These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  Baron, otherwise serene and oracular, grew testy, evading Issenberg’s question and pointing out, irrelevantly, that the Post had not hesitated to release the contents of the emails because “the Clinton campaign never said that they had been falsified.”175

  Issenberg asked Schrage why Facebook hadn’t fact-checked purported news stories before moving them in the News Feed rankings. Schrage talked about Facebook’s “learning curve.” Mainly, he dodged. “It is not clear to me that with 1.8 billion people in the world in lots of different countries with lots of different languages, that the smart strategy is to start hiring editors,” he said.176 As congressional hearings would subsequently confirm, Facebook had hardly any strategy at all, smart or otherwise, except to maximize its number of users and the time they spent on Facebook.

  “Where’s news judgment?” called out someone from the audience, directing the question at the entire panel.

  Zucker shrugged. “At the end of the day, it is up to the viewer.”177 He was answered by groans.

  Carroll, a longtime eminence in the profession of journalism and a member of the Pulitzer board, summed up the discussion. “I know that there are some organizations or some journalists or some observers who feel like the media ought to put on a hair shirt,” she said. “I think that’s crap.”178 And the evening ended, with no one from any of the campaigns, or from cable news or social media or the wire services, having expressed even an ounce of regret, for anything.

  The election had nearly rent the nation in two. It had stoked fears, incited hatreds, and sown doubts about American leadership in the world, and about the future of democracy itself. But remorse would wait for another day. And so would a remedy.

  If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.

  —Reinhold Niebuhr,

  The Irony of American History,

  1952

  Glenn Ligon’s 2012 Double America, in neon and paint, was partly inspired by the opening words of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

  Epilogue

  THE QUESTION ADDRESSED

  IT HAD BEEN UNUSUALLY WARM IN PHILADELPHIA THE summer of the constitutional convention, but by the middle of September, when the last delegates mounted their horses and headed for home, the weather had begun to turn. By October, when The Federalist Papers began appearing in newspapers, asking Americans to debate the question of “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” the air was as crisp as an autumn apple. In November, as the last apples were pressed into cider, the temperature began to plummet. The day after Christmas, ice closed the Delaware River and kept it shut for months, over a winter so cold that the ground froze as far south as Savannah.1

  It’s been hotter in the years since. The climate of the Constitution is gone. The average annual temperature in Philadelphia at the time of the constitutional convention was 52 degrees Fahrenheit.2 By the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, it had risen to 59 degrees.3 When the world began to warm, the temperature over land rose faster than the temperature over water, but the oceans heated up, too. Ice caps melted, seas rose, storms grew.4 Not long after Donald Trump announced that he would withdraw the United States from the nearly two-hundred-member-nation Paris climate accord, a declaration he described as “a reassertion of America’s sovereignty,” a trillion-ton iceberg the size of the state of Delaware broke off of Antarctica.5

  For millions of years the continents had drifted away from one another. In 1492 they’d met again, in America, a new world. Sixteenth-century conquerors debated the nature of justice. Seventeenth-century dissenters hoped to find nearness to God. Eighteenth-century rationalists, cleaving themselves from the past, hoped to found a new beginning, a place out of time.

  The United States began with an act of severing: “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . . a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Its Constitution aspired to create a more perfect union, but it was slaves and the descendants of slaves who, by dissolving the bonds of tyranny, helped to realize the promise of that union, in bonds of equality. Those new bonds tied Americans to one another, and to the world. Telegraph wires stretched across the Atlantic, sunk to the ocean’s floor. Then came steamships, airplanes, supersonic jets, satellites, pollution, atomic bombs, the Internet. “In the beginning, all the world was America,” John Locke had written. By the close of the Cold War, some commentators concluded that America had become all the world, as if the American experiment had ended, in unrivaled triumph.

  The American experiment had not ended. A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. A nation founded on universal rights will wrestle against the forces of particularism. A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquillity. A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders. And a nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.

  And still the waters rose. Trump’s election started a tidal wave. Not a few political commentators announced the end of the Republic. Trump’s rhetoric was apocalyptic and absolute; the theme of his inaugural address was “American carnage.” The rhetoric of his critics was no less dystopian—angry, wounded, and without hope.6

  As Trump began his term in office, Americans fought over immigration and guns, sex and religion. They fought, too, over statues and monuments, plaques and names. The ghosts of American history rattled their chains. In Frederick, Maryland, a Chevy pickup truck carted a bronze bust of Roger Taney, the judge who’d made the decision in Dred Scott, from the city hall to a cemetery outside of town. In St. Louis, cranes pulled up two Confederate memorials—their plinths spray-painted “BLACK LIVES MATTER” and “END RACISM”—and put them into storage. New Orleans planned to take down statues of four Confederate leaders, which led to mayhem, seepage from what secessionists once described as a “sea of blood,” the bursting of a dam. In Charlottesville, Virginia, where a statue of Robert E. Lee had been slated to come down, armed white supremacists marched through the city; one ran down a counter-protester and killed her, as if the Civil War had never ended, she the last of the Union dead.7

  The truths on which the nation was founded—equality, sovereignty, and consent—had been retold after the Civil War. Modern liberalism came out of that political settlement, and the United States, abandoning isolationism, had carried that vision to the world: the rule of law, individual rights, democratic government, open borders, and free markets. The fight to make good on the promise of the nation’s founding truths held the country together for a century, during the long struggle for civil rights. And yet the nation came apart all the same, all over again.

  Conservatives based their claim to power on liberalism’s failure, which began in the 1960s, when the idea of identity replaced the idea of equality. Liberals won gains in the courts while losing state houses, governors’ offices, and congressional seats. By the 1990s, conservative Robert Bork insisted, “Modern 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.”8 But the problem wasn’t that liberals did not succeed in winning popular support; the problem was that liberals did not try, spurning electoral politics in favor of judicial remedies, political theater, an
d purity crusades.

  Conservatives rested their claim to political power on winning elections and winning history. The National Review, William F. Buckley had written in 1955, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” From wanting it to stop, conservatives began wanting history to turn back, not least by making a fetish of the nation’s founding, in the form of originalism. “From the arrival of English-speaking colonists in 1607 until 1965,” Newt Gingrich wrote in 1996, “from the Jamestown colony and the Pilgrims, through de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, up to Norman Rockwell’s paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, there was one continuous civilization built around commonly accepted legal and cultural principles.”9 Since 1965, the year Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration Act, Gingrich argued, that civilization had come undone. Gingrich’s account of America’s past was a fantasy, useful to his politics, but useless as history—heedless of difference and violence and the struggle for justice. It also undermined and belittled the American experiment, making it less bold, less daring, less interesting, less violent, a daffy, reassuring bedtime story instead of a stirring, terrifying, inspiring, troubling, earth-shaking epic. And yet that fairy tale 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 American great again.” Nor was the nostalgia limited to America alone. All over the world, populists seeking solace from a troubled present sought refuge in imagined histories. The fate of the nation-state itself appearing uncertain; nationalists, who had few proposals for the future, gained power by telling fables about the greatness of the past.

  Barack Obama had urged Americans “to choose our better history,” a longer, more demanding, messier, and, finally, more uplifting story. But a nation cannot choose its past; it can only choose its future. And in the twenty-first century, it was no longer clear that choice, in the sense that Alexander Hamilton meant, had much to do with the decisions made by an electorate that had been cast adrift on the ocean of the Internet. Can a people govern themselves by reflection and choice? Hamilton had wanted to know, or are they fated to be ruled, forever, by accident and force, lashed by the violence of each wave of a surging sea?

  The ship of state lurched and reeled. 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 any 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, reckoning what their forebears had wrought, to fathom the depths of the doom-black sea. If they meant to repair the tattered ship, they would need to fell the most majestic pine in a deer-haunted forest and raise a new mast that could pierce the clouded sky. With sharpened adzes, they would have to hew timbers of cedar and oak into planks, straight and true. They would need to drive home nails with the untiring swing of mighty arms and, with needles held tenderly in nimble fingers, stitch new sails out of the rugged canvas of their goodwill. Knowing that heat and sparks and hammers and anvils are not enough, they would have to forge an anchor in the glowing fire of their ideals. And to steer that ship through wind and wave, they would need to learn an ancient and nearly forgotten art: how to navigate by the stars.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IT IS A TRUISM THAT EVERY BOOK TAKES AN AUTHOR A LIFE to write. In this case, the truism is apt. I’ve been teaching much of the material in this book for decades and my first thanks is to my students, whose searching questions have deepened my curiosity, challenged my assumptions, and sharpened my understanding.

  My next thanks is to my colleagues. To write this book, I undertook the incredibly delightful and joyful work of learning and writing about many people, events, ideas, and institutions I’d never studied before and reading the work of generations of distinguished American historians and political scientists. I leaned on their expertise in other ways, too. Extraordinarily generous colleagues read drafts, pointed me to readings, and talked me through trouble spots. Special thanks to David Armitage, David Blight, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Davíd Carrasco, Linda Colley, Nancy Cott, Noah Feldman, Gary Gerstle, Annette Gordon-Reed, John Harpham, Elizabeth Hinton, Adam Hochschild, Tony Horwitz, Maya Jasanoff, Walter Johnson, Jane Kamensky, James Kloppenberg, Ann Marie Lipinski, Louis Menand, Charles Maier, Lisa McGirr, Julie Miller, Martha Minow, Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey, Latif Nasser, Sarah Phillips, Leah Price, Emma Rothschild, Bruce Schulman, Erik Seeman, Rogers Smith, and Sean Wilentz.

