These Truths: A History of the United States

Described as “a broad-shouldered sea captain from Genoa,” Christopher Columbus, who became a figure of controversy in the last quarter of the 20th century, was an Italian explorer, funded by the Spanish monarchy, who inadvertently “discovered” North America (3). His diary was copied by Bartolomé de Las Casas. That copy was lost until a sailor found it in a Spanish duke’s library in 1790. The widow of a librarian sold what appeared to be parchment scraps of the original diary in 1894. The scraps had Columbus’s signature and the year 1492 was printed on the cover of the diary. The widow disappeared, as did whatever may have remained from the original diary. Columbus had a son, Ferdinand, who wrote a biography of his father, which remained unpublished when he died in 1539.

Bartolomé de Las Casas was a priest, scholar, and historian of the Spanish conquest who was present in Hispaniola in 1511. He had copied parts of Columbus’s diary and Ramon Pané’s Antiquities. In 1542, he wrote a book in protest of the atrocities that indigenous tribes suffered due to conquest. Eight years later, the Spanish king summoned Las Casas and other scholars to his court in Valladolid to discuss the nature of the Indigenous Americans. Las Casas “argued that the conquest was unlawful” and dismissed charges that the tribes were cannibals (24). Las Casas’s account was later translated into English and “lavishly illustrated with engravings of atrocities” (25). It was usually published under the title Spanish Cruelties and, later, as The Tears of the Indians.

Edward Coke was the attorney general who prepared Virginia’s first charter. Coke was an investor in the Virginia Company and “the leading theorist of English common law” (34). He became a member of Parliament in 1589 at the age of 37. In the early 1600s, he prosecuted Walter Raleigh for treason based on a supposed plot against the king. Raleigh’s conviction allowed King James I to establish the settlement of Virginia on his own terms—a plan conducted “under Coke’s watchful eye” (34).

In 1621, Coke “had emerged as James’s most cunning adversary” and “claimed that Parliament had the right to debate on all matters concerning the Commonwealth” (40). James had Coke arrested and dissolved Parliament. In the 1620s, Coke revived the Magna Carta—a document from 1215 in which King John “pledged to his barons that he would obey the ‘law of the land’” (40). The Magna Carta granted to all free men in King John’s realm all the liberties in the document to be enjoyed by them and their heirs. It was also King John, son of Henry II, who had attempted to resolve the question of whether a law can exist if it was never written down. Unwritten laws, he decided, were still laws, forming what he called “common law.” When Coke was 76, he returned to Parliament, claiming that the king’s authority was constrained by the Magna Carta. At his suggestion, Parliament delivered to King Charles, James’s successor, a Petition of Right, “which cited Magna Carta to insist that the king had no right to imprison a subject without a trial by jury” (42). In 1629, King Charles forbade the publication of Coke’s study of the Magna Carta and dissolved Parliament, which led many of his subjects to flee to the Americas.

English Enlightenment-era philosopher John Locke was a key influence on the formation of the United States. Locke’s best-known work, Two Treatises on Government (1689), established the concepts of natural rights and sovereignty, which inspired American colonists to seek independence, and ideas about property that the colonists used to justify both the usurpation of lands from indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African peoples. Borrowing from Christianity, Locke claimed that “all men were born into a state ‘of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another’” (34).

Locke, who had “a hollow face and a long nose,” like a bird of prey, was a tutor at Christ Church, a college at Oxford University (51). One of his students was the son of the Earl of Shaftesbury—the sickly chancellor of the exchequer. Locke had never married and, in 1667, left Oxford to work as the earl’s personal secretary and caretaker. He moved into Exeter House, the earl’s London residence. Shaftesbury was deeply involved in American colonial affairs, particularly the establishment of “various councils on trade and plantations” (52). Locke later became the secretary of the colony of Carolina. In this role, Locke “wrote and later revised” Carolina’s constitution soon after he wrote Letters Concerning Toleration. He was simultaneously drafting Two Treatises on Government, in which he attempted to explain how governments developed. He imagined a state of nature in which all men had the freedom to organize their actions and dispose of both their energies and possessions however they chose. From this state of natural equality, Locke believed, men created civil society—or government—for the sake of order and the protection of personal property.

In his constitution for Carolina, Locke established freedom of religion, while barring Jews, atheists, and agnostics from settling in the colony and owning land. However, in the document he argued against seizing land from the indigenous tribes simply because they were not Christian. Kings or chiefs like Powhatan, however, had no sovereignty because they did not cultivate their land, but only lived on it. Government, Locke insisted, largely existed to protect and maintain property. Locke’s argument was partly motivated by a desire to distinguish English settlement from that of the Spanish. The latter had justified the seizure of indigenous peoples’ land by marking their religious difference. Locke determined that their lack of cultivation, based on European standards, was a better justification.

In Two Treatises on Government, Locke condemned slavery, arguing that all men were born equal “with a natural right to life, liberty, and property” (54). Governments existed to protect those natural rights. Thus, slavery existed at variance with civil society. However, Locke’s constitution read that all free men of Carolina—that is, white men—were to have “absolute power and Authority over [their] Negro slaves” (55).

Author of Common Sense (1776), a book that was a key influence on the development of the United States, Thomas Paine was the English-born son of a grocer. He immigrated to Philadelphia from England in 1774 and published his famous pamphlet anonymously in January 1776. His intention was to make his 47-page argument easy for the less educated to understand. Paine was a staunch anti-monarchist who believed that monarchs had no inherent right to reign, arguing that their origins were likely as common as everyone else’s. Paine asserted the “plain truth” that “all men [were] originally equals” (34). He believed that America’s cause was “the cause of all mankind” (94). In a rejection of British imperialism, he also pointed out the absurdity of an island governing an entire continent.

Paine reappropriated Locke and revised the English philosopher’s idea about a state of nature, making it more digestible for less learned readers. He claimed that distinctions between rich and poor, and the presumed right of some to rule over others, were unnatural. They were merely the results of actions and customs. He encouraged the colonists “to argue not from precedent or doctrine but from nature” (95). When a government ceased to support a people’s safety and liberty, that people retained the natural right to depose that government and forever retained that right. Paine also invoked the Magna Carta, which he cited as a document that contained laws insisted upon by the people, not the Crown. He then urged Americans to write their own Magna Carta.

Paine’s next book was Rights of Man (1791). He wrote the second part of the book in France, where he went after fleeing from England. Paine was in Paris during the Reign of Terror, when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were beheaded. Paine was arrested and penned much of the second part of his book from prison.

Franklin was the eldest of the 75 men who had been elected to represent 12 states at the Philadelphia convention. He was 81, hunched, crooked, and suffering from gout when he signed the American Constitution in 1787. Franklin was against slavery, a sentiment he expressed to his sister in their frequent letters. He had been a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. His final public act was to urge the new nation to embrace abolition.

During the colonial era, Franklin had been a fierce advocate for freedom of the press. Franklin was the youngest of ten sons. He also had seven sisters, including Jane. Franklin taught himself to read and write, then he taught Jane. He aspired to become a writer, but his “[f]ather could only afford to send him to school for two years” (59). One of his brothers, James, became a printer and published the New-England Courant. At 16, Benjamin worked as his apprentice and when James was imprisoned for sedition, Franklin took over the printing of the newspaper. He printed excerpts from Cato’s Letters—“144 essays about the nature of liberty, including freedom of speech and of the press” (60). In 1723, after his brother was released from prison, Franklin left the apprenticeship and settled in Philadelphia. There, he printed his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, in 1729. In 1731, he founded the first lending library in the nation, the Library Company of Philadelphia. The following year, he started printing Poor Richard’s Almanack. In 1736, he was elected clerk of the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly. The following year, he was made postmaster of Philadelphia and worked to improve the postal service. Franklin also established the American Philosophical Society, the colonies’ first intellectual organization, and took the nation’s first census.

In 1751, he wrote an essay about population entitled “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.” In the essay, Franklin wanted to know what would happen if the colonies were to grow bigger than the countries the colonists had come from. Land was cheap, making it possible for someone to buy a parcel of land that could be turned into a plantation. In the essay, he also wrote about a people who were “white,” while Africans were “black”; Asians and indigenous peoples were “tawny”; and Russians, Swedes, Germans, the French, Italians, and Spaniards were “swarthy.” The English were, in Franklin’s view, the only true “white” people in the world. In the essay, he admitted to his partiality. Franklin owned several of his own slaves. He promised to free two of them, a husband and wife named Peter and Jemima, upon his death. Some years later, in 1763, Franklin visited a school for Black children. The visit changed his mind about the intellectual capacities of people of African descent.

In 1754, he printed the “Join or Die” woodcut in the newspaper, which he had used to illustrate an article about “the need for the colonies to form a common defense—against France and Spain, and against warring Indians and rebelling slaves” (65). He believed that the colonies lacked cohesion. The newspaper business had made Franklin rather wealthy. In April, the governor of Pennsylvania appointed him commissioner of a meeting set to take place in Albany, New York, in June. There, delegates from the colonies were to negotiate a treaty with a confederation of Iroquois called the Six Nations at what came to be called the Albany Congress. Franklin proposed a Plan of Union there, which would designate representatives for each of the 11 colonies based on the size of their respective populations. The new government would meet in Philadelphia and exert power to pass laws, make treaties, and raise money for defense. The plan, however, was rejected.

One of seven sisters of Benjamin Franklin, Jane was, unlike most white women of her time, semi-literate. Under her brother’s tutelage, she received a slightly better than rudimentary education, allowing her to maintain an epistolary correspondence with Benjamin, particularly during the years of revolution and the constitutional convention. Lepore uses Jane as the lens from which she can explore what life might have been like for a middle-class Northern woman in the 18th century. Gender determined much of the outcome of Jane’s life. While her brother was educated and allowed to realize his full potential, Lepore intentionally prods the reader to wonder what Jane’s life might have become if she were given similar opportunities. In her correspondence with her brother, Jane expressed her views about politics and current events. Like many Americans, she had suffered from the Revolutionary War. One of Jane’s sons died as a result of being wounded during the Battle of Bunker Hill, while another had become mentally ill. She was fervently against violence, encouraging her brother to “support an end to the draft and capital punishment” (120).

In addition to being one of the drafters of the American Constitution and the second president of the United States, John Adams was also one of the delegates and chief author of the state constitution for Massachusetts, which was ratified in 1780. In Article I of the Massachusetts Constitution’s Declaration of Rights, Adams had written about the natural rights and freedom of all men, in addition to the right of “seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness” (113). A Black woman named Bett (later, Elizabeth Freeman), enslaved in Massachusetts, cited this clause in a suit for her freedom and won her case.

Adams was born in Braintree, Massachusetts on October 19, 1735. He had a reputation for being argumentative, vain, learned, and fervently opposed to the development of political parties. Alexander Hamilton believed Adams to be unfit for the presidency, due to his vanity and jealousies. He had cofounded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and wrote the three-volume Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1797).

