Jill Lepore, “These Truths: History of the United States,” W.W. Norton & Co, 2018, 789 pp.
This book is a political history paying little attention to military and diplomatic history or to social and cultural history. The author spends a lot of time and emphasis on the impact of slavery on the American state up through and including George Washington’s death as well as to the present time. The emphasis this book provides is a portion of our history I had not studied before in any detail.
“These Truths” are those Thomas Jefferson called “sacred and undeniable” and Benjamin Franklin edited to “self-evident; they are political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology, from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine, from talk radio to twenty-first-century Internet polls, from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act, from the printing press to Facebook News.
Lepore criticizes Newt Gingrich for recasting American history into a fairy tale for Republicans. Yet the Gingrich version, fairy tale or not, carried conservatives to power. She states that “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.”
Jill Lepore is a professor at Harvard and the author of several books on American history. She is also a staff writer for the New Yorker.
My Notes:
Pg. xiv: The American experiment of government rests on three political ideas: political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. (More importantly, in my opinion, is the separation of powers and dedication to the rule of law)
Pg. xix: This book contains many episodes in the history of American law and religion, journalism and technology, chiefly because these are places where what is true and what is not, have sometimes gotten sorted out.
Pg. 9: In 1492, about sixty million people lived in Europe, fifteen million fewer than lived in the Americas.
Pg. 84: In the late 1700s, on the American mainland, whites outnumbered blacks, four to one. On the West Indian Islands, blacks outnumbered whites, eight to one. One-quarter of all British troops in British America were stationed in the West Indies, where they protected English colonists from the ever-present threat of slave rebellion. Unsurprisingly, the West Indies supported the tax on stamps that the mainland so adamantly opposed.
Pg. 94: Not all colonists supported the American Revolution. John Adams estimated that about a third of colonists were patriots, a third were Loyalists, and a third never really made a decision about independence.
Lord Dunmore was the British Royal Governor of Virginia at the time of the American Revolution and a foremost adversary of the colonists. Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation. On November 7, 1775, offered freedom to slaves and indentured servants if they declared their loyalty to the British and took up arms in the British military. Edward Rutledge, a member of South Carolina’s delegation to the Continental Congress said that this declaration did more to separate the colonies from Britain than the taxes on tea, the shots at Lexington and Concord, or the siege of Boston. (This threat to slavery certainly would have gotten the aristocratic South on board which otherwise may not have joined. Thomas Paine’s Commonsense pamphlet was also a strong contributor to soliciting support for the revolution)
Pg. 100: During the war, nearly one in five slaves in the US fled in search of British promised liberty. The 15,000 to 20,000 slaves who escaped on British ships were the largest emancipation before Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation declaration.
Pg. 128: The arguments in favor of ratifying the Constitution were best presented in eighty-five essays known as The Federalist Papers, published between October 1787 and May 1788. Alexander Hamilton wrote fifty-one, Madison twenty, and John Jay the rest.
Pg. 147f: In 1799 George Washington, laying on his deathbed, had his wife bring him the two Wills laying on his desk. He gave her one to destroy. The one he did not destroy instructed his executor to free all of his 123 slaves when his wife passed on. Together, Martha and George had a total of 300 slaves when he died. As Washington’s Will was published in newspapers across the land, Martha lived in fear that she would be murdered.
Pg. 158: In 1798 President John Adams attempted to outlaw the opposition while the US was engaged in an undeclared war with France. Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, granting to the president the power to imprison noncitizens he deemed dangerous and to punish printers who opposed his administration: twenty-five people were arrested for sedition. Up to 1798, the Supreme Court had not attempted to rule on the constitutionality of laws, nowhere in the Constitution was this power mentioned. Meanwhile, Jefferson and Madison believing this sedition act unconstitutional, argued that states could rule on this law as unconstitutional.
