European journal of American studies, 15-2

European journal of American studies

15-2 | 2020

Summer2020

Only Dead Metaphors Can Be Resurrected: A

Review of Jill Lepore’s These Truths

GeorgeBlaustein

Electronicversion

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/16087

DOI: 10.4000/ejas.16087

ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher

European Association for American Studies

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George Blaustein, “Only Dead Metaphors Can Be Resurrected: A Review of Jill Lepore’s These Truths”,

European journal of American studies [Online], 15-2 | 2020, Online since 30 June 2020, connection on 08

July 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/16087 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.16087

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Only Dead Metaphors Can Be

Resurrected: A Review of Jill

Lepore’s These Truths

George Blaustein

1 Historical narratives of the United States have never not been shaped by an anxiety

about the end of it all. Will we, in the end, sink or soar? Are we a new Rome or a new

Zion? Even the driest textbook turns lofty on its final page. Nor have such narratives

ever been without a corresponding civic intention, stated or unstated: the point is to

push the ending back awhile, to ensure a futurity for the American experiment, to

endure.

2 Most textbooks push that ending back by returning, in those final pages that few

students ever read, to founding principles—to the truths expressed in the Declaration

of Independence, say, or in the Constitution’s preamble—and concluding with the hope

that American reality will one day meet them. If the historian is committed to

democracy, as most textbook writers are, then the agents of history are presumed to be

“the people.” We the people need a national history because, after all, America still

exists, and the course of our history will depend, tautologically, on us—the same us that

is also, in theory, history’s readers. The textbook, like the jeremiad, recalls founding

ideals and chastises the present for not living up to them. As Sacvan Bercovitch argued,

both the Jeremiah doing the yelling and the listeners doing the hearing are already in

on the rhetoric. We know, implicitly, that the yelling lets us carry on.

3 It is intriguing to imagine a narrative that altogether relinquishes this generic civic

obligation. It could be structured around a frank acknowledgement of American decay.

Perhaps write of America not as something “great” but as something small, tawdry, and

provisional. Admit that the Constitution is a terrible scripture. Give up on newness and

jump straight to American age. Or write American history as if from thousands of years

in the future. Mark Twain played this melancholy game while touring ruins in Europe

and the Holy Land, in 1867, two years after the Civil War. The ruins made him wonder,

Only Dead Metaphors Can Be Resurrected: A Review of Jill Lepore’s These Truths

European journal of American studies, 15-2 | 2020

“What may be left of General Grant’s great name forty centuries hence?” So he

conjured this helpful entry from an “Encyclopedia for A.D. 5868”:

URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT—popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of

the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742;

but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a contemporary of Scharkspyre,

the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the

Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote “Rock me to Sleep, Mother.”

4 My favorite detail is the deadpan clarification that “Graunt” flourished “some three

centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it”—a glimmer of what else one would

learn from this future Encyclopedia of error and inversion.

5 But we are all condemned to live in the present, and the present seems like an

apocalyptic moment for the American historical narrative, at least of the textbook

variety. A unique national future cannot be presumed, and not only because a future in

general cannot be presumed. The veil has been drawn back: the history of the United

States is cut from the same cloth as everything else. It is dismal to admit that American

history is continuous with history’s general “panorama of sin and suffering.” That was

Hegel’s phrase for the basic human experience of worldly time, before the historian

steps in to lift a narrative out of it.

6 * * *

7 These Truths: A History of the United States is the eleventh of the prolific historian Jill

Lepore’s twelve books, a number that includes one co-authored work of historical

fiction. This one is her most ambitious. It is also a throwback to an older genre: the

national history. “I wrote this book,” she writes with candor and caveat, “because

writing an American history from beginning to end and across that divide hasn’t been

attempted in a long time, and it’s important, and it seemed worth a try.”

It is worth a

try! And These Truths may take its place as a standard history, partly because of its

pedigree—Harvard and the New Yorker—and partly because of its elegance and

digestibility.

8 It is not entirely true that such an American history “hasn’t been attempted in a long

time,” but as a textbook, or textbookish antidote to textbooks, the book is notable for

making its civic purpose explicit rather than implicit, and for its more direct

acknowledgment of political urgency. “The United States is founded on a set of ideas,”

Lepore writes, “but Americans have become so divided that they no longer agree, if

they ever did, about what those ideas are, or were.” So These Truths is “meant to double

as an old-fashioned civics book, an explanation of the origins and ends of democratic

institutions, from the town meeting to the party system, from the nominating

convention to the secret ballot, from talk radio to Internet polls” (xviii-xix). The book’s

outermost frame is a yes-or-no question: “Can a political society really be governed by

reflection and election, by reason and truth, rather than by accident and violence, by

prejudice and deceit?” (xiv). This is a loaded question, the only acceptable answers

being yes, maybe, and I hope so. (In fact These Truths will arrive, maybe despite itself, at a

remarkably bleak assessment of present-day national political resources.) The book’s

real task is to demonstrate that history, when animated in a particular way, can lift us

toward a humane or enlightened politics. Read me, it whispers, and you will be

equipped to steer the ship of state through the storm.

9 It is no easy thing, nowadays, to tell an inspiriting national history. Lepore’s attempt

has received admiring reviews and critical reviews. The criticisms are usually about

Only Dead Metaphors Can Be Resurrected: A Review of Jill Lepore’s These Truths

European journal of American studies, 15-2 | 2020

what is muted or left out—voices, regions, whole methodologies and historical

processes. For Christine DeLucia, the core flaw is methodological: Lepore’s exclusive

“reliance on written literacy and record-keeping as powerful determinants of history

and memory” blinds her to indigenous historiography and to “non-textual knowledge

systems and cross-cultural translation,” and leaves the book without fully-rendered

indigenous voices. For Richard White, the flaws are methodological as well as stylistic.

Lepore’s inattention to political economy as a decisive factor in history makes her

account cursory and superficial, especially of the Gilded Age and the histories of the

West and Midwest. The style of the book, meanwhile, crystallizes a lamentable “New

Yorkerization of American history.”

10 My concern here is not the book’s exclusions, exactly, nor its more-or-less familiar

ideological project. By now, most respectable college-level textbooks already have the

same liberal-progressive oomph, and the same aspiration toward enlightened

consensus. What is remarkable about These Truths is its storytelling, the structure it

grafts onto the past, its attempt to revive national history as a serious genre—in other

words, its narrative form. It represents the pinnacle of contemporary liberal nationalist

history-writing. If we seek an anatomy of that historiography, and if we want to know

its limits, These Truths is a good place to look. It is an occasion to ask what national

history is, and what it is for.