During the constitutional convention in 1787, Adams served as minister to Britain. From there, he maintained an epistolary correspondence with his friend and political adversary, Thomas Jefferson, who was simultaneously serving as minister to France. Together, the statesmen had crafted the Declaration of Independence. Adams was concerned about the Constitution giving the legislature too much power. Like Jefferson, he worried about the outcomes of elections. Unlike Jefferson, he preferred the idea of strong executive power and a president who could serve until death, like a king. He sought to restrain majority rule. Adams believed that, in every society in which the rich and poor coexisted, there could never be equal laws. One side, he insisted, would always seek to take advantage of the other.

Adams was married to Abigail. One of their sons, John Quincy, became the sixth president of the United States. Thomas Jefferson was Adams’s political rival and his opponent in two elections in 1796 and 1800. Adams narrowly won the first, while Jefferson won the latter. By 1800, Adams was 64 years old. After he retired from politics, he resumed his friendship with Jefferson. John Adams died at age 90 on July 4, 1826, when the United States celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, his friend and political rival, died on the same day.

Thomas Jefferson was third president of the United States, a drafter of the Declaration of Independence, minister to France, the nation’s first secretary of state in George Washington’s cabinet, and vice president to John Adams. Like fellow Founding Fathers Washington and James Madison, Jefferson was a Virginian and the owner of a large estate on which enslaved Black people labored. He was known to be moody, frantic, and inconsistent. Like Adams, he was exceptionally learned and regarded as an excellent writer. However, like the other Founding Fathers, particularly George Washington, Jefferson expressed deep ambivalence over the question of slavery. He went further than others in seeking to rationalize his democratic ideals with his commitment to slaveholding. On March 4, 1815, the day after Congress delayed a resolution to eliminate the three-fifths clause from the Constitution, Jefferson created an equation that attempted to calculate “how many generations would have to pass before a child with a full-blooded African ancestor could be called ‘white’” (175).

Jefferson was married to Martha Wayles, who had died in 1782, when Jefferson was 38 years old. Swearing to his wife on her deathbed that he would never remarry, he took Wayles’s much younger and enslaved half sister, Sally Hemings, as a concubine. With Hemings, Jefferson conceived at least seven children. The last was born in 1808. Hemings remained with Jefferson, despite having had the opportunity to obtain her freedom during a trip to Paris, after he promised that, in exchange for her companionship and labor, he would manumit all of their children. Newspapers scrutinized Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, much to his irritation. Jefferson eventually allowed his two oldest children with Sally—Beverly and Harriet—to leave Monticello, providing Harriet with funds and transportation to Philadelphia.

John Adams was Jefferson’s political rival and his opponent in two elections in 1796 and 1800. By 1800, Jefferson was 57 and president of the American Philosophical Society. Jefferson, unlike Adams, believed in the rule of the majority. After the men retired from politics, they resumed their friendship. Thomas Jefferson died at Monticello on July 4, 1826, the year of the nation’s fiftieth anniversary. He was 83. His friend and long-term political adversary, John Adams, died about five hours later. In his will, he arranged to free the youngest of his two children with Sally Hemings—Eston and Madison. He did not arrange for Hemings’s freedom. After Jefferson’s death, Hemings, who was 53, quietly left Monticello and went to live in Charlottesville, where she later died. Jefferson had 130 enslaved people on his estate when he died, all of whom were sold at auction to cover his debts.

James Madison, nicknamed “the sage of Montpelier,” was the fourth president of the United States. Previously, he had served as secretary of state in Thomas Jefferson’s cabinet and was a key draftsman of the Constitution. He was married to Dolley Madison.

Madison was raised in Montpelier, the Madison family’s plantation in the Piedmont region of Virginia, east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His grandfather, Ambrose Madison, had settled Montpelier. Ambrose was 36 in 1732, when he was murdered by enslaved Africans who poisoned him. Madison graduated from Princeton University and spent his youth at home, educating his younger siblings. He studied religious liberty particularly carefully. He revised George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights and Form of Government to include “the first-ever constitutional guarantee of religious liberty” as a fundamental right (96). In response to the passage of the Coercive Acts in 1774, Madison began to think of war. He wrote to his friend William Bradford, a Philadelphia-based printer, and asked if it might be time for the colonies to develop their own defense.

Studious and modest, James Madison presented a contrast to George Washington, the other Virginian leader present at the convention in Philadelphia. He “spoke softly and haltingly” (109). He was a secularist who respected religion, believing, as most Americans did at the time, that religion could only thrive if it existed separately from government, and that government could thrive only if it did not coexist with religion. Madison drafted the Bill of Rights and invented the Three-Fifths Compromise. In April 1787, Madison drafted an essay entitled “Vices of the Political System of the United States” in which he listed 11 deficiencies in the new nation, including the failure of states to abide by constitutional requirements, encroachments of the states on federal authority, and treaty violations. He believed that the people themselves committed these vices, suggesting that the majority sometimes posed a danger.

In 1791, Madison penned an essay called “Public Opinion” in which he detailed the ways in which the public might be deceived. Though Madison believed that a large republic was superior to a smaller one because a candidate would have to appeal to a large number of voters, thereby having to prove their qualifications, he also thought that the larger a country was, the harder it would be to ascertain its collective opinion. Its populace could also be misled by dishonest yet persuasive people. The wide circulation of newspapers, he believed, was the only viable solution to this problem.

After retiring to his native Virginia, Madison continued to answer questions about constitutionality, including Congress’s potential power to make the prohibition of slavery a condition of entering the Union. Madison was also a member of the American Colonization Society. Madison died in 1836, after collapsing at his breakfast table. He was 85 and the last delegate from the constitutional convention to die. In his will, Madison did not free his slaves. Instead, he devoted a sizeable portion of the proceeds from his much anticipated Notes, an account of the debates at the constitutional convention, to go to the American Colonization Society. The book was published in 1840. Instead of settling the question of whether the Constitution sanctioned slavery, Madison’s Notes only gave both proslavery and abolitionist factions more ammunition for their respective sides.

George Mason, a Virginian who was 61 during the Philadelphia Convention, is best known as one of several delegates (many of whom were Anti-Federalists) who refused to sign the Constitution until the others agreed to later include a bill of rights, which James Madison drafted. Mason’s refusal and opposition to ratification on this ground established “the all-or-nothing dualism” that led to the United States’ current two-party system.

Mason was also among those Founding Fathers who had doubts about slavery. In December 1765, he sent George Washington an essay in which he argued that slavery had led to the downfall of the Roman republic and would eventually destroy the British Empire, too. In May 1776, Mason drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights and Form of Government. In it, he invoked both John Locke and Thomas Paine when arguing that all men were “by nature equally free and independent” and had “certain inherent rights” (96). All power, he wrote, was vested in the people and derived from them.

George Washington, the first president of the United States, was born in 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia. He inherited his first slaves at the age of 10, traveled to the Caribbean during his youth, and accepted his first military post at age 20. In 1758, Washington was elected to the Virginia legislature, but spent much of his time managing his vast tobacco estate.

Tall, imposing, and serious, he was almost universally admired and received a celebratory greeting when he arrived in Philadelphia for the constitutional convention, for which he played the ceremonial role of president. Much of this admiration came as a result of his resignation of power after the Revolutionary War. Regarded as a strikingly handsome man, Lepore notes that his beauty was spoiled only by his rotting teeth. Washington wore dentures made from ivory. His set of false teeth also included nine teeth extracted from the mouths of his slaves. Washington ran a substantial plantation on his Virginia property, Mount Vernon.

Washington was elected president in 1788 and sworn in at Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York. His speeches, including his inaugural address, were written by future secretary of the treasury Alexander Hamilton. Washington appointed Thomas Jefferson as his secretary of state, Edmund Randolph as his attorney general, and Henry Knox as his secretary of war. John Adams was vice president. Washington served for two terms, though he had initially intended to resign after his first ended in 1792.

Washington returned to Virginia at the end of his presidency and died at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1799. By the time of his death, Washington and his wife Martha owned 317 enslaved Black people at Mount Vernon, most of whom had been owned by Martha. Washington himself owned 123 people, while Martha owned the rest. Several of those whom the Washingtons had enslaved had escaped from the plantation. These included Harry Washington; their cook, Hercules; and a seamstress named Ona Judge. Like other Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, Washington expressed moral ambivalence about slavery but made no effort to emancipate those whom he had enslaved during his lifetime.

Appointed Secretary of the Treasury by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton was a New Yorker, a Federalist, and Washington’s speech writer. Red-haired and ambitious, Hamilton had not played much of a role at the constitutional convention in 1787, but he penned 51 of the 85 essays in The Federalist Papers. Hamilton, however, believed that the Constitution created too democratic a government.

A political rival of Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton supported the institution of a national bank, mirrored on the Bank of England, to pay off the Continental Congress’s war debts as well as those of the states. In exchange for the support of James Madison and other key Southerners for this plan, Hamilton agreed that the nation’s capital could be in the South. Hamilton believed that the nation’s future was in manufacturing. He was antislavery and belonged to the New York Manumission Society, which had been cofounded by John Jay.

Son of the United States’ second president, John Adams, and Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams was the nation’s sixth president and the successor to the men who had founded the country. Since his childhood, John Adams had groomed him for the presidency. At the age of 12, when he accompanied his father to Europe on a diplomatic mission, John Quincy began to keep a diary. He studied to be an attorney, then served as George Washington’s minister to the Netherlands and Portugal. During his father’s administration, John Quincy served as minister to Prussia. He was later James Madison’s minister to Russia. He was a polyglot who spoke 14 languages. As secretary of state under James Monroe, he drafted the Monroe Doctrine. He also served as a US senator. In his duties as an academic, he had been a professor of logic at Brown University and a professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard.

During the 1824 election, future president Andrew Jackson was his opponent. Adams was the learned candidate who could write, while Jackson, who had been a general, was styled as the one who could fight. Adams won the election and the South Carolinian, John C. Calhoun, who had been James Monroe’s secretary of war, served as his vice president. Calhoun would next also serve as Jackson’s vice president. In the 1830s, he was the leader of the Whig Party.

By the time he was 80, Adams was “hobbled and infirm,” but still vociferously objected to the Mexican-American War and the annexation of parts of Mexico (251). An opponent of slavery, like his father, he rightly believed that the annexation would expand slaveholding. On the day that President John Polk received the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, Adams, who had been giving a speech, fell on the floor of the House. He died two days later. The death of John Quincy Adams was the first to be closely reported and turned into a national ceremony. His coffin, which had been covered in glass, traveled 500 miles across the country by train, where thousands of people viewed his body.

Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States. His election heralded a new era—Jacksonian Democracy—born from an expanded electorate and the nation’s westward expansion, which Jackson pursued through his displacement of indigenous tribes to Oklahoma Territory. Formerly a general, who became a national hero after the War of 1812’s Battle of New Orleans, Jackson led campaigns against the Five Civilized Tribes, particularly the Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws. His policy of removal—the first campaign of his presidency—combined treaty-making and war.

