These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

George Washington as the great ship steamed past Mount Vernon.1 Tyler, a gaunt and ungainly man, had staked his presidency on annexation. But his presidency had been weak from the start, and by the time the treaty was drafted, he was a president without a party. A southern aristocrat who despised populism, Tyler had been nominated as Harrison’s running mate because he’d been a vocal critic of both Jackson and Van Buren, and because Whigs hoped he would carry his crucial home state, Virginia. He’d hardly been queried on his politics, nor had voters been informed of them. As one campaign song had it, “We will vote for Tyler therefore / without a why or wherefore.” But Tyler did have political positions, strenuously held: he had long advocated states’ rights. An opponent of the national bank, Tyler didn’t like anything national; he once complained about the signs he saw all over Washington, DC: “National Hotel, National boot-black, National black-smith, National Oyster-house.”

When Charles Dickens met Tyler while on a headlong tour of the United States that year, the novelist wrote that the president “looked somewhat worn and anxious, and well he might; being at war with everybody.”

Upshur, like Tyler, was a southern aristocrat, disdainful of the people (they “read but little,” he said, “and they do not think at all”). Upshur believed that slavery solved the problem of the tensions between capital and labor by giving even a white man of desperate circumstances a reason to accept the economic order: “However poor, or ignorant or miserable he may be, he has yet the consoling consciousness that there is a still lower condition to which he can never be reduced.”

in which he attempted to illustrate the nation’s laws to its children. “The Constitution is the will, the deliberate will, of the people,” he explained.15 Tocqueville rhapsodized that the American people knew their Constitution as if by heart. “I scarcely ever met with a plain American citizen who could not distinguish with surprising facility the obligations created by the laws of Congress from those created by the laws of his own state,” the Frenchman reported.16 He thought that the American people were fitted to their Constitution like a hand to a glove.

No American president made that reach for empire with more bluster and determination than James K. Polk. Texas was only the beginning. Polk also wanted to admit Florida, as a slave state, and, he hoped, Cuba. (“As the pear, when ripe, falls by the law of gravity into the lap of the husbandman,” Calhoun had once said, “so will Cuba eventually drop into the lap of the Union.”)25 But when Polk sent an agent to Spain, he was told that, rather than sell Cuba to the United States, Spain “would prefer seeing it sunk in the Ocean.”

Polk’s very slender victory at the polls proved a thin reed on which to wage a war of aggression in the name of the American people. Nor did Congress escape heightened scrutiny. In the quarrelsome 1840s, visitors to Congress very often found its deliberations contemptible, but no one was more severe on this subject than the author of Pickwick Papers. During his stay in Washington, Charles Dickens, who had started out as a police reporter, visited the House and Senate every day, sitting in the galleries, taking notes. He found the rooms in the Capitol attractive and well appointed—“both houses are handsomely carpeted,” he allowed—and the Senate was “dignified and decorous,” its deliberations “conducted with much gravity and order.” But meetings of the House of Representatives, he said, were “the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought.” Its members were cowardly, petty, cussed, and degraded. Dickens, for all the flair of his pen, had by no means exaggerated.

Although hardly ever reported in the press, the years between 1830 and 1860 saw more than one hundred incidents of violence between congressmen, from melees in the aisles to mass brawls on the floor, from fistfights and duels to street fights. “It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs,” Dickens wrote, “to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked.” Dickens knew a rogue when he heard one and a circus when he saw one.

If the United States were to acquire territory from Mexico, and if this territory were to enter the Union, would Mexicans become American citizens? Calhoun, now in the Senate, vehemently opposed this idea. “I protest against the incorporation of such a people,” he declared. “Ours is the government of the white man.”

From the stillness of Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau heeded that call to conscience. He refused to pay his taxes, in protest of the war. In 1846, he left the cabin where he’d listened to whip-poor-wills sing Vespers, and went to jail. In an essay on civil disobedience, he explained that, in a government of majority rule, men had been made into unthinking machines, spineless, and less than men, unwilling to cast votes of conscience. (Of the democracy of numbers, he asked, searchingly, “How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.”) Prison, he said, was “the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor.”37 When Emerson asked him why he had gone to jail, Thoreau is said to have answered, “Why did you not?”

