♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein.

I'm pleased to be at the New York Historical Society's Robert H. Smith Auditorium with Jill Lepore.

LEPORE: Thanks so much.

I'm delighted to be here.

RUBENSTEIN: So, uh, for most people, writing a 900 page book on American history... (laughs).

Would take a lifetime and probably you wouldn't have time to do anything else.

So, what made you think about writing a one volume history of the entire United States?

How long did it take you?

And did you ever regret doing it while you were working through it?

(laughs).

LEPORE: I don't think I regretted it.

It was an incredible challenge.

It was, uh, it was really fun to write, actually.

That's embarrassing to say.

I feel very bad when people have writer's block, because I have a problem, I write too much.

So it was fun to have, uh, uh, an almost infinite task, actually.

Um, I decided to write the book because I'd been asked here, there, every once in a while, would I join a textbook writing team or would I write a single volume on the American Revolution or would I write this.

And I've always thought textbook writing would be depressing.

It doesn't really come alive on the page, or it has a different objective.

Um, and so I was asked to, to ... uh, one more time, to write a single volume, single narrator history of the United States as a textbook.

And I thought, well, I should not say no again.

I should, I should take up this invitation to do this work of public service.

But I said to my publisher, you know, I'm happy to do a college edition, but what I really wanna do first is, uh, uh, a book about all of American history for ordinary people, that I thought that actually the nation needed a, an accessible, new history that took into account the incredible revolution of scholarship over the last half century that I don't think has sufficiently broken out of the academy.

RUBENSTEIN: So, in the book, you spend a fair amount of time on prominent women who often are not in the textbooks that I used to read in college and high school prominently mentioned.

Um, one of the women that you mention was a woman that, um, has gotten a lot of attention in recent years.

Her name was Phyllis Schlafly.

A Radcliffe graduate and she transformed herself into one of the most powerful people in the Republican Party, but also one of the most powerful people fighting the ERA and fighting, uh, certain types of abortion, um, that was permitted by the Supreme Court.

So why did you spend so much time on her and what, why were you so fascinated by her?

LEPORE: Yeah.

Well, let me just say to back up a little to the broader question of including women.

I think it's important to remember that, although, you know, I sorta specifically set myself the task of having women and people of color be in this book, the reason that they're not in other books is 'cause they were taken out.

Right?

It, it's not that I invented that women are political actors and people of color have been political actors all throughout American history.

So, back to Phyllis Schlafly...

I just think she's fascinating.

Also, she is a hugely important driving force in the realignment of the party system in the middle decades of the 20th century as the, I think, most important kind of field general of the conservati, conservative movement, and has been doubly ignored, because most to, to be frank about it, most academic historical scholarship is written by people with a liberal bent who historically have done a fairly poor job, including conservative thinkers and conservative figures.

And the conserv, history that's written by conservatives generally is written by men who don't think women have a lot of political power or should, and so they ignore Schlafly.

She's really important.

RUBENSTEIN: She, uh, led the effort against the ERA.

You point out in your book that the Equal Rights Amendment was actually going through legislatures unanimously for, for quite some time, until she began the effort to stop it around the, in the '70s.

And you think it would have passed but for her?

Or been ratified, I should say?

LEPORE: I mean, one of the things that's important about Schlafly, like, she begins being a political figure, major political figure, in the 1950s as the head of the Republican Woman's Club, Federation of Women's Clubs.

And she inaugurates what I call, you know, a new political style in American politics, just as sort of an adaptation of something between McCarthyism and Goldwater-ism.

You know, running, running politics as a moral crusade.

And she, you know, she's, she's behind the Goldwater nomination.

She's incredibly instrumental.

Barry Goldwater, the conservative who wins the Republican nomination, 1964.

And then she gets pushed out of the Republican Party by the late '60s, where they're like, "What did we do with Goldwater?

We need to kinda steer back towards moderates like Nixon."

And then, and then she reinvents herself as a moral crusader arguing against the ERA, which then becomes a signature issue for the Republican Party even though ERA was introduced in Congress in 1923 and Republicans supported it, had it on their platform, since 1940.

The Republicans had always been in support of ERA until Schlafly said, "You know what?

This is how we will reimagine the party."

RUBENSTEIN: When our country was started, it's hard to believe now, but women who were married did not have the right to own property.

They also, obviously, couldn't vote.

And they also couldn't run for office, since they really couldn't vote and they weren't allowed to be office holders.

Um, the right to vote, the suffragette movement, which you talk about, it is hard to believe today, but many leading so-called feminists then opposed the right to vote for women.

