Book excerpt: Jon Meacham's 'The Soul of America'

Excerpted with permission from the new book "The Soul of America" by Jon Meacham. Published by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Copyright 2018 by Jon Meacham. All rights reserved.

The fate of America -- or at least of white America, which was the only America that seemed to count -- was 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 Virginia’s Cabell Hall in Charlottesville. The subject at hand: President Harry S. Truman’s 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 party’s nomination in Birmingham, Alabama, “that there’s 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, Thur- mond declared, were a Red plot against the Free World: “Only the States Rights Democrats—and we alone—have 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 supremacy—twenty-first century Klansmen and neo-Nazis among them—gathered 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 States—himself an heir to the white populist tradition of Thurmond and of Alabama’s George Wallace—said 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 president’s divisive language on immigration (among many other subjects, from political foes to women) and his nationalist rhetoric.

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.”