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By Andrew Sullivan

• Sept. 14, 2018

THESE TRUTHS A History of the United States By Jill Lepore Illustrated. 932 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $39.95.

It isn’t until you start reading it that you realize how much we need a book like this one at this particular moment. “These Truths,” by Jill Lepore — a professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker — is a one-volume history of the United States, constructed around a traditional narrative, that takes you from the 16th to the 21st century. It tries to take in almost everything, an impossible task, but I’d be hard-pressed to think she could have crammed more into these 932 highly readable pages. It covers the history of political thought, the fabric of American social life over the centuries, classic “great man” accounts of contingencies, surprises, decisions, ironies and character, and the vivid experiences of those previously marginalized: women, African-Americans, Native Americans, homosexuals. It encompasses interesting takes on democracy and technology, shifts in demographics, revolutions in economics and the very nature of modernity. It’s a big sweeping book, a way for us to take stock at this point in the journey, to look back, to remind us who we are and to point to where we’re headed.

This is not an account of relentless progress. It’s much subtler and darker than that. It reminds us of some simple facts so much in the foreground that we must revisit them: “Between 1500 and 1800, roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried 12 million Africans there by force; and as many as 50 million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease. … Taking possession of the Americas gave Europeans a surplus of land; it ended famine and led to four centuries of economic growth.” Nothing like this had ever happened in world history; and nothing like it is possible again. The land was instantly a refuge for religious dissenters, a new adventure in what we now understand as liberalism and a brutal exercise in slave labor and tyranny. It was a vast, exhilarating frontier and a giant, torturing gulag at the same time. Over the centuries, in Lepore’s insightful telling, it represented a giant leap in productivity for humankind: “Slavery was one kind of experiment, designed to save the cost of labor by turning human beings into machines. Another kind of experiment was the invention of machines powered by steam.” It was an experiment in the pursuit of happiness, but it was in effect the pursuit of previously unimaginable affluence.

And, of course, it was and is full of contradictions: A radically new secularism founded it, and a political-religious fervor came to define it. As industrialization accelerated, and modernity beckoned, Americans turned back to God: Before the start of the Second Great Awakening , at the end of the 18th century, “a scant one in 10 Americans were church members; by the time it ended, that ratio had risen to eight in 10.” And these religious waves advanced the cause of the spiritual equality of all human beings, which in turn became political equality. “The self-evident, secular truths of the Declaration of Independence became, to evangelical Americans, the truths of revealed religion” is Lepore’s insight. And argument raged from the get-go: constant, careening, apocalyptic and at times elevated discourse about real things, vital things, in primary colors, and with passion. All these crosscurrents — reason and faith, truth and propaganda, black and white, slave and free, immigrant and native, industry and agriculture — ripple through this history, with one obvious period where the country simply came apart in the bloodiest civil conflict in history.

No country before or since has been this convulsed with conflict and wealth. No country has been both a republic and effectively an empire across an entire continent. No country had ever been defined as one of strangers and travelers, where waves and waves of immigration constantly churned through society, in what one reformer in 1837 called “the boldest experiment upon the stability of government ever made in the annals of time.” No people were as passionate both for slavery and for freedom. The Civil War, in fact, revealed that there were effectively two countries fighting for supremacy on one continent. The Southern states showed themselves to be profoundly hostile to democracy and civil equality, as any system based on white supremacy has to be. Secessionists, Lepore brutally demonstrates, “were attempting to build a modern, pro-slavery, antidemocratic state.” This meant suppression of dissent and extirpation of free speech: “One of the first things the new state of Georgia did was to pass a law that made dissent” against secession “punishable by death.” The other country was built on the First Amendment.

The war itself beggars belief. In one single battle, 24,000 men were casualties. More than 750,000 Americans died over all, from wounds and disease. Even today, that number numbs. And yet this cathartic breakthrough for freedom nonetheless came to be alloyed. Lincoln was murdered by a white supremacist. Reconstruction — a surreal and glorious period when Confederate veterans were barred from voting and freed slaves exercised real power in the South — was abandoned in a petty political deal over a presidential ticket. Jim Crow must count as the most bitter, resentful and wicked response to defeat by the losing side in any civil war. It suggested, indeed, that the Civil War would never end, merely wax and wane. And its toll on the human spirit and the black body was matched only by its evil. From Jackson’s massacre of Native Americans to the Southern labor camps to the full embrace of torture in the Bush-Cheney administration is a single, consistent and evil line.

Lepore’s most distinctive theme she refers to as “the machine”: a concern that newspapers, and then mass media, especially radio and television — in combination with pollsters and political consultants — progressively undermined any concept of empirical truth, and thereby slowly sank the reasoned deliberation essential to republican government. She seems obsessed with the malignancy of polling; it takes up more pages than, say, the war on drugs. And she’s not wrong about the cynicism of media and political pros. But dirty campaigning, distortion of reality and propaganda were there from the very beginning, as indeed she notes. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were, in some ways, the peak of political discourse in this country, but they nonetheless were resolved by mass bloodshed. And the collapse of a common truth in the late 20th century was as much a function of modernity and post-modernity as of political malfeasance.

