These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

This had come to pass.

Homo sapiens, modern humans, evolved about three hundred thousand years ago, in East Africa, near and around what is now Ethiopia.

Before 1492, Europe suffered from scarcity and famine. After 1492, the vast wealth carried to Europe from the Americas and extracted by the forced labor of Africans granted governments new powers that contributed to the rise of nation-states.

In the history of the world, most of the people who have ever lived either did not know how to write or, if they did, left no writing behind, which is among the reasons why the historical record is so maddeningly unfair.

In much of Africa, labor, not land, constituted the sole form of property recognized by law, a form of consolidating wealth and generating revenue, which meant that African states tended to be small and that, while European wars were fought for land, African wars were fought for labor.

Between 1630 and 1640, the years during which King Charles ruled without Parliament, a generation of ocean voyagers, some twenty thousand dissenters, fled England and settled in New England.

“The care of the public must oversway all private respects,” Winthrop said. “For it is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.”

There would never be very many Africans in New England, but New Englanders would have slave plantations, on the distant shores. Nearly half of colonial New Englanders’ wealth would come from sugar grown by West Indian slaves.41

Hamilton believed that the future of the United States lay in manufacturing, freeing Americans of their dependence on imported goods, and spurring economic growth. To that end, his plan included raising the tariff—taxes on imported goods—and providing federal government support to domestic manufacturers and merchants.

Also, tariffs appeared to place the burden of taxation on merchants, which appealed to Jefferson. “We are all the more reconciled to the tax on importations,” Jefferson explained, “because it falls exclusively on the rich.” The promise of America, Jefferson thought, was that “the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone.”79

“A circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people,” he explained, “is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits.” Newspapers would make the country, effectively, smaller.90

and if they were well educated. “Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge,” he urged. “In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”95

“Passion” or variants of the word appear seven times in the Farewell; it is the source of every problem; reason is its only remedy. Passion is a river. There would be no changing its course. Nor was George Washington free from its force.

Months after George Washington died at Mount Vernon, the exiled rebels of Sierra Leone elected, as their leader, Harry Washington.98

He insisted that all the goods Americans needed they could produce in their own homes. “Every family in the country is a manufactory within itself, and is very generally able to make within itself all the stouter and middling stuffs for its own clothing and household use,”

Manufactures, sufficient for our own consumption, of what we raise the raw material (and no more). Commerce sufficient to carry the surplus produce of agriculture, beyond our own consumption, to a market for exchanging it

for articles we cannot raise (and no more). These are the true limits of manufactures and commerce. To go beyond them is to increase our dependence on foreign nations, and our liability to war.”46

In Washington, the men who met in Davis’s Hotel decided upon a plan: they would found a colony in Africa, as Clay said, “to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population.”

Month after month of pencil to paper, adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, did not settle the matter of the ratio of white people to black people in the United States. Nor did the colonization scheme. (Only about three thousand African Americans ever left for Liberia.)

Before the rise of the factory, home and work weren’t separate places. Most people lived on farms, where both men and women worked in the fields.

With the rise of the factory came the division of labor into steps done by different workers.

One writer in 1830 argued that commercial banking was “the foundation of artificial inequality of wealth, and, thereby, of artificial inequality of power.”

In Boston, the top 1 percent of the population controlled 10 percent of wealth in 1689, 16 percent in 1771, 33 percent in 1833, and 37 percent in 1848, while the lowest 80 percent of the population controlled 39 percent of the wealth in 1689, 29 percent in 1771, 14 percent in 1833, and a mere 4 percent in 1848.

Jackson believed that the Bank of the United States undermined the sovereignty of the people, defied their will, and, like all banks, had “a corrupting influence” on the nation by allowing “a few Monied Capitalists” to use public revenue, to “enjoy the benefit of it, to the exclusion of the many.”85

Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau.

Were all these vast designs and rapid strides worth it? Thoreau thought not. He came to this truth: “They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”

Thoreau’s own commitment to abolition was strengthened by his reading a book just published in London. The same was true of many of his contemporaries. The book had made its way to Concord even as Brown was raiding Harpers Ferry: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Darwin’s Origin of Species would have a vast and lingering influence on the world of ideas.

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.

(It did not free slaves in states that had not seceded, nor those in territory in secessionist states held by the Union army.)

“I cannot go home and tell my constituents that I voted for a bill that would allow a man, a millionaire, who has put his entire property into stock, to be exempt from taxation, while a farmer who lives by his side must pay a tax.” A tax on income seemed a reasonable, and less regressive, alternative.

Unlike a tax on real estate, an income tax was not, or at least not obviously, a direct tax, prohibited by the Constitution. Income also included earnings from stocks and so didn’t exempt fat cats.

