These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  38.Nancy Woloch, Muller v. Oregon: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), 5.

  39.Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 333–40 (quotation, 337).

  40.Quoted in Woloch, Muller v. Oregon, 17.

  41.Woloch, Muller v. Oregon, 8.

  42.Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 394–95.

  43.“The Brandeis Brief,” Louis D. Brandeis School of Law Library, https://louisville.edu/law/library/special-collections/the-louis-d.-brandeis-collection/the-brandeis-brief-in-its-entirety, accessed July 9, 2017.

  44.This element of Brandeis’s argument is quoted and discussed in Sally J. Kenney, For Whose Protection? Reproductive Hazards and Exclusionary Politics in the United States and Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 45–46.

  45.Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 10, and see also ch. 8.

  46.Louis Brandeis, “Efficiency and Social Ideas,” 1914, in Philippa Strum, ed., Brandeis on Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 33.

  47.Frederick W. Taylor, “The Gospel of Efficiency,” American Magazine 71 (1911): 479–80, 570–81. And see Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Bros., 1911).

  48.Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy (New York: Norton, 2009), 48–50.

  49.On immigration in this era, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), and John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).

  50.Painter, Standing at Armageddon, xix.

  51.Stephen P. Meyer, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1981), 2, 5, 12. Chrysler is quoted in Maury Klein, Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 29.

  52.Quoted in Janet F. Davidson et al., On the Move: Transportation and the American Story (New York: National Geographic, 2003), 165.

  53.Jill Lepore, The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (New York: Knopf, 2012), ch. 6.

  54.Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 6, 99, 156.

  55.Philippa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 160.

  56.Edna Yost, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth: Partners for Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 185–88; “Roads Could Save $1,000,000 a Day,” NYT, November 22, 1910; Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People, 166–67.

  57.Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 2007), 3–4, 474–77.

  58.Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 265, 257.

  59.Woodrow Wilson, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1913; Theodore Roosevelt, “New Nationalism,” Speech, Osawatomie, Kansas, 1910; Berg, Wilson, 294.

  60.“Women Leap Suddenly Into Political Favor, Now Courted by All Parties” New York Herald, August 11, 1912.

  61.McGerr, “Political Style and Women’s Power.”

  62.Quoted in Geoffrey Cowan, Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary (New York: Norton, 2016), 99.

  63.Quotations from Cowan, Let the People Rule, 208, 259.

  64.Roosevelt’s senior thesis at Harvard in 1880 was titled “Practicability of Equalizing Men and Women before the Law”; Freeman, We Will be Heard, 23, 30, 37, 52, 55.

  65.Quotations from Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 123, 173.

  66.Sidney Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009).

  67.Wilson, Inaugural Address.

  68.Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money: and How the Bankers Use It (New York: F. A. Stokes, 1913), 33, 99; Strum, Brandeis on Democracy, 15.

  69.David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 9–11, 384–390.

  70.James Weldon Johnson, “President Wilson’s ‘New Freedom’ and the Negro,” in The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, ed. Sondra Kathryn Wilson, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1 (The New York Age Editorials, 1914–1923):182.

  71.Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 7.

  72.Henry James to Rhoda Broughton, August 10, 1914, in The Letters of Henry James, selected and edited by Percy Lubbock, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 2:389.

  73.See, for example, the reckoning in Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 6–7.

  74.Quoted in Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: Norton, 2011), 30.

  75.Quotations from FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, 71–79, 97, 113.

  76.Quotations from ibid., 113; Kazin, A Godly Hero, 263–64; Larson, Summer for the Gods, 39.

  77.Quoted in Jon Butler et al., Religion in American Life: A Short History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 329.

  78.Charles Benedict Davenport, Eugenics, the Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding (New York: Henry Holt, 1910); Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 42–43.

  79.Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; Or, the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Scribner, 1916), 10. And see Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

  80.Quotations from FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, 102–14.

  81.Quoted in Kazin, A Godly Hero, 215.

  82.Quoted in Berg, Wilson, 417.

  83.Ibid., 384, 412, 404–5.

  84.Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “A Woman’s Party,” The Suffragist 8 (1920): 8–9; Campaign in Colorado Donkey with National Woman’s Party sign advocating opposition to Democratic Party, Colorado, United States, 1916, Library of Congress; “Last Minute Activities of the Woman’s Party,” The Suffragist 4 (1916): 4–5; Berg, Wilson, 417; Cooper, Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson, 126.

  85.Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, 93–95; Mary Chapman and Angela Mills, Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 294.