So Eleanor Roosevelt, for a while, was against the right to vote.

LEPORE: Well, women are like men in that they have a variety of political opinions and political agendas.

So, uh, you know, actually, one of the reasons that women didn't get the right to vote for a long time is that men feared women would vote as a block.

Like, oh no, what would we do if ... 'cause there's more women than men, there'd be more women voters.

Um, but it turns out women don't vote as a block at all, when women first began politically agitating, they were fighting for abolition.

Right?

They were the main thing that women fought for in the 19th century was not the right for women to vote, it was the end of slavery.

Uh, it was part of a Christian Evangelical movement that women, women were disproportionately church-members and it was a moral reform movement.

Uh, they also fought for temperance.

They thought they were fighting for an end to forms of tyranny, especially household tyranny, and those in, those things included not ha, women not having the right, uh, to own property, and also not having the, the right to vote.

The narrowing of the, uh, right, of the struggle for women's rights to the right to vote was actually pretty problematic for the, for the larger movement.

In much the same way, if you think about going back to your Schlafly question, the early 1970s, after women lost the ERA, the women's rights movement got incredibly narrowed to a fight for the right to abortion and all the other things that women had been fighting for became secondary to that, which was a disaster, in my view, for feminism.

RUBENSTEIN: Now you begin your book with a discussion about the discovery of this country, quote, discovery, by early settlers and you talk about Columbus coming over.

Um, Columbus has been somebody that has been vilified by some people in recent years because of the way he handled the trips over here and so forth.

Do you think he was appropriately vilified, or do you think he was more of a hero than he, than he's currently seen by some people?

LEPORE: There's a lot that we can learn from and should learn from and that, for instance, teachers and textbook writers need to understand to accommodate, uh, that the story of, of the United States begins tens of thousands of years ago, uh, with migrations of people that we would now call Indigenous Americans, and that that story is vitally important to who we are today and that story, uh, the story of European conquest, is a story of tremendous violence.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

LEPORE: Uh, of, of religious violence, of, uh, a legal regime that is in many ways with us still that bears a lot of scrutiny.

Um, that said, uh, it's really interesting that, and it was an interesting and puzzling question for me, where to start a history of the United States, right?

Like, the easiest, straightforward way is I'm gonna start with the Declaration of Independence.

That's when the United States begins.

Uh, but that doesn't really offer an explanation for like a country that's wrestling with these very problems.

Like how are, how is it that we are descended both from European colonizers and from Indigenous peoples and from Africans, uh, kidnapped from their homes and brought as forced laborers.

Like, we have to all, I think, accept as a people to be a nation that we're descended from all these people.

RUBENSTEIN: And you point out in your book that, uh, when Columbus arrived here, he didn't actually hit North America, he kind of hit the, some islands in the Caribbean, but there were many, many millions of people living here.

It wasn't as if there were a few Indians, uh, scattered around.

There were, what, 10 or 20 million people living in the continent, is that right?

LEPORE: Yeah, there's many more millions than that.

I mean, it, and it, it, you know, it's not wro, it is a genocide.

I mean, the, the European invasion of the Americas is a genocide of, of millions of people.

It is a lot of, a lot of those deaths are caused by disease, but a lot of that disease is fairly woefully spread in a, in a quasi-known way.

Um, the acts of violence, the forced enslavement of Indigenous peoples, uh, the erasure of the sophistication and diversity of Native cultures, is, is a legacy whose, whose agony we bear with us still.

The reason in the end I decided to begin with Columbus and 1492 and then move backwards to, uh, Indigenous life earlier, was that my, the way I decided to tell the story was actually in large part about how our political arrangements are the product, in part, of our technologies of communication, as much as our ideas.

How, what technologies we have available to us to communicate our political ideas is really important to our political arrangements.

And it was, indeed, extremely significant that Columbus could write his diary down and that he could tell the queen and king of Spain that he took possession of these lands and that they, you know, and that he could decide these people have no language, just because he didn't understand it.

That that, that technology of communication of writing is hugely important in that, in that historical moment.

And we can see it differently and understand the power dynamics differently if we pay attention to technology.

RUBENSTEIN: When I was in grade school, I remember people saying, "Well, Columbus went to discover a new route to the East, but it wasn't clear that the world was round and he was maybe risking falling off the globe, um, because it wasn't clear where the ocean ended."

That wasn't the case.

Everybody knew the world was round.

He was just looking for a cheaper way to get to Asia.

