Jill Lepore on Traveling through Time
Jill Lepore — Harvard historian, New Yorker staff writer, and author of These Truths — joins Tyler Cowen for Ep. 24 to range across constitutional originalism, time travel as intellectual metaphor, the hidden subversiveness of Stuart Little, and what it means to be a working-class outsider inside elite institutions.
Key ideas
- The accordion metaphor for historical reasoning. The instinct to collapse past and present — ‘Trump is just like Andrew Jackson’ — is, Lepore argues, like squeezing an accordion until then and now look identical. The more productive move is to pull the accordion wide open: study the distance between two moments, what happened in between, and only then ask what transformation tells us about the present.
- The right to privacy was built to hide women. The 1890 Brandeis-Warren article that anchors US constitutional privacy doctrine was motivated by men’s discomfort with photography making women and domestic life visible. Lepore argues this tainted foundation means reproductive rights were on shaky ground when they were grounded in privacy rather than in equal protection or liberty.
- Photography as America’s democratic art form — and its limits. Frederick Douglass, the most photographed man of the 19th century, argued that portrait photography was the most democratic art because the poorest servant could afford a likeness. Lepore uses his essays to frame the question of whether Instagram and Snapchat are the same democratising force — and finds that her students give a dark answer.
- Stuart Little is satire about sex education and the juvenilisation of culture. E. B. White wrote the book as a continuation of his parody of children’s facts-of-life literature. The banning campaign, led by New York Public Library’s first children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore, was triggered by the mouse being born (not adopted) from a woman’s body. Lepore tracked down the suppressed letter at UCLA after years of searching.
- Direct democracy and representative democracy are in deep tension. Lepore diagnoses a structural mismatch: Americans have built technologies of instant self-expression while maintaining a representative system premised on the idea that elected officials exercise judgement, not just tabulate constituent preferences. The result is that both sides accuse the other of breaking a system neither fully understands.
Content
Playing the accordion of time
Lepore’s central claim about how historians should — and mostly do not — reason about the past. The collapsing instinct (‘This is just like 1932’) she calls intellectually indefensible: it makes the distance disappear, and the distance is precisely where the explanation lives. She illustrates it with Thurgood Marshall’s 1987 response to the Constitution’s bicentennial. Where the Reagan Justice Department under Edwin Meese was celebrating the founding document, Marshall refused: he would celebrate the 200 years of struggle since, the amendment and litigation that tried to redeem a flawed original. That is what stretching the accordion open looks like. The same logic applies, she argues, to constitutional interpretation: originalism — asking ‘What would James Madison think?’ — collapses 230 years of transformation and pretends they do not exist.
She extends the point to historical analogy in political commentary. The desire for an anchor (‘Bannon is very 1840s’) is understandable but usually misleading; what a visual resemblance or a structural parallel actually reveals is how different things are, not how similar, once you are forced to specify what exactly links them.
Privacy, visibility, and women in public life
Brandeis and Warren’s 1890 Harvard Law Review article ‘The Right to Privacy’ — later resurrected to anchor the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision on reproductive rights — was animated, Lepore argues, by a specific and revealing anxiety: photography and new media were making women visible in public. Warren’s concern was his wife being photographed at her father’s funeral. The constitutional doctrine that later became the basis for abortion rights was, at root, a tool for keeping women out of view.
Lepore carries this forward to the early cinema and the 1920s controversy over the ‘new woman’: the flapper’s visibility triggered the campaign that eventually dismantled the Comstock laws (the 1873 federal law that defined pornography broadly enough to include contraception and any discussion of homosexuality). Social media then reverses the trend: the cost of women speaking in public has risen, not fallen, because the speed and venom of the response has no historical precedent. The Rutgers Center for American Women in Politics, she notes, tracks the chilling effect on women considering political candidacy.
The Tea Party, popular constitutionalism, and liberal abdication
Lepore, who wrote a book about the Tea Party movement, offers a measured account of what it revealed about both sides. Tea Party rallies sold The Constitution Made Easy and ran study groups — what scholars call ‘popular constitutionalism,’ the claim that the people, not legal experts, should interpret the founding document. Lepore found this exciting even where she disagreed: it exposed how completely liberals had vacated constitutional language over the preceding decades. The rights campaigns of the mid-20th century — Brown v. Board through same-sex marriage — used constitutional argument extensively, but by 2017 liberals had largely stopped, ceding the rhetorical ground. The result: a structurally unequal fight where conservatives appeared to own the text.
