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      The Nation That Never Was review: a new American origin story, from the ashes of the old

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      The Nation That Never Was review: a new American origin story, from the ashes of the old Kermit Roosevelt III, descendant of Theodore, sees lessons for today’s divided nation in Reconstruction and the civil rights era As with the climate, in politics we are running out of time. America’s retreat from democracy cannot persist. Though Native Americans, Black people, women and plenty others of us were excluded from America’s compact of equality and opportunity, many are still nostalgic for once upon a time. Some see even so flawed a quest for “a more perfect union” as admirable enough to deem it beyond reproach. After all, the argument goes, the American experiment always included and valued most. So that’s alright. All do not think that way.‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American historyRead moreKermit Roosevelt III illuminates tumultuous today by examining the contentious beginning. With The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, he thoughtfully explains our growing confusion as to what the creation meant and means.How can so many, looking back to the intentions of the founders, be so misled now? How have we misinterpreted what America has always been about? Citing an evolution as profound as “an eye for an eye” metamorphosing to “God is love”, Roosevelt’s investigation gives lie to every originalist argument today. One might even be tempted to view the United States’ contradictory impediment of slavery like Christianity’s “blessing” of original sin, the absence of which, theologians say, precludes salvation.Roosevelt is a Penn law professor and a great-great grandson of the “trust-busting” 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. He is careful to give credit where credit is due. He notes his book was prefigured by Nikole Hannah-Jones’s powerful 2019 essay, Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.Created for the New York Times’ groundbreaking 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones’s piece relates: “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie … despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans … have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves – Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.”Roosevelt endorses this sentiment by stating that the Declaration of Independence was not conceived as a document dedicated to impartiality. Au contraire. As he puts it, it protected the rights and interests of “insiders” from the striving and ambitions of “outsiders”, a push and pull, he says, that remains in effect.The nub of the Declaration, Roosevelt asserts, is that when supposedly free people are oppressed, it is incumbent upon them to rebel. Ironically, it was only with the arrival of the civil war, rebelling southern states invoking the supposed tyranny of efforts to end their oppression of others, that America was redeemed.The result was not just a second revolution. It presented us with a second constitution, one that in important ways undid the slavery-supporting first constitution.And yet despite the indifference of that document to individual rights, Roosevelt writes: “We tell ourselves a story that links us to a past political regime – Founding America, the America of the Declaration of Independence and the Founders’ Constitution – to which we are not the heirs … We are more properly the heirs of the people who destroyed that regime”, who “defeated it by force of arms”.Abraham Lincoln appreciated this. So did Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Yet each strategically choose to give credence to the more broad appeal of the founding myth. Both the Gettysburg Address and the I Have a Dream speech do this. So many, their authors understood, find embracing an origin story based on the ideal of universal inclusion more palatable than our tainted reality.Moreover, the second constitution, contingent and evolving, requires both “the blood of patriots and tyrants” Thomas Jefferson proscribed to sustain liberty and the “eternal vigilance” he also recommended. To ward off neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, far-right Christians and the like takes the fortitude of activists like Black Lives Matter combined with the sacrifice of a Bobby, Martin, Malcom or John. There is no less grievous way.Realizing our promise, Roosevelt insists, requires completing the reform of Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Relics supporting the privilege of “insiders” – the electoral college, encumbrances of voting rights, pay-to-play election financing – all must be banished.The Nation That Never Was makes one all too aware of the ways insiders protect their advantage. Always they urge patience in what they see as a benevolent, color-blind system. Professing that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”, even King grew weary waiting.So have I. Concerned about the modest size of a newly protected historic district, Harlem residents were reassured by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission that they needn’t worry.“This is our opening salvo. We’ll be back to do more…”Their return only took 44 years.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead moreRoosevelt is at his poignant, tragicomic best when calling-out perennial efforts to rationalize and justify the biases of white supremacy into public policy and law. Did the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, really believe his 2013 ruling eviscerating the Voting Rights Act? He said racially motivated voter suppression was a problem of the past, that “the nation is no longer divided” into states with a recent history of voter suppression and those without.Plessy v Ferguson, the overturning of Roe v Wade, depriving the franchise to so many inhabitants. American history is not a saga of anomalous outrage. Every incident of persisting misogyny, homophobia or racism brings to the fore the problem Roosevelt seeks to address.No matter how familiar Laozi’s truism, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, some people today are just like those in all the other volumes I’ve reviewed here. Wether in Wilmington’s Lie, Learning From the Germans, The Other Madisons or The Groundbreaking, the common obstacle to change and healing is reluctance to even admitting that anything bad ever happened – much less that an injustice stands unamended.
