Democracy is in crisis in the United States, presidential historian Jon Meacham said, but history has shown repeatedly that Americans can rise to the occasion given the right leadership and the right mindset.
Meacham, who spoke Sunday at the Purdue Northwest Sinai Forum lecture series in Westville, said that includes looking at political rivals as opponents, not enemies.
“Crisis is the moment in disease where the patient lives or dies,” and the same holds true for public life, he said.
The 2020s are an echo of the 1920s, he suggested, setting the scene for his point. He quoted Mark Twain: “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
Meacham reminded the large crowd that in 1926 the United States had just been through World War I, in which empires rose and fell, experienced brutal fighting on the Western Front, witnessed increasing mechanization of war, and the widespread use of chemical and biological weapons. Aircraft were used in combat for the first time.
Then a global pandemic, the Spanish flu, hit.
The Bolshevik revolution created fears of armed socialist rebellion around the world. Totalitarianism was on the rise.
Anti-immigrant sentiment, protectionism, tariffs and isolationism were the order of the day.
The Ku Klux Klan, Meacham said, targeted immigrants, Jews and Catholics as much as blacks.
Then came the 1929 stock market crash, the start of the Great Depression. “One out of four American men were out of work. There were food riots in the Midwest,” Meacham said.
So what solved that crisis? “I think in many ways Franklin Roosevelt happened.”
In his inaugural address on March 4, 1933, Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
“It’s on the first page of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ That’s how Harper Lee grounds the story in 1933,” Meacham said.
But his address also mentioned the possible need for war-like executive powers, for the president to be able to take strong actions to solve the crisis.
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“Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that it chilled her to the bone that people seemed ready for a warlike dictator,” Meacham said.
That same year, Smedley Butler, head of the American Legion, testified before Congress that a group of industrialists paid him to bring an armed group to Washington, D.C., to stage a coup d’etat and remove Roosevelt.
“An armed group came to Washington,” Meacham said. “This wasn’t some fevered, swampy corner of the internet. This actually happened.”
Roosevelt insisted “the experiment of 1787” – the Constitution – would not end on his watch.
Fast forward to the 2020s, and the nation is divided, with presidential elections this century decided by a thin margin.
“It’s not a partisan thing to say the state of the country is not what many of us would have it,” Meacham said. Americans live in “a decade of unease, a decade in which we have not found answers as a country commensurate to the scaled questions we face.”
“I live in Tennessee, so when I say I have conservative friends, that’s redundant,” Meacham quipped. Rather than calling himself a conservative or liberal, he puts it this way: “I’m an unabashed American constitutionalist.”
Meacham said he declines to be part of a generation that leaves American institutions weaker than they found them.
“We have an intellectual and moral obligation to call things as we see them,” he said. That includes seeing each other “not as enemies but as rivals and opponents.”
“Partisanship is part of the American atmosphere. It’s supposed to be,” he said, but not taken to extremes like it is today.
“Conflict is entertaining. It’s certainly profitable, isn’t it,” Meacham said. “That’s how you get an Obama tan suit thing.”
“You have to have something to fight about, because the business model is conflict,” he said.
But the Trump era is different, he said.
Richard Nixon was a centrist. He created the Environmental Protection Agency, proposed a guaranteed annual income and even sought healthcare reform far to the left of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Meacham said.
“When he broke the law, he had a sense of shame, and then he followed the law,” Meacham said. “When the Supreme Court said hand over the tapes, he handed them over.”
Having sinned, the route to redemption was resignation. “It was a deeply moral moment,” Meacham said.
“From 2015 until late November or December of 2020, I was convinced that this was a difference of degree but not of kind,” just as in the Federalist Papers era, when it was a philosophical struggle before it became a duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.
“Then the post-election drama of 2020 happened,” Meacham said.
“The introduction into the body politics of the virus that says if I lose the election it was stolen, is, I think, going to be a durable and dangerous virus,” he said.
When Andrew Jackson won a plurality of popular votes in the 1824 presidential election but not the Electoral College decision, he called it a “corrupt bargain” but rejected a governor’s offer to send armed forces to Washington on his behalf.
“If the country is going to endure and prevail, we have to have the ability to both win graciously and lose graciously. We have to,” Meacham said.
The last decade has been shaped by one person and the reaction to that person. “You can’t love your country only when you win,” Meacham said.
“What we don’t know is whether that personality will have durable political and policy legacy,” he said.
“This has been the age of Trump. Any historian who is intellectually honest will call it the age of Trump,” Meacham said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.