  86.Mary Alexander and Marilyn Childress, “The Zimmerman Telegram,” Social Education 45, 4 (April 1981): 266.

  87.Wilson, War Message to Congress, April 2, 1917; Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (New York: Knopf, 2017), 181.

  88.Robert Lansing, Address before the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps . . . July 29, 1917 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1917), 5.

  89.John Dewey, “Conscription of Thought,” The New Republic [hereafter TNR], September 1, 1917, 128–29; Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 4. And see Jonathan Auerbach, Weapons of Democracy: Propaganda, Progressivism, and American Public Opinion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

  90.Quoted in Schaffer, America in the Great War, 15.

  91.W. E. B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1915; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 554–56; Schaffer, America in the Great War, 75.

  92.Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit,” 1939. The poem was published as “Bitter Fruit” (1937).

  93.On Lippmann’s role in the Inquiry, see Steel, Walter Lippmann, ch. 11.

  94.W. Elliot Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America: A Short History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 62–63; Weisman, Great Tax Wars, 333, 337; Webber and Wildavsky, History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World, 421; “War Savings Societies—A Home Defense,�
�� Medical Times 46 (1918): 24. The war advanced what the historian Julia C. Ott has called the ideology of an “investors’ democracy”: Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). And see also Meg Jacobs, “Pocketbook Politics: Democracy and the Market in Twentieth-Century America,” in Meg Jacobs et al., eds., The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

  95.Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations, 148; Schaffer, America in the Great War, 58, 66.

  96.Schaffer, America in the Great War, 101, 97; Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in America Since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), especially ch. 2; Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: Norton, 2016), xviii–xxi. And Darrow as quoted in John A. Farrell, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (New York: Doubleday, 2011), 327.

  97.Quoted in Steel, Walter Lippmann, 143, 147, 148.

  98.Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes, 13, 97.

  99.Theodore Roosevelt, Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star; War-time Editorials (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921), 274.

  100.Steel, Walter Lippmann, 152; Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), 3–4; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 141–58.

  101.Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 367, 561–78; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 365.

  102.Berg, Wilson, 568–70.

  103.H. G. Wells, Outline of History (London, 1920), 1066–67.

  104.Steel, Walter Lippmann, 158; John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 41, 228.

  105.Berg, Wilson, 605–7.

  106.Ibid., 613–14.

  107.Ibid., 619, 633–38, 664; Cooper, Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson, 16.

  108.Walter Lippmann, “The Basic Problem of Democracy,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1919, 616.

  109.Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), 364.

  110.Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, with a new foreword by Ronald Steel (1922; New York: Free Press, 1997), 356; intelligence bureaus: 242–51.

  111.Quoted in McGerr, “Political Style and Women’s Power,” 833.

  112.Woloch, Muller v. Oregon, 58–59; Kenney, For Whose Protection?, 46–47.

  113.Warren G. Harding, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1921; David C. Mearns and Verner W. Clapp, comp., The Constitution of the United States together with An Account of Its Travels Since September 17, 1787 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1958), 1–17; Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself, 252.

  114.James M. Beck, The Constitution of the United States: A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution of the United States (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1922), 110; Thomas Reed Powell, “Constitutional Metaphors, a Review of James M. Beck’s The Constitution of the United States, Originally Published in TNR on February 11, 1925. And see the typescript, “Constitutional Metaphors,” and the poem, “The Constitution Is a Dock,” in Thomas Reed Powell Papers, Special Collections, Harvard Law School, Box F, Folder 11.

  115.Elmer Rice, The Adding Machine: A Play in Seven Scenes (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1923), 9.

  116.“Thomas Watson,” IBM Archives: Transcript of Thomas Watson comments on “THINK,” https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/multimedia/think_trans.html, accessed July 5, 2017.

  117.Harding, Inaugural Address.

  118.Klein, Rainbow’s End, 28.

  119.Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America, 73n13; Andrew W. Mellon, Taxation: The People’s Business (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 18, 137; “Taxpayers’ League Target of Attack before Committee,” Atlanta Constitution, November 10, 1927; “Clashes Electrify Estate Tax Hearing,” NYT, November 9, 1927. On the Mellon family as funders of the League, see “W. L. Mellon Listed as Tax Lobby Donor,” NYT, November 6, 1929. Holmes on taxation: Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue, 275 U.S. 87 (1927). Webber and Wildavsky, History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World, 423.

  120.Whyte, Hoover, 226, 206, 233–37.

