DR: Why did America become so economically powerful in the latter part of the nineteenth century?
JL: There’s a fairly vigorous debate among historians about that. I would point to the obvious things. Our natural resources are peerless. Also, bankruptcy protection was huge in the nineteenth century. Until bankruptcy reform in the 1840s, only Wall Street brokers can declare bankruptcy. Ordinary businesspeople can’t. But we democratize bankruptcy protection, because Americans decide risk is good, and if you want to encourage risk, you have to be willing to give people a clean slate. That’s part of a democratic sensibility too.
So the economic risk-taking in which Americans engage in the nineteenth century, American businessmen in particular, makes the United States economy leapfrog past others for a time.
DR: Woodrow Wilson is reelected president in 1916, and we go into World War I. Was it inevitable that the United States would fight in the war? Was it inevitable that we didn’t join the League of Nations afterward?
JL: I don’t believe in historical inevitability. Everything is contingent. Everything could have gone differently. I tend to not be very excited about presidential biography because it has a political consequence, which is to inflate our impression of the power of the presidency. The influence of the executive office is out of whack with our constitutional system.
But in the case of the League of Nations, it really did come down to what Wilson did—how he handled going to Paris, how he became very sick with the Spanish flu there; then later how he had a stroke and then lied to his cabinet that he had suffered a stroke. There are a lot of weird, freaky accidents of history around Wilson and the League of Nations.
DR: One of the accidents of history, you could argue, is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president of the United States. Even though he had come down with polio, he managed to keep that from being largely known, and was elected for four terms. Do you think FDR was the transformational U.S. president of the twentieth century?
JL: I think the most transformational movement of the twentieth century was the constitutionalization of the New Deal. Therefore, Roosevelt would be high on my list of important presidents. When I think about Roosevelt’s presidency, I am attracted to explanations that have less to do with him than with how Americans came to accept the idea of the New Deal and its social welfare state—a set of arrangements that many Americans had been hostile to before. People didn’t know objectively how bad his polio was, but they knew he was a person who understood suffering. And that allowed for a kind of leadership that you don’t see very often on the national stage.
DR: Why don’t we discuss some of the modern-era presidents and the social effects of their leadership? Take President John F. Kennedy. He only served about a thousand days in office. Do you think he has left a legacy we still have?
JL: Everybody leaves a legacy. The most significant moment in Kennedy’s presidency was the Cuban Missile Crisis. He gets credit for saving the world from nuclear war. How many people can you say that about?
DR: A good point.
JL: Some years ago I took two of my kids to the Kennedy Library and Museum [in Boston]. I remember going into the room that was about John Kennedy’s relationship with Bobby Kennedy, his attorney general. And you know what’s going to happen to both of them.
I remember afterward having lunch with my sons and saying, “What do you make of that story? Does it make you want to go into public service?”
They said exactly the opposite. What it communicated to them was that there’s no winning. There’s no making the world better by running for office. This is a deeply cynical thing to say, but I think President Kennedy, who was cherished as an idealist at the time and in the immediate aftermath of his death, actually is a kind of buoy in the water signaling the end of idealism.
DR: Many people would say that, post–World War II, the best foreign policy decision the United States has made was probably the Marshall Plan. The worst foreign policy decisions, some would say, were Vietnam and the invasion of Iraq. How do you compare the impact on society, and on our standing in the world, of Vietnam and of Iraq?
JL: Eisenhower famously said that he feared for the nation when someone who had not seen combat occupied the office. Our worst military decisions have been made by people who never saw military service. The turn to an all-volunteer military is a good part of what is responsible for the forever wars of the end of the twentieth century. A legacy of Vietnam was the end of the draft, but the end of the draft worsened American foreign policy.
DR: In the book, you spend a fair amount of time on women who were not prominently mentioned in the textbooks I read. One has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. Her name was Phyllis Schlafly. Why were you so fascinated by her?
JL: Let me back up a little to the broader question of including women. Women and people of color have been political actors all throughout American history. They were ignored and stripped out of other people’s histories. We forget how bamboozled we are by so much bad history that circulates in our world.
I went to a kindergarten class a few years ago that was studying the American Revolution. Each kid had to choose a person and then write a little biography and make a costume and a poster.
I asked, “Who are you studying?”
“Benjamin Franklin,” “George Washington,” “Alexander Hamilton,” “John Paul Jones,” “Patrick Henry.”
“Are any of you studying women?”
