The Soul of America

by Jon Meacham

  Dignified theatricality is an essential element of power. Whether on stage or on a throne, whether in the Oval Office or in the House of Commons, great leaders are often great performers, able to articulate national purposes and hopes, projecting strength and resolve in moments that threaten to give way to weakness and despair. On the night before Agincourt, Shakespeare’s Henry V was racked by doubt and anxiety and fear, only to emerge in the sunlight to transform his men into a fabled “band of brothers.”

  FDR’s point in his 1935 observation about the need to ration his exposure was that Agincourts are the exception, not the rule. Dwight Eisenhower, who served in the years of the rise of television, used to make the same argument. “I keep telling you fellows I don’t like to do this sort of thing,” Ike told advisers who urged him to go on the air more often. “I can think of nothing more boring, for the American public, than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.”

  Presidents, as John Kennedy once observed, are subject to “clamorous counsel”—everyone, it can seem, has thoughts on how they could do the job better. When he was being told what to do and how to do it, Eisenhower—who, beneath his serene surface, had more than a bit of a temper—would reply: “Now, look, I happen to know a little about leadership. I’ve had to work with a lot of nations, for that matter, at odds with each other. And I tell you this: you do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it’s usually called ‘assault’—not ‘leadership.’…I’ll tell you what leadership is. It’s persuasion—and conciliation—and education—and patience. It’s long, slow, tough work. That’s the only kind of leadership I know—or believe in—or will practice.”

  TR would have agreed. In a letter written from the White House in December 1902, the first President Roosevelt described the nature of the office.

  Well, I have been President for a year and a quarter, and whatever the future may hold I think I may say that during that year and a quarter I have been as successful as I had any right to hope or expect. Of course political life in a position such as this is one long strain on the temper, one long acceptance of the second best, one long experiment of checking one’s impulses with an iron hand and learning to subordinate one’s own desires to what some hundreds of associates can be forced or cajoled or led into desiring. Every day, almost every hour, I have to decide very big as well as very little questions, and in almost each of them I must determine just how far it is safe to go in forcing others to accept my views and standards and just how far I must subordinate what I deem expedient, and indeed occasionally what I deem morally desirable, to what it is possible under the given conditions to achieve….Often when dealing with some puzzling affair I find myself thinking what Lincoln would have done. It has been very wearing, but I have thoroughly enjoyed it, for it is fine to feel one’s hand guiding great machinery, with at least the purpose, and I hope the effect, of guiding it for the best interests of the nation as a whole.

  Sound and sensible, and not a bad standard for any president: The way to stand the “long strain on the temper” is to embrace compromise, seek balance, and strive to serve the national interest, which will be, in the fullness of time, in the personal historical interest of the individual president himself. Seemingly banal points, true, but recent history shows us that what we’ve long accepted as obvious isn’t always as self-evident to a controlling portion of the electorate as one might think, or hope.

  The essential question for voters, then, is discerning the nature of the man or woman who will be standing alone at what Kennedy described as the “vital center of action.” For, as the Greeks knew, character is destiny.

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  What counts is not just the character of the individual at the top, but the character of the country—its inclinations and its aspirations, its customs and its thought, its attachments to the familiar and its openness to the new. “The form of government which prevails,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it.” Americans are driven by many forces, and chief among those forces—and thus a formative element in the country’s soul—is the “pursuit of happiness” of which Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.

  When he composed those words in his rented second-floor quarters at Seventh and Market in Philadelphia in late June, 1776, Jefferson was not thinking about happiness in only the sense of good cheer. He and his colleagues were contemplating something more comprehensive—more revolutionary. Garry Wills’s classic 1978 book on the Declaration, Inventing America, put it well: “When Jefferson spoke of pursuing happiness,” Wills wrote, “he had nothing vague or private in mind. He meant public happiness which is measurable; which is, indeed, the test and justification of any government.”

  Until Philadelphia, the pursuit of happiness had never been granted such pride of place in a new scheme of human government—a pride of place that put the governed, not the governors, at the center of the project. Reflecting on the sources of the thinking on which he drew to draft the Declaration, Jefferson credited “the elementary books of public right…Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, & c.”

  To understand the Declaration, then, we have to start with Aristotle. Happiness, he wrote, is the end and the purpose of action—the whole point of life. It was an ultimate good, worth seeking for its own sake. Given the Aristotelian insight that man is a social creature whose life finds meaning in his relation to other human beings, Jeffersonian eudaimonia—the Greek word for happiness, which can also mean “flourishing”—evokes virtue, good conduct, and generous citizenship. Happiness in the ancient and American traditions is as much about the public weal as it is about an individual’s endorphins.

