These Truths: A History of the United States

During the final decades of the 19th century, a handful of people became enormously wealthy due to industrialism; the middle class received cheaper goods; and a wide swath of people became mired in poverty and misery. The power of the federal government grew as corporations grew. So much of American life became “mass.” The term “mass production” was created in the 1890s. There was also “mass immigration” at the turn of the century, “mass consumption,” and, by 1927, “mass communication” with the invention of the radio. New agencies were formed, including the Coast Guard and the Forest Service. To meet the challenges of the new age, which became known as the Progressive Era, activists created reforms. Their greatest failure, Lepore contends, was the Progressives’ unwillingness to address Jim Crow. Arguably, they supported the system of legal segregation.

Progressivism was rooted in 19th-century populism, but “was the middle-class version: indoors, quiet, passionless” (364). They also championed the same causes as Populists, particularly where big business was concerned. Yet, while Populists advocated for less government, Progressives wanted more, believing that government agencies were essential to reform. Much of the Progressivist ethos came from a Protestant movement called the Social Gospel, which was influenced by Henry George’s book Progress and Poverty.

After losing the 1896 election, William Jennings Bryan devoted himself to the protest of American imperialism. Bryan believed that imperialism was antithetical to “both Christianity and American democratic traditions” (366). Meanwhile, other Progressives, particularly Protestant missionaries, saw opportunities in Cuba and the Philippines to gain more converts.

In 1898, the Spanish-American War began. Newspaper barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer sided with the Cubans, who had been trying to throw off Spanish colonial rule since 1868. They sent journalists and photographers who worked not only to report on the war but to stir it up. In February 1898, President McKinley sent the USS Maine to Cuba. It exploded in Havana, killing 250 US sailors. Though the explosion was later revealed to be the result of an accident, both Hearst and Pulitzer informed Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, that it was no accident. Newspaper readers demanded war. Pulitzer later regretted his role in causing the Spanish-American War, but Hearst did not.

After the war, Cuba became independent, and Spain ceded Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico to the US. Filipinos, however, revolted against American colonial rule after throwing off Spanish rule. McKinley, refusing to recognize Philippine independence “fired on Filipino nationalists” in 1899, thereby initiating the Philippine-American War (367). Bryan organized the Anti-Imperialist League in response. Other members included Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain.

The Philippine-American War was brutal and involved “the slaughter of Filipino civilians” (367). The annexation of the Philippines caused representatives in Washington to debate citizenship questions once again. Those who favored imperialism in the Philippines argued that Filipinos were unable to govern themselves. Black soldiers who fought in the war saw the connection between colonialism in the Asian country and Jim Crow in the South. Meanwhile, in the North and the West, cities and counties “passed racial zoning laws, banning blacks from the middle-class communities” (369). In Montana, in 1890, Black people had lived in all 56 of the state’s counties. Forty years later, they lived in only 11. In Atlanta, W. E. B. Du Bois saw that the knuckles of Sam Hose, a Black farmer who had been lynched, burned, and dismembered, were being sold as souvenirs in a store window. In response to racist terrorism, hordes of Black Americans decided that they could no longer live in the South. They left the South in what became known as the Great Migration.

When McKinley won the 1896 election, the Democratic Party blamed Bryan, who had failed to account for the fact that an increasing number of people were moving to cities and working in factories and offices. Bryan, who had focused on the rural vote, had not taken account of demographic changes. In 1901, an anarchist shot and killed McKinley in Buffalo. Theodore Roosevelt, who was 42 at the time, “became the nation’s youngest president” (375). Reelected in 1904, Roosevelt moved further to the left and pursued a reformist agenda, which included regulation of the railroads, food and drug laws, and the cessation of child labor. He also endorsed an income tax. Despite the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the income tax law in 1894, public support for the measure came in 1906 when a massive earthquake in San Francisco resulted in major infrastructural damage and the collapse of the insurance companies, due to their inability to pay all claims. The debts spurred a national financial panic.

Roosevelt chose not to run for a third term, and William Howard Taft was elected president in 1908. Taft, who had been a federal judge and would later serve as chief justice on the Supreme Court, supported a constitutional amendment for the income tax which went to the states to be ratified in 1909. The 16th Amendment passed easily and became law in February 1913.