After the First World War, Progressives refashioned their aims and took to calling themselves “liberals.”2

Much that was vital in Progressivism grew out of Protestantism, and especially out of a movement known as the Social Gospel, adopted by almost all theological liberals and by a large number of theological conservatives, too.

In March of 1920, the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles—and the League of Nations—by seven votes.

Mass democracy can’t work, Lippmann argued, because the new tools of mass persuasion—especially mass advertising—meant that a tiny minority could very easily persuade the majority to believe whatever it wished them to believe.

Hoover, master of emergencies, steered the country through the crash, but when the Depression began he did very little except to wait for a recovery and attempt to reassure a panicked public. He believed in charity, but he did not believe in government relief, arguing that if the United States were to provide it the nation would be “plunged into socialism and collectivism.”

All that while, a new kind of conservatism was growing, too. It consisted not only of businessmen who opposed government regulation of the economy but also of Americans, chiefly rural Americans, who objected to government interference in their lives. These two strands of conservatism were largely separate in the 1930s, but they’d already begun moving closer together, especially in their animosity toward the paternalism of liberalism.

the Digest had consistently underestimated FDR’s support because its sample, while very big, was not very representative: people who supported FDR were much less likely than the rest of the population to own a telephone or a car.91

Much of the public greeted the decision with elation and joy, nowhere better captured than in a photograph of a young mother sitting on the steps of the Supreme Court, cradling her young daughter in the crook of her arm, holding in her lap the next day’s newspaper, with its outsized front-page headline HIGH COURT BANS SEGREGATION IN NATION’S SCHOOLS. Warren’s opinion was greeted with near equal pleasure by Cold Warriors, who called it a “blow to communism.”

Reagan asked not whether a people can rule themselves by reason and choice instead of accident and force but “whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”84 Not reason versus force, but the people versus the government.

He complained about undergraduate “malcontents,” and, as Election Day neared, he made a point of publicly denouncing invitations issued by students at the University of California, Berkeley, to two speakers: Robert Kennedy, who was slated to talk about civil rights, and Stokely Carmichael, who had been asked by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to deliver the keynote address at a conference on Black Power. “We cannot have the university campus used as a base from which to foment riots,” Reagan warned.

“Let us encourage individuals at home and nations abroad to do more for themselves, to decide more for themselves.” If Americans had trusted too much in government, this wasn’t because government couldn’t be trusted, because presidents had lied to the American people; this was because people should do more for themselves.

The atrocities waged in the name of the American people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the chaos on American streets—these were not the fault of elected officials who made grave mistakes, lied to the press, and obstructed justice. These things were the faults of liberalism, which had taught Americans to expect too much of government. “In trusting too much in government, we have asked of it more than it can deliver,” Nixon declared. “This leads only to inflated expectations, to reduced individual effort, and to a disappointment and frustration that erode confidence both in what government can do and in what people can do.” Kennedy had urged Americans, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Nixon urged Americans to ask what they could do for themselves.

In a brief, curt speech, he touted his foreign policy achievements, which were many, and of deep and abiding significance. He’d opened diplomatic relations with China, after a quarter century. For all that he’d done to prolong it, he had in fact ended the war in Vietnam. He’d improved U.S. relations in the Middle East. He’d negotiated arms limitation agreements with the Soviet Union, building on relationships he’d established on his trip to Moscow in 1959. He said nearly nothing about conditions in the United States, except to allude to “the turbulent history of this era”—a turbulence he had done little to alleviate and much to aggravate.132

The GOP, founded in 1854 as the party of reform, had been the party of abolition and the party of women’s rights. By 1896, it had become the party of big business. It had remained the party most supportive of women’s rights. The Equal Rights Amendment had been on the GOP platform since 1940. In 1968, in the first wave of the backlash against the women’s movement, the ERA had been left off the party’s platform. In 1972, Nixon began turning the GOP into the party opposed to abortion but, long before that effort saw its first successes, Schlafly turned the GOP into the party opposed to equal rights for women.

With some exceptions, evangelicals had steered clear of party politics for more than a century. Not since the crusade against slavery had Protestant churches engaged in overt politicking, but in the 1970s, determined to protect the family and the church from the state, evangelicals joined the conservative revolution.

Much of it is better understood as a consequence of the politicization of abortion. Between 1978 and 1984, pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans were purged from their parties.

Aborto foi fator preponderante pro início da polarização .

By then, both parties had abandoned a political settlement necessary to the stability of the Republic—equal rights for women—and descended into a politics of seemingly interminable division that would outlive nearly all of the people who had been its architects, including Phyllis Schlafly, whose last public act, in 2016, at the age of ninety-one, only months before her death, would be to endorse Donald J. Trump as the nation’s next president.