Tennessee-born and the son of Irish immigrants, Jackson was also uneducated, provincial, and a ruthless fighter. John Quincy Adams, his opponent in the 1824 election, despised him, referring to him as a “barbarian” who could hardly write his own name. Jackson had served in the Senate for less than a year before he ran for president. Thomas Jefferson declared Jackson the most unfit for the presidency. Despite his lack of sophistication and his cruel policies toward both indigenous peoples and African Americans (Jackson was a slave owner and avidly proslavery), Jackson was a talented politician who used his personal narrative to his advantage. He arranged for the writing of his biography—The Life of Andrew Jackson—which omitted any negative details from his past while characterizing him as self-taught, not uneducated; “self-made,” not ill-bred. Jackson had also seized on the nation’s desire to expand its power and its borders.

Though Jackson lost the 1824 election, due to a failure to seize a majority of the electoral vote (he had won the popular vote), he returned to his property in Tennessee, the Hermitage, and waited while the electorate grew. As new states entered the union and drafted more democratic constitutions, such as the elimination of property requirements for voting, his chances for getting elected increased. Jackson won the election of 1828, which “marked the founding of the Democratic Party, […] the party of the common man, the farmer, the artisan: the people’s party” (186). Jackson received 56% of the popular vote during this election.

During his presidency (1829-1837), he also “dismantled the national bank” and expanded his executive power (211-12). Jackson despised all banks, especially the Bank of the United States, which he believed undermined the people’s sovereignty and benefited only a few wealthy capitalists at the expense of the populace. He was the first president to veto laws passed by Congress and, once, rid himself of his entire cabinet. His imperiousness earned him the reputation of a despot. His adversaries nicknamed him “King Andrew.” He also believed that the president reserved the right to determine the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress.

William Lloyd Garrison was a Boston-based abolitionist and journalist, best known as the editor and publisher of his abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, which was first printed on January 1, 1831. He had apprenticed as a typesetter, worked as a printer and editor, and failed in multiple ventures before founding his radical newspaper. Described as a “thin, balding white man,” Garrison was so devoted to his work that “he slept on a bed on the floor of his cramped office” (189-90). Garrison participated in the Second Great Awakening as a supporter of the temperance movement. He next entered the public sphere as a supporter of abolition. He delivered a Fourth of July address to the Massachusetts branch of the Colonization Society in which he criticized the Founding Fathers, calling them hypocrites. He also called the Constitution “a Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell.” In 1833, Garrison organized the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Garrison later developed a friendship and working relationship with the former slave Frederick Douglass who, under Garrison’s sponsorship, became an abolitionist and orator. Douglass eventually broke with Garrison due to the latter’s insistence on crafting Douglass’s image to suit his own prejudices and those of other white abolitionists.

Best known as a key figure in the 19th-century Transcendentalist movement alongside his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer Henry David Thoreau was 27 years old in 1844 when he built a log cabin on Walden Pond, on a piece of land owned by Emerson in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau moved into the modest cabin on the Fourth of July. Thoreau was resistant to the Industrial Age and worried about what machines would do to the American soul. Telegraph technology had been developing, coinciding with the development of the railroad.

Thoreau lived on little money and almost never bought anything. He worked only six weeks out of the year, spending most of his time reading and writing, and the rest “planting beans and picking huckleberries” (231). In protest against the Mexican-American War, which resulted in the annexation of Texas and the expansion of slavery, Thoreau refused to pay his taxes. He went to jail in 1846 for tax evasion. The experience led to his writing the seminal essay “Civil Disobedience.” He argued that the government of majority rule had deterred men from casting votes of conscience. Prison, he believed, was the only house of honor in a slave state.

Formerly enslaved in Maryland, Frederick Douglass was an African American abolitionist, orator, writer, and publisher. Born in Maryland in 1818, he taught himself to read, using pieces of newspaper and old spelling books. At age 12, he read debates in the schoolbook The Columbian Orator, which also included “Dialogue between a Master and Slave.” His reading of the dialogue led him to question the institution of slavery, its justifications, and its origins.

Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838 by disguising himself as a sailor. While living in New England, he began reading William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, the Liberator. He wrote about his early life as a slave and his journey to freedom in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom. The former was translated into French, Dutch, and German. It led to global speaking engagements and to Douglass’s reputation as the world’s most famous Black person. Douglass was also the most photographed American man in 19th-century America, believing that the photograph eliminated the possibility of being distorted or caricatured by a white portraitist. He sat for his first photograph in 1841 when he was 23. By the 1840s, Douglass had become one of the country’s best-known public speakers, with over 100 speaking engagements in 1843 alone. He was known for his “force and eloquence” (248). Douglass bought his freedom in 1847 and returned to the United States to start his own newspaper—the North Star.

Though Garrison introduced Douglass to an audience of abolitionists, Douglass disliked how Garrison tried to craft his image, preferring that he appear humbler and simpler—that is, more aligned with Garrison’s and other white abolitionists’ idea of a former slave. Douglass’s insistence on seizing control of his personal narrative, which included challenging the century’s stereotypes about Black people, was a key act of agency. His falling out with Garrison, which was also due to a debate over the Constitution (Garrison found the document useless on the question of slavery, while Douglass thought it provided justification to end slavery) also revealed the racist biases of some figures within the abolitionist movement.

On July 5, 1852, Douglass gave his best-known speech in Rochester, New York. “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” criticized the hypocrisy of the holiday—an annual celebration of the nation’s liberation from tyranny that occurred while white people continued to tyrannize and enslave African Americans.

After the capture of John Brown, Douglass, whom Brown had told of his plot, fled first to Canada, then, to England, for safety. In December 1860, Douglass delivered his “Plea for Free Speech,” in response to a mob that had disrupted a speech he was slated to give at Boston’s Tremont Temple in commemoration of John Brown’s execution. In the speech, he invoked the Founding Fathers to illustrate the sacred right of free speech, which he knew the defenders of slavery refused to tolerate.

After emancipation, Douglass met with Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, in the White House during what turned out to be a tense meeting. Douglass sought the president’s support for the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Douglass later served as US ambassador to Haiti. In 1893, Douglas attended the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the only eminent African American to appear at the fair. He was 75 and appeared at the fair “to explain the rise of Jim Crow” (353). He gave a lecture on August 25, on what was designated “Colored People’s Day” at the fair. Douglass also represented the nation of Haiti at the Haiti pavilion. Douglass had planned to give a lecture entitled “The Race Problem in America,” but Ida B. Wells, who was also in attendance, encouraged him to boycott Colored People’s Day instead. Douglass ended up writing an introductory essay to a pamphlet entitled The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the Columbian Exposition, in which he emphasized that, while “he wished he could tell the story of America as a story of progress, the truth was different” (356). He also gave his planned address to an audience that included white hecklers. In his speech, he eschewed the notion of a “Negro problem” and questioned, instead, whether white Americans had enough honor to live up to their own Constitution. Douglass’s speech at the Columbian Exposition was one of the last public speeches that he ever gave.

Douglass died from a heart attack at age 77 after collapsing in the midst of a post-dinner conversation with his wife about women’s emancipation. He had spent the day attending suffrage meetings with Susan B. Anthony, who was one of his dearest friends. Thousands of mourners attended his funeral.

Margaret Fuller was a journalist, critic, orator, women’s rights activist, and Transcendentalist. In 1844, Horace Greeley hired her to work as an editor at the New York Tribune, the newspaper he had founded and published. At the time that she was hired, Fuller was 34 and regarded as the most erudite woman in the United States. Arguably, Fuller was one of the most learned figures of her generation of any gender. She was “nearsighted and frail,” but “as comfortable writing literary criticism as she was discussing philosophy with Emerson” (252). Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that her oratory skills put her powerful writing in the shade. Contrary to the conventions of the times, Fuller was one of several white women who spoke publicly and enjoyed debate. She criticized the work of literary figures whom she did not admire, such as that of Edgar Allan Poe, and supported both abolition and equality between the sexes. In 1845, Fuller published Woman in the 19th Century, in which she “argued for fundamental and complete equality” (252). The book, which expanded on an essay Fuller had written for the Transcendentalist journal The Dial in July 1843, was a hit. One of Fuller’s catchphrases when talking about women’s abilities was “Let them be sea-captains, if you will,” an expression that Greeley often used when greeting her. Greeley sent Fuller to Europe to work as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune and she became America’s first female war correspondent.

While in Rome, Fuller fell in love, became pregnant, and gave birth to a son. She also wrote about the Italian revolutions of the late 1840s and looked after injured revolutionaries in a Roman hospital. According to Lepore, it was Fuller’s work that catalyzed the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. In July 1850, while returning to the United States with her new family, Fuller, her partner, her infant son, and her manuscript about the revolutions, were lost to a shipwreck a few hundred yards off the coast of Fire Island, New York. Only the body of her nearly two-year-old son, Nino, was found.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a writer, suffragist, and women’s rights activist who was, alongside Susan B. Anthony, one of the chief early advocates of women’s suffrage. Stanton was the daughter of Daniel Cady, who first served as a member of the House of Representatives and, later, as a New York Supreme Court Justice. She grew up reading her father’s law books. Stanton later married Henry Brewster Stanton, a lawyer and abolitionist who also helped found the Republican Party. Stanton had worked to secure the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act—a New York law that allowed married women to separate their personal property from communal property.

At age 32, Stanton wrote the manifesto the “Declaration of Sentiments” which used rhetoric from the Declaration of Independence. The manifesto outlined how men had oppressed women throughout time. Stanton refused to believe that the battle over the Constitution and the intent of the nation’s founders were matters to be resolved only by men. With Susan B. Anthony, Stanton petitioned for signatures to ratify the 13th Amendment.

Like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman was a runaway slave from Maryland. Tubman had first run away from her plantation when she was seven years old. She was key in building the Underground Railroad—a secret network through which abolitionists, allies, and other runaway slaves (“conductors”) assisted enslaved people on their journey to Northern states. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), runaways sought to reach Canada, where they could not be hunted and shipped back to the South.

Tubman was five feet tall. She had experienced some of the cruelties that many other enslaved people had endured, including being beaten and starved. Once, a weight had been thrown at her head, leaving a permanent dent. She had escaped from slavery in 1849, making her way to Philadelphia. Nicknamed “Moses” or “Captain Tubman,” Tubman made around 13 trips back to Maryland to help approximately 70 men, women, and children escape from slavery. She managed to do this “while working, in New York, Philadelphia, and Canada, as a laundress, housekeeper, and cook” (261).

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th American president, best known for having emancipated African Americans from slavery. He stood “six foot four and straight as a tree” (276). Lincoln, who was from Kentucky, held numerous professions before initiating a career as a prairie lawyer. He then became a member of the House of Representatives from Illinois—the only Whig from his state. While in office, he had opposed the Mexican-American War and supported the Wilmot Proviso. During his term, he said little about slavery. Lincoln returned to his career in law, but was coaxed back into politics after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which he loathed. He was 45 years old at the time. He developed an argument against slavery that was grounded “in his understanding of American history, in the language of Frederick Douglass, and in his reading of the Constitution” (265). When the Republican Party was founded in May 1854, Lincoln joined. Three months later, he decided to challenge Democratic senator Stephen Douglas for his seat. He debated Douglas in Peoria before an enthralled crowd. Douglas spoke for three hours. After a dinner break, the men returned to the debates and Lincoln, too, spoke for three hours. Using language from the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln argued that there was no moral right in making one person the slave of another. He also believed that the maintenance of slavery made the United States appear hypocritical. Ultimately, Lincoln lost the race for the Senate, but he continued to hone his antislavery arguments.

