The History Wars and America at 250, with the Historian Jill Lepore

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2:14Jill Lepore:Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Guess what? The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is nearly upon us. And to think about this occasion and what it means, I've asked Jill Lepore to join us. Jill's been a staff writer at The New Yorker for many years. And just this month, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book, We the People, A History of the U.S. Constitution. Jill Lepore is a professor of history and law at Harvard University, and she's our host for today's program. Way back in the 1930s, in the dark days of the Great Depression, with democracy on the rocks, the U.S.

2:58government hired more than 6 ,000 out-of-work writers for something called the Federal Writers Project. They brought on all kinds of writers, from newspaper reporters to playwrights, anybody who used to make some kind of a living by writing and couldn't anymore. Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Zor Neal Hurston, John Cheever, Richard Wright, they all got involved. Studs Terkel, too. He got his start at the Federal Writers Project. The government sent those writers out all over the country to talk to people, to listen to people. to chronicle American life. The project's folklore editor, Benjamin Botkin, said he wanted to turn the streets, the stockyards, and the hiring halls into literature.

3:46The idea that documenting ordinary lives was important was part of how Americans in the 1930s saved democracy at home. So this year, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, I got really interested in what a project like that might find out today. We're going to hear that later. But I've also been really curious about what Americans thought about the state of the country 50 years ago, the bicentennial. Revolution, that's what it means. Well, it's just a celebration of 200 years. Lots of work. I came across this film deep in the National Archives. It's called The Birthday Party.

4:29It was commissioned by the National Park Service, which hired a documentary filmmaker named Joe Giovi. to make a little film Vox Pop style, Man on the Street, Federal Writers Project style. Reporters went all over the country to ask Americans what the nation's 200th birthday meant to them. It's a good thing. It's a big celebration. It's like a great big birthday. I'm glad it's happening. I'm really excited about it. I don't see a great orgy of celebration. Right now we don't have a great deal to celebrate. I feel that it might leave a lot of people out. I'm just thankful to be here, be a part of the centennial.

5:09This film somehow got lost. I don't know if anyone ever even watched it, but I've watched it like 50 times. I love this stuff. I would eat this stuff for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's a message in a bottle. There are middle-aged men wearing pork pie hats, smoking pipes, women with long straight hair parted in the middle, young guys with really, really long hair and beards or afros. There are bell bottoms and beads. And the thing is, America at 250 seems now, to a lot of people, to me anyway, it seems like a mess. In a piece I wrote for the magazine this winter, I called the 250th a goat rodeo, and I stand by that.

5:52But the bicentennial had kind of the same vibe. A lot of the people you can hear in this birthday party film, and not just the countercultural types? They just weren't too head up about America at 200. For me, it doesn't have any real significant meaning. I mean, what's the difference between 199 years or 201 years? In many ways, the bicentennial is just being fabricated. At the time of the bicentennial, we still have 8 % unemployment. I can't see any reason to go around patting ourselves on the back for having just survived two centuries. We have a long way to go, baby, as Billie Jean King might have paraphrased it.

6:35Jill Lepore:So what do you hear there? I hear a couple of things. One is a critique that was made about the bicentennial, which is that it had become commercialized. And I think also a deep sense of kind of uncertainty guarantee about how you're supposed to act in a moment like that. Beverly Gage is a professor of history at Yale. In researching her new book, This Land is Your Land, Gage went out on the road a few years ago, trying to figure out how this country tells the story of its own past. I really wanted to talk to her about this bicentennial film. So is, like any birthday or big marker, is it just a sort of fake occasion?

7:21Jill Lepore:And also, how do you relate to a country that I actually think it's kind of remarkable that it lasted 200 and then 250 years? So I would not agree with the commenter who was saying, what's the big deal? But nonetheless, how to relate to and maybe even celebrate a country about which you feel profoundly ambivalent? The bicentennial, I think it could be a very profitable thing for a business here in Washington. Well, it's a bad time, I think, to have it. So I really don't know what we have to gain by it. Well, after Watergate, the morale of the country is low. Maybe if we could inject some national spirit back into the country, it would do a lot of good.

8:09Jill Lepore:I loved the comment that the bicentennial was coming at a really inconvenient time. It's a bad time. We ought to reschedule, which I think a lot of people feel about 2026, too. I think that woman was basically my aunt, you know? You know, the other thing that strikes me is that there are not more convenient moments in history. And one of the things that you can see reflected in that clip is how persistent the anxiety that the country is in decline, that it's flying apart, that you are living at the worst moment. In fact, one of the opening images of the book is this famous, you can tell me, apocryphal or true moment with Ben Franklin after the Constitutional Convention when he says, hey, you know, that sun on the back of George Washington's chair is the sun rising or setting on the republic that we've created.

