{"id":129405,"date":"2018-09-18T12:11:34","date_gmt":"2018-09-18T16:11:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129405"},"modified":"2018-09-20T17:49:40","modified_gmt":"2018-09-20T21:49:40","slug":"america-doesnt-have-to-be-like-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/18\/america-doesnt-have-to-be-like-this\/","title":{"rendered":"America Doesn\u2019t Have to Be Like This"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Jill Lepore\u2019s <\/em>These Truths and the foundational myths of the United States.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Adolphe Yvon, The Genius of America<\/em>, ca. 1870.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t have to be this way.<\/p>\n

This thought kept blinking through my mind, like a neon sign on a dark street, as I read These<\/em> Truths<\/em>,\u00a0the newest book by the Harvard professor and\u00a0New Yorker <\/em>contributor Jill Lepore. A nine-hundred-plus-page tome, it is a full history of the United States, a country I was born in and soon after left. I was raised in Israel, a much younger country that was handed over by a colonizing force to a people desperate for a home back in the days\u2014not so long ago, really\u2014when colonizers could simply gift the land they\u2019d taken as if it were theirs to give. The history I was taught from the ages of six to eighteen was both condensed and elongated, the history of a fledgling country full of war but also of an ancient people once enslaved and long persecuted.<\/p>\n

But I was born in the U.S., which makes me a citizen. I didn\u2019t have to pass a test or learn about this country or understand any more of it than any non-American understands about the place that gave us McDonald\u2019s, the Internet, the iPhone. I moved back here easily, when I was nineteen years old. My birth certificate sufficed; my ignorance was never questioned or corrected.<\/p>\n

What are the myths the United States has built itself on? Lepore\u2019s question\u2014the one the book explores\u2014is more honed, adapted from statements by Alexander Hamilton: \u201cCan a political society really be governed by reflection and election, by reason and truth, rather than by accident and violence, by prejudice and deceit?\u201d Lepore\u2019s answer is something like: Well, sometimes yes, and sometimes no, and in the past few decades, it kind of depends on who\u2019s being asked.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I set out to read this book and write this article, I had a general understanding of how the United States came to be. I knew about the Founding Fathers (though couldn\u2019t name them all\u2014as with Disney\u2019s seven dwarfs, I always forgot at least one). I knew that this land wasn\u2019t empty or fallow or wasted; it was settled and loved and well cared for by the peoples native to it long before Europeans arrived. I knew about the terrible legacy of slavery, of the millions of human beings forced onto ships, across oceans, onto land, where they were treated horribly, worked to death, and yet survived, generation after generation. But there was a lot more that I didn\u2019t know or that I had understood incorrectly. I viewed history as a straight line, a collection of clearly defined and connected dots. I saw it as inevitable, maybe self-evident.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take the American Revolution, for instance. A seemingly renegade idea, the severing of a people from another land\u2014courageous, ballsy. But the myth is always simpler than the truth. Lepore writes:<\/p>\n

The revolution in America, when it came, began not with the English colonists but with the people over whom they ruled. Long before shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, long before George Washington crossed the Delaware, long before American independence was thought of, or even thinkable, a revolutionary tradition was forged, not by the English in America, but by Indians waging wars and slaves waging rebellions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, the American Revolution, the very idea that it was possible to revolt against power, came not from the bright minds of a few white men (whose whiteness, I might add, was newly recognized as a feature of note) but from those they attempted to conquer and subjugate. Proof of the possibility came, for example, from Jamaica, where in 1739, the First Maroon War yielded victory, freedom, and independence over some fifteen hundred acres of land for former slaves led by a man named Cudjoe.<\/p>\n

Slavery itself wasn\u2019t inevitable or even taken for granted in the early days of American thought, though the simplified narrative I\u2019d picked up in dribs and drabs from pop culture, various college courses, and the occasional Wikipedia rabbit hole allowed it to seem so. Of course, those held as slaves weren\u2019t resigned to their fate\u2014and any notion that they were is a gross fabrication to reduce guilt over the institution\u2019s dehumanization. But beyond that, it wasn\u2019t as if everyone else was just cool with slavery until Abraham Lincoln came around. Lepore tells the story of Benjamin Lay, a small hunchbacked man who wrote a book titled All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates<\/em> and sailed the world denouncing slavery to anyone who\u2019d listen.<\/em> He was furious at the hypocrisy of so-called good Christians who found moral excuses for the ownership of slaves.<\/p>\n

