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.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “With Soul of Flame and Temper of Steel: ‘The Melting Pot,’ TR and His ‘Bully Pulpit,’ and the Progressive Promise”
Unlike many presidents before and after, President Theodore Roosevelt welcomed immigrants and supported their efforts to become Americans. Serving between 1901 and 1909, Roosevelt viewed the country as a nation of immigrants brought together by the promise of American progress, a vision epitomized by Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot.
Meacham next provides a brief summary of anti-immigration rhetoric in America. He traces it as far back as 1798’s Alien and Sedition Acts, signed by President John Adams to limit the political activities of immigrants and to give the federal government extraordinary powers to imprison or deport noncitizens. Anti-immigrant sentiment cooled to a large extent until the mid-19th century, when a surge in immigration followed a series of 1848 revolutions across Europe. This era saw the rise of the Know Nothings, a far-right nativist political party. As slavery and secession became the dominant issues in America, anti-immigrant movements receded, only to spring up again in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed by President Chester A. Arthur in response to racist labor anxieties directed toward Asian immigrant workers.
Roosevelt’s attitudes toward poverty and immigration were shaped by his time as New York City’s police commissioner from 1894 to 1897. He was profoundly affected by How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis’s 1890 expose on New York poverty, and often walked the streets with Riis late at night to ensure that his officers were doing their jobs and enforcing his reforms. Meacham writes, “What was the purpose of action for Roosevelt? Born to great privilege, he adopted the progressive passion for reform that grew out of revulsion at the capitalistic excesses of an industrializing America” (78).
Despite Roosevelt’s antipathy toward nativism, his attitudes toward race were hardly progressive by today’s standards. Though presumably welcoming to all immigrants, his rhetoric reflected a preference for those of Anglo-Saxon origin. Moreover, his views on imperialism were in line with those of the English writer Rudyard Kipling, who believed it was the white man’s burden to impose Western values on foreign soil where inhabitants are not white. At the same time, Roosevelt invited author and educator Booker T. Washington to a formal dinner at the White House, the first time such an invitation was extended to a black American. He also voiced support for numerous black candidates and appointees at federal and state levels. From this mixed record, Meacham concludes that Roosevelt nevertheless sided more closely with America’s better angels than its worst.
Finally, Meacham points to the influence of American activist Jane Addams on Roosevelt’s evolution as a progressive politician. By the end of Roosevelt’s political career, for example, he had become a supporter of women’s suffrage, a key movement detailed in the next chapter.
Chapter 4 Summary: “A New and Good Thing in the World: The Triumph of Women’s Suffrage, the Red Scare, and a New Klan”
Meacham details a brief history of the women’s suffrage movement, tracing the fight for gender equality to First Lady Abigail Adams’s 1776 exhortation to her husband John that he “remember the ladies” (96). The formal launch of the women’s suffrage movement, however, did not come until 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the Seneca Falls Convention. Another major landmark came in 1872, when Susan B. Anthony was arrested for illegally casting a vote for Ulysses S. Grant. A more aggressive civil disobedience movement arrived in the 1910s led by Quaker activist Alice Paul. For a two-and-a-half-year period between 1917 and 1919, Paul’s Silent Sentinels sat in daily protest on the lawn of Woodrow Wilson’s White House. Many were arrested, including Paul, who went on a hunger strike. Images of jailers brutally force-feeding Paul and others brought even more attention to the issue of women’s suffrage. Finally, Wilson announced his support for the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, which formally passed in late 1919.
Despite the hard-fought progress achieved by women’s rights activists in the 1910s, Meacham is ambivalent about the era more broadly. He writes, “The era of the suffrage triumph, for instance, was also the age of segregation, of the suppression of free speech in wartime, of the Red Scare of 1919-20, and of the birth of a new Ku Klux Klan (103).
In the 1912 election, for example, Meacham writes that black Americans voted for Wilson as a desperate alternative to incumbent William Howard Taft, who had little appetite for spending political capital on racial equality. According to Meacham, this gamble backfired. To appeal to his sizeable voting base of white Southern Democrats, Wilson supported Jim Crow laws and oversaw segregationist hiring practices at the federal level. And while Wilson made a powerful appeal against lynching in 1918, the deaths of innocent black Southerners at the hands of white lynch mobs continued unabated, absent a more aggressive push for antilynching laws. Moreover, Wilson espoused rhetoric inspired by the Lost Cause narrative in a speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.
Wilson’s presidency also coincided with the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. Meacham attributes this resurgence to the popularity of director D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Written in collaboration with white supremacist author Thomas Dixon Jr., the movie glorifies members of the first Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction for heroically protecting the edifice of white supremacy in the South along with the supposedly threatened virtue of its white women. By 1924, every state in the country had a Klan presence. The author counts 11 governors, 16 senators, and scores of House representatives as having joined the Klan, giving it enormous political power.
Meacham also attributes the growth of the second Ku Klux Klan to broader unease about crime related not only to black Americans but also immigrants, anarchists, and communists. Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, intense patriotism during World War I, and an influx of European immigrants following that conflict all conspired to create the Red Scare. Particularly after Wilson suffered a massive stroke in late 1919, a vacuum of power opened up to be taken advantage of by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who himself was nearly the victim of an anarchist’s bombing attack. Aided by his action officer J. Edgar Hoover, Palmer embarked on a series of raids that resulted in the arrests of 3,000 people, most of them Italian and Eastern European immigrants. In all, 556 were deported due to Palmer’s raids, though that number would have been much higher if not for intervention by the US Department of Labor, which disagreed with Palmer’s tactics.