Is that more or less right?

LEPORE: Yeah.

But he was also a former slave trader.

I mean, he wasn't just a kind of seeker of knowledge.

Uh, he was a person who was engaged in a particular... RUBENSTEIN: Well, I like to cite him as the first private equity investor, really, because...

He had a deal with Queen Isabella.

He got 5% of the gold and 10% of the profits, but there was no gold and no profits, so in the end he didn't really make any money out of it, why did he not get the country named after him?

It's called the United States of America.

Why did we use the America?

Why didn't he get the billing rights there?

LEPORE: Um, well let me just actually kinda take seriously your private equity argument, because there is a really important interpretation to offer with regard to the European conquest of the Americas, which is that it actually makes possible the emergence of capitalism, because of the vast wealth that Europeans extract from the natural resources and the forced enslavement, the forced labor of Native Peoples and of Africans, and bring to Europe, which consolidates wealth in such a way that makes possible the emergence of capitalism.

So in a larger systemic way, kind of setting aside Columbus and his whatever how we wanna think about Columbus, uh, in a, in a much larger scale of economic history, it is a really important development in the history of economics.

In terms of the, the naming, that, that story largely has to do with Amerigo Vespucci who, uh, wrote a book called "Novus Mundus" uh, after his voyage to what is now came to be called Brazil.

Um, Vespucci was a Florentine explorer and he was the first European to call these lands, which no one really understood in Europe what they were or where they really were, to call them the "New World".

And that was really compelling to a European mapmaker, German mapmaker, nam, named Martin Waldseemüller when he went to make a map in 1507, he didn't know anything really about Columbus, but he had read Amerigo Vespucci's book "The New World" which had been widely translated, and he, on the map, called just an honor to Vespucci called this blob of land: America.

RUBENSTEIN: The original sin of this country was slavery.

When did slavery really start?

Because the English, uh, colonial, um, people came over to colonize here, the English, uh, Puritans and others that came over, they weren't slave owners at the time.

How did slavery get started here in this country?

LEPORE: Many of the English, in fact, were...

They didn't bring enslaved people with them to New England.

Many of them had already, uh, made voyages to or had family that had made voyages to the Caribbean and had, uh, slave plantations in places like Barbados and Jamaica.

The Atlantic trade in slaves is, dates to the middle of the 15th century and, and had its origins in Portugal and, Portugal and Spain engaging, especially Portugal, in, in raids of people along the West African coast, which happened before Columbus made his voyage.

It's just one of these terrible accidents of history that this new trade in people from West Africa was, uh, just beginning to churn when, um, Portugal and Spain began, uh, founding colonies.

RUBENSTEIN: So when the colonies were established, we ultimately had 13 colonies, um, they were minding their own business, and then after the French and Indian War, the British said, "You need to pay for some of the protection we've given you," and they began to impose taxes and that didn't seem to work out, uh, to the satisfaction of the colonial leaders.

But do you think that the British could have prevented a revolution from occurring, but had they done so, would it have made a difference, because eventually the United States would have broken away?

LEPORE: We now think about there were 13 colonies, but really there were 26, because there were the 13 colonies in the Caribbean, which nobody really distinguished in any meaningful way.

From the vantage of London, those are the colonies.

All, all of them.

RUBENSTEIN: They were more profitable for England.

LEPORE: The, the Caribbean colonies are the ones England really wanted to keep, because the Caribbean colonies, which were these just brutal death camps, uh, for Africans, were the sugar plantations, were, it was where England was making its most money off the colonies.

The English colonists in the 13 mainland colonies, when they were protesting Parliament and first the sugar tax and, and the stamp tax and then later, later the taxes in the 1770s, they kept trying to recruit, recruit the colonial assemblies in Barbados and Jamaica.

They're like, "All right, we're sending a petition to Parliament complaining about this tax.

Are you with us?"

And the Caribbean, you know, these slave owning plantation owners, would say, "You know, the thing is, we really like the British Army and we really need the British Army's protection, because we are outnumbered by our enslaved property 30 to one here.

So, um, you guys go off and rebel against these people, but we actually need the British Army."

Like the, you know, the Bostonians are like, "We're gonna get rid of the redcoats or the lobster backs."

The Caribbean colonies are like, "No, actually, we, no, we, we really, we want the power of the British empire behind us."

And that was Britain's strategy.

Cause why keep these kinda sad colonies when there's all the riches are in the Caribbean?

RUBENSTEIN: Your title of your book, it really relates to, uh, the Declaration of Independence.