Between 1880 and 1910, over one-quarter of the federal budget went toward welfare payments. Reformers, such as Jane Addams, began “leading a fight for legislative labor reforms for women,” which included limitations on work hours, minimum wages, and the abolition of child labor (377). Critics called these reforms unconstitutional and the Supreme Court often agreed, frequently ruling against Progressive labor legislation. Leftist critics contended that “the courts had become an instrument of business interests,” while conservatives insisted that the courts were just to protect business interests (378). Market forces, the latter believed, would eventually care for the sick and enfeebled. Those who died, as Social Darwinists reasoned, were too weak to survive. For these reasons, Progressivist universal health insurance campaigns were far less successful than those in Britain. Germans had invented the first state health insurance plan in 1883. However, after the US went to war with Germany in 1917, those who were against national health insurance used anti-German sentiment to dissuade the public from embracing the policy.

The simplest way, at the time, to advocate for social welfare was to center the effort on women and children. Women held one-fifth of all manufacturing jobs. Still unable to vote, they relied on the state for protections. State courts had made rulings that protected women as a class, particularly in response to labor exploitation. Usually, these protections focused on women being weaker than men.

As the nation grappled with concerns over the expansion of corporate power and the mechanization of labor, more Americans became socialists. In 1908, over 400,000 people voted for Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs. Three years later, 18 cities had a Socialist mayor, and over 1,000 Socialists held offices in 30 states. The election of 1912, in which Woodrow Wilson won the Democratic nomination, was largely influenced by women and motivated by a Progressivist agenda. Women had achieved suffrage rights in eight states. The word “feminism” had entered the English language in the 1910s, as had the term “birth control,” coined by New York–based nurse Margaret Sanger. Theodore Roosevelt hoped to win the Republican nomination by appealing to women. He mainly availed himself of another Progressivist reform—the direct state primary, which was first held in 1899 and gained popularity in 1905.

Roosevelt’s campaign was a turning point: The focus was on the candidate, not the party. He also used modern advertising to gain a following. Roosevelt won 27% of the vote. However, most of his votes were drawn from Taft supporters, giving Wilson, the ultimate winner, an edge.

In 1914, war broke out in Europe on a scale never before seen. It was a war managed by experts in efficiency “and waged with factory-made munitions” (389). World War I marked the end of Europe as the center of the Western world. The United States would, after the armistice, take the continent’s place. In 1916, 800,000 were killed at the Battle of Verdun over several months; 1.1. million were killed during the Battle at Somme. Civilians were killed, too. For the first time, bombs were dropped from airplanes. Before the end of the war, almost 40 million people had been killed and another 20 million injured. In the aftermath of the war, there was increased anticolonialist sentiment, as well as more conversion to fundamentalism, due to an aversion to the horrors modernity had wrought.

It was fundamentalism that instigated the rejection of Darwinism. Fundamentalists argued that the purpose of a church was “to convert people to Christ by teaching the actual, literal gospel” (390). Progressives mocked fundamentalists for their anti-intellectualism. Fundamentalists argued that intellectuals suppressed conservative opinions.

Meanwhile, women marched for suffrage and for peace. Those who could vote awarded Wilson, who had promised to keep the nation out of the war, a narrow victory: He won 10 out of 12 of the states in which women had suffrage rights. Wilson ignored suffrage during his second term, leading to a vigil outside of the White House. Public support for women’s voting rights dropped. As the nation neared war, criticism of the president began to look like disloyalty. Several days after Wilson’s inauguration, German U-Boats torpedoed three American ships. At the beginning of April, Wilson went to Congress for a declaration of war, saying that the world had to be made safe for democracy. Congress obliged. All American men between the ages of 18 and 45 were to register for the draft; about 5 million were drafted to serve.

To gain public support for the war, Wilson established a propaganda department, the Committee on Public Information, headed by the muckraking journalist George Creel. In 1918, Congress passed a Sedition Act. Dissenters of war, including pacifists, feminists, and socialists, were jailed. Eugene Debs was among them. W. E. B. Du Bois, who had argued that the First World War was rooted in colonial rivalries in Africa, was reined in by Creel, who called 31 Black editors and publishers to Washington and “warned them about ‘Negro subversion’” (396). Du Bois promised not to make any public comments about race relations for the duration of the war. He used his magazine, the Crisis, to encourage Black people to stand “shoulder to shoulder with [their] white fellow citizens,” encouraged Black men to fight, and asked Black people to delay protests against lynchings (396).

The First World War also expanded the powers of the government, which included new powers over the bodies of citizens. A “social purity” movement, geared toward diminishing the spread of venereal disease, started and led to military ordinances. In December 1917, Congress prohibited the sale of alcohol.

By the end of the war, Americans had suffered only 116,000 casualties, while those in France and Germany were nearly 2 million. Europe, which comprised 17 countries before the war, became a continent of 26 nations. All of them were deeply in debt, mainly to Americans. In 1918, an influenza epidemic took 21 million lives globally but only 675,000 in the US.

The Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. Wilson led the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919. Wilson was particularly well received by delegates from “stateless and colonized societies,” including a young Ho Chi Minh, who unsuccessfully tried to meet with him (399). Wilson promoted a rhetoric of self-determination, which fueled the anticolonial movement. W. E. B. Du Bois traveled to Paris four days after Wilson. He was mainly present to attend the Pan-African Congress.

The treaty both suppressed German industry and deprived the nation of managing its own affairs. Additionally, it demanded $33 billion in war reparations. Wilson believed that the newly established League of Nations could address any shortcomings in the treaty. Two days after he returned to the US, Wilson “delivered the Treaty of Versailles to the Senate and explained its provisions, including for the League of Nations” (400). Finding little support for the treaty in Congress, he decided to gain public support by going on a 17-state train tour. One day, in Colorado, he stumbled while climbing onto a stage. He lost the use of his left side after a stroke and lay infirm in the West Wing of the White house for five months. His wife kept his condition secret. In March 1920, the Senate rejected both the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations.

In August 1920, the 19th Amendment, “the last constitutional act of the Progressive Era,” was ratified (401). The Equal Rights Amendment was then introduced three years later, leading to a division between early feminists who wanted equal rights and those who supported the maintenance of women under protective legislation.

In the 1920 presidential election, Republican Warren G. Harding triumphed easily over his relatively unknown running mate. Harding rode a conservative wave to the White House. He led a movement to make the Constitution sacred, taking the parchment out of storage and placing it in “a national shrine” (403). Harding also pushed for administrative efficiency in government and lighter tax burdens. He wanted to eliminate government interference in business and peopled his cabinet with conservative businessmen, including industrialist Andrew W. Mellon. Herbert Hoover was secretary of commerce. Harding’s cabinet led the nation during “some of the most prosperous years in American history” (404). Industrial production had risen by 70% between 1922 and 1928. Wages and income had also significantly risen. In the 1920s, more American homes gained electricity. Americans’ faith in progress was wedded to consumerism. The US economy became the world’s largest, as well as the world’s biggest lender. The nation also began to turn inward, placing harsher restrictions on immigration. This left Europe unable to send excess workers across the Atlantic, in addition to being unable to sell their manufactured goods to the US, making it difficult to pay their war debts. European countries responded by raising tariffs, which punished American farmers and manufacturers.

Meanwhile, between 1890 and 1920, around 1.5 million Mexicans entered the US. They were fleeing from the dictator Porfirio Diaz, against whom many had revolted in 1910. Many of them took jobs picking produce after Japanese immigration ended in 1908. In Congress, legislators argued over their immigration, with some contending that they were not easily assimilated and therefore should return to their native country, while others said that no one else would perform the work that Mexican laborers did. Thus, Mexicans were allowed to enter the US on temporary visas, but they were denied a path to citizenship. Their status became closely tied to the “new legal, racialized category of ‘illegal alien’” (410). The US Border Patrol formed in 1924 after the deportation of “illegal aliens” became a policy measure.

The Ku Klux Klan, which had seen a resurgence in 1915, was vocally supportive of immigration restrictions. While white supremacists rewrote the nation’s history as one of white people, Black intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance drew critical attention to the place of Black people in the nation’s past.

By 1926, American politics had become divided, particularly over interpretations of the Constitution. In 1923, US Army veterans Henry Luce and Briton Hadden decided to found a magazine, which they initially intended to call Facts. They settled instead on Time, which was modeled on Frederick Taylor’s idea of efficiency. The magazine was to save readers time, as all of its articles were to be read in an hour. Luce and Hadden also sorted the magazine into sections, which was unprecedented. Subjectivity in journalism, however, led to errors in print. Time, therefore, established the process of fact-checking. They hired young women, newly graduated from college, to perform this work. Fact-checking was an intense practice at the offices of Time’s chief rival, The New Yorker, edited by former city newspaper reporter Harold Ross. However, The New Yorker was not designed to save readers time.

As part of the nation’s growing divide over matters of fact, a year earlier, Tennessee became the first state to ban the teaching of evolution. John Scopes, a biology teacher, was found guilty of teaching it. The ACLU had been looking to challenge Tennessee’s law, the Act Prohibiting the Teaching of the Evolution Theory, which infringed on free speech. They initially intended to defend Scopes. That plan changed when William Jennings Bryan joined the prosecution, leading Clarence Darrow to agree to defend Scopes.

