The soul of America : the battle for our better angels / Jon Meacham.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear.

ONE OF OPRAH'S "BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH" * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR * The Christian Science Monitor * Southern Living

Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history. He writes about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the Lost Cause; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the fight for women's rights; the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First in the years before World War II; the anti-Communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson's crusade against Jim Crow. Each of these dramatic hours in our national life have been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear--a struggle that continues even now.

While the American story has not always--or even often--been heroic, we have been sustained by a belief in progress even in the gloomiest of times. In this inspiring book, Meacham reassures us, "The good news is that we have come through such darkness before"--as, time and again, Lincoln's better angels have found a way to prevail.

Praise for The Soul of America

"Brilliant, fascinating, timely . . . With compelling narratives of past eras of strife and disenchantment, Meacham offers wisdom for our own time." --Walter Isaacson

"Gripping and inspiring, The Soul of America is Jon Meacham's declaration of his faith in America." -- Newsday

"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." -- USA Today

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

one The Confidence of the Whole People Visions of the Presidency, the Ideas of Progress and Prosperity, and "We, the People" Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. --Alexander Hamilton, The New-York Packet, Tuesday, March 18, 1788 I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. --Words popularly attributed to Sojourner Truth, the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851 Dreams of God and of gold (not necessarily in that order) made America possible. The First Charter of Virginia--the 1606 document that authorized the founding of Jamestown--is 3,805 words long. Ninety-eight of them are about carrying religion to "such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God"; the other 3,707 words in the charter concern the taking of "all the Lands, Woods, Soil, Grounds, Havens, Ports, Rivers, Mines, Minerals, Marshes, Waters, Fishings, Commodities," as well as orders to "dig, mine, and search for all Manner of Mines of Gold, Silver, and Copper." Explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought riches; religious dissenters came seeking freedom of worship. In 1630, the Puritan John Winthrop, who crossed a stormy Atlantic aboard the Arbella, wrote a sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," that explicitly linked the New World to a religious vision of a New Jerusalem. "For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill," Winthrop said, drawing on Jesus's Sermon on the Mount. (Forever shrewd about visuals, Ronald Reagan added the adjective shining to the image several centuries later.) We've always lived with--and perpetuated--fundamental contradiction. In 1619, a Dutch "man of warre" brought about twenty captive Africans--"negars"--to Virginia, the first chapter in the saga of American slavery. European settlers, meanwhile, set about removing Native American populations, setting in motion a tragic chain of events that culminated in the Trail of Tears. And so while whites built and dreamed, people of color were subjugated and exploited by a rising nation that prided itself on the expansion of liberty. Those twin tragedies shaped us then and ever after. As did basic facts of geography. There was a breathtaking amount of room to run in the New World. The vastness of the continent, the wondrous frontier, the staggering natural resources: These, combined with a formidable American work ethic, made the pursuit of wealth and happiness more than a full-time proposition. It was a consuming, all-enveloping one. For many, birth mattered less than it ever had before. Entitled aristocracies crumbled before natural ones. If you were a white man and willing to work, you stood a chance of transcending the circumstances of your father and his father's father and of joining the great company of "enterprising and self-made men," as Henry Clay put it in 1832. The next year, President Andrew Jackson appointed one such man to be postmaster of Salem, Illinois. Though a Whig at the time--Jackson was a Democrat--Abraham Lincoln was happy to accept. His rise from frontier origins became both fable and staple in the American narrative. Lincoln understood the power of his story, for he knew that he embodied broad American hopes. "I happen, temporarily, to occupy this big White House," Lincoln told the 166th Ohio Regiment in the summer of 1864. "I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has." No understanding of American life and politics is possible without a sense of the mysterious dynamic between the presidency and the people at large. Sundry economic, geographic, and demographic forces, of course, shape the nation. Among these is an unspoken commerce involving the most ancient of institutions, a powerful chief, and the more modern of realities, a free, disputatious populace. In moments when public life feels unsatisfactory, then, it's