama spent eleven dollars per white pupil for every dollar it spent on her. Her father worked land he did not own under terms he could not negotiate; her mother washed white families’ clothes and could not walk on the same sidewalk as the women who employed her.

Witte’s America — elevator rides, Jewish refugees “enjoying full liberty,” ministers and rabbis singing peace hymns in a New Hampshire church — was not Martha’s America. Martha’s America was the America of Plessy v. Ferguson, decided nine years earlier, which held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not prohibit states from assigning her to the colored car, the colored school, the colored waiting room, the colored cemetery. It was the America of the fifty-seven Black Americans documented as lynched in 1905 — a rate of more than one per week — and of the thousands more whose deaths went uncounted.

The question a column about America-in-1905 should answer is not “what did a visiting Russian diplomat feel in a New Hampshire church?” It is “what was actually happening to the people whose labor produced the prosperity, and whose exclusion defined the ‘liberty’?” Peggy Noonan’s column asks the first question and treats it as if it answered the second. A nation’s story-telling that selects only the frame in which it looks good is not history — it is a monument built on invisible human cost. The work we owe Martha is the work King called for at Riverside: a radical revolution of values, in which we stop asking how the country looked to a czarist finance minister and start asking who paid for the view.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: for op-eds, Substack replies, and exchanges with identity-protective readers who need the structural analysis made explicit without mockery.

There is a genre of American political writing that could be called the Nostalgia-Withholding Game. The columnist presents a charming historical anecdote — Witte! Portsmouth! church bells! — and treats the prettiness of the picture as an argument for American exceptionalism, while carefully omitting everything that makes the picture a lie. Noonan’s column on Witte’s 1905 visit is a clean specimen of the form.

The problem is not inaccuracy; Witte did visit, and he did meet reporters. The problem is frame-cropping of a specific kind — presenting a white visitor’s tightly managed diplomatic experience of white America as “America,” period. This sleight of hand converts an emotional response to a curated scene into a fact about the nation. The frame crops out the structural facts of 1905: Plessy v. Ferguson, which ruled the Fourteenth Amendment permitted state-mandated racial subordination; the Chinese Exclusion Act; the Dawes Act dispossessing Native lands; a colonial counterinsurgency in the Philippines; and Jim Crow — an entire labor and social regime enforced by terrorist violence averaging more than one documented lynching a week.

None of this is revisionist. All of it is standard historical scholarship drawn from census records, Congressional testimony, and the Supreme Court’s own docket. The institutional author of the frame is not a cabal but a feature of the conservative-movement memory-management apparatus, of which the Wall Street Journal editorial page is a flagship. The beneficiary is the existing distribution of power, which the “America was always good” story insulates from structural scrutiny.

An honest reckoning with 1905 America must answer the question the column forecloses: who paid for the diorama? The answer is in the census records and the lynching archives. A columnist of Noonan’s caliber choosing not to look, and presenting the cropped image as the full frame, is the thing the crop was designed to hide.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: when the person you’re responding to needs to see the absurdity of the picture Noonan paints, not just its factual omissions — the “rack in the room” for bystanders.

Sergei Witte, a czarist finance minister whose empire is collapsing around him, steps off a ship in New York and is immediately mobbed by reporters. He is a man of “great asperity” — Peggy Noonan gives us the word twice, because she wants us to know she consulted a thesaurus — and he is shocked, shocked, by American egalitarianism. Elevator operators expect tips. University students work as waiters. Secret Service agents look like “gentlemen.” America, he concludes, is a mighty locomotive bearing down history’s tracks.

Noonan presents these impressions as evidence of something profound. They are actually evidence of what happens when a member of a decaying aristocracy encounters a society organized around commerce rather than hereditary rank, and mistakes his own culture shock for a divine national attribute.

Meanwhile, in the America Noonan’s column visits without seeing, a Black man named Ed Johnson is lynched in Chattanooga in March 1906 by a mob that breaks into a jail where he is held under a Supreme Court stay. The Court orders the sheriff prosecuted — the only criminal trial in the Court’s history — and the sheriff serves ninety days. Witte did not visit Chattanooga; he visited Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Chattanooga story cannot be folded into a sweet anecdote about church choirs because the Chattanooga story is the America that was actually happening to the people the American project was organized to exclude.

The column’s method is to ask only the questions that produce the answers it wants. A czarist finance minister on a diplomatic junket was the perfect vehicle for this because he was professionally committed to not seeing the costs of the systems he served. Noonan is professionally committed to the same thing: maintaining the sentimental frame that lets the audience feel proud of a past they have never honestly examined.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: against the institutions and ideas, not against Noonan personally — the mirror forcing the target to see the shape of what they are participating in.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page is not a neutral platform for historical musings. It is the central nervous system of American establishment conservatism, and its function, across decades, has been to launder power-protecting ideology through the forms of respectable prose. Noonan’s Witte column is a perfect specimen of that function: it is not about 1905 — it is about 2026. The argument is that America has always been good, and therefore its present arrangements require no fundamental alteration.