In the 1840s, Douglass became one of the nation’s best-known speakers. In 1843 alone, he had more than one hundred speaking engagements. He spoke with force and eloquence. His bearing rivaled that of the greatest Shakespearean actors. Garrison wished Douglass would make himself humbler, and talk plainer, to appear more, that is, like Garrison’s notion of an ex-slave. Bristling at Garrison’s handling, Douglass told his own story and made his own way. In 1845, he published an autobiography that, by revealing details of his origins, exposed him to fugitive slave catchers and imperiled his life; he left the country. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was translated into French, German, and Dutch. Douglass, speaking in Europe, became the most famous black person in the world.41 After buying his freedom, he returned to the United States in 1847 and started a newspaper, the North Star. Its motto and creed: “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.”

These dismal fears were on the mind of eighty-year-old John Quincy Adams, hobbled and infirm, who objected to the war, and to the peace, with his dying breath. On February 21, 1848, the day Polk received the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Quincy Adams collapsed in the House of Representatives, very nearly in the middle of giving a speech, a last gasp of opposition to the war and all that it stood for. He died two days later. Young Abraham Lincoln, who’d been there when Quincy Adams fell to the floor, was among the men appointed to make arrangements for the funeral, held in the House of Representatives. Calhoun served as a pallbearer. Until the death of Lincoln, the death of no other statesman was so closely reported, followed, and witnessed, a national pageant.

The final proslavery element of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law, required citizens to turn in runaway slaves and denied fugitives the right to a jury trial. The law, said Harriet Jacobs, a fugitive slave living in New York, marked “the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population.”76 Bounty hunters and slave catchers hunted down and captured former slaves and returned them to their owners for a fee. Little stopped them from seizing men, women, and children who had been born free, or who had been legally emancipated, and selling them to the South, too. Nothing so brutally exposed the fragility of freedom or the rapaciousness of slavery. “If anybody wants to break a law, let him break the Fugitive-Slave Law,” Longfellow wrote bitterly. “That is all it is for.”

Joining the new party, Lincoln wrestled with the implications of the speeches and writing of far-seeing Frederick Douglass, who had staked the fundamental case against slavery in the common humanity of all people. In August 1854, still working out his best line of argument, Lincoln began speaking at political meetings. That fall, campaigning as a Republican, he decided to challenge Stephen Douglas for his seat in the Senate. He debated Douglas in Peoria before a fascinated crowd. Douglas spoke for three hours and then, after a dinner break, Lincoln spoke for just as long. Lincoln argued that what Douglas advocated was an abomination of the idea of democracy. The matter depended on whether “the negro is a man,” Lincoln said. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that “all men are created equal;” and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another. For this, for making democracy into the abomination of despotism, he said he hated the Kansas-Nebraska Act: I hate it because of the monstrous...

Kansas, left to decide whether it would enter the Union as a free or a slave state, broke out in outright war. Southerners moved into Kansas to vote for slavery; northerners moved into Kansas to vote against it. Eventually, they began shooting one another. Horace Greeley dubbed it “Bleeding Kansas.” Soon there would be blood on the Senate floor. Lincoln privately confided his despair about what he described as the nation’s “progress in degeneracy,” a political regression: As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

But the most powerful speech about the court’s ruling in Dred Scott was the speech given by Frederick Douglass. Jubilant slave owners said Dred Scott had settled the question of slavery for good. Douglass, looking to history, disagreed. “The more the question has been settled,” he wryly remarked, “the more it has needed settling.” In spite of the bleakness of the ruling—he called it a “vile and shocking abomination”—he found much reason for hope. “You may close your Supreme Court against the black man’s cry for justice, but you cannot, thank God, close against him the ear of a sympathising world, nor shut up the Court of Heaven.” Taney’s interpretation of the Constitution would be ignored, Douglass predicted. “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people.”