11 Historical narratives need a beginning, and These Truths begins, as it must, with

conquest and catastrophe. “We saw naked people,” Columbus wrote in his diary,

describing the Taíno people on the island he called Hispaniola. The Taíno, Lepore notes,

had no writing; “they sang their laws, and they sang their history.” The context is soon

saturated by colonization, slaughter, and disease. “There were about three million

people on that island … when Columbus landed; fifty years later, there were only five

hundred; everyone else had died, their songs unsung.”

12 So begins Part I, “THE IDEA, 1492-1799.” It starts with European colonization and will

arrive at revolution and the national founding. A book like this cannot convey the

fullness of colonial devastation, but only gesture with solemnity toward the

exponential horror. “Meanwhile, the people of the New World: they died by the

hundreds, they died by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of

thousands, by the tens of millions.” English and French colonization followed Spanish

and Portuguese; Lepore invokes the 17th-century English vicar Samuel Purchas, whose

history of the world suggested that Europeans’ “literall advantage” explained their

colonial dominance in America (13). Literacy itself, in other words, enters the narrative

as one more tool of subjection. The legal and historical foundations of what will become

the United States lie here, in slavery above all. “In one of the more unsettling ironies of

American history,” Lepore writes of colonial Virginia, “laws drafted to justify slavery

and to govern slaves also codified new ideas about liberty and the government of the

free” (48). There is nary an American branch without that root.

13 The workings of oppression nevertheless give way, over three centuries, to revolution

and, by the end of the period, to an antislavery impulse that has become its own moral

force in history. By the 1780s the institution of slavery “had begun to break, like a

plane of glass streaked with cracks but not yet shattered” (105). This progression from

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European journal of American studies, 15-2 | 2020

the darkness of point A to the promise of point B hinges on a central claim: “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. They revolted again and again and again. Their revolutions

came in waves that lashed the land” (55). Most of these revolutions were unrealized in

their own era and aren’t detailed in Lepore’s account. But proleptic revolution is always

present, as an ambient potential. One proof of that potential is the fact that European

colonies had to operate, in effect, as massive counterinsurgency regimes.

14 With that origin of a revolutionary tradition in place, what we call “the American

Revolution” thus becomes a white man’s pale borrowing from it, an etiolated version of

more radical uprisings and insurgencies. After slave rebellions rocked New York in the

1730s and 1740s, white colonists in turn rebelled against the royal government, but

they did so only in order to defend the racial order. “One kind of rebellion was

celebrated, the other suppressed—a division that would endure,” Lepore writes. “In

American history, the relationship between liberty and slavery is at once deep and

dark: the threat of black rebellion gave license to white political opposition” (64).

White Virginians, meanwhile, articulated abstract rights in order to defend their non-

abstract prerogatives as slaveowners. “Inevitably, slavery cast its long and terrible

shadow over these statements of principle,” Lepore writes of the 1776 Virginia

Declaration of Rights and Form of Government, whose author, George Mason, owned

slaves; “slavery, in fact, had made those statements of principle possible” (96). That the

American Revolution was in fact such a borrowing would not have been clear to

Thomas Jefferson, but it can be clear to us.

15 Call it a morally absurd irony, a contradiction, a paradox, a crime—it has been central

to serious American historiography for decades.

The Revolution would not have

happened as it did, the Constitution would not have emerged as it did, without the

political economy of slavery there as a precondition and to some degree a cause.

Jefferson’s ideas depended on enslaved labor, insofar as slavery made possible his

freedom to have ideas at all. These Truths does not have to re-grapple with such

questions in any sustained analytical way, because the predicament itself can be

conveyed with the show-don’t-tell sharpness of anecdote: James Madison, author of the

Constitution, buys a copy of Leviathan in 1782, the same moment he was “short of cash

and complaining that he would soon be ‘under the necessity of selling a negro’” (106).

16 But These Truths is a national history, and it has to draw at least some inspiration from

the founding. The irony must be transcended. Positing a broader “revolutionary

tradition” that emerged organically out of the histories of colonization and slavery—a

tradition forged “by Indians waging wars and slaves waging rebellions”—lets Lepore

fold even the American Revolution, with all its irony and hypocrisy, into a nobler story.

“The American political tradition was forged by philosophers and by statesmen, by

printers and by writers, and it was forged, too, by slaves” (64). The narrative of Part I—

and thus the founding of the United States—can encompass, that is to say, the

revolutions that were realized and the ones that were not. The reader can hold aloft

THE IDEA, because THE IDEA is many things: reason, revolution, independence,

emancipation, enlightened self-government, a new beginning. History can begin in

chaotic and catastrophic darkness, but ideas can rise above the circumstances of their

creation.

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European journal of American studies, 15-2 | 2020

17 The IDEA will not be fully achieved in the national founding; genuine consummation

must remain in the future if the rest of the book is to be necessary and interesting. But

the wished-for-ness of it makes the narrative all the more thrilling. The Declaration of

Independence can now be “a stunning rhetorical feat, an act of extraordinary political

courage” (97), even after we know its contradictory origins. The brilliance of the

Constitution can outshine the grayness or villainy of its authors and assume mythic

proportions: the “giant W” of “We the People” is “as sharp as a bird’s claw” (xi).

Historical events can now be page-turningly suspenseful: “Ratification proved to be a

nail-biter” (128). The era’s more radical potentialities, meanwhile, are also given vivid

narration; they convey a parallel thrill of expectation. Those as-yet-unrealized

revolutions can be incorporated, narratively if not historically, into the national

aspiration. The “unsettling ironies” of the political prehistory of the United States—the

articulations of liberty that depended on slavery—are re-settled into a more open, a

more sprawling, and a more heroic plot.

18 Heroism itself—individual heroism and moral heroism—has become possible in a way

that it was not possible before. As Part I arrives at the actual founding of the United

States, its focus falls on family dramas. The latter parts of the book do not. Historical

figures who lived in the shadow of the familiar founders are given the spotlight—

Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane, for instance. Jane’s story conveys the social-historical

fact that “girls, like slaves, were hardly ever taught to write (they were, however,

taught to read, so that they could read the Bible)”; Jane’s story also imparts a

retrospective grandeur to a formerly-unrecognized individual (59).

The familiar story

of George Washington is juxtaposed with the parallel quests of Harry Washington, “who

had once been Washington’s property.” Harry escaped from Mount Vernon to the

British side during the revolution, made his way to Sierra Leone, “another unruly

republic,” and eventually led a rebellion there (147-148). The American founding needs

Founders; the ingenuity of Lepore’s storytelling is to make Harry Washington a

Founder, too. There becomes part of the here.

