Historic Decisions

  To celebrate the Bicentennial back in 1976 some theater folks thought it would be a good idea to produce a musical history of the presidency and call it 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They had Leonard Bernstein for the music and Alan Jay Lerner for book and lyrics. Ken Howard would play all the presidents, and Patricia Routledge all the first ladies. And, while they were at it, they would show us the downstairs staff, played by Gilbert Price and Emily Yancy. Great idea, great team, great cast.

 What could possibly go wrong?

 The finale, to begin with.  Chronologically it would have to end with Jerry Ford, a nice guy but the only president who was never nationally elected. He had replaced Nixon who fled articles of impeachment. Nixon followed Johnson, who would end the show waist deep in the Big Muddy. And so on. A decision had to be made: History would end with Teddy Roosevelt.

 When you undertake Big History, you must make big decisions about what to put in and what to leave out. And these days put-ins have to include people George Bancroft and Samuel Eliot Morison left out. Jill Lepore, in These Truths, gives Jane Franklin almost as much attention as her brother Ben, and notes that Frederick Douglass was the most photographed man in pre-Civil War America.

 Lepore  tells you things you may not have known, like what happened to the bricks from the wall that named Wall Street. And that Samuel F.B. Morse developed his code originally to give the government a secret way of communicating when the Catholics tried to take over his country. She weaves such goodies seamlessly into the history of the country from the first white settlers and black slaves to the Trump election.

 The temptation in writing Big History is to hit the Revolution/Constitution with great exuberance, race through the boring parts (except Andrew Jackson) to get to the Civil War, and then race on to McKinley, Teddy and San Juan Hill. These Truths gives all the highlights their due without dwelling on the parts we already know and by filling in the shadows of the parts we don’t know. Even after reading U.S. Grant’s disgust  about the Mexican War (a boring part in most Big History) in his Autobiography, I was not prepared to see how divisive it was. John Tyler’s entire Cabinet quit over his compulsion to annex Texas and other parts of Mexico. Nobody lost a Cabinet over Vietnam.

 I want to get in a plug for These Truths before June, when people will be picking their summer reading. I am only a little more than halfway through, but my enthusiasm is boundless.  I admit it is a commitment – 789 pages of text, plus footnotes for a total of 932 plus 20 in Roman numerals. It’s hard on arthritic thumbs. It is a worthwhile commitment, though.

 I have been a huge fan of Lepore (author, Harvard historian, New Yorker writer) since her New York Burning in 2005. In telling the story of a 1741 fire that destroyed colonial New York, Lepore seemed to know personally the people she was writing about and to have a nodding acquaintance with everybody else in New York. “How did she do that?” I thought.

 She wrapped her arms around American history (her publisher's suggestion), and it turns out she knows everybody. She did it again. And she writes so smoothly you barely realize you’re on a trek, not a run to the mailbox.

  (The makers of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue should have quit when they realized their 200-year history had to last in less than 120 years. Itself, the musical seemed longer. It opened for previews in Washington, easily passed the four-hour mark and kept going. By the time it got to Philadelphia, where I saw it, it still ran way past bedtime and had more longueurs than the Congressional Record. It opened and closed in New York in a week.)