Democracy, Division, and the Declaration at 250

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you Christiane. And Jill Lepore, welcome back to the show.

JILL LEPORE: Thanks.

ISAACSON: In a month we’re gonna be celebrating our 250th, but boy, we seem like we’re in no mood for a celebration. How difficult is it to celebrate at a time like this, politically?

LEPORE: It really is a kind of perfect storm. There’s just so much going on in the country, really, from town to town, city, neighborhood to city neighborhood, where people are asking basic questions about the nature of the American experiment, the meaning of our heritage, the direction of the nation’s future. I mean, between the 250th, kind of ongoing rolling intense debates that the Trump administration spurs. And we’re also in the midst of this, you know, AI backlash moment, this tech-lash moment. So I think there’s gonna be a lot of hot dogs and parades and baseball games and bicycle races and basketball games, and a lot of regular old standard 4th of July celebration. But I think the larger kind of epic moment will elude us.

ISAACSON: Well, you know, 50 years ago we were going through a period that was very similar to what you just talked about in the sense that we were very torn apart about Vietnam, about the assassinations of Kennedys and King, the urban riots, Watergate, the resignation of a president, and by the way, landing on the moon and letting the internet become more public. And yet we rang the Liberty Bell and we had the bicentennial, and there was a healing process. Why is that not happening now?

LEPORE: You know, I sometimes wonder how much of a healing process it was. I don’t know about you. I was a little kid for the bicentennial, and I remember mainly it just being a blast. Like we had to sew our own colonial dresses and wear –

ISAACSON: And the tall ships came up. Yeah.

LEPORE: And the Girl Scouts, we went out and we painted the fire hydrants red, white and blue. So I have a kind of kids’ eye view of it. But I did spend a lot of time researching what the bicentennial meant for a piece that I wrote in the New Yorker. And I, one of the things I came across that was so wonderful, the National Park Service made a documentary in 1974/75, where they went and just interviewed people at national parks, like national historic parks too, right? So Philadelphia and San Francisco as much as Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, and ask people what the bicentennial meant to them. And the answers are remarkably candid and wide ranging, and there is a lot of cynicism. We forget how much cynicism there was about the real commercialism of the bicentennial, was mocked as the BUYcentennial, the B-U-Y centennial, like everything was sold with a bicentennial theme. You know, you bought sanitary napkins. They were red, white, and blue that year. Like just everything, toilet paper, anything that you bought in any restaurant came with a quote by Paul Revere on it, you know? So it was tacky and cheesy in all kinds of ways, although for kids, I think that was fun. I remember thinking those were fun things to collect.

But there was a lot of cynicism about the nature of, what did the country have to celebrate, you know, after Watergate and Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers. What really happened though, with the bicentennial that has not happened this time around, is that it was saved by the recognition in the years before 1976, that the planning wasn’t working. That the planning had become hyper-partisan. So Lyndon Johnson had a bicentennial commission that he had set up in 1965, really early on. Richard Nixon, when he took office in 69, got rid of that whole commission, appointed a bunch of Republicans, was using it really almost like a slush fund and to promote the GOP agenda. Then there was a kind of big expose about that. The Washington Post, after publishing the Pentagon Papers published the well remembered Bicentennial Papers that revealed kind of the corruption of the commission. And then the commission was basically disbanded.

And the guy that was brought in, John Warner, who continued into the Ford Administration, he had this really good idea, which was just to say, you know what? This isn’t really a project of the federal government. This is something for communities to figure out on their own. We’ll fund anything and we’ll announce anything and we’ll promote anything. They published a newspaper called The Bicentennial Times listing things that were going on all over the country. They kept a calendar, which was a really kind of complicated thing to do in that day and age. And they, and they funded really – I think something like between a half and two thirds of every historic site in the country received funding from the federal government during that era. So, little historic houses in your neighborhood or oral history projects in your city. These things, most of them were funded by the federal government for the bicentennial without a specific agenda of what the story of America ought to be. That was for your community to decide.

ISAACSON: As we talk about celebrating, you know, anniversaries of the Declaration, it seems to go, go all the way back to John Adams. I’ll read you something he wrote to his wife, Abigail on July 3rd, 1776. He said, he hoped that the Americans would celebrate every year “with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of the continent to the other.” First, let’s take the fact that that was written on July 3rd, kind of quirky. He thought, I think that July 2nd when he was the one who got the resolution passed to break away from England, he thought we’d be celebrating July 2nd. What happened?