19 * * *

20 Part I casts the national founding and its colonial prehistory into a particular narrative

form. The narrative runs, in effect, on two tracks. One is the grisly epic of colonization,

an epic that “raged on,” as epics do, one crime after another (34). The other track is the

emergence, over three centuries, of a moral sense that can rise above it. Part I, in other

words, narrates not only the era’s cruelties and contradictions, but also the emergence

of our own capacity to recognize them as cruelties and contradictions at all.

21 This is an effective way of pulling a redemptive national founding from an otherwise

unredeemable past. It acknowledges history’s fundamental atrocities but rescues us, in

the end, from those fundaments. As a narrative, it adheres to the archetypal plot

structure that the historian and theorist Hayden White called a Romance, in his classic

study of historiography, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century

Europe. “The Romance,” White wrote, “is fundamentally a drama of self-identification

symbolized by the hero’s transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it,

and his final liberation from it.” The hero in this case is “the IDEA,” and the array of

enlightened or emancipatory things contained within it. The Romance “is a drama of

the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness, and of the

ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the

Fall.”

Plotting the national founding this way is as much a literary act as it is, strictly

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speaking, a historical one. It is not the kind of thing one can simply call true or false,

although one can certainly argue with it. The emplotment, to use White’s term, is an act

of narrative, a derivation of meaning and drama from the past’s warp and woof.

22 The colonial prehistory can begin as a chronicle of devastation but become, ultimately,

a triumph of light. This romantic frame, with its redemptive ending, makes it possible

to approach so terrible a history with something like wonder. It is, after all, marvelous

that Harry Washington would so perfectly echo George Washington’s pro-slavery

revolution with an anti-slavery revolution in Sierra Leone. That the historical record

provides such improbably vivid stories—that the national founding can be emplotted as a

Romance at all—is a marvel unto itself, with hints of providential design. None of it had

to be; chaos did not have to yield to light. Romantic history allows for accidents and

miracles. The word “America” was the coinage of a couple mapmakers who happened

to read Amerigo Vespucci’s account of the New World in 1507. “The name stuck by the

merest accident,” Lepore writes, while “much else did not last.” By the 18th century, “a

word on a long-ago map had swelled into an idea.”

23 Hayden White died in 2018; Metahistory appeared in 1973. His main premise was that

history is more art than science, that a historical text is, first and finally, a literary

artifact. This premise was not the bland observation that historians are “biased”; it was

a suggestion about the deeper cognitive and aesthetic structures of historical narrative

itself. Any work of history emerges from the alchemy of a historian’s expectations or

longings, their self-awareness or inner blindness, their prefiguration of past events,

their interrogated or uninterrogated theories of how the world’s gears turn, their

narrative license. There would be no history without that alchemy, no history without

that narrative imagination. Moreover, we can only approach historical narrative with

language, itself an imperfect (and therefore artful) way of apprehending the world.

Good history is good not because it denies these workings of the imagination; it is good

because of them.

24 The vocabulary of Metahistory is well-suited to the task at hand, for These Truths is a

conspicuously emplotted book. One can see affinities, for instance, between Lepore and

the 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, who emplotted the French Revolution as a

Romance and whose books were similarly vivid. Michelet, White suggests, “conceived

his task as a historian to be that of the custodian of the dead, whether they be

conceived as good or evil by him, though in the interest finally of serving that justice in

which the good are finally liberated from the ‘prison’ of human forgetfulness by the

historian himself.”

Lepore would likewise bring the vividness of Romantic quest even

to those who were crushed or silenced in their own era, precisely because her own historical

writing has exhumed them and given them life. As a historian, she is both the custodian

of what was, and the deliverer of the Romantic might-have-been.

25 There are in fact four grand plots in These Truths, one for each of the book’s four

chronological parts—a Romance, a Tragedy, a Comedy, and a Satire—each with their

own implications for the workings of historical change. Within each plot are many

voices, contrary moods and episodes, and sub-plottings, which might run counter to

the grander arcs, adding tension and pathos to the drama, and thus making the grander

arcs all the richer. The four broad emplotments determine what kind of heroism is

possible in the world and era being narrated, or whether heroism is possible at all.

26 Lepore’s work is marked less by a coherent philosophy of history than by a

commitment to storytelling. This can read as mystifying or precious, as when she

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describes history as a method: “The work of the historian is not the work of the critic

or of the moralist,” she writes in the prologue, “it is the work of the sleuth and the

storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the

teller of truth.” As often happens in a Lepore sentence, the flourish and the treacle pile

up and topple. But it is remarkable—poignant even—that into the vacuum of our

moment, when the familiar center of the US history textbook no longer holds, there

would come a book like this, harkening back to the historical imagination of earlier

eras, and throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the problem of national history.

II.

27 Part II of These Truths is about “THE PEOPLE, 1800-1865.” Emplotting this period as a

Tragedy would seem like a more straightforward task than the problem of pulling a

Romance from the history of colonization. “The United States was born as a republic

and grew into a democracy,” Lepore writes, “and, as it did, it split in two, unable to

reconcile its system of government with the institution of slavery” (191). Part II

chronicles territorial expansion and Indian removal, the market revolution and the

dawn of “a distinctively American idea of progress,” the political crisis of the 1850s, and

finally the Civil War (191). The United States’ first major national historian, George

Bancroft, enters the drama as something of a prototype for Lepore herself. In 1826,

Bancroft proclaimed that “The popular voice is all powerful with us; this is our oracle;

this, we acknowledge is the voice of God,” and he embarked on a massive, multivolume

History of the United States in the age of Andrew Jackson.

But he was fated to write

Romantic histories in an era that Lepore emplots as Tragic. Bancroft could not see

America as “a nation looking down the barrel of its own gun” (238).

28 Blindness is a recurring metaphor. THE PEOPLE believe that progress is inevitable, that

destiny is manifest. But they cannot see, until it is too late, that cathartic cataclysm is

also inevitable. Historical figures who played a part in the Romance here become tragic

heroes. When Thomas Jefferson dies in 1826, Sally Hemings takes “a pair of Jefferson’s

eyeglasses to remember him by—a man of sight, a man of blindness” (186). References

to Greek tragedy are explicit. In the wake of the Dred Scott case (1857), in which the

Supreme Court declared that blacks could never be citizens, Lepore has Frederick

Douglass look on in despair at the tragic hastening of contradictions: “it was as if the

nation, like Oedipus of Thebes, had seen that in its own origins lay a curse, and had

gouged out its own eyes” (271). Douglass is both an actor in the drama and its chorus.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—a surrogate narrator, and a mark of the book’s poetic as

opposed to historical aspirations—noted in his diary that “the dissolution of the Union

goes slowly on … Behind it all I hear the low murmur of the slaves, like the chorus in a

Greek tragedy” (301).

