The Soul of America

by Jon Meacham

  “THE TRUTH IS” Ford, Rise and Growth of American Politics, 293.

  “ONE THING I BELIEVE” Roosevelt, Tomorrow Is Now, 10.

  “THE ARC OF” Martin Luther King, Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” March 31, 1968, King Institute Encyclopedia, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Global Freedom Struggle, Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/publications/knock-midnight-inspiration-great-sermons-reverend-martin-luther-king-jr-10. The quotation, which King used frequently, echoed words from Theodore Parker. See, for instance, “Theodore Parker And The ‘Moral Universe,’ ” National Public Radio, September 2, 2010. https://www.npr.org/​templates/​story/​story.php?storyId=129609461.

  “SURELY, IN THE LIGHT OF HISTORY” Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life (New York, 1960), 168.

  THE HINGE OF The writer Shelby Foote called the war the “cross-roads of our being.” Shelby Foote in The Civil War, PBS documentary miniseries, Ken Burns director and producer, Sept. 23–27, 1990. In it, Foote added: “And it was a hell of a cross-roads.” Ibid.

  “THE PROBLEM OF” W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1993), 5.

  FEAR, AS THE POLITICAL THEORIST COREY ROBIN Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York, 2004), was invaluable. “By political fear,” Robin wrote, “I mean a people’s felt apprehension of some harm to their collective well-being—the fear of terrorism, panic over crime, anxiety about moral decay—or the intimidation wielded over men and women by governmental groups. What makes both types of fear political rather than personal is that they emanate from society or have consequences for society.” Ibid., 2. I also learned much from Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York, 2011); Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (Emeryville, Calif., 2006); Philip Perlmutter, Legacy of Hate: A Short History of Ethnic, Religious, and Racial Prejudice in America (Armonk, N.Y., 1990); and, for the other side of the spectrum, James W. Fraser, A History of Hope: When Americans Have Dared to Dream of a Better Future (New York, 2002).

  UNDERSTOOD BY ROBIN AND MANY SCHOLARS Robin, Fear, 2. Throughout this book, I am also indebted, as noted above, to Bennett, Party of Fear, for its excellent treatment of fear in a right-wing political context. “If there has been political extremism of the Right in American history, it is found in large measure in…efforts to combat peoples and ideas that were seen as alien threats to a cherished but embattled American ‘way of life,’ ” Bennett wrote. “The passionate men and women who joined the right-wing groups that sought to check various alien enemies became extremists when they violated democratic procedures and moved outside the norms of democratic society….They were the leaders and members of the party of fear.” Ibid., 3.

  “POLITICAL FEAR” Robin, Fear, 2.

  CAN BE “SPARKED” Ibid.

  AND “MAY DICTATE” Ibid.

  WHO ONE BELIEVES POSE A THREAT Ibid.

  “IS CAUSED BY” Aristotle, “Rhetorica,” book 2, sec. 5 in The Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1928), 11:1382A.

  THOMAS HOBBES BELIEVED Mitchell Cohen and Nicole Fermon, eds., Princeton Readings in Political Thought: Essential Texts Since Plato (Princeton, N.J., 1996), 208. The point is drawn from Hobbes’s 1651 Leviathan.

  TO BE CONCERNED My argument about fear emphasizes its disorienting effects, but this is a complex subject with many nuances. Corey Robin, for example, has argued that “[P]olitical fear reflects the interests and reasoned judgments of the fearful about what is good for them, and responds to real dangers in the world: to genuine threats to the nation’s security and well-being, to the coercive power wielded by elites and the lurking challenge the lower orders pose to those elites….It is an affair of collusion, involving the grunt work of collaborators, the cooperation of victims, and aid from those bystanders who do nothing to protest fear’s repressive hold.” Robin, Fear, 162–63. He added, “It is fear’s repressive consequences, not just the personal suffering it inflicts, that make it a toxic fact of life that must be opposed.” Ibid., 164.

  FEAR…DOES NOT STRIKE Aristotle, “Rhetorica,” 11:1383A.

  “NO PASSION…SO EFFECTUALLY ROBS” “Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful,” pt. 2, sec. 2 in “Terror” from Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Other Writings, ed. Jesse Norman (New York, 2015), 55. I am indebted to my friend and teacher Dale Richardson for introducing me to Burke’s literary criticism nearly thirty years ago, at the University of the South.

  HOPE, DEFINED AS THE EXPECTATION My analysis and its supporting quotations owe much to Claudia Bloeser and Titus Stahl, “Hope,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​spr2017/​entries/​hope/.

  “THE COWARD, THEN, IS” Ibid. In political life, fear, which can be hidden, often manifests itself in detectable expressions of anger. Seneca noted that wise men had long said that anger “is a brief madness” and likened it to “a collapsing building that’s reduced to rubble even as it crushes what it falls upon.” Seneca, Anger, Mercy, Revenge, trans. Robert A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum (Chicago, 2010), 14.

