Pulitzer-prize winning historian and author Jill Lepore has spent her career uncovering the stories we often do not tell, particularly about American history and democracy. In her most recent books, These Truths and We, the People, she asks what really made and makes the United States and what role citizens have in arching toward a more perfect Union. Listen in as she talks about her work for Writers on a New England Stage, recorded at the Seacoast Litfest in Portsmouth New Hampshire.
Transcript:
Hannah McCarthy: Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author Jill Lepore has spent her career uncovering the stories we often do not tell, particularly about American history and democracy. In her most recent books, These Truths and We the People, she asks what really made and makes the United States and what role citizens have in arching toward a more perfect union. I'm Hannah McCarthy. Listen in as she talks about her work for writers on a New England stage recorded at the Seacoast Lit Fest in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Jill, I'm so thrilled to be here with you today. Jill. I'm going to get it out of my system now. I host a civics podcast, Civics 101, as Jim mentioned. I read a lot of history. I read a lot of civics government books, and I never recommend them to my friends because my friends are brilliant, but they are not of this world and they wouldn't find it interesting. These truths was the first history book I recommended to people to whom I never would have recommended a history book. I find it, I truly find it that compelling. And before we get into, you know, the the meat of this book, part of what makes it so compelling, I would first just love to know. Jill, what is it about you that made you someone who would endeavor to. And then successfully write a history of the United States.
Jill Lepore: You know, for years I had been asked by various publishers to contribute to a U.S. history textbook. So in the college classroom, textbooks are dying because of shifts in the publishing industry and because you can sort of assign crap from the internet for free, and schools don't have any resources. But there are still U.S. history textbooks, and they're mostly written by teams of scholars. And you write a section that is your area of expertise, and they read like books written by teams of scholars, which means they're not fun to read and students hate them. And so I'd always said no. Like, I just thought that that's the kind of writing I'd never want to do. Um, but increasingly I was concerned by the kinds of books, not so much that college students are assigned to read, but that the public had on offer if you wanted to, as an American or as an, you know, person interested in the United States, to have a sense of the sweep of American history. And you went into a bookstore, you trawled around Amazon. There really was really very little to choose from. Maybe there was, um, you know, like, um, a Bill O'Reilly book, Killing America or something like that. Or maybe there was Howard Zinn's A People's History on the left, or maybe there was this Newt Gingrich book to Renew America.
Jill Lepore: It was very pious. And so at a certain point, when Norton, my publisher, asked me, okay, we'd like you to write a textbook, but just you. What about just you? We don't have we don't really do that anymore. Like a single person writing a textbook. And I said, well, now I'm kind of interested in doing that, but I actually want to write a trade book. I want to write a book for ordinary, you know, for regular readers. And then we can kind of convert that into a textbook and sell it in the college market if you'd like to. And they were like, do you really think a bookstore is going to sell any copies of a big, long history of the United States? Well, I don't know. No one's done it in a long time. So it really was just the short answer is it was the kind of Girl Scout sense of duty, because I didn't really think it would be, like, fun to write. I wanted that book to be out there so that my friends who would never read a history book would have something that they could read if they just kind of wanted to understand the shape of American history.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. Was it any fun to write?
Jill Lepore: It was, um, I think the challenge of it was really interesting. The parts that were least interesting were parts I knew the best. But I had, like I wrote chronologically, I outlined the thing and then I kept these three stacks of books in my office, like a stack of books, generally for the chapter I just finished writing that I needed to haul back a stack of books for the chapter I was writing, and then I'd kind of accumulate the books for the chapter I was about to write. And I just would, you know, every day I'd take a book off and take my notes and finish the stack, write the chapter, move those books to the next. Try to anticipate, because I had a very quick turnaround time for a book that was a thousand pages. So I like a race. I love writing fast. I love a deadline. I published a book of essays a few years ago. It's called The Deadline. Just kind of I love deadlines, so I had a very strict schedule for myself. Like I really had to write a chapter a month, essentially. And that's tough. I mean, the books like 350,000 words, but I, I think the, um, I don't know, the kind of like NASCAR of it all was fun.
