Jon Meacham Quotes

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Always take all the time to reflect that circumstances permit, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking. (Andrew Jackson)
Jon Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House)
Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
He dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
Broadly put, philosophers think: politicians maneuver. Jefferson's genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
In our finest hours, though, the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists;
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
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. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
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.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
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.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Politicians often talk too much and listen too little, which can be self-defeating, for in many instances the surer route to winning a friend is not to convince them that you are right but that you care what they think.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
Jackson was a transformative president in part because he had a transcendent personality; other presidents who followed him were not transformative, and served unremarkably.
Jon Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House)
The war between the ideal and the real, between what’s right and what’s convenient, between the larger good and personal interest is the contest that unfolds in the soul of every American.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
The story of America is...one of slow, often unsteady steps forward. If we expect the trumpets of a given era to sound unwavering notes, we will be disappointed, for the past tells us that politics is an uneven symphony.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Leadership meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
Or, as Jackson would have said: The people, sir-the people will set things right.
Jon Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House)
In our finest hours...the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists; to look out rather than to turn inward; to accept rather than to reject. In so doing, America has grown ever stronger, confident that the choice of light over dark is the means by which we pursue progress.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
politics is brutal because it engages the most fundamental human impulses for affection, honor, power, and fame. Great principles and grand visions are ennobling, but at its best politics is an imperfect means to an altruistic end.
Jon Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House)
Sometimes paranoids have enemies, and conspiracies are only laughable when they fail to materialize.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
Steadiness of faith, was, in the long run, as illuminating and essential as sophistication of thought.
Jon Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House)
Jefferson was ambivalent about executive power – until he bore executive responsibility.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.
Jon Meacham (His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope)
We cannot guarantee equal outcomes, but we must do all we can to ensure equal opportunity.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
I am writing now not because past American presidents have always risen to the occasion but because the incumbent American president so rarely does.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
I’ll tell you what leadership is. It’s persuasion—and conciliation—and education—and patience. It’s long, slow, tough work. That’s the only kind of leadership I know—or believe in—or will practice.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Jackson lead as he lived, sometimes with his heart, sometimes with his mind, sometimes with both.
Jon Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House)
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
Songs are the soul of movement! - MLK Jr.
Jon Meacham (Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation)
We live in a center-right country. Now watch me smile oleaginously.
Jon Meacham
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.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Not all great presidents were always good, and neither individuals nor nations are without evil.
Jon Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House)
A small thing, but in a dissonant world, every moment of harmony counts--and if we share music, we might just shout in anger a little less and sing in unity more. Or so we can hope.
Jon Meacham (Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation)
He turned the presidency – and the President's House – into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, of vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader life of the nation, from science to literature.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
With a writer's eye, Irving detected Jackson's depths. "As his admirers say, he is truly an old Roman-to which I would add, with a little dash of the Greek; for I suspect he is as knowing as I believe he is honest.
Jon Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House)
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. Our fate is contingent upon which element—that of hope or that of fear—emerges triumphant.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
It did not speak well of the power of God, in other words, if He needed a human government to prop him up.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
A politician's task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible account with the ideal and the principled.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
The American people,” Small added, “must understand that as soon as America doesn’t stand for something in the world, there is going to be a tremendous erosion of freedom.
Jon Meacham (Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush)
For Jefferson, politics was not a dispiriting distraction but an undertaking that made everything else possible.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage. It took presidential action to make things official—a Lincoln to free the slaves, a Wilson to support the women’s suffrage amendment, a Lyndon Johnson to finish the fight against Jim Crow—but without the voices from afar, there would have been no chorus of liberty. The lesson: The work of reformers—long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work—can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase “We, the People” that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
I think that ’twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. —Words popularly attributed to SOJOURNER TRUTH, the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
this injunction of TR’s remains resonant: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.
Jon Meacham (His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope)
Once, when a Republican congressman from Massachusetts accused Lincoln of having changed his mind, Lincoln replied, “Yes, I have; and I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
Jon Meacham (And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle)
As much as Jefferson loved France residence abroad gave him greater appreciation for his own nation. He was a tireless advocate for things American while abroad, and a promoter of things European while at home. Moving between two worlds, translating the best of the old into the new and explaining the benefits of the new to the old, he created a role for himself as both intermediary and arbiter.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
The best political figures create the impression that they find everyone they encounter to be what Abigail Adams said Jefferson was: “one of the choice ones of the earth.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
In the final analysis, we are one people, one family, one house—not just the house of black and white, but the house of the South, the house of America,
Jon Meacham (His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope)
In the charged and complicated spheres of identity, politics, philosophy, and power in America, though, racism was not situational but systemic.