In the summer of 1858, Lincoln and Douglas debated again, and Lepore writes that the debates illustrate, better than any other historical record, the character of the disagreement between antislavery and proslavery factions. This was also the first time in which the two men argued with each other face-to-face. During the debates, Lincoln asserted that he had no intention of interfering with slavery in the states in which it already existed. He also claimed that he had “no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races,” but contended that the Declaration of Independence entitled Black people to all of the natural rights that the document enumerates (277). For Lincoln, quite simply, the discussion over slavery was truly a matter of right versus wrong.

Lincoln narrowly lost the Senate seat to Douglas, but he had emerged as a leader in the Republican Party and its most powerful orator. He later edited and published their debates. Poet William Dean Howells wrote Lincoln’s biography as part of the support for the candidate’s campaign—Life of Abraham Lincoln (1860). Now nicknamed “Honest Abe,” Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861. Since Election Day, he had grown a beard. He ran for reelection—the first president to do so since Andrew Jackson—and won. After he resumed the presidency, Lincoln pressed for passage of the 13th Amendment, which permanently abolished slavery. Lincoln was assassinated at 10:15 p.m. on April 14, Good Friday, at Ford’s Theatre, a playhouse just “six blocks from the White House” (305). Lincoln was 56 years old and the first president to be killed while in office. He was quickly apotheosized as a national martyr. His embalmers promised that his corpse would never decay. In the South, many rejoiced in his passing.

Militant abolitionist John Brown is famous for his raid on a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on the eve of the Civil War. Prior to this, he worked as a tanner and a sheep farmer. He had also been a failed businessman and the founder of a secret society named the League of Gileadites. Augustus Washington, an African American daguerreotype artist, took his best-known portrait, in which Brown stands beside the flag of the Underground Railroad with his right hand raised, as if taking an oath.

In 1858, the year in which the Lincoln-Douglas debates took place, Brown was 58 and the father of 20 children. He was “lean and fearsome” and “spoke of prophecies and scourges” (279). He and his followers, comprising 44 Black men and 11 white men, wrote their own constitution in Canada, borrowing language from the Declaration of Independence to highlight how Black men were oppressed citizens and that slavery was antithetical to “those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence” (279). Thus, they declared war against slavery and began to hoard weapons.

The following year, in the spring, Brown and a group of his followers went to Maryland. They had planned a military operation that would start with their seizure of a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Brown had sought the support of Harriet Tubman in this venture, yet failed to enlist her. He next sought out the support of Frederick Douglass, whom he met in Pennsylvania. Douglass tried to dissuade Brown, convinced that he would both fail and be killed. On Sunday, October 16, 1859, Brown and 21 men “attacked the arsenal and captured it” (282). They had briefly stopped a train leaving Harpers Ferry, then let it pass. As the train sped to Baltimore, passengers threw notes out the windows of the cars, warning people about the rebellion. The notes led to telegraphs. Brown had hoped that word of the insurrection would lead Black men and women to take up arms and join him and his men in revolt. However, word never reached slave cabins, as enslaved people had no access to telegraph technology. Military soldiers, commanded by Robert E. Lee, retook the arsenal, captured Brown, and captured or killed all of his co-conspirators.

Brown’s broader plan was “to lead an armed revolution throughout the South” (283). The soldiers found numerous “boxes of weapons and ammunition, along with […] thousands of copies of his 1858 constitution and maps of the South […] with places where blacks outnumbered whites marked with Xs” (283). Brown, like Lincoln and Douglass, believed that the nation’s founding documents served as proof that slavery was antithetical to the United States’ core values. Conversely, Brown’s failed plot convinced Southern planters that abolitionists were, indeed, zealots and murderers. After his death, some Northerners, including the writer and Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, praised Brown as a righteous hero committed to equality. Brown was ultimately found guilty of murder, conspiracy, and treason. Allowed to speak at his November 2 sentencing, Brown gave a speech in which he agreed to forfeit his life to further justice and the end of slavery. He was hanged on December 2, 1859.

Mary Elizabeth Lease (née Clyens) was an orator and cofounder of the populist People’s Party—the most successful third party in American history. Lease could speak for hours on how the federal government was conspiring with railroad companies, speculators, and bankers to disempower farmers and factory workers. Lease stood nearly six feet tall and had what one writer called “a golden voice” (330). She was born in 1850, the daughter of Irish immigrants. Her father, two of her brothers, and an uncle had died during the Civil War. Her uncle perished at Gettysburg, while her father “starved to death as a prisoner of war” (331). She remained angry at both the South and the Democratic Party for her losses. Lease married Charles Lease in 1873 and had six children—two of whom died while still children. Lease farmed in Kansas and Texas, while also taking in laundry, writing, and studying law. In the spring of 1873, Lease and her family moved to Kingman, Kansas, “onto land they’d acquired through the Homestead Act” (334). The land was free, but Charles had to borrow large sums of money from a local bank to purchase farming tools and to “pay land office fees” (334). The Leases lived in a sod house. After barely getting by for several months, they were unable to pay their bills, leading the bank to repossess their land. The Leases, however, were not alone in their financial suffering. The year 1873 “saw the worst financial disaster since the Panic of 1837” (334).

In addition to fighting for small farmers and laborers, which helped to set off the populist revolt against corporate monopolies, Lease also advocated for women’s suffrage and temperance. She entered politics through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), believing that women needed the right to vote if they were going “to end the scourge of alcohol,” or the abusive and neglectful behavior of men, often triggered by excessive drinking (339).

Despite her and other Populists’ commitment to political equality and labor rights, Lease and others within her party embraced white supremacy and nativism. Using the scientific racism of her time, Lease argued in The Problem of Civilization Solved that white people were to be the “guardians of the inferior races” (343). She believed that people of African and Asian descent were better suited to perform all manual labor. In the 1880s, she joined the Union Labor Party in Kansas. The party had been formed by Henry George to promote the Australian ballot.

In 1895, Joseph Pulitzer endorsed Mary Lease as candidate for mayor of Wichita. Lease lost the election and her home in the town was foreclosed. She then moved to New York City, which she regarded as “the heart of America,” and campaigned for Henry George’s next mayoral candidacy. After George died, Lease delivered his eulogy. After the election of William McKinley to the presidency, Lease, repulsed by the infusion of corporate money into politics, left populist politics behind and became a journalist. Pulitzer hired her to work as a reporter.

Henry George was a California-based journalist and populist who, along with Mary Lease, cofounded the People’s Party. Additionally, George was a political economist who advocated for the single tax. George was also instrumental in introducing the secret ballot into American voting, having previously observed the process of private voting in Australia. George also worked to try to eliminate the influence of money in politics. To promote the Australian ballot, George started the Union Labor Party.

George was born in Philadelphia in 1839. He left school at 14 and sailed to both India and Australia “as a foremast boy, on board a ship called the Hindoo” (340). While in India, George noticed the country’s remarkable poverty. He returned to his native Philadelphia and worked as a printer’s apprentice. He next “joined the crew of a navy lighthouse ship sailing around Cape Horn in 1858” in an attempt to get to California (340). He made it to San Francisco, where he edited a newspaper that quickly failed. By 1865, he had a wife and four children. Impoverished, he begged in the streets for money to feed his family. George eventually found work as a printer. He then worked as a writer and editor for the San Francisco Times. He wrote an essay called “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” in which he expressed his belief that it would only make the rich richer and the poor poorer. In 1879, George published Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Causes of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth, in which he explained his support for the single tax, or land tax—an idea that had some support in subsequent decades before dwindling. Clarence Darrow was one skeptic of George’s program, which declared that only economic equality could bring true Christianity to Earth. Darrow believed that George underestimated people’s selfishness.

Like Mary Lease, George supported women’s suffrage, but he was “vehemently opposed to extending either suffrage or any other right of citizenship to Chinse immigrants or their children” (342). Poor white men were the focus of his activism.

In 1886, George moved to New York City and ran for mayor on the Union Labor ticket. He lost to the Democratic candidate, Abram Hewitt. George beat the Republican candidate, however—28-year-old Theodore Roosevelt. George ran for mayor again in the mid-1890s. This time, it looked as though he might win, but he died of a stroke five days before the election. His body was put on display at Grand Central Station. Over 100,000 mourners went to the station to pay their respects. Mary Lease gave his eulogy. The New York Times reported that not even Lincoln’s death was met with so much ceremony.

Best known for his anti-evolution stance during the Scopes Trial, William Jennings Bryan was also a key figure in the populist movement, bringing the political wave “from the Plains to the Potomac,” thereby turning the Democratic Party into a people’s party (345). Lepore describes Bryan as “[t]all, broad-shouldered, and sturdy” (345) He dressed in the Western style, wearing cowhide boots and a string tie. Nicknamed “Boy Bryan,” he was the first presidential candidate to campaign on behalf of the impoverished.

Born in Illinois in 1860, Bryan was fascinated by Democratic Party politics from a young age. He graduated from Illinois College, then attended Union College of Law in Chicago. He trained in oratory. He later moved to Nebraska and settled in Lincoln. At the time, Nebraska was the nation’s fastest-growing state. In 1890, when he was 30, Bryan was elected to Congress as a Democrat. Those who heard him speak claimed that he was the best orator they had ever heard. In the summer of 1896, Bryan went to the Democratic National Convention, set to take place at the Chicago Coliseum, “where he would deliver one of the most effective and memorable speeches in American oratorical history” (350). His purpose was to join the People’s Party to the Democratic Party—to build a coalition of white Southerners, Western farmers, and Northern laborers—and to turn the Republican Party into the party of wealthy businessmen. Bryan’s political style fused together Jeffersonian agrarianism with the revivalist Christianity of the Second Great Awakening. At the convention, Bryan advocated for ensuring the prosperity of the masses, which would eventually benefit every class. The People’s Party, including Mary Lease, supported Bryan at the Democratic National Convention. When the party held its own convention in St. Louis, it seconded Bryan’s nomination. He also had the support of Socialists, including the labor organizer Eugene Debs. In 1896, Bryan ran against William McKinley, a Republican and former governor of Ohio, for the presidency. McKinley, who had ample funding from wealthy businessmen, won the election.

Bryan later earned the nickname “Mr. Fundamentalist,” due to his objection to modern, secular studies at educational institutions. He became a leader of evangelical fundamentalists. Bryan, however, was not an actual fundamentalist—that is, he did not believe in literalizing the gospel and using it to convert people to Christianity. Instead, he believed in the Social Gospel, which promoted the idea of using the example of Christ to perform good works, a position that was anathema to true fundamentalists. Bryan’s anti-evolution stance was due to his confusing Darwinism with Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism, and the program of eugenics that would develop out of the latter.