The Scopes Trial led to a media circus, as well as “dozens of preachers and psalm singers” (416). Bryan sought to put the theory of evolution on trial. The judge sided with him and refused to allow the testimony of biologists. Darrow called Bryan to the witness stand and subjected him to a rigorous cross-examination. The judge later ordered to have Bryan’s testimony expunged from the public record. The jury found Scopes guilty. Five days later, Bryan died, leaving in his wake a legacy of fundamentalism, despite reporters’ mockery of both him and his followers. For Walter Lippmann, the battle between Bryan and Darrow was rooted in how people decided on facts. Did truth arise from faith or reason? More importantly, what happened when the citizens of a democracy could not generally agree on what was true? Would majority rule take precedence? Lippmann stumbled upon a quandary: People of faith could not accept reason “as the arbiter of truth without giving up on faith,” while the person of reason could not accept “that truth lies outside the realm of reason” (419). If citizens disagreed over matters of fact, they would disagree over how to educate their children in public schools.

In this chapter, Lepore describes two key periods of rapid social progress—the Progressive Era and the Roaring Twenties, also sometimes referred to as the Jazz Age. During the Progressive Era, the US experienced mass industrialization and the introduction of federal agencies specifically dedicated to the preservation of natural resources. Negative consequences of this period of reform most notably include the rise of the eugenics movement and, shortly thereafter, the mechanization of war. As Lepore notes, Progressivists failed to address Jim Crow, leading to a rise in lynching as a terrorist tool. She overlooks, however, the relationship between Progressive reform and imperialism. Both the paternalist sentiments of Progressive Era reformers and a common belief in social Darwinism likely led to the notion that some peoples were better off being led by Western nations than being allowed to remain autonomous. Undoubtedly, the exploitation of some countries, particularly in Africa, for their mineral wealth, fomented the growth of industry during this period.

During this time, there was also a shift of many citizens from rural areas to cities. In addition to the African Americans who left the South during the Great Migration—the results of both a desire to escape from racist violence and the devastation of cotton crops due to the boll weevil—many Americans left farms for jobs in offices and factories. The employment of white women in some of these positions led to the use of the 14th Amendment to ensure their protection as a class. The potential problem with this argument, as Lepore suggests, is that these legal protections were rooted in essentialist ideas about sex. Instead of reforming labor protections so that they would address general concerns about workplace safety and the exploitation of labor, particularly when women were the employees, reformers cast women as relatively weaker than men—a position that would be used decades later to stall the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Compromises, such as those that white women may have made for workplace safety at the expense of their civil rights, were also made in racially marginalized communities. W. E. B. Du Bois’s compromise during the First World War, which backfired, may have influenced his later radical politics.

An offshoot of the suffragist movement, the social purity movement was also largely influenced by soldiers returning from the First World War, some of whom had contracted venereal diseases. This resulted in programs to instill uniformity in hygiene and daily habits, which were unprecedented before this war. Industries also catered to the daily needs of deployed soldiers.

The 1920s was a period of both pulsing innovation and social regression. The Harding administration sought to make the Constitution sacred, as though the nation’s prosperity was connected to its foundational principles. Additionally, the US became more inward-looking, reverting to the isolationist stance it took before World War I. The treatment of Mexicans during this period mirrors their contemporary struggles to achieve citizenship status, as well as the nation’s willingness to exploit their labor without offering them a path to citizenship.

The Harlem Renaissance flourished both despite and in response to the rise in white supremacist violence and oppression. Figures from the Harlem Renaissance, who were also often active politically, sought to highlight the integrality of Black culture and Black people to the national heritage while organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan were dedicated to historical erasure and mythologizing. Their efforts to manipulate the national historical narrative were aided by the popularity of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed the vigilante group as underdogs turned heroes.

By the end of the 1920s, the nation’s optimism seemed limitless. While accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Herbert Hoover declared his belief that poverty would one day come to an end on Earth. American economic growth was an engine that never stopped running. Privately, Hoover worried that Americans mistook him for a kind of superman.

Europe, on the other hand, had fallen into a depression by 1928, still saddled with the consequences of the First World War. Four years later, New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt stumped for the Democratic nomination, promoting “a new brand of liberalism that borrowed as much from Bryan’s populism as from Wilson’s Progressivism” (428). Roosevelt later heard at the governor’s mansion in Albany that he had secured his party’s nomination for president. He called the convention hall in Chicago and announced that he’d be arriving soon. It was the first time a presidential nominee had ever appeared to accept the nomination. In his acceptance speech, Roosevelt promised Americans “a new deal” (429).

