These Truths: A History of the United States

“Its infancy is preserved, like baby teeth kept in a glass jar, in the four parchment sheets of the Constitution, in the pages of almanacs that chart the weather of a long-ago climate, and in hundreds of newspapers, where essays for and against the new system of government appeared alongside the shipping news, auction notices, and advertisements for the return of people who never were their own masters—women and children, slaves and servants—and who had run away, hoping to ordain and establish, for themselves and their posterity, the blessings of liberty.”

Lepore describes how the United States’ nascence is preserved in documents. She analogizes these documents to a parent’s retention of baby teeth to show how these artifacts work to show the transition from one stage to another—British colonies to independent nation. She contrasts the colonialists’ pursuit of independent government with their simultaneous embrace of slavery.

“Americans are descended from conquerors and from the conquered, from the people held as slaves and from the people who held them, from the Union and from the Confederacy, from Protestants and from Jews, from Muslims and from Catholics, and from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration.”

Lepore illustrates the motley and contrasting elements that make up the American populace. This passage also demonstrates how wondrous it is that the United States has survived as a democracy, despite the coexistence of historically antagonistic groups within its borders.

“In the brutal, bloody century between Columbus’s voyage and John White’s, an idea was born, out of fantasy, out of violence, the idea that there exists in the world a people who live in an actual Garden of Eden, a state of nature, before the giving of laws, before the forming of government. This imagined history of America became an English book of genesis, their new truth.”

Lepore describes the origin of the idea of a “new world” in what would become the United States. The idea, as Lepore is careful to illustrate, was born both out of the stories European colonists told themselves and the nation that they forcefully constructed to suit their needs. They invented the idea of a land that was pristine, innocent, and unformed, despite the prevalence of civilizations among the tribes who had long occupied North America.

“Twenty Englishmen were elected to the House of Burgesses. Twenty Africans were condemned to the house of bondage. Another chapter opened in the American book of genesis: liberty and slavery became the American Abel and Cain.”

Lepore illustrates the division at the root of the nation’s founding. At Jamestown, where the first enslaved Africans landed, the United States initiated both the institution of slavery and its earliest notions of who would be enslaved and who would be free, who would receive equal protections under the law and who would not. Both Black and white people would be integral to the nation’s founding, but the racist ideology born out of slavery would reduce Black Americans to a permanent second class.

“The only way to justify this contradiction, the only way to explain how one kind of people are born free while another kind of people are not, would be to sow a new seed, an ideology of race. It would take a long time to grow, and longer to wither.”

Lepore describes how those who institutionalized slavery created the demarcation between “black and white” to define who would be enslaved and who would be free. Arguably, this is how the notion of race was born or, at least, codified within economic terms. The ideology, as Lepore notes, would not develop into a “science” for another two centuries.

“The Constitution drafted in Philadelphia acted as a check on the Revolution, a halt to its radicalism; if the Revolution had tilted the balance between government and liberty toward liberty, the Constitution shifted toward government.”

Lepore explains how the Constitution provided the nascent nation with structure, something that other countries in a state of revolution in the late 18th century—France and Haiti, for example—lacked, which led to periods of tumult and despotism.

“With the ratification of the Bill of Rights, new disputes emerged. Much of American political history is a disagreement between those who favor a strong federal government and those who favor the states.”

Disputes over the ratification of the Constitution resulted from the absence of a bill of rights. This dispute, Lepore tells us, set the precedent for today’s two-party system, as the debate created Federalists, those who sought to ratify the Constitution, and Anti-Federalists, which later transformed into the Democratic-Republican Party. With the inclusion of the Bill of Rights—that is, 10 of the 12 amendments drafted by James Madison—the dispute did not end, but merely transformed into one between those who favored a strong central government and those who favored states’ rights. This argument lingers to date.

“The newspaper would hold the Republic together; the telegraph would hold the Republic together; the radio would hold the Republic together; the Internet would hold the Republic together. Each time, this assertion would be both right and terribly wrong.”

Using repetition, Lepore describes the nation’s misguided tradition of believing that technology would serve to maintain the Union. Though each form of technology expanded the populace’s access to information, none succeeded in forming any commonality around what people knew. All forms would become tools of those who would seek to manipulate public opinion for selfish gains.