9:05Jill Lepore:So at the very moment that the Constitution has been created, there's this anxiety, are we making progress or are we already in decline? And so you can certainly hear that in the 70s. Now, I think there are particular things about our moment that make those concerns acute in a different way, but they are almost constant in the story of this country. There are also some bits in this film of a kind of anguished account of American progress. There's another clip, I think, from this lady that I think of as my aunt with the blue glasses. And another thing we have, the different nationality problems, the different color problems.

9:48However, we have begun to accept some of it, I think. There's a lot of divisions here in the United States. Used to be called the melting pot. I don't know what's happening here. You know, maybe the compounds are beginning to separate again, and the people in the United States are diverging again. So, like, if they're going to do anything, rather than celebrating, I think it's the time to start implementing all the things they have on paper, getting it out into the streets. If some people that are in power right now would sort of reconstruct quickly what took place in 1776 and what the colonies wanted, these are what the minorities sometimes want.

10:28Is that optimism? Do you hear optimism there?

10:32Jill Lepore:I do to some degree. But what I see there is something that I wonder how much we have of anymore, which is a willingness to think about a moment like the Bicentennial as an opportunity. A whole range of different movements, but especially movements of social change, social progress, used to seize upon the symbols, the stories of the founding of American national identity. The early women's rights advocates, the abolitionists were so engaged with these questions about the meaning of the Declaration, the meaning of the Constitution, what it is that the country ought to be, could be, has been. Is it not the case that the Tea Party movement or the New Kings movement are engaged in that kind of work?

11:27Jill Lepore:Right. I think that those are great examples and great counterexamples. So I want to turn to one last clip from the Bicentennial film, this young, long-haired guy in a jean jacket and big, mirrored shades. I don't know. Maybe progress is regress. I think we've done already enough, like, enough buildings and enough covering the earth with concrete and destroyed enough in nature already that maybe progress is regress. I don't know. He really captures a moment in history, the sensibility of the mid-70s. Yeah, how so? You can just see the force of all of these movements and incredible cultural changes that had happened over a relatively short period of time, right?

12:16Jill Lepore:He has a counterculture vibe. He has an environmentalist vibe. He's questioning all the big narratives. You can tell from the pacing of his voice that he may also be shaped by certain things that he has himself imbibed in recent years. I don't want to cast dispersions or suggest it. So as a person who has been exploring the implications of this moment, the 250th anniversary of the country, now for a few years on the road, in classrooms, what is your July 4th plan? New Haven does actually incredible fireworks every 4th of July. Also, maybe not for the 4th itself, but I want to go to D.C. because there's going to be this wild thing called the Great American State Fair going on that the administration is putting on on the mall.

13:14Jill Lepore:And I'm actually quite curious to see what that's going to look like. I'm sure I won't love all of the history on display there. But I do like that something is happening in this moment. So the energy behind it isn't bad, even though I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to engage the execution. Hey, man, progress is regress, you know? That's the way to engage.

13:43Beverly Gage is a professor of history at Yale University. Her books include G-Man, a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, and This Land is Your Land. I'd like to see the Bicentennial deal with the kind of future I think we're going to have, and I think it's going to be a sort of troubled future. We're going to talk about that future in a moment. I'm Jill Lepore, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around.

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17:25This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm Jill Lepore. I'm a staff writer for the magazine, and I wrote an essay about the Declaration of Independence for the New Yorker's special issue called America at 250. And that's our theme for today's program also, America at 250. The MAGA movement has put a lot of attention on America's past. So is the Black Lives Matter movement. It's a big and often pretty heated argument, and most historians aren't really in that argument. Most of us are just watching. But that argument raises vital questions about the role historians play in public life. American history, like any history, is full of beauty and also tragedy.

18:09Have historians got the mix right? I wanted to talk about this war over America's past with Jelani Cobb, who, like me, is both a historian and a journalist. And we're also pretty close in age. We were both kids during the bicentennial. One of the things that stands out to me was that Richard Pryor released an album that year, which we totally cannot even say the name of, but it is Bicentennial, insert racial epithet here, where he goes in on kind of the contradictions of the founding and race and slavery and, you know, kind of prime targets, exemplifying particular contradictions in the founding of the country.

18:58I listened to this Gil Scott Heron piece called Bicentennial Blues. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, like it's some good rhymes about the state of our country. The blues is grown, but not the home. The blues is grown, but the country has not. The blues remembers everything the country forgot. It's a bicentennial year. And the blues is celebrating a birthday. And it's a bicentennial blues. It seems to me that so much about this moment this year goes right to the core of the questions that have animated so much of your work, both as a journalist and as a historian. And yet it's also just kind of just such a messy moment.

