The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“The message of Martin Luther King, Jr.—that we should be judged on the content of our character, not on the color of our skin—dwells in the American soul; so does the menace of the Ku Klux Klan. History hangs precariously in the balance between such extremes.”

In establishing what he means by the soul of America, Meacham states that it is neither a beacon of hope nor a state of fear and brutality. Rather, it is comprised of all the attitudes and behaviors of the populace at any given moment in history, and therefore it tends to swing back and forth depending largely on the tone set by the president. This ebb and flow between acceptance and exclusion make up the narrative of US history, according to the author.

“You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.”

In this quote Harry S. Truman neatly encompasses the sense of civic duty any elected official—but particularly the president—must possess to steer the country toward its better angels. Unfortunately, Meacham repeatedly highlights individuals like George Wallace and Joseph McCarthy who prove Truman’s point by winning elections through appeals to their constituents’ worst instincts. And while many of the presidents profiled by Meacham won elections by taking the opposite route, he suggests that doing so takes a rare talent like Lincoln or one of the Roosevelts.

“There was nothing, Lyndon Johnson remarked, that ‘makes a man come to grips more directly with his conscience than the Presidency. Sitting in that chair involves making decisions that draw out a man’s fundamental commitments. The burden of his responsibility literally opens up his soul. No longer can he accept matters as given; no longer can he write off hopes and needs as impossible.’“

If there is a quote that best captures Meacham’s ideal approach to the presidency, this would be it. And to hear it spoken by Lyndon B. Johnson is particularly convincing, given that as a senator he supported the segregationist opinions of his Democratic constituents in Texas. That he grew into the presidency and its responsibilities, embracing landmark civil rights legislation and aggressively pushing his colleagues for it, makes Johnson one of Meacham’s most admired presidents.

“Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

Throughout the book Meacham depicts individuals who accomplished phenomenal things that served the entire national interest but who nonetheless compromised on important issues of racial justice—either with the American people or with themselves. Lincoln, whose beliefs on slavery and white supremacy were constantly evolving, is depicted here in this quote by abolitionist Frederick Douglass as the epitome of these uncomfortable compromises. The quote also plays into one of Meacham’s major themes: that agents of social change, particularly at the presidential level, are almost always profoundly imperfect individuals.

“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.”

In addition to expressing Meacham’s deep admiration for activists, journalists, and protesters, this quote also reflects the extent to which expressions of a president’s character are dependent on the character of the “people” he or she governs. That includes both the collective people of a nation, whose attitudes make up its “soul,” and also individuals like Alice Paul, Jane Addams, and Martin Luther King Jr. Given the complex and arduous work required of presidents and unelected reformers alike to enact social change, the achievements highlighted above are some of the most profound in human history.

“In the creed of the Lost Cause, arguments over states’ rights, not over slavery, had led to war. And now postbellum Southerners had to shift from military to political means in the battle for state power, which in practice meant the battle for white supremacy. Our history and our politics even now are unintelligible without first appreciating the roots of white Southern discontent about the verdict of the Civil War.”

If there is a metaphysical antagonist throughout the entirety of Meacham’s narrative, it is the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, which represents profound resentment and anxiety over losing one’s racial status. These inherited qualities have, in the author’s telling, informed the politics of fear at nearly every juncture in postbellum America, from hysteria over immigrants and communists, to resistance against repealing segregation and Jim Crow Laws, to present-day divisions across countless cultural vectors.

“Within about three decades of Lee’s surrender, angry and alienated Southern whites who had lost a war had successfully used terror and political inflexibility (a refusal to concede that the Civil War had altered the essential status of black people) to create a postbellum world of American apartheid.”

Building off the previous quote, this reflects the rather shocking success of the Lost Cause narrative in justifying a postwar apparatus of white supremacy in the South. In perhaps no other war has the defeated side so quickly reestablished a social and cultural postwar status quo that so closely resembles that of the prewar period. Meacham admits that this cannot entirely be attributed to the Lost Cause. At the same time, the narrative fortified white Southern intransigence against even modest Reconstruction efforts, at the great expense of black Southerners.

“TR’s capacity on some occasions to stand for equality and for openness and in other contexts to argue that it was the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to rule the world was a particular example of a more universal American inconsistency. We believed in life and liberty for some; we simultaneously believed in imposing our will on the lives and liberties of others on the grounds that they were innately inferior. The tension between these visions of identity, of assimilation, and of power have long shaped American life, and rarely more so than in the Age of the first Roosevelt.”

In this quote about Theodore Roosevelt, Meacham betrays a particular habit of justifying the imperfections of certain presidents by positioning them as men of their time. As a historian, identifying such individuals whose traits reflect the character of their era can be instructive. Yet doing so may run the risk of unfairly lionizing a historical figure despite deeply problematic traits, as Meacham arguably does in the case of Andrew Jackson.