Hannah McCarthy: You, you write in the introduction to the book that it is in part designed to be an old fashioned civics book. And if you think of civics as the study of the rights and duties of citizenship. What duties do you hope that your readers take away after reading this book?
Jill Lepore: Well, honestly, I think if you read the book, you can check a lot of things off your list in that one of your obligations in a democracy is to be well informed. And that usually in our contemporary lives, is narrowed to, did you scroll through the headlines and your Apple News feed or whatever? Like there's a few things you know are going on, but I don't think that is being a well-informed citizen. I actually think that historical knowledge is a piece of what's required for being knowledgeable in the world as a citizen. I mean, it's a little bit like if being a citizen was I'm thinking that we're at the seacoast thing. So I'm kind of trying to come up with a maritime metaphor. If you know you wanted to get your captain's license, you know, you actually do need to have some hours on a boat steering it, you know, not just along the coast, but out into the open ocean. You need to know how to repair your motor. You need to know how to you know how to call the Coast Guard. What to do if you encounter another vessel in danger. Like you need to kind of study up, but you also need to be out there on the water.
Jill Lepore: And I like the way we think of what a well-informed citizen is by kind of scrolling through the headlines. Like, that's like looking at a postcard of a boat. Like it's just not that doesn't really constitute the knowledge that you need to be a captain of an ocean going vessel. And that's, that's the person who walks into the bookstore and is like, what can I read that will tell me about American history? Like, that's the thing that wasn't there. If you wanted to become well informed that I was, That's a need I was trying to fill. And I would also say like, I don't think other people have written sweeping accounts of American history since this book first came out in 2018, but I hope they do. Like, I wasn't trying to say like, ta da! Here's the one and only account of American. I was trying to say like, here's a thing historians should do. And so that readers would have the ability to encounter a book like this and, you know, get their captain's license.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. Something that I love that you do in your writing is you bring in little moments, little stories, little details, uh, some of them you describe an older woman tapping a young man on the shoulder and embracing him in what would become Sierra Leone. That woman was his mother. They were formerly enslaved. It was moments like that in the book. I have to pause. I have to put it down because otherwise I'm going to soak the book in tears. What compels you to include those little details that may not, I suppose, directly inform the Ark, but to me at least feel incredibly important to the narrative.
Jill Lepore: Yeah, I do think they're important. And I guess one thing I would say is that my style of writing comes out of narrative nonfiction more than it comes out of academic history. So narrative nonfiction is, you know, a true story that takes the form of fiction, like in its in its literary sense, there are plot, there are characters, there's plot, there's suspense, there's a, an attempt to achieve an emotional response from a reader. That's what a novelist does. And the reason, I mean, there are many reasons I write as a narrative nonfiction writer, but one is it's my experience. Well, there are two. I guess there's two big reasons. One is there are a lot of big ideas in a book like this, right? You have to understand sovereignty, populism, personhood, conquest, whatever. There's like big ideas, evangelicalism. And in my experience, people can digest ideas better if they're attached to a person. So especially when I'm trying to wrestle with a really big idea, I introduce a character, a real life person whose world experience embodies this idea. So when I talk about, say, 19th century agrarian populism, I this kind of short profile of this woman, Mary Lees, who was a Kansas mother of six who was known as the Amazon of the West. She was an incredible speaker. She was like six foot tall.
Jill Lepore: And I feel like people will remember Mary Lees. And if they can't remember what populism was about, as long as you can remember some details from her life, you know what populism was about. So there's that. If you start a novel, even if you don't really like it, you tend to finish it because you want to know what happened. But if you start a nonfiction book, or let's say you start a journal article like the Journal of American History, and you have no reason to finish it. And seldom does anyone do. Um, like you just read the abstract and you're like, okay, I know what this argument is. This is an argument that, uh, 19th century populism was informed by the Railroad Act of 1862, without which we would not have like, it's just an argument. And there's no you could read the article if you wanted to have the evidence trotted out and the historiography presented for you, and then the argument repeated, but you don't need to get to the end of the story. You don't need to know what happened to read a journal article. You just need the argument. So I want people to both get to the bottom of the argument and get to the end of the story. So the way I write is to begin with a story and then weave the argument like it's like braiding the argument through it and get the argument deeper and deeper and deeper.