29 The Civil War is the Tragedy’s agon, the scene of suffering. It marks, in White’s terms,

“the fall of the protagonist and the shaking of the world he inhabits,” but Tragedy

brings “a gain in consciousness for the spectators of the contest. And this gain is

thought to consist in the epiphany of the law governing human existence which the

protagonist’s exertions against the world have brought to pass.”

Out of the Civil War

comes Lepore’s war-weary Abraham Lincoln, his face “sunken and craggy, as chiseled

as a sea-swept rock.” As he rises to deliver the Second Inaugural Address, “the skies

cleared and the sun broke through the clouds” (304).

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30 Lincoln himself, in the Second Inaugural Address, emplotted the Civil War in tragic

terms: “All dreaded it, all sought to avert it,” he observed, and all knew that the

slaveholding interest was “somehow the cause of the war.” The conflict had its own

inexorable logic, producing a result—the “fundamental and astounding” end of slavery

—that neither side, in its partial blindness, could see beforehand. “Neither anticipated

that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should

cease.” Narrating the war this way gave it meaning in 1865, as it came to an end. The

gain in consciousness for Lincoln and his listeners was theological and ideological:

Lincoln articulated the theological epiphany that “the Almighty has his own purposes,”

and heralded the ideological triumph of free labor over the now-purged evil of slavery.

31 The emplotment in These Truths is similar to Lincoln’s own: the tragic conflict is

between sections, or between different visions of progress, or between slavery and

freedom. Ironically, this is problem for Lepore’s narrative, because Lincoln has already

stated the moral of the story, which makes Part II’s denouement more summary than

history. History, after all, needs retrospect. Tragedy delivered a gain in consciousness

to Lincoln’s listeners, but the gain in consciousness that it is supposed to deliver to us,

history’s readers, is redundant or at best uncanny. American readers already have the

sense that the war was “tragic”—it is there in advance, like a movie we’ve seen.

32 As an alternative, one might position, say, capitalism and democracy as the forces

standing in inexorable conflict. Another theorist of history from the period, Karl Marx,

defined the bourgeoisie by that more robustly tragic self-contradiction: the

bourgeoisie, according to the Communist Manifesto, cannot exist “without constantly

revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of

productions, and with them the whole relations of society,” which would lead

dialectically to its demise. (Marx, it so happens, wrote rapturously about Lincoln and

the Emancipation Proclamation, and he celebrated Lincoln as a bourgeois figure “sui

generis in the annals of history.” At the same time, he prophesied the bourgeoisie’s self-

destruction, emplotting the bourgeoisie’s Tragedy within the broader historical

Comedy of the proletariat’s emergence.

) Lepore’s account of the mid-19th century

tends to downplay these internal structural contradictions. It emphasizes the more

straightforward villainies of political violence and territorial expansion, and the novel

cacophony of the era’s news media, but it is not a decisively tragic account of political

economy. The capitalism of that era, in fact, reads as more humane than our era’s

version, for instance forgiving debts in ways our society no longer does. “A nation of

debtors, Americans came to see that most people who fall into debt are victims of the

business cycle and not the fate of divine retribution or the wheel of fortune” (226). This

looser narration is more about how “Americans” saw things than about the things that

structured their seeing. It might stir a nostalgia for a kinder, gentler free labor

ideology.

33 “As if the nation had gouged out its own eyes,” Lepore writes—the as if hints that Part II

is not a complete Tragedy but a near-Tragedy or pseudo-Tragedy. (In tropological terms,

White would say it operates by simile rather than by a more decisive metonymy.)

Narrator and reader enter the drama already looking for things that will be salvaged

from the wreck. A vague spirit of democracy is salvaged even as we lament what the

tragically-flawed democracy tragically did to itself. What the democracy did to others is

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attended to, certainly, but it is not an essential element of the consciousness gained in

the denouement.

34 It is instructive to read These Truths alongside An Indigenous People’s History of the United

States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, which appeared in 2014. Like These Truths, it

announces itself as a corrective to the standard story, though where Lepore’s

corrective takes the form of liberal reconciliation, Dunbar-Ortiz’s is blistering. Both

are, so to speak, post-revisionist narratives, though from opposite directions. An

Indigenous People’s History is an emphatically anti-national textbook: by design, it defies

incorporation into any liberal American narrative, however demographically capacious

that narrative may be. It is pitched against “post-civil-rights-movement US history

revisionism”—that is, against the now-diversified historical canon, with its noble black

heroes and its “nation of immigrants.” It reveals the palliative veneer of

“multiculturalism” to be “an insidious smoke screen meant to obscure the fact that the

very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its

resources,” merely the last insult heaped on the injury of colonization and genocide:

“With multiculturalism, manifest destiny won the day.”

These books are narratively

irreconcilable, even at those moments when they range over similar territories of

dispossession. Books in the tradition of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United

States, like Dunbar-Ortiz’s, do not have the structure of Tragedy or any other

emplotment; they have the structure of a trial. As narratives, they appeal to a legal and

moral authority that stands above the scene of the crime, as it were, and they

pronounce a verdict.

35 In These Truths, certain kinds of art and certain kinds of technology, certain democratic

expressions and certain technological inventions, can be celebrated, insulated from

Tragedy, even if the era tips inexorably toward the Civil War. Photography, for

instance: “A photograph stops time, trapping it like a butterfly in a jar,” Lepore

similizes. “No other kind of historical evidence has this quality of instantaneity, of an

impression taken in a moment, in a flicker, an eye opened and then shut.” Whitman

thought “all art will be democratized” by photographs, and Frederick Douglass loved to

pose for them. Photographs are democratic insofar as they “capture the ordinary, the

humble, the speechless,” insofar as they don’t discriminate “between the rich and the

poor, the literature and the illiterate, the noisy and the quiet” (273). Maybe. This is no

longer romance, but it is not quite tragedy.

36 Lepore is also fond of Henry David Thoreau, who found in Walden Pond just the right

angle from which to watch the train of industrialization go by. “Thoreau’s experiment

wasn’t a business; it was an antibusiness; he paid attention to what things cost because

he tried never to buy anything.” Thoreau withdraws from the democratic wreck in

order to preserve a liberal national narrative for future Lepores. Walden is read as if it

was written deliberately for us, the national us: a message of calm and narrative

continuity in a transhistorical bottle, an organic jam to be opened and savored in the

ignobly mechanized era that will close the book. The pastoral is thus shielded from

economic determinism. This is what is meant by Lepore’s otherwise curious line,

“Instead of Marx, America had Thoreau” (231). Thoreau can emerge, in his own time

and in ours, as a gardener in the machine.

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III.