Jon Meacham (His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope)
Fear divides; hope unifies.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.2 —American motto suggested
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention.1 Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. —THOMAS JEFFERSON
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time.
Jon Meacham (Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship)
Asked whether history had ever seen anything like the Depression, John Maynard Keynes replied: “Yes. It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
But “the supreme judge of the world” and “divine providence” were no more specific to the God of the Bible than “Creator” and “Nature’s God.
Jon Meacham (American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation)
imperfection is the rule, not the exception.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Where Goldwater-ites saw the world in black and white, Rockefeller noted shades of gray.
Jon Meacham (Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush)
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.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Preparing for the Kingdom of God meant making the world as like unto that Kingdom as possible, and the Kingdom was to be a new reality of restoration, redemption, renewal, and resurrection
Jon Meacham (His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope)
I believe after a series of years that no government that has the power to collect taxes and declare war, can be restrained but by a display of sufficient power to break it up,” Pickens said.
Jon Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House)
Democracy is easy; republicanism is hard. Democracy is fueled by passion; republicanism is founded on moderation. Democracy is loud, raucous, disorderly; republicanism is quiet, cool, judicious – and that we still live in its light is the Founders' most wondrous deed.
Jon Meacham (American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation)
We are not immortal ourselves, my friend; how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress—a period like our own. Americans today have little trust in government; household incomes lag behind our usual middle-class expectations. The fires of fear in America have long found oxygen when broad, seemingly threatening change is afoot. Now, in the second decade of the new century, in the presidency of Donald Trump, the alienated are being mobilized afresh by changing demography, by broadening conceptions of identity, and by an economy that prizes Information Age brains over manufacturing brawn. “We are determined to take our country back,” David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, said in Charlottesville. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. And that’s what we gotta do.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
When the nation sees differently, it enhances its capacity to act differently. From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, America has gradually expanded who’s included when the country speaks of “We the People.
Jon Meacham (His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope)
I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.2 —PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, at a dinner in honor of all living recipients of the Nobel Prize, 1962
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
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. To do so requires innumerable acts of citizenship and 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, freer way of life. And 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.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
The service--a moved Roosevelt called it the "keynote" of his meeting with Churchill--was working a kind of magic, which is one of the points of liturgy and theater: to use the dramatic to convince people of a reality they cannot see.
Jon Meacham (Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship)
All we can do is to make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it in a phrase drawn from the abolitionist Theodore Parker, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Bends, not swerves—but what we can miss in this cold-eyed understanding of history is that the arc won’t even bend without devoted Americans pressing for the swerve.
Jon Meacham (His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope)
For Jefferson, William and Mary was largely about what university life is supposed to be about: reading books, enjoying the company of like-minded, and savoring teachers who seemed to be ambassadors from other, richer, writer worlds. Jefferson believed Williamsburg "the finest school of manners and morals that ever existed in America.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
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.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. —JAMES BALDWIN
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Arguing for black enfranchisement in 1867, Frederick Douglass said: “If black men have no rights in the eyes of white men, of course the whites can have none in the eyes of the blacks. The result is a war of races, and the annihilation of all proper human relations.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Politics was at once clinical and human, driven by principles and passions that he (the leader) had to master and harness for the good of the whole.
Jon Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House)
My mind has been long fixed to bow to the judgment of the world, who will judge me by my acts, and will never take counsel from me as to what that judgment should be.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
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.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Baron Humboldt asked Jefferson, 'Why are these libels allowed? Why is not this libelous journal suppressed, or its editor at least, fined and imprisoned?' The question gave Jefferson a perfect opening. 'Put that paper in your pocket, Baron, and should you hear the reality of our liberty, the freedom of our press, questioned, show this paper, and tell where you found it.
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Johnson said: “John Kennedy’s death commands what his life conveyed—that America must move forward. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law, and those who pour venom into our Nation’s bloodstream.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
In life, Lincoln’s motives were moral as well as political—a reminder that our finest presidents are those committed to bringing a flawed nation closer to the light, a mission that requires an understanding that politics divorced from conscience is fatal to the American experiment in liberty under law. In years of peril he pointed the country toward a future that was superior to the past and to the present; in years of strife he held steady. Lincoln’s life shows us that progress can be made by fallible and fallen presidents and peoples—which, in a fallible and fallen world, should give us hope.
