These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

12 To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present.

In those songs, they told their truths. They told of how the days and weeks and years after the broad-shouldered sea captain first spied their island were the worst of times. Their god, Yúcahu, had once foretold that they “would enjoy their dominion for but a brief time because a clothed people would come to their land who could overcome them and kill them.”9 This had come to pass. There were about three million people on that island, land of mountains, when Columbus landed; fifty years later, there were only five hundred; everyone else had died, their songs unsung.

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.

If not for the three-fifths rule, the representatives of free states would have outnumbered representatives of slave states by 57 to 33.44

Much of American political history is a disagreement between those who favor a strong federal government and those who favor the states.

Tenth Amendment, which reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Madison had promised that the Constitution would insure its stability. A democracy, in which the people “assemble and administer the government in person,” will always be subject to endless “turbulence and contention,” he argued, but a republic, in which the people elect representatives to do the work of governing, can steer clear of that fate by electing men who will always put the public good before narrow or partisan interests, the good of all above the good of any part or party. Earlier political thinkers had suggested that this system could only work if a republic were small. Madison argued that it could only work if a republic were large, for two reasons. First, in a large republic, there would be more men to choose from, and so a better chance, purely as a matter of numbers, for the people to elect men who will guard the public interest. Second, in a large republic, candidates for office, in order to be known and to appeal to so large a number of voters, would need to be both notable and worthy.

Newspapers in the early republic weren’t incidentally or inadvertently partisan; they were entirely and enthusiastically partisan. They weren’t especially interested in establishing facts; they were interested in staging a battle of opinions. “Professions of impartiality I shall make none,” wrote a Federalist printer. “They are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense.”92 The printer of the Connecticut Bee promised to publish news Of turns of fortune, changes in the state, The fall of fav’rites, projects of the great, Of old mismanagements, taxations new, All neither wholly false, nor wholly true.93 Once much maligned as destructive of public life, parties, driven by newspapers, became its machinery. “The engine,” said Jefferson, “is the press.”

The North and the South, the East and the West, ought not to consider their interests separate or competing, Washington urged: “your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty.” Parties, he warned, were the “worst enemy” of every government, agitating “the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,” kindling “the animosity of one part against another,” and even fomenting “riot and insurrection.”

“In every society where property exists, there will ever be a struggle between rich and poor,” he wrote. “Mixed in one assembly, equal laws can never be expected. They will either be made by numbers, to plunder the few who are rich, or by influence, to fleece the many who are poor.”

printers “live by the zeal they can kindle, and the schisms they can create.”

“If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States,” Tocqueville predicted. “They will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition.”

In 1831, twenty thousand Europeans migrated to the United States; in 1854, that number had risen to more than four hundred thousand. While two and a half million Europeans had migrated to all of the Americas between 1500 and 1800, the same number—two and a half million—arrived specifically in the United States between 1845 and 1854 alone. As a proportion of the U.S. population, European immigrants grew from 1.6 percent in the 1820s to 11.2 percent in 1860.

The insularity of both Irish and German communities contributed to a growing movement to establish tax-supported public elementary schools, known as “common schools,” meant to provide a common academic and civic education to all classes of Americans. Like the extension of suffrage to all white men, this element of the American experiment propelled the United States ahead of European nations. Much of the movement’s strength came from the fervor of revivalists. They hoped that these new schools would assimilate a diverse population of native-born and foreign-born citizens by introducing them to the traditions of American culture and government, so that boys, once men, would vote wisely, and girls, once women, would raise virtuous children. “It is our duty to make men moral,” read one popular teachers’ manual, published in 1830. Other advocates hoped that a shared education would diminish partisanship. Whatever the motives of its advocates, the common school movement emerged out of, and nurtured, a strong civic culture.

New World on arguments that native peoples had no right to the land they inhabited, no sovereignty over it, because they had no religion, or because they had no government, or because they had no system of writing. The Cherokees, with deliberation and purpose, challenged each of these arguments. In 1823, when the federal government tried to get the Cherokees to agree to move, the Cherokee National Council replied, “It is the fixed and unalterable determination of this nation never again to cede one foot of land.” A Cherokee man named Sequoyah, who’d fought under Jackson during the Creek War, invented a written form of the Cherokee language, not an alphabet but a syllabary, with one character for every syllable. In 1825, the Cherokee Nation began printing the Phoenix, in both English and, using the syllabary, in Cherokee. In 1826, it established a national capital, at New Echota (just outside of what’s now Calhoun, Georgia), and in 1827 the National Council ratified a written constitution.65 South Carolina–born John C. Calhoun, Monroe’s secretary of war, pressed them: “You must be sensible that it will be impossible for you to remain, for any length of time, in your present situation, within the limits of Georgia, or any other State.” To which the Cherokees replied: “We beg leave to observe, and to remind you, that the Cherokees are not foreigners, but original inhabitants of America; and that they now inhabit and stand on the soil of their own territory; . . . and that the...

Jacksonians argued that, in the march of progress, the Cherokees had been left behind, “unimproved,” but the Cherokees were determined to call that bluff by demonstrating each of their “improvements.” In 1825, Cherokee property consisted of 22,000 cattle, 7,600 horses, 4,600 pigs, 2,500 sheep, 725 looms, 2,488 spinning wheels, 172 wagons, 10,000 plows, 31 grist mills, 10 sawmills, 62 blacksmith shops, 8 cotton gins, 18 schools, 18 ferries, and 1,500 slaves. The writer John Howard Payne, who lived with Cherokees in the 1820s, explained, “When the Georgian asks—shall savages infest our borders thus? The Cherokee answers him—‘Do we not read? Have we not schools? churches? Manufactures? Have we not laws? Letters? A constitution? And do you call us savages?’”67 They might have prevailed. They had the law of nations on their side. But then, in 1828, gold was discovered on Cherokee land, just fifty miles from New Echota, a discovery that doomed the Cherokee cause. When Jackson took office, in March 1829, he declared Indian removal one of his chief priorities and argued that the establishment of the Cherokee Nation violated Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution: “no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State” without that state’s approval.

Ruckerize” became a verb: it means to commit political skullduggery by packing a convention.)96

Fearful for his safety, Tyler had established a presidential police force (it later became the Secret Service).

If the Democratic Party had become the party of slavery; the Republican Party would be the party of reform. In that spirit, it welcomed the aid of women:

“Your purpose, then, plainly stated,” Lincoln charged, “is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please.”

“No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech,” Douglass said, and “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.”46

One of the first things the new state of Georgia did was to pass a law that made dissent punishable by death.

When the war began, both sides expected it to be limited and brief. Instead, it was vast and long, four brutal, wretched years of misery on a scale never before seen. In campaigns of singular ferocity, 2.1 million Northerners battled 880,000 Southerners in more than two hundred battles. More than 750,000 Americans died. Twice as many died from disease as from wounds. They died in heaps; they were buried in pits. Fewer than 2,000 Americans had died in battle during the entire War with Mexico. In a single battle of the Civil War, at Shiloh, Tennessee, in 1862, there were 24,000 casualties.

After yet another slaughter, Union general Ulysses S. Grant said a man could walk across the battlefield in any direction, as far as he could see, without touching the ground but only the dead.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

In 1862, Lincoln signed a law establishing an Internal Revenue Bureau charged with administering an income tax, later turned into a graduated tax, taxing incomes over $600 at 3 percent and incomes more than $10,000 at 5 percent. The Confederacy, reluctant to levy taxes, was never able to raise enough money to pay for the war, which is one reason the rebellion failed.

CHINESE IMMIGRANTS BEGAN arriving in the United States in large numbers during the 1850s, following the gold rush. In 1849, California had 54 Chinese residents; by 1850, 791; by 1851, more than 7,000; by 1852, about 25,000. Most came from Kwangtung Province and sailed from Hong Kong, sent by Chinese trading firms known as “the Six Companies.” Most were men. Landing in San Francisco, they worked as miners, first in California and then in Oregon, Nevada, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Colorado. In the federal census of 1860, 24,282 out of 34,935 Chinese toiled in mines.

In 1870, Chinese immigrants and their children made up nearly 9 percent of the population of California, and one-quarter of the state’s wage earners.

Political equality had been possible, in the South, only at the barrel of a gun. As soon as federal troops withdrew, white Democrats, calling themselves the “Redeemers,” took control of state governments of the South, and the era of black men’s enfranchisement came to a violent and terrible end. The Klan terrorized the countryside, burning homes and hunting, torturing, and killing people. (Between 1882 and 1930, murderers lynched more than three thousand black men and women.) Black politicians elected to office were thrown out. And all-white legislatures began passing a new set of black codes, known as Jim Crow laws, that segregated blacks from whites in every conceivable public place, down to the last street corner. Tennessee passed the first Jim Crow law, in 1881, mandating the separation of blacks and whites in railroad cars. Georgia became the first state to demand separate seating for whites and blacks in streetcars, in 1891. Courthouses provided separate Bibles. Bars provided separate stools. Post offices mandated separate windows. Playgrounds had separate swings. In Birmingham, for a black child to play checkers with a white child in a public park became a crime.41 Slavery had ended; segregation had only begun.

Populism also pitted the people against the state. During populism’s first rise, the state as a political entity became an object of formal academic study through political science, one of a new breed of academic fields known as the social sciences. Before the Civil War, most American colleges were evangelical; college presidents were ministers, and every branch of scholarship was guided by religion. After 1859, and the Origin of Species, the rise of Darwinism contributed to the secularization of the university, as did the influence of the German educational model, in which universities were divided into disciplines and departments, each with a claim to secular, and especially scientific, expertise. These social sciences—political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology—used the methods of science, and especially of quantification, to study history, government, the economy, society, and culture.96 Columbia University opened a School of Political Science in 1880, the University of Michigan in 1881, Johns Hopkins in 1882. Woodrow Wilson completed a PhD in political science at Johns Hopkins in 1886. He planned to write a “history of government in all the civilized States in the world,” to be called The Philosophy of Politics. In 1889, he published a preliminary study called, simply, The State.97 For Wilson’s generation of political scientists, the study of the state replaced the study of the people. The erection of the state became, in their view, the greatest achieve...

IN 1893, Americans marked the anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic by hosting the largest-ever world’s fair, the Columbian Exposition, on six hundred acres of fairgrounds in Chicago, in more than two hundred buildings containing thousands of exhibits, pavilions representing forty-six nations, and, not least, the first Ferris wheel.

The resulting legal principle—that public accommodations could be “separate but equal”—would last for more than half a century.

Progressives championed the same causes as Populists, and took their side in railing against big business, but while Populists generally wanted less government, Progressives wanted more, seeking solutions in reform legislation and in the establishment of bureaucracies, especially government agencies.6 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.

Before the Great Migration began, 90 percent of all blacks in the United States lived in the South. Between 1915 and 1918, five hundred thousand African Americans left for cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland, Chicago and Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Detroit. Another 1.3 million left the South between 1920 and 1930. By the beginning of the Second World War, 47 percent of all blacks in the United States lived outside the South.

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.

“A man would be better off without booze but the same is true of pie,” was the position taken by Clarence Darrow.96

Between 1929 and 1932, one in five American banks failed. The unemployment rate climbed from 9 percent in 1930, to 16 percent in 1931, to 23 percent in 1932, by which time nearly twelve million Americans—a number equal to the entire population of the state of New York—were out of work. By 1932, national income, $87.4 billion in 1929, had fallen to $41.7 billion. In many homes, family income fell to zero. One in four Americans suffered from want of food.11 Factories closed; farms were abandoned. Even the weather conspired to reduce Americans to want: a drought plagued the plains, sowing despair and reaping death. Soil turned to dust and blew away. Schools shut their doors, children grew thin, and even thinner, and babies died in their cradles. Farm families, displaced by debt and drought, wandered westward, carrying what they could in dust-covered jalopies.

wrote the political theorist Harold Laski in 1932.13 The last peace had created the conditions for the next war. Out of want came fear, out of fear came fury. By 1930, more than three million Germans were unemployed and Nazi Party membership had doubled. Adolf Hitler, as addled as he was ruthless, came to power in 1933, invaded the Rhineland in 1936, Poland in 1939. The bells of history tolled a tragedy of ages. Japan, whose expansion had been prohibited by the League of Nations, invaded Manchuria in 1931 and Shanghai in 1937. Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, thirsting for glory and for the triumphs and trophies of war, invaded Ethiopia in 1935. Tyrants ruled with the terror of lies, led by the Reich’s Ministry of Propaganda. Mussolini predicted: “The liberal state is destined to perish.”

Six days later, Hitler told his cabinet of his intention to establish a Ministry of Propaganda. Joseph Goebbels, appointed as its head on March 13, reported in his diary four days later that “broadcasting is now totally in the hands of the state.” Having seized control of the airwaves, Hitler seized control of what remained of the government. On March 23, he addressed the German legislature, the Reichstag, its doors barred. Speaking beneath a giant flag of a swastika, Hitler asked the Reichstag to pass the Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich, essentially abolishing its own authority and granting to Hitler the right to make law. The government then outlawed all parties but the Nazi Party.

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.

he argued that “at one time the press was depended upon as the chief agency for instructing and informing the mass of people,” but that the growth of public schools meant that newspapers no longer filled that role

Goebbels had a device installed in his office that allowed him to preempt national programming, and he deployed “radio wardens” to make sure Germans were listening to official broadcasts. The purpose of fascist propaganda is to control the opinions of the masses and deploy them in service of the power of the state.

Goebbels hoped to sow division in the United States, partly through a shortwave radio system, the Weltrundfunksender, or World Broadcasting Station, the Propaganda Ministry’s “long-range propaganda artillery.” By 1934 it was broadcasting pro-Germany English-and foreign-language propaganda to Africa, Latin America, the Far East, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Australia, though its broadcasts to North America far outstripped the scale of all of its other programs. To the United States, where it broadcast in “American English,” the Weltrundfunksender sent false “news,” chiefly having to do with claims about a “Communist Jewish conspiracy.”

With FDR, polling entered the White House and the American political process. And there it remained.

Jim Crow defined New Deal politics. Between violence, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other forms of disenfranchisement, less than 4 percent of African Americans were registered to vote. Nevertheless, “the revenge of the slave is to place his masters in such subjection that they can make no decision, political, social, economic, or ethical, without reference to him,” Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote in 1930. “Voteless, he dominates politics.”100 FDR’s reliance on public opinion surveys made this problem worse. Gallup’s early method is known as “quota sampling.” He analyzed the electorate to determine what proportion of the people who vote are men, women, black, white, young, and old. The people who conducted his surveys had to fill a quota so that the survey respondents would constitute an exactly proportionate mini-electorate. But what Gallup presented to the American public as “public opinion” was the opinion of Americans who were disproportionately wealthy, white, and male. Nationwide, in the 1930s and 1940s, blacks constituted about 10 percent of the population but made up less than 2 percent of Gallup’s survey group. Because blacks in the South generally could not vote, Gallup assigned no “Negro quota” in those states.101 Instead of representing public opinion, polling essentially silenced the voices of African Americans. Roosevelt’s electoral coalition drew African Americans from the Republican Party; he consulted an informal group of advisers who came to be called his “b...

Isolationists developed a vision of “Fortress America.” Most isolationists were Republicans, while opposition to isolationism was strongest among southern Democrats, who were committed to global trade for their tobacco and cotton crops.

Britain, overwhelmingly outgunned by Germany and with its own armaments fast dwindling, had run out of cash to buy tanks and ships and planes from the United States. FDR had a plan for that, the Lend-Lease Act: the United States would lend these things to Britain, less a loan or a lease than a gift, in exchange of long-term leases of territory for American military bases.

Between 1940 and 1945, Americans produced 300,000 military planes, 86,000 tanks, 3 million machine guns, and 71,000 naval ships. Farm production increased by 25 percent. Farmers produced 477 million more bushels of corn in 1944 than they had in 1939. These supplies weren’t just for American forces; the United States supplied Britain, France, the Soviet Union, China, and other allies. Fifteen percent of American output was shipped abroad.43 The federal budget grew at an astounding rate, from $9 billion in 1939 to $100 billion in 1945. Between 1941 and 1946, the federal government spent more than it had from 1789 to 1941. In 1939, less than 2 percent of American national output went to war; by 1944, 40 percent did. The GDP doubled. And the GNP rose from $91 billion to $166 billion, crushing doubts that the economy had reached its limit. Mobilization for war acted as a public works program, the largest ever. In Europe, even food was rationed during the war; in the United States, civilians enjoyed a wealth of consumer goods and increased buying power. The leanness of the Depression was over.

The Manhattan Project, a secret federal project to develop an atomic bomb, begun in 1939, had, by the end of the war, employed 130,000 staff, and cost $2 billion. The National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), established by FDR in 1940, was headed by Vannevar Bush, the so-called czar of research, who by 1941 was also head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Before the end of the war, the NDRC employed some two thousand scientists, including three out of four of the nation’s physicists.

When governments assume control over economic affairs, Hayek warned, the people become slaves: “What is called economic power, while it can be an instrument of coercion, is, in the hands of private individuals, never exclusive or complete power, never power over the whole life of a person. But centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery.”