53 pages • 1 hour read
The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
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Themes
The Politics of Fear Versus the Politics of Hope
From Reconstruction to the Red Scare to the civil rights movement, Meacham views US history through a simple yet convincing dichotomy: fear versus hope. By extension, politicians use fear to divide individuals along racial and cultural lines, while hope is used to unite Americans by offering equal protection to as many as possible, given the constraints of the era. When Meacham writes about the battle over America’s soul, fear and hope are the two combatants.
For example, rather than attempt to unite the country across regional and racial boundaries, Andrew Johnson tied his political fate to making appeals to just one passionate constituency: white Southern Democrats who wanted to preserve white supremacy in the South. This political strategy—along with his own white supremacy—led Johnson to make deplorably racist statements like this: “Whenever [black Americans] have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism” (62). And while white postbellum Southerners needed no encouragement in their racism, Meacham believes that such presidential proclamations can set the tone of the nation, for good or ill.
By contrast, Meacham identifies Theodore Roosevelt as a president who trafficked in the politics of hope more often than not. On the topic of race in America, Roosevelt said, “The only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he shows himself worthy to have” (87). His rhetoric on immigration is even stronger: “It is a base outrage to oppose a man because of his religion or birthplace, and all good citizens will hold any such effort in abhorrence” (75). At the same time, Roosevelt is an instructive example in that he reflects the limitations of hopeful rhetoric. Roosevelt’s America was still a place of immense racial inequalities, and he did little to preserve black suffrage in the South. Moreover, his rhetoric on American Indians and the primacy of Anglo-Saxon culture cause Meacham to conclude that “it would be a mistake to hold Roosevelt up as a forerunner or as a prophet of the racially and ethnically diverse America of the twenty-first century” (75).
Even more problematic is Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was capable of speaking stirringly about the evils of lynching in speeches that hinted at “what a powerful civil rights president he might have been if he had put his heart and mind into the cause” (105). Yet given the fact that Wilson put America behind in terms of civil rights by resegregating numerous federal agencies, it is difficult to praise him for unifying rhetoric on race issues. On the issue of women’s suffrage his record is better, as he championed the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. For these reasons, Wilson is very much a case study on the power and limitations of the politics of hope.
More than most presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt married the politics of hope to real action, uniting an extraordinarily fractured country to endure the Great Depression and later to win World War II. That said, Roosevelt is also responsible for one of the most shameful acts of fear-politics in US history: the internment of 117,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.
McCarthy, meanwhile, is a veritable maestro of the politics of fear, sparking hysterical paranoia over communism through his expert manipulation of television, then a new and more direct media platform. Like Andrew Johnson, McCarthy is an enormously instructive example for Meacham as he works out his attitude toward Donald Trump. He writes, “To remember Joe McCarthy, for instance, gives us a way to gauge demagoguery” (270).
Meacham’s final profile in hope is that of Lyndon B. Johnson. Perhaps more than any other president included in the book, Johnson’s hopeful vision of a more equal America was actually realized to a significant extent, thanks to the president’s policy work and Martin Luther King’s activist work.
Donald Trump as Metatext
Rarely in the book does Meacham mention Donald Trump by name. He does so in the Introduction when discussing what he believes was a shameful response to the 2017 murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A few pages later, he decries Trump’s attitude toward the presidency as a reality television competition, writing, “This Hobbesian view of the presidency—that every single day is a war of all against all—is novel and out of sync with much of the presidential past” (26). Yet aside from a brief reminder that McCarthy’s lawyer Roy Cohn later worked for Trump, the 45th president need not be explicitly named for readers to sense the shadow he casts over the book. For example, one need not read Trump’s name to know what Meacham means when, after a litany of quotations from some of America’s most inspiring presidents, he writes, “To hear such voices is to be reminded of what we have lost” (27).
Later, when Meacham explores the presidency of Andrew Johnson, he writes:
Resentful and impassioned, Johnson also riled up the Washington’s Birthday crowd with claims that his opponents were considered having him assassinated. Rather than offering reassurance to an anxious public, then, Johnson chose to foment chaos and promulgate fears of conspiracy (64).
Whether one reads that and is reminded of the 45th president will depend on the reader. Yet based on subsequent interviews, Meacham is clearly drawing a connection between the rhetoric of Johnson and the rhetoric of Trump. The same is true of McCarthy, particularly with respect to how journalists have been forced to rethink their approach toward neutrality and reporting both sides, particularly when one side willfully spreads falsehoods to muddy discourse as much as possible. Even relatively minor rhetorical gestures toward America’s better angels made by less-than-towering presidents like Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge are put into perspective by recalling Trump’s Charlottesville comments.
The connection to McCarthy is made once more in the Conclusion when Meacham quotes journalist Richard Rovere, who explains how lucky America is that it has never had a McCarthy-esque figure as president. Meacham writes, “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” (270).
Given the extent to which Trump informs the narrative without explicitly appearing in it, the book is designed for a reader living through his presidency. And while that may date the book, Meacham very much intends to write for a contemporary audience for whom the president—for better or worse, depending on the reader—is a constant metaphysical presence.
Looking to the Past to Cope with the Present
The idea that understanding the past is critical for navigating the present and planning for the future is so essential to the work of historians that it’s almost a tautology to say it. Every historian believes this; it is why they are historians. Yet for Meacham, Americans at present live in an era when looking to the past is more important than ever. In bemoaning the fact that in 2007, “a grand wizard of the KKK can claim, all too plausibly, that he is at one with the will of the president of the United States,” Meacham also adds, “History, however, shows us that we are frequently vulnerable to fear, bitterness, and strife. The good news is that we have come through such darkness before” (5). This is but one example where the author tempers his grim assessments with an optimistic slant. For example, in the passage where Meacham quotes a series of inspiring presidents only to conclude that hearing “such voices is to be reminded of what we have lost,” he adds, “but also what can one day be recaptured” (27).
Meacham invokes past periods of strife and division so readers can learn from history’s mistakes. These are teachable moments, yes, but they are also coping mechanisms, reminders of America’s ability to beat back hate and fear, which to likeminded readers serve as glimmers of light piercing through the darkness of the present moment.
But this isn’t to say that Meacham counsels complacency or a blind faith that things will change. Consider his argument that in the 1930s America came disturbingly close to teetering into totalitarianism. Reading those passages, one can easily see how if not for the work of Roosevelt and many others in his administration, along with millions of Americans who rejected fascism in favor of the New Deal initiatives, American democracy could have fallen by the wayside. Thus, the book serves at least three purposes: It is an educational tool, a coping mechanism, and a rallying cry toward better citizenship and cooler heads.
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