  Anger is not something one can easily disguise: “As madmen exhibit specific symptoms—a bold and threatening expression, a knitted brow, a fierce set of the features, a quickened step, restless hands, a changed complexion, frequent, very forceful sighing—so do angry people show the same symptoms: their eyes blaze and flicker, their faces flush deeply as the blood surges up from the depths of the heart, their lips quiver and their teeth grind, their hair bristles and stands on end, their breathing is forced and ragged.” Ibid. The bottom line: “Anger,” Seneca wrote, “turns everything from what is best and most righteous to the opposite.” Ibid., 15–16.

  “THE LOSS OF WHAT WE LOVE” “Question 40: Of the Irascible Passions—Of Hope and Despair, First Article, Obj. 3 with answer and Question 43”: Whether Love Is the Cause of Fear? Obj. 3 from St. Thomas Aquinas and Reginaldo de Piperno, The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas (London, 1914), 4:456. See also Peter Koritansky, “Thomas Aquinas: Political Philosophy,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/​aqui-pol/.

  “PROPERLY SPEAKING, HOPE REGARDS” “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas, 4:487.

  “THE DEVIL CAN” William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, act 1, scene 3, http://shakespeare.mit.edu/​merchant/​merchant.1.3.html.

  “I DO NOT KNOW” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer and trans. George Lawrence (New York, 1969), 293. For all the perils of religion—among them the divine sanction a believer might feel for any course of action, however wrong, and the potential for the kinds of sectarian conflicts that had roiled the Old World—the first generation of the Republic’s leaders, as well as their successors, have acknowledged the reality of religious belief and sought to deploy it for the good.

  “And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion,” George Washington wrote. “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” George Washington, Writings, ed. John H. Rhodehamel (New York, 1997), 971.

  A citizen (or a president) who is motivated by religiously informed impulses may undertake work that will make the lives of believers and of secularists better, just as a citizen (or a president) who is motivated by impulses that have nothing to do with religion may undertake work that will make the lives of secularists and of believers better. The motives can matter less than the means and the ends of action. “This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the
things they hold separately,” G. K. Chesterton once remarked, and experience shows us that America is at its best when we follow that counsel and turn our minds to that which unites us—chiefly the right to fair play and the love of liberty—rather than to the multitude of forces that divide us. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York, 2001), 43.

  AS SUSCEPTIBLE TO HUMAN PASSIONS “Why has government been instituted at all?” Alexander Hamilton asked in The Federalist Papers. “Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.” Alexander Hamilton, Writings, ed. Joanne B. Freeman (New York, 2001), 223.

  IN A NOVEMBER 1963 LECTURE Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 3.

  “THE PARANOID SPOKESMAN” Ibid., 29–30.

  DIVISIONS OF OPINION Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York, 2012), 458–59. Jefferson expressed this view in an 1813 letter to John Adams. Ibid.

  A PRESIDENT WHO, IN 1947 Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 345. For the speech itself, see Harry S. Truman: “Address Before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” June 29, 1947. American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​ws/​?pid=12686.

  HAD COMMISSIONED A REPORT Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 329–30; 352–56. The document itself repays consideration: Steven F. Lawson, ed., To Secure These Rights: The Report of President Harry S Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights (New York, 2003). See also David McCullough, Truman (New York, 1992), 569–70; 586–90. The speech to the NAACP, McCullough wrote, was “the strongest statement on civil rights heard in Washington since the time of Lincoln.” Ibid., 569.

  TRUMAN’S MOTIVATIONS WERE See, for instance, William Lee Miller, Two Americans: Truman, Eisenhower, and a Dangerous World (New York, 2012), 336–41.

  “IT IS MY DEEP CONVICTION” Truman, “Address Before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.”

  THE PRESIDENT HAD WRITTEN Fourth draft, speech to NAACP, with corrections by Harry S. Truman, June 28, 1947, Papers of Harry S. Truman: President’s Secretary’s File, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/​flip_books/​index.php?collectionid=ihow&groupid=3723&tldate=1947-06-28.

  ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1947 Harry S. Truman, “Independence Day Address Delivered at the Home of Thomas Jefferson,” July 4, 1947, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​ws/​?pid=12694.

  “WE HAVE LEARNED” Ibid.

  “SO LONG AS THE BASIC RIGHTS” Ibid.

  ONE · The Confidence of the Whole People

  ENERGY IN THE EXECUTIVE James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York, 1987), 402.

  I THINK THAT “Sojouner’s Words and Music,” Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee, http://sojournertruthmemorial.org/​sojourner-truth/​her-words/. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York, 1996), convincingly argues that this version of Truth’s remarks, popularly in circulation as the “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, was a later invention. Truth was highly unlikely to have spoken in such a dialect; the legendary account was written by a fellow feminist, Frances Dana Gage, in 1863. At the time Gage was writing, she was in South Carolina, which probably influenced her decision to render Truth’s speech in such a way. Ibid., 164–78.