instructive--even necessary--to remember first principles. What can the presidency be, at its best? And how should the people understand their own political role and responsibilities in what Jefferson called "the course of human events"? In the beginning, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, the presidency was a work in progress. Ambivalent about executive authority, many of the framers were nevertheless anxious to rescue the tottering American nation. Governed by the weak Articles of Confederation--national power was diffuse to nonexistent--the country, George Washington wrote in November 1786, was "fast verging to anarchy & confusion!" The Constitutional Convention, which ran from May to September of 1787, was focused on bringing stability to the unruly world of competing state governments and an ineffectual national Congress. In 1776's Common Sense, Thomas Paine had suggested the title of "President" for the leader of a future American government. Still, the colonial suspicion of monarchial power was evident in Paine's pamphlet. "But where, say some, is the king of America?" Paine wrote. "I'll tell you, friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the royal brute of Great Britain. . . . For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king, and there ought to be no other." The tension between the widespread Paine view (that central authority was dangerous) and the practical experience of the Revolutionary War and the Confederation period (that a weak national government was even more dangerous) shaped the thoughts and actions of the delegates who gathered in the Pennsylvania State House, now known as Independence Hall, in May 1787. Physically diminutive but intellectually powerful, James Madison, who laid out a plan for the new government with care, admitted the proper executive structure was a perplexing problem. "A national Executive will also be necessary," Madison wrote fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph before the convention. "I have scarcely ventured to form my own opinion yet, either of the manner in which it ought to be constituted, or the authorities with which it ought to be clothed." Madison's uncertainty reflected the reality of the time. There were competing schools of thought. On the floor of the convention, Alexander Hamilton of New York proposed a president to be elected for life; others favored plans by which the legislative branch would select the executive, effectively creating a parliamentary system. Even when the drafting was done, the precise nature of the presidency--of its powers and relative role in guiding the nation--was an open mystery to the framers. Yet they were willing to live with ambiguity. Why? Because of George Washington. It was generally assumed that General Washington, a man with Cincinnatus-like standing who had voluntarily surrendered military power at the close of the Revolutionary War, would be the first to hold the post. (The delegates did provide that the president had to be a natural-born citizen, "or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution," suggesting that there has always been a wariness of foreign influence and of the foreign-born.) All in all, given the expectation of a President Washington, the creation of the office was an act of faith in the future and an educated wager on human character. From the start Americans recognized the elasticity of the presidency--and hoped for the best. Such hopes have not always been realized. Near the end of Donald Trump's first year in power, for instance, The New York Times reported that, before taking office, he had "told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals." This Hobbesian view of the presidency--that every single day is a war of all against all--is novel and out of sync with much of the presidential past. In his 1867 book The English Constitution, Walter Bagehot delineated the elements crucial to the government of a free people: "First, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population--the dignified parts . . . ​and next, the efficient parts--those by which it, in fact, works and rules." Bagehot argued that the projection of aspirations above the usual run of political business was vital. "The dignified parts of government," Bagehot wrote, "are those which bring it force--which attract its motive power." In the American context, this is especially true of the presidency, for the president, in the words of James Bryce, had become "the head of the nation." Speaking in Bagehot's vernacular, Bryce also observed: "The President has a position of immense dignity, an unrivalled platform from which to impress his ideas (if he has any) upon the people." His influence could therefore be nearly total. "As he has the ear of the country," Bryce wrote, "he can force upon its attention questions which Congress may be neglecting, and if he be a man of constructive ideas and definite aims, he may guide and inspire its political thought." In a twenty-first-century hour when the presidency has more in common with reality television or professional wrestling, it's useful to recall how the most consequential of our past presidents have unified and inspired with conscious dignity and conscientious efficiency. "Every hope and every fear of his fellow citizens, almost every aspect of their wealth and activity, falls within the scope of his concern--indeed, within the scope of his duty," Harry Truman said. "Only a man who has held the office can really