During the Spanish-American War, Bryan formed a volunteer regiment in Nebraska. He then went to Florida to train to fight, though he was never sent into combat. Later, Bryan would position himself as an anti-Imperialist, believing it to be inconsistent with Christian and democratic values. In 1900, Bryan again ran against McKinley for the presidency. Again, he lost. This time, McKinley’s running mate, Theodore Roosevelt, outdid Bryan in the latter’s strongest area—campaigning. Bryan’s second loss was also partly due to changes in American life and politics. Bryan’s base were farmers, while, increasingly, more Americans lived in cities and worked in either factories or offices. Despite being a twice-failed presidential candidate, he continued to rail against plutocrats, particularly John D. Rockefeller, and promoted an amendment to the Constitution that would authorize an income tax. The Democratic Party nominated him for a third and final time in 1908. Bryan lost again, this time, to William Howard Taft. In 1912, Bryan endorsed Woodrow Wilson for president. In exchange, Wilson named Bryan secretary of state. Bryan resigned from his post in 1915, due to his inability to stop the nation’s drift into World War I.

In 1925, at age 65, he served as prosecutor in the trial of John Scopes—a Tennessee-based high school biology teacher “who was charged with the crime of teaching the theory of evolution” (414). Bryan, still reeling from the horrors of the First World War, decried secular modernity, which he believed determined “the end of sympathy, compassion, and charity” (415). At this point in his life, much of the public regarded the man whom they also called “the Boy of the Plains” and “the Great Commoner” as a relic. His former supporter, the Socialist Eugene V. Debs, disavowed him. Bryan died in his sleep, five days after a jury found Scopes guilty.

Frederick Jackson Turner was a historian, one of the first Americans to receive a doctorate in history. Turner was born in Wisconsin in 1861. He was 31 when he attended the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he gave remarks to the American Historical Association, an organization founded in 1884 and incorporated by Congress to collect and preserve key artifacts for the promotion of historical studies. Unlike his predecessor, key historian and national chronicler George Bancroft, Turner used evidence, such as the census, to understand how change occurred. His studies changed how knowledge was organized, and his research led to the abandonment of mystery in favor of objectivity—an intellectual shift that would inadvertently contribute to the rise of fundamentalism.

In the lecture he gave at the Columbian Exposition, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner chronicled four centuries of American history. Turner was influenced by both Thomas Jefferson and Charles Darwin. He regarded the American frontier “as the site of political evolution”—a wilderness that was, in his view, populated by “savages” (354). In his progressivist vision of history, various forms of settlement, starting with the arrival of European traders and culminating in the development of factories and cities, resulted in a final stage of civilization defined by capitalism and democracy. Turner’s ideas developed both out of quantitative analysis and scientific racism. Using information from the 1890 census, Turner argued that the frontier, “which he described as the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” had opened in 1492 and closed four centuries later (355). He declared that there was no longer any demarcation between settled and unsettled parts of the North American continent.

Journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. Wells, the daughter of formerly enslaved people, started her career as a school teacher. In 1883, she was forced to leave the “ladies’ car” on a train and move to a car reserved for Black people. Wells refused, took her case to court, and began writing for African American newspapers. After three Black grocery store owners were lynched, she began writing about the scourge of lynching in the South, which was fostered by the lie that Black men sought to rape white women. Wells encouraged “black militancy and armed resistance against lynching and against Jim Crow” (355).

In Memphis, Wells founded her own newspaper called Free Speech. A white mob burned the newspaper’s office to the ground, causing Wells to move to New York City, where she continued to publish under the pen name “Exiled.” In 1887, Wells was elected secretary of the African American–run National Press Association. Five years later, she published her first book, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892). Frederick Douglass wrote a testimonial for the volume, “saying that his own voice was feeble by comparison” (356).

Walter Lippmann was a journalist and cofounder of the magazine the New Republic. By 1914, when he was 25, he had already written two incisive books about American politics. Lippmann wore three-piece pinstripe suits and was educated at Harvard, where he had studied with the philosophers William James and George Santayana. Though he seemed destined for the quiet career of an academic and philosopher, he decided to become a reporter. He worked for a time as Lincoln Steffens’s assistant, while the latter wrote investigative journalism about big-city politics.

Lippmann used his background in philosophy to invent the image of the learned political commentator. This, combined with his appearance as “heavyset and silent,” led his friends to call him “Buddha” (361). He lived in Washington, DC, in a row house that he shared with other notable young liberals, including future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. Its visitors, who included Herbert Hoover, were illustrious. Theodore Roosevelt called Lippmann the most brilliant young man of his age group in the nation. Lippmann was especially adept at taking apart the ideas of his elders by finding their flaws. He wrote with authority and gained mass appeal during the turn of the century. He worried, however, over “the malleability of public opinion,” which could shift “into mass delusion” (363). During World War I, Lippmann had advocated for the US to enter the war. When he was 28, he drafted a report entitled, “The War Aims and Peace Terms It Suggests.” After the piece was revised by Wilson, it became the president’s Fourteen Points. Lippmann was appointed to the London office of an Inter-Allied Board for propaganda, directing his writings at both Americans and the Germans and Austrians in the Central Powers.

In 1922, Lippmann wrote a book entitled Public Opinion. Out of this book, which was about the management of public opinion, grew the idea of public relations. After the Second World War, Lippmann brought the phrase “the cold war” into the popular lexicon, as it was taken from his 1947 work The Cold War: A Study in US Foreign Policy.

Frederick Winslow Taylor was a mechanical engineer from Philadelphia who was employed at Bethlehem Steel Works “to speed production” (382). While at Bethlehem, he timed the company’s steelworkers, using a stopwatch. Taylor used the example of the fastest worker to calculate the quickest rate at which a unit of work could be completed. All of the factory’s other workers were then required to work at that pace or lose their jobs. Taylor called this system “task management,” which later became known as “The Gospel of Efficiency” or “Taylorism.” Taylor, it turned out, had invented his numbers. Bethlehem Steel eventually fired him for charging too high a fee for himself. Still, his method of efficiency endured and was particularly embraced by Henry Ford, who used Taylor’s method on his assembly-line workers. Future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis also believed that Taylorism was the solution to problems wrought by “mass industrialism and mass democracy” and encouraged railroad companies to apply it, much to the chagrin of laborers (383).

In 1911, Taylor penned a best-selling book entitled The Principles of Scientific Management. In the subsequent decade, his method of efficiency was applied in the Harding White House. In 1923, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, the founders of Time magazine, applied the principle to their new magazine, working to condense a week’s worth of news into a periodical that one could read in an hour. The purpose, as the magazine’s name suggested, was to save time.

Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th president of the United States and a member of one of the nation’s most illustrious families. At age 39, he resigned from his post as secretary of the navy and formed the First US Volunteer Cavalry Regiment. His charge up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War made him a national hero. Like Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt was also a historian who wanted to tell the nation’s story. In 1889, he published the first of his four-volume series The Winning of the West. Unlike Wilson, he was less interested in political ideas than he was in the history of battles. Still, Roosevelt “read widely and deeply,” and was such a great admirer of Lincoln that he wore a ring “that contained a wisp of hair cut from the dead president’s head” (375).

Roosevelt had completed a law degree at Columbia University while serving in the New York State Assembly. A large, boisterous man, he spent much of his time on his ranch in North Dakota. After he returned from fighting in Cuba, he was elected Republican governor of New York. Two years later, President William McKinley named Roosevelt his running mate, despite objections from McKinley’s adviser, who had called Roosevelt a “wild man.” Roosevelt, however, proved to be a tireless campaigner who outdid McKinley’s opponent, William Jennings Bryan, on the campaign trail.

In 1901, after William McKinley was shot by an anarchist in Buffalo, Roosevelt “became the nation’s youngest president” at age 42 (375). As president, Roosevelt was adept with the press and gave its members a permanent room in the White House. He provided them with stories on Sundays so that they could run their articles at the beginning of the week. His most important legacy is the “establishment of a professional federal government,” which included scientific agencies, as well as a “series of wildlife refuges and national parks” (375). Roosevelt served as president for two terms—refusing to run a third time, though he later regretted this decision.

In 1912, he ran for president again as a Republican. After losing the nomination to William Howard Taft, his handpicked successor, Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party, which embraced white women (Roosevelt promised that he would appoint activist Jane Addams to his cabinet), but refused to seat African American delegates. Using the campaign tactics he had learned when campaigning for McKinley, Roosevelt gained a national following by appealing to voters directly with mass advertising. He developed the notion that candidates could foster cults of personality that existed separately from their respective political parties. As a third-party candidate, Roosevelt won 27% of the popular vote, “more than any third-party candidate either before or since” (387). He died in 1919.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was one of the United States’ earliest civil right advocates and one of the nation’s greatest intellectuals. Du Bois, a native of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, earned a doctorate at Harvard in 1895, then studied in Germany at Humboldt University. He pioneered the social survey—a new method of social science research. He applied this methodology to his research in The Philadelphia Negro (1899). In the same year that he published the book, Du Bois worked as a professor at Atlanta University. While in Georgia, he observed the chopped and barbecued remains of the Black farmer Sam Hose in a store window, leading Du Bois to believe that he could not adopt the cool stance of a social scientist to write about racism.

In 1903, Du Bois wrote in his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk that the problem of the 20th century was “the problem of the color line” (410). Six years later, Du Bois cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which developed out of the Niagara Movement—a meeting of African American intellectuals that took place at Niagara Falls in 1905. The following year, Du Bois founded his monthly magazine the Crisis, which published both literature and articles about civil rights issues. During the First World War, Du Bois encouraged Black people to align with white people and to abandon, temporarily, their anti-lynching efforts. He also pushed Black men to enlist as soldiers. His reputation suffered after the war, as lynchings increased exponentially after Black soldiers returned home.

In 1929, Du Bois debated the racist and eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard in Chicago. There, he challenged Lothrop’s view that the United States was a white nation. Du Bois insisted that the country would not exist if not for the contributions of African Americans. Uncompromising in his devotion to civil rights, Du Bois eschewed both the Democratic and Republican parties in favor of radical third-party politics. He later left the United States for Ghana, where he died in 1963.

Woodrow Wilson was the 28th US president and the first Southerner elected to the White House since the Civil War, after a career as a professor of political science. Wilson, a native of Virginia, studied at both Princeton and the University of Virginia. In 1902, he published the first of his five-volume History of the American People and later authored the book Congressional Government. As president, Wilson devoted himself to applying the principles of the Constitution to the modern mechanical age. He insisted that the framers of the Constitution could not have predicted mass industrialization, thereby making it imperative that the nation treat the founding document as a living thing that was capable of evolving. He believed that the federal government had to regulate commerce to protect ordinary Americans from the uncontrollable consequences of the Industrial Age. Wilson also believed that Congress had too much power and argued instead for the expansion of executive power, seeing the president as a key unifying figure and the leader of the nation. He used his power to keep the 63rd Congress in session for 18 consecutive months, longer than the legislative body had ever met before. He oversaw their lowering of the tariff; reforms of banking and currency laws; the abolition of child labor; the passage of a new antitrust law; the first eight-hour workday law; and the first federal aid bestowed to farmers. Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, the first Jewish person ever appointed, as well as “a dogged opponent of plutocrats” (388).

