‘America’ offers hope for a divided nation
Relax, America, author Jon Meacham tells his readers in The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (Random House, 414 pp., ★★★★). We’ve been here before and survived.
Hard times have fallen on America often during our 242 years as a country, often bringing out the worst among many of us. Racism and hatred have flourished; fear and panic often prevailed. Politicians elected to lead have instead catered to our worst instincts and separated us by race, gender and religion.
Yet each time, Meacham writes, we have managed to overcome hatred and divisiveness. “In the main, the America of the twenty-first century is, for all its shortcomings, freer and more accepting than it has ever been. If that weren’t the case, right-wing populist attacks on immigrants and the widening mainstream wouldn’t be so ferocious,” he writes. “A tragic element of history is that every advance must contend with the forces of reaction.”
Those advances, Meacham writes, came during the civil rights era of the 1960s, the fight against the anti-communist hysteria of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and the efforts to raise the working class from the horrific tenements of the late 19th century. During each period, America’s better angels eventually won out. Meacham has become one of America’s most earnest and thoughtful biographers and historians. That was a reason he was chosen to speak at the funeral of Barbara Bush, the wife of one of Meacham’s subjects, former president George H.W. Bush. He employs all of those skills in The Soul of America, a thoroughly researched and smoothly written roundup of some of the worst parts of American history and how they were gradually overcome. Meacham shows how the Ku Klux Klan rose and fell and then rose and fell again, how fear and the compulsion to exploit that fear by manipulative leaders threatened to overcome those who refused to give in to it.
The Klan, Meacham writes, first gained prominence after the Civil War in the defeated Confederacy in reac-
Meacham shows that history and human events run in cycles that alternate between calm and despair. Only the names and faces of the perpetrators change.
tion to black Americans gaining the rights long denied them. The Klan rose again after World War I because of the fear of communism and uncontrolled immigration.
It faded again through the quiet leadership of President Calvin Coolidge, who said in August 1924 that the Constitution defended the rights of all Americans, regardless of color. Here, however, Meacham somewhat undercuts his argument by citing a drop in legal immigration caused by a racist 1924 law that forbade Asians from becoming citizens as a reason for the lowered tensions. In that respect, the Klan and its sympathizers weren’t defeated — they had accomplished one of their goals.
All too often, people tend to think the times in which they live as somehow unique in the human experience. Meacham shows, however, that history and human events run in cycles that alternate between calm and despair. Only the names and faces of the perpetrators change. Meacham gives readers a long-term perspective on American history and a reason to believe the soul of America is ultimately one of kindness and caring, not rancor and paranoia.
Finally, Meacham provides advice to find our better angels: Enter the arena, resist tribalism, respect facts and deploy reason, find a critical balance and keep history in mind. He has provided a great way to do it.
Ray Locker is the Washington enterprise editor of USA TODAY and author of Nixon’s Gamble: How a President’s Own Secret Government Destroyed His Administration and the upcoming Haig’s Coup.