Thomas Jefferson, who himself owned slaves and didn\u2019t particularly care to free them, still wrote in the draft of what would become the Declaration of Independence that King George III had waged \u201ca cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery.\u201d The statement didn\u2019t make it into the Declaration, which, as Lepore writes, \u201cmarked a colossal failure of political will, in holding back the tide of opposition to slavery by ignoring it, for the sake of a union that, in the end, could not and would not last.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lepore\u2019s book\u2014which over its first half or so mentions slavery and free black people on almost every page\u2014is full of people like Lay, who didn\u2019t sit idly by as human beings were treated like property. It is full of statements by men like Jefferson, who saw the horror of the institution and yet refused to end it for his own comfort and monetary gain. We don\u2019t talk about people like Lay often, nor do we discuss the moral quandaries and disastrous choices of men like Jefferson. Ultimately, the former lost and the latter won\u2014history, the truism goes, is written by the winners. But as I read These Truths<\/em>, I realized again how important it is to search for the truth.<\/p>\n

In Lincoln\u2019s address, four months after the Battle of Gettysburg, he doesn\u2019t mention slavery. For years, I had heard\u2014and believed\u2014that the Civil War was fought over slavery, yes, but also over states\u2019 rights. The latter is a pervasive notion, one that buried itself in my brain without reason or education or understanding. It is patently untrue. Even if Lincoln didn\u2019t mention slavery in the Gettysburg address, it was the root of the war. Lepore quotes the words of a soldier writing for his Wisconsin regimental newspaper in 1862: \u201cThe fact that slavery is the sole undeniable cause of this infamous rebellion, that it is a war of, by, and for Slavery, is as plain as the noon-day sun.\u201d And another solider, that same year, writing for his Confederate brigade\u2019s paper: \u201cAny man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks is either a fool or a liar.\u201d Both sides knew it then. This knowledge, this certainty, has gotten lost.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t have to be this way.<\/p>\n

So why is it this way? Why does it seem inevitable? I kept wondering this as I read, trying to figure out whether there was a unifying meaning behind the collective misinformation and belief systems that have overrun political debate today. The first half of Lepore\u2019s book focuses deeply on the way slavery affected every political move of the first hundred fifty years or so of the United States, and the second half holds the answer to my question about inevitability. She moves into a discussion of journalism, social science, and the nature of progress.<\/p>\n

The rise of modern journalism can be traced back to the 1880s and 1890s, when newspapers began focusing not on differing opinions but on facts\u2014or purported facts, anyway. Fact-checkers were introduced into the field of journalism not long after, in the twenties, when Time <\/em>magazine\u00a0was founded. And soon after that, political polling entered the field, right alongside the rise of political campaigners for hire.<\/p>\n

\u201c[George] Gallup liked to call public opinion measurement \u2018a new field of journalism,\u2019\u2009\u201d Lepore writes. He believed he was taking the \u201cpulse of democracy.\u201d E.\u2009B. White, on the other hand, writes that \u201calthough you can take a nation\u2019s pulse, you can\u2019t be sure that the nation hasn\u2019t just run up a flight of stairs.\u201d Though Lepore is careful to leave her own opining largely out of the narrative, it becomes clear that she rather agrees with White.<\/p>\n

Gallup\u2019s polls attempted to predict the outcomes of elections, but they were also meant to scientifically represent the opinions of the nation so elected officials could know what the people wanted. But representation was the woeful problem. Although 10 percent of American citizens in the thirties and forties were black, they made up less than 2 percent of survey groups\u2014and only in the North, because Gallup didn\u2019t bother to survey black people in the South, where a variety of methods prevented many from voting. This was selective representation at best. Plus, Gallup\u2019s method implied that his participants already had opinions on the issues at hand, when often these takes were formed on the spot, spawned by the question, for the simple purpose of having a yes or no answer.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the \u201clie factory,\u201d as some called Campaigns, Inc., was founded in 1933 by Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, who made politics a business. \u201cNo single development altered the workings of American democracy so wholly as the industry Whitaker and Baxter invented,\u201d Lepore writes. In the 1934 California gubernatorial race, Campaigns, Inc. was hired by the author Upton Sinclair\u2019s Republican rivals. Sinclair, having written novels in the past, was screwed by his creativity\u2014Whitaker and Baxter printed quotes from his novels as if they were his own opinions, thus smearing his name.<\/p>\n

Their strategies were basically: keep it simple, don\u2019t explain yourself, and repeat, repeat, repeat. If this sounds familiar, that\u2019s because, as Lepore writes, Whitaker and Baxter shaped the way political campaigns would be run ever after. It\u2019s been eighty-five years since they founded their lie factory, and it inspired others, which have been doing booming business ever since. In the sixties, Leone Baxter finally expressed her reservations about what she\u2019d started, believing that political consulting should remain \u201cin the hands of the most ethical, principled people. People with real concern for the world around them, for people around them, or else it will erode into the hands of people who have no regard for the world around them. It could be a very, very destructive thing.\u201d Well, yes. Quite.<\/p>\n