Jon Meacham (And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle)
The opposite of fear is hope, defined as the expectation of good fortune not only for ourselves but for a 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.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
He was the most contradictory of men. A champion of extending freedom and democracy to even the poorest of whites, Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder. A sentimental man who rescued an Indian orphan on a battlefield to raise in his home, Jackson was responsible for the removal of Indian tribes from their ancestral lands. An enemy of Eastern financial elites and a relentless opponent of the Bank of the United States, which he believed to be a bastion of corruption, Jackson also promised to die, if necessary, to preserve the power and prestige of the central government. Like us and our America, Jackson and his America achieved great things while committing grievous sins.
Jon Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House)
Madison struck in 1785, writing a “Memorial and Remonstrance” on the subject of state support for churches. When religious and civil power were intertwined, Madison said, “What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.
Jon Meacham (American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation)
To everything, in other words, there is a season, and McCarthy’s hubris hastened the end of his hour upon the stage. “I was fully aware of McCarthy’s faults, which were neither few nor minor,” Cohn recalled. “He was impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse. He tended to sensationalize the evidence he had—in order to draw attention to the rock-bottom seriousness of the situation. He would neglect to do important homework and consequently would, on occasion, make challengeable statements.” The urge to overstate, to overdramatize, to dominate the news, could be costly, and so it proved to be for McCarthy. The Wisconsin senator, Cohn said, was essentially a salesman. “He was selling the story of America’s peril,” Cohn recalled. “He knew that he could never hope to convince anybody by delivering a dry, general-accounting-office type of presentation. In consequence, he stepped up circumstances a notch or two”—and in so doing he opened himself to attacks that proved fatal. He oversold, and the customers—the public—tired of the pitch, and the pitchman.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
We truly believed that we were on God’s side, and in spite of everything—the beatings, the bombings, the burnings—God’s truth would prevail,” Lewis recalled. The anguish and the duration of the struggle was, in a way, a vindication of the premise of the struggle itself—that this was the ultimate battle to bring light to darkness no matter how often darkness prevailed.
Jon Meacham (His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope)
I hate polemical politics and polemical divinity,” said John Adams. “My religion is founded on the love of God and my neighbor; on the hope of pardon for my offenses; upon contrition; upon the duty as well as the necessity of [enduring] with patience the inevitable evils of life; in the duty of doing no wrong, but all the good I can, to the creation of which I am but an infinitesimal part.” There
Jon Meacham (American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation)
appreciate the value of our free institutions.” In these pursuits Lincoln was committed to what Theodore Parker defined as the “American Idea,” which was a “composite idea…of three simple ones: 1. Each man is endowed with certain unalienable rights. 2. In respect of these rights all men are equal. 3. A government is to protect each man in the entire and actual enjoyment of all the unalienable rights….
Jon Meacham (And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle)
So what can we, in our time, learn from the past, even while we’re getting knocked in the head? That the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. That compromise is the oxygen of democracy. And that we learn the most from those who came before not by gazing up at them uncritically or down on them condescendingly but by looking them in the eye and taking their true measure as human beings, not as gods.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
In the closed circle of the war cabinet, pounded by terrible report after terrible report, there had been uncertainty about whether he could fend off the drift to exploring a deal with Hitler. The determination of the larger group trumped the tentativeness of the smaller, and Churchill fulfilled his role as leader by disentangling himself from defeatism--one of his singular achievements at the end of May 1940.
Jon Meacham (Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship)
Madison described the state of play well in May 1798: “The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views.…22 Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad.” Extreme measures
Jon Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)
The Call: A Lincoln Emancipation Conference to Discuss Means for Securing Political and Civil Equality for the Negro. “ ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand,’ ” Villard wrote, and “this government cannot exist half-slave and half-free any better today than it could in 1861. Hence we call upon all the believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Two days later, in another diary entry, the defeated president said: “I still feel that there is a disconnect…honor, duty, and country—it’s just passé. The values are different now, the lifestyles, the accepted vulgarity, the manners, the view of what’s patriotic and what’s not, the concept of service. All these are in the hands of a new generation now, and I feel I have the comfort of knowing that I have upheld these values and I live and stand by them. I have the discomfort of knowing that they might be a little out of date.