Jill Lepore: The more the story progresses, so that the reader will be taken by the desire to get to the end of the story and find out what happened, will be taken all the way to the end of the argument, to the bottom of the argument. And like I write for The New Yorker, and that's how my New Yorker essays all work, right? Like you, you have to you have to hope that the reader, you've structured the thing such that the reader will finish the piece. Now, I know sometimes people don't finish New Yorker pieces. I've heard this, but that is the goal. And the way that works is I'm not going to just stand here and say, here's my argument about American history, because then why do you need to read the book? You want to actually have an experience of that moment of emotional connection with the character, of being startled or bewildered by the irony of something, of being moved by the quiet heroism of someone, of being struck by the resonance with our own day, whatever it is that just kind of like, like a little bit of Velcro to hold you onto the page.
Hannah McCarthy: Mhm. Were there any threads that you were particularly enamored of that you felt either didn't fit into the book? Right. You couldn't you couldn't end that story. Or they went in a way that you really couldn't find a place for in your history.
Jill Lepore: Well, I wrote the book before the Covid pandemic, and I thought afterward, although there are a lot of epidemics and pandemics in the book, you know, beginning with the decimation of the indigenous population of much of the Americas, the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918. And there's quite a bit about polio in the 1950s. Like I afterwards was like, well, readers in like 2020, 2021 are going to be frustrated that there's not more presence of the role of disease across American history. I think that the book is. There are many weaknesses in the book, and one is, I think it it's weak on foreign policy. And if I were starting out all over again, I would force. I'm not interested in foreign policy. So I would force myself to pay more attention to it because by the time you get to, I, you know, the 1950s in Korea, I think the readers like. And what are they doing now? Like, like, you know, the cold. It's not that the Cold War doesn't happen or the war on terrorism doesn't happen, but I think we're somehow not set up enough. Structurally, the way the book works architecturally, that was just a failing of mine. And maybe, you know, there are things that have to do with the speed with which I was writing. But for this new edition that I just signed all these books for you all. So the new edition that's come out, there's a new chapter that runs from Election Day 2016, where the previous edition ended to, you know, Trump's second administration. And as I was writing that, I was like, well, I wonder if I've really planted enough seeds in the earlier chapters that you could understand Trump's foreign policy. That was a question I asked myself a lot, was that when I was writing that?
Hannah McCarthy: So it's interesting you have the opportunity to add a bit to the book. Do you think having written A history of a nation as a history marches on? Do you fear or are you concerned that you may have a longing to continue to add to this?
Jill Lepore: No. Historians, in my experience, certainly me, hate to write about the present. If we wanted to write about the present, we really wouldn't have become historians. So there are plenty of historians who do write about the present, or most of them you see on TV frequently, and they like to talk about the present. When I first agreed to write the book and I outlined it, I wanted it to end with Barack Obama's inauguration in January of 2009, because I figured the book would come out 2018, 2019, and that was like ten years in the past. And it's a good ending for a book. It's a great scene. You know, there's a kind of like a shoe drops. But it was also safely in the past, which I was comfortable with. But as I was finishing the book and I was like, in the last year of writing the book, Trump was elected. And I just thought, oh, shoot, now I need to actually write a whole history of the Obama years so that I can end on Trump's election, which is also a very weird ending to a book, because it's not like a shoe drops. It's like you throw a shoe up in the air and everyone's like, where's it gonna land? Um, so it really wasn't like it was very hard place to end the book. People still the historians political science still don't really understand Trump's rise in 2015 2016. I still don't think there's like a definitive great account of that. That was hard enough. And then being asked to like add a chapter that would go up to the present. It was really, really, really, really hard. I don't expect to do it again in my lifetime.
Speaker 3: Coming up, more of my conversation with Jill Lepore, recorded live at Seacoast Litfest for writers on a New England stage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Jill Lepore, New Yorker staff writer, author of many books and professor of history and law at Harvard University, has spent a career noticing and sharing the vital details that are often left out of the narrative of American history. Her latest and Pulitzer Prize winning book, We the People, asks what role citizens truly play in the making of American democracy. While her best selling book, These Truths, gives us a new history of the United States.
