The Soul of America

by Jon Meacham

  Ever practical, Eleanor Roosevelt offered a prescription to guard against tribal self-certitude. “It is not only important but mentally invigorating to discuss political matters with people whose opinions differ radically from one’s own,” she wrote. “For the same reason, I believe it is a sound idea to attend not only the meetings of one’s own party but of the opposition. Find out what people are saying, what they are thinking, what they believe. This is an invaluable check on one’s own ideas….If we are to cope intelligently with a changing world, we must be flexible and willing to relinquish opinions that no longer have any bearing on existing conditions.” If Mrs. Roosevelt were writing today, she might put it this way: Don’t let any single cable network or Twitter feed tell you what to think.

  Wisdom generally comes from a free exchange of ideas, and there can be no free exchange of ideas if everyone on your side already agrees with one another. “I have been fiercely partisan in politics and always militantly liberal,” Harry Truman recalled. “I will be that way as long as I live. Yet I think we would lose something important to our political life if the conservatives were all in one party and the liberals all in the other. This would make us a nation divided either into two opposing and irreconcilable camps or into even smaller and more contentious groups.”

  RESPECT FACTS AND DEPLOY REASON

  There is such a thing as discernible reality. Facts, as John Adams once said, are stubborn things, and yet too many Americans are locked into their particular vision of the world, choosing this view or that perspective based not on its grounding in fact but on whether it’s a view or perspective endorsed by the leaders one follows. “The dictators of the world say that if you tell a lie often enough, why, people will believe it,” Truman wrote. “Well, if you tell the truth often enough, they’ll believe it and go along with you.”

  To reflexively resist one side or the other without weighing the merits of a given issue is all too common—and all too regrettable. By closing our minds to the even remote possibility that a political leader with whom we nearly always disagree might have a point about a particular matter is to preemptively surrender the capacity of the mind to shape our public lives. Of course, it may be that you believe, after consideration, that the other side is wrong—but at least take a minute to make sure. To expect to get everything you want simply because you want it is to invite frustration. Reform is slow work, and it is for neither the fainthearted nor the impatient.

  FIND A CRITICAL BALANCE

  “Wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government,” Jefferson wrote in 1789, adding: “Whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.” Being informed is more than knowing details and arguments. It also entails being humble enough to recognize that only on the rarest of occasions does any single camp have a monopoly on virtue or on wisdom.

  American presidents are not mythic figures. They are human beings, with good days and bad days, flashes of genius and the occasional dumb idea, alternately articulate and tongue-tied. If we are sympathetic rather than blindly condemnatory or celebratory, we will, I believe, help create a more rational political climate. One evening in 1962, as part of a series of what the Kennedys called “Hickory Hill seminars” (they had started at RFK’s house in McLean, Virginia) in which a small group of high-ranking officials would have dinner and listen to an informal lecture by a visiting scholar, the historian David Herbert Donald was chatting with President Kennedy and other guests in the Yellow Oval Room. The conversation turned to presidential rankings, and Kennedy burst out: “No one has a right to grade a President—even poor James Buchanan—who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made his decisions.”

  Theodore H. White, the Time-Life writer who helped create the modern genre of presidential campaign books in which the quest for the American presidency has Arthurian tones, once defined what he called “the politician’s optic,” in which the hostile language in any press story leaps off the page while the positive recedes. By the same token, even the slightest compliment to an opponent “swells to double-size capitals” in the politician’s gaze. “This is an occupational disease of politicians,” White wrote, “just as it is for authors and actors, who similarly live by public approval or distaste.”

  Fair enough, but this injunction of TR’s remains resonant: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” Even with their manifold failings, journalists who seek to report and to illuminate rather than to opine and to divide are critical to a democracy. “Publicity is the very soul of justice,” the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote. “It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against impropriety….Without publicity, all other checks are fruitless: in comparison with publicity, all other checks are of small account.”

  JFK, despite his defensiveness with Professor Donald about criticism of the presidents, understood this large truth. In a Christmastime 1962 “Conversation with the President” in the Oval Office with three television network interviewers, Kennedy acknowledged the importance of a free press:

  I think [the press] is invaluable, even though…it is never pleasant to be reading things that are not agreeable news. But I would say that it is an invaluable arm of the Presidency….There is a terrific disadvantage [in] not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily….Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn’t write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn’t any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.

  KEEP HISTORY IN MIND

  A grasp of the past can be orienting. “When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course,” Senator Daniel Webster said in 1830. “Let us imitate this prudence, and before we float farther on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to conjecture where we now are.”