Wilson also espoused segregationist politics. He was friends with Thomas Dixon, the Southern novelist whose book The Clansman was adapted into the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith. Wilson praised the film, which he had viewed at the White House, and believed its content to be true. While speaking on the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, Wilson encouraged his audience to forget that the war had been fought over slavery, instead embracing the notion that it had been a battle over states’ rights. Despite his campaign promise to promote equal treatment, which gained him the support of some African American voters, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Wilson imposed segregation in his cabinet, leading to the elimination of many Black civil servants through both demotions and an unwillingness to hire Black employees.

While the First World War raged in Europe, Wilson held fast to an isolationist policy. In 1916, he had campaigned on the promise of keeping the nation out of the war. After German U-boats sank the British liner the Lusitania in 1915 and three American ships in 1917, the US entered the war. Wilson later distinguished himself as a key diplomat in establishing peace, particularly with his Fourteen Points and his establishment of a League of Nations—a precursor to the United Nations. Around this time, Wilson signed a tax bill that raised taxes on incomes and corporate earnings to cover the cost of the war. When tax revenue failed to pay the price of the war, the federal government began to sell war bonds.

In 1919, in honor of his leadership after the war, Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize. After Wilson suffered from a series of strokes, he became bedridden. For five months, he was hidden in a room in the West Wing of the White House. His wife, Edith, refused to allow anyone to see him. He died in 1924.

Henry Ford was the son of Michigan farmers who opened the Ford Motor Company in Detroit in 1903. He employed the efficiency method invented by the mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor to speed production. Ford was 40 years old when he opened his factory, where he popularized the use of the assembly line. By 1914, the Ford plant was producing nearly 250,000 cars per year. The automobiles cost one-quarter of the price at which they were sold 10 years earlier.

Ford was also very much involved in the lives of his employees, many of whom were recent immigrants. He sought to assimilate them to American life according to his ideals. Ford’s English School taught his employees hygiene, thrift and economy, and how to behave both at home and in their communities. By the 1920s, Ford was the second wealthiest man in America. His son, Edsel, was the third.

Herbert Hoover was the 31st US president, best known for presiding over the nation after it had fallen into the Great Depression. Hoover had previously served as secretary of commerce under President Warren G. Harding.

Hoover had been born in poverty “in the Quaker town of West Branch, Iowa, and orphaned at nine” (405). He enrolled at Stanford University, where he studied geology. He proved to be an organizational genius in his career as a mining engineer, and became wealthy from his efforts in Australia and China. He retired from business at age 37 to devote himself to public service. By then, he had lived most of his life outside of the United States and was working toward humanitarian relief in Europe both during and after the First World War. Some in Europe believed that he, not Wilson, was truly deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. Reporter and political commentator Walter Lippmann considered Hoover the most interesting man he had ever met. In 1920, both Democrats and Republicans urged Hoover to run for the presidency. He lost the Republican nomination to his future boss—Harding.

Hoover brought his efficiency expertise into the Harding administration. As secretary of commerce, he had “control over the entire American economy” (406). He brought farmers, labor leaders, businessmen, and fishermen to meetings in which they worked out the federal government’s priorities. Under Hoover’s direction, the department’s budget grew exponentially. He also organized “a series of annual radio conferences at the White House between 1922 and 1925” (421). He understood that broadcasting was the future of radio, and that the technology would unify the nation, though he was ill-suited to the medium and failed to use it successfully with the public.

Hoover, who was masterful at managing emergencies, guided the US through the 1929 stock market crash, but he had no incentive to handle the depression that ensued. While Hoover supported charity, he did not support a program of government relief, believing the latter would lead to socialism. Instead, he severed the US from Europe by getting Congress to pass a trade bill—the 1930 Tariff Act, which led to the shrinking of world trade and the decrease of American imports. European debtors, unable to sell their goods to the US, found themselves unable to pay back war debts to American creditors. Between the crash in 1929 and 1932, one-fifth of all American banks failed. The unemployment rate climbed exponentially, reaching 23% by 1932. Twelve million Americans found themselves out of work; a quarter were starving. A drought, which became known as the Dust Bowl, engulfed the Great Plains, leading to death and greater despair. After the stock market crash, Americans overwhelmingly rejected both Hoover and the Republican Party, electing Franklin D. Roosevelt president in 1932.

Credited with pulling the United States out of the Great Depression with the New Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt, or FDR, the 32nd president, was born a patrician into one of the nation’s most privileged families. He often wore a wide-brimmed hat and wireless round glasses, in addition to clutching a cigarette holder between his teeth. Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, New York, in 1882. When he was young, he had so admired his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt that he adopted some of the latter’s expressions. Roosevelt was elected to the New York State Senate as a Democrat in 1910, when he was 28. Three years later, President Woodrow Wilson appointed him assistant secretary of the navy. By 1920, Roosevelt was considered as a vice presidential candidate. The following year, however, when he was 39, he contracted polio and lost the use of both of his legs. Publicly, he disguised his condition by using leg braces and a cane, despite the great pain induced from walking. Privately, he was confined to a wheelchair. His wife Eleanor believed that living with paralysis taught her husband what it meant to suffer. Roosevelt easily defeated Hoover, sweeping up both the Electoral College and the popular vote. Roosevelt was elected to four terms in office and died in the midst of both his fourth term and the Second World War, leaving his successor, Harry Truman, to handle the peace.

Unlike his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt was adept at using the radio. He spoke with such warmth, charm, and sincerity that both Democrats and Republicans found themselves agreeing with his remarks. Roosevelt spoke much slower than most radio announcers, using a pedestrian vocabulary. The technique worked: The entire nation seemed to be tuned in to his fireside chats on the radio. Roosevelt also coordinated with his Federal Communications Commission chairman to prevent newspaper publishers, particularly William Randolph Hearst, from owning radio stations, in an attempt both to prevent Hearst from expanding his empire and to keep a key Republican opponent off the airwaves.

During his first 100 days, Roosevelt met with legislators each day to pass a flurry of legislation that reformed the banking industry, used government reform to regulate the economy, and increased employment through public assistance programs and public works.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt and is one of the United States’ most admired First Ladies. Roosevelt was born in New York City in 1884 and was orphaned during her childhood. She married Franklin—her fifth cousin—in 1905, and together they had six children. Less than a decade into their marriage, Eleanor found out about her husband’s affair with her social secretary. Agreeing to remain married for the sake of her husband’s political career, Eleanor turned her energy toward public service. She worked on international relief during the Second World War and, after her husband became paralyzed, she began a career in public speaking, often working as her husband’s surrogate. She became the leader of the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Party while her husband governed New York and campaigned for the presidency. By 1928, she was head of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Convention (DNC), making her “one of the two most powerful women in American politics” (431).

Roosevelt was tall and lean. She often wore floral dresses and floppy hats. She had little interest in becoming First Lady, a role that she thought would relegate her to a servile domestic role. Instead, Roosevelt revolutionized the role, using it to advance women’s rights and civil rights. She wrote a newspaper column, went on a national tour to champion her ideas, and gave a series of 13 national radio broadcasts. Though she was a less gifted speaker than her husband, she gained a devoted audience. She delivered around 300 radio broadcasts from the White House—nearly as many as her husband. She was especially keen on reaching rural women through radio. Roosevelt’s efforts helped to make the Democratic Party, a party that had previously dismissed women, one that concerned itself more with women’s issues. In the spring of 1933, Roosevelt published It’s Up to the Women. In it, she argued that only women could pull the nation out of the Depression with hard work, frugality, good sense, and civic involvement.

Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, and raised in Lansing, Michigan, Malcolm X was one of the most pivotal civil rights figures of the 20th century. Malcolm X was born to Louise Little, a native of Grenada, born to a Black mother and a Scottish father. Her husband, Earl, was a Baptist minister. They met at a meeting for Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Philadelphia in 1917. When she was pregnant with Malcolm, a group of Klansmen arrived at the Little home in Omaha, threatening to lynch Earl. The family left for Michigan, where they encountered more racist vigilantes. This time, the family’s home was burned to the ground. In 1931, Reverend Little was run over by a streetcar in what was probably the result of another attack from white vigilantes. Due to the insurance company denying Louise her husband’s life insurance, the children ended up in foster care and Louise was committed to a mental institution at Kalamazoo State Hospital, where she remained for 25 years. Malcolm left a juvenile home in 1941 and later moved to Boston to live with his older half sister, Ella. There he became a petty criminal before moving to Harlem and becoming a numbers runner and pimp.

During a six-year stint in prison for robbery, Malcolm discovered the Nation of Islam (NOI) and became a Muslim. He also studied Greek and Latin, read history voraciously, and learned how to debate. He would later debate the civil rights activists Bayard Rustin and James Farmer. When he emerged from incarceration, he became the Nation of Islam’s most prominent proselytizer and one of Elijah Muhammad’s most committed followers. He was featured in the “five-part 1959 documentary narrated by CBS News’s Mike Wallace,” The Hate That Hate Produced (606). Malcolm later compared the documentary to Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

As Malcolm’s star rose and he inadvertently became both the organization’s most visible spokesperson and leader, he garnered the envy of fellow NOI members, including that of the leader Elijah Muhammad. Deeper rifts developed as Malcolm spoke out publicly, particularly in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, against the NOI’s wishes. Malcolm’s subsequent discovery of Elijah Muhammad’s sexual exploitation of young women in the organization, as well as his pilgrimage to Mecca, led to a break with the NOI and his development of the Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU). Malcolm X’s defection from the NOI ultimately resulted in his assassination on February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, where he was murdered in front of his wife and daughters by a member of the Newark branch of the NOI.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a revived interest in Malcolm and his espousal of militancy—the opposite of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s advocacy of civil disobedience in response to racist violence. Newly published editions of Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and the 1992 release of Spike Lee’s eponymous film spurred renewed interest in Malcolm’s life, in addition to solidifying his place within the pantheon of key 1960s civil rights figures.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was the 36th president of the United States, vice president under John F. Kennedy, and a former senator from Texas who was so powerful in his role that his biographer, Robert A. Caro, nicknamed him “master of the Senate.” Johnson was adept at “wrangling senators the way a cowboy wrangles cattle,” using intimidation, if necessary, to get their votes on key legislation (552).

He displayed this skill most markedly when Congress passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1957. Previously, Johnson had voted against every civil rights bill he encountered during “his career in the House and the Senate, from 1937 to 1957” (585). Privately, he had never been a segregationist, and he publicly supported Brown v. Board of Education. By the mid-1950s, he believed that the Democratic Party needed to change its policy direction. More importantly, Johnson was eyeing the presidency. To win, he needed to show that he was a national politician—not simply a Southern one. Due to his ability to court and count votes better than any other Senate majority leader in history, the civil rights bill passed.

