OPINION:
THE SOUL OF AMERICA: THE BATTLE FOR OUR BETTER ANGELS
By Jon Meacham
Random House, $40, 416 pages
The United States has a problem. We have devolved into a mostly anti-intellectual country, instead now run by showmen and politicians and talking heads and hucksters who would rather look and talk of themselves on TV or Facebook or look into a camera than talk of freedom, liberty, wisdom, philosophy. Where the great minds went, we don’t know.
At the same time, the last two years have had a spike not just in anti-intellectualism, but in division. Much of it is racial. To some, President Trump himself is responsible for much of the division. To others, institutions like big media, big education and big entertainment are the ones most responsible.
All of this — the show-over-substance, the racial divide and the violence and the political divide and all else — has a single root: Fear.
We may be afraid, says Jon Meacham, but we should not be. We are not doomed. We have been here before. And that is what makes us Americans. “The war between the ideal and the real, between what’s right and what’s convenient, between the larger good and personal interest in the contest that unfolds in the soul of every American.” Hopeful. The endless search for better angels.
“Yet, the journey goes on, and proceeds even now.” But as he further says, “One point of this book is to remind us that imperfection is the rule, not the exception.”
So Mr. Meacham writes in his new book “The Soul of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels.” Mr. Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, perfectly writes a mix of philosophy and history into a coherent treatise.
The soul that he speaks of, he says, “is what makes us us.”
What, then, is our nation’s soul? To do better than yesterday, to do better than today.
Jon Meacham paints an argument here, that history is not all rosy as we may think. When we say the country is doomed now, we wash away all troubles that got us here. We should look forward.
“The Soul of America” is not solely a history book. It concerns history, certainly, and history is its main topic, but it’s not solely historical. It isn’t just a list or narrative of facts and dates. It isn’t a copy-paste of Wikipedia. It’s an argument, a thesis. A treatise. And a good one at that.
In came Abraham Lincoln and his Gettysburg Address in 1863. The Civil War, supposedly fought over secession and land grabs and the rights of states, was raging. Lincoln wanted to change its very nature: “It was not about territory or spoils,” Mr. Meacham writes. “It was not about the boundaries of a nation It was, Lincoln was saying now, about democracy and equality.” Lincoln leapt from a logistical war to a war of ideologies.
The richness of Mr. Meacham’s writing makes the essential point that nearly all men who have occupied the White House have gone on to become better men, better angels. American Exceptionalism. Not all, but most changed for the better, became the awesomeness of the office and the power to do good.
We weren’t just fighting a battle of race in the past: Women did not have the right to vote until August 18, 1920, with the ratification of the 19th Amendment. “And yet, and yet — there is always an ’and yet’ in American history,” Mr. Meacham warns.
You can almost hear the sigh from him. “The era of suffrage triumph 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.”
He continues, hammering it home. “The story of America is thus one of slow, often unsteady steps forward.”
In the face of violence, literal civil war, humiliation, we come out on top. That is America, always striving upward, surviving.
America has a poet laureate, and maybe what is needed as well is a historian laureate to advise presidents and national leaders. Can one imagine if a historian had been at President George W. Bush’s side, rather than George Tenet’s, telling the president that Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the British and later the Soviets could not invade and hold or control Afghanistan?
If such a position were created, Jon Meacham would be an excellent choice.
There are some small quibbles with “The Soul of America,” but far too tiny to dwell upon.
With this book, Mr. Meacham does it again, but in a first, it is a prescriptive book, breaking with his previous masterpieces on Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson and FDR. He is a distinguished intellectual in an otherwise anti-intellectual country. A pilgrim in an unholy land. We hope for many more people like him, whose views — agree or not with them — are more than just tweets and twaddles with barely a thought.
• Craig Shirley is a Reagan biographer and presidential historian. Scott Mauer is his researcher.
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