The Soul of America Read online

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  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following to reprint previously published material:

  THE HEIRS TO THE ESTATE OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., C/O WRITERS HOUSE, LLC: Excerpts from “I Have a Dream” (August 29, 1963), copyright © 1963 by Martin Luther King, Jr., and copyright renewed 1991 by Coretta Scott King. Reprinted with the permission of The Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., c/o Writers House LLC as agent for the proprietor, New York, NY.

  GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING AND BARRY N. MALZBERG: Excerpts from Where the Buck Stops: The Personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman, edited by Margaret Truman, copyright © 1989 by Margaret Truman. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing and Barry N. Malzberg.

  KNOPF, AN IMPRINT OF THE KNOPF DOUBLEDAY PUBLISHING GROUP, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC: Excerpts from The Paranoid Style in American Politics, copyright © 1952, 1964, 1965 by Richard Hofstadter. Used by permission of Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  THE PERMISSIONS COMPANY, INC., ON BEHALF OF THE DAVID GRAHAM DU BOIS TRUST: Excerpts from Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois, copyright © 1935 by W.E.B. Du Bois. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the David Graham Du Bois Trust.

  Hardback ISBN 9780399589812

  Ebook ISBN 9780399589836

  randomhousebooks.com

  TITLE PAGE: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, pictured here in 1941 at the president’s third inauguration, presided over the country from March 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, until FDR’s death in April 1945, on the verge of victory in World War II.

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Tom McKeveny

  Cover image: Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, N.Y.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction: To Hope Rather Than to Fear

  Chapter One: The Confidence of the Whole People

  Chapter Two: The Long Shadow of Appomattox

  Chapter Three: With Soul of Flame and Temper of Steel

  Chapter Four: A New and Good Thing in the World

  Chapter Five: The Crisis of the Old Order

  Chapter Six: Have You No Sense of Decency?

  Chapter Seven: What the Hell Is the Presidency For?

  Conclusion: The First Duty of an American Citizen

  Dedication

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration List and Credits

  By Jon Meacham

  About the Author

  History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.

  —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

  Nothing makes a man come to grips more directly with his conscience than the Presidency….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.

  —LYNDON B. JOHNSON

  “For only the President represents the national interest,” JFK said. “Upon him alone converge all the needs and aspirations of all parts of the country…all nations of the world.”

  INTRODUCTION

  TO HOPE RATHER THAN TO FEAR

  Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake, is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something. Of what? Of many things, but usually of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded, or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime.

  —W.E.B. DU BOIS, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935

  We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, First Inaugural Address, 1861

  THE FATE OF AMERICA—or at least of white America, which was the only America that seemed to count—was at stake. On the autumn evening of Thursday, October 7, 1948, South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, the segregationist Dixiecrat candidate for president of the United States, addressed a crowd of one thousand inside the University of Virginia’s Cabell Hall in Charlottesville. The subject at hand: President Harry S. Truman’s civil rights program, one that included anti-lynching legislation and protections against racial discrimination in hiring.

  Thurmond was having none of it. Such measures, he thundered, “would undermine the American way of life and outrage the Bill of Rights.” Interrupted by applause and standing ovations, Thurmond, who had bolted the Democratic National Convention in July to form the States’ Rights Democratic Party, was in his element in the Old Confederacy. “I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen,” Thurmond had said in accepting the breakaway party’s nomination in Birmingham, Alabama, “that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, into our churches.”

  The message was clear. He and his fellow Dixiecrats, he told the University of Virginia crowd, offered “the only genuine obstacle to the rise of socialism or communism in America.” Civil rights, Thurmond declared, were a Red plot against the Free World: “Only the States Rights Democrats—and we alone—have the moral courage to stand up to the Communists and tell them this foreign doctrine will not work in free America.”

  Nearly seventy years on, in the heat of a Virginia August in 2017, heirs to the Dixiecrats’ platform of white supremacy—twenty-first century Klansmen and neo-Nazis among them—gathered in Charlottesville, not far from where Thurmond had taken his stand. The story is depressingly well known: A young counter-protestor, Heather Heyer, was killed. Two Virginia state troopers died in a helicopter crash as part of an operation to maintain order. And the president of the United States—himself an heir to the white populist tradition of Thurmond and of Alabama’s George Wallace—said that there had been an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” as if there were more than one side to a conflict between neo-Nazis who idolized Adolf Hitler and Americans who stood against Ku Klux Klansmen and white nationalists. The remarks were of a piece with the incumbent president’s divisive language on immigration (among many o
ther subjects, from political foes to women) and his nationalist rhetoric.

  Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress—a period like our own. Americans today have little trust in government; household incomes lag behind our usual middle-class expectations. The fires of fear in America have long found oxygen when broad, seemingly threatening change is afoot. Now, in the second decade of the new century, in the presidency of Donald Trump, the alienated are being mobilized afresh by changing demography, by broadening conceptions of identity, and by an economy that prizes Information Age brains over manufacturing brawn. “We are determined to take our country back,” David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, said in Charlottesville. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. And that’s what we gotta do.”

  * * *

  —

  For many, the fact that we have arrived at a place in the life of the nation where 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 seems an unprecedented moment. 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.

  This book is a portrait of hours in which the politics of fear were prevalent—a reminder that periods of public dispiritedness are not new and a reassurance that they are survivable. In the best of moments, witness, protest, and resistance can intersect with the leadership of an American president to lift us to higher ground. In darker times, if a particular president fails to advance the national story—or, worse, moves us backward—then those who witness, protest, and resist must stand fast, in hope, working toward a better day. Progress in American life, as we will see, has been slow, painful, bloody, and tragic. Across too many generations, women, African Americans, immigrants, and others have been denied the full promise of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Yet the journey has gone on, and proceeds even now.

