53 pages • 1 hour read
Jon MeachamThe Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 7-ConclusionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “What the Hell Is the Presidency For? ‘Segregation Forever,’ King’s Crusade, and LBJ in the Crucible”
Chapter 7 opens on the night of November 22, 1963, hours after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Newly endowed with the power of the presidency, Lyndon B. Johnson resolved to pass the proposed civil rights legislation championed by his predecessor. The past few months, meanwhile, had been full of turmoil on the racial justice front. In January, newly elected Alabama Governor George Wallace delivered an inauguration speech defying federal efforts to enforce desegregation laws, proclaiming, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” (219). Six months later in June, Wallace attempted to block the federally mandated integration of the University of Alabama. The very next day, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi. Then in August Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington, a wildly successful alliance between civil rights leaders, labor activists, and religious organizations. The very next month, four young girls were killed in a Birmingham church bombing perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan.
Though passing civil rights legislation was as urgent as ever, Johnson also recognized the intensity of the battle before him. When his advisors counseled to him to move slow until after the 1964 election, Johnson uttered his famous reply, “What the hell is the presidency for?” (212).
As a congressman representing Texas, Johnson historically sided with Southern segregationists. Yet with the interests of the entire country to consider, Johnson embraced his destiny as a civil rights reformer. In fact, according to Meacham, Johnson’s experience as a congressman with segregationist sympathies made him far better equipped to convince Southern Democrats to vote for civil rights legislation than Kennedy was. As early as the night of Kennedy’s funeral, Johnson tracked down King to emphasize how serious he was about civil rights legislation. Impressed, King later told reporters that Johnson planned to do everything in his power to move the bill out of committee by Christmas that year.
It took only slightly longer than they hoped, but Johnson managed to get the Civil Rights Act out of the Rules Committee by January 1964, and by February the full House had passed the bill. Next came the daunting task of achieving a 67-vote majority in the Senate to break a filibuster led by Southern Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond. By summer, Johnson had the votes he needed, and the bill passed the Senate on June 19, 1964.
Not content to rest on his laurels, Johnson tasked Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach with writing what the president referred to as “the goddamndest, toughest voting rights act that you can devise” (231). After winning the 1964 election against Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in a landslide 44-state victory, Johnson set about getting the Voting Rights Act passed as quickly as possible before losing his postelection political capital.
As Johnson got to work in Washington, King and other activists continued their nonviolent protest movement. On March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers and possemen attacked a number of activists including King and future congressman John Lewis as they marched from Selma to Montgomery on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Though Johnson considered sending National Guard troops to Alabama, he worried that doing so would further alienate white Southerners and bring to mind images of Reconstruction. Instead, he invited Wallace to the White House and successfully convinced him to use state troopers and guardsmen to maintain order, not to attack nonviolent protesters.
A few months later, on August 6, 1965, Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation.
The narrative then flashes forward to March 31, 1968. In a televised address to the nation Johnson announced he would not seek reelection. The year had begun poorly with the Tet Offensive, which emboldened the North Vietnamese Army against the half-million American troops stationed there. Within a week of Johnson’s announcement, King was assassinated. Two months later, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Widespread social unrest erupted in cities around the country, including at the chaotic Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August. Kennedy’s death and the political chaos enveloping the Democratic Party helped pave the way for a November win for President Richard Nixon, who went on to escalate the war in Vietnam. By the end of 1968, 16,899 US troops had died that year at a rate of 48 per day. Finally, Meacham argues that Nixon’s ascendancy was aided by a new kind of cultural populism pioneered by consultant and future Fox News chairman Roger Ailes.
Conclusion Summary: “The First Duty of an American Citizen”
Meacham takes a long view of the arc of history, concluding that while the 21st century is imperfect is some profound ways, the United States is freer than ever before. That said, he argues that President Donald Trump, the incumbent at the time of this book’s writing, has abandoned the country’s better angels and embraced the politics of fear more than any other president in recent memory. As evidence of this, he highlights how each of the previous six US presidents continually rose to the occasion to speak to what’s best in the country.
On that note, Meacham identifies five duties he believes every American should uphold. The first is to engage politically by, at the very least, paying attention and casting ballots. The second is to avoid tribalism by viewing politics as a “mediation of difference” rather than an all-out war (267). The third is to deploy facts and reason. Meacham quotes Truman, who wrote, “The dictators of the world say that if you tell a lie often enough, why, people will believe it. Well, if you tell the truth often enough, they’ll believe it and go along with you” (268). The fourth is to find a balance that allows each party and politician to be right at least some of the time. Meacham’s fifth and final duty is to keep history in mind, both to spot McCarthy-style demagoguery when we see it and to be grateful that we’ve never had a demagogue as president until now, according to the author.
