Book: THE AMERICAN BEAST: ESSAYS, 2012-2022
Author: Jill Lepore
Published by: John Murray
Price: Rs 799
At the dedication of the National Archives Building in 1941, the then president, F.D. Roosevelt, emphasised that: “To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women living in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgements in creating their own future.” Jill Lepore quotes these words in The American Beast, a collection of her essays published in The New Yorker between 2012-2022, and adds: “Americans used to believe in those three things. Do they still?”
In her essays, Lepore returns to these concerns. She reflects on contemporary events in American politics, bringing a historian’s insights to bear on current affairs. The volume opens and closes on violence, which plagues American society: the violence of killings in schools, the political violence of January 6, 2021. She tells the history of gun-control laws and the transformation, since the 1970s, of the Second Amendment by the National Rifle Association into an argument about an individual’s right to carry a gun. She wonders about how future historians will refer to the events of January 6. She reads the report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol and finds that it lacks in narrative power, as if the committee had been trapped in Donald Trump’s “very plotlessness”, that it fails, above all, to address the deep (historical) causes of the events. Echoing Roosevelt’s words, she finds that the report lacks a sense of both the past and the present. To do so, she argues, requires taking in the decay of the party system, the advent of political intolerance, the role of social media, the predicament of journalism in America. The report does not reflect either on contemporary crises (mass shootings, Covid, natural calamities and so on) that contribute to the national mood of vulnerability.
Lepore displays a keen attention to words and concepts and to their histories: “innovation” (originally seen as negative); its companion, “disruption” (“[d]isruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It’s not more than that.”); “impeachment” (first used in 1376). Events cannot be understood without a historical perspective: Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is the occasion to tell the history of how women gained the right to vote; the history of the presidential archives matters to the historian as much as to the Nation; even the history of Fox News deserves to be told to understand the journey. She carries this concern for words and the precision of their meanings into her own style, sometimes distanced, sometimes humorous, writing with clarity about complex issues.
These politically engaged essays are an analysis of current events as well as a call to preserve democracy in the spirit of her quotation of James Stewart’s plea in Mr Smith Goes to Washington: “It’s not too late.” They resonate in this election year.