Can you explain the title and the inconsistency between these truths and the reality?

LEPORE: So, you know, of course we all know Jeff, Jefferson famous for "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

I take the Declaration of Independence very, very seriously as, as, as a founding document for this nation.

I take very seriously the idea, uh, that a nation is the only creation of human civilization that has been able to guarantee rights.

Uh, it's the only rights granting and guarantor that, that humanity has ever introduced.

So I take that very, very seriously.

I chose "These Truths" as the title for my book because, uh, something that we, I don't think, reckon with fully as citizens as much as we, certainly as often or as, as deeply as we need to that an obligation of, of being a citizen in a democracy is the act of inquiry.

Right?

That Jefferson also says in the Declaration of Independence, let facts... "Let these facts be submitted to a candid world."

Uh, the document is essentially a product of the Enlightenment and its, its passion, its passion for empirical observation and research and experiment, the nat, this nation is an experiment, this is the statement of, uh, uh, of our obligation to participate in the experiment and to be keen observers of the results.

But it is also an experiment that, uh, it has been fraught from the start from long before the start, even where Jefferson got those ideas, I think, is quite fraught.

And it is our obligation as historians and I think as citizens who have an obligation to think about the relationship between the past and the present to reckon with whether the nation has lived up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, um, when he wrote the Declaration, it was approved by the Second Continental Congress, but they edited a lot of it, and he didn't really like the changes.

But at the time, the most important part was not the preamble, which was the part that is the most famous sentence now probably in the English language, it was the sins of King George and so forth.

But why is it that the preamble is now perhaps the most famous sentence in the English language?

What does it stand for as it became the creed of our country, though it really didn't live up to the creed?

LEPORE: So there's a piece of the story that, uh, is really important to remember, which is that when Jefferson talked about equality, uh, that all men are created equal, he was talking in a very narrow political sense about the equality of propertied, educated men.

Why that preamble has become, uh, ubiquitous and why it is cherished is not because of what Jefferson meant when he wrote it, but because of the work that black abolitionists did in the 1820s and 1830s to re-interpret those words.

So by, so that's 1776.

Go ahead 50 years, it's gonna be the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it's a new nation, let's have some part, let's like have celebrations, we'll have July 4th parades, we'll have the jubilee of the Declaration of Independence.

Well, among other things that happen to be going on in the 1820s is a religious revival, Evangelical religious revival.

Uh, many, many Americans are born again, including many free blacks in the North, uh, who are born again and the attraction to them of Evangelical Christianity is the spiritual call, equality of all people in the eyes of God.

Male or female, black or white, uh, we are all equal before God.

And they, uh, through preaching and writing and especially some incredibly powerful abolitionist tracts, but a lot of preaching, black abolitionists in the North reinterpret the, we, we, the equality of the Declaration of Independence as a universal equality of all people: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."

Well, then, we can't have slavery.

And it becomes the manifesto for the abolitionist movement.

That's the Declaration of Independence that we cherish.

RUBENSTEIN: Now when Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address, he was in effect referring to the Declaration of Independence, um, preamble, and he was in effect saying that all white and all black people should be equal.

Is that right?

LEPORE: Right.

That's what, I mean, people know about the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 when they're both running for a Senate seat in Illinois.

Douglas, Stephen Douglas says, "Well, the thing is, the Declaration of Independence was never meant to include black people.

And this is a white man's government for white man and white man's posterity forever," Douglas says.

And Lincoln says, "No."

Like, "Show me where in these documents it says this is a white man's government."

And Lincoln has largely gotten that argument from Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and, and, who, who had been born into slavery and ran away.

Uh, 'cause Douglass had, had been part of that movement to re-interpret the Declaration of Independence.

And Lincoln constitutionalizes that.

I mean, that's what the struggle of the Civil War is over.

But it, it becomes the new Constitutional truth of the nation.

RUBENSTEIN: So when I took, uh, American history course in junior high school or high school, inevitably, by the end of the World War II period, uh, we were done with the year, so we didn't actually get the modern American history.

LEPORE: Yeah.

Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Um, some of you may have had this same experience.

So, uh, you have actually, um, written, uh, your history all the way through the President Trump period.

So why don't we cover, uh, some of the presidents and some of the social effects of their leadership from the modern era.

So, take President Kennedy.

He only served about 1000, uh, days in office.

Do you think he has left a legacy that we still have?

Or do you think he's largely been forgotten by people because of so many things that have happened in technology and social movements since then?

LEPORE: You know, everybody leaves a legacy.

