The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

Jon Meacham examines critical periods in American history when hope overcame division and fear, offering perspective on contemporary partisan conflict. The book is not new to American politics; Meacham demonstrates how what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have repeatedly prevailed. Meacham presents portraits of presidents including Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, alongside influential activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr., suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Joseph N. Welch. The book covers the Civil War and Reconstruction, anti-immigrant backlash during World War I and the Ku Klux Klan resurgence of the 1920s, the fight for women's rights, the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin, Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist witch-hunts, and Lyndon Johnson's campaign against Jim Crow. Each historical moment reflects a struggle between looking forward with hope or backward with fear. While the American story has not always been heroic, Meacham argues that belief in progress has sustained the nation through darkness.