The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels is a nonfiction book published in 2018 by American journalist, historian, and presidential biographer Jon Meacham. The book explores periods of US history during which the politics of fear battled against the politics of hope. The author largely threads his narrative around issues of racial justice and anti-immigrant nativism, from the Reconstruction era in the postbellum South, to the civil rights era of the mid-20th century, to the era of Donald Trump. This study guide refers to the 2018 edition published by Merewether LLC.

In the Introduction Meacham expresses how disturbed he was to hear Donald Trump—the incumbent president as of the book’s writing—refer to the 2017 murder of Heather Heyer at a white supremacist rally in Virginia as an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” (4). To Meacham and millions of other Americans, this implied a defense of white supremacists that only served to divide the country further through the politics of fear. With this in mind, Meacham’s intent behind the book is twofold: First, he wishes to explore other periods of social unrest and divisiveness to determine how best to navigate the present era; second, he wants to remind readers that America has been through eras of fear and hate in the past and can therefore survive this one.

The rest of the book is divided into seven chapters. Given that Meacham views social change predominantly through the lens of presidential power, he devotes the first chapter to exploring the roots of this power. Largely due to their faith in George Washington, the Founding Fathers baked a significant amount of ambiguity into the role of the president. According to Meacham, seventh president Andrew Jackson was the first to view the presidency as both central to American governance and sensitive to the will and character of the people. After Jackson, few presidents wielded executive power so strongly until Abraham Lincoln, who in preserving the Union and abolishing slavery during the Civil War reemphasized the centrality of the presidency along with the primacy of the federal government over the states.

The second chapter explores the period of extreme tumult that followed the Civil War. Although the South lost the war, its scholars sought to “win the peace” (65) by spreading the historically revisionist Lost Cause narrative which argued that states’ rights, not slavery, was the reason behind secession. This allowed white Southerners to maintain dignity in defeat while building a new political and paramilitary apparatus of white supremacy to replace slavery. In the early years of Reconstruction, white Southerners found a champion in Andrew Johnson, who assumed the presidency following Lincoln’s assassination. Resentful and divisive, Johnson faced strong opposition from Congress, which managed to pass key laws and amendments protecting the safety and citizenship of black Southerners, overriding the president’s vetoes. In 1868 Congress impeached Johnson, but the president was later acquitted in the Senate by one vote.

The following year former Union general Ulysses S. Grant became president. Facing insurmountable racial and regional tensions, Grant championed a series of crucial Reconstruction initiatives, including the 15th Amendment protecting black suffrage and the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, which allowed the federal government to crack down on the newly established Ku Klux Klan. However, Reconstruction ended prematurely with the Compromise of 1877, which handed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the win in a contested presidential election in exchange for a series of concessions to Southern Democrats. According to Meacham, this helped usher in an era of segregation and anti-black terrorism in the South that would persist for decades.

In the third chapter Meacham explores the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, who served from 1901 to 1909. Aside from his progressive achievements in regulating banking and industry, Roosevelt’s greatest legacy, according to Meacham, is his acceptance of immigrants. Roosevelt also became the first president to extend a formal White House invitation to an African American when he dined with educator Booker T. Washington. That said, Meacham also points out that Roosevelt was not immune to the white supremacy of his day, particularly in regard to Western imperialistic conquests of lands in Asia.

The fourth chapter focuses on the extraordinary tumult of the 1910s and early 1920s. This era saw the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, thanks largely to the popularity of the 1915 white supremacist film Birth of a Nation. As America faced an influx of refugees fleeing World War I, anti-immigrant sentiment reached unprecedented highs. This hysteria, combined with fears over the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, led to widespread panic over communists and anarchists, a phenomenon known as the Red Scare. At the same time, 1920 saw the ratification of the 19th Amendment which granted women the right to vote. According to Meacham, President Woodrow Wilson encapsulated the contradictions of the era by championing women’s suffrage while also resegregating numerous federal offices.

In the fifth chapter Meacham explores the enormous odds faced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as he sought to guide America out of the Great Depression during the 1930s. According to Meacham, American democracy itself hung in the balance as many feared the country would devolve into totalitarianism, whether in the form of right-wing fascism or left-wing communism. Roosevelt faced arguably even greater odds in preparing a deeply isolationist country to enter the fight against the Nazis in World War II. Despite generally falling on the side of America’s better angels, Roosevelt eventually embraced the politics of fear when he interned 117,000 Japanese Americans between 1942 and 1946.

Meacham devotes the sixth chapter to US Senator Joseph McCarthy. By manipulating the new direct media engagement enabled by television, McCarthy became one of the most successful peddlers of the politics of fear and hate in US history. On a daily basis, McCarthy lobbed unsupported allegations of pro-communist treason toward government officials and army officers, forcing journalists to rethink how they covered public figures who consistently made verifiably false statements.

In the seventh chapter Meacham recounts the efforts of President Lyndon B. Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to make landmark civil rights legislation a reality. Despite overseeing a deadly quagmire in Vietnam, Meacham views Johnson as an exemplar of domestic policy and presidential leadership thanks to his success in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Finally, in the Conclusion Meacham reiterates his belief that President Trump has failed in both action and rhetoric to appeal to America’s better angels. He ends the book with a list of five civic duties every American should follow to help win the battle between hope and fear in the soul of America.