She is careful about what ‘right’ means. The Court’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act under the Commerce Clause does not have the same moral clarity, looking back, as Dred Scott (1857) or Lochner (1905). Whether Tea Party constitutional objections were correct is therefore genuinely uncertain — which is different from the originalism debate, where Lepore thinks the collapse of historical distance makes the method itself suspect.
Doctor Who, H. G. Wells, and time as something you can colonise
Time travel literature interests Lepore not as escapism but as social symptom. She traces the genre’s late-19th-century explosion to industrialisation: the sense that the pace of life was accelerating created a fantasy of reversal. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) works out what politics and economics look like without industry. Doctor Who, which began in 1963, she reads as a specifically British inflection: the Doctor is a ‘Time Lord,’ and time travel in the series is a vehicle for Britain resuming the role of the world’s policeman at a moment when it had become merely a member of the UN Security Council. The nostalgic structure is imperial: you could be the policeman of all of history, not just the present. Brexit, she notes, is the political expression of the same fantasy — the desire to ‘just turn back.‘
Stuart Little and the juvenilisation of American culture
Lepore stumbled into the Stuart Little story while reviewing a history of children’s literature. Every book she read mentioned offhandedly that Stuart Little had ‘of course been banned’ — with no footnote and no explanation. She spent years tracking down the suppressed letter that Anne Carroll Moore, the formidable founding librarian of the New York Public Library’s children’s room, sent to E. B. White urging him not to publish. The letter surfaced at UCLA in the papers of Moore’s successor.
The controversy turned on two issues. First, in the original edition Stuart is not adopted but born — from a woman’s body — which Carroll Moore found monstrous for children to imagine. Second, White’s project was explicitly satirical: Stuart Little continues his parody of the facts-of-life genre for children (see his earlier Is Sex Necessary? and his New Yorker parody ‘The Birth of an Adult,’ written in response to a Life magazine photo essay on childbirth). White and his wife Katharine — herself the New Yorker’s fiction editor — were at war with the ‘Golden Age of Children’s Literature’ and its programme of sanitising everything a child might encounter. Carroll Moore represented that project’s most institutional form.
Photography, democracy, and the social media question
Douglass’s 1860s essays on photography — collected under titles like ‘Pictures in Progress’ — argue that portrait photography democratises representation: where only kings and bishops were once painted, the humblest person can now afford a likeness. He was himself the most photographed man of the 19th century, using the camera as an explicit counter to the caricature of enslaved people in runaway-slave advertisements. Lepore uses Douglass to frame the Instagram question for her students: is the smartphone camera the same democratic force? The students, she reports, give a dark answer. She locates the origins of Silicon Valley’s techno-utopianism in 1960s countercultural liberation politics — the idea of the personal computer as ‘Ken Kesey,’ the personal liberator against the IBM mainframe — and treats that genealogy as both illuminating and tragic, given what the research on digital democracy’s actual effects shows.
Working-class origins and the outsider inside
Lepore grew up outside Worcester, Massachusetts, in a household where the Boston Globe was ‘that communist rag’ and Harvard was an embarrassment. She worked secretarial jobs — at Polaroid, Unisys, Harvard Business School — before going to graduate school, and describes the experience of arriving at Tufts as a first-generation student with no money, working three jobs to fund a meal plan while classmates casually went out for nachos. She does not romanticise this background but argues it gives her a real purchase on the Tea Party interviews: the people she spoke to were ‘exactly like my family,’ and the cultural contempt that elite institutions direct at working-class political instincts is something she recognised from inside.
The observation she returns to is that the sorting of Americans into hostile camps — intellectuals vs. the people — was at its worst in the 20th century and serves everyone poorly. She cites the 1930s Left’s romance of the folk, then the 1950s Left’s contempt for mass culture and television, as two sides of the same failure to take ordinary people seriously on their own terms.
Related
- Jill Lepore — guest; Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer
- Tyler Cowen — host