Hannah McCarthy: I really want to talk about. There's a through line in your book. You talk about the numbers game, the math equation that is a government by the people and for the people. And and in the later third, fourth of the book, you talk about the development of machines that are able to count and quantify and sort by demographic people. And it seems to me that the ability to sort us in that way smooths out not just individuality, but the disagreements and nuances of the group or the community. What do you think was the effect on the power of the people, the ability to have a voice after you had both the media and parties sorting people by demographic and targeting them by demographic?
Jill Lepore: Yeah. All right. Well, this is not something I've argued before. I'm going to throw out a theory.
Hannah McCarthy: Lay it on.
Jill Lepore: Me. We could think about American history as in its political culture, as going through several different stages. So, you know, there's party politics. We understand what party politics are. You know, the parties, organized parties are loyal dissent. They organize dissent. That's what. There's a party in power. There's a. There's a party in opposition. It organizes legitimate political dissent. Then you have kind of machine politics where the same is true. It's party politics. But a political machine is doing the work of the parties. And then you have interest group politics, really by the 1950s, say interest groups are really important, not segmenting the population, but but groups beyond that are smaller than the party. Right. So maybe the suburban voters, how are veterans kind of large groups? And then by the 1970s, you have identity politics and you cannot have identity politics without the segmentation of the population through mainframe computers, without kind of beginning the beginnings of micro-targeting of populations, like, okay, it's not just suburban voters. It's a 47 year old Detroit housewife who's Catholic and Irish. We're going to send her this one message. But the person who lives next door, who's a 30 year old welder, who's Detroit born and is a veteran, he's going to get a completely different message.
Jill Lepore: So I think we think that identity politics kind of came out of racial liberation and women's liberation. And the gay rights movement in the 1960s really came out of market research. It comes out of market research, completely takes over the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party becomes the party of identity politics because that's how they're doing. But it also, of course, affects the Republican Party. But I think what we're in now, so if we go back over my little I like truly just invented this. So I'm not going to defend it. But, you know, party politics, machine politics, interest group politics, identity politics, you would say we're in now something that we might call artificial politics, which is to say you are actually just a piece of data and you're not even really like a 47 year old housewife, mother of three who's Catholic and Irish from Detroit. You're just much less than that. And you're representing not your own self, but an avatar of You is operating politically. I just think it's a completely different ball game. But each of these developments is affected by shifts in technologies of communication.
Hannah McCarthy: I have a friend who I love very much who has voted or not voted based on whether or not she believes her vote is going to mean anything, depending on where she lives. And I have always argued that she should vote no matter what. And the only argument I ever made that I found worked for her was, if you go out to vote and you get people who are also of your same demographic to go out to vote, than the people who you think are ignoring, you might start to pay attention to you because there are more first generation white women with a college degree between the ages of 30 and 40. But having read your book a couple of times now and really trying to think harder about this, that really does, I think, strip away something more important, right? Because what does that demographic even mean? How can we possibly understand what that demographic wants? Right? I fit into the same demographic as a lot of people, but we don't want the same things necessarily. And that brings me, I think, to this idea of polling. So you talk about polling in your book now as a journalist, I have been warned by many social scientists not to rely on polls because they don't actually give you the answer that you're looking for. And I'd love to know, you know, you don't not that I can see in the book. You don't flat out condemn polling, but I'd love to know your opinion of the rise of the Gallup poll and what that then meant for the way that party's treated the supposed desires of the electorate.