  To remember Joe McCarthy, for instance, gives us a way to gauge demagoguery. Writing in 1959, five years after the senator’s fall, Richard Rovere reflected on the meaning of McCarthy. “I cannot easily conceive of circumstances in which McCarthy, either faulted as he was or freed of his disabling weaknesses, could have become President of the United States or could have seized the reins of power on any terms,” Rovere wrote. “To visualize him in the White House, one has, I think, to imagine a radical change in the national character and will and taste.” There was, though, no guarantee against such a radical change. “But if I am right in thinking we have been, by and large, lucky,” Rovere wrote, “there is no assurance that our luck will hold.” And it didn’t.

  The past and the present tell us, too, that demagogues can only thrive when a substantial portion of the demos—the people—want him to. In The American Commonwealth, James Bryce warned of the dangers of a renegade president. Bryce’s view was not that the individual himself, from the White House, could overthrow the Constitution. Disaster would come, Bryce believed, at the hands of a demagogic president with an enthusiastic public base. “A bold President who knew himself to be supported by a majority in the country, might be tempted to override the law, and deprive the minority of the protection which the law affords it,” Bryce wrote. “He might be a tyrant, not against the masses, but with the masses.” The cheering news is that hope is not lost. “The people have often made mistakes,” Harry Truman said, “but given time and the facts, they will make the corrections.”

  * * *

  —

  Lincoln, who gave
us the image of our better angels, should have the last word. “He was a president who understood people, and when it came time to make decisions, he was willing to take the responsibility and make those decisions no matter how difficult they were,” Truman wrote. “He had a good head and a great brain and a kind heart….He was the best kind of ordinary man, and when I say that he was an ordinary man, I mean that as high praise, not deprecation. That’s the highest praise you can give a man, that he’s one of the people and becomes distinguished in the service that he gives other people. I don’t know of any higher compliment you can pay a man than that.”

  In the summer of 1864, the 166th Ohio Regiment called at the White House. The volunteer infantry had seen action some weeks before when Confederate general Jubal Early—the Jubal Early who would, after Appomattox, become one of the most influential defenders of the Lost Cause through the miserable years of Reconstruction—had moved against Washington. Headquartered at Silver Spring, Maryland, in the country house of Francis Preston Blair, Early was, he recalled, “in sight of the dome of the Capitol.”

  The Federal troops mounted a stand at Fort Stevens, in northwest Washington, and held their ground. Lincoln, who observed the battle firsthand, came under enemy fire; “a man,” his secretary John Hay wrote, “was shot by his side.” Lincoln never flinched. “He stood there with a long frock coat and plug hat on, making a very conspicuous figure,” one observer recalled of the commander in chief. “Get down, you damn fool!” a young officer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., of the Twentieth Massachusetts, was reputed to have snapped at the president.

  To the veterans returning to Ohio after the battle, Lincoln made some brief remarks as they prepared to go west. No one knew when the war would end; no one knew if Lincoln, who was facing reelection in November, would even be president in a matter of months. He spoke not with the poetry of Gettysburg, but his words on that August day said much about why the salvation of the Union would repay any price in blood and toil and treasure. The tall, tired president, his face heavily lined, his burdens unimaginable, was straightforward.

  “It is,” he said, “in order that each one of you may have, through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field, and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise, and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life with all its desirable human aspirations—it is for this that the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthrights—not only for one, but for two or three years, if necessary.” And, finally: “The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.”

  For all of our darker impulses, for all of our shortcomings, and for all of the dreams denied and deferred, the experiment begun so long ago, carried out so imperfectly, is worth the fight. There is, in fact, no struggle more important, and none nobler, than the one we wage in the service of those better angels who, however besieged, are always ready for battle.

  TO EVAN THOMAS AND MICHAEL BESCHLOSS

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  THE ROOTS OF THIS BOOK can be traced to a Sunday afternoon call I received from Nancy Gibbs, then the editor in chief of Time, who reached out to ask me if I had anything to say about the terrible events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. As a Southerner who grew up on Missionary Ridge, the Civil War battlefield, I could still find minié balls in our yard as late as the 1970s and ’80s. William Faulkner’s observation in Requiem for a Nun—that “The past is never dead; it’s not even past”—has always struck me as one of the great truths, and the American battles over power and race and history have proven Faulkner right with astonishing regularity.

  The result of the call from Nancy was an essay that formed the genesis of this larger project. For Time that week, I explored several different eras in which a politics of fear seemed to triumph, at least temporarily, over hope. That tension is a defining one in American history, and I soon decided that the subject merited a fuller treatment.

  For careful students of history, some of these stories may be familiar, but if we have learned anything in recent years—years in which the president of the United States has taken pride in his deliberate lack of acquaintance with the most essential historical elements of his office—it is that even the most basic facts of our common past repay attention. “Eternal vigilance,” it has been long said, “is the price of liberty,” and a consciousness about what has worked—and what hasn’t—in previous eras is surely a useful form of such vigilance. Such is my goal here.