They looked at me, and they’re all like, “Ooh, cooties, no.” I said, “Why not?” And this little girl raised her hand and she said, “Because there were no women then.”
She was smart as a whip. This was just what she had observed from what she was learning and from the posters in her classroom. We don’t reckon with the cost of using books where the women have been taken out.
So back to Phyllis Schlafly. She is a hugely important driving force in the realignment of the party system in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the most important kind of field general of the conservative movement.
She has been doubly ignored, because—to be frank about it—most academic historical scholarship is written by people with a liberal bent who historically have done a poor job including conservative thinkers and figures. And the history that’s written by conservatives generally is written by men who don’t think women have a lot of political power, or should. So liberal academics ignore her and conservative academics ignore her.
DR: You point out in your book that the Equal Rights Amendment was actually passing legislatures unanimously until Schlafly began the effort to stop it in the ’70s. You think it would have been ratified but for her?
JL: But for her and the army that she put together. One of the things that’s important about Schlafly is she begins being a major political figure in the 1950s as the head of the Republican Federation of Women’s Clubs, and she inaugurates what I call a new political style in American politics. It becomes a partisan style, the female moral crusade, an adaptation of something between McCarthyism and Goldwaterism. She’s behind the nomination of Barry Goldwater, the conservative who wins the Republican nomination in 1964.
Then she gets pushed out of the Republican Party in the late ’60s, when they’re like, “We need to steer back toward moderates like Richard Nixon.” She reinvents herself as a moral crusader arguing against the ERA, which becomes a signature issue for the Republican Party, even though the ERA was introduced in Congress in 1923 and Republicans had supported it, had it in their platform, since 1940. The Republicans had always been in support of the ERA until Schlafly said, “This is how we will reimagine the party.”
DR: Planned Parenthood, which today is synonymous in some people’s minds with support for abortion rights, was a Republican organization, more or less. That shifted. How did that shift come about?
JL: Planned Parenthood’s history is long and tangled, but it is very much bound up in that party realignment in the ’60s and ’70s. Going into the 196
0s, its message is that the way to consolidate the American middle class is for people to choose the family size that they want.
It’s not a hyperpartisan organization, but it is predominantly a Republican organization. George H. W. Bush famously supported contraception. Nixon was even what we would now call pro-choice for quite some time.
DR: George Herbert Walker Bush was so much in support of Planned Parenthood that he had a nickname in the House of Representatives. What was that nickname?
JL: “Rubbers.”
DR: When our country was started, women who were married did not have the right to own property. They couldn’t vote. They weren’t allowed to be officeholders. It’s hard to believe today, but many leading so-called feminists then opposed the right to vote for women. Eleanor Roosevelt, for a while, was initially against the right to vote. Why were so many women not in favor of the right to vote?
JL: 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 bloc. But it turns out women don’t vote as a bloc at all, and the parties have to vie for them. That’s why issues involving women and family and children tend to be hyperpoliticized, because in the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a struggle for those new voters.
The main thing that women fought for in the nineteenth century was not the right for women to vote, it was the end of slavery. It was part of a Christian evangelical movement. Women were disproportionately church members, and it was a moral reform movement. They also fought for temperance.
They thought they were fighting for an end to forms of tyranny, especially household tyranny, and those things included women not having the right to own property and not having the right to vote. The narrowing of the struggle for women’s rights to the right to vote was actually pretty problematic for the larger movement.
In the early 1970s, after women lost the ERA, the women’s rights movement got narrowed to a fight for the right to abortion. All the other things that women had been fighting for became secondary to that, which was a disaster, in my view, for feminism.
DR: How do you think technology is changing the American character, if at all?
JL: This is why I start with Columbus writing in his log. Our technologies of communication shape our political order all the time. For instance, I have made the argument that the realignment of the party system, which has happened several times in American history, has always coincided with a technological innovation.
So the invention of the penny press in the 1820s and 1830s makes possible the democratization of American politics and the rise of Andrew Jackson and the founding of the Democratic Party. The radio makes possible the New Deal. Television makes possible the emergence of the modern conservative movement. So we can think about the effects of cable television, talk radio, and the Internet, kind of all at once, starting in the 1980s.
It’s easy to get distracted by the period from the founding of Facebook and social media to the present, just in the last decade or so, but talk radio, cable news, and the Internet and social media are all one big glommed-together disequilibrium machine, politically.