Is our current spasm of authoritarianism unprecedented? Hardly. It was there in Andrew Jackson’s contempt for the Supreme Court; in Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus; in Franklin Roosevelt’s effective blackmailing of the Supreme Court to back the New Deal; in the internment camps for Japanese-Americans; in the crimes of Richard Nixon; and in the claims of total executive power under Bush-Cheney. Lepore cites Mencken’s spoof Constitution for Roosevelt: “All governmental power of whatever sort shall be vested in a president of the United States.” Similarly, she exposes Walter Lippmann’s advice to the president: “The situation is critical. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.”

The same can be said about the rise of white nationalism in the wake of mass immigration. The last time the foreign-born as a percentage of the population rivaled ours today, a brutally draconian immigration law was imposed, with specific racial categories for exclusion, and the Klan turned not just against blacks but against Catholics and Jews as well. Ditto the consistency of political extremism: from John Brown to Malcolm X to Black Lives Matter. Ditto huge economic inequality — in the 1920s and 2010s. Rhetorical excess? “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign,” opined one Martin Luther King Jr. Social breakdown? It would be hard to match the late 1960s, when the achievement of civil rights was followed by an explosion of mass violence, beginning in Watts, Los Angeles, in 1965, and the 1970s, when domestic terrorism was everywhere.

Lepore panders a little to liberal sensibilities. And so in her account, Communism was no real threat at all; Nixon was simply playing the demagogue in going after Alger Hiss (she doesn’t note that Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy and a traitor). Ronald Reagan gets no credit for the implosion of the Soviet Union. Clinton’s crime bill was a terrible failure because of mass incarceration, and yet the extraordinary decline in crime that followed does not earn a mention. But she is withering about the New Left, and liberalism’s turn toward elitism and identity politics. And she highlights truths that are usually dim-lit: that the first attempt at a welfare state came in the South, where women secured a war widow’s pension; that the conservative movement was made possible by women, especially Phyllis Schlafly; that the gay rights movement only succeeded when it took a conservative turn. She sees John F. Kennedy, rightly, as a conservative Democrat. She admires in many ways how the right seized populism as the left abandoned it. This is not an account conservatives will hate.

She’s brilliant at times. She devastates the current maximalist position of the National Rifle Association (which the N.R.A. itself once strongly opposed) in the context of gun ownership and the historical debate about the Second Amendment. The 2008 Heller decision rejecting a District of Columbia handgun ban is quite obviously bonkers. Similarly, the emergence of abortion as the critical litmus test for both parties is an entirely novel and polarizing development: “Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom.” It is as if complexity has become a sin. She sees both sides in recent times as corrosive of liberal norms: “Both the left and the right, unwilling to brook dissent, began dismantling structures that nurture fair-minded debate: the left undermining the university; the right undermining the press.” Perfect. She notes how recent presidential candidates have declared vast swaths of the public as “unworthy of their attention” (Romney’s 47 percent of “takers”) or beneath their contempt (Hillary’s “deplorables”). They both deserved to lose. And she sees the deregulation of the airwaves (the end of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan) and of Wall Street (under Clinton) as key reasons our politics is now so nihilist and unequal.

Lepore is also a writer. This book is aimed at a mass audience, driven by anecdote and statistic, memoir and photograph, with all the giants of American history in their respective places. There wasn’t a moment when I struggled to keep reading. We know that Washington ordered his slaves freed once his wife died; I didn’t know that in the room where he died, there were more black people than white. I’ve always admired Benjamin Franklin, but he is a glittering star in this account: “He was the only man to have signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris and the Constitution. His last public act was to urge abolition. Congress would not hear of it.” There are moments, however, when you wince at the purple prose. “The Republic was spreading like ferns on the floor of a forest.” Dred Scott was “suffering from tuberculosis, a slow sickness, a constitutional weakening, as relentless as the disease that wracked the nation itself. Frederick Douglass watched, and looked for a cure, an end to suffering. … But it was as if the nation, like Oedipus of Thebes, had seen that in its origins lay a curse, and had gouged out its own eyes.” Oof. The last two paragraphs of the book amount to one of the most excruciating extended metaphors — yes, the ship of state! — I have ever had the misfortune to struggle through.

