by Jon Meacham
The only way to make sense of this eternal struggle is to understand that it is just that: an eternal struggle. And the only way to come to that understanding is by knowing the history that’s shaped us. “The next generation never learns anything from the previous one until it’s brought home with a hammer,” Truman once said. “I’ve wondered why the next generation can’t profit from the generation before but they never do until they get knocked in the head by experience.”
So what can we, in our time, learn from the past, even while we’re getting knocked in the head? That the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. That compromise is the oxygen of democracy. And that we learn the most from those who came before not by gazing up at them uncritically or down on them condescendingly but by looking them in the eye and taking their true measure as human beings, not as gods.
Which brings us to the moral utility of history. It is tempting to feel superior to the past. But as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once said, “Righteousness is easy, also cheap, in retrospect.” When we condemn posterity for slavery, or for Native American removal, or for denying women their full role in the life of the nation, we ought to pause and think: What injustices are we perpetuating even now that will one day face the harshest of verdicts by those who come after us? One of the points of reflecting on the past is to prepare us for action in the present.
As Truman knew—and the visiting Southerner, to her discomfort, learned at that White House luncheon—the presidency offers possibilities for such action that are both dazzling and daunting. “The President,” Woodrow Wilson wrote, “is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can.” In an echo of that point, in his speech at American University in June 1963 proposing a ban on nuclear testing, JFK said, “Man can be as big as he wants.”
Or as small. One risk we always face can grow out of the anger of crowds—literal and, in our own time, also virtual—of the alienated and the emboldened. In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois plumbed the mind and motives of the Ku Klux Klan, and indeed of mobs and mass movements driven by fear in all times and at all places. “The method of force which hides itself in secrecy is a method as old as humanity,” Du Bois wrote. “The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked, and at night….How is it that men who want certain things done by brute force can so often depend upon the mob?”
* * *
—
The better presidents do not cater to such forces; they conquer them with a breadth of vision that speaks to the best parts of our soul. None of these men was without fault. For generations Democrats provided many of the most strident segregationists, particularly from the South, a political home, and for the past half century or so, too many Republicans have used coded racial appeals to win votes. Still, they—and we—have also had the ability to rise above their baser impulses.
A masterful performer, Ronald Reagan came to power during what his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, called a “crisis of confidence” in a country suffering from high inflation and interest rates at home and worries about weakness abroad. Reagan had spent his pre-political days as a radio sportscaster and as a movie actor and had a remarkable ability to capture great and elusive truths. In a 1985 speech honoring the memory of John F. Kennedy, Reagan let his vivid imagination take flight in describing life in the White House. “Sometimes I want to say to those who are still in school, and who sometimes think that history is a dry thing that lives in a book: Nothing is ever lost in that great house; some music plays on,” Reagan said.
I’ve even been told that late at night when the clouds are still and the moon is high, you can just about hear the sound of certain memories brushing by. You can almost hear, if you listen close, the whir of a wheelchair rolling by and the sound of a voice calling out, “And another thing, Eleanor!” Turn down a hall and you hear the brisk strut of a fellow saying, “Bully! Absolutely ripping!” Walk softly now and you’re drawn to the soft notes of a piano and a brilliant gathering in the East Room, where a crowd surrounds a bright young president who is full of hope and laughter. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s a story I’ve been told. And it’s not a bad one, because it reminds us that history is a living thing that never dies.
In his Farewell Address in January 1989, Reagan addressed himself to America’s generosity of spirit in his evocation of John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill”—an image, in a sign of some consistency of thought among those who have led the nation, that John Kennedy had cited in his 1961 speech to the Massachusetts legislature as he prepared to leave for his inauguration in Washington. “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life,” Reagan said, “but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.” He went on:
But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still….And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.
