by Jon Meacham
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker defined “the American idea” as the love of freedom versus the law of slavery. Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became a leading voice for equality, believed deeply in America’s capacity for justice. “I know of no soil better adapted to the growth of reform than American soil,” Douglass said after the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857. “I know of no country where the conditions for affecting great changes in the settled order of things, for the development of right ideas of liberty and humanity, are more favorable than here in these United States.” Eleanor Roosevelt, niece of TR, wife of FDR, and global human rights pioneer, wrote, “It is essential that we remind ourselves frequently of our past history, that we recall the shining promise that it offered to all men everywhere who would be free, the promise that it is still our destiny to fulfill.”
Self-congratulatory, even self-delusional? At times and in part, yes. It’s an inescapable fact of experience, though, that from John Winthrop to Jefferson to Lincoln, America has been defined by a sense of its own exceptionalism—an understanding of destiny that has also been tempered by an appreciation of the tragic nature of life. “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible,” the theologian and thinker Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1944, “but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” We try; we fail; but we must try again, and again, and again, for only in trial is progress possible.
“When in the course of human events…” John Trumbull’s depiction of the presentation of the first draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress on Friday, June 28, 1776, in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia.
Deep in our national soul we believe ourselves to be entitled by the free gifts of nature and of nature’s God—and, in a theological frame, of our Creator—to pursue happiness. That ambient reality has been so strong that even the most clear-eyed among us have admitted the distinctive nature of the nation. “Intellectually I know America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country,” the novelist Sinclair Lewis remarked in 1930. He was not alone then, nor would he be alone now.
* * *
—
To know what has come before is to be armed against despair. If the men and women of the past, with all their flaws and limitations and ambitions and appetites, could press on through ignorance and superstition, racism and sexism, selfishness and greed, to create a freer, stronger nation, then perhaps we, too, can right wrongs and take another step toward that most enchanting and elusive of destinations: a more perfect Union.
The experience of World War II, where Americans fought with valor from Iwo Jima to Normandy, taught us, President Truman said, that “recognition of our dependence upon one another is essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of all mankind.”
To do so requires innumerable acts of citizenship and of private grace. It will require, as it has in the past, the witness and the bravery of reformers who hold no office and who have no traditional power but who yearn for a better, fairer way of life. And it will also require, I believe, a president of the United States with a temperamental disposition to speak to the country’s hopes rather than to its fears.
In the 1790s, with the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Federalists sought not just to win elections but to eliminate their opponents altogether. In the Age of Jackson, South Carolina extremists threatened the Union, only to be put down by a president who, for his manifold flaws, believed in the Union above all. Anti–Roman Catholic sentiment, driven by immigration, gave rise to a major political movement, the Know-Nothings, in the years before the Civil War. The Reconstruction era featured several instances of progress and light in the passage of crucial constitutional amendments concerning equality and in U. S. Grant’s 1870–71 stand against the Ku Klux Klan, only to give way to Jim Crow laws and nearly a hundred years of legalized segregation.
In just the past century, during World War I and after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a new Ku Klux Klan, boosted in part by the movie The Birth of a Nation, took advantage of American anxiety to target blacks, immigrants, Roman Catholics, and Jews. The fear that the “huddled masses” of Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” would destroy the America that whites had come to know helped lead to the founding of the twentieth-century Klan, a nationwide organization that staged massive marches down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington in 1925 and 1926. Isolationists and Nazi sympathizers took their stand in the 1930s; their influence evaporated only with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941, and Adolf Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war on the United States. Then there was the anti-Communist hysteria of the early Cold War period and the white Southern defense of segregation in the civil rights era.
* * *
—
Our greatest leaders have pointed toward the future—not at this group or that sect. Looking back on the Dixiecrat challenge, Harry Truman—the man who won the four-way 1948 presidential campaign, triumphing over the segregationist Thurmond, the Progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace, and the Republican Thomas E. Dewey—once said: “You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.” Truman understood something his legendary immediate predecessor had also grasped: that, as Franklin D. Roosevelt observed during the 1932 campaign, “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”
As Truman and Roosevelt—and Jackson and Lincoln and Grant and TR and Wilson and Eisenhower and Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, among others—understood, the president of the United States has not only administrative and legal but moral and cultural power. “For only the President represents the national interest,” John F. Kennedy said. “And upon him alone converge all the needs and aspirations of all parts of the country, all departments of the Government, all nations of the world.” There was nothing, Lyndon Johnson remarked, that “makes a man come to grips more directly with his conscience than the Presidency. Sitting in that chair involves making decisions that draw out a man’s fundamental commitments. The burden of his responsibility literally opens up his soul. No longer can he accept matters as given; no longer can he write off hopes and needs as impossible.” The office was a crucible of character. “In that house of decision, the White House, a man becomes his commitments,” Johnson said. “He understands who he really is. He learns what he genuinely wants to be.”