Chapter 7-Conclusion Analysis
In large part due to the quagmire he oversaw in Vietnam, Johnson is frequently overlooked in the pantheon of great US presidents. Yet in terms of his ability to exercise his character and will on domestic matters, Meacham views Johnson as an exemplary figure who embodies all the best attributes of American leadership. His resolve in passing civil rights legislation, combined with his extraordinary skills of persuasion, make him in some ways the apotheosis of what a president can be when called upon by history to act.
At the same time, Johnson seems to contradict Meacham’s assertion that compromise is essential for US presidential leadership. For example, on the night of Kennedy’s death, Johnson is quoted as saying, “Well, I’m going to tell you, I’m going to pass the civil rights bill and not change one word of it. I’m not going to cavil, and I’m not going to compromise” (211). Certainly, proponents of equal rights would be pleased with Johnson’s unwillingness to compromise. Yet this example also draws into question some of the limitations Meacham grants as necessary evils when discussing other presidents, including political capital and the character of the governed. Johnson faced those same limitations yet appeared to be able to conquer them through talent and will.
Such an interpretation, however, ignores the work done by once-in-a-generation activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. Perhaps then, the speed of social change one saw in the Johnson era represented a rare and perfect marriage between profoundly eloquent leaders like King, an army of activists like John Lewis, and a president with the will, character, and means to enact changes at the policy level like Johnson. The fight also neatly encapsulates many of Meacham’s more symbolic themes. Paraphrasing an interview he conducted with Lewis for the book, Meacham writes, “The civil rights struggle always centered on whether the best of the American soul (the grace and the love, the godliness and the generosity) could finally win out over the worst (the racism and the hatred, the fear and the cruelty)” (237). With all that in mind, it is little wonder that Meacham positions the fight for civil rights legislation as the climax of his book.
Given Meacham’s bent toward optimism, it is perhaps unsurprising that he largely elides the tumult that followed this peak of American reform in 1965. Yet if the author’s intent is, as he says, to help Americans navigate the Trump era, it might have been beneficial to examine how the country reached its present state of affairs. This concern is echoed by New York Times critic Sean Wilentz, who wrote in his otherwise positive review:
Unfortunately, the book’s historical narrative ends with a rousing account of the collaboration between Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. in achieving the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Vietnam War, the explosion of white backlash and ghetto violence, and the fitful collapse of the New Deal coalition receive extremely short shrift. Suddenly, we are thrust back into the present, with little understanding of how we got here from there. (Wilentz, Sean. “A Battle for the ‘Soul of America’? It’s as Old as America, One Historian Notes.” The New York Times. 21 May 2018.)
To be fair, Meacham does gesture toward identifying a thread between the post-Johnson era and the Donald Trump presidency when he briefly takes stock of the 1968 election. Of that contest, he writes, “Nixon—advised by Roger Ailes, who would go on to found the Fox News Channel—campaigned on a cultural populism, arguing that elites and implying that minorities were undercutting American greatness” (248). Meacham need only mention “Fox News” and “American greatness” for it to be clear to the reader that the subtext is Donald Trump.
In the Conclusion the subtext once again becomes text, as Meacham acknowledges the challenge Americans presently face in overcoming the politics of fear and hate. He writes:
How, then, in an hour of anxiety about the future of the country, at a time when a president of the United States appears determined to undermine the rule of law, a free press, and the sense of hope essential to American life, can those with deep concerns about the nation’s future enlist on the side of the angels? (266).
Yet Meacham’s textual and metatextual focus on Trump may obscure the argument shared by many that Trump is as much a practitioner of the politics of fear as he is a product of them. This echoes Wilentz’s point that an understanding of the past 50 years of US history is necessary to understand the social, cultural, and economic pressures that led to Trump’s election. From this perspective, it is crucial to reflect on the racial dog whistles heard during the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, the politics-as-all-out-war seen during the Clinton impeachment hearings, and the cultural resentments exploited by the Tea Party movement of the Obama era. By comparing Trump to the previous six presidents solely on the basis of rhetoric—as he does here—Meacham threatens to paint Trump as an outlier that can be easily overcome by electing someone less overtly divisive rather than a reflection of more pervasive, systemic cultural pressures.
Taken another way, however, Meacham certainly acknowledges those systemic pressures—after all, his narrative is threaded entirely around the legacy of Lost Cause resentments that persist to this day. Consistent with his broader arguments is the notion that rhetoric, while of little use on its own, is a prerequisite for social change. Therefore, a president who employs divisive rhetoric that inflames resentment creates a political atmosphere that makes systemic or even modest reform impossible. In this, Meacham is echoed by a 2020 Slate article in which journalist Will Saletan praises presidential candidate Joe Biden for attempting to heal the nation during protests over the murder of George Floyd. After listing a series of unifying political platitudes voiced by Biden, Saletan writes, “In any other era, such promises would be absurdly trite. After three years of Trump, they’re just what we need.” (Saletan, William. “Biden’s Speech About the Protests Is a Vision of Post-Trump America.” Slate. 2 Jun. 2020.)
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