These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Facts, knowledge, experience, proof. These words come from the law. Around the seventeenth century, they moved into what was then called “natural history”: astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology. By the eighteenth century they were applied to history and to politics, too. These truths: this was the language of reason, of enlightenment, of inquiry, and of history. In 1787, then, when Alexander Hamilton asked “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,” that was the kind of question a scientist asks before beginning an experiment.

The origins of the United States can be found in those seams. When the United States declared its independence in 1776, plainly, it was a state, but what made it a nation? The fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face; they came from all over, and, having waged a war against England, the very last thing they wanted to celebrate was their Englishness. In an attempt to solve this problem, the earliest historians of the United States decided to begin their accounts with Columbus’s voyage, stitching 1776 to 1492.

Nearly everything Washington did set a precedent. What would have happened if he had decided, before taking that oath of office, to emancipate his slaves? He’d grown disillusioned with slavery; his own slaves, and the greater number of slaves owned by his wife, were, to him, a moral burden, and he understood very well that for all the wealth generated by forced, unpaid labor, the institution of slavery was a moral burden to the nation. There is some evidence—slight though it is—that Washington drafted a statement announcing that he intended to emancipate his slaves before assuming the presidency. (Or maybe that statement, like Washington’s inaugural address, had been written by Hamilton, a member of New York’s Manumission Society.) This, too, Washington understood, would have established a precedent: every president after him would have had to emancipate his slaves. And yet he would not, could not, do it.65 Few of Washington’s decisions would have such lasting and terrible consequences as this one failure to act.

Counting polls required assembling—all in favor of the Federalist stand here, all in favor of the Republican over there—and in places where voting was done by ballot, casting a ballot generally meant tossing a ball into a box. The word “ballot” comes from the Italian ballota, meaning a little ball—and early Americans who used ballots cast pea or pebbles, or, not uncommonly, bullets. In 1799, Maryland passed a law requiring voting on paper, but most states were quite slow to adopt this reform, which, in any event, was not meant to make voting secret, voting publicly being understood as an act of republican citizenship.

And, in 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, a suit against Jefferson’s secretary of state, James Madison, Marshall granted to the Supreme Court a power it had not been granted in the Constitution: the right to decide whether laws passed by Congress are constitutional. Marshall declared: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”41 One day, those words would be carved in marble; in 1803, they were very difficult to believe.

There followed machine upon machine, steam-driven looms, steam-driven boats, making for faster production, faster travel, and cheaper goods. Steam-powered industrial production altered the economy, and it also altered social relations, especially between men and women and between the rich and the poor. The anxiety and social dislocation produced by those changes fueled the revival of religion. Everywhere, the flame of revival burned brightest in factory towns. 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.

In the winter, women spent most of their time carding, spinning and weaving wool, sheared from sheep. In towns and cities, shopkeepers and the masters of artisanal trades—bakers, tailors, printers, shoemakers—lived in their shops, where they also usually made their goods. They shared this living space with journeymen and apprentices. Artisans made things whole, undertaking each step in the process of manufacturing: a baker baked a loaf, a tailor stitched a suit. With the rise of the factory came the division of labor into steps done by different workers.9 With steam power, not only were the steps in the manufacturing process divided, but much of the labor was done by machines, which came to be known as “mechanical slaves.”

The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, took eight years to dig and covered 360 miles. Before the canal, the wagon trip from Buffalo to New York City took twenty days; on the canal, it took six. The price of goods plummeted; the standard of living soared. A mattress that cost fifty dollars in 1815, which meant that almost no one owned one, cost only five dollars in 1848.13

By the end of the 1820s, after the completion of the canal, these small shops had become bigger shops, typically divided into two rooms and employing many more men, each doing a smaller portion of the work, and generally working by the clock, for wages. “Work” came to mean not simply labor but a place, the factory or the banker’s or clerk’s office: a place men went every day for ten or twelve hours. “Home” was where women remained, and where what they did all day was no longer considered work—that is, they were not paid. The lives of women and men diverged.

The United States was founded during the most secular era in American history, either before or since. In the late eighteenth century, church membership was low, and anticlerical feeling was high. It is no accident that the Constitution does not mention God. Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush wondered, politely, whether this error might be corrected, assuming it to have been an oversight. “Perhaps an acknowledgement might be made of his goodness or of his providence in the proposed amendments,” he urged.27 No correction was made.

The United States was not founded as a Christian nation. The Constitution prohibits religious tests for officeholders. The Bill of Rights forbids the federal government from establishing a religion, James Madison having argued that to establish a religion would be “to foster in those who still reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.”28 These were neither casual omissions nor accidents; they represented an intentional disavowal of a constitutional relationship between church and state, a disavowal that was not infrequently specifically stated.

Nearly everything took on a religious cast during the revival, not least because of the proliferation of preachers. In 1775, there had been 1,800 ministers in the United States; by 1845, there were more than 40,000.32 They were Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Episcopalian, Universalist, and more, very much the flowering of religious expression that Madison had predicted would result from the prohibition of an established religion. The separation of church and state allowed religion to thrive; that was one of its intentions.

Lacking an established state religion, Americans founded new sects, from Shakers to Mormons, and rival Protestant denominations sprung up in town after town. Increasingly, the only unifying, national religion was a civil religion, a belief in the American creed. This faith bound the nation together, and provided extraordinary political stability in an era of astonishing change, but it also tied it to the past, in ways that often proved crippling.