  As Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., once wrote, a broad understanding of happiness informed the thinking of patriots such as James Wilson (“the happiness of the society is the first law of government”) and John Adams (“the happiness of society is the end of government”). Beginning with the Declaration of Independence, the pursuit of happiness—the pursuit of the good of the whole, because the good of the whole was crucial to the genuine well-being of the individual, and vice versa—became part of the fabric (at first brittle, to be sure, but steadily stronger) of the young nation. For Jefferson and his contemporaries—and, thankfully, for most of their successors in positions of ultimate authority—one of the main points of public life was to enable human creativity and ingenuity and possibility, not to constrict it. In The Rights of Man, his 1791–92 celebration of the centrality of the individual and of the possibilities of human endeavor, Thomas Paine wrote: “From the rapid progress which America makes in every species of improvement, it is rational to conclude that if the governments of Asia, Africa, and Europe had begun on a principle similar to that of America, or had not been early corrupted therefrom, that those countries must, by this time, have been in a far superior condition to what they are.”

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  The progress of which Paine wrote and its enabling agents—reform and revolution—have deep philosophical and political roots. As traced by the Columbia sociologist Robert A. Nisbet, the idea that human nature could advance is found as early as the Greek poets Hesiod and Xenophanes (“The gods did not reveal to men all things in the beginning,” the latter wrote, “but men through their own search find in the course of time that which is better”) and in the myth of Prometheus, who gave men fire. Beyond the pagan world, Saint Augustine spoke of life as a pilgrimage from darkness to light: “The education of the human race, represented by the people of God, has advanced, like that of an individual, through certain epochs, or, as it were, ages, so that it might gradually rise from earthly to heavenly things, and from the visible to the invisible.”

  For the American Founders, Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, the Marquis de Condo
rcet, and Adam Smith permeated the age with the hope that progress would be possible through inquiry, argument, agitation, and finally reform. At the Sorbonne in December 1750, Turgot articulated the doctrine of progress. “The whole human race, through alternate periods of rest and unrest, of weal and woe, goes on advancing, although at a slow pace, towards greater perfection,” he said in the lecture later published as A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind. “Like the ebb and flow of the tide, power passes from one nation to another, and, within the same nation, from the princes to the multitude and from the multitude to the princes. As the balance shifts, everything gradually gets nearer and nearer to an equilibrium, and in the course of time takes on a more settled and peaceful aspect.” Of the American Revolution, Turgot wrote: “America is the hope of the human race.”

  Reason, religion, and capitalism were the tributaries that met to form the powerful American river that so impressed Turgot and his contemporaries. By replacing revelation and hereditary authority with rationality and republicanism, the American nation gave political form to the idea that the divine rights of monarchs and prelates had to surrender to the primacy of individual conscience and equality. No longer would certain men, by an accident of birth (kings) or an incident of election (popes), be granted absolute power over the humblest of others. This view of the intrinsic equality of every person—or at least of nearly every propertied white man—drew on secular philosophical insights, the ethos of the Protestant Reformation, and the prevailing culture of the Scientific Revolution.

  The rise of market economics was critical, too, for the ability to prosper by dint of one’s own initiative created citizens with a stake in preserving and advancing the very society that had given them their chance. “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.” To those who worried that the prosperous would close the doors of opportunity behind them, Smith argued that by “pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” Moreover, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, Smith wrote that “how selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” In Smith’s view, the human capacity for sympathy and fellow feeling could be as much a part of the nature of things as the desire for wealth, and this capacity was essential to the life of a republic.

  Liberty itself, meanwhile, was dependent on the moral disposition of the populace. “Machiavelli, discoursing on these matters,” Algernon Sidney, the seventeenth-century English theorist and politician, wrote, “finds virtue to be so essentially necessary to the establishment and preservation of Liberty, that he thinks it impossible for a corrupted People to set up a good Government, or for a Tyranny to be introduced if they be virtuous.” Put another way, a republic is the sum of its parts. In the last instance, we are the state, and the state is us.

  The formation, maintenance, and expression of individual opinion, then, is the motive force of American life, for that opinion will—sooner or later, for good or for ill—manifest itself in the shape and substance of politics. The things we hope for can come to pass; the things we fear can hold us back. “What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud,” wrote Emerson, “shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”

  In a movement whose landmarks stretched from Seneca Falls in 1848 to the adoption of the women’s suffrage amendment in 1920, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony argued against slavery and for equal rights for women.

