The Soul of America

by Jon Meacham

  WE ARE NOT ENEMIES Abraham Lincoln: “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1861, American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​ws/​?pid=25818. See David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York, 1995), 283–84, for details about the drafting of the passage.

  ON THE AUTUMN EVENING “Local Crowd Cheers Thurmond Blasts at Truman and Dewey,” Charlottesville Daily Progress, October 8, 1948. I drew on this scene in my essay “American Hate, a History,” Time, August 17, 2017, and I am grateful to Abigail Abrams for her research assistance on details of the Thurmond visit to Cabell Hall.

  TRUMAN’S CIVIL RIGHTS PROGRAM For Truman, civil rights, and the 1948 campaign, see Michael R. Gardner, Harry Truman and Civil Rights: Moral Courage and Political Risks (Carbondale, Ill., 2002), 87–146; and Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2009), 355–56. For his role in general, see William E. Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson (Baton Rouge, La., 2005), 147–225; Gardner, Harry Truman and Civil Rights, and Raymond H. Geselbracht, ed., The Civil Rights Legacy of Harry S. Truman (Kirksville, Mo., 2007). “If we wish to inspire the peoples of the world whose freedom is in jeopardy…we must correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy,” Truman said in announcing the plan to Congress, framing the call for justice at home in Cold War terms. Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 346; 355–56. See also Harry S. Truman, “Special Message to the Congress on Civil Rights,” February 2, 1948, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​ws/​?pid=13006.

  SUCH MEASURES…“WOULD UNDERMINE” “Local Crowd Cheers Thurmond,” Daily Progress, October 8, 1948.

  INTERRUPTED BY APPLAUSE Ibid.

  HAD BOLTED THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION See, for instance, Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson, Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond (New York, 2005), 114–19; Nadine Cohodas, Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change (New York, 1993), 140–92; Zachary Karabell, The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election (New York, 2000), 164–75; Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York, 2012), 62–84.

  “I WANT TO TELL YOU” Bass and Thompson, Strom, 117. For an illuminating account of the Dixiecrat convention—with particular emphasis on the use of the Confederate battle emblem as a symbol of states’ rights in the middle of the twentieth century—see John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 98–109.

  OFFERED “THE ONLY” “Local Crowd Cheers Thurmond,” Daily Progress, October 8, 1948.

  CIVIL RIGHTS, THURMOND DECLARED Ibid.

  “ONLY THE STATES RIGHTS DEMOCRATS” Ibid.

  HEIRS TO THE DIXIECRATS’ PLATFORM See, for instance, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Brian M. Rosenthal, “Man Charged After White Nationalist Rally Ends in Deadly Violence,” NYT, August 12, 2017; “Charlottesville: ‘Unite the Right’ Rally, State of Emergency,” Time, August 12, 2017.

  A YOUNG COUNTER-PROTESTOR Christina Caron, “Heather Heyer, Charlottesville Victim, Is Recalled as ‘a Strong Woman,’ ” NYT, August 13, 2017.

  TWO VIRGINIA STATE TROOPERS Matthew Haag, “Death of 2 State Troopers Adds Another Layer of Tragedy in Charlottesville,” NYT, August 14, 2017.

  AN “EGREGIOUS DISPLAY” See, for instance, Maggie Astor, Christina Caron, and Daniel Victor, “A Guide to the Charlottesville Aftermath,” NYT, August 13, 2017; Jonathan Lemire, “Trump Blames ‘Many Sides’ After Violent White Supremacist Rally in Virginia,” Chicago Tribune, August 12, 2017; Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Defends Initial Remarks on Charlottesville; Again Blames ‘Both Sides,’ ” NYT, August 15, 2017.

  TEND TO SPIKE See, for instance, David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (New York, 1995); Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York, 1965); Peter Schrag, Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism and Immigration (Berkeley, Calif., 2010); Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York, 2016); Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York, 1982).

  LITTLE TRUST IN GOVERNMENT According to the Pew Research Center, as of May 2017, “Only 18% of Americans today say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right ‘just about always’ (3%) or ‘most of the time’ (15%),” down from a high of 77 percent in October 1964. “Public Trust in Government, 1958–2017,” Pew Research Center, May 3, 2017, http://www.people-press.org/​2017/​05/​03/​public-trust-in-government-1958-2017/.

  HOUSEHOLD INCOMES LAG “Historical Income Tables: Households,” https://www.census.gov/​data/​tables/​time-series/​demo/​income-poverty/​historical-income-households.html. According to a 2014 USA Today analysis, while a family of four requires $130,000 to live what Americans came to understand as a middle-class life, only about one in eight households earned that much in 2013, when the actual median figure was around $51,000. Howard R. Gold, “Price tag for the American dream: $130K a year,” USA Today, July 4, 2014, https://www.usatoday.com/​story/​money/​personalfinance/​2014/​07/​04/​american-dream/​11122015/.