Pg. 168: Marbury v. Madison, (1803), was a U.S. Supreme Court case that established the principle of judicial review in the United States, meaning that American courts have the power to strike down laws, statutes, and some government actions that contravene the U.S. Constitution. Decided in 1803, Marbury remains the single most important decision in American constitutional law. The Court's landmark decision established that the U.S. Constitution is actual "law", not just a statement of political principles and ideals, and helped define the boundary between the constitutionally separate executive and judicial branches of the American form of government. At the end of his opinion in this decision, Chief Justice John Marshall maintained that the Supreme Court's responsibility to overturn unconstitutional legislation was a necessary consequence of their sworn oath of office to uphold the Constitution as instructed in Article Six of the Constitution.
Note: As of 2014, the United States Supreme Court has held 176 Acts of the U.S. Congress unconstitutional. After Marbury, it was 57 years before the Court ruled another law unconstitutional; see the 1857 Dred Scott decision.
Pg. 170: James Monroe was sent by Jefferson to negotiate the sale of New Orleans and Florida for $2 million, he was authorized to pay up to $10 million if necessary. Unexpectedly, Monroe was offered the sale of the entire Louisiana Territory for $15 million. Monroe, unauthorized, made the purchase.
Pg. 175: Sally Hemmings had seven children by Jefferson, only four lived to adulthood. They all could have passed for white, including Sally.
Pg. 179: The Missouri Compromise (1820): slavery was prohibited north of the 36°30′ parallel, excluding Missouri. The Missouri Compromise was controversial at the time, as many worried that the country had become lawfully divided along sectional lines; in any event, Missouri entered the Union as a slave state and Maine as a Free State. In 1854 the Compromise was effectively repealed in the Kansas–Nebraska Act and declared unconstitutional in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). This increased tensions over slavery and eventually led to the Civil War.
Pg. 183: By 1821, property qualifications for voting no longer existed in twenty-one out of twenty-four states. In 1824 eighteen out of twenty-four states held popular elections for delegates to the Electoral College.
Pg. 191: The US was born as a republic and grew into a democracy, and, as it did, it split in two, unable to reconcile its system of government with the institution of slavery. And, this with only 1% of the population actually owning a slave (P. 223).
Pg.202: Before the Civil War, Cotton had become the most valuable commodity in the Atlantic world. The Atlantic slave trade had been closed in 1808 but the inner-state sale of slaves was thriving. Slavery wasn’t an aberration in an industrializing economy; slavery was its engine.
Pg. 250: With the American conquest over Mexico and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the US acquired one million square miles of Mexico, and the US population had grown to 23.2 million, Mexico’s population was 7.5 million.
Pg. 268: Only once, in Marbury v. Madison, had the Supreme Court overturned federal legislation. But Judge Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) chose to do it again when, writing for a 7-2 majority, he declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. His logic was staggering: he argued that the men who wrote the Constitution considered people of African descent ‘beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.’ No ‘negro of the African race,’ he ruled, could ever claim the rights and privileges of citizenship in the US.’
Pg. 318: President Johnson’s policy of amnesty and pardons of Confederates resulted by 1866 in southern states passing ‘black codes,’ new, racially-based laws that effectively continued slavery by way of indentures, sharecropping, and other forms of service. In South Carolina, children whose parents were charged with failing to teach them ‘habits of industry and honesty’ were taken from their families and placed with white families as apprentices in positions of unpaid labor.’ And then rose the Ku Klux Klan, founded in Tennessee in 1866. (President Grant would squash the Klan, but after his defeat, Reconstruction was halted and in 1877 and segregation returned with a vengeance.)
Pg. 319: On February 2, 1866, the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act, the first federal law to define citizenship. “All persons born in the US and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the US.’ Johnson vetoed it in March. Congress, in turn, for the first time ever, overrode his veto and began work on the 14th and 15th amendments.
Pg. 321ff: The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 laid out the process for readmitting Southern states into the Union and divided the former Confederacy into five military districts, each ruled by a military general. Congress made readmission to the Union contingent on the ratification of the 14th amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States—including former slaves—and guaranteed all citizens “equal protection of the laws.” (Persons had to be subject to US laws. Thus, Indians were excluded in this manner as they were, at the time, considered citizens of sovereign nations.).
