The Story of America

The Story of America: Essays on Origins
Jill Lepore (2012, Princeton University Press)

    “To say that the United States is a story is not to say that it is fiction; it is, instead, to suggest that it follows certain narrative conventions. All nations are places, but they are also acts of imagination.” In The Story of America, Jill Lepore’s essays on American history engage deeply with American literature as well, because it’s through the written and printed word that America has imagined itself into being. Lepore ranges widely over the documents that made America, from John Smith’s memoirs and the Constitution, to the massive flood of dime novels that shaped the mythology of the American West, to the strange life of the real Charlie Chan.

    Not everything in those documents is true, but history has been carrying on arguments about that for a long time, and it’s a lively conversation. Lepore’s first essay, on John Smith of Jamestown, introduces the problem of how much we can believe his words. “That Captain John Smith, even before he died, was widely believed to be a liar is of more than passing interest, especially since he was also, America’s first historian.”

    Nineteenth century Virginians made Smith a romantic hero, down to giving him an Indian bride; Henry Adams, a New Englander, demonstrated the unreliability of the Pocahontas story in an 1867 essay. Adams was almost certainly prevaricating, himself, when he claimed a disinterested truth-seeking motive: his work supported the story that the New England settlements should have pride of place over Jamestown in the American origin story.

    Thomas Paine wrote some of the most consequential words of the eighteenth century. His Common Sense was published anonymously in the winter of 1776, a forty-six page essay that made the Declaration of Independence seem not just necessary but inevitable. Not only did Paine turn the tide of opinion, he gave his earnings to supply Washington’s army, and fought for the American cause. None of this was inevitable at all, though: Paine had only been in America a year or so; and he was so ill on the trip over that he might have been left for dead, but for a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin that was found in his pocket.

    However invaluable, his note on behalf of Tom Paine was just one of Ben Franklin’s contributions to American history. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution, to say nothing of his earlier scientific and technical accomplishments. His most influential work, though, may have been an essay called The Way to Wealth, stitched together from Poor Richard’s Almanack, which he’d published annually (and very profitably) for twenty-five years. Lepore argues persuasively that the work was taken much too literally and seriously after Franklin’s death, with all that ‘early to bed, and early to rise’ eyewash; Poor Richard was a spoof generated by Franklin’s endless facility for speaking in epigrams, and imitating voices. John Adams, a cranky and humorless man, deplored his humor as ‘infantine simplicity.’

    It’s really a pity that all Franklin’s scientific, diplomatic, and revolutionary achievements should be reduced to warmed-over adages. But oh, the man could write. At the arguments over the ratification of the Constitution, he was over eighty, and had to hand his speech to another delegate to read aloud. Here’s how he talks about having to act when we cannot be sure we are not making a mistake: “‘Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error.’ The only difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England, he said, is that the former is infallible while the latter is never in the wrong.” Delicious.

    It’s commonly forgotten, I think, how little the Founding Fathers thought of democracy. Thomas Paine’s admiration for the French Revolution made him persona non grata in America, even before he wrote a book celebrating an Enlightenment view that religion was unnecessary, indeed, pernicious. At the time of the Revolution, many of the Founding Fathers considered democracy “the government of the worst, the tyranny of the idle, the ignorant, and the ill informed.” As more and more Americans became literate, the tools of government came into more and more hands.

    The rise of literacy was first shaped by the Bible and Noah Webster’s spelling book; newspapers and pamphlets carried political arguments from town to town. Literature, as such, was not far behind. Charles Dickens was immensely popular in America, not least because he was considered a “democratic writer.” In 1842, he came to America to meet his democratic readers, thinking it would be a feast of mutual love; but, for several reasons, it wasn’t. He took what his hosts regarded as an unseemly interest in prisons, asylums, and factories. He was highly resentful that the proceeds of his work went mainly to pirate/publishers, due to the weakness of copyright laws. And, “everywhere Dickens went, crowds crushed him, as much in the fame of fame as in the fame of accomplishment.”

    He met Charles Sumner, the future abolitionist senator, and his bosom friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Boston; they took a ten mile walk. He met Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore, and promised to help him find a British publisher. After five and a half months, he headed home. “He brought on board the George Washington a spaniel named Timber Doodle; a wife, homesick; and his great expectations for America, dashed. The republic he had admired was a sham: its newspapers vicious, its politics brutal, its people humorless.”

    Dickens’ least successful book is probably his American Notes, written soon after his return, because it was so far from the cheerful humor his fans were used to; Martin Chuzzlewit dresses some of the same disappointment in America in a more familiar fictional dress, but its American scenes are still pretty biting. Dickens didn’t follow through on finding Poe an English publisher, but the raven in Barnaby Rudge inspired “The Raven,” a couple of years later. Small world!

    If, for some reason, you are home-schooling someone in American history, start right here. If you’re looking for a book that will lead you on to other books, here’s a beauty. And it’s wise: “The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak. Also, what people will tell you about the past is very often malarkey.” Lepore’s demonstration of how to deal with that reality is heartening and deeply rewarding.




Any Good Books, Revised
July 2, 2020