37 Part III, THE STATE (1866-1945), chronicles the rise of the nation-state proper. It begins

with Reconstruction and the emergence of Jim Crow. It acknowledges that, tragic

catharsis of Civil War notwithstanding, the Confederacy “won the peace” even if it “lost

the war” (360). The regime of Jim Crow spans the era, blatantly or mutedly, and it

extends abroad: “The relationship between Jim Crow and the war in the Philippines was

not lost on black soldiers who served in the Pacific,” Lepore notes (369). (Part III is also

an account of empire-building, although empire as such is rarely the focus in this

inward-facing national history.

) The immigrant restriction law of 1924 was a triumph

for eugenics and an extension of “the black-and-white racial ideology of Jim Crow to

new European immigrants” (410).

38 Still, even from within the darker moments, there comes the articulation of a liberal

nationalism that Lepore can embrace. The articulation is given to Frederick Douglass,

her favorite ideologue, who called for a “Composite Nationality” in 1869. (This is also

the centerpiece of Lepore’s subsequent programmatic essay, This America: The Case for

the Nation.

) Douglass’s vision failed in his own time, but Part III will arrive at a partial

achievement of it. Emplotted as a Comedy, Part III arcs toward America’s rise to world-

redemptive heights, to the creation of the New Deal and the victory of liberal

democracy over fascism. I do not mean Comedy in the laughable sense; this era

contains many of American history’s more brutal aspects—lynching, for instance. To

call it Comic is to see how even these brutalities, even these descents into hell, are

assimilable into a broader narrative of resolution. The liberal international order

stands as the reconciliation, the promise of redemption or fulfillment, toward which the

Comic arc can bend.

39 The narrative lens falls on vivid personalities and ideologues who, as characters

working in, around, and against THE STATE, illuminate a governmental ushering-in of

harmony. Labor history and the history of capitalism, which do not lend themselves so

tidily to the Comic emplotment, are relegated to the background. The history of

populism is chronicled through the lives of Mary Lease and William Jennings Bryan,

among others.

Progressivism is given more real estate and more complexity, from

Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (presidents and historians both), to legal

thinkers, muckraking journalists, and well-intentioned but overzealous engineers of

“efficiency.” In general, “Populists believed that the system was broken,” Lepore

writes; “Progressives believed that the government could fix it” (364). From out of the

Great Depression, at long last, comes the New Deal, which feels like a happy marriage.

Franklin Roosevelt’s rise to the presidency marked “a new brand of liberalism that

borrowed as much from Bryan’s populism as from Wilson’s Progressivism” (431).

40 In this emplotment, American intervention in World War I was a betrayal, a diversion

from the nobler course.

The isolationism of the 1920s reads as the temporary absence

or death of the hero before a return or resurrection in World War II and the Atlantic

Charter. “The United States, a nation founded in an act of severing, had tied its fate to

the fate of the world,” Lepore waxes. “A nation that had refused to join the League of

Nations had taken the lead in establishing its replacement.” The Comic redemption is

all the more satisfying after so long a winter. She is also careful to locate, in this period,

the origins of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the “scattered sit-ins” organized by

Pauli Murray beginning in 1939, as well as the germs of “what would become the UN’s

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language of human rights.” The American Dream is first dreamt here, too, a phrase

coined in James Truslow Adams’s Epic of America (1931)—another model for Lepore

herself.

The language of the American Dream will “stir leaders of later generations,

from Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama,” even if noble dreams will become mere

dreams in the melancholy irony of Part IV. The book ensures, that is, that these

triumphs have a foot in the Comic narrative before Part IV whisks so much away.

41 Comedy does not mean unalloyed happiness; it is a measured achievement of harmony.

“In Comedy,” White observes, “hope is held out for the temporary triumph of man over

his world by the prospect of occasional reconciliations of the forces at play in the social

and natural worlds….the condition of society is represented as being purer, saner, and

healthier as a result of the conflict among seemingly inalterably opposed elements in

the world; these elements are revealed to be, in the long run, harmonizable with one

another, unified, at one with themselves and the others.”

Balance prevails, in both plot

and historical argument. Part III of These Truths balances undoubtedly bad things with

redemptive things. World War II brought American concentration camps for Japanese

Americans, “and yet the war cultivated new forms of resistance to the racial order.”

The violence was immeasurable, but “the millions of American sailors and nurses and

airmen who fought on all four corners of the globe gained a cosmopolitanism unknown

to any previous generation of Americans” (515).

42 While Part II gestured toward Greek tragedy, Part III invokes the rise of Rome, with

overtones of Virgil’s Aeneid. (The book boasts a parade of epic epithets—Billy Graham,

“broad-shouldered and brylcremed”—and the epilogue will call “the American

experiment” “a stirring, terrifying, inspiring, troubling, earth-shaking epic.”) (788).

The Aeneid tells of the Trojan king Aeneas’ escape from the destruction of Troy by

Greece, setting off with divine sanction to found Rome. Rome needed such an epic, and

the emperor Augustus commissioned one. In These Truths, Reconstruction is something

like an American Trojan War. From the Trojan Horse, in this analogy, spring the Ku

Klux Klan and Jim Crow, the revenge of white supremacy, which sends the hero

(America) into a period of wandering. Greece founded the epic tradition, and was

therefore to be admired, but in Virgil’s saga the Greeks have become perfidious villains.

The Aeneid allows Rome both to supersede Greece and to carry on the Homeric

tradition, just as These Truths allows the American Century both to supersede an ignoble

past and carry on a Constitutional tradition.

43 Lepore’s account never descends into sheer boosterism. As in the Aeneid, one feels the

author’s ambivalence about war and rage, a certain sadness about a warring world even

as we read of our own civilization’s ascendancy. Virgil is a prototype for all national

historians writing from within the nation. The world around the hero descends into

brutality, and the hero has no choice but to partake of it. The last chapter of Part III is

titled “The Brutality of Modernity,” but the brutality that is so grimly revealed, the

Holocaust above all, is mostly elsewhere. Even with these melancholy reflections, the

emplotment is ultimately Comic: victory in Europe, and an American-led redemption

that can, one hopes, make modernity less brutal.

IV.

44 The honeymoon is brief. Part III closed with a redemptive victory over fascism in

Europe; Part IV, THE MACHINE (1946-2016), begins with the atomic bomb. Other

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machines follow: television, the appliances on display at the Kitchen Debate in Moscow,

the mainframe computer, the personal computer, the Internet, the gun. The MACHINE

is as capacious as the IDEA and is in fact the IDEA’s nemesis. War becomes a kind of

machinery: while the Comedy of Part III pointed auspiciously toward a welfare state,

what happened instead was that “the United States built a national security state”

(538). The Vietnam War is a mechanical as much as a moral failure. Lepore points to

figures like the MIT social scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool (later author of Technologies of

Freedom), who along with other modernization theorists convinced the Kennedy

administration to commit more resources to Vietnam. “Convinced that, with enough

data, a computer could simulate an entire social and political system, Pool would

eventually earn a $24 million contract from ARPA for a multiyear research project in

Vietnam” (604). Bitterness is the prevailing mood. Often, potential benevolences are

reduced to machinery. Science itself is made an instrument of war. Politics is corrupted

by amoral “political strategists” and “well-paid political consultants,” who are able to

succeed because political discourse has been made mechanical by the odious

technology of polling. Polls are flashbulbs that reveal everything yet illuminate

nothing.