  “WE ARE DETERMINED” “David Duke: Charlottesville Rally Part of Effort to ‘Take Country Back,’ ” NBC News, August 12, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/​video/​david-duke-says-he-was-at-charlottesville-rally-to-fulfill-promise-of-trump-1023420483642.

  A NATURAL TENDENCY For the perils of selective historical memory, see, for instance, Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York, 1984), where she quoted Samuel Coleridge: “If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us.” Yet Tuchman added, tellingly, “The image is beautiful but the message misleading, for the light on the waves we have passed through should enable us to infer the nature of the waves ahead.” Ibid., 383. The key thing is to see the waves behind us clearly by the light of which Coleridge spoke. In Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York, 1986), the authors cited Thucydides, who observed that he wrote his histories for “those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will at some point or other and in much the same ways be repeated in the future.” Ibid., 232. For a much more recent essay on the question, see Corey Robin, “Forget About It,” Harper’s Magazine (April 2018): 5–7.

  TO SPEAK OF A SOUL I am indebted to Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, A Brief History of the Soul (Hoboken, N.J., 2011); Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford, 1986), especially 174–312; Jacob Needleman, The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders (New York, 2003); and Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (New York, 2003).

  CALLED THE AMERICAN CREED: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1962), 3–25. Myrdal quoted Ralph Bunche: “Every man in the street, white, black, red, or yellow, knows that this is ‘the land of the free,’ the ‘land of opportunity,’ the ‘cradle of liberty,’ the ‘home of democracy,’ that the American flag symbolizes the ‘equality of all men’ and guarantees us all ‘the protection of life, liberty and property,’ freedom of speech, freedom of religion and racial tolerance.” Ibid., 4.

  Another way of thinking about the same theme can be found in the American historian James Truslow Adams’s 1931 book The Epic of America, which popularized a term not yet in the general vernacular in those last years of the reigns of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Adams wrote that his subject was “that American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all
our citizens of every rank which is the greatest contribution we have as yet made to the thought and welfare of the world.” It was not a new thing, this abiding belief that tomorrow would be better than today. “That dream or hope,” Adams wrote, “has been present from the start.” James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston, 1931), viii.

  According to the historian Allan Nevins, Adams’s thesis was that the American Dream “had contributed to the struggle for independence, and from the hour independence was won, every generation had witnessed some kind of uprising of the common folk to protect the dream from forces that seemed likely to overwhelm and dissipate it. ‘Possibly the greatest of these struggles lies just ahead of us at the present time,’ wrote Adams, who perceived that the hour was striking for drastic politico-economic changes.” Allan Nevins, James Truslow Adams: Historian of the American Dream (Urbana, Ill., 1968), 68. See also my “Keeping the Dream Alive,” Time, June 21, 2012.

  “THE GENIUS OF AMERICA” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York, 1992), 142, 145.

  “WHAT IS IT THAT” Hendrik Lorenz, “Ancient Theories of Soul,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2009, https://plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​sum2009/​entries/​ancient-soul/.

  “AND THE LORD GOD” Carl Schultz, “Soul,” Baker’s Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology, ed. Walter A. Elwell, https://www.biblestudytools.com/​dictionary/​soul/. See also Goetz and Taliaferro, Brief History of the Soul, 30–32.

  “GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN” Schultz, “Soul,” Baker’s Evangelical Dictionary.

  “AN ASSEMBLAGE OF” Saint Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York, 1993), 706.

  “JUST AND GENEROUS” Harold Holzer and Norton Garfinkle, A Just and Generous Nation: Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity (New York, 2015), 6. The remark came in a speech Lincoln delivered in Milwaukee on September 30, 1859.

  TOO OFTEN, PEOPLE VIEW I am indebted to Professor Eric Foner for this insight.

  THE SOUL OF THE COUNTRY My views on the nature of America have been informed by innumerable works, reportage, and conversations. In particular, but not exclusively, I owe much to Myrdal, American Dilemma; Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (New York, 2011); Schlesinger, Disuniting of America; Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics and the Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), and Huntingdon, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York, 2005); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York, 1996); Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago, 1958); Michael Walzer, What It Means to Be an American (New York, 1992); Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York, 1980); Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About God, Country, and Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left and Each Other (New York, 1998); Ganesh Sitaraman, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic (New York, 2017); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York, 2016); Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York, 2007); Jonathan Bean, ed., Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader (Lexington, Ky., 2009); Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton, N.J., 2017); Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wis., 1978); Robert N. Bellah and Phillip E. Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (San Francisco, 1980); Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial (Chicago, 1992); Martin E. Marty, The One and the Many: America’s Struggle for the Common Good (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Michael Warner, ed., American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr. (New York, 1999); G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America (London, 1923); Eleanor Roosevelt, Tomorrow Is Now (New York, 2012); and A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco, 2003).