19:43But at the same time, it seems like this is a moment where we're least likely to embrace particular kinds of messiness. And what I mean by that is, you know, we saw earlier this year the federal government, you know, attempt to remove the plaques from the president's house in Philadelphia that talked about the history of slavery in the early republic and people who were enslaved at that site. We've had this kind of contentious discussion about American greatness, you know, anchored in the make America great again rhetoric that we've seen from Donald Trump. But the problem with that kind of sanitized approach to history, at least in my estimation, is that it prevents you from getting to the things that actually are the basis of a claim for greatness.

20:39in saying, you know, out of this incredibly flawed founding moment, there are people who, across generations and across centuries, engage in the work, often at the cost of their own lives, of trying to push the country in a more democratic direction. And I don't know that we're going to get that particular conversation this year. You know, we've been reading a lot about the kinds of erasures, deletions, suppression, censorship that's going on all over the country, but largely through institutions that are under the influence or control of the national government, like the National Park Service.

21:19There's a really kind of amazing organization called Save Our Signs that's been going around taking photos of signs and making a big archive of them online. But how much of an effect will that have? Like, do you think, what's the tale of those changes? I think that people are right to be concerned You know, the president also said that he thought that the Smithsonian African American Museum focused too much on how terrible slavery was, which is an astounding kind of thing to say, especially if you recognize that the impetus for the American Revolution are offenses that are categorically less than kidnapping, raping, and enslaving, bondage of people.

22:09And so it's an astounding thing for someone to say. And at the same time, I feel like you can't unring a bell that generations of historians have done so much work to increase the public consciousness, to increase the availability of access to this kind of information, that ultimately it would be very difficult to sanitize those kinds of things now. There's an astounding array of books, documentaries, private museums. You can't unring the bell, not even the Liberty Bell. Not even the Liberty Bell. I think the short film that the Trump administration's America 250 Commission had projected onto the Washington Monument over the winter, which is a story of American history, is a good proxy for the version of American history that the federally funded celebration intends to proffer.

23:10And as a historian, I find it somewhat bewildering. That film was really interesting. It was strange. And demoralizing in a particular way, but also strange. And it was almost like historical trolling because they gerrymandered the founding to include Christopher Columbus. And I think that was just an attempt to critique people on the left who have associated Columbus's arrival in the Western Hemisphere with the subsequent tides of warfare and genocide and all the other kinds of things that happened, you know, in the wake of 1492. And him being kind of removed and also the idea that you can discover a place where there are already people living.

24:02There is no land acknowledgement in this film. Well, there is a land acknowledgement. It's the acknowledgement that Columbus landed. Yeah, there's a lot of providentialism in it. And in a way, it seemed to me a little bit like, you know, George Bancroft, the 19th century historian, right? He has this providentialist account of the history of the United States that's written in the 1830s. But it's really the manifesto for manifest destiny. Sure. Like, we're fated to expand across the continent, and that was his agenda, and this is our God-given right. But then it has kind of tacked onto it, like a Marc Andreessenism or like a Muskism.

24:40It's like a technology boosting. Like, that's also like, we are fated by our providential God to go to Mars. Like, that's kind of what— Right, yeah, yeah. I mean, presidents and presidential administrations have had their preferred versions of history for a long time. but they did tend to leave it in the hands of historians where this seems very much like a kind of made-to-order political speech. So who does get to tell the story then this year? I mean, I was thinking, you know, you and I have this weird thing in common which is that we're both trained as academic scholars of history and we also work as journalists.

25:19You're at the pinnacle of that profession as dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. So I'm wondering if you think about this moment differently in your capacity as a historian. The historian part of me is very interested in how this fits into other kind of commemorative moments. And, you know, it occurred to me that it was like, oh, OK, this is the only president who's been impeached twice. He's a wildly polarizing figure. But then I look back to 1976, and those July 4th celebrations were presided over by Gerald Ford, who was not elected president or vice president and had controversially pardoned Richard Nixon.

26:04And so there was that. In 1876, Ulysses S. Grant tacks on his comments about the nation's centennial to a State of the Union address. He went on and on about the kind of industrial progress and the amount of railroads. And he was like, oh, also the bondsmen are now free. But he goes on, he's really into like what we would have called GNP, you know, in our time. But the country is still bleeding from the wounds of the Civil War. So I think that none of these moments are really kind of picture perfect in that way. They just emerge, and then we kind of look at them through the lens of what's going on around us right now.

26:50But you know what's so interesting about what you say about the centennial is I think of that celebration as really forward-looking. It really was a celebration of American ingenuity and technical and industrial growth. and it was very forward-looking, almost a kind of like, what is the century of the future going to be? And I think the bicentennial was kind of mixed in that regard. People didn't really want to look back except at the costumes, but there was a sense, you know, Ford had given that speech when he took the oath of office. Our long national nightmares come to an end, right? Watergate, Pentagon Papers, Vietnam, these things are behind us.