Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and presidential biographer whose voice has become a familiar and reassuring one on MSNBC during the Trump Era. He’s a contributing writer to The New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor to Time magazine, and a former Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek. Meacham holds the Carolyn T. And Robert M. Rogers Endowed Chair in American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.
In writing about presidents as varied as Abraham Lincoln and George Herbert Walker Bush, Meacham has noted that “both called on us to choose the right over the convenient, to hope rather than to fear and to heed not our worse impulses but our best instincts.”
In Meacham’s 2018 best-selling book, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, a brilliant and fascinating – if not timely work – which I have found good reading during this pandemic-interrupted year, we are reminded that from our country’s very beginnings, the United States has, in the words of American historian and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed, “struggled to deliver on the promise of the Declaration of Independence and to make our Union ‘more perfect.’ Race has often been at the heart of those struggles, and The Soul of America persuasively argues that the resilient spirit of those who fought throughout our history to overcome that seemingly intractable problem is still with us. It is that spirit that gives us cause to be hopeful in the face of doubts about our country’s future.”
Meacham writes with both clarity and purpose throughout
The Soul of America and explains how our current “Trumpian” climate of partisan fury is not new. He explores other contentious periods of our nation’s history – from the Civil War to World War I to the fight for women’s rights to Lyndon Johnson’s crusade against Jim Crow – to show how presidents and ordinary citizens have united to defeat “the forces of anger, intolerance, and extremism.”
Through each of these periods of our nation’s history, Meacham explains, our national life “has been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear – a struggle that continues even now.” As Meacham once explained to Trevor Noah on
The Daily Show when he was promoting the book two years ago
, “every era is a battle between our best impulses and our worst impulses.”
Careful students of history will be familiar with some of these stories, but as Meacham notes, “if we have learned anything in recent years – years in which the president of the United States has taken pride in his deliberate lack of acquaintance with the most essential historical elements of his office – it is that even the most basic facts of our common past repay attention. ‘Eternal vigilance,’ it has been long said, ‘is the price of liberty’ and a consciousness about what has worked – and what hasn’t – in previous eras is surely a useful form of such vigilance.”
Historian Ken Burns, no stranger to the study of our nation’s past, summed his thoughts about
The Soul of America by saying, “Rather than curse the darkness, Jon Meacham, with his usual eloquence and surpassing knowledge of our history, has offered us all the sublime and calming reassurance that, as threatening as so much of the present moment seems, Americans have weathered such storms before and come out on the other side with fresh and progressive horizons. This is a beautifully expressed and convincing prayer to summon our own ‘better angels’ to meet the obvious challenges of today.”
Meacham concludes
The Soul of America by writing, “For all of our darker impulses, for all of our shortcomings, and for all of the dreams denied and deferred, the experiment begun so long ago, carried out so imperfectly, is worth the fight. There is, in fact, no struggle more important, and none nobler, than the one we wage in the serve of those better angels who, however besieged, are always ready for battle.”
A footnote: In October, HBO debuted a documentary, “The Soul of America,” based upon Meacham’s 2018 book of the same name. Here is a an interview Meacham gave on NBC’s “The Today Show” to discuss the documentary.