  Progress in America does not usually begin at the top and among the few, but from the bottom and among the many. It comes when the whispered hopes of those outside the mainstream rise in volume to reach the ears and hearts and minds of the powerful. Words attributed long afterward to Sojourner Truth, who spoke to a Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, put the struggles of the day well: “I think that ’twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon.” And those voices carry the farthest when they call for fairness, not favors; for simple justice, not undue advantage. “We ask,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton told the New York legislature in 1854, seeking equality for women, “for all that you have asked for yourselves in the progress of your development, since the Mayflower cast anchor [be]side Plymouth Rock; and simply on the ground that the rights of every human being are the same and identical.” Arguing for black enfranchisement in 1867, Frederick Douglass said: “If black men have no rights in the eyes of white men, of course the whites can have none in the eyes of the blacks. The result is a war of races, and the annihilation of all proper human relations.”

  Born into slavery in Ulster County, New York, in the last years of the eighteenth century, Sojourner Truth escaped from bondage and became a stirring advocate for abolition and for the rights of women.

  Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage. It took presidential action to make things official—a Lincoln to free the slaves, a Wilson to support the women’s suffrage amendment, a Lyndon Johnson to finish the fight against Jim Crow—but without the voices from afar, there would have been no chorus of liberty. The lesson: The work of reformers—long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work—can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase “We, the People” that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.

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  At Gettysburg in the spring of 1963, the centennial year of President Lincoln’s address at the dedication of the cemetery there, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson went to the Pennsylvania battlefield to speak at a Memorial Day commemoration. “One hundred years ago, the slave was freed,” Johnson said. “One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin. The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we reply to the Negro by asking, ‘Patience.’ ”

  The country’s fate, Johnson said, was intertwined with the country’s sense of fairness. “Unless we are willing to yield up our destiny of greatness among civilizations of history, Americans—white and Negro together—must be about the business of resolving the challenge that confronts us now,” he said. “Our nation found its soul of honor on these fields of Gettysburg one hundred years ago. We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate.”

  Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1937, when LBJ was a young Texas congressman. Both believed in the transformative power of the presidency and sought to marshal federal power in the service of the excluded.

  Five months and twenty-three days later, Vice President Johnson became President Johnson in a moment of tragedy and fear when John F. Kennedy, the president Johnson served, was shot to death in the streets of Dallas. On that autumn afternoon, in a crowded cabin aboard Air Force One at Love Field, with the fallen president in a coffin on board, Johnson took the oath of office and ordered the plane to take off for Washington. His mind whirring, the new president, always a man of action, did not believe he had a moment to waste.

  The battle that Johnson chose in the bleak closing weeks of 1963 was among the most difficult in American hist
ory. It was the unfinished work of the Civil War. To understand how the forces of fear had kept equality at bay for a century, and how Lyndon Johnson, an American president thrust to authority by assassination, fulfilled long-unmet promises, we must begin the story not in Dallas nor in Washington but in a village in Virginia called Appomattox Court House.

  Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant in Wilmer McLean’s parlor in the village of Appomattox Court House on Palm Sunday 1865, was as much a beginning as an end as defiant white Southerners created and perpetuated a “Lost Cause” mythology. Painting by Tom Lovell.

  The principle for which we contended is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form.

  —JEFFERSON DAVIS, after the defeat of the Confederate States of America

  We may say that only at the moment when Lee handed Grant his sword was the Confederacy born; or to state matters another way, in the moment of death the Confederacy entered upon its immortality.

  —ROBERT PENN WARREN, The Legacy of the Civil War, 1961

  It was, under the circumstances, the most cordial of encounters. On the afternoon of April 9, 1865—Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week—Robert E. Lee, in an impeccable gray dress uniform, surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the village of Appomattox Court House in Virginia. With a handsome sword and a red sash, Lee met Grant, who wore only a private’s blouse with muddied trousers and boots, in the first-floor parlor of a brick house belonging to Wilmer McLean. That morning Lee had mused about sacrificing himself to enemy fire rather than face the humiliation of capitulation. “How easily I could be rid of this, and be at rest!” he said at dawn on the day of his rendezvous with Grant. “I have only to ride along the line and all will be over!” As the story is told, though, Lee mastered his despair. “But it is our duty to live,” he said, reassuring himself and his comrades that they still had a mission. “What will become of the women and children of the South if we are not here to protect them?”