My favorite book of 2018: These Truths by Jill Lepore
My favorite book of
2018 is Jill Lepore's new book "These Truths: A History of the United
States." At 960 pages, the book is so good it feels too short.
The
most haunting section of the book is on pages 284-5 about the arrival of
Charles Darwin's book "The Origin of Species" in America. Darwin’s
book was published in 1859; just two years after the Dred Scott v. Sandford
Supreme Court Case said people of African descent
could never be American citizens.
Part of the reasoning in that decision was the belief that races
were fundamentally different and, worse still, that all Black people were inferior,
the descendants of the Ham, the bad son of Noah.
Henry David Thoreau
filled six notebooks as he read The Origin of Species. For abolitionists like
Thoreau, Darwin's book was proof that all people really are equal. And all
genetic evidence since the discovery of the structure of the genome a century
later in 1953 says the same.
Races of Homo sapiens
differ very little from each other. More importantly, the definition of a
species is the ability to produce fertile offspring. Every race of Homo sapiens
on earth can have children with every other race. These children can have more
children. We are all one species.
It
goes without saying that the South rejected Darwin. Slave owners believed
themselves superior to Blacks, and all other non-white races. In defeat, the
spread Jim Crow laws across the South to disenfranchise Blacks.
Today,
Charles Darwin remains the leading villain of anti-science Evangelicals and other
fundamentalists. The Creation Museum in Kentucky links Darwin to every social
problem in the last 150 years. But the truth is, Evolution, no matter how it is
misunderstood and misappropriated, says we are all one species.
The
Creation Museum and other Evangelical history blames Darwin for inspiring
Nazis. The irony is that Nazis, like
Creationists, twist science to their own needs. But as to inspiration, Hitler
was truly inspired by the Jim Crow South. Hitler did not originally plan
extermination. The American South gave Hitler a blueprint for a society with
separated races: a master race and inferior races.
Lepore
also makes clear that keeping slavery was the cause of the Civil War. She
tracks the increase in the price of slaves in the decade before the Civil War
and shows that Louisiana and other slaves states wanted to re-open the slave
trade to satisfy growing demand for slaves. Following the money shows that
slavery was the center of the secessionist states leaving the union. States Rights
was a lie told later.
Lepore
also tells the story of Quaker dissenter Benjamin Lay. He was a minister during
“The First Great Awakening” a religious revival in the 1730s. While the
revivals roared through country, Lay preached against those who had faith
experience, but kept the slaves they owned. Lay said all who kept slaves were
Apostates, they were wasting their time proclaiming religious conversion. The
Abolitionist movement began long before the country was founded. Preachers like
Benjamin Lay led the fight against slavery that ended slavery in the North. In
the South, slave owners found preachers to twist the Bible into a pro-slavery
shape just for them.
The
book covers all of American history from 1492 to 2017. It says very little
about wars, but looks deeply at the history of women, minorities, religion and
the social movements of the last 500 years. I am sure I will read it again.
