I am working my way through “These Truths,” the masterful history of America by Harvard professor and “New Yorker” contributor Jill Lepore. I’ve reached Reconstruction and am heading for Robber Barons. It should be required reading in every high school student’s American History class.
It won’t be, because it is too long, too complex through fetchingly written, and will be too honest for many timid and/or politically conservative Departments of Education to approve. The truth about America, particularly the gap between its stated ideals and actual behavior is controversial, so bland is often the order of the day. Pity.
One of the glories of this book is its lucid style, another its pausing often in the main progress to discuss artistic, scientific, and social developments and how they interact with politics and economics. For example, in two brief pages Lepore explains how English citizens in the 17th Century used the all-but-forgotten Magna Carta as precedent to demand that Charles I respect the power of Parliament. This in turn provided a model for American colonists to demand representative government from George III.
She points out how the rise of the railroad and telegraph impacted the slavery debate, how newspapers and photography helped elect Lincoln and make the reality of Civil War visible to the world. Little tidbits throw surprising light on unexpected subjects. Who knew, for example, that Longfellow was an abolitionist whose school text favorite, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” was inspired by the execution of John Brown, viewed by many abolitionists as a holy martyr, rather than a domestic terrorist?
Lepore’s book is also noteworthy for how often she has found a perfectly on point quotation to illustrate some issue. Here are a few delightful examples, many of which make us yearn for a politics that was populated with Enlightenment characters who had thought hard about democratic government.
At the end of the Revolution, a New York banquet in George Washington’s honor featured 13 toasts, one for each colony. They were to fallen heroes, allies, liberty, and one by Washington himself that our present leaders might be inclined to ignore. “May America be an Asylum to the persecuted of the Earth.”
When it came time to devise a Constitution in 1787, the attendees agreed to deliberate in secret to keep popular passions from ruining the process, but also pledged “to argue without asperity, and to endeavor to convince the judgement without hurting the feelings of each other.” Those were the days.
The Founders also showed a seemly ability to think anew and to avoid the sin of pride. Once the new charter was adopted, its father, Madison, had some second thoughts. He had assumed, in a country small in size and population, politics would be personal, men would know the people representing them. But America grew rapidly and parties, or factions, assumed unexpected importance. “The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained,” Madison worried. Party bosses, demagogues and other bad actors might arise.
Several fascinating quotes also bear on Constitutional interpretation, and seem to have been ignored by fans of originalism, the dubious fad promoted by Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, which claims we should figure out what the founders meant and never vary from it.
Jefferson, as an old man, refuted such a notion. “Laws and institutions must go hand and hand with the progress of the human mind….To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past.” And, after Madison’s death when his “Notes” on the making of the Constitution were published, one reader remarked that “The Constitution threatens to become a subject of infinite sects, like the Bible.”
Many of the hot button issues of today have a long pedigree — tariffs, income inequality, racial, gender, and ethnic bias. We learn Samuel Morse, of telegraph fame, originally designed his code to be used by the government to defeat an imaginary Catholic plot to take over the country. New York lawyer, George Templeton Strong, whose diary became familiar in Ken Burns’ “Civil War,” looked down his patrician nose at Irish immigrants. “Our Celtic fellow citizens are almost as remote from us in temperament and constitution as the Chinese.”
And as the North-South split over the issue of slavery grew worse and worse, many worried. Near the end of a long life, the great Chief Justice John Marshall said, “The Union has been preserved thus far by miracles. I fear they cannot continue.”
Lincoln despaired as Kansas became the scene of bloodshed over the slave question, and worried that if the Know-Nothing Party gained power, the Declaration would have to be amended to read: “All men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” If that happened, he said it might be better to live in some country where there was “no pretense of loving liberty…Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
Charles Dickens visited America during the run-up to War when Congress had become the site of over 100 incidents of violence between members, or as he wrote “the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought.”
In such an environment, there was concern about the Bill of Rights’ insistence on an unfettered press. Until the mid-19th Century, newspapers were strictly partisan party organs, like Fox News today, and delighted in rousing the rabble. But a more widely distributed, penny press began to change that. One of its pioneers was James Gordon Bennett of the “New York Herald.” It became what he called a “free press,” not free from government censorship, but from political affiliation. “We shall support no party. We shall endeavor to record facts.”
When Civil War came, the South chose the opposite course. It sought to suppress dissent at the expense of free speech. Georgia went so far as to pass a law making dissent punishable by death. Frederick Douglass was inspired to proclaim that, “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.”
I can’t recommend “These Truths” more highly, but I understand 770 pages of our complicated history may not be to every taste. So here’s another recommendation.
To celebrate free speech while we’ve still got it, head for YouTube where Randy Rainbow is doing to Donald Trump what Weird Al did to Michael Jackson. Show tunes meet the Donald in “Kavanaugh,” to the tune of “Camelot,” “Trump’s Favorite Things” from “The Sound of Music,” ”There is Nothing like a Wall” from “South Pacific,” and many more. As long as there are jesters free to dissent, there is hope the Emperor’s lack of clothes will be noticed.