These Truths: A History of the United States, by Jill
Lepore
Review by Dave Gamrath
Book Review:
Reading American history can be highly
informative. Looking at where we’ve been
can give us a clearer understanding about where we are, and where we’re
headed. In These Truths, author Jill
Lepore shows how history does repeat itself, and how key issues of today’s
America are really a continuation of the past.
The title of Lepore’s book, These Truths, derives from
the Declaration of Independence. This
seemingly simple statement of fact, Lepore points out, is anything but. “We hold these truths to be self-evident”. But who are “we”? What is true?
What counts as evidence? Lepore
describes how rival interpretations of our founding principles and declarations
have driven contention throughout our history.
America has rarely been a country at rest or at peace with itself.
Lepore describes how the injustice in America today is
nothing new. There has always been
injustice in America, ever since Columbus arrived in 1492. Columbus claimed ownership of these “new
lands”, conveniently determining that the natives were savages and infidels who
couldn’t rightfully own anything. Years
ticked by, and the floodgates opened.
Between 1500 and 1800, roughly 2.5 million immigrants came to the
Americas, as well as 12 million Africans slaves. During this time, as many as 50 million
Native Americans died, mostly of disease.
The details of these events, laid out by Lepore, are staggering.
Lepore describes many amazing things within our
history, including our efforts at building a country based on democracy. But other key American values, such as freedom
and liberty, were largely a myth, unless you were fortunate to be a white man
who owned property. Reading These
Truths, it came to me that “injustice” is arguably the strongest theme in
American history, with slavery at its core.
Slavery didn’t start in America, but many of our Founding Fathers
embraced it, including Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. Even Columbus was in the slave trade, serving
on Portuguese slave ships. Lepore
provides extensive history on American slavery, some details of which I knew,
such as slaves being tortured, but also many sickening details I didn’t, such
as common methods of slave torture (broken on the wheel, starved to death,
burned at the stake, roasted over a slow fire, gibbeted alive, etc.). I knew that George Washington had rotten
teeth. I didn’t know that he replaced
them with dentures made from a combination of ivory and nine teeth pulled from
the mouth of his slaves. Yeesh. Nasty stuff, it goes on. And on.
By 1820, more than a million slaves had been “sold down the river.” Another million slaves were sold and shipped
west from 1820 to 1860. After the Civil
War, slavery had ended, but segregation had only just begun. The Confederacy lost the war, but won the
peace. Lynching was common; someone in
the South was hanged or burned every four days.
These truths are hard to take, at least for me.
American racism was not just racism against African
Americans. President Andrew Jackson became
an American hero largely through his efforts towards exterminating Native
Americans. Racism was rampant against Asians,
Hispanics, the Irish, Italians and more.
Hatred of “those people” has been a constant American theme, and remains
today. Consider Trump’s ban on Muslims
and southern wall. Hatred of “others” underly
much friction in today’s America.
Our country today seems overwhelmingly divided, and
our government highly dysfunctional. But
compare today to history. Between 1830
to 1860, there were over 100 acts of violence between congressmen, including
melees, brawls, fistfights, duels and street fights. Then came the Civil War. Political violence has a well-worn path in
American history.
The inequality in today’s society is not new. Inequality was as bad in 1900 as today. It took FDR’s New Deal to temper
inequality. But over the past decades,
liberalism weakened, socialism was discredited, and Conservatism gained
strength. Lepore describes in detail the
changes in political campaigning that made this possible, with the rise of “the
lie factory” as a key campaign strategy.
The mantras of “attack, attack, attack” and filling campaigns with “fake
news” arose in the 1930s. Lepore
describes how while liberals floundered, conservatives mastered these tactics,
resulting in a large swing to the right.
Lepore dedicates over 200 pages to more recent
history, defining recent history that led to America today. In the Epilogue, Lepore states that “the
American experiment had not ended. A
nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos”, “a nation of
immigrants cannot close its borders”, and “a nation of contradiction, liberty
in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever,
over the meaning of its history.” This
fight continues daily.
Lepore puts as much responsibility for our
rightward-swing on liberals as on conservatives, stating that “liberals did not
try, spurning electoral politics in favor of judicial remedies, political
theater, and purity crusades.
Conservatives rested their claim to political power on winning elections
and winning history.” Lepore writes that
the stories told by Republicans of the greatness of our past were “fantasy” and
“fairytales”, and although “useless as history”, were very useful politically,
and “spoke to the earnest yearnings and political despair of Americans who
joined the Tea Party, and who rallied behind Donald Trump’s promise to make
America great again.”
Lepore closes her book with a sailing metaphor,
writing “Liberals, blown down by the slightest breeze, had neglected to trim
the ship’s sails, leaving the canvas to flap and tear in a rising wind, the
rigging flailing. Huddled belowdecks,
they had failed to plot a course, having lost sight of the horizon and their
grasp on the compass. On deck,
conservatives had pulled up the ship’s planking to make
bonfires of rage: they had courted the
popular will by demolishing the idea of truth itself, smashing the ship’s very
mast. It would fall to a new generation
of Americans to repair the tattered ship.”
It will be interesting to see how this boat ride
develops. Most likely we’ll need a fair
amount of Dramamine.
Reviewer Rating
of Book:
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