45 Technological change, in Part IV, is now more consequential than other kinds of

change—political, geopolitical, moral. This is one reason why, for example, the end of

the Cold War does not mark a fundamental historical shift. Americans may have

imagined something grand when the Berlin Wall fell, but “they were unable to imagine

the revolution in information technology that would resist regulation and undermine

efforts to establish a new political order” (695). THE MACHINE thus names an era in

which technological change hinders rather than catalyzes political progress. In

contrast to the earlier emplotments, technological advance now creates the conditions

of political regression, and renders moral or liberal victories fleeting. The causes of and

preconditions for Donald Trump’s election are shown to be decades old, or older. The

vacuum didn’t suddenly start sucking in 2016.

46 That mechanical background effectively determines how ideas are expressed and which

ideologies prevail. Conservatism prevails because powerful conservatives are more

cynical than liberals, and because they capitalize more cleverly on the new mechanics

of politics. Liberalism, meanwhile, alienates itself from the people—first through an

understandable worry about mass politics in the wake of fascism, eventually by cultural

elitism and suspicion of mass culture, and finally by an embrace of a “knowledge

economy.” (There are exceptions: Dwight Macdonald personified the liberal disdain for

mass culture but he also, in a heroic New Yorker article in 1963, made plain “the atrocity

of poverty in an age of affluence” [611].)

47 One noble and paradigmatic liberal in this account is the journalist Edward R. Murrow,

who, at the close of Part III, was Lepore’s lens onto the Holocaust. In the 50s, Murrow

maintains a “faith in the American creed, in the triumph of reason over fear, in

progress over prophecy.” But it is “a shaken faith.” Liberals like Murrow are admirable

only to the extent that they discern their own predicament; their discernment does not lead

to effective action. “Between the unreasoning McCarthy and the coldly calculating

computer,” Lepore has him wonder, “where was the independent-minded American

voter, weighing facts and searching for truth?” (565). Aeneas has to navigate between

Scylla and Charybdis; America will crash stupidly into both.

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48 Part IV is emplotted as a Satire. Its world is not laughable, and there is much to lament,

but Satire tends toward wry fatalism rather than catharsis, toward melancholy rather

than outrage. The righteous outrage of the Vietnam era is given a place, to be sure.

Noam Chomsky, after all, also exposed the machinery of foreign policy and mass media;

the key term of Manufacturing Consent (1988) is “manufacturing.”

But Satire will

render righteousness feckless and pitiable. In 1969, Lepore writes, Chomsky argued that

“much of academic life in the United States—the production of knowledge itself—had

been suborned for the purpose of waging a grotesque war in which all the courage had

been shown by the young, by young soldiers who fought the war, and by young

students who protested it” (635). Chomsky’s reckoning comes across as necessary then,

but it will slide down a slope toward self-defeating shrillness.

49 Leftist critiques of liberal or American mythologies are damned with faint praise and

then crunched into the plot of political breakdown. Of revisionist history: “A revolution

on the streets produced a revolution in scholarship: a new American past” (635). Yes, it

was “long overdue,” “but in the context of the war in Vietnam, questioning academic

authority and pointing out the biases of experts began to slip into a cynicism about

truth itself.” This is a straw man. “In some corners of the left, the idea that everything

was a lie became a fashionable truth,” Lepore laments. “Poststructuralism and

postmodernism suffused not only American intellectual life but American politics, too.

If everything is politics, and politics is a series of lies, then there is no truth” (636). The

reductio ad absurdum is irritating, yet necessary for the broader emplotment: even the

dissents that Lepore herself might agree with have to become mechanical versions of

themselves—doomed, in effect, to manufacture their own dissent—in order to fit into the

grinding erosion of enlightened truth.

50 The Civil Rights Movement is an episode of genuine moral heroism, but it does not

endure. Thurgood Marshall is a heroic figure, not least for his abiding faith in the

Constitution, but even Marshall must face the fact that successful civil rights litigation

depended to an extent on the Cold War. (Everyone gets a simile, and Marshall’s is a

“thin mustache as pointed as a punctuation mark”—fine, but which punctuation mark?)

He ends up both fighting and dancing with that machinery: “The Cold War would keep

overshadowing the civil rights movement, and also propelling it forward” (586). Lepore

also notes the downsides of court-driven, rights-based desegregation, which “often

resulted in black teachers losing their jobs” (581).

51 Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in this emplotment, is a majestic

portal in time to an earlier and more dignified plot: “It was as if every bell in every

tower in every city and town and village had rung.” Another as if: the simile indicates

that King was both saint and anachronism. In mechanical reality, people watched the

speech on television. Two years later, during the Watts riots of 1965, “King flew to Los

Angeles and preached nonviolence; no one really listened.” The machinery of Army

tanks and helicopters that crushed the riot prefigures the militarized police of our own

day. “From the outside, it looked as if rights had been answered with riots, as if the

entire project of liberalism were collapsing in on itself” (623).

52 Part IV sometimes foregrounds the direct origins of our own present—Donald Trump

first appears as the protégé of the odious Nixon hand Roy Cohn—or it offers

prefigurations of our own present. Before Cambridge Analytica, there was Ithiel de Sola

Pool’s Simulmatics Corporation, a machine for political data first deployed in John F.

Kennedy’s election. The Cold War-era debate over a nuclear winter—the projected

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environmental impacts of a nuclear war—marks the moment when “conservatives

extended their longstanding critique of the ‘liberal bias’ of the media to science.” That

episode thus “established the themes and battle lines of the debate over climate

change” (682-683). One senses history repeating itself, first as farce and then as bigger

farce.

53 Themes and figures from the earlier in the book can now make an ironic return. “Fake

news” is as old as fascism. Our era’s ideological polarization looks a lot like the

polarization of the 1920s. Slaveowners before the Civil War were a “1 percent” that

“deployed the rhetoric of states’ rights and free trade …, but in fact they desperately

needed and relied on the power of the federal government to defend and extend the

institution of slavery” (223). The telegraph prefigures the Internet, though the Internet

—a machine of shame, loneliness, and hatred—is so much worse (772).

54 The reader is thus equipped to measure our own era against the past. The sequel does

not come off well. There are echoes across time, certainly, but the moral and aesthetic

satisfactions of previous emplotments are negated or made unavailable. Satire, in

White’s terms, “presupposes the ultimate inadequacy” of the other emplotments’ visions

of the world. It “signals a conviction that the world has grown old.”

