Looking back at Jill Lepore’s ‘These Truths’ and what she said about race, class and identity politics

Over the weekend I finished the audio version of Jill Lepore’s monumental survey of American history, “These Truths,” published in 2018. At 960 pages or, in my case, 29 hours, the book is a major commitment, but it’s well worth it.

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That said, one thing I learned was that I already knew a lot about American history, so much of “These Truths” was familiar to me. There’s nothing startlingly revisionistic about it, but it nevertheless works as a skillfully executed and gracefully written overview of the past 500 years, from Columbus to Trump. I especially appreciated her extensive treatment of Black and women’s history.

Lepore recently published another doorstop of a book, “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution,” much of which deals with our inability over the past 100 years to amend that imperfect 18th-century document in any meaningful way. Maybe I’ll take that on next.

This is not a review of “These Truths.” You can’t take notes in an audiobook, and I listened to most of it on long walks or while in the car. (Bonus: She reads it herself, although I had to slow it down because she talks so quickly.) But there are a couple of sections that I think are worth highlighting.

The first is Lepore’s assertion that fears that the British would abolish slavery was one of the driving forces behind the American Revolution. If you have a long memory, you may recall that journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones was criticized by a number of eminent historians for making exactly that assertion in The 1619 Project, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times account of slavery and race that she oversaw and helped write.

As Hannah-Jones wrote, “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” But a group of five historians pushed back, writing, “This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.”

Yet Lepore’s book had already been out for a couple of years at that point, and she makes it clear that Hannah-Jones was right. I’ve mentioned that before, but I want to offer a bit more. I bought the Kindle version of “These Truths” so that I would be able to look things up, and here’s what Lepore wrote about Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, who did indeed offer freedom to any slaves who would take the side of the British:

“It is imagined our Governor has been tampering with the Slaves & that he has it in contemplation to make great Use of them in case of a civil war,” young James Madison reported from Virginia to his friend William Bradford in Philadelphia. Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, intended to offer freedom to slaves who would join the British army. “To say the truth, that is the only part in which this colony is vulnerable,” Madison admitted, “and if we should be subdued, we shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that knows that secret.”…

No estate was without this Achilles’ heel. George Washington’s slaves had been running away at least since 1760. At least forty-seven of them fled at one time or another. In 1763, a twenty-three-year-old man born in Gambia became Washington’s property; Washington named him Harry and sent him to work draining a marsh known as the Great Dismal Swamp. In 1771, Harry Washington managed to escape, only to be recaptured. In November 1775, he was grooming his master’s horses in the stables at Mount Vernon when Lord Dunmore made the announcement that Madison had feared: he offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty’s troops in suppressing the American rebellion.

In Cambridge, where George Washington was assembling the Continental army, he received a report about the slaves at Mount Vernon. “There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believed they could make their escape,” Washington’s cousin reported that winter, adding, “Liberty is sweet.” Harry Washington bided his time, but he would soon join the five hundred men who ran from their owners and joined Dunmore’s forces, a number that included a man named Ralph, who ran away from Patrick Henry, and eight of the twenty-seven people owned by Peyton Randolph, who had served as president of the First Continental Congress.

Edward Rutledge, a member of South Carolina’s delegation to the Continental Congress, said that Dunmore’s declaration did “more effectually work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies — than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.” Not the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it was this act, Dunmore’s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence.

The second point I want to raise is Lepore’s deep disdain for the academic left, identity politics and Democratic strategists who, starting in the 1970s, began embracing the rising professional class while giving scant attention to the working class — a failure that had become toxic when she was writing “These Truths” and that has since descended into a crisis. Lepore notes that, in 1969, Kevin Phillips published his book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” based on the notion that Richard Nixon’s appeal to what he called the “Silent Majority” would overwhelm the Democrats.

In response, Democratic strategists Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg wrote “The Real Majority,” arguing that a new coalition of the left that some were advocating — “the young, the black, the poor, the well-educated, the socially alienated, minority groups, and intellectuals” would relegate the Democrats to oblivion. Lepore notes ruefully that their warning went unheeded, writing: “Scammon and Wattenberg recommended that Democrats move to the center though they feared Democrats wouldn’t take their advice, and they were right. But Nixon did not ignore their advice.”

Lepore’s concerns, in her view, reached a low in the 2010s. I can’t possibly put it better than she does, so here’s an extended excerpt:

If the favored modes of the alt-right were the women-hating troll and the neo-Nazi meme, the favored modes of the alt-left were clickbait and the call-out, sentimental, meaningless outrage — “8 Signs Your Yoga Practice Is Culturally Appropriated” — and sanctimonious accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. In 2014, Facebook offered users more than fifty different genders to choose from in registering their identities; people who were baffled by this were accused online of prejudice: public shaming as a mode of political discourse was every bit as much a part of the online Far Left as it was of the online Far Right, if not more. After forty-nine people were killed in a terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the alt-left spent its energies in the aftermath of this tragedy attacking one another for breaches of the rules of “intersectionality,” which involve intricate, identity-based hierarchies of suffering and virtue. “One Twitter-famous intersectionalist admonished those who had called it the worst mass shooting in US history by reminding them that ‘the worst was wounded knee,’” the writer Angela Nagle reported. “Other similar tweeters raged against the use of the term Latina/o instead of Latinx in the reporting, while still others made sure to clarify that it was the shooter’s mental illness, not his allegiance to ISIS and the caliphate, that caused the shooting. Not to be outdone, others then tweeted back angrily about the ableism of those who said the shooter had a mental illness.”

As we know, one of the reasons for Kamala Harris’ defeat last year was that the Republicans succeeded in portraying her as part of the elitist left that Lepore decries, partly because of positions she took when she was running for president in 2019, partly because they’re really good at that sort of thing. And here we are.