THESE TRUTHS

Jill Lepore

Political equality.  Natural rights.  Sovereignty of the people.  These are the truths our country is based on.  Thomas Jefferson said these truths were "sacred and undeniable."  Benjamin Franklin changed that to "self-evident." In THESE TRUTHS, Jill Lepore sets out to discover how those three truths have weathered the evolution of this country in the last 250 years.  She uses those truths as a lens to look at the American Experiment.

It is not a particularly pretty picture, but it is a thrilling book not least because Lepore writes with such beauty and power.  Starting with the rather surprising discovery of America by Europeans rather than some other group, she then begins to show how a systemic pattern of conquest fueled by bigotry and the rationalizations to excuse that bigotry enabled our founders to justify their conquest of the continent.

It is a 250 year long story (so far) of rulers and the ruled.  It is, to put it mildly, disturbing.  Lepore calls it the  "American book of genesis: liberty and slavery became the American Abel and Cain."  This seeming contradiction is evidenced in a country whose founding documents proclaim that "all men are created equal" while that very country grew rich on the scarred backs of Africans ripped from their homes and Indians forced down a "trail of tears."  And this is not just a southern phenomenon.  Half of colonial New England's wealth came from sugar grown by West Indian slaves.

Lepore's modern history shows in glaring detail that without exception every effort to emancipate whoever or whatever needed emancipating--blacks, women, indians, homosexuals, immigrants of color--was shot down by those powers profiting from the subjugation of those groups and those "sympathetic" to their cause by their cowardly acquiescence.  George Washington could have sent a powerful message by freeing his slaves (the most indelible image of Mount Vernon to this visitor was the slave quarters out back), but he didn't until after he died.  Jefferson behaved identically.  The list of founding fathers who hypocritically held slaves is too long to mention here.

The subjugation of The Ruled grew more sophisticated as we became technically savvy.  Public opinion pollsters, propagandists, public relation offices, political consultants:  They all manufactured lies in their spin factories to keep The Ruled under their thumbs, to promote the candidacy of racists and opportunists.  They lambasted the coastal elites for looking down their collective noses at blue collar voters in the heartland and calling them stupid, but they all counted on that heartland stupidity to buy into their contrived messages, their outright lies.

This all brings us to the current state of affairs, to Donald Trump and his profiteering minions.  I don't know if this is true, but it is hard to imagine that Lepore didn't have Trump in her sights from the very moment she started researching this book.  "A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquility," Lepore states in her epilogue.  "A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders."

The main thing I take away from this book is an insight about myself.  I was an indifferent history student in high school and college.  I took pride in getting a B in classes without putting in the appropriate work, without really reading the books.  I kinda sorta knew everything in THESE TRUTHS, but I never fully understood until I read it.  I will always be thankful to Jill Lepore for that.

Postpone all further activities and read this book.  At the very least, it will piss off the folks at FoxNews.