NF

As I set down Jill Lepore’s weighty one-volume history of the United States I was prompted to pick up the US Constitution to refresh my own understanding of what the whole thing was about.

One of the founding fathers of the American experiment, Alexander Hamilton asked in 1787 “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

In one (literally) blistering 789 page volume Lepore aims to answer the verdict of history.

How well has the American experiment in self-government succeeded...from the early explorations of the American continent, from the early baronial accommodations of the British sovereign, and from the blossoming of the Enlightenment to the election of Donald J. Trump?

For that I needed to go back to the preamble of the US Constitution. The authors of the constitution sought to create “a more perfect Union,” to establish “Justice” (meaning the operation of courts), ensure “domestic tranquility,” “promote the general welfare,” “provide for the common defence, “and secure the Blessings of Liberty.”

If you take as the starting point the American Revolution and the endpoint the 50 years following the Constitution and omitted the War of 1812, you can justly argue that the Constitution did pretty well establishing courts, some domestic tranquility, improvement in the material wellbeing of the increasingly populated United States, and some of the “Blessings of Liberty” meaning relatively few cases of imprisonment without just cause, or random acts of violence disturbing the family dinner.

But the continuation of slavery, the absence of the franchise (the vote) for women, the depopulating of Indian lands, increasingly brutal working conditions for immigrant labourers and children in the North and wild swings in the economy meant that not everybody enjoyed what we would consider “the Blessings of Liberty” equally.

Domestic tranquility was broken by the Civil War, by the expansionist wars against Mexico, against Spain, against aboriginal peoples; by the depredations of the Jim Crow Era, by two world wars, by the launch of Sputnik, and by the fall of the twin towers.

It was also disturbed by at least three major religious revivals — including the Billy Graham-led revival beginning in the 1950’s — by the non-violent Civil Rights protests also beginning in the 1950s; by the anti-Vietnam War student disturbances and political assassinations in the 1960’s; and most recently by the Trump-inspired attack on the US Capitol.

But these are mostly political disturbances.

There were other kinds of disturbances including the massive organization of industry following the Civil War — mostly in the north — that led to the Gilded Age depredations of new industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and JP Morgan.

There were disturbances in communications with the early proliferation of newspapers, the rise of the telegraph, the telephone, the cinema, television, the Internet, and social media.

Then there were the broader technological innovations in electricity, the theory of evolution, the internal combustion engine, the discovery of the subconscious, quantum mechanics, the Special Theory of Relativity, advances in chemistry, weapons manufacture, digital electronics, the discovery of DNA and antibiotics, breakthroughs in aviation, in optics, astrophysics, and the new horizon of bioengineering.

Here is where Hamilton’s “accident and force” come in.

You saw in this segment of history the collision of social, economic, and political ambitions of this United States that could not possibly have been envisioned by the authors of the Constitution.

Now you can’t in fairness blame the framers for failing to see these momentous changes.

In a moment of pique Jill Lepore’s sympathies peek through the pages when she laments the fetishization of the US Constitution by legal “originalists,” justices including Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and I’ll include the new lot on board up and down the federal court system appointed during the Trump administration.

When I skip through the nuts and bolts of the US Constitution my eyes fall on the First Amendment in which Congress is forbidden from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion, “ or “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Now most people interpret that as a kind of protection of religious freedom. I on the other hand interpret that as a repudiation of religion. It was as if the authors having forgotten to add that freedom in the body of the Constitution had this afterthought that the sacred operation of the people’s government would only be sullied by religions.

(Apparently, there was sincere heated debate about whether or not to include a bill of rights in the Constitution and it was left out for a lack of consensus.)

For me to see the American public positively clamour for a Christian President in these times amounts to absurdity. This obsession with ideological purity while obvious on the right is also there on the left.

And this is a country which professes a prohibition of religious tests in holding national office.

That, I think, is where the framers of the Constitution whether knowingly or unknowingly anticipated problems in the American experiment: in its dependence on the Enlightenment’s model of rational man (or woman).

And I’m not talking about the ravings of God’s militias or the white nationalists, or the American Nazis.

Simply for the flexibility of the system to accommodate the irrational in people.

Some of us like to complain that at election time politicians like to bribe us with our own money. That’s the only way they can get our attention.

To some degree, the Northerners may have done the same: they bribed the Southerners into joining their crusade against the King disingenuously guaranteeing them their slave economy.

This resulted in the massive and bloody conflict of the Civil War over slavery and the rights of states to protect their turf. It also resulted the horrid lynchings and treatment even of black servicemen for too many years following the Civil War, and the continued abomination of police brutality, de facto segregation in home ownership, and mass incarceration in what Michelle Alexander has called the new Jim Crow era.

Critics could argue it was a Faustian bargain from the beginning.

Lepore argues persuasively that it was the early slaves who were the first revolutionaries. The slaves who fought the abomination of slavery in the American economy, and also the slaves who fought the abomination of slavery in the sugar plantations of Haiti under the French, and the maroons in Jamaica.

America’s official revolutionaries, Northerners as well as Southerners, had a long way to go in believing that coloured people and women had an equal if not greater claim to the bounty of the land and the promises of freedom.

America is a society that has some distance to go in the quest to establish fairness, but America is not the only society in this predicament. Slavery and prejudice existed long before America came along. To expect it to deliver on the promise of a truly equitable society on its own was maybe asking too much. Other nations must and some do contribute to the quest.

Lepore’s revisionist history shows that there was nothing “self-evident” about “these truths,” that they’re as much aspirational and prescriptive as descriptive of the American experiment even today after state-sanctioned slavery is long gone.

She also clearly believes that contemporary Republicans aren’t doing nearly enough to promote the general wellbeing of the people.

I learned much from this book, including that the advances in communications don’t seem to have brought the people together starting from the get go.

However, the architecture of the story as it is told is not particularly imaginative or inspiring. I felt Prof. Lepore could have fleshed out her argument better and left out some of the tangential details.

The story gets going with a bang and ends with a whimper, almost as though the project exhausted her and she wanted to get working on her next New Yorker article.

As well, the book could have done with more proofreading before it went to press. Even this amateur reader found several errors that should have been caught by a Harvard professor.

Thomas Jefferson once said “Laws and Institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of human mind.”

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant.” But when they do “They ascribe to men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.” I forget who said this, but it makes sense.

I also appreciated her reference to Lincoln’s Gettysburg address where he complains “We cannot hallow this ground.” We are obliged, instead, to walk this ground, dedicating ourselves to both the living and dead.

America’s record on dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic is not reassuring. Donald Trump aside, something is amiss in the US’s federalist system and power-sharing with the states. And as of this writing, many Americans are not cooperating to control the spread of the disease.

And we are about to find out which nations have the moxie to adapt their laws and institutions to the needs of millions of displaced persons when climate change forces their hand. ( )

Amazing book. So relevant to current political events. ( )

Incredible! ( )

Incredible! ( )