Jill Lepore: Yeah. I, um, I wrote an article for the New Yorker years ago called politics and the New Machine. That was a kind of history of the polling industry at the cusp of when the polling industry was becoming obsolescent and was being replaced by data science. Like, um, there is still polling, but really most political consultants and in fact, most reporting organizations are using data analytics. Like they don't need to call someone on the telephone and ask them what they think. They, they can know that in other ways. So it's not the polling doesn't still exist, but it's a completely different thing than than what it used to be. There are polls in the 19th century, but they're not scientific polls. So modern scientific polling, which is using a representative sampling of the population, dates to the 1930s. And George Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion Research soon after, followed by Elmer Roper and then the Fortune Survey, and then public opinion surveying becomes a huge thing in the academy and social scientific research from the start. There were, and there, of course, remain all kinds of concerns about polling that it's wrong in the sense of inaccurate. And I think we're all familiar with that. I'm like, well, then pollsters will say, well, we're better now, or we have these corrections and we aggregate the polls and we take the whatever, like they're just an evergreen.
Jill Lepore: There's always concerns about the accuracy of the polls, the reliability of the polls. And I think we all know that we should be cautious about looking at polls. Or are they too far in advance? What I think we have forgotten, and what this piece was really trying to engage with, is that the polls are wrong in the moral sense that in fact, it is wrong to pull the population. And that actually has been a critique that has been made since the beginning of scientific polling, including by George Gallup himself. So Gallup was doing he had a newspaper column called America Speaks. It was syndicated across the country. When he would report like, here's what Americans think about toothpaste. Here's what Americans think about Germany. Here's what Americans think about Neville Chamberlain. And there were like a lot of doubts about it. People were like, how do you know? What is this method, this scientific method? And so he kept trying to drum up subscribers for his syndicated column. And he said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to prove that my public opinion surveys are accurate because how do you gainsay that? Like, and he said, I'm going to do that by predicting the next election.
Jill Lepore: I'm going to ask people who they're going to vote for, and then I'm going to tell you who's going to win, and that will prove that my opinions are. But I want to be clear. I know this is wrong. It would be. It's dangerous to democracy to actually try to figure out in advance who's going to win an election, and then tell people that would be wrong and our politics. And he does it very apologetically and for a couple of elections, he's right. And then famously, of course, everybody's wrong. In 1948 when when Dewey does not beat Truman. But what happens is that people love it. And so he's like, oh, I do think this is wrong, but he keeps doing it and then increasingly becomes like the the best seller of his business. So in other words, even the person who started Armenia for these polls understood them as somewhat dangerous to democracy. There was a great critique of polling written in 1948 by a political scientist named Lindsay Rogers, who had a book called The Pollsters, in which he explains how dangerous it is to representative government to announce the public's opinion of the possible winner of an election in advance of an election.
Jill Lepore: And, of course, we forget that other countries have bans on polling. Like in some countries, you you cannot do polling. You know, in the last 200 days before an election or like there are a lot of countries that have some constraints on public opinion polling because it interferes in the process of, of, of, of learning about candidates and has been demonstrated to distort elections by elevating candidates with high name recognition or whatever, or some of the, some of the problems polling. I just think it's weird that we don't even talk anymore. Or for instance, like, like NPR has like, what are they? I think they partnered with like Quinnipiac or something. The first news sponsored poll wasn't until 1975. It was a CBS sponsored poll, and it was roundly condemned. Like, wait a minute, you're supposed to be reporting the news. Not making it like to produce a poll is to make the news. How can a media organization do that in any ethical way? And yet we completely accept, you know, after a matter like maybe five, ten years. Obviously, the media is going to be doing polling all the time. It's just that it's I find it to be a weird, inexplicable deformity of our politics.
Speaker 3: We'll be back with more of my conversation with Jill Lepore, including some questions from the audience at Seacoast Litfest when writers on a New England stage continues. Pulitzer prize winning historian and author Jill Lepore has spent her career uncovering the stories we often do not tell, particularly about American history and democracy. I'm Hannah McCarthy. Listen in as she talks about her work for writers on a New England stage recorded at the Seacoast Lit Fest in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Hannah McCarthy: I would love to keep asking you questions, but there are people in the audience who I believe have questions of their own, and I would love to hear those far more than the sound of my own voice. Please come on down. We've got a mic for you.
Speaker 4: Great talk. Just following up on what you're talking about. Now, I'm struck at how little conversation there is in politics now about policy, and particularly across party lines about that. And I was wondering if you would comment on what has caused that and how we might rectify it.