Johnson was an enemy of Wisconsin senator and Communist hunter, Joseph McCarthy, and later played a key role in the senator’s censure and subsequent fall from power. Johnson is best known for having passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in public accommodations, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which helped bring an end to decades of voter intimidation directed against Black Southerners. He was married to Lady Bird Johnson.

George Gallup, the namesake for the Gallup poll, married journalism and social science to invent political polling, which he believed was “a new field of journalism” (454). Gallup attended the University of Iowa in the 1920s with the intention of studying journalism. Instead, he got a degree in psychology, which was more feasible during that decade. He graduated in 1923, having specialized in Applied Psychology. In his courses, Gallup became interested in measuring public opinion. He first sought “to use the sample survey to understand how people read the news” (454). His dissertation, written in 1928, was entitled “An Objective Method for Determining Reader Interest in the Content of a Newspaper.” In it, he argued that the press had once been “the chief agency for instructing and informing the mass of people,” but the development of public schools placed newspapers in the field of providing entertainment (454). He developed a method to measure readers’ interest, which he called the “Iowa method.” This study’s purpose was to find out which features and writers readers liked best so that a newspaper editor could eliminate content regarded as dull.

By 1932, Gallup was a professor of journalism at Northwestern University. He used his method of measuring reader interest to calculate the chances of his mother-in-law, Ola Babcock Miller, winning the office of lieutenant governor, for which she was campaigning. After that venture, he moved to New York and both worked for an advertising agency and taught at Columbia. Around this time, “he perfected a method for measuring the size of a radio audience” (454). He continued working in the 1930s on ways to predict elections for newspapers and magazines. He then started a company called Editors’ Research Bureau. He renamed it the American Institute of Public Opinion and established it in Princeton, New Jersey, to lend it some academic prestige. Gallup began to survey public opinion by selecting a sample of the population and asking them questions. This, he asserted, was a way to take the “pulse of democracy” (455). He intended for his work to operate in favor of the republic—not to do the work of political consulting.

Poet, civil rights activist, legal scholar, and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray was born in Baltimore in 1910. She graduated from Hunter College in 1928, then went to work for the National Urban League and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). She had been denied admission to the University of North Carolina in 1938, on account of her race. Meanwhile, Murray, who identified as male, searched for a doctor who would prescribe her testosterone. She had no success. However, she insisted on challenging UNC’s racism. She approached Thurgood Marshall, then a young attorney leading the NAACP’s charge against discrimination. Marshall discouraged her because Murray had by then moved to New York, making her case as a nonresident weaker. Murray graduated first in her class at Howard University’s law school, where she was the only woman, but was denied admission to Harvard Law School for postgraduate work, because the university barred women. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, instead, where she wrote a dissertation on “The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment.” She would encourage a reading of the 14th Amendment that fought not only Jim Crow, but also “Jane Crow,” or sex discrimination.

Murray was one of the architects of the sit-in movement, which would continue into the 1960s. In 1940, she was arrested in Virginia for refusing to abide by segregated busing. Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she was influenced by both Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi, who espoused civil disobedience. Her goal, which began when she was a law student at Howard, was to dismantle Jim Crow by getting the Plessy v. Ferguson decision overturned. During the Second World War, Murray organized sit-ins in drugstores and eateries throughout the nation’s capital.

Harry Truman was the 33d president, best known for ending the Second World War by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and for making the first attempt to create national health insurance. Truman was raised in Independence, Missouri, and worked on his family farm until he went to combat in France during the First World War. He had no college degree. Truman started his political career in Missouri, where he first held a county office, then was elected to the US Senate in 1934. In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt selected Truman as his running mate because the Missouri politician was devoid of controversy. During his vice presidency, Truman had little involvement in White House business, leaving him little prepared to ascend to the presidency after President Roosevelt’s death. Lepore describes him as “[m]ild-mannered and myopic [with] a common touch” (531). He expressed concern for the lives of ordinary Americans, particularly African Americans, whom he had courted since the beginning of his political career. Truman established a commission on civil rights and later desegregated the armed forces. He had some bipartisan support, particularly from then California governor Earl Warren.

Earl Warren was a Republican governor of California and, later, chief justice of the Supreme Court, appointed by President Eisenhower. Warren first served as solicitor general but was promised a position on the Court. When Chief Justice Fred Vinson died in 1953, Warren was appointed chief justice—a position that he held for 16 years, “presiding over the most liberal bench in the court’s history” (579). During his years as governor, Warren had proposed a compulsory health insurance funded with a payroll tax, which served as a model for the plan that Harry Truman tried to institute nationwide. As chief justice, he helped overturn segregation in public schools in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision. Warren began his career as a conservative Republican, but ended it as a liberal. Richard Nixon counted Warren among his chief enemies.

Warren was the son of a Norwegian immigrant railroad worker who was later murdered. He studied political science and law at the University of California, Berkeley. He served during the First World War and, in 1939, became California’s attorney general. In that position, he supported President Roosevelt’s policy of interning Japanese Americans and openly expressed racist views toward this population. In his later years, Warren expressed deep remorse for his past prejudices. In 1942, Warren ran for governor of California and won. Two years later, Warren became seriously ill with a kidney infection. Concern about the financial impact on his family led him to consider a state insurance plan. He introduced the proposal in January 1945 during his State of the State address. The California Medical Association opposed the plan and enlisted the help of an ad agency to defeat it.

Richard Milhouse Nixon was the 37th president of the United States, notorious for the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation. Paranoid, power-hungry, and known to hold grudges, particularly toward Ivy League alums, Nixon’s presidential achievements (e.g., the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency) are often overlooked to focus on the shortcomings of his character.

Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California, in 1913. He had been a sharp and ambitious child, but anxious. His family later moved to Whittier, California, “where his father ran a grocery store out of an abandoned church” (534). Nixon attended Whittier College, despite wishing that he could attend an Ivy League institution. He paid his way through college and resented his inability to afford to attend a better school. Lepore describes him as having wavy black hair in his youth, small and dark eyes, and heavy eyebrows. He was an outstanding debater, which helped him gain entry to Duke Law School. He applied to Wall Street law firms, but none would hire him. He returned home to Whittier, then served in the US Navy in the South Pacific. When he came back, he was 32-year-old Lieutenant Commander Nixon. A group of California bankers and oilmen soon recruited him to run against “five-term Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis for a seat in the House” in 1946 (534). During the campaign, Nixon characterized Voorhis as soft on communism and smeared his political reputation, thereby cementing his signature tactic of making false claims then feigning offense when his opponent accused Nixon of being dishonest.

Nixon later served as vice president under Dwight D. Eisenhower. Despite the Republican Party being the party of wealthy businessmen and stockholders, Nixon lived a very modest life, which included debts and little capital. He ran unsuccessfully for the presidency against John F. Kennedy in 1960, but ran again in 1968 against Hubert Humphrey and won by a landslide. He was reelected in 1972 and served until his resignation in 1974. Nixon was adept at exploiting feelings of inadequacy among the electorate, feelings he shared, which would become evident from both his paranoia and habit of recording political opponents. In his campaign against Voorhis, he exploited voters’ unease with Ivy League graduates who made them feel inferior. In the 1968 election, he would use the support of the Silent Majority—that is, white working-class and white ethnic voters who felt discarded by the Democratic Party after the civil rights movement—to secure a win. In 1972, he won reelection in a landslide, becoming the first presidential candidate ever to win 49 states. His presidency ended in ignominy, however, due to the Watergate scandal. To avoid impeachment, Nixon resigned. Despite the shame around his resignation, Nixon, who had prioritized foreign over domestic policy during both of his terms, had “opened diplomatic relations with China, […] negotiated arms limitation agreements with the Soviet Union,” and ended the Vietnam War (644).

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States and, at 43, was the youngest ever to be elected at the time. Kennedy was known for his focus on diplomacy and anti-communism and, tragically, for being the last of four presidents assassinated, with his death in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Kennedy, like his 1960 presidential opponent, Richard Nixon, ran for a House seat in 1946. Unlike Nixon, Kennedy had been prepared for a political life from birth. Kennedy, the son of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, was born to a large, wealthy Irish Catholic family in Brookline, Massachusetts. He attended Choate and Harvard. His future running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, referred to him as “the boy.” Kennedy was a foil to Nixon—while the latter had fought hard to attend college and to climb the political ladder, Kennedy, through his father’s connections, had easily been granted admission to the nation’s best schools and given boosts to ascend the political ladder. The two faced off during the 1960 presidential debate, which was televised. Kennedy, who appeared cool on camera compared to an ill and sweaty Nixon, was regarded as the winner, though the race between the candidates was very tight. In the end, Kennedy prevailed in a close election.

One of the first acts of the Kennedy administration was to form the Peace Corps in March 1961. Ten years earlier, when Kennedy was contemplating a run for a Senate seat, he and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, stopped in Vietnam during a tour of Asia and the Middle East.

Like Nixon, Kennedy was largely motivated by a wish to deter communism, and particularly the ambitions of the Soviet Union. Initially, other members of his party distrusted him due to his silence on McCarthyism. Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, who became attorney general during his brother’s administration, had been a close friend and associate of Joseph McCarthy, aiding the latter in his hunts for Communists. President Kennedy’s own anti-communist efforts included the Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba—an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro—and the nearly catastrophic Cuban Missile Crisis. His efforts toward civil rights, both as a candidate and a president, were tentative, though he had run as a civil rights candidate to win Black votes in the North. Civil rights legislation was not carried to fruition, however, until his successor, Lyndon Johnson, became president.

Born Thoroughgood Marshall in Baltimore in 1908, Marshall was “the son of a steward […] and a kindergarten teacher” (575). He began to spell his name “Thurgood” by second grade because it was simpler than his given name. He first read the Constitution when he was forced to study it as a punishment for disobedience. Marshall was enthralled by the document. His parents aspired for him to become a dentist, but Marshall “work[ed] his way through college as a dining-car waiter on the B&O Railroad” (575). Sometime thereafter, he decided to become an attorney. He got his first practice arguing with his father at the dinner table.

Barred from attending the University of Maryland on account of his race, Marshall went to Howard, despite it being 40 miles away from his home. He graduated first in his class in 1933 and, two years later, won a case against the state of Maryland, arguing that, because it provided no law school for African Americans, it defied the “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessy v. Ferguson. By 1950, Marshall convinced the NAACP to abandon this argument in favor of abolishing segregation altogether.

Marshall then started the NAACP’s Legal and Educational Defense Fund and served as its chief counsel. He argued hundreds of cases across the South in an effort to end Jim Crow. He started with law schools and professional schools, then worked on cases at colleges, hoping to get as far as public schools. In 1967, Marshall was appointed to the US Supreme Court, where he served until 1991.

Marshall was six foot four, had wavy black hair, which he wore slicked back, and had a thin mustache. He spoke with a slight Southern drawl. Marshall believed that the Brown case would put the matter of racial inequality to rest. When he realized that it would not, he continued to hope that a Supreme Court case would come into the docket that finally could. Marshall retired in 1991 due to health concerns and was succeeded by Clarence Thomas.