appreciate that." Reflecting on his historic push for civil rights after President Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson recalled: "I knew that, as President and as a man, I would use every ounce of strength I possessed to gain justice for the black American. My strength as President was then tenuous--I had no strong mandate from the people; I had not been elected to that office. But I recognized that the moral force of the Presidency is often stronger than the political force. I knew that a President can appeal to the best in our people or the worst; he can call for action or live with inaction." To hear such voices is to be reminded of what we have lost, but also what can one day be recaptured. The possibilities of a powerful president informed several of Hamilton's contributions to The Federalist, his joint effort, with Madison and John Jay, to support the ratification of the Constitution. Hamilton defended article 2, the establishment of the executive, with characteristic eloquence. In his Federalist published on Tuesday, March 18, 1788, Hamilton wrote, "Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to . . . ​the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy." Still, Hamilton's enthusiasm had its limits. Eight days later, in a subsequent Federalist essay, he observed, "The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of . . . ​a President of the United States." The Founders saw, then, that the executive office would require check and balance. With Hamilton and Madison's counsel, President Washington gave the institution its founding form. "As the first of everything, in our situation will serve to establish a Precedent," he wrote Madison, "it is devoutly wished on my part, that these precedents may be fixed on true principles." As Thomas Jefferson, the first secretary of state, recalled it, Hamilton once said that "the President was the center on which all administrative questions ultimately rested, and that all of us should rally around him, and support with joint efforts measures approved by him." In 1792, when farmers in western Pennsylvania were gathering forces to rebel against a federal excise tax on whiskey, Hamilton urged Washington to take a direct hand. "Moderation enough has been shown; it is time to assume a different tone," Hamilton argued. "The well-disposed part of the community will begin to think the Executive wanting in decision and vigor." Washington agreed, writing, "Whereas it is the particular duty of the Executive 'to take care that the laws be faithfully executed' . . . the permanent interests and happiness of the people require that every legal and necessary step should be pursued" to avoid "violent and unwarrantable proceedings." Within two decades, Thomas Jefferson, after serving in the highest office himself for eight years, came to share something of Washington's understanding of the presidency. "In a government like ours it is the duty of the Chief-magistrate, in order to enable himself to do all the good which his station requires, to endeavor, by all honorable means, to unite in himself the confidence of the whole people," Jefferson wrote in 1810. "This alone, in any case where the energy of the nation is required, can produce an union of the powers of the whole, and point them in a single direction, as if all constituted but one body & one mind: and this alone can render a weaker nation unconquerable by a stronger one." Many of even the most divisive figures in our history have shared this Jeffersonian vision. Before Andrew Jackson, for example, power tended toward the few, whether political or financial. After Jackson, government, for better and for worse, was more attuned to the popular will. In the American experiment, Jackson proved that a leader who could inspire the masses could change the world. He was the most contradictory of men--but then, America was, and is, among the most contradictory of nations. He had massacred Indians in combat, executed enemy soldiers, fought duels, and imposed martial law on New Orleans. A champion of even the poorest of whites, Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder. A sentimental man who adopted an Indian orphan, he was one of a line of leaders who drove Native American tribes from their homelands. An enemy of the Second Bank of the United States, Jackson would have given his life to preserve the central government. Jackson spoke passionately of the needs of "the humble members of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers" and made the case for popular politics and a more democratic understanding of power. He did so in part because he had begun his life as one of that "humble" class. A self-made man who had risen to the highest levels of a slaveholding society, he wanted to open the doors of opportunity for men like him. Today we find many of his views morally shortsighted, but in his time he was a figure of democratic aspiration. In the presidency, compromise was a little-remarked Jacksonian virtue. No other president fulminated more passionately or threatened his foes more forcefully, but Jackson believed in the union with all his heart. To him, the nation was a sacred thing, hallowed by his family's blood, for he had lost his mother and brothers in the Revolutionary War. We were then, and are now, what Jackson called "one great family." Excerpted from The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels by Jon Meacham All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