In 1995, when Timothy McVeigh, darkly inspired by anti-Semitism, white nationalism, and antigovernment sentiment, bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168, including 19 children in the facility’s day-care center, leaders of both major parties said and did the right things. “Let us let our own children know that we will stand against the forces of fear,” President Clinton told mourners in Oklahoma City. “When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. In the face of death, let us honor life. As St. Paul admonished us, Let us ‘not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’ ”
In those terrible weeks, the National Rifle Association dispatched a fund-raising letter that targeted not the murderers of innocents but federal agents whom the gun lobby’s leadership derided as “jackbooted thugs.” Reading the missive, former president George H. W. Bush, a life member, resigned from the group. “To attack Secret Service agents or A.T.F. people or any government law enforcement people as ‘wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms’ wanting to ‘attack law abiding citizens’ is a vicious slander on good people,” Bush wrote, adding that “your broadside against Federal agents deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor; and it offends my concept of service to country.” The forty-first president asked that his name be permanently removed from the rolls of the NRA.
Clinton and Bush: There, from two men of different generations, different philosophies, different temperaments, came unambiguous words of denunciation in a time of national crisis over hate and extremism. The same spirit animated George W. Bush when, six years later, he insisted that America’s war on terror was not a war against all of Islam. “The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself,” Bush 43 said. “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them.”
Three days after the terrorist attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, with thousands dead and many missing, never to be found, Bush climbed the steps of the lectern at Washington’s National Cathedral to speak of America’s resolve. But he was pastoral, too, acknowledging the loss of the hour and summoning the forces of love. “Our purpose as a nation is firm,” Bush said, continuing:
Yet, our wounds as a people are recent and unhealed and lead us to pray. In many of our prayers this week, there is a searching and an honesty. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York on Tuesday, a woman said, “I prayed to God to give us a sign that He is still here.”…There are prayers that help us l
ast through the day or endure the night. There are prayers of friends and strangers that give us strength for the journey. And there are prayers that yield our will to a will greater than our own.
A pause, and then Bush said: “This world He created is of moral design. Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance, and love have no end. And the Lord of life holds all who die and all who mourn.”
For Robert and John Kennedy, both martyred in the turbulent 1960s, politics was at once the most pragmatic and idealistic of undertakings. Here, a photographer captured an image of the brothers outside the Oval Office on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.
In Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, late in the presidency of Barack Obama, a young white supremacist armed with a .45-caliber Glock pistol murdered nine innocents during a Bible study group at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. As the president eulogized one of the victims, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, Obama spoke of hope and hate and history.
“According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned,” the president said. “Grace is not merited. It’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Grace—as a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves.”
Action had to follow words. “For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present,” Obama said. “Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty or attend dilapidated schools or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career. Perhaps it causes us to examine what we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate.”
Suddenly, unexpectedly, Obama began to sing the old hymn:
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch; like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
* * *
—
Progress—redemption, even—was possible in this hour of grief. “We may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency and short-sightedness and fear of each other, but we got it all the same,” Obama said. “He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace. But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift.”
Even by the standards of the presidency, the day Obama spoke in Charleston was a full one. That morning, before he had gone to South Carolina, he had received word that the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. “Our nation was founded on a bedrock principle that we are all created equal,” Obama said in the Rose Garden. “The project of each generation is to bridge the meaning of those founding words with the realities of changing times—a never-ending quest to ensure those words ring true for every single American. Progress on this journey often comes in small increments, sometimes two steps forward, one step back, propelled by the persistent effort of dedicated citizens. And then sometimes, there are days like this when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.” The ruling, he said, “reaffirmed that all Americans are entitled to the equal protection of the law…regardless of who they are or who they love.”
It was a watershed. “I know change for many of our LGBT brothers and sisters must have seemed so slow for so long,” Obama said, adding:
But compared to so many other issues, America’s shift has been so quick. I know that Americans of goodwill continue to hold a wide range of views on this issue. Opposition in some cases has been based on sincere and deeply held beliefs. All of us who welcome today’s news should be mindful of that fact; recognize different viewpoints; revere our deep commitment to religious freedom. But today should also give us hope that on the many issues with which we grapple, often painfully, real change is possible. Shifts in hearts and minds is possible.
* * *
—
In his postpresidential notes, Harry Truman was candid about the tricky nature of democracy. Yes, much of the nation’s fate lies in the hands of the president, but the voters have the ultimate authority. “The country has to awaken every now and then to the fact that the people are responsible for the government they get,” Truman wrote. “And when they elect a man to the presidency who doesn’t take care of the job, they’ve got nobody to blame but themselves.”