And so our era is

not Tragic, but absurd. At least the Tragic phase could sustain some moral and

aesthetic depth; even the grief-in-advance that Lepore finds poetically expressed in the

pre-Civil War years is unavailable in our era. Our protagonists are ignoble or stupid

rather than grand and grandly flawed. The similes reflect this. In the 1850s, it was “as

if” the nation gouged its own eyes out with something like tragic grandeur; the closest

our era comes is Lyndon Johnson, passing a tax cut that undermines the Great Society

program, “as if he’d cut off one of his own feet” (618).

55 Our era is not a Comedy, but an anti-comedy. Where THE STATE arrived at a

harmonious marriage, in the form of the New Deal coalition and the liberal

international order, THE MACHINE arrives at hideous mis-marriages. In an earlier era,

the Left had achieved some “solidarity across difference” (a good marriage), but it

“abandoned” that solidarity “in favor of the meditation on and expression of suffering,

a politics of feeling and resentment, of self and sensitivity” (a divorce and a bad

remarriage) (701). The Right, meanwhile, marries the worst of mass politics to the

worst of plutocracy. “Populism” ends up in an absurd situation of trans-ideological

bigamy: “If the Tea Party married populism to originalism, Occupy married populism to

socialism” (759). (These -isms are stretched thin, and veer into tendentious false

equivalence.)

56 The quests of our era are not Romantic but perverse. Lepore has proper scorn for the

“New Democrats” of the Democratic Leadership Council. The Clinton-era Democratic

party became “technocratic, meritocratic, and therapeutic.” Democrats believed

personal computers would pollinate the empowered, therapeutic self, but the computer

proved to erode that self—which was an anemic model of selfhood to begin with.

Democrats made a fetish of market competition but only ushered in Google, here

correctly identified as the largest and most insidious monopoly of all time. “The party

stumbled like a drunken man,” Lepore writes, “drunk with technological utopianism”

(696).

57 Left-liberalism no longer strives for equality but for identity. Such a quest drifts not

toward actual fulfillment but toward feckless martyrology. The moral heroes of the

post-1945 era remain sources of sentimental inspiration but are useless as pragmatic

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models, despite their indisputable nobility. Identity politics, this account would

suggest, will ultimately bring little more than the bitter satisfaction of righteous

suffering. And it will lose to a reactionary conservatism that also strives for identity,

albeit in a more demonic form.

58 The narrative of Part IV thus threatens to negate everything that has come before,

leaving us in a state of dismal irony. Americans “believed they were fighting for the

meaning of America, but, really, they were fighting for raw political power” (691). Even

the book’s aspirational title, These Truths, turns grim: the enlightened Romance of a we

that can hold these truths devolves into a farcical we that bickers over incompatible

certainties, this truth divorced from that truth.

59 * * *

60 A Romance from which emerges a Tragedy, out of which climbs a Comedy that

devolves into a Satire. That is what the national history is. Even when it drifts toward

bitter lamentation, These Truths has a pleasing rhythm—a rise and a fall, followed by a

second rise and a second fall. One can disagree with these emplotments while

acknowledging that the narrative architecture, as a narrative architecture, is an

achievement of writing and assembly.

61 In the theoretical tradition of White’s Metahistory, Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and

Satire are really the only four ur-emplotments in the Western historical imagination,

which, if true, would make These Truths that rarest of achievements: the total work of

history. A Gesamtgeschichte. A quadruple threat! So perfectly do the parts line up with

these emplotments that my paranoid mind did wonder whether Lepore reverse-

engineered the book from Metahistory, or from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, or

from some older theory of literary archetypes. That would be its own remarkable feat.

62 A reverse-engineered history becomes its own circular proof: if those archetypal

narratives are, so to speak, the fundamental ingredients of historical consciousness,

and if a national history can sustain all four of them, then that national history has, in

some mythic or Hegelian sense, fully realized and fully transcended itself. But in These

Truths, cunningly, each of the emplotments leaves a deliberate sliver of non-resolution;

each of them yearns for closure. That yearning for closure becomes our yearning for

closure. The national narrative arrives at the threshold of the reader’s experience of

the present moment and swells our experience of the present with historic import.

This, we feel, is what a national history is for. A reader’s absorption into the book

effects a mystical absorption into the life of the nation: we are metamorphosed into

citizen-readers, keen to rescue the protagonist, who is after all an extension of

ourselves.

63 * * *

64 And yet the spell will break. Stepping back to the book’s outermost frame—to the

question of whether a people can govern themselves “by reflection and choice” rather

than “by accident and force”—you may find yourself breaking the taboo and answering:

No. If the national history has run its grand historical cycle, as the book’s narrative

form would suggest, then is it really possible to revive the enlightened romance? These

Truths is both occasioned and constrained by its enormous civic purpose. It cannot

entirely give up on “the people,” since that would undermine its stated commitment to

democracy and popular sovereignty. Since it doubles as an assignable US history

textbook, it has to assume that the people are in fact educable. It has no choice but to

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hang from a cliff, though the question and the cliff we’re hanged from are ideologically

routine.

65 Hope, if there is hope, lies in old poetry and the power of wishful thinking. In 1849,

Longfellow began writing a poem called “The Building of the Ship,” Lepore writes,

“about a beautiful, rough-hewn ship called the Union.” He wrote two endings for it. The

first was despairing, for “he could imagine nothing but disaster for this worthy vessel.”

Then Charles Sumner “convinced Longfellow that the Union might yet be saved, and

that he ought to write a more hopeful ending to his poem.” That’s why we have

Longfellow’s more hopeful ending: “Sail on! Sail on! O Ship of State! / For thee the

famished nations wait! / The world seems hanging on thy fate!” (259-260). That’s the

version FDR memorized and sent to Churchill, who then read it on the radio. These

Truths pulls this nugget up through the narrative layers of tragedy and farce and holds

it aloft. Longfellow’s poem is a miniature for the book itself, in which the first yes-or-no

question gives way to a second yes-or-no question, more desperate and sentimental:

Can we change the ending?

66 Can history help? Could it have helped? This national history might well reflect a

genuine liberal hope that it can. It insists that nations need poetic mystifications, even

if we admit that they are, after all, only mystifications. But it is also a self-conscious

exercise in the genre of national history—hence its stylized archaism, from the intro

(“the Question Stated”) to the epilogue (“the Question Answered”), to the bedraggled

master metaphors of the storm and the ship of state. “To steer that ship through wind and

wave,” the epilogue finally concludes, a new generation of Americans “would need to

learn an ancient and nearly forgotten art: how to navigate by the stars” (789). The

poetry of nationalism on which These Truths ultimately relies itself becomes, well,

mechanical.