But these are quibbles. We need this book. Its reach is long, its narrative fresh and the arc of its account sobering to say the least. This is not Whig history. It is a classic tale of a unique country’s astonishing rise and just-as-inevitable fall. And if you reread the book and ask yourself, what is the period of American history that most resembles today?, you would have to say, I think, the late 1850s and early 1860s. Here’s Lepore’s description of that time: “A sense of inevitability fell, as if there were a fate, a dismal dismantlement, that no series of events or accidents could thwart.” Lincoln thought of the nation as a house, and quoted Scripture: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” And his words, as always, cut through the ages like a knife.

Andrew Sullivan is a writer at large for New York magazine.

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Jill Lepore excavates the history of America, down to its bedrock values.

September-October 2018

Illustration by Phil Foster

These Truths: A History of the United States,  by Jill Lepore (Norton, $39.95)

Only the ampersand is still visible; Benjamin Franklin’s thick backslashes hide the words themselves. It was two weeks before the United States would declare its independence from Great Britain, and Thomas Jefferson, having finished tinkering with his draft of the declaration, asked Franklin to review it. The elder statesman’s changes were few, but critical: where Jefferson had written “these truths” were “sacred & undeniable,” Franklin crossed out the adjectives, and suggested instead that they were “self-evident.”

According to Kemper professor of American history Jill Lepore, it was the edit that changed the nation. Her astounding new account of the American experiment—from when Columbus first stumbled on its shores to when President Donald Trump promised to put walls around them—is titled These Truths because of that substitution of evidence for reverence. Lepore argues that the revision meant rights were no longer “the stuff of religion” but “the stuff of science.” The founders grounded their principles in reason, not because it necessarily conflicts with faith, but because anything self-evident could be observed, queried, and debated.

These Truths does just that, surveying American history to see when the country reflected its founding commitments and when it belied them. Historians are often cheerleaders or critics, but Lepore is less like Herodotus or Howard Zinn, and more like Hercule Poirot: sorting out what happened, but also why and how. “Between reverence and worship, on the one side, and irreverence and contempt, on the other,” Lepore writes of her single-volume endeavor, “lies an uneasy path away from false pieties and petty triumphs over people who lived and died and committed both their acts of courage and their sins and errors long before we committed ours.”

To walk such a path all the way through American history is an unlikely task for one of the country’s leading microhistorians, who previously focused her considerable intellect on obscure figures from Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane to the peculiar psychologist who created “Wonder Woman,” using their lives to tell the story of broader cultural trends and historical movements.

Delightfully, though, Lepore conjures a cast in These Truths every bit as unruly as those in her earlier histories: Quaker preacher Benjamin Lay, who made his pokeberry-juice trick-bible bleed; activist Phyllis Schlafly, A.M. ’45, who torched the feminist tent of the GOP one newsletter at a time; black entrepreneur and intellectual David Walker, who stitched his revolutionary pamphlets into the lining of clothes; Samuel Morse, who sped up communication only by accident, while trying to create a code Catholics could not decipher; “Amazing Grace” Hopper, who programmed some of the earliest computers for the Navy; and the Christian conservative Rod Dreher, whose blog decries the end of Christendom and conservatism with every post.

In These Truths there are no heroes or villains, only Americans. But the book is more than a collection of profiles in chronological order; Lepore considers ideas as much as individuals. She divides the country’s history into four parts: its first 300 years, when ideas of natural rights were first taking shape; the antebellum nineteenth century, when arguments over popular sovereignty divided the nation; from Reconstruction to the end of World War II, when the nation state expanded its ideas of political equality; and the technological age that followed nuclear warfare, when machines disrupted democracy. Writing in an era of fake news and four Pinocchios, when truth seems anything but self-evident, Lepore insists that the United States was founded on facts—and more surprisingly, that only facts can save it.

“The Confederacy had lost the war,” Lepore argues, “but it had won the peace.”

Within a few weeks of Benjamin Franklin’s edits, the Declaration of Independence was ratified, read aloud in taverns and town halls around the country, and reprinted in newspapers around the world. Not long after that, a slave rebellion started in Jamaica. The truths of the document proved so self-evident that enslaved persons were inspired to revolt, too, and right away Americans were forced to confront their own mendacity. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes,” asked the writer Samuel Johnson, in eighteenth-century England’s version of a hot take.

Acknowledging the hypocrisy of men yelping for liberty while denying it to others has become standard for colonial histories, but Lepore goes further, arguing that the founders were not just hypocrites, but copycats: “A revolutionary tradition was forged not by the English in America, but by Indians waging wars and slaves waging rebellions.” Though the founders might have been reading John Locke and David Hume, none needed a treatise to know that tyranny could be resisted. They had heard about Metacom and the Algonquians who fought colonial encroachment in New England in 1675. And revolutions had been attempted all around them. George Washington’s slave Harry escaped Mount Vernon to fight for the British alongside a man named Ralph who had once been the property of Patrick Henry, while James Madison had to take a break from the Constitutional Convention to track down a 17-year-old named Anthony who escaped from Montpelier. Keeping the word “slave” out of the Constitution did not mean slavery was absent from the document; in fact, Lepore calls slavery America’s Achilles heel, narrating the tortured series of amendments, bargains, and compromises that only delayed the confrontation between the country’s commitment to natural rights and its failure to extend them to African Americans.

