The Soul of America

May 7, 2018
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 15, 2018
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.

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June 1, 2018

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2018
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)