As usual, the old man was on to something. Truman had immense regard for FDR’s longtime adviser Harry Hopkins, who also believed the followers mattered as much as the leader. “God damn it,” Hopkins had told Robert Sherwood on the day of FDR’s White House funeral, “now we’ve got to get to work on our own. This is where we’ve really got to begin. We’ve had it too easy all this time, because we knew he was there, and we had the privilege of being able to get to him….Well—he isn’t here now, and we’ve got to find a way to do things by ourselves.”
Hopkins and Sherwood, though, were working in a national context of hope; FDR and Truman came out of the best of the American tradition of leadership. To those presidents the nation was rising, not falling. It was already great, and could be made greater.
In our own moment, fears of American decline are pervasive. But the imminence of chaos, of a nation torn asunder, of a country irretrievably lost is a long-standing political trope. “Commerce, luxury, and avarice have destroyed every republican government,” John Adams wrote in 1808. “We mortals cannot work miracles; we struggle in vain against the…course of nature.”
Every generation tends to think of itself as uniquely challenged and under siege. The questions of the present assume outsize and urgent importance, for they are, after all, the questions that shape and suffuse the lives of those living in the moment. Humankind seems to be forever coping with crisis. Strike the “seems”: Humankind is forever coping with crisis, or believes it is, and will until what William Faulkner described as “the last red and dying evening.”
We have managed, however, to survive the crises and vicissitudes of history. Our brightest hours are almost never as bright as we like to think; our glummest moments are rarely as irredeemable as they feel at the time. How, then, in an hour of anxiety about the future of the country, at a time when a president of the United States appears determined to undermine the rule of law, a free press, and the sense of hope essential to American life, can those with deep concerns about the nation’s future enlist on the side of the angels?
ENTER THE ARENA
The battle begins with political engagement itself. Theodore Roosevelt put it best: “The first duty of an American citizen, then, is that he shall work in politics; his second duty is that he shall do that work in a practical manner; and his third is that it shall be done in accord with the highest principles of honor and justice.”
Those who disdain the arena are unilaterally disarming themselves in the great contests of the soul, for they are cutting themselves off, childishly, from what Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., called the “passion and action” of the age. Politicians will disappoint; that’s inevitable. But they will also, from time to time, thrill. “Every man who has been in practical politics,” TR remarked, “grows to realize that politicians, big and little, are no more all of them bad than they are all of them good.” One need not become a candidate (though that’s certainly an option worth considering) or a political addict hooked on every twist and every turn and every tweet. But the paying of attention, the expressing of opinion, and the casting of ballots are foundational to living up to the obligations of citizenship in a republic.
To believe something creates an obligation to make that belief known and to act upon it within the arena. Politicians are far mo
re often mirrors of public sentiment than they are molders; that is the nature of things in a popular government and should be a source of hope for those who long for a change of presidents or of policy. In The English Constitution, Walter Bagehot defined public opinion as “the secret pervading disposition of society” that reveals itself in elections, and James Bryce, in The American Commonwealth, argued that “hereditary monarchs were strong because they reigned by a right of their own, not derived from the people. A President is strong for the exactly opposite reason, because his rights come straight from the people…Nowhere is the rule of public opinion so complete as in America, or so direct.”
Skepticism about the incumbent authority of the moment is embedded in our character, for what was the American Revolution but one of history’s largest and boldest acts of reform in the cause of progress? “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive,” Thomas Jefferson wrote Abigail Adams in the winter of 1787. “It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere.” So long as the resistance was informed by fact and executed with integrity, Jefferson believed, all would be well.
RESIST TRIBALISM
Engagement, especially at a time of heightened conflict, has its perils: Those motivated by what they see as extremism on the other side are likely to view politics not as a mediation of difference but as total warfare where no quarter can be given. The country works best, however, when we resist such tribal inclinations. “We know instinctively,” Jane Addams wrote, “that if we grow contemptuous of our fellows and consciously limit our intercourse to certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect, we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of our ethics.”
