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Zusammenfassung von The Soul of America

Name: The Soul of America
Rating: 4.1 (65 reviews)
Author: Jon Meacham

Jon Meacham

The Battle for Our Better Angels

4.1 (65 Bewertungen)

26 Min.

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The Soul of America by Jon Meacham is a historical exploration of how America has endured through times of crisis, and how past leaders have navigated through dark moments to restore hope and unity.

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Geschichte der USA Demokratie Schwarze Geschichte

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What’s in it for me? Find hope in the 200-year history of the United States.

Political experts continue to scratch their heads over the recent turn of events in the United States. Yet if we look back at the history of this relatively young nation, we’ll discover something that might come as a surprise: the events surrounding the 2016 election aren’t all that unusual.

For instance, as the author notes, Huey Long employed Trump-like tactics before Donald Trump was even born. Long, a Louisiana politician, took audiences by storm during the Great Depression, leveraging his folksy charisma and the political unrest of the times to whip voters into a frenzy. He called for a new form of government, and used the country’s deep-seated tensions around race and immigration to his advantage.

In fact, politicians throughout America’s history have used fear to their advantage. This tactic – to divide and motivate voters by preying on their fears, all the while propelling one’s own political career – was well understood even in Aristotle’s days, back in ancient Greece.

But time and time again, the people of America have persevered through the fearmongering and come out on the other side with hearts full of hope. Author Jon Meacham wants readers to understand that US history contains many times when people had to choose between their worst and their best instincts. It may not happen overnight – in fact, it may take decades – but, if history is any indicator, the United States will make the right choice.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

how certain books and films managed to set back American civil rights;
how a sense of decency prevailed during the McCarthy era; and
the five ways you can fight fear and stay hopeful.

The United States has always been torn between feelings of hope and fear.

In the United States, many concerned citizens are still trying to understand how the country elected a president who they think is at odds with fundamental American principles such as a free press and the rule of law. To them, it seems like a very dark time. However, if we look back at the nation’s history, we’ll see that America has weathered far, far worse.

Not only that, we can even see how current fear-driven and paranoid attitudes toward immigrants are a continuation of similar feelings from previous generations. Throughout America’s history, fear has been at odds with the feelings of hope on which the nation was founded.

Fear and hope are two very natural human instincts, and, in a way, they’re representative of people at their worst and at their best. In other words, when we’re acting under the influence of fear, we can make some of our worst decisions, and when we’re acting under the influence of hope, we can do some of our best work.

Abraham Lincoln referred to this battle between our good and bad impulses in his first inaugural address.

At the time, the nation was already deeply divided on issues of race and state’s rights, and he knew that people were afraid that the nation might fall apart or descend into the violence of war. But Lincoln remained hopeful, which is what made him a truly great president. On March 4, 1861, he asked America’s citizens not to give in to hostile instincts, but rather to act upon “the better angels of our nature.”

A similar sentiment has animated all of America’s best presidents. Of course, no president has been perfect, including Harry Truman, who made strides in civil rights while continuing to use common racial slurs in private. But Truman showed wisdom when he remarked that it was important for a president to appeal to the nation’s best instincts, not its worst.

Fear has many sources – economic, religious, racial – and politicians have always known how to use that fear to motivate people in irrational ways. Fear, however, will always divide people. Only hope can unite them in the name of the common good.

The United States was founded on noble principles – happiness, freedom and equality – but it has a slow political system.

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.

After the Civil War, the South continued to resist and the government failed to enforce authority.

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.

There was hope and progress under Theodore Roosevelt, who embraced America as a melting pot.

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.

Fear reduced freedoms and helped the Ku Klux Klan expand in the early twentieth century.

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.”

Franklin Roosevelt brought hope to the nation during the Great Depression, but he was also susceptible to fear.

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.

Fear is what propelled the dark times leading up to the McCarthy hearings.

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.

Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson galvanized leaders to pass the Civil Rights Act.

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.

There are five ways to resist fear and embrace your better angel.

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.

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Worum geht es in The Soul of America?

The Soul of America (2018) takes readers on an enlightening tour of America’s tumultuous past. From the final moments of the Civil War to the long overdue civil rights and voting legislation of the 1960s, the book reveals the United States for what it has always been: a nation of deep and lasting conflict. By looking to America’s past, we can see both where today’s political divides stem from and why the nation will likely be able to persevere.

Bestes Zitat aus The Soul of America

If the Reconstruction of Southern states… had been conceived as a major national program… we should be living today in a different world. – W.E.B. Du Bois

—Jon Meacham

Wer The Soul of America lesen sollte

Readers eager for perspective on current events
Students of history and politics
Fans of historical insight

Über den Autor

Jon Meacham is a writer of multiple New York Times best sellers, including Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power and Destiny (2012) and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (2015). His 2008 book, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, won him the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

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