Around the same time Baxter apparently became aware of her conscience, American history began to be loudly reclaimed. \u201cThe civil rights movement,\u201d Lepore writes, \u201cand the war in Vietnam called attention to aspects of American history that had been left out of American history textbooks from the very start. The American Indian Movement, founded in 1968, challenged the story of the nation\u2019s origins \u2026 The Black Power movement, the Chicano movement, and a growing Asian American movement made similar demands.\u201d The legacy of these movements remains with us today, as history continues to require reclamation, as certain false ideas persist even in those of us who think we\u2019re aware of the injustices of the past. Somehow, there are always more of them to uncover.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t have to be this way.<\/p>\n

In the final section of the mammoth book\u2019s final chapter, \u201cAmerica, Disrupted,\u201d Lepore sits in a room with the campaign managers of the 2016 presidential elections, where they debrief, as they\u2019ve been doing since 1972, in a kind of postelection gloat session: \u201cNo one said a word about the United States or its government or the common good. Sitting in that room, watching, was like being a pig at a butchers\u2019 convention: there was much talk of the latest technology in knives and the best and tastiest cuts of meat, but no one pretended to bear any love for the pig.\u201d<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t have to be this way, but this is how it is: there are still myriad ways in which minorities and marginalized people in the U.S. suffer systemic oppression, and there is still so much money in politics that it boggles the mind and seems like an obvious, glaring flaw in the system. And so what to do? Lepore doesn\u2019t give us any answers, though she does appear to be unfortunately impatient with millennials\u2019 insistence that language\u2014how people are spoken about, joked about, belittled\u2014matters. She writes that the rules of \u201cintersectionality\u201d (she uses quotes) involve \u201cintricate, identity-based hierarchies of suffering and virtue.\u201d I disagree with her definition of intersectionality<\/em>.\u00a0But I agree with her that it isn\u2019t the only thing that matters. Laws, protections, Supreme Court rulings\u2014these matter just as much. In the long run, maybe they matter more.<\/p>\n

Lepore\u2019s final metaphor in the book relates back to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow\u2019s ship of state from a poem whose original ending was dire:<\/p>\n

\u2026 where, oh where,
\nShall end this form so rare?
\n\u2026 Wrecked upon some treacherous rock,
\nRotting in some loathsome dock,
\nSuch the end must be at length
\nOf all this loveliness and strength!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But when a hopeful Charles Sumner, an antislavery activist, convinced Longfellow that the nation still had a chance, Longfellow changed his ending to the one we know:<\/p>\n

Sail on! Sail on! O Ship of State!
\nFor thee the famished nations wait!
\nThe world seems hanging on thy fate!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps America\u2019s ultimate direction is neither as desolate as Longfellow\u2019s first draft nor as self-important as his last. Instead, we can look back, educate ourselves about our history, and try to do better. The women running for office all around the nation give me hope. The eight trans politicians elected to public office in 2017 give me hope. And living in a red state, watching first-year students learn to respectfully discuss their differences and misunderstandings, I am hopeful that we can learn to have productive conversations despite the media landscape, despite the clickable outrage, despite the systems set in place to prevent them. I am hopeful.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t have to stay this way.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ilana Masad is an Israeli American book critic and fiction writer. She is the founder and host of <\/em>The Other Stories, a podcast featuring new, struggling, and established fiction writers. Her work has appeared in<\/em> The New Yorker, the<\/em> New York Times, the<\/em> Washington Post, the<\/em> Los Angeles Times, and more. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska\u2013Lincoln.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Jill Lepore\u2019s These Truths and the foundational myths of the United States. \u00a0   It didn\u2019t have to be this way. This thought kept blinking through my mind, like a neon sign on a dark street, as I read These Truths,\u00a0the newest book by the Harvard professor and\u00a0New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore. A nine-hundred-plus-page […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1598,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[4655,2861,3635,37433,3890],"class_list":["post-129405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-george-washington","tag-history","tag-jill-lepore","tag-these-truths","tag-upton-sinclair"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAmerica Doesn\u2019t Have to Be Like This<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On Jill Lepore\u2018s \u2018These Truths\u2019 and the foundational myths of the United States.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/18\/america-doesnt-have-to-be-like-this\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"America Doesn\u2019t Have to Be Like This by Ilana Masad\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 18, 2018 \u2013 On Jill Lepore\u2019s These Truths and the foundational myths of the United States. \u00a0   It didn\u2019t have to be this way. 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