History does not actually repeat itself, but studying how countries have worked through trying times can be reassuring. This is the message that Pulitzer Prize-winning Meacham (political science, Vanderbilt Univ.; American Lion) provides in his exceptional new book. Here, Meacham recalls the struggles the United States has faced, including issues of racism, sexism, war, and pestilence. The author describes how, through what Lincoln famously called "the better angels of our nature," the country has prevailed and tried to move forward in the fervent belief that all Americans deserve guarantees of equality and justice. Using examples of challenging periods in U.S. history, such as Reconstruction, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and the anti-Communist witch hunts led by -Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, Meacham helps readers understand that the country has experienced difficulties before and will endure them again. VERDICT An excellent work by a skilled historian and worthy of all library collections.-Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

America's centuries-long struggles about race, gender, and immigration are viewed through the lens of presidential calculation and convictions in this sonorous but shallow study. Vanderbilt historian Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power) examines presidential leadership on issues of civil rights and equality, from Ulysses S. Grant's vigorous action to protect freedmen from Ku Klux Klan attacks during Reconstruction to Lyndon Johnson's moral and political dynamism in enacting civil rights legislation in the 1960s. In between, he surveys presidential vacillations that mirrored the nation's contradictory moods: Theodore Roosevelt awkwardly married white supremacism with progressive stances on race and women's suffrage; Franklin Roosevelt defended democratic values against fascism but allowed the racist internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II; Eisenhower was largely missing in action in the fight against Joe McCarthy's inflaming of anti-foreign sentiment. Meacham's gracefully written historical vignettes don't break new scholarly ground, but they do highlight patterns that resonate with today's controversies over immigration and white nationalism. (In the 1920s, he notes, Klan membership numbered in the millions, and one nativist demagogue called for a "wall of steel" against immigration from southern Europe.) Unfortunately, Meacham's focus on presidents as moral exemplars and embodiments of America's political soul feels more like mysticism-and anti-Trump panic-than cogent analysis. Photos. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian Meacham (Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, 2015) has written this exceptionally fluent and stirring portrait of hours in which the politics of fear were prevalent in America out of profound knowledge, respect, and love for the nation and in the belief that understanding the past engenders perspective, guidance, and hope. By investigating the ways presidents have faced crises, Meacham, whose shining, cogent prose carries in its swift current mind-opening quotes from myriad sources, freshly defines the soul of America its inclusiveness; charts the eternal struggle to preserve it; and tracks the courses presidents of different temperaments and politics followed to moral clarity, summoning, as President Lincoln so memorably expressed it, the better angels of our nature. Meacham vividly recounts acts of conscience and courage by Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, and both Bushes. Here, too, are crucial accounts of dire threats against American democracy, including the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, who chose to foment chaos and promulgate fears of conspiracy, and Senator Joseph McCarthy's false charges, fearmongering, and self-aggrandizing media manipulation. Meacham observes, Reason prevailed. The system worked. But only because people spoke out. This engrossing, edifying, many-voiced chronicle, subtly propelled by concern over the troubled Trump administration, calls on readers to defend democracy, decency, and the common good. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Meacham's topic couldn't be more urgent, and his regular television appearances will further stoke interest.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

An esteemed historian and author chronicles America's never-ending fight to live up to her ideals.In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a divided nation about the "the better angels of our nature." Lincoln's words failed to prevent civil war, but they serve as a template for the latest book from Pulitzer Prize winner Meacham (Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, 2015, etc.). The author contends that throughout American history, presidential leadership and citizen activism have overcome "hours in which the politics of fear were prevalent" to "lift us to higher ground," particularly in relation to civil rights. Meacham provides a sturdy history of this steady but halting progress, primarily through the prism of presidential leadership. Thus, while Ulysses S. Grant effectively cracked down on the Ku Klux Klan, the post-1877 years featured the rise of Jim Crow and a renewed disenfranchisement of black voters. Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House and resisted pressure to remove a black female postmaster in Mississippi, yet he "shared the dream of Anglo-Saxon imperialism" and held "ideas of racial superiority." Indeed, it was not until the 1960s that President Lyndon Johnson's relentless advocacy and Martin Luther King Jr.'s courage combined to help secure the civil and voting rights of all Americans. Clearly, Meacham hopes that the struggles of the past will inspire readers to contend for America's soul by resisting the modern-day forces of fear and bigotry in the personae of Donald Trump and his supporters. Yet whether he is criticizing Trump's post-Charlottesville comments or fretting over the influence of the largely irrelevant contemporary Klan, the author is not fully convincing in his argument that Trump poses a dire threat to our hard-won rights and liberty.Meacham ably depicts our nation's struggles to live up to Lincoln's words, but he oversells the notion that the fruits of past efforts are at risk in today's America. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.