I had been looking to fill some gaps in my knowledge of U.S. history so I recently picked up “These Truths. A History of the United States” by Jill Lepore. The title is, of course, a reference to the famous opening line of the second paragraph of the United States Declaration of Independence.
“These Truths” is a social-political history of the United States, not an economic history, there is very little about the industrialists and bankers whose names now adorn buildings and universities across the United States, nor a cultural history, Melville and Faulkner both get name-checked once, but there is no mention of Louis Armstrong, Hollywood, Jackson Pollock, the Beat generation, West Side Story, Superman, Woodstock or any other artist or cultural event that shaped the collective unconsciousness and the nation’s cultural identity.
With those limitations in mind, Jill Lepore's “These Truths” is probably the best single-volume history of the United States currently available. But don't take my word for it, because I’ve only read one. Across 789 highly readable pages, Lepore, a professor of history at Harvard University and a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, weaves together political philosophy, social movements, historical characters, and the long-silenced voices of women, African-Americans, Native Americans, and others pushed to the margins. The history of the United States, in Lepore’s telling, is no triumphant march of progress. It is darker, stranger, more honest than that. From the outset, the United States emerges as a tangle of contradictions: a magnet for European fortune seekers and free thinkers that was also a gulag for those forcefully moved from Africa or born into slavery; a secular experiment that curdled into religious fervor; and a people fanatical about both slavery and freedom.
That last contradiction nearly destroyed everything. The Civil War, Lepore argues, exposed two countries grappling for one continent: one built on the First Amendment, the other an antidemocratic, pro-slavery state willing to punish dissent with death. I had been unaware how brutal the Civil War was: more than 750,000 Americans died, with 24,000 casualties in a single battle. The Union emerged victorious, the Confederacy was dissolved, yet liberation proved tragically incomplete. Lincoln fell to an assassin, Reconstruction was bartered away in a grubby political bargain, and Jim Crow rose as the losing side's venomous revenge.
Lepore definitely has a way with words and despite its length “These Truths” is an easy read. It brims with vivid anecdote and arresting detail: who would have thought that George Washington's dentures were fashioned from his slaves' teeth? Benjamin Franklin emerges as one of the book’s unsung heroes. They should name a street after him in every U.S. city 😊. If only Congress had gone along with his call for abolition.
As a European I continue to be puzzled by the American obsession with guns, periodic mass shootings with multiple casualties notwithstanding. I’m equally puzzled that abortion remains such a divisive issue. As Lepore writes: “In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death. Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom.”
“These Truths” was first published in 2018, two years into the first Trump presidency, when many observers still considered his ascent to power an aberration. Yet here we are. One can only hope that a century from now Trump and MAGA only warrant a short paragraph in a future single-volume history of the United States. As “These Truths” makes abundantly clear the present moment is not the only dark page in U.S. history. In February 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor, some 112,000 Japanese living in the United States, including 79,000 U.S. citizens, were ordered from their homes and imprisoned in camps in Arizona, California, Oregon and Washington. There is, sadly, nothing new about ICE and today’s detention facilities.
If you’ve always wondered who the founding fathers were that U.S. politicians and media like to refer to or if you think that Abraham Lincoln was one of them, I highly recommend Jill Lepore's “These Truths”.
* There is a statue of Benjamin Franklin at the Square de Yorktown in Paris, but I got there at the wrong time of day to make a decent photo. I'll go back another time.