Both the Red Scare hysteria and the Ku Klux Klan waned in influence over the 1920s. Meacham attributes a number of factors for the Klan’s loss of political power. Thanks to efforts by courts and journalists—along with small but significant gestures made by Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge—Klan violence was exposed at a national level. In addition, anti-immigration fervor subsided as immigration quotas plummeted during the 1920s. By 1929, yearly immigrants had fallen to 164,000 from a peak of 805,288 in 1921. Widespread—if unequally distributed—economic prosperity also played a role in reducing anxieties about crime and lost jobs which the Klan regularly exploited. Finally, the Klan sabotaged itself, most dramatically in the case of David Curtis Stephenson, a Klan leader in Indiana who raped and murdered a young white woman, undercutting the Klan’s claims of moral purity in the face of those who would defile white female virtue.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Of all of the presidents profiled here by Meacham, perhaps none are more reflective of imperfect vessels for social change than Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. On one hand, Roosevelt cherished the image of the United States as a melting pot of different immigrant cultures. Moreover, he spoke stirringly of how the fate of African Americans is deeply intertwined with that of white Americans. His White House invitation to Booker T. Washington was—at the time, at least—a significant gesture toward black America. And aside from racial issues, Roosevelt was responsible for a series of progressive reforms that were enjoyed by all Americans, not just the wealthy.
At the same time, Meacham points out that Roosevelt’s high-minded rhetoric “was more easily articulated than widely realized—even for Roosevelt himself” (75). His vision of Americanism tended to demand assimilation into white Anglo-Saxon culture. For that reason, he felt little sympathy for American Indians, writing, “a good deal of sentimental nonsense has been talked about our taking the Indians’ land” (75). Roosevelt expressed similar sentiments when it came to Western imperial conquests in Asia. Meacham quotes scholar Thomas G. Dyer, who wrote, “Although Roosevelt may have been a moderating force in an age of high racism, he nevertheless harbored strong feelings about the inferiority of blacks” (89).
Wilson’s record on race and equal rights is even more problematic. As a champion of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, Wilson earned his place among Meacham’s gallery of better angels. Yet particularly on the matter of race, many scholars see Wilson as severely lacking. Meacham writes, “Wilson supported Jim Crow regulations within the government and, as his biographer John Milton Cooper Jr. has written, ‘readily…accepted the customary racial inequalities and indignities of the time’” (105). Even on the matter of women’s rights, Wilson relented only after amassing a significant amount of political capital following the end of World War I. This reflects yet another of the author’s themes: that progress is as often hindered by political expediency as it is by fear and hate.
That Meacham singles out both men despite their flaws also speaks to his emphasis on presidential rhetoric. While presidential action is certainly preferable, Meacham attaches great value to stirring speeches that unite rather than divide. This may be due to the author’s singular disdain for Trump’s divisive rhetoric. In any case, Meacham celebrates Wilson’s strong public statements against lynching, despite the fact that he was unable or unwilling to pass legislation on the matter. Of Roosevelt, Meacham surveys his actions and rhetoric on race only to conclude, “For his time, however, Roosevelt was closer to the side of the angels than many other Americans were” (87).
If Meacham seems overly forgiving of Roosevelt and Wilson, it is worth remembering that he views their faults and strengths as inconsistencies endemic to America as a whole. So while in some ways he views them as examples for other presidents to aspire to, he also views them as instructive individuals who can tell Americans something of their past and present (this is also true of Meacham’s ambivalent attitude toward Andrew Jackson). For example, he writes of Roosevelt:
TR’s capacity on some occasions to stand for equality and for openness and in other contexts to argue that it was the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to rule the world was a particular example of a more universal American inconsistency. We believed in life and liberty for some; we simultaneously believed in imposing our will on the lives and liberties of others on the grounds that they were innately inferior. The tension between these visions of identity, of assimilation, and of power have long shaped American life, and rarely more so than in the Age of the first Roosevelt (75).
Finally, Meacham addresses the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1910s and ’20s, a grim development that raises several questions about America and the author’s theories thereof. Of the second Klan, Meacham quotes historian David H. Bennett, who wrote, “It was a movement so remarkably suited to its time and place that its growth matched the boom of the larger nation” (111). A disturbing thought, and one that puts Wilson’s legacy in perspective. Although Wilson disavowed Birth of a Nation—the film that arguably lit the fuse for the Klan’s resurgence—it is worth debating what role Wilson’s own racism played in that resurgence. In Meacham’s telling, the chief factors leading to the new Klan were economic anxieties stemming from a host of directions, including industrialization and immigration at home, and communism and subversion aboard.
But if the reader accepts Meacham’s thesis that strong presidents set the tone of the nation, then it is worth questioning whether Wilson’s behavior in office sent a message that precipitated the Klan’s reemergence. For example, Wilson resegregated numerous federal agencies that had been integrated decades earlier during Reconstruction. And according to contemporary civil rights journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, Wilson’s administration “allied itself with the forces of reaction, and put itself on the side of every torturer, of every oppressor, of every perpetrator of racial injustice in the South or the North.” (Villard, Oswald Garrison. “The President and the Segregation at Washington.” The North American Review. Volume 198, Issue 667. Dec. 1913.)
However one measures Wilson’s complicity, his presidency coincided with what was arguably the peak of the Lost Cause movement. With Birth of a Nation, author Thomas Dixon Jr. helped spread the Lost Cause narrative to the North, where it grabbed a foothold that infected Northern history books for decades. After the film’s release, Dixon wrote in an approving letter to Wilson on his segregation policy, “This play is transforming the entire population of the North and the West into sympathetic Southern voters. There will never be an issue of your segregation policy.” (Matthews, Dylan. “Woodrow Wilson Was Extremely Racist—Even by the Standards of His Time.” Vox. 20 Nov. 2015.)
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