  I benefited, as well, from immensely helpful comments from audiences who listened to me present versions of this work as the George Bancroft Memorial Lecture at the U.S. Naval Academy; the Spencer Trask Lecture at Princeton University; the Patten Lectures at Indiana University; the Richard Leopold Lecture on Public Affairs at Northwestern University; the Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; the F.E.L. Priestley Memorial Lectures in the History of Ideas at the University of Toronto; the Distinguished Visiting Fellow Lecture at the University of Connecticut, Storrs; and the Callahan Distinguished Lecture at Case Western Reserve University. I received particularly crucial suggestions during seminars at Harvard, including in the History Department, at the Nieman Foundation, and at the Program on Constitutional Government, as well as during presentations at the American History Seminar at the University of Cambridge and at the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

  All books of this scope represent the culmination of long-waged labors. To write this book, I in many cases revisited stories that I have told before—in lectures, in essays, and in books—about everything from the histories of taxation, debt, and political consulting to the lives of Jane Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, and Barack Obama. I have drawn freely from my earlier teaching, research, and writing, especially from articles originally written for The New Yorker. My boundless thanks, as ever, to my editor there, Henry Finder. Readers of the magazine may recognize the ghosts of old magazine essays haunting these pages, brought to life in new form and for an altogether different purpose—and with endnotes clattering after them like chains.

  Jon Durbin at Norton asked me if I would write this book and I thought he was crazy but I’m glad he asked. Thanks as well to Tina Bennett, for cheering me on. Peter Pellizzari, Thera Webb, and Sean Lavery checked facts, saving me from many an error. Janet Byrne copyedited with peerless care and judiciousness. The amazing Pembroke Herbert compiled illustrations; Rebecca Karamehmedovic tracked down permissions. Marie Pantojan and Don Rifkin at Norton miraculously kept everything on track. The passion and wisdom of my editor at Norton, Robert Weil, are without rival.

  Abiding thanks to dear friends: Adrianna Alty, Elise Broach, Jane Kamensky, Elisabeth Kanner, Lisa Lovett, Liz McNerney, Bruce Schulman, Rachel Seidman, and Denise Webb. Paul and Doris Leek have become my own parents. And to Gideon, Simon, Oliver, and Tim Leek: love, everlasting.

  NOTES

  A Note about the Notes

  This book draws on innumerable primary sources and a sprawling scholarly literature. I have tried both to identify my chief sources and to keep citations brief. I have favored citing primary sources over secondary literature. Full titles appear only at the initial citation. For well-known speeches and public documents that are easily available online—for example, inaugural addresses, nomination acceptance speeches, party platforms, and online editions of manuscript collections—I have generally provided a citation but not a URL. In instances where I have drawn on research I conducted for essays written for The New Yorker, I have provided citations to my original sources rather than to the essays.

  Introduction: THE QUESTION STATED

  1.New-York Packet, October 30, 1787.

  2.September 12, 1787, The Records of the Federal Convention
of 1787, ed. Max Farrand, 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), 2:588.

  3.“An Old Whig IV,” [Philadelphia] Independent Gazetteer, October 27, 1787.

  4.James Madison to William Eustis, July 6, 1819, in The Papers of James Madison, Retirement Series, ed. David B. Mattern, J. C. A. Stagg, Mary Parke Johnson, and Anne Mandeville Colony, 12 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 1:478–80.

  5.New-York Packet, October 30, 1787.

  6.Ibid.

  7.Michael Holler, The Constitution Made Easy (n.p.: The Friends of Freedom, 2008).

  8.Benjamin Franklin, “Observations on Reading History,” May 9, 1731, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (hereafter PBF), online edition at Franklinpapers.org.

  9.David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding [1748],” Essays and Treatises on Various Subjects (Boston: J. P. Mendum, 1868), 54.

  10.For example, Ross Douthat, “Who Are We?,” New York Times [hereafter NYT], February 4, 2017.

  11.Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I, ch. 1; Herodotus, The Essential Herodotus, translation, introduction, and annotations by William A. Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2; Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal (1967; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5.

  12.Sir Walter Ralegh, The Historie of the World (London: Walter Burre, 1614), 4.

  13.Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Philadelphia: R. Bell, 1776), 17, 12. James Madison, Federalist No. 14 (1787).

  14.Paine, Common Sense, 18.

  15.Carl Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), xi.