Section 1, Clause 1, of the Fourteenth Amendment, reads: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
Pg. 376: Constitutional Amendments are notoriously difficult to pass, but not the 1913 Sixteenth Amendment allowing a progressive income tax. (Note: this amendment provided an alternate source of income to the government other than tariffs and liquor taxes, providing the landscape for the Prohibition movement).
Pg. 390: The American Civil War killed 750,000 in four years of fighting which looked minuscule once WWI occurred. Within the first eight weeks of the WWI, nearly 400,000 Germans were killed, wounded, sick, or missing. In 1916, over a matter of mere months, there were 800,000 military casualties in Verdun and 1.1 million at the Somme. But civilians were slaughtered too. The Ottoman government massacred as many as 1.5 million Armenians. When WWI was over, nearly 40 million people had been killed and another 20 million wounded. The US had only 116,000 casualties in WWI.
Pg. 392: Beginning in 1907, with Indiana, the world’s first sterilization law was passed resulting in two-thirds of American states passing such laws. Between 1907 and 1963 over 64,000 US individuals were sterilized.
Pg. 393: Congress passed a Sedition Act in 1918, the first since the 1798 Sedition Act which had arrested fewer than two dozen people. Now over 2,000 were arrested and 1,000 convicted. Supreme Court appeals failed.
Pg. 409f: Notably, the 1924 Immigration Act, setting quotas, did not restrict immigration from Mexico. However, Congress alternatively required passports and visas which allowed Mexicans to cross the border to work temporarily but denied access to citizenship. Between 1890 and 1920, some 1.5 million Mexicans entered. However, virtually all Asians were forbidden from immigrating to America under the Act. According to the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian, the purpose of the act was "to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity.”
Pg. 415: In 1925 Tennessee became the first state to ban the teaching of evolution. The ACLU, founded in 1917 to combat the Red Scare, convinced Scopes, a temporary teacher, to test the law; Scopes lost, as expected, but the shenanigans exercised by Tennessee kept the case from being appealed—the original ACLU intent.
Pg. 423ff: By 1929, a quarter of US households owned stocks, compared to less than 1 percent a generation before. When Hoover was elected president in 1928, the DJIA teetered at 240, a record high; then in 1929, it rose past 380. Then retreated to 326 and then dropped to 198, losing 40 percent. Unemployment climbed from 9 percent in 1930, to 16 percent in 1931, to 23 percent in 1932, by which time nearly twelve million Americans were out of work.
Pg. 442: In economics, the Gini coefficient, sometimes called Gini index, or Gini ratio, is a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income or wealth distribution of a nation's residents, and is the most commonly used measure of inequality. An Italian statistician named Corrado Gini is credited with its origin. In short: if all the income in the world were earned by one person and everyone else earned nothing, the world would have a Gini index of one. If everyone in the world earned the exact same amount, the index would be zero.
Pg. 458: In 1936 Gallup predicted that Literary Digest would forecast that Alf Landon would defeat FDR in a landslide and that the Digest would be wrong. Gallup was right on both counts. (Blacks, for instance, were not included in the Digests polling).
Pg. 464: Presiding over the country during the Great Depression and the New Deal, the Hughes Court, dominant through the 1937 term, struck down many of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies. Roosevelt's frustration with the Court led to his so-called "court-packing scheme", a 1937 proposal—defeated in Congress—to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court in order to affect its ideological position. However, after this threat passed the Court discontinued its opposition: called “The switch in time that saved nine.”
Pg. 484: Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941: Japanese bombers sank four battleships, destroyed nearly 200 American planes, killed more than 2,400 Americans, and wounded another 1,100. All while the US and Japan were still engaged in diplomacy. On December 11, 1941, Hitler inexplicably declared war on the US—Roosevelt would probably have had a difficult time convincing Congress to declare war on Germany as it was Japan that attacked us. (More than 16 million American men and women served during the war).
Pg. 494: On February 19, 1942, another day that would live in infamy, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the confinement of 112,000 Japanese, to be confined in Concentration camps, 79,000 were citizens. In 1943 the Supreme Court upheld this incarceration.
Pg. 525: Computers are often left out of the study of history and government, but, starting at the end of WWII, history, and government cannot be understood without them. Democracies rely on an informed electorate, computers would explode and unsettle the very nature of knowledge.