Jill Lepore: I assume you're talking about national politics. Yeah. I think in the States people still talk about policy. I think most states are still governed in interesting ways that involve, you know, bipartisan coalitions and citizen participation in governance. Nationally, I think part of the reason we don't talk about policy is neither party has a coherent one, um, or really a coherent political philosophy anymore. Political scientists talk about the parties as being hollowed that there's just like, there's like a, it's like, you know, for Easter Sunday, you ever blow the eggs out? Like that's what the parties are now. There's like nothing inside. And I don't think that that's likely to change until a fairly significant political revolution deals with the problem of money in politics.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much. It's it's really a pleasure to have this opportunity to ask you this question. We you spoke about identity politics. You spoke about interest groups, and I lived 20 years overseas in developing countries and have been in a different headspace for a long time before I came back during Covid. And one of the things that's really struck me is that we have two slots to put our put our put our faith in Democrat or Republican. And it seems to me that the US would really benefit from a parliamentary system. And in that way, these interest groups become parties themselves and have a stake and have seats. And and those extremist wings have their places and then are automatically, in a lot of ways sort of pushed to the sides. Whereas in our country, the extremist groups, due to the way that we do our elections and primary system, take over our parties in a lot of ways. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Thank you.
Jill Lepore: Yeah, thanks. That's a great question. I think I think a lot of political scientists share your view. I think there's a lot of empirical evidence to support your view. What's challenging is to imagine how things can change. I think that's generally the problem in how we think about at least the the politics nationally these days is any kind of vision for change. But I could imagine the existing two party system being successfully challenged in some states. And I think that's where I look for political reforms, imaginative political experiments. And I tell my students all the time to spend some time thinking about how to get involved in state politics. I just think there's more room for things to change.
Speaker 5: Do you do you think we're at a place right now with not only the division, but also the hunger for that kind of change that perhaps we have an opportunity, uh, rather than things collapsing into a state of total incivility and possible civil war, or in whatever that would form, it would take, but rather the opportunity to say, cleaving off, finding different ways. I think Plattner is perhaps an example of this AOC, others. Thank you.
Jill Lepore: Yeah. I mean, I think that it does feel to me like we're at the beginning of some kind of a political watershed, but I don't know how to really assess whether that's the case or that's just a fantasy on my part. But but there tend to be. I don't think there's a lot of incremental change going on. So I feel like there's something likely that will be overwhelming. And I find that both exciting and terrifying. I'm in a meliorist and I don't really like revolution. Um, I don't know. I don't know how we would know it was starting until it really started. And I don't think it's quite started and I don't see the organizational infrastructure for such a thing. I mean, so it's easy to say, for instance, compare the Tea Party movement with the no Kings rallies. And although we think of the Tea Party movement as in some ways, you know, defunct and unsuccessful, the Tea Party movement had a legislative agenda that has largely been accomplished, whereas the occupy movement had none of that, and nothing has been accomplished that it was on its non agenda. I guess a concern, if you're thinking nationally, is that like the no Kings movement is not an an organized movement for change. It is a performance of resistance.
Speaker 6: Thank you for a very interesting talk. Thank you also for writing as much as you have. Thank you for the name of war. Thank you for historians who love too much. Thank you for this book because as you sort of suggested, the last time I read a full survey of U.S. history was 50 years ago when I was when I was 16.
Jill Lepore: What one was.
Speaker 6: It? It was garrity's. I forget what it was called, but it was. Oh yeah, it was a standard AP history textbook in the 70s. I admit to not having yet finished this book. I have 204 pages to go, so I've made good progress. But as I look.
Jill Lepore: Spoiler.
Speaker 6: Alert in well, not asking for as I as I read it and I felt that I discerned a through line and I have a feeling it was intentional, but you can tell me if it was intentional or if I'm off base of perennial sustained internal conflict that that from the beginning there have been thoroughly fought out, sometimes with weaponry, philosophical and political conflicts in this country. And so that made me think harder about whether what we see today is necessarily that different from things we've seen in the past. We've fought three bloody civil wars already. I'm not looking for another. I'm not suggesting we're going for another. But was conflict really a through line in there? Am I misreading it?
