I Hope Meacham Is
Right
February 10, 2023
I just finished reading Jon Meacham’s book The Soul of
America, The Battle for Our Better Angels (Random House, New York, 2018). It
came out the year after Donald Trump became president. Meacham presents the
book as a response to Trump, though he rarely mentions Trump by name. On page
13 writes, "I am writing now not because past American presidents have
always risen to the occasion but because the incumbent American president so rarely
does so.” Meacham’s thesis is that American history has been a constant
struggle between what is good in America and what is bad. He says the bad times
don’t last. He says we survive periods of bad presidents and bad circumstances
and always come out all right on the other side. He writes, I guess, to tell us
that we’ll survive Donald Trump and MAGA too. I hope he’s right.
For most of the time I was reading the book I thought
Meacham was being too rosy. I thought he was gliding over some important
negative facts from our history and making that history sound better than it
is. He doesn’t condemn several presidents the way he should. He doesn’t point
out that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. He mentions Andrew Jackson relocating
Native Americans, but he doesn’t damn him as the genocidal white supremacist
that he was. He doesn’t mention the Trail of Tears. He likes Teddy Roosevelt a
lot, but he never mentions Roosevelt’s warmongering and love of American
imperial expansion. He doesn’t damn TR for these things the way he should. He
says Woodrow Wilson permitted the segregation of the federal civil service. He
doesn’t say Wilson initiated it, which he did. Meacham never discusses Wilson’
deep racism or condemn him for it.[1]
When he tries to explain why millions of Americans joined the Ku Klux Klan in
the 1920s, he sounds like he’s making excuses for them. He doesn’t condemn them
for joining a terrorist organization
founded on hate. He heaps praise on Lyndon Johnson for Johnson’s courageous
stand on civil rights and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965
Voting Rights Act. Fair enough. Johnson did a lot to advance the cause of civil
rights in this country. But Meacham spends very little time on how Johnson’s
disastrous Vietnam policy destroyed his legacy. He mentions Richard Nixon but
doesn’t mention Watergate. On a broader issue, he doesn’t mention American
institutional racism at all much less analyze it or suggest how we might overcome
it. He certainly doesn’t ignore American racism, but he doesn’t paint its
history as being as horrific as it is nor does he get its nature as central to
American culture right.
It's interesting that in a couple of passages in which
Meacham is clearly attacking Trump he doesn’t use Trump’s name. I cited what he
says on page 13 above. There’s no mention of Trump’s name there. The book’s
Index listing for Trump directs the reader to page 266. There Meacham refers to
today as “a time when a president of the United States appears determined to
undermine the rule of law, a free press, and the hope essential to American
life." True, but there’s no mention of Trump here. Meacham’s book holds
out hope that we will survive Trump. Meacham certainly could, however, have made
his criticism of Trump much more explicit and much more pointed than he did. Maybe
that’s because he is a professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and is a
best-selling, Pulitzer Prize winning author. Whatever his reason, his attack on
Trump is far more muted than it needed to be.
Is Meacham right that America’s better angels always survive
the bad times and reassert themselves? I suppose he is. The country survived
the Civil War more or less, though we’re still struggling with its aftermath. We're
still here, and in some ways we are a better nation than we have been in the
past. We have, however, never atoned for slavery. We have never atoned for our
genocide of Native Americans. We have never atoned for our imperial expansion
across North America and beyond into the Caribbean and the Pacific. Racism
remains deeply embedded in American culture and American life. Explicit
expressions of racism may not be as socially acceptable as they once were, but
racism is if anything more insidious when it is silent the way institutional
racism is. Meacham addresses none of these issues central to American history
in this book.
Is Meacham right that we’ll survive Donald Trump and the
MAGA movement? There is reason to hope that we will. Trump did, after all, lose
the 2020 presidential election. Yet neither he nor his fascistic movement have
disappeared from American life. Trump is running for election again in 2024. So
is governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who may be more dangerous than Trump
because he is as culturally reactionary but comes across as less deranged than
Trump does. Millions upon millions of Americans still want Trump to be
president. Do they want him to be the tyrant he wants to be? It’s hard to see
how they don’t since they keep supporting him and believing his lies when his
aspiration to tyranny is obvious to anyone who will just look at the truth. At
one point in the book Meacham acknowledges the threat of a tyrant ruling not
against the people but with the people. As long as Trump, Trumpists, and MAGA
are still alive in our country, that threat is very real.
Meacham is trying to be a reassuring voice of calm and hope
in a time of great stress and danger for our country. That could be a good
thing, but I fear that it may lull us into complacency about the threat Donald
Trump and his ilk still pose to American democracy. Our better angels prevail
only when enough Americans refuse to give in to our worse angels, the ones that
rule so much of the country even today after Trump is out of office. If Meacham
right about hope for the future? I hope so. I wish I were more convinced that
he is.
[1]
When I graduated from the University of Oregon in 1970 I was named a Woodrow
Wilson Fellow. It was an award granted to graduating senior who intended to
pursue graduate studies. When I was named a Woodrow Wilson Fellow I didn’t know
what a racist Wilson had been. In 2020 the Woodrow Wilson Foundation changed
its name to The Institute for Citizens and Scholars. They ditched the name Woodrow
Wilson because Wilson was such a racist.
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