I am writing now not because past American presidents have always risen to the occasion but because the incumbent American president so rarely does. A president sets a tone for the nation and helps tailor habits of heart and of mind. Presidential action and presidential grace are often crucial in ameliorating moments of virulence and violence—and presidential indifference and presidential obtuseness can exacerbate such hours.
We are more likely to choose the right path when we are encouraged to do so from the very top. The country has come to look to the White House for a steadying hand, in word and deed, in uneasy times. As Woodrow Wilson observed more than a century ago, the president is “at the front of our government, where our own thoughts and the attention of men everywhere is centered upon him.”
About that there has long been little debate. “His person, countenance, character, and actions, are made the daily contemplation and conversation of the whole people,” John Adams wrote in 1790. After his own presidency,
Adams observed, “The people…ought to consider the President’s office as the indispensable guardian of their rights,” adding: “The people cannot be too careful in the choice of their Presidents.” In 1839, his son John Quincy Adams wrote that “the powers of the executive department, explicitly and emphatically concentrated in one person, are vastly more extensive and complicated than those of the legislature.” The British writer and statesman James Bryce, in his American Commonwealth, published in 1888, described the presidency as “this great office, the greatest in the world, unless we except the papacy, to which anyone can rise by his own merits.” The political scientist Henry Jones Ford, writing in 1898, observed, “The truth is that in the presidential office, as it has been constituted since Jackson’s time, American democracy has revived the oldest political institution of the race, the elective kingship.”
The emphasis on the presidency in the following pages is not to suggest that occupants of the office are omnipotent. Much of the vibrancy of the American story lies in the courage of the powerless to make the powerful take notice. “One thing I believe profoundly: We make our own history,” Eleanor Roosevelt, who knew much about the possibilities and perils of politics, wrote shortly before her death in 1962. “The course of history is directed by the choices we make and our choices grow out of the ideas, the beliefs, the values, the dreams of the people. It is not so much the powerful leaders that determine our destiny as the much more powerful influence of the combined voice of the people themselves.”
We are a better nation because of reformers, known and unknown, celebrated and obscure, who have risked and given their lives in the conviction that, as Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This is not sentimental. “Surely, in the light of history,” Mrs. Roosevelt remarked, “it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.”
Of course, history’s stories of presidential leadership in hours of fear can be as often disappointing as they are heroic. The Civil War was the hinge of our national saga, and our brief survey will begin in earnest in the shadow of Appomattox. Southern anxiety was a critical factor in the coming of the Civil War—the fear that the “peculiar institution” of slavery could not survive, much less thrive, within the Union. And fear fundamentally shaped American life and politics in the Reconstruction period well into the twentieth century—the white fear of ceding too much power to free blacks, an anxiety that knew no regional boundary. The most profound issues of freedom and power, of domination and subordination, were in play. From decade to decade, the white fear of people of color and of immigrants played significant, sometimes decisive, roles in the imaginations and the actions of the powerful. Writing in 1903, the scholar, historian, and activist W.E.B. Du Bois observed that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,” and, while Du Bois was surely right, it is correct, too, to say that color in some ways remains the problem of American history as a whole.
Such talk is uncomfortable in the twenty-first century. After King, after Rosa Parks, after John Lewis, after the watershed legislative work of Lyndon B. Johnson in passing the civil rights bills of the mid-1960s, many Americans are less than eager to acknowledge that our national greatness was built on explicit and implicit apartheid. Yet for all that the United States has accomplished—and we have been a country that people take pains to come to, not to leave—we remain an imperfect union.
* * *
—
Fear, as the political theorist Corey Robin has brilliantly argued, has been with us always. Understood by Robin and many scholars both ancient and modern as an anticipation of danger to oneself or to a group to which one belongs—including economic, racial, ethnic, religious, or other identity groups—it is among the oldest of human forces. “Political fear…arises from conflicts within and between societies,” Robin wrote in his 2004 book Fear: The History of a Political Idea, adding that political fear can be “sparked by friction in the civic world” and “may dictate public policy, bring new groups to power and keep others out, create laws and overturn them.” In the most elemental of terms, masters of such politics are adept at the manufacturing or, if the fear already exists, the marshaling of it at the expense of those who one believes pose a threat to one’s own security, happiness, prosperity, or sense of self.
