New York Times Book Review of the Soul of America
Nonfiction
A Battle for the 'Soul of America'? Information technology'southward as Quondam equally America, One Historian Notes
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THE SOUL OF AMERICA
The Battle for Our Ameliorate Angels
By Jon Meacham
Illustrated. 403 pp. Random House. $thirty.
At the close of his Showtime Inaugural Address, President Abraham Lincoln entreated the seceding slaveholders to "great the chorus of the Matrimony" until the nation was touched "by the better angels of our nature." It is among the most eloquent sentences past our almost eloquent president, and subsequent speechwriters and pundits accept quoted information technology nearly to death. But as Lincoln knew well, eloquence is non necessarily the same as efficacy. V weeks after his inauguration, the secessionists fired on Fort Sumter and the slaughter of the Civil War began.
Jon Meacham is the latest writer to cite Lincoln's plea, which helps suggest why his new volume, "The Soul of America," is at one time and so engaging and troubling. Appalled by the ascendancy of Donald J. Trump, and shaken past the deadly white nationalist rallies in Charlottesville in 2017, Meacham returns to other moments in our history when fear and division seemed rampant. He wants to remind us that the current political turmoil is not unprecedented, that as a nation we take survived times worse than this. And initially this sounds a petty also reassuring.
But Meacham quickly adds that America's survival has never been automatic. Roofing the century that stretched from the abolitionism of slavery to the civil-rights victories of the mid-1960s, he explains how the nation has required activist liberal presidents — above all Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Due south. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson — to replace fear with hope and then to reverse injustice and aggrandize equality. Our better angels, Meacham implies, reside in that role of the American soul that inspired the Square Bargain, the New Deal and the Bully Society.
At a time when liberalism is besieged by populisms of both the right and the left, these portions of Meacham'due south book offer a stiff if unfashionable reminder of all that progressive American authorities has achieved. His book even recalls the kinds of confident histories written 50 years ago past the likes of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Eric Goldman, in which the nation was delivered from the forces of complacency and reaction, and achieved great political and social reforms. Meacham widens the field of historical influence to include activists and intellectuals usually deemed exterior the mainstream, in a higher place all Westward. E. B. Du Bois.
Meacham commends a particular liberal disposition that once dominated our politics but whose influence has long since waned. It is a public philosophy akin to what Schlesinger described equally the politics of "the vital center," devoted to egalitarian reform just disbelieving in human perfection, fierce in its advocacy only humble in the face of human folly. Above all, it is pragmatic, its idealism tempered non by timidity or cupidity or corporate fealty but by a respect for its own limits. This is also, of form, the view of James Madison, and information technology undergirds the Constitution. By its very nature, it is anti-Trump, whose narcissism is only the beginning of his antithesis to the American political tradition. Yet it is also at odds with the strident purism so evident today from many quarters that insists on turning politics into a kind of crusading hysteria.
Those are the engaging parts of "The Soul of America." What's troubling is the continuing history, handsomely if less fully documented in the book, of another abiding element of the American "soul," an disciplinarian politics that is absolutist, oligarchic, anti-egalitarian, demagogic and almost always racist. This political strain emerged before Meacham fully begins his story, flowering in the Confederate States of America, the modernistic world's first experiment in building a nation founded explicitly on racial supremacy. Although defeated in 1865, this night strain was never destroyed; indeed, if the Confederacy lost the Civil War, Meacham remarks, in of import ways it won the peace following the white South's fitful overthrow of Reconstruction.
Thereafter, he shows, the authoritarian strain mutated into numerous deplorable appeals and movements that incited white racism, demonized immigrants and promoted plutocracy. For adherents — as he observes of the original racist neo-Confederates during Reconstruction — the rejection of federal dominion was "a holy crusade."
Although these antidemocratic impulses have sometimes infected conventional partisan politics, for the most function national parties and politicians have kept them at bay. Under President Trump, still, they have go not just ascendant in the White House but entrenched in what was long ago Lincoln's Republican Party. In response, Meacham tries to summon the better angels past looking back at when America truly has been great.
He is constructive as ever at writing history for a broad readership. A announcer and presidential biographer who won a Pulitzer for his life of Andrew Jackson, he has seen how American politics works close up, as about bookish historians accept not, nevertheless he has remained uncynical. He is an balletic and appealing storyteller. While interested in providing a usable history with lessons for the nowadays, he tries to judge the by on its own terms, resisting the easy moralizing that smugly elevates the right-thinking living above the thoroughly unenlightened expressionless. Yet he does not on that account pardon his heroes' serious shortcomings, whether it be Theodore Roosevelt's Anglo-Saxon imperialism or Franklin D. Roosevelt's's wartime order to intern Japanese-Americans.
Some of the book's most surprising passages describe how political leaders well outside Meacham'due south pantheon stood upwardly to racists and right-fly demagogues. When the 2d Ku Klux Klan arose in the 1920s, President Warren 1000. Harding, in a oral communication in Birmingham, Ala., bravely and pointedly (if less than ardently) defended blacks' civil rights. His successor, Calvin Coolidge, called the guarantee of equal rights for blacks a ramble imperative that was key "to the traditions and … the principles of the Republican Political party." Thirty years later, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's fate was sealed when Senate Republicans, including Ralph Flanders and Prescott Bush, denounced him. Meacham leaves it to his readers to draw the connections — or the stunning lack thereof — betwixt the improve angels then and the night side now.
Unfortunately, the book's historical narrative ends with a rousing account of the collaboration between Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. in achieving the Civil Rights Deed of 1964 and the Voting Rights Human action of 1965. The Vietnam War, the explosion of white backlash and ghetto violence, and the fitful plummet of the New Deal coalition receive extremely short shrift. Suddenly, nosotros are thrust dorsum into the present, with little agreement of how nosotros got here from at that place. Specifically, at that place is virtually goose egg about how the well-documented right-wing radicalization of the Republican Party paved the way for Donald Trump — from Richard Nixon'southward Southern strategy to Ronald Reagan's domestic dog-whistle appeals to states' rights racism, to Newt Gingrich's systematic smear tactics and the devolution of the G.O.P. into what the political scientists Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Isle of man have called an "insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme." Peradventure Meacham understands the final one-half century of American politics differently, which would be interesting to consider. Absent that key explanation, though, his volume cannot adequately address and measure out what's gone and so wrong with the American soul and what we can do to right information technology.
The book concludes with some worthy injunctions well-nigh getting active in politics, rejecting tribalism and respecting facts. Simply these neglect to convey the profound depth of the crunch. Not since 1861 has the authoritarian function of the American soul so damaged and endangered our commonwealth and the rule of law. It will not be overcome easily. And then information technology makes sense to recall, as Meacham does, Lincoln's invocation of our amend angels in his Get-go Inaugural, but only if we sympathize that history brought not an "easier triumph," every bit Lincoln reflected in his Second Inaugural, only a fearsome fight for the survival of the nation'due south ethics, one that required more than angels.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/books/review/jon-meacham-soul-of-america.html
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