Pg. 527: The end of WWII marked the dawn of an age of affluence, widely shared. It led both to a new direction for liberalism—away from an argument for government regulation of business and toward an insistence on individual rights—and to a new form of conservatism, dedicated to the fight against communism and deploying to new ends the rhetoric of freedom. The author describes the GI Bill as the origin of postwar prosperity that created a veterans-only welfare state. The bill extended to the sixteen million Americans who served in the war a series of benefits, including a free, four-year college education, zero-down-payment low-interest loans for homes and businesses. Some eight million Americans took advantage of the educational benefits. (However, this same bill exacerbated inequality as it excluded women from benefits, ruling that they had served as civilians in the war. Pg. 529)
Pg. 552: In 1951 the Supreme Court gave a boost to Senator Joseph McCarthy when it upheld the Smith Act of 1940 that free speech, press, and assembly did not extend to communists.
Pg. 559: In 1948, less than 5 percent of American homes had a television—by 1959 90 percent of homes had one. (The first TV I ever saw was in 1949 at the fire-station in Madison, WI).
Pg. 569: After Eisenhower was elected President and Billy Graham’s influence sky-rocketed with evangelicals, Eisenhower chose to become a Presbyterian to enhance his political position. His administration then initiated the national prayer breakfasts, mandated the inclusion of ‘In God We Trust” on all money and added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.
Pg. 573: The Smith Act, formally Alien Registration Act of 1940, U.S. federal law passed in 1940 made it a criminal offense to advocate the violent overthrow of the government or to organize or be a member of any group or society devoted to such advocacy. However, modifications were made in 1957 with Yates v. United States, decided by the Supreme Court of the United States that held that the First Amendment protected radical and reactionary speech unless it posed a "clear and present danger."
Pg. 604: (Note: the Bay of Pigs occurred in 1961, the Soviet Missiles in Cuba in 1962) Eisenhower OK’d the planning, and Kennedy, in April 1961, approved the plan for the October 1961 Bay Of Pigs Cuban invasion, using disgruntled Cubans. Castro’s forces met them at the beaches and captured or killed them all. The following summer (1962) U2 flyovers detected Soviet missile’s being deployed in Cuba. The US set up a blockade to prevent any more nuclear material reaching the Cubans; at the last moment, Khrushchev backed off and had his ships turn back.
Pg. 637: Democrats in 1970 began forming a new coalition of the left, composed of the young, the black, the poor, the well-educated, the socially alienated, minority groups, and intellectuals—while relegating Middle America and especially white union labor to the ranks of racists.
Pg. 638: Nixon (cynically) proposed a guaranteed income plan he called the Family Assistance Plan (1969). It would have eradicated the welfare system and eliminated social workers and many social programs and replaced them with a cash payment to everyone earning below a certain wage level. He told Haldeman to make a big play for the plan, but be sure it’s killed by Democrats—and it was.
Pg. 647: The public was divided on many issues relating to women, but in the 1960s and 1970s, and well into the 1980s, those divisions did not fall along partisan lines. Only in 1980 did the two parties place legalized abortion on their platforms—Republicans against, Democrats for. Likewise, gun ownership and gun safety legislation was not a partisan issue before 1970.
Pg. 656: Conservatives had been trying since the 1930s to dismantle the New Deal coalition and to take over the Republican Party. In the 1970s and ‘80s, by bringing Catholics, evangelical Christians, and white southern Democrats into their own coalition, they finally succeeded. Reagan’s platform incorporated ‘End abortion Now” and “Stop ERA,” along with his tax cut proposals.
Pg. 657: The economy and moral downturn that would be called a ‘malaise’ during Carter’s administration in 1977, had first become visible in 1973, during the OPEC oil embargo. In a matter of months, the cost of gasoline increased by a factor of five, the Dow lost 37 percent, and Japanese vehicles out-competed Detroit.
Pg. 658: By 1973 the economy began to falter in ways that intensified battles over the role and rights of women and soon enough, over guns. Beginning in 1973, and well into the 1990s, real earnings for all but the very wealthiest Americans remained flat or declined. The real wages of the average male worker dropped by 10 percent. To make up for shrinking family income, more married women began working. They began arguing for government-supported childcare. Soon, three out of four women between twenty-five and fifty-four were working for pay.