LEPORE: Americans decided to celebrate July 4th. The –

ISAACSON: Is that because the declaration is such an important founding document?

LEPORE: I think that it was received with great pomp and circumstance at the time. There were a lot of public readings of the Declaration, you know, in Boston. People climbed up to the balcony of what is known as the Old State House that had been the governor’s balcony and read it out loud to great applause and cheers. It was very much part of the effort to convince Americans that independence was in fact the right decision and that the war was gonna be worthwhile and that the war could be won. So I think that – and also Adams was instrumental in insisting that the document ought to be celebrated in that way. It really doesn’t take off, the 4th of July, as a big public celebration until the 1790s. But then it is actually quite important at building up a sense of national character and a sense of shared experience as a nation.

That the country had been through the war had been through the elaborate and contentious and very close call of ratifying the Constitution by 1789. This is really not until the 1790s that the really big celebrations begin. And it’s in a way, part of the larger project of Constitutionalizing the Declaration of Independence. Because, of course, they’re two very different documents separated by 11 years. And it’s, but it’s the preamble of the Declaration of Independence that I think Americans care about the most and often think is in the Constitution. But in a way it gets written into the Constitution by the way we celebrate it on the 4th of July. We don’t really celebrate Constitution Day, which is September 17th and wasn’t a holiday until the 20th century.

ISAACSON: Well, you wrote a great book about the Constitution. Tell me what you mean when you just said Constitutionalizing the Declaration.

LEPORE: So the Declaration of Independence, you know, Jefferson, who was its chief author – although this always pissed off John Adams – Jefferson always said, you know, there wasn’t an original idea in it. It was just an attempt to write down what is contained in the American mind. And that was true. There had been, many of the states had declared independence. Towns had written declarations of its independence. Virginia had written its Declaration of Rights. A lot of state constitutions that were written in the early months of 1776 had language in them that found its way into the Declaration of Independence. So it wasn’t like something that dropped out of the sky. It was a document that was produced by the American people. And Jefferson just essentially was its – wrote it down like a scribe. That’s how he would’ve talked about it.

So these ideas were constitutional ideas ’cause they’re in the state constitution. So, Massachusetts constitution from 1780 insisted that all men are born equal. How that becomes constitutionalized federally is partly because of people seeking emancipation from slavery. It’s largely because of people seeking emancipation from slavery, even in the 1780s. So, you know, in 1783, there’s a famous case in Massachusetts where a woman in Western Massachusetts who’s held as a slave, you know, files for freedom. And she says, our constitution says all men are free and born free. So we therefore are, and therefore, I cannot be a slave. And she wins her case. And that’s a means of constitutionalizing the ideas that are in the Declaration of Independence, many of them are also in the state constitutions. How that enters the federal Constitution really isn’t until what’s known as the Jubilee in 1826, which is the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It’s also on July 4th of that year, really spookily, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson die that day, the two most important figures in writing the Declaration of Independence. But in the 1820s, and especially around the Jubilee, black abolitionists insist that the spirit of the Declaration of Independence is contained within the Constitution. And they do that constitutionalizing. In a way, it doesn’t really happen until the Civil War. Lincoln is, of course, instrumental in this. He writes about the Declaration of Independence as part of the Constitution, and that’s what the 14th Amendment does, which is ratified after the Civil War.

ISAACSON: Well, speaking of slavery and the Declaration, let’s address the complexity of Thomas Jefferson, especially in the early drafts that get edited out his denunciation of slavery, even as he enslaved, I think more than 400 people at that time.

LEPORE: Yeah. This is a hard one for Americans to wrestle with, has been a hard one for Americans to wrestle with even when Jefferson was alive. Northerners campaigned against Jefferson on the basis of not only his status as a slave owner, but what was kind of a fairly well-known public secret at the time that he had had children with Sally Hemings, who was the half-sister of his deceased wife. Jefferson’s relationship to slavery was a scandal in his lifetime. And it remained so across time in ways that are really worth reexamining. And it’s one of the projects of Monticello – Jefferson’s Virginia home – to lead a conversation for the nation around the multiple meanings of Jefferson’s plea for equality and liberty and universal rights and our need as a country to face the history of slavery and its many descendants and legacies. So I think that it’s worth looking at how odd it is that Jefferson, as an owner of human beings denounced slavery as an institution in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, denounced the slave trade, and then weirdly blamed it on the King. And Congress deleted this paragraph. It was the last and final and longest paragraph in the Declaration of Independence.