The column’s technique is to present a white visitor’s tightly cropped frame of white America as the totality of “America” — a nostalgia-laundered magic trick where the rabbit is visible only because the landscape behind it is painted over in blood.

The institutional author of this framing is the conservative memory-management apparatus of which the Journal’s page is a flagship. The beneficiary is the existing allocation of wealth and power in American life, which depends for its legitimacy on the story that present arrangements are the organic outcome of a fundamentally benign past — a story that now actively obstructs the fixing of present voter suppression, housing segregation, and the wealth gap (the direct institutional descendants of Shelby County v. Holder’s carve-outs).

The America Witte visited was a racial-apartheid state simultaneously (a) enforcing Jim Crow under federal constitutional doctrine; (b) killing Black Americans at rates exceeding one lynching per week; (c) excluding Chinese immigrants entirely by law; and (d) dispossessing Native nations of their remaining lands while prosecuting a brutal colonial war overseas. Noonan’s column vanishes all of it and replaces it with church choirs. That is not history. That is propaganda with the body count airbrushed away. The column is an anesthetic for the powerful.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: against the ideas and the institutions — the full scorched-earth takedown of the ideological operation Noonan’s column performs.

Sergei Witte, the waspish finance minister of a collapsing autocracy, arrives in 1905 America and is immediately scandalized by tipped elevator operators. He finds the Secret Service agents well-dressed, which in his moral calculus apparently says something profound about the republic rather than something trivial about Secret Service grooming standards. He is moved to tears by a multi-faith church service that is, by his own description, a diplomatic photo op with organ music. And he concludes that America is a mighty locomotive bearing down the tracks of history — a judgment delivered by a man whose own locomotive was, at that very moment, derailing into the ditch of the twentieth century.

Noonan presents this as revelation. It is actually the noise that happens when a hereditary aristocrat encounters a commercial republic and misrecognizes extraction machinery as hymns. The America Witte visited was two countries: the white one that was prosperous and building skyscrapers, and the non-white one being crushed to fund the view. The Jewish refugees who told Witte they enjoyed “full liberty” were telling the truth relative to Czarist pogroms, and that truth is real. But the “full liberty” they described existed in the same legal year as Plessy, as the Exclusion Act, and as lynch law.

The column is a Thomas Kinkade painting of a country whose structural elegance was built by disappearing the mass graves from the canvas. The body count is the point. The glowing windows are designed to obscure the mass graves. The politics this column is defending is the politics of “you don’t need to change anything.” The reader is invited to feel proud of the elevator ride and to conclude that anyone demanding accountability for Shelby County or wealth gaps must be alarmist. The apparatus Noonan serves is the entire memory-management infrastructure of American conservatism. The beneficiary is the class whose power the story insulates. The cost-bearers are the descendants of the lynched, the excluded, and the dispossessed who are told, a century later, to shut up and appreciate the church choirs. This isn’t history. It’s a political tranquilizer dressed in Pulitzer-quality prose.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: for the reader who needs the moral witness register — the prophetic disgust at what has been done to the historical record in the service of power.

Goddamn those who call evil good and good evil. Isaiah was not extolling tax rates; he was naming a condition of the soul where darkness is swapped for light so methodically that the swapper forgets the swap happened. The condition is permanent. It is right now in this column. A Pulitzer-winning historian has taken the census record of Jim Crow, the Tuskegee lynching logs, the congressional testimony on Philippine atrocities — a mountain of documentary evidence that in 1905 the United States was a racial-apartheid state running a colonial counterinsurgency — and replaced it with a czarist aristocrat’s emotional response to an elevator.

The canon Noonan invokes in closing — the “mighty locomotive bearing down history’s tracks” — is the physical infrastructure of dispossession, the engine that carried stolen land into the real-estate market, and presenting it as a symbol of benevolent national progress is like blessing the furnace that burns the bones. The alibi is constructed from a diplomat’s selective memory; the editor’s blue pencil crops the frame; together they serve an anesthetized congregation a hymn where the last shall be first only after they forget the first were never last.

The test the Gospel imposes on any claim to Christian nationhood is not what the nation felt at the peace summit. It is what it did for “the least of these.” The least in 1905 were the Black men swinging from Southern trees at the rate of one every six days. The country was not a church service. The country was Plessy, 1,200 words of airbrushed nostalgia, and a choir that blocked the sound of the lynching drums. Woe to the historians who tell you the noise is music. Woe to the editorial pages that run the sheet music. Hell on a business model that treats historical memory as an anesthetic and calls the resulting narcosis “civilization.” Drunk on the blood of the saints, the seer of Patmos wrote. The intoxication is the intoxicating forgetting. The American locomotive runs; the diorama is rebuilt every Sunday in columns just like this. The prophet’s question cuts through the liturgical muzak: “What did you do for the least of these?” The column’s 1,200 words answer: “We waved at them from a train.”