Frederick Douglass, an early convert, became a theorist of photography. “Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists,” he said. “It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features.” But a photograph was no caricature. Douglass therefore sat, again and again, in a portraitist’s studio: he became the most photographed man in nineteenth-century America, his likeness taken more often than Twain or even Lincoln. Douglass believed both that photography would set his people free by telling the truth about their humanity and that photography would help realize the promise of democracy by capturing rich and poor alike. “What was once the special and exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now the privilege of all,” he said. “The humblest servant girl may now possess a picture of herself such as the wealth of kings could not purchase fifty years ago.” Technological progress, he predicted, would usher in an age of equality, justice, and peace: The growing inter-communication of distant nations, the rapid transmission of intelligence over the globe—the worldwide ramifications of commerce—bringing together the knowledge, the skill, and the mental power of the world, cannot but dispel prejudice, dissolve the granite barriers of arbitrary power, bring the world into peace and unity, and at last crown the world with justice, liberty, and brotherly kindness.5

The debate turned on the interpretation offered by the two men, and by their parties, of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Douglas argued that Lincoln misread the Declaration of Independence if he believed that it applied to blacks as well as whites. “This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis,” Douglas said. “It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.” As to the institution of slavery, that was up to the electorate, Douglas insisted: “I care more for the great principle of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for all the negroes of Christendom.” Douglas charged Lincoln with being a zealot. This Lincoln denied. “I will say here, that I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists,” he said when he took the stage. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He contested Douglas’s assertion that he, Lincoln, believed in the equality of the races. “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races,” he said. “But I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The crowd cheered. “I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man,” he ...

Many in the South pressed for secession. Others urged patience. Two days after the election, the New Orleans Bee printed a one-word response to Lincoln’s victory: “WAIT.”47 They did not wait for long. Six weeks after the election, South Carolinians held a convention in which they voted to repeal the state’s ratification of the Constitution, declaring, “The union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”48 Six states followed—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—and in February 1861 they formed the Confederate States of America, with, as president, former Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, a man the Texan Sam Houston once called “as ambitious as Lucifer and as cold as a lizard.

The truths of the Confederacy disavowed the truths of the Union. The Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, a frail Georgian named Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he made those differences starkly clear. The ideas that lie behind the Constitution “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” Stephens said, but “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and moral condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”52 It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states’ rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy.

“Slavery cannot tolerate free speech,” Frederick Douglass had said, in his “Plea for Free Speech.”54 The seventeenth-century battle for freedom of expression had been fought by writers like John Milton, opposing the suppression of religious dissent; the eighteenth-century struggle for the freedom of the press had been fought by printers like Benjamin Franklin and John Peter Zenger, opposing the suppression of criticism of the government; and the nineteenth century’s fight for free speech had been waged by abolitionists opposing southern slave owners, who had been unwilling to subject slavery to debate.

Opposition to free speech had long been the position of slave owners, a position taken at the constitutional convention and extended through the gag rule, antiliteracy laws, bans on the mails, and the suppression of speakers. An aversion to political debate also structured the Confederacy, which had both a distinctive character and a lasting influence on Americans’ ideas about federal authority as against popular sovereignty. Secessionists were attempting to build a modern, proslavery, antidemocratic state. In order to wage a war, the leaders of this fundamentally antidemocratic state needed popular support. Such support was difficult to gain and impossible to maintain. The Confederacy therefore suppressed dissent.

The most ardent supporters of secession were the wealthiest plantation owners; the least ardent were the great majority of white male voters: poor men who did not own slaves. The most effective way to persuade these men to support secession was to argue that even though they didn’t own slaves, their lives were made better by the existence of the institution, since it meant that they were spared the most demeaning work. Prosecessionists made this argument repeatedly, and with growing intensity. James D. B. DeBow’s The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-Slaveholder (1860) was widely excerpted in newspapers, reminding poor white men that “No white man at the South serves another as a body servant, to clean his boots, wait on his table, and perform the menial services of his household.”57

Nevertheless, rather than trusting a decision about secession to the voters, or even to a ratifying convention, Georgia legislator Thomas R. R. Cobb advised his legislature to make the decision itself: “Wait not till the grog shops and cross roads shall send up a discordant voice from a divided people.” When Georgia did hold a convention, its delegates were deeply split. The secessionists cooked the numbers in order to insure their victory and proceeded to require all delegates to sign a pledge supporting secession even if they had voted against it. One of the first things the new state of Georgia did was to pass a law that made dissent punishable by death.

He did not mention slavery. There would be those, after the war ended, who said that it had been fought over states’ rights or to preserve the Union or for a thousand other reasons and causes. Soldiers, North and South, knew better. “The fact that slavery is the sole undeniable cause of this infamous rebellion, that it is a war of, by, and for Slavery, is as plain as the noon-day sun,” a soldier writing for his Wisconsin regimental newspaper explained in 1862. “Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks,” a soldier writing for his Confederate brigade’s newspaper wrote that same year, “is either a fool or a liar.”67 By then, the emancipation had begun.