“The first factories in the Western world weren’t in buildings housing machines powered by steam: they were out of doors, in the sugarcane fields of the West Indies, in the rice fields of the Carolinas, and in the tobacco fields of Virginia.”

Lepore uses the metaphor of industrial machinery to illustrate how human beings were enslaved and mechanized to plant and harvest lucrative cash crops. The profits from those crops funded the Industrial Revolution, which also relied on enslaved Black people to harvest the cotton that supplied textile mills.

“A picture of progress as the stages from ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’—stages that could be traced on a map of the American continent—competed with a picture of progress as an unending chain of machines.”

Lepore illustrates for the reader how the notion of American progress, which would become an especially significant theme during the Progressive Era, was often hierarchical. Not only was progress contextualized by industrial innovation, but also by the belief that some groups, particularly people of African descent, were best suited to a subordinate position in the social order due to being regarded as less civilized and intelligent than those of European descent.

“Slavery wasn’t an aberration in an industrializing economy; slavery was its engine.”

Lepore once again connects slave labor to the Industrial Revolution, underscoring how much the textile mills of New England and Great Britain depended on cotton production in the American South. She compares the power of machines—measured in horsepower—to the slaves’ “hand power,” reiterating an earlier point about the ways in which African Americans were commodified and mechanized.

“It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states’ rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy.”

Using a speech from Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America, Lepore undermines the myth that the South’s primary interest in going to war was states’ rights. This myth has been perpetuated to veil the South’s racist history and its economic dependence on slavery. The pursuit of states’ rights as the justification for war is an untruth that has been reiterated in Southern classrooms and validated in history textbooks.

“The seventeenth-century battle for freedom of expression had been fought by writers like John Milton, opposing the suppression of religious dissent; the eighteenth-century struggle for the freedom of the press had been fought by printers like Benjamin Franklin and John Peter Zenger, opposing the suppression of criticism of the government; and the nineteenth century’s fight for free speech had been waged by abolitionists opposing southern slave owners, who had been unwilling to subject slavery to debate.”

Lepore ties the fight for free speech to the effort to limit institutional power. People in every modern century, as she notes, have contended with religious, political, and economic powers who resisted dissent by trying to limit or eradicate free speech. This tradition of legitimized suppression, which the South tried to reinstitute, explained why the founders included the right of free speech in the First Amendment. This detail also reiterates Lepore’s point about the Confederacy being antagonistic to the democratic values that the Union tried to uphold.

“The American Odyssey had barely begun. From cabins and fields they left. Freed men and women didn’t always head north. They often went south or west, traveling hundreds of miles by foot, on horseback, by stage, and by train, searching. They were husbands in search of wives, wives in search of husbands, mothers and fathers looking for their children, children for their parents, chasing word and rumors about where their loved ones had been sold, sale after sale, across the country. Some of their wanderings lasted for years. They sought their own union, a union of their beloved.”

Lepore recounts the exodus of enslaved Black Americans from Southern plantations after the Emancipation Proclamation, likening it to Homer’s Odyssey, as a journey of both necessity and self-discovery. She also likens the journey to the Civil War’s purpose of reuniting the Union. The condition of the enslaved people was the cause of secession, and the centuries of violence they endured were visited upon many of those who either sought to keep them in bondage or who expressed indifference to their condition. While the Civil War was a means of healing politically through violent methods, the journey of the newly freed to find their lost ones, however in vain, was a journey of love and an expression of hope for future of peace.

“Populism entered American politics at the end of the nineteenth century, and it never left. It pitted ‘the people,’ meaning everyone but the rich, against corporations, which fought back in the courts by defining themselves as ‘persons’; and it pitted ‘the people,’ meaning white people, against nonwhite people who were fighting for citizenship and whose ability to fight back in the courts was far more limited, since those fights require well-paid lawyers.”

Lepore illustrates how populism—a movement whose ideology was meant to promote inclusion—ironically led to more divisive politics. The wealthy, threatened by the power of numbers, found political loopholes to protect their power. More dismayingly, white people used populism to frame themselves as the true American people, which led to a century of support for discriminatory policies against nonwhite people.