  121.Ibid., 206, 257–58; Ellis W. Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–1928,” JAH 61 (1974): 116–40 (quotation, 121); Dumenil, The Modern Temper, 36–38.

  122.Samuel Strauss, “Things Are in the Saddle,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1924, 579.

  123.League of Nations, Industrialization and Foreign Trade (Geneva: League of Nations, 1945), 13.

  124.Eric Rauchway, The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8–9, 28–32.

  125.Rauchway, The Great Depression and the New Deal, 11.

  126.Quoted in Steel, Walter Lippmann, 285.

  127.Daniel Levin, “Federalists in the Attic: Original Intent, the Heritage Movement, and Democratic Theory,” Law and Social Inquiry 29 (2004): 308.

  128.Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street, 36–54, and see also Morrison H. Heckscher, “The American Wing Rooms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Winterthur Portfolio 46 (2012): 161–78; and Wendy Kaplan, “R. T. H. Halsey: An Ideology of Collecting American Decorative Arts,” Winterthur Portfolio 17 (1982): 43–53.

  129.Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, 2017), 105, 118.

  130.David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 39–55.

  131.Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Prince ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), introduction and chs. 1 and 2; Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 52–53, 55.

  132.Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2017); Robert K. Murray, The 103rd Ballot: Democrats and the Disaster in Madison Square Garden (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

  133.Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 13.

  134.Alain LeRoy Locke and Winold Reiss, The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 5; the author of “The Negro Digs Up His Past” was the historian and writer Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, whose collection became an important part of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center (originally the Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints); Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 93.

  135.W. E. B. Du Bois and Lothrop Stoddard, Report of Debate Conducted by the Chicago Forum: “Shall the Negro be encouraged to seek cultural equality?” (Chicago: Chicago Forum Council, 1929).

  136.George Lloyd Bird and Frederic Eaton Merwin, The Newspaper and Society: A Book of Readings (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1942), 30; Daly, Covering America, 148–49; Schudson, Origins of the Ideal of Objectivity, 249, citing Ivy Ledbetter Lee, Publicity: Some of the Things It Is and Is Not (New York: Industries Publishing Co., 1925), 21.

  137.Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 5 (1905–1930):294–95; Isaiah Wilner, The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 83–86; Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Knopf, 2010), 99; Daly, Covering America, 195.

  138.Mott, A History of American Magazines, 5:230, 319–21; Sarah Smith, “Lessons Learned: Fact-Checking Disasters of the Past,” https://netzwerkrecherche.org/files/nr-werkstatt-16-fact-checking.pdf#page=24.

  139.Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 35; Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (New York: Scribner, 2000), 202–3. And see especially Sarah Cain, “‘We Stand Cor
rected’: New Yorker Fact-Checking and the Business of American Accuracy,” in Writing for the New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical, ed. Fiona Green (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 36–57.

  140.Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Crown, 1998), 78–79; Ernest Gruening, “The Higher Hokum,” The Nation, April 16, 1924, 450; Edward L. Bernays, “Putting Politics on the Market,” The Independent, May 19, 1928, 470–72; Edward L. Bernays, “This Business of Propaganda,” The Independent, September 1, 1928, 198–99.

  141.Edward Bernays, “Propaganda and Impropaganda,” June 1928, Edward L. Bernays Papers, Library of Congress, Container 422: 1919–1934, Folder: Speech and Article File, 1919–1962.

  142.Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), 9.

  143.Quoted in Larson, Summer for the Gods, 32.

  144.Quoted in ibid., 7, 32; Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform, 55; FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, 125–27.

  145.Richard J. Jensen, Clarence Darrow: The Creation of an American Myth (New York: Greenwood, 1992), 3; Farrell, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned, 13; Darrow, The Story of My Life, 244.

  146.Quoted in Farrell, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned, 341.

  147.Farrell, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned, 362; Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), vii–viii.

  148.Darrow, The Story of My Life, 249.

  149.Marquis James, “Dayton, Tennessee,” The New Yorker [hereafter TNY], July 4, 1926. Mencken is quoted in FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, 135.

  150.For the trial, see Jeffrey P. Moran, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

  151.Kazin, A Godly Hero, 287–95; John Nimick, “Great Commoner Bryan Dies in Sleep,” UPI, July 27, 1925.

  152.Nimick, “Great Commoner Bryan Dies in Sleep”; H. L. Mencken, Editorial, American Mercury, October 1925, 158–60. Mencken is quoted in Kazin, A Godly Hero, 298.

  153.Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1941), 493.