On January 1, 1863, sometime after two o’clock in the afternoon, Lincoln held the Emancipation Proclamation in his hand and picked up his pen. He said solemnly, “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper.”

As late as the summer of 1862, in the last weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had insisted that the purpose of the war was to save the Union. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it,” he wrote Horace Greeley, “and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”82 But by 1864, he had wholly changed his mind. Victory without abolition would be no victory at all.

“You are placed in a position where you have the power to save or destroy us,” Douglass told the president. “I mean our whole race.” Johnson, in a rambling, evasive, and self-justifying speech, assured Douglass that he was a friend to black people. “I have owned slaves and bought slaves,” he said, “but I never sold one.” In truth, Johnson had no intention of taking a stand against black codes or debating equal rights or signing a Civil Rights Act. After Douglass left, Johnson scoffed to an aide, “He’s just like any nigger, and he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”18 In March, after the House passed the Civil Rights Act, Johnson vetoed it. In April, Congress, wielding its power, overrode Johnson’s veto. A landmark in the history of the struggle for power between the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, Congress’s stand marked the first time that it had ever overridden a presidential veto.

In Washington, Johnson struggled to regain his feet. Early in 1868, he tried to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Radical Republican and Lincoln appointee. But Stanton, hardheaded and uncompromising, barricaded himself in his office for two months. The nation reeled from one constitutional crisis to the next. The House began impeachment proceedings against the president, charging him with violating a recently passed Tenure of Office Act. Congress voted to impeach, 126 to 47, but the Senate vote, 35–19, fell one vote shy of the two-thirds required. Johnson had survived, but impeachment, a constitutional gun that had never before been fired, had for the first time been loaded.

In 1870, five black women were arrested for voting in South Carolina. But by now, women had decided to test the limits of female citizenship not only by voting but also by running for office. Victoria Woodhull, a charismatic fortune-teller from Ohio who’d attended a suffrage convention in 1869, moved to New York, and reinvented herself as a stockbroker, became the first woman to run for president. She ran as a “self-nominated” candidate of the party she helped create, the Equal Rights Party. In 1871 she announced, “We are plotting revolution.” Woodhull said she ran “mainly for the purpose of drawing attention to the claims of woman to political equality with man.” Ingeniously, she argued that women had already had the right the vote, under the privileges and immunities clause of the Constitution, an argument she brought before a House Judiciary committee, making her the first woman to address a congressional committee. “As I have been the first to comprehend these Constitutional and legal facts, so am I the first to proclaim, as I now do proclaim to the women of the United States of America that they are enfranchised.” Woodhull’s candidacy ended in ignominy. She spent Election Day in prison on charges of obscenity, and in the end, the Supreme Court ruled against her interpretation of the Constitution, deciding, in Minor v. Happersett, that the Constitution “did not automatically confer the right to vote on those who were citizens.”

But Lippmann soon began to write about the masses as “the bewildered herd,” unthinking and instinctual, and as dangerous as an impending stampede. For Lippmann, and for an entire generation of intellectuals, politicians, journalists, and bureaucrats who styled themselves Progressives—the term dates to 1910—the masses posed a threat to American democracy. After the First World War, Progressives refashioned their aims and took to calling themselves “liberals.”

To meet that challenge in what came to be called the Progressive Era, activists, intellectuals, and politicians campaigned for and secured far-reaching reforms that included municipal, state, and federal legislation. Their most powerful weapon was the journalistic exposé. Their biggest obstacle was the courts, which they attempted to hurdle by way of constitutional amendments. Out of these campaigns came the federal income tax, the Federal Reserve Bank, the direct election of U.S. senators, presidential primaries, minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws, women’s suffrage, and Prohibition. Nearly all of these reforms had long been advocated for, in many cases first by William Jennings Bryan. Progressives’ biggest failure was also Bryan’s: their unwillingness to address, or even discuss, Jim Crow. Instead, they propped it up. And all of what Progressives accomplished in the management of mass democracy was vulnerable to the force that so worried the unrelenting Walter Lippmann: the malleability of public opinion, into mass delusion.

