The Soul of America summary

The United States began auspiciously. Unlike almost all previous nations, it was able to start afresh while being mindful of society’s past mistakes. The young nation had separated itself from the British and established independence – but this left the Founding Fathers with a lot of choices to make. How would the country be run? What principles would guide it?

In the Declaration of Independence, it’s stated that all men are created equal, and that each should be free to pursue his own happiness. This happiness isn’t just about being cheerful, either – it’s more aligned with the thought of Aristotle and the eighteenth-century American revolutionary Thomas Paine. They both believed that happiness is an “ultimate good,” something that has more to do with service and good citizenship than with smiling and good times.

Back in 1851, escaped slave and human-rights activist Sojourner Truth shared some words of wisdom. At a conference for women’s rights, she said, “I think that ‘twixt [between] the negroes of the South and the women of the North [seeking freedom] white men will be in a fix pretty soon.”

Uttered a decade before the outbreak of the American Civil War, Truth’s prediction was both spot-on and something of an understatement. In 1865, slavery was abolished and the South surrendered, but that didn’t mean the struggle was over; the states that fought under the Confederate flag resisted the North by undermining federal authority.

In September, 1901, Booker T. Washington, a writer and educator who was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation at age nine, became the first black man to receive a presidential invite to the White House. This invitation was issued by Theodore Roosevelt, a president who, during his eight years in office, gave Southern leaders and newspapers plenty to be outraged over.

But Roosevelt was more concerned with improving the United States than he was with Southern editorials. Indeed, he was one of the most progressive presidents since Lincoln.

Some presidents didn’t start out with much grounds for hope, and yet, along the way, they rose to the occasion. Such is the case with Woodrow Wilson. Although he began his presidency with little concern for women’s rights, Wilson eventually embraced the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote.

As Wilson suggested when he enacted the new law, people around the world were well aware of the example being set by the United States, and “we should show democracy as all-inclusive.”

When the Great Depression hit the United States at the start of the 1930s, it left one out of every five people jobless. Naturally, this made a great deal of people fearful – and not just parents who were worried about feeding their families, either. People were rightfully afraid that this crisis might spell the end of democracy altogether.

After all, something as catastrophic as the Great Depression could easily be seen as a clear sign that the system is broken and needs to be replaced. And, at the time, there was totalitarianism on the right and communism on the left waiting to take over.

After World War II, there was an unprecedented period of growth in the United States, thanks in large part to the government passing the G.I. Bill, which gave veterans money to go to college and allowed them to take out a loan for buying a home.

This gave a tremendous boost to the American middle class; however, more fear was just beneath the surface, waiting to bubble to the top.

After John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas, in November of 1963, the eight-year-old daughter of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. turned to her father and said, “We’re never going to get our freedom now.”

Few people expected Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson, to rise to the occasion quite as he did. Yet, following the death of Kennedy, one of the first things Johnson made clear was his intention to push forward the Civil Rights Act that Kennedy had been preparing.

Martin Luther King, Jr. found it ironic that Lyndon Johnson, a senator from the Southern state of Texas, got the Civil Rights Act passed. This fact, and the fact that imperfect people like Harry Truman can do the right thing when the time comes, should be seen as a reassuring sign that positive change sometimes doesn’t need to take a century – it can happen in a handful of decades.

When Truman was a young politician seeking local office in Jackson County, Missouri, he almost joined the Klan for the political power it would have brought him. But, years later, when he heard about a black vet returning home from World War II and being beaten so viciously that he went blind, he was shocked and quickly prepared his 1948 speech to Congress on civil rights. When it was over, a representative from Mississippi called him anti-American, but Truman was firm in reminding people that the Bill of Rights must apply to every American.