The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

by Kermit Roosevelt III

Overview

Our idea of the Founders' America and its values is not true. We are not the heirs of the Founders, but we can be the heirs of Reconstruction and its vision for equality.

There’s a common story we tell about America: that our fundamental values as a country were stated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, and made law in the Constitution. But, with the country increasingly divided, this story isn’t working for us anymore—what’s more, it’s not even true. As Kermit Roosevelt argues in this eye-opening reinterpretation of the American story, our fundamental values, particularly equality, are not part of the vision of the Founders. Instead, they were stated in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and were the hope of Reconstruction, when it was possible to envision the emergence of the nation committed to liberty and equality.
 
We face a dilemma these days. We want to be honest about our history and the racism and oppression that Americans have both inflicted and endured. But we want to be proud of our country, too. In The Nation That Never Was, Roosevelt shows how we can do both those things by realizing we’re not the country we thought we were. Reconstruction, Roosevelt argues, was not a fulfillment of the ideals of the Founding but rather a repudiation: we modern Americans are not the heirs of the Founders but of the people who overthrew and destroyed that political order. This alternate understanding of American identity opens the door to a new understanding of ourselves and our story, and ultimately to a better America.
 
America today is not the Founders’ America, but it can be Lincoln’s America. Roosevelt offers a powerful and inspirational rethinking of our country’s history and uncovers a shared past that we can be proud to claim and use as a foundation to work toward a country that fully embodies equality for all.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226817613
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	06/24/2022
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	189,019
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Kermit Roosevelt III is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. A former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice David Souter, he is the author of The Myth of Judicial Activism, as well as two novels, Allegiance and In the Shadow of the Law.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction
1 Stories of America
2 Questioning the Standard Story: Dissenters
3 The Exclusive Declaration
4 The Ambiguous Revolution
5 The Geostrategic Constitution
6 The Story of Continuity
7 The March of the Declaration
8 Why We Tell the Standard Story
9 Why We Shouldn’t Tell the Standard Story
10 Magic Tricks and Revolutions
11 Why, How, and Who We Are
12 Redemption Songs: Inclusive Equality and Exclusive Individualism in Modern America
13 The Better Story
Bibliographical Essay
Acknowledgments
Notes

Editorial Reviews

01/31/2022

Misunderstandings about the language and intent of America’s founding documents are the cause of today’s political dysfunctions, according to this impassioned revisionist history. Constitutional law scholar Roosevelt (The Myth of Judicial Activism) maintains that the values taken for granted by most Americans were not actually encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence, because the statement “All men are created equal” was not intended to mean that all people have equal rights. Delving into the precise language of the Declaration, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, and other landmark texts, Roosevelt documents the founding fathers’ problematic views on race and slavery and makes the strong case that Americans today are more properly the heirs of the people who “rejected the Founders’ Constitution”: President Lincoln and other proponents of Reconstruction, “which for all its failures was born from the belief that we fight not only for ourselves, that we should lift up even those we did not push down, and that the future can be better than the past.” Astute textual analysis, careful historical research, and a deep commitment to social justice make this an inspiring reexamination of America’s past. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Kermit Roosevelt III illuminates tumultuous today by examining the contentious beginning. With The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, he thoughtfully explains our growing confusion as to what the creation meant and means.

Guardian

"In this brilliant book, Roosevelt asks us to trade in our standard story of America, based on founding myths about the Declaration of Independence, for a different, more complicated, and yet more hopeful story of Reconstruction. Like the Reconstruction framers, we too can build on the wreckage of the past to achieve justice not only for ourselves but for everyone, and help create the America that is to come."

 

author of The Cycles of Constitutional Time Jack M. Balkin

The problem, argues Roosevelt, is that tying our modern egalitarian commitments to the Declaration and the founding is to say, in no uncertain terms, that our values can survive, even thrive, in a world of profound inequality and injustice.

The New York Times

★ 2022-01-25
A searching history of the legal and ideological basis of American identity.

Americans love to tell comforting stories about our foundational documents, writes Roosevelt, a Penn law professor and great-great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, purportedly enshrines the notion that all men are created equal; of course, that’s not true. Although Thomas Jefferson included a clause condemning slavery—though owning enslaved people himself—the Declaration means all White men are created equal. “Segregation and denying Blacks the vote are perfectly consistent with the Declaration of Independence,” writes the author. The nub of the Declaration, he adds, is that when supposedly free people are oppressed, it is incumbent upon them to rebel. With the arrival of the Civil War, the South was able to invoke that notion as a cause for separation. The result was not just a second revolution, but also a second Constitution, one that in important ways undid the slavery-supporting first Constitution. “We tell ourselves a story that links us to a past political regime—Founding America, the America of the Declaration of Independence and the Founders’ Constitution—to which we are not the heirs,” writes Roosevelt, provocatively. “We are more properly the heirs of the people who destroyed that regime” and who moreover “defeated it by force of arms.” But this second Constitution is contingent and incomplete, allowing for neo-Confederate revivals (Reagan, Trump) thanks to relics such as the Electoral College, “a legacy of slavery, which seems increasingly likely to stop a majority of Americans from electing the candidate of their choice.” Roosevelt proposes that we do away with that institution and attempt a national enterprise to atone for our original sin through targeted investment in Black and other marginalized communities, which “offers the possibility of a real transformation.” His argument is sometimes repetitive but compelling and well worth consideration.

A novel way of reading our founding documents and revising them as both law- and nation-building myths.

Kirkus Reviews

Roosevelt has written a truly extraordinary book. Instead of a sometimes fatuous ‘audacity of hope,’ he offers something much tougher to read and to come to terms with: the audacity of a fearless confrontation with the American past (and its possible future). He persuasively argues that we must liberate ourselves from our sentimentalized attachment to ‘the Founders’ and even to the Declaration of Independence, which he audaciously reinterprets. We should instead define our national identity around the promises (and challenges) of Reconstruction and the aspiration, yet unachieved, for a genuine regime change to replace the ‘Slaveholders’ republic’  founded on white supremacy that was the aftermath of secession from the British Empire and the drafting of the 1787 Constitution.  This book will undoubtedly be controversial. It deserves intense discussion, for if Roosevelt is right, nothing less than the future of the United States is at stake.

Sanford Levinson

"Roosevelt argues that the conventional story of the United States, which credits the Founders for inaugurating the American project, is false. Equality, he contends, had no place in their vision. Rather, it was Reconstruction, which followed the Civil War and pursued the ideals of liberty and equality, that forged the nation Americans today inherit."

Yale Law Report

"Roosevelt. . . challenges the prevailing narrative of the founding of the American regime."

Choice

In The Nation That Never Was, Roosevelt argues that the Fourteenth Amendment is at the heart of our contemporary constitutional identity, and he is right to stress the revolutionary nature of the Amendment and its divergence—not convergence—from the political theory of the Declaration. He understands that the history we need to know to move forward as a country is that of secession, Reconstruction, and the post-Reconstruction era.”
 

Jane Dailey