I think the most significant moment in Kennedy's presidency was the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I mean, he, he does in, he gets credit for saving the world from nuclear war.

How, how many people can you say that about?

RUBENSTEIN: You got a point.

LEPORE: I, I remember some years ago I took two of my kids to the Kennedy Library and Museum.

It's this beautiful, beautiful place.

And, uh, an incredible set of exhibits.

But I remember going into the room, uh, that was about his relationship with Bobby Kennedy, who was, of course, his attorney general.

And then, you know, you know what's gonna happen to both of them.

And I remember afterwards like having lunch with my sons and saying, "You know, just what do you make of that story?

Like does it make you want to go into public service?"

And they said exactly the opposite.

Like what it, what it communicated to them, which is a tragedy of the library and not what the library intended, um, was that there's no winning.

There's no making the world better by running for office.

Um, so this is a deeply cynical thing to say, but I think Kennedy, who was cherished at the time as an idealist in some ways, uh, and in the immediate aftermath of his death, certainly was, um, actually is a kind of buoy in the water signaling the end of idealism.

RUBENSTEIN: So many people would say post-World War II, the best foreign policy decision the United States has made was probably the Marshall Plan, though there may be others who have a different view.

But maybe the opening to China would be the second most important, let's say.

But the, the worst foreign policy decisions, some would say, were Vietnam and the invasion of Iraq.

How do you compare the impact on society of Vietnam and the impact on society of Iraq and our standing in the world?

LEPORE: You know, the work of the great military historian Andrew Bacevich is really important.

Here he writes about, uh, the collapse of the distance between civilian and military life in the United States in the sense that as a kind of popular culture, we value militarism, uh, but we don't actually value military service, nor do we require it.

Uh, and that, you know, Eisenhower, of course, famously said that he feared for the nation when someone who had not served in, you know, had not seen combat occupied the office.

Uh, and our worst military decisions have been made by people who never saw military service.

I think the, uh, you know, the turn to an all-volunteer military is a, a good part of what is responsible for the forever wars, uh, of, of the end of the 20th century.

Uh, a legacy of Vietnam was the end of the draft, but the end of the draft worsened American foreign policy.

RUBENSTEIN: So, technology has become an important part of our life in the last 10, 20 years or so, maybe even more so than the previous 50 or 60 years.

How do you think technology is changing the American character, if at all, and our presence in the world?

LEPORE: I think, you can make, and I have made the argument, that the realignment of the party system, which has happened seven times in American history, has always coincided with a technological innovation.

So, uh, the, the invention of the penny press, 1820s and 1830s, makes possible the, the democratization of American politics and the rise of Andrew Jackson, the founding of the Democratic Party.

Uh, the radio makes possible the New Deal.

Uh, television makes possible the emergence of the modern conservative movement.

So we can think about the effects of cable television, uh, talk radio, and the internet, kind of all at once, starting in the, the 1980s.

I think they're kind of best understood as a bundle.

Um, it's easy to get distracted with kind of from the founding of Facebook and social media to the present, just in the last decade or so, but I think kinda talk radio, uh, cable news, and the internet and social media are all kinda one big glommed together disequilibrium machine, politically.

RUBENSTEIN: Now some professional historians would say you really can't be a real historian if writing about something that's happening now or within the last 10 or 15 or 20 years.

You might need 30 or 40 years to see the documents.

But, on the Obama administration, what would you say its greatest impact on American history has been or is likely to be seen in the future?

LEPORE: So when I began my, I had my big outline to write the book, I planned to end on Obama's inauguration.

Um, 'cause a great ending, and also 'cause historians are quite reticent to write about the recent.

How do we know anything about The last 10 or 15 years?

Um, and then I, after Trump's election, I decided I needed to go forward to Trump's election, it's such a significant political moment.

Um, weirdly, and this, this will seem to undermine the importance of Obama's eight years in office, the most important legacy of Obama's presidency was his election.

Uh, the election itself.

Um, the fact of the triumph over, uh, centuries of racial prejudice and division, uh, that this nation could elect, uh, a, a person of color president was an incredible moment that, uh, just completely shakes up the whole historical narrative.

RUBENSTEIN: What is your next book gonna be?

LEPORE: I'm writing a book about an early data science company that claimed credit for getting Kennedy elected in 1960.

I think of it as the Cambridge Analytica of the Cold War.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

I'd like to thank you very much for an interesting conversation and I highly recommend to anybody here buying this book.

LEPORE: Thank you.

RUBENSTEIN: Thank you.

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