Jill Lepore: No. You're not misreading it. I think that, um, you know, there there are plenty of historians to get to your sort of historiographical point of view that would support the contention that American history is characterized by a kind of Manichean battle between liberal and illiberal forces. Uh, I think that's almost essentially irrefutable. And especially if you're trying to be broad minded and not write a partizan or highly ideological account, you're going to be constantly. And then these people tried to do this, and these people said, no. And these people tried to do this. And these people said, no, we're doing this. And these people said, no. Like, that's the story of America. Like, that's like, that's the story of most people's, right. So yes, that is a through line. I think that we, it maybe looks more prominent in the way you would read the book in 2026 or even in 2018. Um, then maybe then maybe I meant it to be. Um. But I do think there is something different about this moment. And I think that's largely to do with the difficulty of extracting ourselves from this kind of like hands around each other's throat or like, you know, that scene in a kind of holed up movie where the two guys each have a gun to the other guy's head and you're like, what's going to happen next? Like, that's sort of how it feels in that that gun is, is basically social media. Like, you know, until we disarm social media, I don't think we can have a republic.
Speaker 7: Thank you.
Hannah McCarthy: And I know we have a long line there. We have about five minutes remaining. So probably a question or two.
Speaker 8: Um, religion has been extremist religion from my Puritan ancestors and to the Spanish and the southwest and the in the early 1600s through history. Is there any feeling of that thread? And also, does that can that help us understand the rise of Christian fascism?
Jill Lepore: You know, I remember learning when I was in college, when the Moral Majority remember Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority of 1979 and the so-called Christian right emerged. I remember being taught in history classes that this was the first time Christian Christianity organized Christianity had influenced American politics. And I was like, and certainly there was actually a lot of commentary about that. There was a kind of like, that's what you'd hear on the news. Maybe that was more on the news than in a classroom. But like organized religion has always been part of politics in the United States. And as I was trying to sort of emphasize earlier, certainly not exclusively on the right or on the left, I would say more often in American history, Christian churches have been involved in social reform, moral crusades for equal rights coming from the left. It's sort of what was kind of unusual about Jerry Falwell was that that was coming from the right. So to answer your question, I mean, like, absolutely, it is a through line. Um, but I think it's, it's, it's important to me as a historian, but also as a person of maybe little faith, but some faith to be, to be clear that I don't think that's like a demonic force in American history. I think, um, I think of the incredible work of temperance reformers. I'm not a supporter of prohibition, um, but temperance reformers and the Women's Christian Temperance League union really were committed to ending domestic violence. I mean, the reason to try to get rid of alcohol in the United States was because, women and children were being so often beaten by their drunken husbands or abandoned by them, and it was a way before women had the right to vote, to try to exert some kind of political power through a moral crusade that was rooted in their religious experience. So I think it's I guess I just would agree with the idea that there's a lot of religion in American history. It often bleeds into our politics, um, and often in, in very powerfully good ways and often in very powerfully bad ways.
Speaker 9: Just a simple question. Do you think that the US Constitution would have been would have been written and structured differently if the idea of political parties was more prominent in 1787?
Jill Lepore: Yes. Okay. Next.
Speaker 9: How?
Jill Lepore: It's not only that there were no political parties in 1787, it's that they were in impossible to conceive of because political parties were considered inimical to Republican forms of government, that any Republican government that had parties would succumb to factionalism and destroy itself. So things like the amendment mechanism of the Constitution in Article five, whereby to become a part of the Constitution, a proposed amendment has to pass by a double supermajority in both houses by two thirds vote, and then by three quarters of the states. We can't do that. We haven't meaningfully amended the Constitution since 1971. For most of American history, it's been impossible to amend the Constitution because our our constitutional amendment mechanism is so difficult that math would not have made any sense to people who anticipated political parties.
Speaker 10: I, I work in an elementary school and I go into classrooms and they're teaching social studies, and I go in and they're talking about checks and balances. And we're talking about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, knowing what this present administration has done with our agencies. Okay. As well as national policies and just decimating things. What can we say about what's going on with our checks and balances while this is all happening in front of us?