  DREAMS OF GOD AND OF GOLD Charles W. Eliot, ed., Harvard Classics, vol. 43, American Historical Documents (New York, 1910), 51–61. For the details about the First Charter of Virginia, I also drew on my American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (New York, 2006), 41–42, and my essay “Keeping the Dream Alive,” Time, June 21, 2012. See also James Horn, A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America (New York, 2005), and Ed Southern, ed., The Jamestown Adventure: Accounts of the Virginia Colony, 1605–1614 (Winston-Salem, N.C., 2004).

  IN 1630, THE PURITAN JOHN WINTHROP Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York, 2003), 180. The phrase “city upon a hill” is from the Gospel of Matthew, 5:14.

  “A MODEL OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY” John Winthrop, Winthrop Papers, vol., 2, 1623–1630, ed. Malcolm Freiburg (Boston, 1931), 282–95. See also The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeadle (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 1, 726.

  RONALD REAGAN ADDED See, for instance, Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” January 11, 1989, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​ws/​?pid=29650.

  IN 1619, A DUTCH “MAN OF WARRE” Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956), 17–18.

  EUROPEAN SETTLERS, MEANWHILE Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln, Neb., 1984), is a foundational work. “The great distinguishing feature of English relations with the Indian groups was replacement of the Indians on the land by white settlers, not conversion and assimilation of the Indians into European colonial society.” Ibid., 11.

  THE VASTNESS OF THE CONTINENT The classic statement of this case is Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at the ninth annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Chicago, July 11–13, 1893, and reported in The Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1894, 119–227.

  “ENTERPRISING AND SELF-MADE MEN” Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War (New York, 1990), 77. See also Cullen, American Dream, 69.

  APPOINTED ONE SUCH MAN Donald, Lincoln, 50. See also my American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York, 2008), 247. Nearly three decades later, in late 1860, Lincoln would summon the spirit of Jackson in his own struggle against disunion. “The right of a state to secede is not an open or debatable question,” Lincoln said. “It was fully discussed in Jackson’s time, and denied…by him….It is the duty of a President to execute the laws and maintain the existing government. He cannot entertain any proposition for dissolution or dismemberment. He was not elected for any such purpose.” Meacham, American Lion, 355. The Union was essential. “The central pervading idea of this struggle,” Lincoln told Congress on the Fourth of July, 1861, “is the necessity…of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.” William J. Cooper and John M. McCardell, eds., In the Cause of Liberty: How the Civil War Redefined American Ideals (Baton Rouge, La., 2009), 3.

  “I HAPPEN, TEMPORARILY” Abraham Lincoln, “Address to the 166th Ohio Regiment,” August 22, 1864, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​ws/​?pid=88874.

  GOVERNED BY THE WEAK ARTICLES For the road to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, see Richard Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York, 2009), 3–21; Carol Berkin, A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution (New York, 2002), 11–47; and David O. Stewart, The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution (New York, 2007), 1–45. Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York, 1997), is also invaluable on the story of the Constitution, as is Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (New York, 2010).

  “FAST VERGING TO ANARCHY” George Washington to James Madison, November 5, 1786, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Washington/​04-04-02-0299.

  THOMAS PAINE HAD SUGGESTED William M. Goldsmith, The Growth of Presidential Power: A Documented History (New York, 1974), 3:88.

  “BUT WHERE, SAY SOME” Ibid., 89.

  “A NATIONAL EXECUTIVE” Ibid., 82.

  TO BE ELECTED FOR LIFE Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison (Athens, Ohio, 1984), 136.

  OTHERS F
AVORED PLANS Beeman, Plain, Honest Men, 299–305.

  BECAUSE OF GEORGE WASHINGTON Ibid., 128.

  (THE DELEGATES DID PROVIDE) Ibid., 301. “It was in some respects an odd decision, since several members of the Convention themselves had been born outside the United States, but it was dictated in large measure by the delegates’ fears of the corrupting effects of European society.” Ibid.

  THE CREATION OF THE OFFICE See, for instance, ibid., 124–43; Harlow Giles Unger, “Mr. President”: George Washington and the Making of the Nation’s Highest Office (Boston, 2013); Thomas E. Cronin, ed., Inventing the American Presidency (Lawrence, Kan., 1989); Sidney M. Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2007 (Washington, D.C., 2008); Charles W. Thach, Jr., The Creation of the Presidency, 1775–1789: A Study in Constitutional History (Farmington Hills, Mich., 2010). Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (New York, 2004), 1–34, is also illuminating.

  “TOLD TOP AIDES” Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, and Peter Baker, “Inside Trump’s Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation,” NYT, December 9, 2017.

  A WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL Cohen and Fermon, Princeton Readings in Political Thought, 208. The precise line of Hobbes, who was describing what he called “the natural condition of mankind”: “Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man.” Ibid., 207–8.

  “FIRST, THOSE WHICH EXCITE” Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (New York, 1967), 61.

  “THE DIGNIFIED PARTS OF GOVERNMENT” Ibid.

  “THE HEAD OF THE NATION” Bryce, American Commonwealth, 3:36.

  “THE PRESIDENT HAS A POSITION” Ibid., 3:68.

  “AS HE HAS THE EAR” Ibid., 3:72. Bryce went on to delineate the constraints a president faced despite the power of the office.