Pg. 671: Between 1970 and 1990, the percentage of illegitimate births rose from 38 percent to 67 percent for blacks and from 6 percent to 17 percent for whites.
Pg. 674: In 1924 the National Origins Act was passed instituting a set of quotas by place of origin. Resulting by 1970 that only 9.6 million Americans, less than 5 percent of the US population, were foreign-born, the lowest percentage in more than a century, and most of these immigrants had come from Europe. But the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act replaced the old quota system with a new system that did not discriminate on the basis of race or national origins and by 2000, foreign-born constituted 29 percent of the population. (This is incorrect: the 2017 census yields about 9% as foreign born). Most from Latin America and East Asia. Immigration moved to the center of American political debate. (2017 census shows that out of a US population of 303 million,, 276 were born in US)
Pg. 679: In 1986 Congress repealed parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act to ensure rights of citizens to keep and bear arms under the second amendment, an interpretation that in 1991 Warren Burger stated was the greatest piece of fraud by special interest groups that he had ever seen. In a few short, violent years, guns became for conservatives what abortion had become for liberals—an issue to reliably get voters to the polls.
Pg. 700: Two-thirds of the rise in the prison population between 1995 and 2000 involved drug convictions. The overwhelming majority of Americans convicted of drug offenses are black men—it’s the New Jim Crow.
Pg. 704: In 1987 the Reagan administration provided broadcasters operating with federal licenses freedom from programming to the public interest or to represent opposing points of view. This repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made possible a new kind of conservative talk radio. The best known among them is Rush Limbaugh who began broadcasting in 1988.
Pg. 742: The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had been exposed to very little public debate. This was not only because of the widening gap between the civilian and the now totally professional military population but also because of the diminishing impact of balanced newspaper and media reporting. The conservative attack on fake media had corroded trust. Even science became politicized.
Pg. 749: The Dow Jones at 14,164 in October 2007, had fallen to 8776 (38%) by the end of 2008. Home values fell by 20%. In the last years of the Bush administration, nearly 900,000 were repossessed.
Pg. 757: By 2011, the top 1 percent of American families were once again earning 24 percent of the nation’s income, a level not seen since 1928. In 2013 the US Census Bureau reported a Gini index of .476, the highest ever recorded in any affluent democracy. (1.0 indicates all the money is owned by one person; 0 indicates everyone has exactly the same amount).
Pg. 763f: In 2012 the US had the highest rate of private gun ownership in the world, twice that of the second-highest, Yemen. Between 1980 and 2012, forty-nine states had passed laws allowing gun owners to carry concealed weapons for personal protection (Illinois was the sole holdout). In 2005 Florida passed a ‘stand your ground’ law.
Pg. 774: Election polling by 2016 was in a crisis, response rates to questions were down in the single digits—it had been above 90 percent in the 1930s and above 60 percent in the 1980s. Every major polling organization had predicted a 2016 win for Hillary Clinton.
Pg. 778: Exit polls showed 52 percent of Catholics and 81 percent of Evangelicals voted for Trump.
Pg. 787: Robert Bork said in the 1990s that liberalism is fundamentally at odds with democratic government because it demands results that ordinary people would not freely choose. Liberals must govern, therefore, through institutions that are largely insulated from the popular will. (I believe both liberals and conservatives are doing this: think of the Administrative State and the Court rulings.)
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), this unanimous decision effectively overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which had allowed separate but equal public education. In Brown, racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. However, the decision did not spell out any sort of method to rectify the violation, and the Court's second decision in Brown II (1955)) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed". At the time, racial segregation in education varied widely from the 17 states that required racial segregation to the 16 in which it was prohibited. The United States and the Soviet Union were both at the height of the Cold War during this time, and U.S. officials, including Supreme Court Justices, were highly aware of the harm that segregation and racism played on America's international image.
Pg. 582: In 1955, in eight states in the South, not a single black child attended school with a white child in spite of the 1954 Brown decision.
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