The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“For many, the fact that we have arrived at a place in the life of the nation where a grand wizard of the KKK can claim, all too plausibly, that he is at one with the will of the president of the United States seems an unprecedented moment. History, however, shows us that we are frequently vulnerable to fear, bitterness, and strife. The good news is that we have come through such darkness before.”

This quote serves two chief purposes. The first is to set up President Donald Trump as something of a metatextual lodestar by which the reader draws comparisons between the incumbent president and the best and worst of America’s prior leaders. The second is to remind readers that it is by no means naive to experience optimism in the present day, given how frequently the country has come under—and then emerged from—the spell of the politics of fear in the past.

“The message of Martin Luther King, Jr.—that we should be judged on the content of our character, not on the color of our skin—dwells in the American soul; so does the menace of the Ku Klux Klan. History hangs precariously in the balance between such extremes.”

In establishing what he means by the soul of America, Meacham states that it is neither a beacon of hope nor a state of fear and brutality. Rather, it is comprised of all the attitudes and behaviors of the populace at any given moment in history, and therefore it tends to swing back and forth depending largely on the tone set by the president. This ebb and flow between acceptance and exclusion make up the narrative of US history, according to the author.

“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.”

In this quote Harry S. Truman neatly encompasses the sense of civic duty any elected official—but particularly the president—must possess to steer the country toward its better angels.