Meacham - The soul of America: the battle for our better angels

For only the President represents the national interest, JFK said. Upon him alone converge all the needs and aspirations of all parts of the countryall nations of the world.

Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake, is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something. Of what? Of many things, but usually of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded, or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime.

W . E . B . D U B OIS , Black Reconstruction in America, 1935

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

A BRAHAM L INCOLN , First Inaugural Address, 1861

T HE FATE OF A MERICA or at least of white America, which was the only America that seemed to countwas at stake. On the autumn evening of Thursday, October 7, 1948, South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, the segregationist Dixiecrat candidate for president of the United States, addressed a crowd of one thousand inside the University of Virginias Cabell Hall in Charlottesville. The subject at hand: President Harry S. Trumans civil rights program, one that included anti-lynching legislation and protections against racial discrimination in hiring.

Thurmond was having none of it. Such measures, he thundered, would undermine the American way of life and outrage the Bill of Rights. Interrupted by applause and standing ovations, Thurmond, who had bolted the Democratic National Convention in July to form the States Rights Democratic Party, was in his element in the Old Confederacy. I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, Thurmond had said in accepting the breakaway partys nomination in Birmingham, Alabama, that theres not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, into our churches.

The message was clear. He and his fellow Dixiecrats, he told the University of Virginia crowd, offered the only genuine obstacle to the rise of socialism or communism in America. Civil rights, Thurmond declared, were a Red plot against the Free World: Only the States Rights Democratsand we alonehave the moral courage to stand up to the Communists and tell them this foreign doctrine will not work in free America.

Nearly seventy years on, in the heat of a Virginia August in 2017, heirs to the Dixiecrats platform of white supremacytwenty-first century Klansmen and neo-Nazis among themgathered in Charlottesville, not far from where Thurmond had taken his stand. The story is depressingly well known: A young counter-protestor, Heather Heyer, was killed. Two Virginia state troopers died in a helicopter crash as part of an operation to maintain order. And the president of the United Stateshimself an heir to the white populist tradition of Thurmond and of Alabamas George Wallacesaid that there had been an egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, as if there were more than one side to a conflict between neo-Nazis who idolized Adolf Hitler and Americans who stood against Ku Klux Klansmen and white nationalists. The remarks were of a piece with the incumbent presidents divisive language on immigration (among many other subjects, from political foes to women) and his nationalist rhetoric.