  “WE HAVE IT IN OUR POWER” Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (New York, 2007), 335.

  “THINGS IN LIFE” Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1945, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​ws/​?pid=16607.

  “I ALWAYS CONSIDER” John Adams, “Fragmentary Draft of a Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, February 1765,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Adams/​01-01-02-0009-0002.

  A “MARCH OF CIVILIZATION” Thomas Jefferson to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Jefferson/​98-01-02-4523. Laws and institutions, Jefferson said elsewhere, “must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” Thomas Jefferson to “Henry Tompkinson” [Samuel Kercheval], July 12, 1816, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Jefferson/​03-10-02-0128-0002.

  “THE AMERICAN IDEA” Theodore Parker, “Discourses of Slavery,” May 29, 1850.

  “I KNOW OF NO SOIL BETTER” Frederick Douglass in Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, ed. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, (Lanham, Md., 2003), 99.

  “IT IS ESSENTIAL” Roosevelt, Tomorrow Is Now, 4.

  “MAN’S CAPACITY FOR” Reinhold Niebuhr, Major Works on Religion and Politics, ed. Elisabeth Sifton (New York, 2015), 354.

  “INTELLECTUALLY I KNOW” “Lewis Holds Books Do Not Prevent War,” NYT, December 30, 1930.

  IN THE 1790S James Rogers Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 12.

  “YOU CAN’T DIVIDE” Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (New York, 1974), 252.

  “THE PRESIDENCY IS NOT MERELY” McCormick, “Roosevelt’s View of the Big Job,” NYT, September 11, 1932.

  “FOR ONLY THE PRESIDENT” John F. Kennedy, “The Presidency in 1960—National Press Club, Washington, D.C.,” January 14, 1960, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​ws/​?pid=25795.

  THERE WAS NOTHING Johnson, Vantage Point, 157.

  A PRESIDENT SETS A TONE For the rhetorical and symbolic role of the presidency, I have learned much from Eric F. Goldman, “The Presidency as Moral Leadership,” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: Ethical Standards in American Public Life, ed. Clarence N. Callender and James C. Charlesworth (Philadelphia, 1952), 37–45; Erwin C. Hargrove, The President as Leader: Appealing to the Better Angels of Our Nature (Lawrence, Kans., 1998); Vanessa B. Beasley, You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric (College Station, Tex., 2004), and Beasley, ed., Who Belongs in America? Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration (College Station, Tex., 2006); Roderick P. Hart, The Political Pulpit (West Lafayette, Ind., 1977); Michael Novak, Choosing Presidents: Symbols of Political Leadership (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992); James David Fairbanks, “The Priestly Functions of the Presidency: A Discussion of the Literature on Civil Religion and Its Implications for the Study of Presidential Leadership,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 11, no. 2 (Spring 1981), 214–32; Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York, 1948); Garth E. Pauley, The Modern Presidency and Civil Rights: Rhetoric on Race from Roosevelt to Nixon (College Station, Tex., 2001); Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, N.J., 1987); James M
acGregor Burns, Leadership (New York, 1978); and Burns, Presidential Government: The Crucible of Leadership (New York, 1965).

  I share this view of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s:

  In the end, a President of the United States must stand or fall by his instinct for the future as well as by his understanding of the past and his mastery of the present. Implanted within him, there must be an image, not necessarily—or even desirably—explicit or conscious, but profoundly rich, plastic, and capacious, of the kind of America he wants, of the vision of the American promise he is dedicated to realize, of the direction in which he believes the world is moving. Without such a sense, his Presidency will be static and uncreative. As Franklin Roosevelt’s successor once put it, ‘The President’s got to set the sights.’ This vision of the future becomes the source of his values; it justifies his strivings; it renews his hopes; it provides his life with its magnetic orientation. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal, The Age of Roosevelt, vol. 2 (Boston, 1957), 587.

  “AT THE FRONT” Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York, 1908), 33.

  “HIS PERSON, COUNTENANCE” John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the U.S. With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams (Boston, 1851), 6:255–56. The observation came in his Discourses on Davila, published in 1790 and 1791.

  “THE PEOPLE…OUGHT” Ibid., 302.

  “THE PEOPLE CANNOT” Ibid.

  “THE POWERS OF” Henry Jones Ford, The Rise and Growth of American Politics: A Sketch of Constitutional Development (New York, 1967), 291.

  “THIS GREAT OFFICE” James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 1, The National Government; The State Governments (New York, 1911), 77. The quotation is from a chapter of Bryce’s entitled “Why Great Men Are Not Chosen President.” Ibid., 77–84.