Introduction
 
In 2014 Philadelphia cheered as thirteen-year-old Mo’ne Davis, the first girl in Little League World Series history to pitch a winning game, took the Taney Dragons to the semifinals. Her story embodied everything America likes to believe about itself: here was the barrier-shattering underdog, leading an underfunded urban team, proving that for those with enough talent and drive, anything is possible.

And yet . . .

The Taney Dragons took their name from Taney Street, which runs to their home field by the Schuylkill River. Everyone pronounced the team’s name “Tay-nee,” but that isn’t right. Law students learn in their first year that it’s actually “Taw-nee.” They learn that because it’s the name of Roger Brooke Taney, fifth chief justice
of the United States Supreme Court. Taney was the author of the Dred Scott decision, where he had something different to say about Mo’ne Davis and her fellow Black Americans. He said they had no rights that the white man was bound to respect, that they could never be citizens of the United States. Mo’ne Davis took the mound with that man’s name written across her back.

The connection wasn’t well known in 2014, and when it surfaced, some said the success of the Dragons redeemed the name. “It means something else,” a column in Hidden City Philadelphia proclaimed. “Taney is a word that has taken on its own meaning, a word that’s become a symbol of hope.” But not everyone agreed. A group of citizens pushed to change the name of the street. On June 25, 2020, the Taney Youth Baseball Association declared that “the name ‘Taney’ has remained a source of divisiveness” and “we cannot ignore the very real negative feelings” that it provokes. In October, they announced a new name: the Philadelphia Dragons. Was that the right choice? It was not our fault—not the fault of anyone now living—that Taney Street was named for Roger Taney. The name came to Philadelphia in 1858, one year after the Dred Scott decision. But it was our decision what to do about it now. Either keep the name and try to understand it in its best light—as something changed, as something now bearing a positive message—or make a break with the past and start over.

The same decision is playing out across the country, with monuments and statues (often those erected to honor the Confederacy), with buildings and schools. And something very similar plays out with American history more broadly. Repeatedly, Americans have faced the choice between maintaining and rejecting a connection with the past, between putting it in its best light as a way to move forward and burning it all down to start over. Neither answer is necessarily correct; neither will be the right choice in every circumstance. But there’s one scenario that might always be wrong: What if you burned it all down and started over . . . and then pretended
that you hadn’t? What if you insisted on locating your ideals and your identity in an old order that you had already rejected—that, in fact, you had overthrown and destroyed by force? That should seem deeply odd. Yet this is what we do with the most fundamental question of American identity. 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. We are more properly the heirs of the people who destroyed that regime.

Why do we do this? Stories of national identity exist to fulfill a particular set of purposes: to bring people together in the name of shared ideals. The story that tells us we are the heirs of Founding America—what I call the standard story—once seemed like a good way to do this. But it is not, and it never was. When the standard story flourished, it encouraged a complacency that prevented progress toward its stated ideal. It allowed many of us to believe things about ourselves that aren’t true. Once it came under attack, that standard story lost some of its power to unify and became a subject of profound disagreement instead. Less obviously, but more seriously, as we pushed forward a more accurate account, the standard story increasingly undermined itself. Whether people realized it or not, a story that was supposed to promote inclusive equality instead fed exclusive individualism.

By inclusive equality, I mean, generally, this belief: “Our political community is open. Those who are now outsiders are fundamentally similar to us and may become insiders. Political outcomes are legitimate if they are the product of an open and fair democratic process. Government can and should act to promote equality.” By exclusive individualism, I mean more or less the opposite: “Our political community is closed. Outsiders are different and dangerous. Political outcomes are legitimate if they protect the rights and interests of insiders. Government has no business promoting equality and should not redistribute, especially not to outsiders.” The contest between these two visions is shaking the nation today—but understanding how we got to this point will take most of this book to
explain. Most of the book concerns different stories of America. I will criticize the standard story on several grounds and offer different versions of it that highlight its flaws. And I will propose an alternative. The standard story ties us to a problematic past, but we can escape that trap. We can cut the cord that linked Mo’ne Davis and Roger Taney—not by simply renaming a street, but by changing our understanding of who we are and where we come from.
The way we think about American history now—as a continual unfolding and realization of the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence—holds us back. Yet maybe that is not the right way to think about America. Maybe our relationship to the Declaration is different. Maybe our origins are not what we have been taught.