PROGRESSIVISM HAD ROOTS in late nineteenth-century populism; Progressivism was the middle-class version: indoors, quiet, passionless. Populists raised hell; Progressives read pamphlets. Populists had argued that the federal government’s complicity in the consolidation of power in the hands of big banks, big railroads, and big businesses had betrayed both the nation’s founding principles and the will of the people, and that the government itself was riddled with corruption.

Populists believed that the system was broken; Progressives believed that the government could fix it. Conservatives, who happened to dominate the Supreme Court, didn’t believe that there was anything to fix but believed that, if there was, the market would fix it. Notwithstanding conservatives’ influence in the judiciary, Progressivism spanned both parties. After 1896, when the Democratic Party convinced Bryan to run as a Democrat instead of as a Populist, Democrats boasted that they had successfully folded Populists into their party. In 1905, Governor Jeff Davis of Arkansas said, “In 1896, when we nominated the grandest and truest man the world ever knew—William Jennings Bryan—for President, we stole all the Populists hate; we stole their platform, we stole their candidate, we stole them out lock, stock, and barrel.” But Republicans were Progressives, too. “The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being,” Theodore Roosevelt said. And, as Woodrow Wilson himself admitted, “When I sit down and compare my views with those of a Progressive Republican I can’t see what the difference is.”

The Social Gospel movement was led by seminary professors—academic theologians who accepted the theory of evolution, seeing it as entirely consistent with the Bible and evidence of a divinely directed, purposeful universe; at the same time, they fiercely rejected the social Darwinism of writers like Herbert Spencer, the English natural scientist who coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” and used the theory of evolution to defend all manner of force, violence, and oppression. After witnessing a coal miners’ strike in Ohio in 1882, the Congregationalist Washington Gladden, a man never seen without his knee-length, double-breasted Prince Albert frock coat, argued that fighting inequality produced by industrialism was an obligation of Christians: “We must make men believe that Christianity has a right to rule this kingdom of industry, as well as all the other kingdoms of this world.”

Mark Twain called lynching an “epidemic of bloody insanities.”

By one estimate, someone in the South was hanged or burned alive every four days. The court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson meant that there was no legal recourse to fight segregation, which grew more brutal with each passing year. Nor was discrimination confined to the South. Cities and counties in the North and West passed racial zoning laws, banning blacks from the middle-class communities. In 1890, in Montana, blacks lived in all fifty-six counties in the state; by 1930, they’d been confined to just eleven. In Baltimore, blacks couldn’t buy houses on blocks where whites were a majority. In 1917, in Buchanan v. Warley, the Supreme Court availed itself of the Fourteenth Amendment not to guarantee equal protection for blacks but to guarantee what the court had come to understand as the “liberty of contract”—the liberty of businesses to discriminate.

Constitutional amendments are notoriously difficult to pass. The Sixteenth Amendment was not, and its success is a measure of the reach and intensity of the Progressive movement. It was ratified, handily and swiftly, in 42 of 48 states, six more than required, winning passage in state senates with an average support of 89 percent and, in state houses, 95 percent. In nineteen lower legislatures, the vote in favor was unanimous. The Sixteenth Amendment became law in February 1913. The House voted on an income tax bill in May. When the Bureau of Internal Revenue printed its first 1040, the form was three pages, the instructions only one.31 Americans later came to argue about the income tax more fiercely almost than anything they’d argued about before, but when it started, they wanted it desperately, and urgently.

Muller v. Oregon established the constitutionality of labor laws (for women), the legitimacy of sex discrimination in employment, and the place of social science research in the decisions of the courts. The “Brandeis brief,” as it came to be called, essentially made muckraking admissible as evidence. Where the court in Plessy v. Ferguson had scorned any discussion of the facts of racial inequality, citing the prevailing force of tradition, Muller v. Oregon established the conditions that would allow for the presentation of social science evidence in the case that would overrule racial segregation, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in 1954.43

As with the secret ballot, primaries were part Progressive reform, part Jim Crow. Roosevelt needed to win them because, at the Republican National Convention, he had no real chance of winning black delegates. Because the Republican Party had virtually no white support in the South, the only southern delegates were black delegates, men who had been appointed to party offices by the Taft administration. Roosevelt tried in vain to wrest them from their support for the president. “I like the Negro race,” he said in a speech at an AME Church the day before the convention. But the next day the New York Times produced affidavits proving that Roosevelt’s campaign wasn’t so much trying to court black delegates as to bribe them. After Roosevelt lost the nomination to Taft, he formed the Progressive Party, whose convention refused to seat black delegates. “This is strictly a white man’s party,” said one of Roosevelt’s supporters, a leader of the so-called Lily Whites.