As Aristotle wrote in his Rhetoric, fear “is caused by whatever we feel has great power of destroying us, or of harming us in ways that tend to cause us great pain.” Whatever we feel: Fear can be rational—Thomas Hobbes believed fear of the state of nature, a milieu without government and order, was the primary motivation for men to enter into society, forming mutual bonds of protection—but it is often irrational. To be concerned is not necessarily the same thing as being fearful; fear is more emotional, more destabilizing, more maddening. Fear, Aristotle observed, does not strike those who are “in the midst of great prosperity.” Those who are frightened of losing what they have are the most vulnerable, and it is difficult to be clear-headed when you believe that you are teetering on a precipice. “No passion,” Edmund Burke wrote, “so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
The opposite of fear is hope, defined as the expectation of good fortune not only for ourselves but for the group to which we belong. Fear feeds anxiety and produces anger; hope, particularly in a political sense, breeds optimism and feelings of well-being. Fear is about limits; hope is about growth. Fear casts its eyes warily, even shiftily, across the landscape; hope looks forward, toward the horizon. Fear points at others, assigning blame; hope points ahead, working for a common good. Fear pushes away; hope pulls others closer. Fear divides; hope unifies.
“The coward, then, is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything,” Aristotle wrote. “The brave man, on the other hand, has the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.” In Christian terms, fear, according to Saint Augustine, was caused by “the loss of what we love.” Building on Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote that “properly speaking, hope regards only the good; in this respect, hope differs from fear, which regards evil.”
Augustine and Aquinas viewed the world in theological terms; in due historical course, the Puritans and successive generations of Americans would also see our national story in a religious context. To be sure, as Shakespeare wrote, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” and the Bible has been used to justify human chattel, to cloak Native American removal with missionary language, and to repress the rights of women. At the same time, the great American reform movements have drawn strength from religious traditions and spiritual leaders. “I do not know if all Americans have faith in their religion—for who can read the secrets of the heart?—but I am sure that they think it necessary to the maintenance of republican institutions,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the Age of Jackson. “That is not the view of one class or party among the citizens, but of the whole nation; it is found in all ranks.”
There was a genius about the American Founding and the emergence of American democratic politics. That genius lay in no small part in the recognition that the Republic was as susceptible to human passions as human beings themselves. The Founders expected seasons of anger and frustration; they anticipated hours of unhappiness and unrest. Fear frequently defies constitutional and political mediation, for it is more emotional than rational. When the unreconstructed Southerner of the late nineteenth century or the anti-Semite of the twentieth believed—or the nativist of the globalized world of the twenty-first believes—others to be less than human, then the protocols of politics and the checks and balances of the Madisonian system of governance face formidable tests. Mediating conflicting claims between groups if one of the groups refuses to acknowledge the very humanity of the others is a monumental task. Our Constitution and our politics, however, have endured and prevailed, vindicating the Founders’
vision of a country that would require amendment and adjustment. That the nation was constructed with an awareness of sin and the means to take account of societal changes has enabled us to rise above the furies of given moments and given ages.
And while those furies sometimes ebb, they also sometimes flow. In a November 1963 lecture that formed the basis of a Harper’s cover story and of a book, the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter defined what he called “the paranoid style in American politics,” a recurring popular tendency to adhere to extreme conspiratorial theories about threats to the country. “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values,” Hofstadter wrote. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever running out.”
The measure of our political and cultural health cannot be whether we all agree on all things at all times. We don’t, and we won’t. Disagreement and debate—including ferocious disagreement and exhausting debate—are hallmarks of American politics. As Jefferson noted, divisions of opinion have defined free societies since the days of Greece and Rome. The art of politics lies in the manufacturing of a workable consensus for a given time—not unanimity. This is an art, not a science. There is no algorithm that can tell a president or a people what to do. Like life, history is contingent and conditional.
* * *
—
In the American experience—so far—such contingencies and conditions have produced a better nation. Strom Thurmond’s fate in the 1948 election is, in a way, itself an encouraging example. The Dixiecrat carried just four states—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Thurmond’s native South Carolina. Given a choice, a sufficient number of American voters believed Truman the right man to bet on. In electing the Democratic nominee to a full term, the people were picking a president who, in 1947, had addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at the Lincoln Memorial—a first for an American president—and who had commissioned a report, To Secure These Rights, which offered a devastating critique of racial discrimination and detailed a civil rights program to bring African Americans into the mainstream.