Which is a list of grievances against the King.

ISAACSON: The ultimate indictment of the king. Right?

LEPORE: The ultimate – the worst thing the king has done is because there had been some efforts to close the slave trade. And he’s blaming the king for having made those not happen. So, I mean, it’s a very complicated story. But in any event, Congress looked at this draft, the continental of Congress, and said, yeah, we’re not gonna – no, we’re gonna just take that out in its entirety. Remember this is a time at which people in England who were not supportive of the American Independence Movement liked to point out the hypocrisy of Americans who were crying for liberty while holding millions of human beings in a state of slavery. And that it would call more attention to that hypocrisy to put this language in the Declaration of Independence, is one of the arguments against it.

ISAACSON: One of the great contradictions is when they’re sitting there in the room writing that declaration, you’ve mentioned Sally Hemings, but in that room is Robert Hemings, older brother and enslaved valet of Thomas Jefferson, who came up with him from Monticello. Explain to me the complexities that must have been going on in Jefferson’s head.

LEPORE: Yeah, and it’s, it’s important to remember the intimacy of that relationship too. I mean, Hemings would have shaved Jefferson every day, would’ve dressed Jefferson every day. Hemings was himself literate. He might have been fetching books or papers for him, in some way or another, engaged in this project. He’s a very mysterious figure in the historical record. The historical record is incredibly asymmetrical. We know so much about Thomas Jefferson. We know so little about Robert Hemings in spite of the incredible work that so many historians have done to recover that life and the life of so many other of the people held by Jefferson in particular, just because the story is so important to the nation’s founding. The building in which Jefferson did that writing was actually destroyed, but a replica was built during the bicentennial, which kind of fascinating moment. Right. Kind of a monument to the writing of the Declaration of Independence. And it’s an exact replica of the brick building in which Jefferson did this writing while Robert Hemings waited upon him. It’s called Declaration House.

There’s an amazing artist named Sonya Clark who did an installation there last year that just really tried to wrestle with the legacy of that moment of the nation’s founding. She went and she found photographs of descendants of Jefferson and Hemings, Sally Hemings and all the descendants of all of the Hemingses, some of whom were related to Jefferson and many of whom of course were not. And she interviewed a number of people as well as using photographs. And then onto the windows of this beautiful Georgian brick building from the inside, she projected their eyes. It’s like an Alice Wonderland. You walk down the street of Philadelphia and look at this beautiful building, and there are these giant eyes looking out of each of the windows, and they’re the eyes of the descendants of Jefferson and Hemings. Just occupying that space, bearing witness looking upon you. They’re moving, they’re animated because she was videotaping them. You can tell sometimes when people are smiling, they’re telling stories about their family. She asked them to tell family stories. And it’s just a kind of, I think an example of the way in which art and storytelling and poetry, historical writing, public history projects are able to do the really important work of celebrating the nation’s founding, the writing of the Declaration of Independence, and also inviting all of us to think about our place in the nation’s story and the place of people that we might not have thought about as founders of the United States and the ongoing nature of the American experiment.

ISAACSON: You’ve written in one of your books about how we each try, each side sometimes tries to capture our history, and that sometimes – especially when we’re looking at our founding – we make it, either we demonize it or we totally sugarcoat it. Is that happening worse right now?

LEPORE: I don’t know that I think it’s worse. I think it’s dangerous – it’s always dangerous when your view of the past maps on conveniently to your political preferences. And I think for viewers, if that seems familiar to you should be a little bit concerned. Right. We have a very hyperpolarized politics, and we have a hyperpolarized sense of the American past. And I think that’s not worse maybe than it has been in other moments. But more dangerous because of the appetite for political violence on both sides of the political aisle that’s really been increasingly documented in public opinion research. So when you have a view of the past, the present, and the future that is irreconcilable with the views of time held by people with whom you disagree politically, and you also think maybe there’s no possibility that you might be a little bit wrong and you maybe even entertain the possibility that you are so right that violence might be a proper means to advance your version of these events. That’s an insurrectionary political culture.

ISAACSON: Jill Lepore, thank you so much for joining us.

LEPORE: Thanks a lot, Walter.