Born in Atlanta in 1929, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became the most significant civil rights activist to emerge from a period of activism (1955-1968) generally referred to as the civil rights era or the civil rights movement. His positions, particularly his stance on civil disobedience, would bring him in conflict with more militant activists like Malcolm X. After his death, his legacy would be significantly sanitized, overlooking his radicalism and his dedication to union organizing. King was the son of a minister and NAACP leader. He was influenced by evangelical Christianity, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and anticolonialist efforts abroad, particularly Mahatma Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolence.

King, who was ordained in 1948, “had wide-set eyes, short hair, and a pencil mustache” (582). During his youth, he was lean. As he aged, his body became sturdier. Once rather quiet, his voice had become stirring and deep. He had attended a theological seminary in Pennsylvania, then completed a doctorate at Boston University in 1955 “before becoming a pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church” in Montgomery, Alabama (583).

He, along with Rosa Parks, led the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. The following year, he founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). His efforts to secure the civil and economic rights of Black Americans led to the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. One year later, at age 35, he became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. King was murdered on April 4, 1968, while in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was working to organize sanitation workers.

Ella Baker was a key civil rights activist in the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Virginia in 1903, Baker had worked for many years as an organizer with the NAACP, first as a field secretary starting in 1938, then as a director of numerous Southern branches in the 1940s. One of the projects on which she worked was equal pay for Black teachers. Baker joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1958 to lead “an Atlanta-based voter registration drive known as the Crusade for Citizenship” (596). She had been frustrated by Southern preachers’ seeming indifference to the issue of voting rights and found Martin Luther King Jr. “too self-centered and cautious” to address the issue (596). She urged students who had been organizing sit-ins throughout the South to start their own organization instead of forming a junior chapter of the SCLC. The result was the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Baker left the SCLC to join the new organization.

When George Wallace became governor of Alabama, he was only 43 and obsessed with politics. He started his career in 1935, at age 16, when he worked as a page in the state senate. He attended the University of Alabama, where he distinguished himself as both class president and an outstanding boxer. After studying law, he was an airman in the Pacific during the Second World War. Wallace ran for state congress in 1946, but he had never been particularly passionate about maintaining segregation, despite his loyalty to the South. Thus, when he served as an alternate at the 1948 Democratic convention, he refrained from leaving the floor alongside the Dixiecrats. He also endorsed Adlai Stevenson for president.

In 1958, when he ran for governor, Wallace shifted his political sympathies publicly. He posed alongside Confederate flags, but still lost the primary to John Patterson, who more strongly opposed desegregation and later became governor. In 1962, determined not to be outdone, Wallace worked with a speechwriter “who doubled as an organizer for the KKK” (608). With his help, Wallace became governor, winning 96% of the vote. During his inauguration, he famously promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” (608). He also warned educational leaders against moving forth with school desegregation efforts.

Barry Goldwater was a longtime US senator from Arizona and the Republican presidential nominee in 1964. He was a far-right Republican who, in 1960, had published The Conscience of a Conservative, which became a bestseller. Goldwater, at the time, had been a fringe conservative. He advocated “for the abolition of the graduated income tax” and recommended dismantling much of the federal government—policies that would now align with certain members of the contemporary Libertarian Party. Goldwater also opposed school desegregation, as mandated by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, in favor of states’ rights. This position brought him supporters among Dixiecrats and members of the John Birch Society. Moderate Republicans, particularly New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, believed that Goldwater was part of “a lunatic fringe” that would “subvert the Republican party itself” (614). Rockefeller, who had been competing with Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination, characterized him as a Nazi.

At the Republican National Convention, US Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who was also running for president on the Republican ticket, “refused to release her delegates to Goldwater” (615). Richard Nixon, who realized that he had no chance of winning the presidency that year, decided to throw his support behind the eventual nominee. Nixon then gave 156 speeches on Goldwater’s behalf.

Goldwater tried to usurp some of President Johnson’s support among evangelicals by campaigning for a constitutional amendment that would “guarantee Bible reading and prayer in public schools” (615). However, he failed to make inroads with evangelical voters and lost the election in a landslide.

Phyllis Schlafly was the president of the National Federation of Republican Women and later became known for organizing the coalition of conservative white women who torpedoed the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She became one of the most notable women in US politics due to this effort. Schlafly was born in Missouri in 1924 and was a devout Catholic. She had worked as a gunner during the Second World War and used her income to put herself through college. She later earned a graduate degree in political science from Radcliffe College. She was a supporter of Joseph McCarthy, and her husband served as president of the World Anti-Communist League. In 1952, Schlafly ran for Congress.

Schlafly never identified as a feminist, but she believed that women should have been helping to lead the Republican Party. Three months after a rival within the National Federation of Republican Women kept her from assuming the presidency, she began writing a monthly newsletter, in which she began her “crusade for law and morality” (617). Before her death in 2016, Schlafly showed public support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Ronald Reagan was the 40th president of the United States and, after the decline of Barry Goldwater’s political career and Reagan’s election as California’s governor, he became a conservative standard bearer and leader within the Republican Party. As president, he was nicknamed “the Great Communicator,” setting both the political and cultural tone of the 1980s, while leaving behind a policy agenda that impacted views on government for decades after he left office.

Reagan was raised in Illinois and was the son of a shoe salesman. His family survived the Great Depression because of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, making young Reagan a devoted Democrat. He regularly listened to Roosevelt’s fireside chats and memorized the president’s speeches. Reagan graduated from Eureka College in Illinois and then worked as a radio broadcaster and sports announcer. He began acting in films in 1937. He married fellow actor Jane Wyman several years later. After their divorce, he married fellow actor Nancy Davis in 1952, with whom he later appeared in a war-themed film. During World War II, he produced films for the Office of War Information. In Hollywood, he developed a reputation for being reliable and affable, leading to his being elected president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). As president of SAG, Reagan became an anti-communist activist. He registered as a Republican in 1962, though he had begun to support conservative candidates in the previous decade. Two years later, he supported Goldwater’s presidential run.

Stokely Carmichael, who later renamed himself Kwame Ture, was the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), credited with both coining and helping to lead the Black Power movement. Having started his career in political activism as a Freedom Rider in 1961, Carmichael later gave up on party politics after witnessing white Democratic Party leaders’ exclusion of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party from the nominating convention in 1964. Carmichael graduated from Howard University in the same year with a degree in philosophy. For his work in registering voters in Mississippi, he was nominated for a Senior Class Humanity Award. His activism led to his getting arrested six times. The FBI started a file on Carmichael in 1964.

While the SCLC still favored working with white liberals, Carmichael helped take SNCC in a direction that “favored black consciousness and black power” (621). He borrowed the term “black” from Malcolm X and famously called for “black power” during a speech in 1966 in response to police brutality. He encouraged forms of protest that were adopted by the Black Lives Matter movement nearly half a century later and criticized the regulation of free speech, particularly where Black people were concerned.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a former US senator from New York, former secretary of state, and the first woman to obtain a major party’s nomination for president. She entered political discourse as an object of animus for political conservatives, particularly former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, who believed that Bill Clinton’s administration would usher in a liberal agenda, which Buchanan characterized as “radical feminism,” that would undermine traditional America. Clinton, as Lepore notes, remained a target of the political right throughout her years as First Lady, during her careers as senator and secretary of state, and during her two failed presidential bids.

Clinton was born in Chicago in 1947 and was raised to be a Republican. She canvassed for Nixon when she was 13 and was a “Goldwater Girl” at 17. She attended Wellesley College, where she was elected president of the Young Republicans. In 1968, she worked as an intern on Capitol Hill. Her antiwar sympathies and her feminism drove her away from an increasingly conservative GOP. The following year, she became the first student at Wellesley selected to deliver a commencement address, which was featured in Life magazine. In 1970, she spoke before the League of Women Voters on its 50th anniversary. In 1971, while she was a student at Yale Law School, she met fellow student Bill Clinton. After graduating from Yale, she moved to Washington, DC. During Nixon’s impeachment inquiry, she worked as a staff attorney for the House Judiciary Committee. She married Clinton soon thereafter but kept her name. Only when her husband began to run for political office did she call herself Hillary Rodham Clinton.

During her years as First Lady, she served more as a colleague to her husband, to the consternation of many conservatives. She led the president’s health care initiative, heading the Task Force on National Health Care Reform. He referred to her as “his Bobby Kennedy” (698). Clinton, as First Lady, was unprecedented. She was the first working woman in the White House. Though she was not the first feminist in her role, she was unabashed about her feminist views. She also had more senior staff working for her than did Vice President Al Gore.

William Jefferson Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States and the spouse of former senator, secretary of state, and two-time presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. Clinton was relatively young, only 46, when he entered the White House. Born in Hope, Arkansas, in 1946, he had grown up poor and was raised by a single mother. He dodged the Vietnam War draft, earned a degree in international affairs from Georgetown University, got a Rhodes Scholarship, and enrolled at Yale Law School, where he met Hillary Rodham.

In 1978, Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas. With his humble Southern background and affable charm, he appealed to the Democratic Party’s old guard while its new guard, particularly African Americans, responded to his Ivy League education and his progressive record on civil rights.

In 1992, Clinton made his bid for the presidency—an ambition that was nearly undone by news of his extramarital affairs, as well as accusations of sexual harassment. Though Clinton had spoken openly about other aspects of his private life to the media—from his past usage of marijuana to his underwear preferences—he asked the media to eschew salaciousness by avoiding further conversations about alleged affairs. Clinton eventually won the 1992 election “with the lowest popular—43 percent—since Woodrow Wilson” (697). Al Gore, a former representative and senator from Tennessee, and a scion of a well-heeled political family, served as vice president for both of Clinton’s terms. Like Truman, Clinton prioritized health care reform; also like his predecessor, he failed in this effort. After the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton lost both houses of Congress.

His enduring legacy, as a liberal, was when he appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court in 1993. On other matters, particularly economic ones, he had moved further to the right. Lepore blames this political shift on Clinton’s embarrassment after losing on health care reform, as well as what she characterizes as his perpetual need to seek others’ approval and be liked. Clinton ratified the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), despite opposition from labor unions. In 1994, he continued the war against crime and, particularly drugs, that had been waged for nearly 30 years. He signed a crime bill that extended “mandatory sentencing and instituted a 100:1 ratio between sentences for possession of crack and of cocaine,” a policy that disproportionately impacted poor, nonwhite groups and sent more African Americans, in particular, to prison (699). Perhaps most damagingly, he pursued welfare reform, siding with conservatives who claimed that it trapped people in poverty and encouraged dependence on government. The Clinton administration, thus, abolished the Aid for Families with Dependent Children and left welfare allotments up to states. Clinton did, however, veto a Republican version of the bill that would have eliminated Medicaid.

In 1996, during his second term, Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, which “deregulated the communications industry” and allowed for the restoration of media monopolies (732). Three years later, he repealed parts of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had been passed during FDR’s administration in 1933. He thereby ended “a ban on combinations between commercial and investment banks” (700). Clinton’s presidency would end in ignominy over his impeachment due to the revelation of yet another affair—this time, with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. This made him the second president after Andrew Johnson to be impeached.