  In addition to my work for Time, I have also drawn on a series of essays that I wrote for The New York Times Book Review on books that, while not fresh from the presses, seemed to me to speak to our current political and cultural moment, as well as Times op-ed columns. An interview I conducted with Congressman John Lewis for Garden & Gun magazine on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday at Selma, Alabama, was also helpful. I am grateful to my editors at these publications for the opportunities they have given me and for their permission to adapt that work for the present volume: Nancy Gibbs, Michael Duffy, Edward Felsenthal, Pamela Paul, James Bennet, James Dao, Clay Risen, Radhika Jones, David DiBenedetto, and Susan Ellingwood.

  A number of excellent historians, writers, and friends—the categories, I’m happy to say, are not mutually exclusive—generously took time to read the manuscript (or parts of it) and offer wise counsel: Annette Gordon-Reed, Eric Foner, David Oshinsky, John Milton Cooper, Jr., Walter Isaacson, Amity Shlaes, Tom Brokaw, Ken Burns, John Huey, Julia Reed, Jonathan Karp, Rushad Thomas, and Jerry L. Wallace. Thanks, too, to Corey Robin, whose Fear: The History of a Political Idea, was essential, and to Jeffrey Engel, Howard Fineman, and Ann McDaniel. I benefitted greatly from the observations of Nicholas S. Zeppos and John Geer of Vanderbilt University, both of whom had to listen to more of my musings about the project than I suspect either of them would have liked, but they never let on, for which I’m grateful. Lamar Alexander, who once taught a course on “The American Character and America’s Government” at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, kindly shared his work on the subject with me. I also owe an ancient debt to Charles Peters, and to the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Their books and essays informed my argument at nearly every step of the way.

  Michael Hill, my friend and colleague, is a master of the craft of research, and his energy, experience, and good cheer are at once enviable and unique. Jack Bales performed his usual bibliographic magic; Merrill Fabry fact-checked the manuscript with intelligence and insight; Abigail Abrams, the initial researcher on the original Time essay, provided invaluable assistance.

  At Vanderbilt, where I am privileged to teach, I am indebted to David Eric Lewis, the chair of the Department of Political Science, and to Sam Girgus. For their grace in matters large and small, I am grateful to Amanda Urban, Will Byrd, Ratu Kamlani, Jean Becker, Freddy Ford, Barbara DiVittorio, Ann Patchett, Sally Quinn, Andrew Mead, Rachel Adler, Kate Childs, Jack Rose, Pamela Carter, Margaret Shannon, and Andy Brennan.

  Random House has been my publishing home for two decades and seven books. Gina Centrello remains a force to be reckoned with, though I don’t advise it; better, in my experience, to do as she says in the beginning, because she always prevails in the end. Which is a good thing, for her instincts and insights are spot-on. She is a matchless friend and leader.

  Wise, gracious, and tireless, Kate Medina is the best. Most writers say this about their editors, but I know this: I would never want to publish without her. The same holds true of the larger Random House team: Tom Perry, Susan Kamil, Andy Ward, Benjamin Dreyer, Dennis Ambrose, Erica Gonzalez, Anna Pitoniak, Joe Perez, Simon Sullivan, Leigh Marchant, Andrea DeWerd, Sally Marvin, Barbara Fillon, Mary Moates, and Porscha Burke. I am also grateful to Carol Poticny and Fred Courtright. My copy editor, Michelle Daniel, was characteristically indispensable.

  This book is dedicated to the most steadfast friends and counselors a
nyone could ever wish for: Evan Thomas and Michael Beschloss. They are reassuring, selfless, and kind; I owe them debts I cannot possibly repay. To them—and to Oscie and to Afsaneh—I can only offer my deepest thanks and endless affection.

  And to Keith, of course, a final word of gratitude and of love. Our life with Sam, Mary, and Maggie is more than I could have imagined, and certainly more than I deserve.

  Notes

  EPIGRAPHS

  HISTORY, AS NEARLY NO ONE James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony, August 1965, 47. The essay appears in slightly different form under the title “Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes,” in The White Problem in America, ed. The Editors of Ebony (Chicago, 1966), 174.

  THE PRESIDENCY IS NOT MERELY Anne O’Hare McCormick, “Roosevelt’s View of the Big Job: The Presidency Is ‘a Superb Opportunity for Applying the Simple Rules of Human Conduct,’ Says the Democratic Candidate, Interviewed in the Midst of a Whirl of Varied Activity,” The New York Times (NYT), September 11, 1932.

  NOTHING MAKES A MAN Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York, 1971), 157.

  INTRODUCTION · To Hope Rather Than to Fear

  BACK OF THE WRITHING W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York, 1983), 678.