WAR BROKE OUT in Europe in July of 1914, war on a scale that had never been seen before, a war run by efficiency experts and waged with factory-made munitions, a war without limit or mercy. Machines slaughtered the masses. Europe fell to its knees. The United States rose to its feet. The Great War brought the United States into the world. It marked the end of Europe’s reign as the center of the Western world; that place, after the war, was held by the United States.

William Jennings Bryan, Mr. Fundamentalist, was not actually a fundamentalist. For one, he believed in the Social Gospel; for another, he does not appear ever to have owned a copy of The Fundamentals and, as a man unconcerned with theological matters, he hardly ever bothered defending the literal truth of the Bible. “Christ went about doing good” was the sum of Bryan’s theology. Bryan was confused for a fundamentalist because he led a drive to prohibit the teaching of evolution in the nation’s schools. But Bryan saw the campaign against evolution as another arm of his decades-long campaign against the plutocracy, telling a cartoonist, “You should represent me as using a double-barreled shotgun fixing one barrel at the elephant as he tries to enter the treasury and another at Darwinism—the monkey—as he tries to enter the schoolroom.”

Wilson, the political scientist, tried to earn the support of the American people with an intricate theory of the relationship between democracy and peace. It didn’t work. To recast his war message and shore up popular support, he established a propaganda department, the Committee on Public Information, headed by a baby-faced, forty-one-year-old muckraker from Missouri named George Creel, best-known for an exposé on child labor called Children in Bondage. Creel applied the methods of Progressive Era muckraking to the work of whipping up a frenzy for fighting. His department employed hundreds of staff and thousands of volunteers, spreading pro-war messages by print, radio, and film. Social scientists called the effect produced by wartime propaganda “herd psychology”; the philosopher John Dewey called it the “conscription of thought.”89 The conscription of thought also threatened the freedom of speech. To suppress dissent, Congress passed a Sedition Act in 1918. Not since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 had Congress so brazenly defied the First Amendment. Fewer than two dozen people had been arrested under the 1798 Sedition Act. During the First World War, the Justice Department charged more than two thousand Americans with sedition and convicted half of them. Appeals that went to the Supreme Court failed. Pacifists, and feminists went to prison, and so, especially, did socialists. Ninety-six of the convicted were members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), inc...

The government asserted new forms of authority over the bodies of citizens, too. A “social purity” movement campaigned against the spread of venereal disease, which became the subject of military ordinances. “You wouldn’t use another fellow’s toothbrush,” one army film pointed out. “Why use his whore?” Yet another moral campaign, Prohibition, long a female crusade, also became part of the wartime expansion of the powers of the state. It was approved by Congress in December 1917 as a war measure. “No drunken man was ever efficient in civil or military life,” said Tennessee senator Kenneth McKellar. Outside of Congress, Americans were dubious. “A man would be better off without booze but the same is true of pie,” was the position taken by Clarence Darrow.

In 1923, when two young army veterans, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, decided to found a magazine, they wanted to call it Facts. In the end, they decided to call it Time, with the idea that, in the age of efficiency, it would save readers time. Time was meant to offer busy readers—and especially businessmen—a week’s worth of news that could be read in an hour. Each issue was to contain 100 articles, none over 400 words long, full of nothing but the facts, put together, at first, by cutting sentences out of seven days’ worth of newspapers and pasting them onto pages. Using a Taylor system of task management, Luce and Hadden sorted the news into categories, something that hadn’t been done before. Despite its speed, brevity, and simplicity, Time claimed to be free from error, a record of events “accurately chronicled,” which wasn’t the same thing as making a claim for objectivity. “Show me a man who thinks he’s objective, and I’ll show you a man who’s deceiving himself,” Luce once said.137 Objectivity was impossible; subjectivity led to the introduction of errors.