Yet even after more than 750,000 men had died in the struggle over emancipation in the Civil War, the question of citizenship remained fiercely contested. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were drafted to preserve the rights of freedmen, but the substitution of “male inhabitants” for “persons” left suffragists protesting for the rights of women, and two decades later the first federal immigration laws revealed how the rise of nativism constricted the notion of political equality even more.

 “The Confederacy had lost the war,” Lepore argues, “but it had won the peace”—not only because the South retained so much political power, but because not all men were equal, not all persons could be citizens, and not all citizens were afforded equal rights. The country’s commitment to its self-evident truths was wavering at best, and the decades after Reconstruction are some of the darkest in Lepore’s doorstopper of a book. These are the chapters where the very populism that tweets all day every day these days first appeared in the form of William Jennings Bryan, and the muckraking journalism of Nellie Bly, Ida B. Wells, and Ambrose Bierce was met by the yellowing prose of publishers like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, class of 1885. In these years, America Firsters first appeared, and African-American soldiers fighting for freedom around the globe asked when they would find it on the home front, only to learn that Japanese Americans there were being forced into internment camps.

Whatever their enemies abroad, Americans were also fighting a domestic war between the forces of corruption, demagoguery, prejudice, and propaganda and those of reason, reflection, and truth. Although the country had survived earlier periods of extreme partisanship, like the fights between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans in the 1790s, and Whigs and Democrats in the 1850s, political squabbles in the years after World War II started to seem more intractable. 

In these times, many will read  These Truths  like a dying man reading a first-aid manual, but history is not self-help.

Technology had always fostered partisan divisions: printing presses arrived not long after the colonists did, and after that it was cheaper paper that divided opinion, then the telegraph and the radio. But Lepore argues that “Hiroshima marked the beginning of a new and differently unstable political era, in which technological change wildly outpaced the human capacity for moral reckoning.” The computers that broke German ciphers and calculated the trajectories of Japanese bombs were soon taking inventory, managing payroll, and sorting voters. It had taken a lot of shoe leather, postage stamps, and newspaper ink for the first consulting firm—Campaigns, Inc.—to torpedo President Harry Truman’s plan for universal health insurance. Now public opinion could be manipulated via mass marketing.

Televisions went into almost every parlor, and smartphones, in time, into almost every pocket. In between, conservative intellectual Richard M. Weaver argued in his 1948 book, Ideas Have Consequences , that a commitment to deep truths had been replaced by a shallow concern for facts, and Cold War diplomat George Kennan worried that the paranoid distortions of McCarthyism were not a fluke but a feature of modern politics. Although politicians have always used history in selective and self-serving ways, both Democrats and Republicans began to see it as a palliative discipline: the party of the past peddling a fairy-tale version of a homogenous, prosperous nation that never was; the party of progress insisting on a narrative of advancement that has only occasionally been true, and never for everyone.

Both parties were selling these stories as network television and daily newspapers declined and the balanced-coverage regulations that once governed the airwaves were repealed. Collective truths and collaborative discernment were even more imperiled by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, where partisans could post without meaningful rebuttal or rebuke. Tea Party types can put on Patrick Henry costumes without ever reckoning with Gabriel’s Rebellion, the slave uprising that took place just down the street from the site of his most famous speech in Richmond, and Democratic Socialists can hum Hamilton lyrics without ever walking from Trinity Church to the African Burial Ground in Manhattan. More insidiously, whole swaths of the country can like, favorite, and scroll until their thumbs fall off without ever knowing basic facts about their democracy, including election days.

 Perhaps instead of the next U2 album, Apple could make a copy of These Truths appear on every iPhone—not only because it offers the basic civics education that every American needs, but because it is a welcome corrective to the corrosive histories peddled by partisans. In these times, many will read These Truths like a dying man reading a first-aid manual, but history is not self-help. Jill Lepore is at her best when she is describing what has happened, not prescribing what should; the book’s weakest pages are the final ones, where she lapses into prediction, and gets lost in a strained metaphor about the ship of state righting itself.

But the first step in self-help is to know thyself, and Lepore can certainly help with that. She has assembled evidence of an America that was better than some thought, worse than almost anyone imagined, and weirder than most serious history books ever convey. Armed with the facts of what happened before, we are better able to approach our collective task of figuring out what should happen now.

Casey N. Cep ’07, a former Berta Greenwald Ledecky Fellow at this magazine, has written for The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Times. Her first book, Furious Hours: Harper Lee and an Unfinished Story of Race, Religion, and Murder in the Deep South, is forthcoming from Knopf.

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