In 1816, when Jefferson was seventy-three and the awakening was just beginning, he warned against worshipping the men of his generation. “This they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead,” he wrote: “. . . laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past. “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacr...

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.”

As the United States swelled, Mexico shrank. Most of the land along the border between the two countries was barren and featureless. When the Joint United States and Mexican Boundary Commission began the work of surveying, its members found it hard even to stay alive: most died by starvation.

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.

By the winter of 1865–66, Southern legislatures consisting of former secessionists had begun 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.16 Slavery seemed like a monster that, each time it was decapitated, grew a new head. And then rose the Ku Klux Klan,

Before 1896, European immigrants to the United States had chiefly come from northern and western Europe, and especially from Germany and Ireland. After 1896, most came from the south and the east, and especially from Italy and Hungary. Slavs, Jews, and Italians, lumped together as the “new immigrants,” also came in far greater numbers than Europeans had ever come before, sometimes more than a million a year. The number of Europeans who arrived in the twelve years between 1902 and 1914 alone totaled more than the number of Europeans who arrived in the four decades between 1820 and 1860.49

One union man in Schenectady said, “People got mighty sick of voting for Republicans and Democrats when it was a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ proposition.” In the presidential election of 1908, more than 400,000 people voted for the Socialist Party candidate, Eugene Debs. In 1911, Socialists were elected as the mayors of eighteen cities and towns and more than a thousand Socialists held offices in thirty states.

In Nevada, his face began to twitch; in Utah, he sweated through his suit; by Wyoming he was incoherent. Finally, in Colorado, on October 2, 1919, he stumbled while mounting the stage. “I seem to have gone to pieces,” he said. He lost the use of his left side. For five months, he was hidden in the West Wing of the White House, unseen, even by his cabinet. Edith Wilson banned the public from the grounds. Even members of the Senate did not know the state of Wilson’s condition. When the Senate sought compromise and the president proved unresponsive, the Senate could only conclude that he was uncompromising.107 In March of 1920, the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles—and the League of Nations—by seven votes. The chance for a lasting peace came and, silently, went.

What any office worker might know how to do got smaller and smaller, like the skills of factory workers, while the businesses people worked for got bigger and bigger, including, by 1924, IBM. “We must study, through reading, listening, discussing, observing and thinking,” said the company’s founder, Thomas Watson. Its motto was THINK, which was what employees were asked to do, but observers worried, and more as the years passed, that thinking was becoming the work of machines.

Hoover was an efficiency expert, best known for an influential 400-page report called Waste in Industry. So great was his fame that nearly anything involving the elimination of waste, including vacuum cleaning, took his name.

Nearly five in ten white families and nine in ten black families endured poverty at some point during the Depression. Black families fared worse, not only because more fell into poverty but also because the roads out of poverty were often closed to them: New Deal loan, relief, and insurance programs often specifically excluded black people.

Housewives were to the Republican Party infrastructure what labor union members were to the Democrats’. “If it were not for the National Federation of Republican Women, there would not be a Republican Party,” Barry Goldwater admitted. (Nixon couldn’t stand them: “I will not go and talk to those shitty ass old ladies!” he’d fume. All the same, gritting his teeth, he went.)83 By the 1950s, a majority of GOP activists were women, compared to 41 percent of Democratic Party activists.

In the GOP, party work was women’s work, work that the party explained, structured, and justified by calling it housework. Republican Party aspirants were told to “be proud of the women who work on the home front, ringing the doorbells, filling out registration cards, and generally doing the housework of government so that the principles of the Republican Party can be brought to every home.”

Republican women established Kitchen Kabinets, appointing a female equivalent to every member of the president’s cabinet, who shared “political recipes on GOP accomplishments with the housewives in the nation” by way of monthly bulletins on “What’s Cooking in Washington.”84 As a senator speaking to the federation of women’s clubs suggested, the elephant was the right symbol for the GOP because an elephant has “a vacuum cleaner in front and a rug beater behind.”

Nixon knew that the more violent the riots, and the worse the news from Vietnam, the better his chances. Deciding that peace would bar his road to the White House, he arranged for Anna Chennault, born in China and the widow of a U.S. general, to act as a conduit to promise South Vietnam that it would get better peace terms if it waited until after the election, and a Nixon victory. Johnson heard rumors about the arrangement, called Nixon, and confronted him. Nixon, lying, denied it. Johnson failed to negotiate a peace; the fighting would last for five more years, at a cost of countless lives.

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.

The idea that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to carry a gun, rather than the people’s right to form armed militias to provide for the common defense, became the official position of the NRA only in the 1970s, and only after a struggle not unlike the contest over abortion among the leaders of the Republican National Committee.

No federal law had restricted immigration before the 1870s, but the United States had instituted a set of quotas by place of origin, most significantly in the National Origins Act of 1924. By 1970, only 9.6 million Americans, less than 5 percent of the U.S. population, were foreign-born, the lowest percentage in more than a century, and most of these immigrants had come from Europe. By 2000, the number of foreign-born Americans had risen to 31 million, constituting 11 percent of the U.S. population. Most of these newer immigrants were from Latin America and East Asia.

Five million immigrants had entered the United States between 1931 and 1965; 4.5 million entered in the 1970s, 7.3 in the 1980s, and 9.1 in the 1990s, not counting those who entered the country illegally.78 Immigration moved to the center of American political debate.