67 The most obvious problem with the metaphor of the ship of state is that it has little to

say about the ocean, nor about the ship poisoning the ocean it sails on—nor, for that

matter, about other ships. But this is, by design, a book for the readers still on that

ship, which for narrative purposes is the only ship, and if I am honest, I too would

prefer that the ship not sink. National histories are mystification machines, but a

salutary remystification of the American past is better than nothing.

NOTES

1. Sacvan Bercovitch, American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). The

journalist and historian Frances FitzGerald’s reflections, in 1979, on history textbooks in the

twentieth century are worth a mention here, for she keenly identified the predicament of

“democratic histories” in a bureaucratized age. Any work of civic-minded history will have to

place history’s “moral burden” somewhere, FitzGerald argued—it is built into the genre. And

starting in the 1930s, high school textbooks “developed the habit of displacing [the moral

burden] from the real offenders onto the heads of children.” The readers, that is, become “the

people” on whom the duty of democracy falls. “Their history is a catechism, except that it deals

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with institutions, not individuals. In its flatness and its uncritical conformism, it is a kind of

American Socialist realism.” Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the

Twentieth Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 161-162.

2. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress (Hartford: American Publishing

Company, 1869), 336.

3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (London:

Henry G. Bohn, 1857), 23.

4. Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), xvi,

hereafter cited parenthetically.

5. Christine DeLucia, “The Vanishing Indians of These Truths,” LA Review of Books (January 10,

2019), https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-vanishing-indians-of-these-truths/; Richard

White, “New Yorker Nation,” Reviews in American History 47 no. 2 (June 2019), 159-167.

6. These events are the focus of Lepore’s earlier book, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and

Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

7. The classic account of Virginia is Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The

Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975).

8. Jane Franklin is the subject of Lepore’s earlier book, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane

Franklin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).

9. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 8-9.

10. Ibid., 161.

11. George Bancroft, Oration Delivered on the Fourth of July, 1826, at Northampton, Massachusetts

(Northampton, 1826), 20; Lepore, These Truths, 185.

12. White, Metahistory, 9.

13. Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, in The Collected Works of Abraham

Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 8:332-333.

14. Karl Marx, “On Events in North America,” translated and reprinted in On America and the Civil

War, ed. Saul K. Padover, The Karl Marx Library, vol. 2 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 222.

Marx’s article originally appeared in the Vienna newspaper, Die Presse (October 12, 1862). White,

Metahistory, chapter 8.

15. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Revisioning American

History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 5. In both texts, the violent past speaks directly to present,

though in different ways. Lepore’s epilogue frames the Charlottesville riots of 2017 as a grimly

poetic return of the Civil War: “In Charlottesville, Virginia, where a statue of Robert E. Lee had

been slated to come down, armed white supremacists marched through the city; one ran down a

counter-protester and killed her, as if the Civil War had never ended, she the last of the Union

dead.” Lepore, These Truths, 787. For Dunbar-Ortiz, it is a straight line from the first permanent

English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, founded in 1607, to the Virginia Tech mass shooting 400

years later, in 2007—with no “as if” to shield the present from the past. “The Virginia Tech

killings were described… as the worst ‘mass killing,’ the ‘worst massacre,’ in US history.” Dunbar-

Ortiz notes. “Descendants of massacred Indigenous ancestors took exception to that

designation.” Central to this narrative of America, and built into the American psyche, is the

deep continuity of frontier violence. “The shooter himself was a child of colonial war, the US war

in Korea.” What Lepore called “unsettling ironies” cannot, in Dunbar-Ortiz’s account, be

resettled. Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History, 175.

16. Here it is worth mentioning another historical synthesis from 2018 that is aimed at a general

reader. Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States (New

York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2018) could stand as a geographical inverse of Lepore’s These

Truths. is framed not around the fate of IDEAS but of territory. It is a chronicle of the American

possessions that are not part of the continental United States. Those possessions include places

Only Dead Metaphors Can Be Resurrected: A Review of Jill Lepore’s These Truths

European journal of American studies, 15-2 | 2020

that became states, like Hawaii and Alaska, and places that did not become states but were

nevertheless bombed along with Pearl Harbor. It also includes the uninhabited Pacific Islands

that were acquired for their agriculturally useful bat guano in the 19th century, and the eight

hundred or so military bases that make up the American “pointillist empire” of our own time.

Immerwahr’s narration tends, revealingly, toward the mode of Satire, befitting a long and often

murderous farce.

17. Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation,

2019).

18. Starting that history with Mary Lease lets Lepore trace a “female political style” that drove

populism, at times heroically. But the style turns toxic in the cynical pseudo-populism of the

twentieth century: Richard Nixon’s aggrieved and “maudlin” Checkers Speech marks one

culmination of it. Lepore, These Truths, 331, 563.

19. That betrayal, in Lepore’s account, tarnishes figures who are otherwise heroic. W.E.B. Du Bois

first enters the narrative as a cool-headed sociologist who turns heroically radical upon

witnessing the brutality of lynching: in 1899 he cast aside dry academic inquiry “and decided that

‘one could not be a calm, cool and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and

starved.’” (370). He was then “brought to heel” in 1916, and drifted with the tide of militarism:

“Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks,” he wrote,

“shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for

democracy” (396). But Du Bois will reemerge in the second world war to “put pressure on local

and state institutions, and especially on the federal government, to dismantle desegregation”

(496).

20. James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1931).

21. White, Metahistory, 9.

22. I have relied on Stanley Lombardo’s translation. Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Stanley Lombardo

(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2005).

23. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass

Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).

24. White, Metahistory, 10.

ABSTRACTS

Traditionally, U.S. history textbooks announce a civic function when aimed at U.S. readers: they

exist to read America into the future, to imply a futurity for the American “experiment.” But

present-day political breakdown has presented deep challenges for the familiar national

narrative. Jill Lepore’s recent synthesis—These Truths: A History of the United States (2018)—is the

most prominent such text to emerge in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. It represents

the pinnacle of liberal nationalist historiography and will likely take its place on college syllabi

inside and outside the United States. It is also the most substantial attempt in recent years to

revive the national history as a serious intellectual genre. This essay takes the form of a

narratological interpretation of These Truths. The book is an occasion to consider what national

history is and what it is for.

Only Dead Metaphors Can Be Resurrected: A Review of Jill Lepore’s These Truths

European journal of American studies, 15-2 | 2020

INDEX

Keywords: historiography, historical revisionism, jeremiad, narratology, national history,

textbooks

Only Dead Metaphors Can Be Resurrected: A Review of Jill Lepore’s These Truths

European journal of American studies, 15-2 | 2020