DR: Some professional historians would say you can’t be a real historian if you’re writing about something that happened within the last ten or fifteen or twenty years. Let’s have fun and talk about the impact on American history of the Obama and Trump administrations.
JL: When I did my big outline for the book, I planned to end on Barack Obama’s inauguration, because it’s a great ending, and also because historians are quite reticent to write about the recent past. Then, after Trump’s election, I decided I needed to go forward to that, because it’s such a significant political moment.
Weirdly—and 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 itself. The triumph over centuries of racial prejudice and division, that this nation could elect a person of color president, was an incredible moment that completely shakes up the whole historical narrative.
DR: What about the Trump administration?
JL: Hard to say. Also hard to say in a fully broad-minded and nonpartisan way. What we would say, looking back fifty years from now, has to do with where this goes. At the moment, it does seem to be that the legacy of this administration and this cultural moment is our contemporary epistemological crisis—that it is very difficult for people to know how to know things. “You’re biased, I don’t believe you, you’re lying.” Our larger structures of epistemological authority are in crisis.
DR: Why do you think it is that people are not focused on history anymore—so much so that, for example, two-thirds of Americans cannot name the three branches of the federal government?
JL: Those findings—like that people can’t identify the three branches of government—have been remarkably consistent since they were first empirically tested, beginning in 1948. But with regard to our general failure to want to think historically or to study the past in a meaningful way, we live largely in a world where there’s a crisis of other forms of knowledge. We don’t read poems to know things. I think we should. We think the only way you can know something now is with data, and the bigger the data, the better.
The purpose of the computer, working with that kind of data, is to make predictions about the future. Which is to say, all we seem to want to know is about the future and not about the past.
DANIELLE S. ALLEN on the Declaration of Independence
James Bryant Conant University Professor, Harvard University; author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality and other books
“It’s important to recognize that the compromises and structure of the Constitution were already in play at the moment of the Declaration.”
The Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, and its text was sent to each of the colonies, to George Washington to read to his troops, and to King George III.
And the Declaration served its purpose: letting the world know that the offenses of King George III against the colonies were so intolerable that only one remedy—independence—was an appropriate and justified outcome.
At that time, relatively little attention was given to the Declaration’s preamble. Subsequently, well after the Revolutionary War, the preamble became the best-remembered part of the Declaration, for it was seen as containing the founding creed of the U.S. It became, as well, the founding creed of other countries and of disenfranchised parts of our society and other societies:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness….
That sentence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, with some editing by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, had its obvious flaws. It clearly excluded all women and the country’s half a million slaves from the “self-evident” right of equality. But the preamble eventually helped unleash the desire for equality among all Americans.
To be sure, in the effort by so many Americans to achieve equality, there have been many violent and bloody struggles since 1776. And they continue today in a number of areas. Whether the goal of achieving equality would even exist in America if the Declaration had been drafted differently is unknowable. But it does seem that the “equality” concept is more ingrained in Americans than in the people of most other countries.
In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in what Jefferson and the Second Continental Congress actually meant by the precisely chosen words that were included in the Declaration. One of the leading scholars behind this revival has been Danielle Allen, a professor at Harvard and the author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. Professor Allen, who has also held senior positions at the University of Chicago and the Institute for Advanced Study, has helped to reignite scholarly
interest in what Jefferson really intended with his magical—and inspiring—words about equality. I interviewed her on November 12, 2019, at the Library of Congress as part of the Congressional Dialogues series.
* * *
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): The Declaration of Independence is important in our history, but it’s not a legal document. It’s not the Constitution. Why should anybody care today about what the Declaration says?
DANIELLE S. ALLEN (DA): I’m going to give you the case for why the Declaration is indeed a legal document. In order to do that, however, I have to remind you of what is in the second sentence:
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
The last clause is the most important part because it lays out the responsibilities of citizens—to make a judgment about how your government is doing, and then, if necessary, to alter it by doing two things: laying the foundation on principle, and organizing the powers of government to deliver on those principles.
Now, this was not just airy-fairy fancy language. It was a to-do list. When we come to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, there was one supremely important individual whom people don’t pay enough attention to anymore—not James Madison, but James Wilson.
Wilson, who was from Pennsylvania, signed the Declaration and the Constitution. He was one of the only people who really thought about the relationship between them. Wilson made the case that the new constitution they had just signed rested on the basis of the Declaration of Independence. He quoted the sentence I just recited to you and said, “On this basis, everything we have erected stands.”
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