Jon Meacham (Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush)
There’s a natural tendency in American political life to think that things were always better in the past. The passions of previous years fade, to be inevitably replaced by the passions of the present. Nostalgia is a powerful force, and in the maelstrom of the moment many of us seek comfort in imagining that once there was a Camelot—without quite remembering that the Arthurian legend itself was about a court riven by ambition and infidelity. One point of this book is to remind us that imperfection is the rule, not the exception.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
the only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he shows himself worthy to have,” continuing: I say that I am “sure” this is the right solution. Of course I know that we see through a glass dimly, and, after all, it may be that I am wrong; but if I am, then all my thoughts and beliefs are wrong, and my whole way of looking at life is wrong. At any rate, while I am in public life, however short a time that may be, I am in honor bound to act up to my beliefs and convictions.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
A contemporary recalled that when Emily’s children and, later, those of Sarah Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Jr.’s wife, were infants and became “restless and fretful at night, the President, hearing the mother moving about with her little one, would often rise, dress himself, and insist upon having the child, with whom he would walk the floor by the hour, soothing it in his strong, tender arms, while he urged the tired mother to get some rest.” At White House meals, Jackson wanted the family’s youngsters to dine at the table with him: they were not to be kept in the kitchen or nursery, but at the center of the household.
Jon Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House)
It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear.” She continued: I speak as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American…. I think that it is high time that we remembered that we have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution. I think that it is high time that we remembered that the Constitution, as amended, speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation…. Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism: The right to criticize; The right to hold unpopular beliefs; The right to protest; The right of independent thought.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Whites reigned supreme. Within about three decades of Lee’s surrender, angry and alienated Southern whites who had lost a war had successfully used terror and political inflexibility (a refusal to concede that the Civil War had altered the essential status of black people) to create a postbellum world of American apartheid. Many white Americans had feared a postslavery society in which emancipation might lead to equality, and they had successfully ensured that no such thing should come to pass, North or South. Lynchings, church burnings, and the denial of access to equal education and to the ballot box were the order of the decades. A succession of largely unmemorable presidents served after Grant; none successfully marshaled the power of the office to fight the Northern acquiescence to the South’s imposition of Jim Crow. “We fought,” a Confederate veteran from Georgia remarked in 1890, “for the supremacy of the white race in America.” That was a war they won—and, in a central American irony, they did so not alone but with the aid and comfort of many of their former foes on the field of battle.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Reason, religion, and capitalism were the tributaries that met to form the powerful American river that so impressed Turgot and his contemporaries. By replacing revelation and hereditary authority with rationality and republicanism, the American nation gave political form to the idea that the divine rights of monarchs and prelates had to surrender to the primacy of individual conscience and equality. No longer would certain men, by an accident of birth (kings) or an incident of election (popes), be granted absolute power over the humblest of others. This view of the intrinsic equality of every person—or at least of nearly every propertied white man—drew on secular philosophical insights, the ethos of the Protestant Reformation, and the prevailing culture of the Scientific Revolution.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
The July 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights convention—brought about by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, among others—issued a “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” that sanctified a movement’s creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” The italics are mine; the vision the suffragists’. Susan B. Anthony, an essential figure, echoed the point down the years: “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union,” she said in 1873 after she illegally cast a ballot for U. S. Grant for president. “And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people—women as well as men.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
who made it. Perfection was impossible; greatness was reserved for those who managed to move forward in an imperfect world: His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen…. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined….
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
I believe in one God, creator of the universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we can render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental principles of all sound religion, and I regard them as you do, in whatever sect I meet with them. As to Jesus of Nazareth…I think the system of morals and his religion as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have…some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.
Jon Meacham (American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation)
When Lincoln was running for the House of Representatives from Illinois, he was charged with being “a scoffer at religion,” wrote the historian William J. Wolf, because he belonged to no church. During the campaign, Lincoln attended a sermon delivered by his opponent in the race, Reverend Peter Cartwright, a Methodist evangelist. At a dramatic moment in his performance, Cartwright said, “All who do not wish to go to hell will stand.” Only Lincoln kept his seat. “May I inquire of you, Mr. Lincoln, where you are going?” the minister asked, glowering. “I am going to Congress” was the dry reply. When he was president, Lincoln also liked the story of a purported exchange about him and Jefferson Davis between two Quaker women on a train: “I think Jefferson will succeed,” the first said. “Why does thee think so?” “Because Jefferson is a praying man.” “And so is Abraham a praying man.” “Yes, but the Lord will think Abraham is joking.
Jon Meacham (American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation)