These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Taney had argued that the equality asserted in the Declaration of Independence was never intended to apply to black people. If this were true, Lincoln asked, what were the value of Jefferson’s words? Were “these truths” mere lies? Lincoln offered his own reading. “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain,” he argued, “and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism.”101

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.

The best hope for mass democracy might have seemed to be the scrupulously and unfailingly honest reporting of news, but this, Lippmann thought, was doomed to fall short, because of the gap between facts and truth.

The argument over the nature of the Constitution had much in common with the argument between Protestants who believed the Bible to be literally true and those who did not.

propaganda was to the masses what the unconscious was to the mind, a people’s “invisible governors.”

With enough money, and with the tools of mass communication, deployed efficiently, the propagandist can turn a political majority into a truth.