STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The writer Jill Lepore wrote a history of the United States called "These Truths." Now she's gone through the same history again for a book on the Constitution. She focuses on fights to amend or reinterpret our basic law long after it was drafted in 1787.
JILL LEPORE: I just really love the agitation of it all.
INSKEEP: The book "We The People" covers a lot of history. I asked Jill Lepore about one period that feels relevant now.
In the early 1900s, Americans confronted a growing industrial economy, income inequality and mass immigration. They responded with constitutional amendments from women's voting rights to an income tax. And a powerful president, Woodrow Wilson, reinterpreted the document.
LEPORE: Wilson had, in fact, been a constitutional scholar. He advocated what came to be called and is still often called living constitutionalism.
INSKEEP: Among other things, Wilson signed into law the creation of an independent Federal Reserve, setting aside claims that the Constitution did not allow it. That is the very same Fed whose independence President Trump is challenging now. Lepore says Wilson's idea of a living constitution differed from the framers' idea of the Constitution as a machine.
LEPORE: So when they talked about checks and balances, you know, they're picturing weights on strings balancing one another. And Wilson, he wanted to move beyond that notion, and he argued that the Constitution is an organism, a living thing that has to be allowed to grow naturally. And that remains, in many ways, a debate that Americans still have about the very nature of the Constitution.
INSKEEP: Woodrow Wilson, I have noticed, still bothers modern-day conservatives. I want to play a bit of a recent interview with John Yoo, who's a conservative legal scholar, talking about that. Let's listen.
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JOHN YOO: People like Woodrow Wilson, who I think is in many ways the godfather of this idea, thought that there were scientific answers to public policy, that you could get things exactly right, and so that politics were a dirty, messy business. And the last thing you would want, then, if you created a Federal Trade Commission or the Federal Reserve, probably the most powerful of our independent agencies...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
YOO: ...Is to allow a president elected at the head of a party to govern what it does.
INSKEEP: What was it that Wilson and some of his successors, like Franklin Roosevelt, were doing to the government and to society?
LEPORE: Well, I think we just need to maybe pause for a moment to say that the left has also disavowed Wilson...
INSKEEP: True.
LEPORE: ...For his racism. Wilson was a Southerner who segregated the civil service. So Wilson and, of course, later FDR but a number of Republicans in between were all involved in fortifying the federal government to steer the United States through the turn to a modern industrial economy and to try to find ways to adjust the U.S. Constitution to keep pace with what these developments meant for ordinary people. One of the things I found really kind of fun in working on this book was - so you can find all the arguments that a John Yoo is making now - you can find those in the 1920s and 1930s.
INSKEEP: What was the effect on society that it was decided for that time that it was legal and constitutional - upheld by the Supreme Court incidentally - to have independent agencies, technocrats, people trying by their lights to apply the best solutions to various economic problems with at least some insulation from directly elected officials?
LEPORE: Well, you get the buffering of the forces of the market. You get an insulation against the worst excesses of monopoly. You know, by the time we get to the 1930s, democracies all over the world are collapsing. They're kind of going in either direction towards communism or towards fascism - you know, a kind of state-controlled economy. And FDR finds a way, a kind of compromise position to adjust the strictures within the Constitution to both protect the free market and also protect against the worst excesses of a free market.
INSKEEP: In listening to you, I think you're saying that Franklin Roosevelt and some other presidents had an idea to respond to an ever-larger and more powerful and more complicated economy with a more active government that was supposed to engage in the economy but not be under the hands of a dictator, as was happening in other countries around the world. Was that the idea that we're now to some extent challenging?
LEPORE: Yes. I mean, it is - FDR's agenda and his accomplishments are depicted by extremists as extreme for the purpose of demonizing the New Deal. That was the case in the 1930s. It was unsuccessful then. I think it will ultimately be unsuccessful now because the kinds of benefits that accrue to societies as a whole in having an active federal government, the more those provisions are dismantled and withdrawn from ordinary Americans, the more visible they become and their absence becomes more painful.
INSKEEP: What excites you when you go back to this era of people pushing for reform, pushing for changes to the Constitution or to its meaning?
LEPORE: It's just a much bigger, more colorful, wildly interesting canvas of constitutional history that makes me feel quite a bit better about a sense of possibility moving forward. I think to the degree that we kind of narrow our vision and look through a very, very tiny, tiny lens like a little monocle (laughter), we feel kind of trapped in a very polarized and very stuck politics and very kind of stuck era of constitutionalism. But if you widen that out and look at the whole of American history in that broad canvas, with teaming actors with all kinds of loud opinions and silent protests and nonviolent action and everything else and in between, it's a kind of glorious history.
INSKEEP: You also, by taking this wide lens, make me think about unintended consequences. People push for a change, and it turns out that whatever they thought would happen is not what happened.
LEPORE: Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes people have been asking me, your book seems to be just celebrating amendment for its own sake (ph). Well, actually, a lot of amendment ideas are really terrible ideas, and some of them once put in place turn out to not have the effect that was hoped for or they're betrayed or they're defied. I mean, we're looking right now and - we're in a moment right now where the birthright citizenship clause, or the 14th Amendment, the Trump administration is insisting doesn't mean what it says. So, you know, there are very difficult constitutional battles ahead, but there's a lot to be learned from the way those battles were waged in the past.
INSKEEP: Jill Lepore is the author of "We The People: A History Of The U.S. Constitution." Such a pleasure to talk with you again, Jill.
LEPORE: Oh, thanks so much, Steve.
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