Jill Lepore: Um, there was a lot of concern in the 1930s that FDR had destroyed the system of checks and balances by founding New Deal agencies that were perceived as usurping the power of Congress and moving legislative powers to the executive. And I think in some ways, the conservative insurgency that holds power in the United States today in the federal government, sees itself as undoing the New Deal. But but at the same time, redoing the New deal. I think the comparing the different uses of executive and legislative power in the 1930s and the 2020s is a really interesting way to try to be non-ideological in how to think about what checks and balances are, and under what conditions emergency powers can be used. Because one of the things that FDR did was say that he was using emergency powers. He was dealing first with the Great Depression and then with the emergency of the Second World War. And the new chapter of my book that you all now have is called A State of Emergency. It is largely about the Trump administration usurping legislative powers and taking them into the executive branch and also asserting judicial powers, which is the thing that that FDR did not do by declaring emergencies that I would say empirically do not exist in my house. When my kids were little, we had a constitutional convention every Labor Day weekend before the school year began.
Jill Lepore: And you're like, I'm so glad I didn't grow up as one of your kids. And we would take the Constitution off the refrigerator from the previous year and we would examine like what the truth, you know, the allocation of chores were what everybody's bedtime was. And we would entertain proposals for amendment and we would amend it every year because the kids got older and your bedtime is going to be different. And also if like last year, you were in charge with washing the dishes four nights a week, and what you really wanted to do was to be the person who vacuumed the stairs or whatever, like whatever. We just, we would revise the Constitution every year. And there were obvious exceptions. Like, um, if we were Knicks fans, like bedtimes would not have mattered the last couple of weeks. Right? Like that's an emergency. But like other things maybe wouldn't have been really emergencies. Like I really want to watch this movie is not a reason to adjust your bedtime like I think there are to return to your civics education. Like I think that kids understand what a check and a balance is pretty easily because they're negotiating with their parents or with their teachers all the time about the rules under which we live together and that if someone's abusing their powers all the time, like, you know, we often had a problem that one of our kids would pay one of our other kids to do the and like, that's a constitutional violation.
Jill Lepore: So there has to be a way to address that. And, you know, maybe like, so then there's going to be like, we're going to have an amendment that if you do that, you're going to be fined and you're going to be fined at a rate of like 200% of what you charge the kid. And it's going to come out of your we didn't have allowances, but like whatever. Like, I think that kids can understand if you don't have rules, you live in chaos. And the way to abide by the rules is to help make them. And this gets back to your question about reading the Constitution, its legibility. How do. How would we revise it? What would we write it now? But there is I don't know if I'm misreading the room, but like a little bit of like dreariness and dread about the world in the room. We're like wearing this, like, mantle of powerlessness between like, we can't change the fucking government.
Jill Lepore: And AI is destroying everything we love and care about, including bookstores. And I can't even have like a printed newspaper anymore. Like just the things everybody's kind of mad about and we feel so powerless about. Um, but I think in that, like we created this government by our own consent, we can revise it, we can reject it, we can rewrite our state constitution. New Hampshire wrote the first constitution in this country in January of 1776. It is the 250th anniversary of your first state constitution, the first written constitution in the United States. It is a time to think about. Do you have a government that represents you? If you don't, how can you make sure to have it? How can you consent to a government that you admire, that is in the interest of everyone where you are willing to make sacrifices in the interest of other people, and with an idea of the public good? That is what the country's history really is a gift to all of us for. It's really exciting to be heading toward July 4th, and as a way to maybe claim that moment to begin the watershed of whatever the questioner asked. So I just want to thank you all for coming out for this conversation and thank Hannah. It's been a real treat.
Hannah McCarthy: Jill, thank you so much. I just want to say my thanks to the Music Hall Acting President and CEO Joe Gleason, New Hampshire Public Radio president and CEO Jim Schachter, production manager. Dan Cahill, NH Public Radio program director. Emily Cork, the music hall literary producer. Brittany Wasson, the music hall production manager. Aidan Kellerman, the Music hall live sound and recording engineer Ian Martin, the music hall lighting and cinema coordinator, Drew Fabrizio. Thank you all so much. This was wonderful. Thank you.