The Soul of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels

Jon Meacham, “The Soul of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels,” Random House, 2018, 272 pp.

At the close of his First Inaugural Address, President Abraham Lincoln entreated the seceding slaveholders to “swell the chorus of the Union” until the nation was touched “by the better angels of our nature.” However, five weeks after his inauguration, the secessionists fired on Fort Sumter and the Civil War began.  

Author, Jon Meacham appalled at the election of Trump and the anger/fear exhibited in the country, such as the nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, points out that the present is similar to periods in our history when fear and division were also prominent. The current political turmoil is not unprecedented and we have survived before.  Our better angels, Meacham implies, reside in that part of the American soul that inspired the Square Deal, the New Deal, and the Great Society.  This book is the story of how we have endured moments of madness and of injustice, giving the better angels of which Lincoln spoke on the eve of the Civil War a chance to prevail—and how we can again (P. 19), even though our present president appears determined to undermine the rule of law, as well as a free press; and politics has become dominated by hysterical, crusading, partisans.

The book concludes with some worthy injunctions about getting active in politics, rejecting tribalism, and respecting facts. But these injunctions fail to convey the profound depth of the crisis. Not since 1861 has the authoritarian part of the American soul so damaged and endangered our democracy and the rule of law. It will not be overcome easily. And so it makes sense to recall, as Meacham does, Lincoln’s invocation of our better angels in his First Inaugural, but only if we understand that history brought not an “easier triumph,” as Lincoln reflected in his Second Inaugural, but a fearsome fight for the survival of the nation’s ideals, one that required more than angels.

I was disappointed that the book says virtually nothing about how the well-documented right-wing radicalization of the Republican Party paved the way for Donald Trump — from Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy to Ronald Reagan’s dog-whistle appeals to states’ rights racism, to Newt Gingrich’s systematic smear tactics.

My Notes:

Pg. 10f:  To know what has come before is to be armed against despair.  If the men and women of the past, with all their flaws and limitations and ambitions and appetites, could press on through ignorance and superstition, racism and sexism, selfishness and greed, to create a freer stronger nation, then perhaps we too can right wrongs and take another step toward a more perfect Union.

Pg. 39:  Eisenhower said: ‘You do not lead by hitting people over the head.  Any damn fool can do that but it’s usually called assault—not leadership.  Leadership is persuasion—and conciliation—and education—and patience. ‘(I would add: EXAMPLE).

Pg. 42:  Reason, religion, and capitalism were the tributaries that met to form the powerful American river.  By replacing revelation and hereditary authority with rationality and republicanism, the American nation gave political form to the idea that the divine rights of monarchs and prelates had to surrender to the primacy of individual conscience and equality; (at least of propertied white males).  This view drew on the secular philosophical insights, the ethos of the Protestant Reformation, and the prevailing culture of the Scientific Revolution.

Pg. 62:  Even the most obtuse chief executive, though, can be formidable without being indomitable.  The Civil Rights Act of 1866 and Reconstruction legislation in 1867 that created military districts in the South and guaranteed black suffrage were passed over President Johnson’s veto.  President Johnson also unsuccessfully opposed the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to former slaves and guaranteed, at least on paper, equal protection.  The amendment established the principle of birthright citizenship (thus overturning Dred Scott and making blacks citizens), and with its equal protection clause put the idea of equality into the ‘constitution for the first time, making the federal government, not the states, the protector of Americans’ liberties

Pg. 103:  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. (Grant had squashed the post-Civil War Klan but it revived after Grant left office and Reconstruction was ended).  By 1924 the Klan had a presence in all forty-eight states.  This new Klan hated blacks, Jews, and Catholics. (P. ‘110).

Pg. 139:  A small group of rich Wall Streeters tried their hand, in 1933, at conceiving and launching a plot to supplant FDR as president by attempting to convince the retired Marine major general Smedley Butler, a respected veteran, to raise an army, march on Washington, and take the capital.  They planned to impose a fascist state.  (The episode was also known as the ‘Business Plot.’)  Butler was an unwilling traitor and told Hoover about the conspiracy. 

Pg. 153:  In a pre-1936 campaign conversation Roosevelt sketched out how he would oppose himself if he were running as a Republican in the coming race for reelection.  ‘I would say: I am for social security, work relief, etc., etc.  But the Democrats cannot be entrusted with the administration of these fine ideals.  I would cite chapter and verse on WPA inefficiency—and there’s plenty of it—as there is bound to be in such a vast emergency program.  You know….the more I think about it, the more I think I could lick myself.’

Pg. 161:  In 1940, fearing a third Roosevelt term, the Third Reich had sought to influence the presidential election by placing newspaper ads and paying for isolationist congressmen to attend the Republican National Convention. 

Pg. 165:  Beginning in 1942, about 117,000 Americans of Japanese descent were consigned to concentration camps for the duration of the war when Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment.

Pg. 194:  Senator Joseph McCarthy recognized the growth of mass media and their use in politics that brought politics closer to the people than ever before and made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators felt themselves involved. 

Pg. 249:  George Wallace in 1968 earned 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.