But Darrow knew that, for all that Bryan’s campaign against the teaching of evolution was a campaign against social Darwinism, and a campaign for the underdog, it was also an assault on science. And Darrow couldn’t take that, nor could most people who’d fought on the same side of the labor question as Bryan. By 1924, Eugene Debs, a longtime Bryan supporter, had taken to referring to Bryan as “this shallow-minded mouther of empty phrases, this pious canting mountebank, this prophet of the stone age.”147 Darrow agreed. He had been raised reading Charles Darwin and Frederick Douglass. His interest was in education. “I knew that education was in danger from the source that has always hampered it—religious fanaticism,” he said. He considered Bryan “the idol of all Morondom.”

Fundamentalism did not die when Bryan’s head fell on his pillow. Fundamentalism endured, and the challenge it posed to the nation’s founding principles and especially to the nature of truth would be felt well into the twenty-first century. Darrow was not among those who believed that the Scopes trial, followed so swiftly by Bryan’s death, had closed the book on fundamentalism. “I am pained to hear of Bryan’s death,” said a sober Darrow. “I have known Bryan since 1896 and supported him twice for the Presidency.” But the idea that modernity had killed William Jennings Bryan took hold, and, mere weeks after his death, big-city reporters and above all H. L. Mencken were back to lampooning Bryan and his followers as dumb hicks, while privately, Mencken confessed that he was terrified of the people he’d met on that courthouse lawn in Dayton—their bigotry and fury set him shuddering. “I set out laughing,” Mencken wrote to a friend, “and returned shivering.”

If the common people hate reason, Lippmann concluded, there’s no way a government of the people can protect the freedom of thought. The person of faith cannot accept reason as the arbiter of truth without giving up on faith; the person of reason cannot accept that truth lies outside the realm of reason. The citizens being unable to agree on basic matters of fact, they cannot agree on how to educate their children together. “This is the propagandist’s opportunity,” Lippmann wrote.156 With enough money, and with the tools of mass communication, deployed efficiently, the propagandist can turn a political majority into a truth.

If the Depression, and alike the New Deal, created a new compassion for the poor, it also produced a generation of politicians committed to the idea that government can relieve suffering and regulate the economy. In 1937, lanky former Texas schoolteacher Lyndon Baines Johnson was elected to Congress, where he worked to obtain federal funds for his district for projects like the construction of dams to improve farmland. When LBJ was a boy, his father had lost his farm. He’d grown up dirt-poor. Six foot three, with long ears and no discernible end to his energy, Johnson had hitchhiked to a state teachers college and, after graduating, taught at an elementary school in Cotulla, Texas, sixty miles north of the border. The students were Mexican American; there was no lunch break, because the children had no lunch to eat. Johnson organized a debating team and taught them how to fight for their ideas. When he ran for Congress, he printed signs that read “Franklin D. and Lyndon B.” Like his hero, LBJ embraced the radio, campaigning on radio stations like KNOW in Austin and KTSA in San Antonio and once—in an act of inspired populist appeal—broadcasting from a barbershop.

The National Rifle Association had been founded in 1871 by a former reporter from the New York Times, as a sporting and hunting association; most of its business consisted of sponsoring target-shooting competitions. Not only did the NRA not oppose firearms regulation, it supported and even sponsored it. In the 1920s and 1930s—the era of Nye’s Munitions Committee—the NRA endorsed gun control legislation, lobbying for new state laws in the 1920s and 1930s. Concern about urban crime led to federal legislation in the 1930s. Public-safety-minded firearms regulation was uncontroversial. The NRA supported both the uniform 1934 National Firearms Act—the first federal gun control legislation—and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which together prohibitively taxed 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. In 1939, in a unanimous decision in U.S. v. Miller, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld these measures after FDR’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.” The text of the amendment, Jackson argued, makes clear that the right “is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in th...

CAMPAIGNS, INC., the first political consulting firm in the history of the world, was founded by Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter in California in 1933. Critics called it the Lie Factory. Political consulting, when it started, had one foot in advertising and one foot in journalism. Political consulting is often thought of as a product of the advertising industry, but the reverse is closer to the truth. When modern advertising began, in the 1920s, the industry’s big clients were interested in advancing a political agenda as much as, if not more than, a commercial one. Muckrakers and congressional investigations tended to make Standard Oil look greedy and Du Pont, for making munitions, sinister. Large corporations hired advertising firms to make themselves look better and to advance pro-business legislation.