These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

“It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

“Let the People Rule” became Roosevelt’s 1912 slogan. “The great fundamental issue now before the Republican Party and before our people can be stated briefly,” he said. “It is: Are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves? I believe they are. My opponents do not.” Thirteen states held primaries (all were nonbinding); Roosevelt won nine.62

Darrow wasn’t about evolution, it was about how people decide what’s true—does truth derive from faith or from reason?—and, more deeply, what happens in a democracy when people can’t agree about how they decide what’s true. Does the majority rule?

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.

To illustrate, it quoted Mein Kampf. “At the bottom of their hearts the great masses of the people are more likely to be poisoned than to be consciously and deliberately bad,” Hitler had written. “In the primitive simplicity of their minds they are more easily victimized by a large than by a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves but would be ashamed to tell big ones.”

African American veterans were excluded from veterans’ organizations; they faced hostility and violence; and, most significantly, they were barred from taking advantage of the G.I. Bill’s signal benefits, its education and housing provisions. In some states, the American Legion, the most powerful veterans’ association, refused to admit African Americans, and proved unwilling to recognize desegregated associations. Money to go to college was hard to use when most colleges and universities refused to admit African Americans and historically black colleges and universities had a limited number of seats.

But the bill’s easy access to credit and capital was far less available to black veterans. Banks refused to give black veterans loans, and restrictive covenants and redlining meant that much new housing was whites-only.19

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.