Jill Lepore Revisits American Myths With an Eye to the Present

August 27, 2023

THE DEADLINE: Essays, by Jill Lepore

In 1636, at the height of the Dutch economic hysteria known as Tulipomania, John Harvard helped found the first college of the American colonies. I like to trot out this fact at parties because of its skewed implication that meanwhile, on this side of the ocean, the 17th century had its head screwed on straight. It’s a good thing I do not have Jill Lepore’s job. A professor of history at John Harvard’s start-up as well as staff writer for The New Yorker, she is the finest practitioner of historical extrapolation working today; there is no one better at excavating the underlying ideologies at the root of our contemporary problems and holding them up to the light.

Her 13th book, “The Deadline,” is both shorter and less focused in scope than her 2020 book of American history, “These Truths.” But with 46 essays on subjects ranging from political theory to disruptive innovation, it’s still a doorstop.

The phrase “historical framework” is insufficient when it comes to Lepore, who also provides the picture and the glass. “The Deadline” is segmented into 10 thematic parcels, containing mostly biographical studies of consequential Americans (or consequence-adjacent, like Jane Franklin or Lela Scopes). Through these figures Lepore covers American consumerism, literary biography, journalism, intellectual property law and other cultural curiosities. A lighter section (in contrast to studies of Guantánamo and Magna Carta) includes delicious portraits of Robert L. Ripley (of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” fame), “Doctor Who” and a 2018 piece on Mattel that feels au courant. Lepore’s wealth of knowledge is rarely applied to a niche subject (most readers are familiar with the Affordable Care Act); her modus operandi is to tackle common conundrums for a few unassuming paragraphs before stepping on the gas with several centuries’ worth of precedent.

Reading Lepore on the Second and 14th Amendments (any amendment, really) is elucidating. But it’s her inclinations toward misfits and old narratives we have taken for granted that make “The Deadline” glow. The literary section includes two transcendent pieces, one on the “Silent Spring” author Rachel Carson and one on Mary Shelley and “Frankenstein,” her “chaos of literary fertility” published the same year Fredrick Douglass was born enslaved. Lepore examines American myths in the spirit of Joan Didion’s “Political Fictions,” touching on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s controversial Supreme Court appointment and her “unprecedented judicial celebrity”; as well as turn-of-the-century American socialism, which “had less to do with Karl Marx and communism than with Walt Whitman and Protestantism.”

All but two of these essays have been previously published in The New Yorker, so there’s a smattering of field journalism throughout. Lepore travels to San Francisco to see the Wayback Machine, the largest archive of almost every web page that exists, whose founder told Lepore that “he once put the entire World Wide Web into a shipping container” measuring “20 feet by eight feet by eight feet,” and it fit. She tours the Cryonics Institute in Michigan. These reports are easier to swallow than Lepore’s expedition to a gun range, which feels like a foregone conclusion: She compares her setting to “a clubhouse” but also “a porn shop.”

It would have been handy to introduce (rather than end) each essay with the year it was first published, in most cases because of their innocence: “The robots are coming. Hide the WD-40,” begins a 2019 study of artificial intelligence. And who knew Herman Melville (“making kindling of correspondence appears to have been something of a Melville family tradition”) would have so much in common with Donald Trump?

But what does Lepore think of America? Lurking in these decidedly liberal “reflections on the relationship between the American past and its fractious, violent present” is a centrist sensibility. America: They just don’t make it like they used to. Her 2016 essay “The War and the Roses” is a masterwork precisely because it is equally excoriating of two different political conventions. In 2018’s “Valley of the Dolls,” she bluntly states that “empowerment feminism is a cynical sham.” Sure. But this line hit different in the context of “The Return of the Pervert,” written in the same year; “sex panics obscure the actual object of a culture’s fears,” Lepore writes of J. Edgar Hoover’s 1937 “War on the Sex Criminal” that set the stage for McCarthyism. “The modern sex panic’s signature characteristic is an inability and unwillingness to distinguish between degrees of misconduct.” True enough. But she ends the piece with a rhetorical question: Was the #MeToo movement, which she sees as a ginned-up proxy for identity politics, “one more chapter to the sorry history of political terror?”

They’ve sent a personal essayist to review an academic essayist’s work, so I can’t help but remark upon the moments when Lepore makes an effort to weave in her personal stories and winds up sounding like a tourist over-pronouncing the word croissant. Traits of loved ones (“She had an opinion on any movie. She had a crush on John Cusack. She loved to run”) add up to something less vivid than her portraits of Albert Camus, Kurt Gödel and even Roger Ailes. Her social and domestic asides read as factual accounts of that which is nonfactual: an inner life. I also read some of her analogies with splayed fingers, starting with the first line: “One summer day, the sun’s rays as spiky as a coronavirus.” She later writes, “All historians are coroners”; but not all are poets.

In Woolfian parlance, Lepore is more comfortable working in granite, and who can blame her? Early in her career, “I learned that it was crucial, if you wanted to get tenure, to hide your children,” and to “never show your colleagues your soft belly.” Decades later, one can still taste the sediment of that self-consciousness at the bottom of each glass. Regardless, the book emerges as a riveting survey of America, a vital reminder that “history isn’t a pledge, it’s an argument.”

Sloane Crosley’s next book, “Grief Is for People,” will be published in February.

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