Jon Meacham's "The Soul of America"

 

    I have just finished reading Jon Meacham’s 2018 history, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels.” It is the story of how the United States worked over our 2050-year history to solve problems whose solutions helped to define our national character.  It is a remarkable look at how the citizens of the United States and their leaders struggled over the generations to address fundamental issues surrounding our society’s commitment to serving all of its people. 

    Meacham looks at key moments in American history that shaped our sense of ourselves as a nation, with stories of leaders have faced the issues and shaped our common culture.  He looks at how the concept of the presidency—and the nature of our democracy—evolved from the Revolution through the presidencies of Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson and how American society continued to be refined as later Presidents dealt with immigration, the Great Depression, the continuing struggle for voting rights and inclusion, political extremism, and the more recent changes brought about by technology.

    It is a powerful book, and the way that Meacham engages our response to seven major social issues to illustrate how our sense of ourselves as a nation evolved is a powerful way to see and understand our history as a nation and a culture.

    Meacham quotes Harry Truman, who won the Presidency in 1948 running against three other candidates—segregationist Thurmond, progressive Wallace, and republican Dewey— “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.”  The Soul of America explores how Presidents throughout U.S. history have approached that challenge to some of the most intractable issues facing our culture.

    The Soul of America is also a great example of how history should be taught, as a saga built around the ongoing challenges facing leaders in a constantly evolving society.  I thank Jon Meacham for his insight into our culture and his lessons for how we should continue to address change.  I heartily recommend it.

"A Complete Unknown"

 

The other night—and again the next afternoon—I watched A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan bio-pic that depicts his rise from his arrival in New York City to his 1965 appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, in which his adoption of folk rock truly did electrify American popular music.  For people like me, who first discovered Dylan in the Sixties with the release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown was a delight, especially knowing that Dylan himself was involved in the production.  Timothy Chalamet plays Dylan and sings his songs throughout the movie.  I am confident that, since Dylan was personally involved, Chalamet also accurately reflects some of Dylan’s personal quirks as he delivers his lines. 

One of the most interesting characters, it turns out, is fictional—sort of.  Dylan’s girlfriend in the film is named Sylvie Russo, played by Elle Fanning.  As Elle noted, “Sylvie is intended to represent the real-life woman who inspired much of Dylan’s early work, and who appeared clutching his arm on the famous cover photo for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan: the artist and activist Suze Rotolo.”  Dylan did not feel it appropriate to use her real name, as she was not a professional colleague, like Joan Baez, but a purely personal friend and lover who stayed out of the limelight and who died a few years ago.  That said, their relationship is an important part of the film.

Beyond that, there are many very interesting moments in the film that give us viewers insights into the music scene at a time when we were on the verge of a cultural revolution.  For my generation, it is a great look back to our roots.

I heartily recommend A Complete Unknown.

A Lesson from Samuel Adams

 

I am reading The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Stacy Schiff’s biography of one of the people who helped set in motion the events that shaped the American Revolution 250 years ago.   Adams, who entered Harvard as a thirteen-year-old undergraduate in 1743, eventually earned his Master’s Degree there, too.  In those days, higher education centered around the ideas of the great thinkers of the classical era, but the study of Enlightenment thinkers was also popular.  Schiff notes that “the sole academic requirement for the degree was a thesis: in Latin, a master’s candidate answered a theoretical question drawn from a list of 400 questions covering the realms of philosophy, ethics, religion, and science” (p. 31).

Adams, then twenty years old, chose this topic: “Is it lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the republic cannot otherwise be preserved?”  As Schiff reports, “Few others asked at the time—when George Washington was a child, Thomas Jefferson months old, and James Madison yet to be born—if resistance to a king might be justified” (p.33).  Adams’ answer was a firm “Yes.”  He argued that, while civil government was a blessing that protected individual citizens from the self-interest of others, when a leader’s actions imperil the rights of other citizens, “he overthrows the very design of government, and the people are discharged from all obedience” (ibid.).   Three decades later, Adams would become a signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of the architects of the principles that made American democracy a model for other nations.

Today, as we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States of America in 2026, the principles that Adams and his colleagues debated are being challenged again, and we need to re-affirm the principles on which the nation was founded.  What is the responsibility of a leader?  How should citizens—individually and through their government representatives in Congress—respond when a leader dis-respects the principles that shaped and continue to guide the way we govern ourselves as a community?  A year away from our 250th anniversary as a constitutional democracy, we need to re-affirm our understanding of and commitment to our constitutional democracy.

Finding Our Way in a New World: The Native American View

 

This winter, I read three books that gave me an insight into the culture that we inherited from the Native Americans who called North America home long before the Europeans "discovered" this place.  

Dwight Jon Zimmerman’s Saga of the Sioux (Henry Holt and Company 2011) is an adaptation of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee that sets the scene by describing how Native Americans’ culture and traditions in North America were shattered in the time of Sitting Bull as the U.S. Army invaded the last remnants of Native territory in the U.S. in order to create roads for settlers headed toward the gold fields.  This 200-page book was designed for younger readers, but it paints a clear picture of this critical period in the Native American experience.

In Becoming Kin (Broadleaf Books, 2022), Patty Krawec takes a longer view, describing how even the earliest European settlement in what is now Canada and the U.S. wreaked havoc on longstanding native American communities, essentially taking their ownership of their tribal lands away from them.  Krawec, whose ancestral roots are in the Anishinaabe, as well as Ukraine, lives in Canada.  Her book is subtitled An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future.  It tells how European settlers took over Native American lands, pushing Indigenous communities from their homelands and forcing them to re-settle on lands controlled by the European settlers.  It is a powerful story of disenfranchisement of an entire culture and a call for today’s generation to recover their identity and kinship with each other and their culture.

At the same time, though, Krawec gives us an important insight into how Indigenous Americans experienced--and continue to experience--their relationship to the world around them.  She demonstrates how they see nature as a community of living things that require respect at every level and how we humans are part of that community.

That relationship with Nature is the focus of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which has the subtitle Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.  In a time when the environment seems to be increasingly threatened by human technology and mis-use of the living world around us, Braiding Sweetgrass has powerful lessons from our indigenous neighbors about how to live within nature—as a part of nature--rather than on nature.  It is an important book that brings to life a perspective on our relationship with the world in which we live.

"The Wager"

 

I am reading The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, David Grann’s best-selling account of a 1742 voyage when a group of British warships attempted a trip around the tip of South America. 

In the process Grann gives us an insight into how some common English phrases evolved out of the experience of naval exploration and warfare.  Grann writes (on p. 35):

“To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck steam.  To “pipe down” was a boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals.  A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control.  To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.”

Later (on page 51) he mentions the source of the phrase “under the weather.”  It referred to when sailors became so sick that they were moved below deck, away from the weather.

The Wager is a great read.  Grann brings together 18th century social and technological issues, international politics, the impact of social stratification, and the role of naval innovation in the politics of European expansion.  I am still early in the book.  I know it will end in tragedy, but am looking forward to learning more about the fate of The Wager and of the sailors who manned it.

It Takes a Village

 

Individual versus Social Responsibility

Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley suffered an embarrassment this election year when asked about the cause of the American Civil War.   It was, she replied, the result of the conflict between two views of how one should live in society.  On one hand, the South celebrated the freedom of the individual, while the North celebrated a society in which government ensured the same rights—equal rights—for all citizens.  Almost immediately, there was a backlash, since most people felt that the Civil War was about slavery and how it denied freedom and full participation in society to an entire race of people.

            One could argue, of course, that slavery—or, more precisely, the right of individual people of one race to buy and hold others as slaves—was a major implication of a social structure defined by the rights of individuals without also referencing the individual’s responsibility to their society and the right of all individuals to the same opportunities.    Ultimately, this frames the questions that all democracies must address and then continue to consider as every new generation faces fresh challenges. 

The question of how to balance the individual’s rights with the individual’s responsibility to the community is not a new concern.  In his history of America during the Presidencies of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams (John Quincy’s grandson) recalled a controversy over whether or not citizens should fund the development of a highway across Rhode Island.  Opponents argued for a toll road, saying that they should not be required to pay the cost of people transporting goods from one place to another (Adams, p. 46).  Adams quotes Timothy Dwight, President of Yale from 1795 to 1817, on the Rhode Island state legislature’s refusal to fund the completion of an unfinished turnpike designed to cross the state:

“The principal reason for the refusal, as alleged by one of the members, it is said, was the following: that turnpikes and the establishment of religious worship had their origin in Great Britain, the government of which was a monarchy and the inhabitants slaves; that the people of Massachusetts and Connecticut were obliged by law to support ministers and pay the fare of turnpikes, and were therefore slaves also; that if they chose to be slaves they undoubtedly had a right to their choice, but that free-born Rhode Islanders ought never to submit to be priest-ridden, nor to pay for the privilege of travelling on the highway. This demonstrative reasoning prevailed, and the road continued in the state which I have mentioned until the year 1805. It was then completed, and free-born Rhode Islanders bowed their necks to the slavery of travelling on a good road” (ibid.).

And so it has gone for the two centuries that followed.  We continue to struggle to find a happy middle ground between the desire for individual freedom, on one hand, and the need for individuals to take responsibility for their communities on the other.  Historically, one result of this way of living is that the control of community falls to a tiny minority.  In the olden days, these were the aristocrats, kings and dictators.  The challenge for today, when many citizens have lost their sense of citizenship, is to keep our culture as a community of individuals.  As some have said, “It takes a village.”  Call it democracy.   

"Mayflower" -- Understanding the Real Events of Our Early History

 I just finished reading “Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War,” Nathaniel Philbrick’s account of how the Pilgrims and other English   peoples left Europe and came to what is now known as “New England” and how they interacted with the native Americans who already called that area home.   The book devotes much attention to the relationship between the Europeans and the Native Americans, showing how they competed for resources, how they learned about each other’s culture and ways, and, ultimately, how they came into conflict through King Philip’s War--a war that divided the Native Americans into pro- and anti-English factions and, ultimately, contributed greatly to the decline of the Native American population in New England.  

    It also documents some disturbing actions, especially in light of the long tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving as a coming together of English and Native American communities.  I was amazed to learn, for instance, that the English sold captured Native American fighters into slavery.  Beyond that, the war resulted in a huge loss of Native American population in the area.  As Philbrick writes, “The fourteen bloody months between June 1675 and August 1676 had a last, disturbing impact. On the development of New England and, with it, all of America.  . . . And yet we must look with something more than cynicism at a people who maintained more than half a century of peace with their Native neighbors.  The great mystery of this story is how America emerged from the terrible darkness of King Philip’s War to become the United States” (Mayflower p. 357).
   

    Given the political extremism that is currently flooding  the United States as we prepare for a historic election, we should all take a fresh look at a our history to better understand how we got here and what we need to value as we continue to evolve as a society.  I highly recommend Mayflower as a starting point.

 Philbrick, Nathanial.  Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War.  Penguin Books, 2007.