  There’s a natural tendency in American political life to think that things were always better in the past. The passions of previous years fade, to be inevitably replaced by the passions of the present. Nostalgia is a powerful force, and in the maelstrom of the moment many of us seek comfort in imagining that once there was a Camelot—without quite remembering that the Arthurian legend itself was about a court riven by ambition and infidelity. One point of this book is to remind us that imperfection is the rule, not the exception.

  On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, who worked as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair department store, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger in Jim Crow–era Alabama. She is pictured here in 1956.

  With countries as with individuals, a sense of proportion is essential. All has seemed lost before, only to give way, after decades of gloom, to light. And that is in large measure because, in the battle between the impulses of good and of evil in the American soul, what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” have prevailed just often enough to keep the national enterprise alive. To speak of a soul at all—either of a person or of country—can seem speculative and gauzy. Yet belief in the existence of an immanent collection of convictions, dispositions, and sensitivities that shape character and inform conduct is ancient and perennial.

  There is a rich history of discussion of what the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, writing in 1944, called the American Creed: devotion to principles of liberty, of self-government, and of equal opportunity for all regardless of race, gender, religion, or nation of origin. Echoing Myrdal, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, “The genius of America lies in its capacity to forge a single nation from peoples of remarkably diverse racial, religious, and ethnic origins….The American Creed envisages a nation composed of individuals making their own choices and accountable to themselves, not a nation based on inviolable ethnic communities….It is what all Americans should learn, because it is what binds all Americans together.”

  I have chosen to consider the American soul more than the American Creed because there is a significant difference between professing adherence to a set of beliefs and acting upon them. The war between the ideal and the real, between what’s right and what’s convenient, between the larger good and personal interest is the contest that unfolds in the soul of every American. The creed of which Myrdal and Schlesinger and others have long spoken can find concrete expression only once individuals in the arena choose to side with the angels. That is a decision that must come from the soul—and sometimes the soul’s darker forces win out over its nobler ones. 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. Our fate is contingent upon which element—that of hope or that of fear—emerges triumphant.

  Philosophically speaking, the soul is the vital center, the core, the heart, the essence of life. Heroes and martyrs have such a vital center; so do killers and haters. Socrates believed the soul was nothing less than the animating force of reality. “What is it that, present in a body, makes it living?” he asked in the Phaedo. The answer was brief, and epochal: “A soul.” In the second chapter of the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, the soul was life itself: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” In the Greek New Testament, when Jesus says “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” the word for “life” could also be translated as “soul.”

  In terms of Western thought, then, the soul is generally accepted as a central and self-evident truth. It is what makes us us, whether we are speaking of a person or of a people, which Saint Augustine of Hippo, writing in The City of God, defined as “an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love.”

  Common agreement as to the objects of their love: It’s a marvelous test of a nation. What have Americans loved in common down the centuries? The answer sheds light on that most essential of questions: What is the American soul? The dominant feature of that soul—the air we breathe, or, to shift the metaphor, the controlling vision—is a belief in the proposition, as Jefferson put in the Declaration, that all men are created equal. It is therefore incumbent on us, from generation to generation, to create a sphere in which we can live, live freely, and pursue happiness to the best of our abilities. We cannot guarantee equal outcomes, but we must do all we can to ensure equal opportunity.

  Hence a love of fair play, of generosity of spirit, of reaping the rewards of hard work, and of faith in the future. For all our failings—and they are legion—there is an abiding idea of an America in which anyone coming from anywhere, of any color or creed, has free access to what Lincoln called the “just and generous and prosperous system, which opens the way for all.” Too often, people view their own opportunity as dependent on domination over others, which helps explain why such people see the expansion of opportunity for all as a loss of opportunity for themselves. In such moments the forces of reaction thrive. In our finest hours, though, the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists; to look out rather than to turn inward; to accept rather than to reject. In so doing, America has grown ever stronger, confident that the choice of light over dark is the means by which we pursue progress.

  For reasons ranging from geography to market capitalism to Jeffersonian ideas of liberty, Americans have tended to believe, without irony, that Thomas Paine was right when he declared that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” In the twilight of his l
ife, Franklin D. Roosevelt recalled the words of his old Groton School rector, Endicott Peabody, who had told him, “Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights—then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.”

  Roosevelt quoted that observation in his final inaugural address in the winter of 1945, and American power and prosperity soon reached epic heights. The Peabody-Roosevelt gospel seemed true enough: The world was not perfect, nor was it perfectible, but on we went, in the face of inequities and inequalities, seeking to expand freedom at home, to defend liberty abroad, to conquer disease and go to the stars. For notably among nations, the United States has long been shaped by the promise, if not always by the reality, of forward motion, of rising greatness, and of the expansion of knowledge, of wealth, and of happiness.

  * * *

  —

  So it has been from the beginning—even before the beginning, really, if we think of 1776 as the birth of the nation. “I always consider the settlement of America with Reverence and Wonder,” John Adams wrote in 1765, “as the Opening of a grand scene and Design in Providence, for the Illumination of the Ignorant and the Emancipation of the slavish Part of Mankind all over the Earth.” Jefferson, too, spoke of the animating American conviction that tomorrow can be better than today. In his eighty-second year, Jefferson wrote of a “march of civilization” that had, in his long lifetime, passed “over us like a cloud of light, increasing our knowledge and improving our condition….And where this progress will stop no one can say.”