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: the all-out, gloves-off, cathartic apex — for the reader who has watched decades of this shit and needs the full expletive release valve.

Fucking spare me.

Spare me the goddamn church bells. Spare me the tearful Russian diplomat and the “mighty locomotive” and the university-student waiters who weren’t “ashamed” of their menial labor. Spare me the entire sentimental diorama, constructed at the expense of the people the diorama was designed to make invisible — the Black Americans being lynched at a rate of more than one a goddamn week while Witte was riding elevators, the Native children being ripped from their families and dumped in boarding schools designed to beat their culture out of them, the Chinese immigrants barred from the country by federal law, the hundreds of thousands of Filipinos the U.S. Army was butchering in a colonial counterinsurgency the same goddamn year America was “brokering peace” at Portsmouth.

Peggy Noonan knows all of this. She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. The census data, the Plessy opinion, the lynching documentation, the Dawes Act, the Philippine atrocity testimony — all of it is publicly available. She omits it because she wants to write church bells, because church bells sell the story the Wall Street Journal editorial page exists to sell, which is the story that America has always been good, and its power is innocent, and anyone who tells you different is an alarmist — the same goddamn word she hangs on Witte’s critics, as if the only people who noticed the collapsing empire were people who needed to calm the fuck down.

The column is a memory-holocaust in prose. It replaces Jim Crow with the elevator ride. It replaces the lynching tree with the interfaith church choir. It replaces the Chinese Exclusion Act with the heartwarming story of Jewish refugees doing well — and it does not ask whether the “full liberty” they experienced was available to the Black people living under the legal regime the column has just spent 1,200 words rendering invisible.

This is not an oversight. It is an ideological operation whose function is to make the reader feel good about a past that was, for millions, a nightmare, so the reader will not ask hard questions about the present the past produced. It is a sedative. The disease being left untreated is the structural legacy of everything the column omitted — the wealth gap, the carceral state, the housing segregation, the voter suppression — all the direct institutional descendants of the Jim Crow regime the column erases from the record. You cannot understand where you are if you do not understand how you got there. The column prevents you from understanding.

And the “mighty locomotive bearing down history’s tracks” — Jesus Christ, the goddamn locomotive. It was the engine of dispossession. It was the machine that carried stolen land into the real-estate market. It is not a symbol of innocent national progress. It is the technological embodiment of the thing the column is doing — moving forward by crushing what is in the way and asking the passengers to admire the view.

Fuck the diorama. Fuck the church bells. The actual locomotive of American history ran over human beings. The Tuskegee Institute compiled the body count. The Plessy Court constitutionalized the crushing. The Shelby County Court protected the passengers. The column is asking you to mistake the sound of the wheels for a hymn — and the hymn is a lie, and the lie has a body count. There is your locomotive. There is your mighty engine bearing down the tracks. It has been running for a century, and the people who built it keep telling you the noise is music. It is not goddamn music. It is the sound of the thing that ate your history and asked you to call the indigestion a blessing.

The Deeper Breakdown

Who benefits and by what mechanism. The framing Noonan’s column advances benefits the existing distribution of power in American life by providing a legitimating backstory. If the American past was fundamentally benign, then present-day inequalities are not the product of structural violence but the natural outcome of a basically fair system. The institutional author is the conservative memory-management apparatus, with the Wall Street Journal page as a flagship, and the beneficiary is the readership disproportionately invested in a story that makes their position seem earned rather than inherited.

The receipts that prove it.

  • Jim Crow and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): Constitutionalized “separate but equal,” permitting state-mandated racial subordination across every sphere of life, with education spending metrics serving as a stark ledger of structural abandonment.
  • Lynching as Terror: In 1905 alone, documented victims of lynch-law enforcement of the Jim Crow regime numbered in the dozens, weekly social death rituals where no one was prosecuted.
  • The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882): Federal law barring laborers from entry by explicit racial category, still in force as Witte toured.
  • The Dawes Act (1887): An ongoing dispossession machine severing Native land into white allotments.
  • The Philippine-American War / Moro Rebellion: A brutal colonial counterinsurgency with a civilian death toll in the hundreds of thousands that ran simultaneous to the “peacemaking” at Portsmouth.

The convergence core: the America of 1905 was a racial-apartheid state whose governing legal structures and territorial expansion were organized around the systematic subordination of non-white peoples. Any portrait of that year that omits these facts is a frame-crop designed to produce a feeling that the facts would not support. Noonan’s column is a frame-crop. The omitted record is the rebuttal.