In November, Roosevelt defeated Hoover resoundingly, earning huge margins in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Roosevelt’s success was partly due to the stock market crash of 1929, which led to the Great Depression. The public seemed to blame Hoover for this economic turndown. After his election, the parties arranged themselves according to their respective position on the New Deal—blue-collar workers, farmers, nonwhite people, liberal intellectuals, and some women and industrialists formed the New Deal coalition. Together, they marked the arrival of a new form of liberalism. Both parties feared that newly enfranchised women would form their own voting bloc; predictably, both set about recruiting women by forming divisions dedicated to that bloc. Carrie Chapman Catt, head of the League of Women Voters, encouraged other women voters to join one of the major political parties instead of forming their own party, believing that it would be easier to get things done by working within existing frameworks. More women became Democrats than Republicans, however.

The nation, sinking under the Great Depression, collectively believed that the economic crisis was so serious that only a president with “the powers of a dictator,” thereby overruling congressional obstructionism, could address it (433). On the matter of dictators, the world watched Germany. American reporters had not initially taken Hitler seriously. On January 30, 1933, he proved them wrong when he was appointed chancellor of Germany. Joseph Goebbels, the head of the newly established Ministry of Propaganda, noted in his diary two months later that broadcasting in Germany was controlled completely by the state. Hitler next outlawed all political parties except for the Nazi Party and withdrew from the League of Nations. Jews who tried to flee to the US were burdened by a German law that forbade them from withdrawing more than a few dollars, and American immigration laws that forbade the entrance of anyone who might become the citizenry’s responsibility.

In the US, bank and business failures were at their zenith. Both the New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade suspended trading. The Emergency Banking Act declared that banks would only be opened once they proved to be financially sound.

High rates of unemployment ensured that more Americans would be at home listening to the radio. Some also became more attracted to distributive economic policies. During the Great Depression, around 75,000 Americans joined the Communist Party. Also in the 1930s, bipartisan concern rose over arms manufacturers. Americans had always owned guns, and states had regulated their production, sale, and storage. It was illegal to carry concealed weapons in many Southern states, including Florida, Texas, and Louisiana. In the West, sheriffs routinely collected visitors’ guns.

In 1871, the National Rifle Association (NRA) was founded “as a sporting and hunting association” by a former New York Times reporter (445). In the 1920s and 1930s, the NRA both supported and sponsored firearms regulation by lobbying for state gun control laws that

[t]axed the private ownership of automatic weapons (‘machine guns’), mandated licensing for handgun dealers, introduced waiting periods for handgun buyers, required permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon, and created a licensing system for dealers (445).

Firearms legislation passed in 1934 and 1938 “enjoyed bipartisan support” and was upheld by the Supreme Court (446). Business interests, particularly members of the du Pont family, opposed both gun control legislation and New Deal legislation. In July 1934, they convened with fellow businessmen “in the offices of General Motors in New York, where they founded a ‘propertyholders’ [sic] association’ to oppose the New Deal” (446). This later became the American Liberty League, which particularly objected to Social Security.

Also by 1934, Josef Goebbels, hoping to sow division in the US via radio, broadcast pro-Nazi English- and foreign-language propaganda to parts of Africa, Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, and Australia. In North America, particularly the US, it sent false news in English which focused on claims that there was a Communist-Jewish conspiracy at work in the nation. Newspapers began calling this propaganda “fake news.” Roosevelt, too, had been accused of using the radio to propagandize. On June 27, 1936, Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

The failure of Hoover’s presidency, as Lepore depicts it, reveals the problem of leadership. By this time, Americans seemed to believe that a president alone could guarantee both prosperity and safety—a myth perpetuated by Warren G. Harding, yet initiated by earlier expansions of executive power, which turned the presidency into a cult of personality.

The ascendancy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt resulted in the creation of a new cult of personality that effectively united the two major political parties. Like William Jennings Bryan, Roosevelt had the ability to connect with those who were ideologically opposed to him. On the other hand, Hoover’s choice to continue Harding’s legacy of keeping the government out of business affairs, instead of addressing the Great Depression, tarnished his legacy. He failed to tailor his policy platform to the urgency of the economic crisis. This resulted in the creation of a new Democratic Party—one that was less rural, more cosmopolitan, and more diverse. The instability of the era also led numerous Western nations to see comfort, however illusory, in authoritarian power. Roosevelt harnessed the power of the radio, aided by the nation’s idleness, to disperse his message and to wield his own overwhelming paternalist authority, however benevolent.

What may be most striking to the contemporary reader is the nation’s shift in its attitudes toward gun rights since this period. Ironically, it was the South and the West—that is, the regions that are now most fervently against gun control—that most often sought gun legislation. Lepore illustrates how powerful corporations, even during a period of Big Business’s unpopularity, sought to manipulate public opinion. It is possible, too, that growing concerns about communism and a burgeoning civil rights movement among African Americans led to the kind of fears among many white Americans that would have encouraged the ownership of firearms.