The Story of America, Jill Lepore. Princeton University Press (ISBN: 9780691153995) 2012.
Summary: Essays on American origins from Jamestown and the Constitution to the IOU and Webster’s dictionary.
Nations as well, as individuals strive for self-understanding. Much of this comes through the stories we tell of ourselves, particularly the stories of our origins. That is, we try to understand how we got here as a way of understanding who we are. This is what Jill Lepore strives to do in this collection of essays on the story of America. Rather than a comprehensive, beginning to the present account, she offers a variety or origin stories, arranged roughly in chronological order.
Most of these essays first appeared in The New Yorker. Lepore says, “I wrote them because I wanted to learn how to tell stories better. But mostly, I wrote them because I wanted to explain how history works, and how it’s different than politics.” She adds to this her definition of doing history: “History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence.”
She begins with the primal origin story, the settlement of Jamestown through the lens of Captain John Smith, who gave us our first account of the settlement, concluding that while he was an “Elizabethan gallant,” he was not a fraud. The colony was a mixture of success and catastrophe, American dream and American nightmare.
Subsequent essays consider the Puritans and the succession of historians who have tried to tell their story, Franklin’s The Way to Wealth, and the career of Thomas Paine, hailed for Common Sense and excoriated for The Age of Reason. She writes on the 4,400 words of the Constitution, often not read and even less understood, and the meanings that have accrued, including originalism as one form of interpretation.
From key events and ideas, Lepore moves to origins less noticed but also significant, for example, the origins of the I.O.U. and the development of bankruptcy law. Particularly fascinating is Lepores avvount of Noah Webster and his dictionary, begun in 1800 and ended in 1828. She reflects on his singular effort in defining 70,000 words compared to Johnson’s 43,000. He defined American words using American examples in his definitions and dug into the etymology of words. And Webster, a religious man whose faith was implicit in the work, reaped the benefit of the religious revivals coinciding with the dictionary’s publication.
She turns to the art of presidential biographies, particularly those on Washington to Jackson. And then there is that inferior item, the campaign biography! She weighs in on Jefferson and the Hemings family. She chronicles Charles Dickens’ journeys in America and his decided dislike for the country. Paired with Dickens in the following essay is Edgar Allan Poe. No love lost between the two men. She charts Poe’s struggle with poverty, his drinking and the question of whether Poe was a genius or mad. Then there are our heroes and the accounts that make them bigger than life, from the dime novels on Kit Carson to Longfellow’s Paul Revere. Added to these is Earl Derr Biggars’ Charlie Chan based on Hawaiian Chang Apana. Chan was hailed as great crime fiction in the day and for invidious racial stereotyping today.
Along the way are essays on the development of voting ballots and Clarence Darrow on a major labor case. One essay discusses the Great Migration. the subject of Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, another on homicide and the death penalty. She concludes with the daunting task of writing inaugural addresses. Certainly, James Garfield was daunted, reading his predecessors. Only Lincoln really excelled. Most were mediocre to awful. Most address some version of history as they look to the future. But even the best speakers are rarely at their best here.
One of Lepore’s observations is the role of literacy in these stories. The story of our democracy is a story of reading and writing. She believes “Americans wrote and read their way into a political culture….” This, for me begs the question of the future of our democracy in our post-literate culture that wallows in an epistemic crisis. Instead of “stories accountable to evidence” we resort to fake news memes created with increasing visual sophistication. And it seems we are recreating our origin stories, engaging in both erasure and fable, attacking the history that is accountable to evidence. If nothing else, what Lepore does is remind us, in engaging story, of our real origins. And she reminds us of what we may easily lose.