“If the railroad served as the symbol of progress in the nineteenth century, the automobile served as its symbol in the twentieth, a consumer commodity that celebrated individualism and choice.”

Lepore depicts the shift in transportation, which helped characterize the 20th century as an era of individualist consumerism. The railroad was essential to this progress, as it contributed to the nation’s westward expansion which led, indirectly, to the development of the interstate highway system.

“The immigration restriction regime begun in 1924 hardened racial lines, institutionalized new forms of race-based discrimination, codified the fiction of a ‘white race,’ and introduced a new legal category into American life: the ‘illegal alien.’”

Lepore describes the long-term consequences of the Asian Exclusion Act and the National Origins Act, both of which were passed as parts of the Immigration Act of 1924. The white race, which would bring together what were regarded as “assimilable” Europeans and white Americans, would be positioned against those who were deemed nonwhite, or “colored.” Additionally the term “illegal alien,” which still exists in our political lexicon, would work to dehumanize and distance noncitizens, particularly those of color, from the main populace.

“With enough money, and with the tools of mass communication, deployed efficiently, the propagandist can turn a political majority into a truth.”

Lepore follows Walter Lippmann’s ominous train of thought to describe how both mechanization and the field of public relations that Lippmann had helped invent could lead to the rise of demagoguery. If a political majority could coalesce around an idea, no matter how false or immoral, it could be elevated as truth. The framers of the Constitution, who had tried to protect the majority from factions, had not anticipated the possibility of the majority being antithetical to reason.

“The war Europe would have, the war the world would have, would be the first war waged in the age of radio, a war of the air. The fighting would unleash forces of savagery and barbarism. And the broadcasting of the war would suggest how, terrifyingly, ‘fake news’ had become a weapon of tyrants.”

Lepore uses Orson Welles’s notorious radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds as a metaphor for the rising atmosphere of panic over a looming evil, fostered by Nazi Germany’s increasing dominance of Europe. The Nazis, led by Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, had been masters of public relations through radio, using the technology to legitimize their fascist and anti-minority politics—a fate that Walter Lippmann had predicted and feared.

“The Second World War would bring the United States out of depression, end American isolationism, and forge a renewed spirit of civic nationalism. It would also call attention to the nation’s unfinished reckoning with race, reshape liberalism, and form the foundation for a conservative movement animated by opposition to state power.”

Lepore outlines the ways in which the United States’ entry into World War II transformed the nation domestically and internationally. The war also led to President Roosevelt’s expanded executive powers, which worried conservatives who disliked both his New Deal policies and his dominance over other branches of government.

“The parties began to drift apart, like continents, loosed. The Republican Party, influenced by conservative suburban housewives, began to move to the right. The Democratic Party, stirred by the moral and political urgency of the struggle for civil rights, began moving to the left. The pace of that drift would be determined by civil rights, the Cold War, television, and the speed of computation.”

Lepore describes how Democrats and Republicans became more markedly distinct at the dawn of the 1950s. While both foreign and domestic policies widened the chasm between the parties, technology, particularly the propagandistic power of television, also influenced their respective party platforms.

“Equality was never going to be a matter of a single case, or even of a long march, but, instead, of an abiding political hope.”

Lepore refers to the lingering hope of former NAACP attorney and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall that Brown v. Board of Education, or some other Supreme Court case, would finally end segregation and racial inequality in the US. Lepore points out that neither a Supreme Court decision, nor the courageous efforts of the civil rights movement were enough to eradicate the nation’s deeply entrenched racism. True justice and political equality remain the nation’s hope. The US has faced significant advances in this direction as well as setbacks.

“And what of the American past? Was the schoolbook version of American history a lie? The civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam called attention to aspects of American history that had been left out of American history textbooks from the very start.”

Lepore describes the ways in which the Vietnam War bred cynicism among American youth and how the civil rights movement and the rights movements of other marginalized groups led to a reassessment of historiography. She uses rhetorical questions to express the questions that these groups were asking themselves and their elders at the time. The mid-20th century resulted in a reckoning with both the nation’s past and the truths that it buried beneath mythologies.