“And yet, and yet—there is always an ‘and yet’ in American history. Taken all in all, Woodrow Wilson and his age are revealing examples of the battles between hope and fear. The era of the suffrage triumph, for instance, was also the age of segregation, of the suppression of free speech in wartime, of the Red Scare of 1919-20, and of the birth of a new Ku Klux Klan.”

Meacham offers an instructive point about US history. While a broad view of history can sometimes look like alternating periods of progress and reaction, in truth, hope and fear often sit uncomfortably atop each other in the same era. For Meacham, this reality makes the 1910s one of the most tumultuous decades in US history, and Woodrow Wilson one of the most uneasy presidents in terms of evaluating his legacy. Indeed, while Wilson was a reluctant yet impactful champion of women’s suffrage, the extent to which his actions and rhetoric enabled the second Klan and the Red Scare is a matter of serious debate.

“It was a movement so remarkably suited to its time and place that its growth matched the boom of the larger nation.”

In this quote from historian David H. Bennett, the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan is viewed as a painfully organic response to several troubling trends in America during the 1910s and 1920s. Chief among these trends was widespread hysteria over an influx of immigrant refugees fleeing World War I. Moreover, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 caused many Americans to fear communism for the first time, adding political anxieties to the cultural and economic anxieties already feeding into the politics of fear.

“One legacy of Dayton was that religion and science had joined race and ethnicity as a theater of war in the fight within the American soul.”

Meacham identifies the Scopes Trial over teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee, as a flashpoint that brought religion into the fold of America’s culture wars. From a 21st-century perspective, it is easy to believe that religion versus secularism has always been a deeply political divide in the United States. Yet according to Meacham, this divide has its roots in the 1920s.

“By 1928 or so, the Klan, like its Reconstruction predecessor in the early 1870s, was ebbing. And just in time: A Klan with substantial strength in the tumult of the 1930s might have increased the chances of America falling into the totalitarianism that consumed some European nations in the same years.”

The notion that America came to the brink of embracing European-style fascism in the 1930s is one that Meacham repeatedly emphasizes. On the subject of how the Klan may have accelerated this trend, it is worth noting that many scholars consider the KKK to be a fascist or proto-fascist organization. And with far greater member rolls and far greater political power in the 1920s than other, more fringe American fascist groups, it is not difficult to see how a large part of America may have fallen under the spell of such an organization during the worst of the Great Depression.

“America seemed on the cusp of a violent break from the ancien régime of democratic capitalism. Would the nation save itself or, like Italy and, as the ’30s unfolded, Germany, seek comfort in totalitarianism? Or might it choose the path of the Soviet Union, casting its lot with Communism?”

Meacham paints Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency during the 1930s as one caught between two polar extremes: fascism on the right and communism on the left. Given the economic desperation of the Great Depression and the ideological extremes so many Americans were willing to embrace, Roosevelt’s success in keeping the country together is almost on the level of Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to preserve the Union during the Civil War. This quote also reflects how close America came to embracing the very political system it fought so hard to vanquish during World War II.

“The loudest cheers during Roosevelt’s inaugural address on Saturday, March 4, 1933, did not come from his assurance that the only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself. No, as Eleanor Roosevelt noted, the greatest ovation greeted the new president’s assertion that the present emergency might require him to assume extended wartime executive powers.”

Meacham shows the appetite among Americans for a political strongman to lead them through the Great Depression. This observation is made all the more chilling when one considers the economic desperation that led Italians and Germans to embrace fascist leaders like Mussolini and Hitler, respectively. The quote also shows how the most memorable historical moments as identified in retrospect by historians are not always considered so significant by those who lived through them.

“A friend told him he might well be remembered as the greatest of presidents if he succeeded, but that he would go down as the worst if he failed. ‘If I fail,’ Roosevelt replied, ‘I shall be the last one.’ Publicly, though, he never wavered. Conservatives hated him; radicals thought him a milquetoast opportunist; liberals weren’t sure, from moment to moment, quite what to make of him.”

Given the profound and hallowed legacy of Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives, it is sometimes easy to forget how controversial the president was in his day. The sheer magnitude of the calamity facing the country, along with the desperate uncertainty regarding its future, would have likely made any bold leader controversial at the time. Yet this quote also reflects how Roosevelt was forced to contend with the forces of fear on all sides as he attempted to guide the country away from ruin.

“If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.”

With the hindsight of history, it is easy to believe that a rejection of Nazism was endemic to the American spirit from the beginning. Yet as this quote from Roosevelt regarding American hero Charles Lindbergh shows, embracing Nazism was by no means the taboo it would become during and after World War II. It is also a disturbing observation in light of a recent resurgence of Nazi sympathies on both sides of the Atlantic in the 21st century.

