The book I enjoyed the most in 2020 was one of the last books I read. These Truths by Jill Lepore is dramatic telling of the history of one of the most fascinating nations on earth.
I came to reading this book having just watched Hamilton on Disney +.
The ideals of that revolution have always fascinated me. The principles of liberty, the formation of a Union of states and the way in which the Union was formed have motivated a lot of my thinking as I studies Law and Politics through University and engaged in debate and politics at leisure.
The very idea of a nation bound by a constitution with the reverence and strength that is bound into the Unites States constitution feels like an enigma to me in a country that not only has no written constitution, but whose legal and political tradition comes form hundreds of years of resisting the creeping constitutionalism that swept around the world following the Revolutionary War.
So, it was by happy circumstance that my desire to jump into a deeper examination of the history of the Revolution and beyond coincided stumbling across These Truths, a history of the United States.
Lepore’s history is, in my opinion, a masterpiece of historical examination and storytelling. Reading the book felt like sweeping through the arc of America’s progress through history from above observing, with a keen sense that this was a journey of debate about what it means to be a nation.
The lessons and stories of These Truths are of the people of the United States, but America is not in a vacuum, their history is the history of the world since the formation of the Union. The underpinning principles of America have been at the center of philosophical thought prior to the American nation but since its formation, have been magnified into global discussion as America has risen.
Two fundamental themes emerged for me as critical in examining what America means and has meant through time. Those are how it is that the constitution gained the dominance and reverence it has in American society today and how, in the land of the free, slavery and civil rights have been such a pox on the debate within the American arc.
Slavery and Freedom
The emancipation proclamation ended slavery in the United States in 1863, thirteen years shy of a century since the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It would roughly the midpoint in United States history between the formation of the union and the landmark Brown v Board of Education in 1954.
The issue of slavery has been at the core of public debate in America since the inception of the nation.
The place and status of African American’s was a debate within the Federalist Papers, the subject of compromise from Jefferson as he tried to calculate the impact of the African heritage in his offspring, and a tension within the principles of liberty and freedom being etched into the genesis of the American nation.
Lepore lays out the start realities of the debate and experience of slavery throughout the chapters of These Truths, illustrating the insidious way in which the arguments for the bondage of persons burrowed into the heart of the American cultural debate.
Washington, the author writes, as the First President both owned slaves and provided evidence that he saw slavery as a burden on the moral character of the new state he governed.
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.
Lepore asks the obvious question, given the status of Washington as the living embodiment of the Union, what could he have done had this burden been felt as strongly for him as it was for his 16th predecessor?
Slavery remains an important theme throughout the chapters of this history, but as the history and book progresses, the development of political organisation to support the institution of slavery becomes important.
The rise of the populist Andrew Jackson and the creation of a version of the Democratic Party that is difficult to reconcile with the Democrat Party that endorsed the 44th President of the United States.
By the 1860s, the debate over slavery reached a crescendo with the election of Lincoln. Growing up I knew Lincoln’s famous action to abolish slavery, but I had not appreciated how compelled he initially was on the issue and how much of a dominant talking point it was for him.
But the strength against the arguments off Lincoln can be seen in the strength of the response. The secession of states to form the Confederacy stemmed from a rejection of Lincoln’s election and a view to start the Union anew.
Lepore’s description of these events adds a weight of moral stakes at play in the arc of American history. Slavery was, of course, an enigma in the so called land of liberty. But a fundamental war was being fought over the idea of America itself. The truths of the nation, set down as self-evident, were not. They were being challenged and torn apart by the people they were meant to reflect.
The issue of slavery did resolve, but it took another almost century to progress the cause of equality and almost half that time again to see it reflected in the highest office of state.
The issue, dominant in the history of America is described by Lepore as
“another chapter opened in the American book of genesis: liberty and slavery became the American Abel and Cain”.
These truths and the constitution
I think the conventional wisdom of modern constitutionalism (from the outside looking in at least) is that the constitution was written, the founding fathers established it has supreme law and that is how it has been.
That is certainly the story told my many within the United States talking about originalist judicial interpretations or referencing the intent of the founding fathers in assessing modern political thought.
Lepore does not go as far as to reject this assessment of the Constitution, but challenges the historical dominance that it has. The conclusion I came to having read These truths is that the constitution today is the product of a fierce, country ripping, debate about what indeed the “truths” meant as well as a powerful device to remind America of principles bigger than any one person.
That latter point is illustrated well in the character of George Washington. Upon taking the presidency, there were no term limits and Washington was a colossus. His decision to voluntarily step down after two terms set a precedent so powerful in remained convention until FDR in the mid 1900s.
Beyond the country-splitting civil war, Lepore adds detail to the history of the constitution by illustrating the constant stresses and challenges the Constitution has been placed under.
Whether it was Congress testing its powers with the first Presidential veto override under Andrew Jackson, the conflict between the courts and African American’s through to 1954, the gauntlet laid down by FDR with his new deal, how the constitution could guarantee liberty but also justify the interment of Japanese-Americans, the ideals at the heart of the American founding document have always been the subject to fierce debate over what the truths, deemed self evident, actually meant.
Of some interest is the more modern discussion of how politics rapidly shifted in ways that set the scene for the America we see today.
The rise of Nazi Germany showed the rise of fake news and propaganda being fed from a foreign power into US households through radio.
The emergence of pollsters saw shifts in political incentives and the stunning victory of Truman who defied all the polls that just got it wrong.
The Democrats moved quickly away from their oppressive roots and turned their populist streak towards those who had previously been subjugated. The Kennedy campaign in 1960 marked a major turning point for the embrace of African American voters within the Democratic Party (prior to thus Truman has also worked hard to move the Democrat position).
The election of 1960 also saw a Republican (Nixon) who had embraced television and was known to lie and defame for political point scoring be defeated only to claim evidence of voter fraud and that the election had been stolen.
At the heart of all of this was how these events and actions coincided within the overarching theory of America. A theory told through the story of the constitution.
Lepore certainly makes some points that inform a number of contemporary political discussions but at the heart of this book she tells the story of a fundamental debate about what it means to be the land of the free, whether liberty is a fundamental truth of the nation, and whether the constitution if for all American’s or something to be used by a majority to further their interests.
These Truths illustrates that through the tumble of history, America and its story have grown, moved, and evolved. But the idea of America remains.
As the 16th President said in a quote that echoes through Lepore’s book:
“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
