"We've been here before," said historian Jon Meacham for an interview with Atlanta's WABE-FM. His book The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels surveys times we've been "here" -- a place when fear and resentments erode confidence in our institutions. Focusing on internal conflicts that have happened since Lincoln's futile appeal to "the better angels of our nature," Meacham highlights what we did to recover ourselves.
As Meacham describes events of the past, we hear resonance with today's newscasts. The "deep state" paranoia is old news: Senator Joe McCarthy claimed to have a list of 200 Communists in Federal Government (he didn't). Support for the Ku Klux Klan actually spiked after exposés ran in a New York paper, because the idea that "eastern elites" purvey "fake news" goes back at least as far as Reconstruction (126). Louisiana's Governor - and - Senator Huey Long easily cowed opposition by baseless accusations, lapped up by his supporters (143). Heroic airman Charles Lindbergh rallied a large swath of the population calling for "America First," admiring fascist dictators, and warning against Jewish influence (155ff). Birthers fabricated African ancestry for Warren G. Harding when he made known his support of civil rights for black citizens (129). A governor of Georgia, speaking to a national convention of the Klan, proposed "a wall of steel... as high as heaven" to keep out immigrants from southern Europe (120).
As someone has said, "Courage is the memory of past successes," and Meacham helps us to remember. Persistent truth-telling in court, political speech, and news media can work, as the facts eventually undercut the Klan's claim to represent the best values of civilization. A deep American sense of fair play and decency can, and did, rise up in disgust at the haters and fear-mongers: The Dalton, GA Citizen wrote of the Klan in 1925, "appealing to race and religious hatreds is … thoroughly un-American and … contemptible …" (127). The memorable line that deflated Senator McCarthy's three - year - run on fledgling TV's first reality series was the response to McCarthy's smear of a young man on the staff of army counsel Joseph Welch, when Welch asked McCarthy, "Have you left no sense of decency?" (201). The Red Scare that followed the Great War fell apart when the Justice Department's own practices to deport immigrants brought public outrage and ridicule. Meacham cites an ACLU attorney's remark as typical of the time: "I hate to see people pushed around" (116). Sometimes, it's just fatigue that deprives the blowhards of support. FDR paused his reforms in 1935 because people in any audience get tired of hearing the same high note over and over (35).
Meacham, putting familiar events in this purposeful context, creates the feeling that certain American characters have carried on a conversation across the centuries. Some of these are historical characters who don't all get credit for insights or moral courage:
- Andrew Jackson headed off secession by South Carolina in 1832 with a positive invitation to the states' people to "contemplate" the "bond of common interest and general protection" of the Union, its encouragement of education and arts "Which render life agreeable," and its offer of "asylum where the wretched and oppressed find a refuge and support" (31). Jackson concludes, "Look on this picture of happiness and honor, and say We too are citizens of America."
- Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower explained that leadership isn't "beating someone over the head" but a process of education and conciliation (39). No fan of Joe McCarthy, he prepared a statement defending the Secretary of State from the Senator's lies, but bowed to political advisors, and, to his ever-lasting regret, omitted that paragraph from a speech in McCarthy's home state of Wisconsin. But TV newsman Edward R. Murrow used clips of the Sentaor's egregious moments to expose him; Ike gave a TV address warning America not to "fall prey to hysterical thinking" and promising that "the American belief in decency and justice and progress and the value of individual liberty [will] carry us through" the real dangers of the time (200). A hard core of 34% of the electorate continued to support McCarthy, until the Senate censured him. McCarthy faded from the news and drank himself into liver failure.
- Harding and Coolidge both stood up to popular opinion on behalf of ethnic minorities. In Birmingham, the heart of the segregated South, Harding said "let the black man vote" and ensure "equal opportunity in economics and education" (127). "Silent Cal" Coolidge wrote a rebuke to a reporter in New York who objected to a black candidate for Congress. Half a million black soldiers fought in the Great War, Coolidge wrote, and the Constitution guarantees equal rights. "It is the source of your rights and my rights. I propose to regard it" (131). The popular President's reply was interpreted as a rebuke to the Klan. Speaking to the American Legion, Coolidge pushed back against anti-immigrant prejudice: "No matter by what various crafts we came here [i.e., Mayflower or "steerage"], we are all now in the same boat...." He continued to assert that differences of "racial stock" and culture
will certainly be elements of strength rather than of weakness. They will give variety to our tastes and interests. They will broaden our vision, strengthen our understanding, encourage the true humanities, and enrich our whole mode and conception of life" (132-133).
- Freedom from fear is a familiar part of FDR's rhetoric, but I was touched by a prayer he composed with daughter and son-in-law, using the Episcopal Prayer Book for a model, offered on the radio in the evening of D-Day:
- FDR sent families of Japanese descent to concentration camps, while their white neighbors went in to snatch up their property. Meacham tells how General Joseph Stilwell rode the train cross-country to deliver personally the Medal of Honor to the family of soldier Kazuo Masuda. The General was making a public statement doing this, and brought along a movie star, 34 - year - old Ronald Reagan, who made this speech:
Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all one color. [America, alone among nations, was] not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of, but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way (166).
As President, Reagan signed a bill to compensate families for their wrongful internment, the bill numbered 422 after Masuda's all-Japanese-American regiment 422.
Almighty God: Our sons, pride of Our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor... ...They will be sore tried by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. ...Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country and with out sister Nations into a world unity that will spell sure peace.... They will be done, Almight God. Amen.
In the last chapter, Meacham condenses the lessons learned from his tour of American history, including "enter the arena" by engagement with the news and with voting, "resist tribalism" and regard with an open mind what the others are thinking, "respect facts and reason," "find a critical balance," and "keep history in mind."
The book enacts the advice found at the end of The Lessons of History, a slender book in which Will and Ariel Durant skimmed what rose to the top in the ten volumes of their encyclopedic History of Civilization. Because the husband and wife both died shortly after completing their life's work, the final paragraph of that final book was their benediction. Writing in 1968, a year of riots, assassinations, domestic terror groups, national shaming in Vietnam and North Korea, and political acrimony, they imagine history, not just as a "chamber of horrors," but, for those who look for "an encouraging remembrance of generative souls," history can be
The book enacts the advice found at the end of The Lessons of History, a slender book in which Will and Ariel Durant skimmed what rose to the top in the ten volumes of their encyclopedic History of Civilization. Because the husband and wife both died shortly after completing their life's work, the final paragraph of that final book was their benediction. Writing in 1968, a year of riots, assassinations, domestic terror groups, national shaming in Vietnam and North Korea, and political acrimony, they imagine history, not just as a "chamber of horrors," but, for those who look for "an encouraging remembrance of generative souls," history can be
a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing.
Sources and Notes
Durant, Will and Ariel. The Lessons of History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.
[See a related post about Ronald Reagan's final speech: "I hope I appealed to your best hopes, and not to your worst fears." A posting about a song of the prophet Isaiah also turns into a reflection on America as a "celestial city."]
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