“One wishes for a better outcome, for wiser heads, for a more compassionate public. Yet one wishes in vain. The only comfort, if we can call it that, is that a knowledge of our past failings may equip us to confront evil without delay when evil comes again. For it will.”

Here Meacham refers to the debate over whether Roosevelt could have done more to help European Jews in the months and years leading up to Nazi Germany’s Final Solution. As ever, the author is sympathetic toward leaders like Roosevelt who manage to accomplish a great deal with severely limited political capital. At the same time, Meacham’s attitude amounts to “forgiving but not forgetting” the sins of past leaders, so that Americans might better navigate these calamities when they arise again.

“The American ideal of what Henry Clay had called ‘self-made men’ in 1832 is so central to the national mythology that there’s often a missing character in the story Americans like to tell about American prosperity: government, which frequently helped create the conditions for the making of those men.”

In something of a classic American irony, the unprecedented prosperity of the postwar era led many Americans to adopt libertarian attitudes against a large government role in capitalism. Yet according to Meacham, this prosperity would not have been possible without dramatic interventions by the federal government dating back to the mid-19th century. Furthermore, this is yet another example of how the myth of America differs wildly from its reality, a pervasive theme in the book.

“Palmer Hoyt, the editor and publisher of The Denver Post, thought McCarthyism required a new way of reporting. In a memorandum to his staff, Hoyt suggested that neutrality was not the highest virtue—truth was.”

One can find clear echoes of this quote in 21st-century debates over how journalists should best cover the Donald Trump presidency. To Meacham and other observers, journalists trained to express neutrality face a profound challenge when it comes to reporting on publicly relevant individuals who trade in regular falsehoods. This challenge came to a head in 2020 as news outlets debated whether to continue airing Donald Trump’s daily coronavirus briefings given the number of potentially dangerous falsehoods they included.

“So ran the line from the polemics of Edward Alfred Pollard to the politics of George Corley Wallace—a line connecting the Civil War to the Cold War, the 1860s to the 1960s, a distant America to the contemporary one. The federal government was the villain. States’ rights were the salvation of the Founders’ vision. White supremacy was to be protected by whatever means possible.”

Here Meacham completes the Lost Cause thread that runs through the entire narrative. To the author, unresolved resentments against both nonwhites and the federal government at large are evident in virtually every movement of fear and hate in America, from Reconstruction to the civil rights era. Given that America is not alone in periodically embracing the politics of fear, one can assume that internal divisions along racial and cultural lines would still exist even if the Lost Cause narrative had not been so successful. Yet it is clear to Meacham that this narrative exacerbated such divisions and continues to do so.

“A senator would come to Kennedy and say, ‘I’d love to go along with you, Mr. President, but it would give me serious trouble back home.’ Kennedy would always say, ‘I understand.’ Now Johnson knew damn well the senator was going to tell him that, and he never let the senator get to the point of his troubles back home. He would tell him about the flag, and by God, the story of the country, and he’d get them by lapels and they were out the door. That’s why he got so much done so fast.”

Here Roosevelt administration lawyer James H. Rowe Jr. explains why Johnson was so much more successful than Kennedy at enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson intimately familiar with Southern politics surrounding segregation, and he also possessed the political will to mold the legislative branch to his own character. As this quote shows, Johnson very much exemplifies all the qualities Meacham looks for in a president, particularly a strong moral center and an even stronger will to act on it.

“For Lewis, the civil rights struggle always centered on whether the best of the American soul (the grace and the love, the godliness and the generosity) could finally win out over the worst (the racism and the hatred, the fear and the cruelty).”

Among the protesters and activists highlighted by Meacham, few reflect his attitude toward America’s soul better than John Lewis. Attacked by National Guardsmen on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday and bleeding from a grievous head wound, Lewis was satisfied to die as a representative of America’s better angels. To Meacham, many are willing to fight for the soul of America, but a precious few are willing to die for it like Lewis.

“The dynamics of the ’68 campaign resonate still: Nixon—advised, among others, by Roger Ailes, who would go on to found the Fox News Channel—campaigned on a cultural populism, arguing that elites and implying that minorities were undercutting American greatness. That November, running on a third-party ticket, George Wallace carried 13.5 percent of the popular vote nationally and won five states: Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, and Mississippi, giving him forty-six electoral votes. It was not a bad starting point for a subsequent populist candidate who would tell voters that walls and tariffs would bring back the America they thought they had once known.”

This is among the most explicit parallels Meacham draws between past politicians and Donald Trump. In fact, it is less a parallel and more a precursor, as the author positions Trump as the heir to Nixon’s scorched strategy of racial resentment. Finally, the quote completes the thread that began with the Lost Cause and persists to this day, as evidenced by Trump’s 2016 election win.