      The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, is published in the US by University of Chicago press
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      ‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American history

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      Interview‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American historyMartin Pengelly in New York The discovery of a plaque showing a member of the Ku Klux Klan at the US military academy made headlines. One member of the commission which recommended its removal is a historian of the US army and the lost cause mythIn a 36-year army career, Ty Seidule served in the US, Germany, Italy, Kenya, Kosovo, Macedonia, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. He retired a brigadier general.Lincoln and the fight for peace: John Avlon on a president in the shadow of new warRead moreAn emeritus West Point history professor, he now teaches at Hamilton College. His online video, Was the Civil War About Slavery?, has been viewed millions of times, and in 2021 he published a well-received book, Robert E Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause.Outside academia, Seidule is a member of the Naming Commission, a body set up in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd and the protests for racial justice it inspired, tasked with recommending changes to military memorials to Confederates who fought in the civil war.Asked how the US military came to name bases, barracks, roads and other assets after soldiers who fought to secede from the union and keep Black people enslaved, Seidule said: “The first thing to know is that in the 19th century, most army officers saw the Confederates as traitors.“That’s not a presentist argument. That’s what they thought. And particularly about Lee, who renounced his oath, fought against this country, killed US army soldiers and as [Union general and 18th president Ulysses S] Grant said, did so for the worst possible reason: to create a slave republic.“So in the 19th century, they would not have done this … the first memorialisation of a Confederate at West Point is in the 1930s. So, why is that? [It’s about] segregation in America. The last West Point black graduate was 1889. The next one was in 1936. West Point reflects America. [The first memorials] were a reaction to integration.”Seidule rejects the notion that memorials to Lee and other Confederates – PGT Beauregard, a West Point superintendent fired for sedition, William Hardee, a commandant who fought in the west – might be claimed as symbols of reconciliation.“The problem with that is it was reconciliation among white people, at the expense of Black people.“There had already been reconciliation. Magnanimously, the United States of America pardoned all former Confederates in 1868 … reconciliation is sort of an agreement among whites that Black people will be treated in a Jim Crow fashion. So no, it’s not a reconciliation based, I would say, on an America we want today.”Last week, the Naming Commission made headlines when it highlighted a bronze at the United States Military Academy which depicts a member of the Ku Klux Klan.Seidule told the New York Times that though the Klan bronze fell outside the remit of the commission – the racist terror group was founded after the defeat of the south – the panel chose to highlight it “because we thought it was wrong”.The commission has issued reports concerning military bases and the military and naval academies. It will present its final report in October. Speaking to the Guardian, Seidule cited such ongoing work as reason not to discuss the Klan plaque further. But West Point did so on its Facebook page.It said: “There is a triptych (three bronze panels) at one of the entrances of Bartlett Hall [the science centre] that depicts the history of the United States. The artwork was dedicated on 3 June 1965 … As part of the middle panel titled ‘One Nation, Under God, Indivisible’, there is a small section that shows a Ku Klux Klan member.“The artist, Laura Gardin Fraser … wanted to create art that depicted ‘historical incidents or persons’ that [documented] both tragedy and triumph in our nation’s history.”Noting that the work was dedicated to graduates who served in the second world war and the Korean war, West Point added: “The academy strives to graduate diverse leaders of character for our nation.”Lee did not lead the Confederacy. Its president was Jefferson Davis, a former secretary of war and senator from Mississippi. But Lee, who died in 1870, became the most-memorialised Confederate.Asked why, Seidule said: “If you think of Confederate monuments, of the burning of books which the United Daughters of the Confederacy did in the early part of the 20th century, to ensure that textbooks said the right thing, really it’s that every religion needs its God. And in a way, that’s what Lee became.”Today, conservatives are banning books in attempts to control teaching of history, race, sexuality and other culture-war issues.Seidule concentrates on his historical work. Lee, he said, was in part idealised for lack of other options. James Longstreet enjoyed battlefield victories but after the war “fought for biracial democracy in New Orleans. So you can’t use him.“While Lee ended up losing hugely, completely defeated, his armies destroyed, he was successful for a time before that. And so he was seen by the white south as their best general, as their ideal. And by the 1930s, he comes to represent something not just in the south, but among white Americans in general.”Beyond West Point, the Confederate battle flag has become a symbol of rebellion, reaction and racism more potent than any statue or building. On 6 January 2021 it even flew in the halls of Congress, when Trump supporters attacked.Again, Seidule rejects any notion that use of the flag might in any way be excused.“We have to remember that it really didn’t mean that much different then than it does now. In 1863 it represented the Army of Northern Virginia, which was fighting to create a slave republic. Now, some people say it reflects rebellion. But remember, this was rebellion to create a slave republic. And so, to me, it is a symbol of all that America is not.“It’s a symbol of insurrection, it’s a symbol of somebody that would not take the results of a democratic election. I grew up with it, my dad had Confederate flags over the mantle. I know how powerful these symbols are.“One thing we often do with the civil war as historians is we let the smell of gunpowder seduce us into thinking about the war as American football, [about the] Xs and Os of military history, without understanding the purpose. That’s the thing I always come back to: why this cruel war?”He today that sheds his blood with me: when West Point rugby went to warRead moreSeidule’s next book will be about events at West Point towards the end of another cruel war: Vietnam. In 1971, Richard Nixon decided he wanted to oversee “a moral rebirth” of an army in disarray.“OK,” Seidule says, “that’s great. But the next thing he does is go to Trophy Point”, the focal point of the West Point campus, high over the Hudson river. “If you’ve seen Battle Monument, you know it says on there, ‘the War of the Rebellion’. Nixon says, ‘Where’s the Confederate monument?’ So he orders the superintendent to put a Confederate monument on Trophy Point.“And the Black cadets find out. And they nearly mutiny and they write a manifesto based on the Attica uprising” – at a New York prison in 1971 – “and [eventually] just so many things change.“They put on a concert to raise money for sickle cell anemia research, featuring Stevie Wonder and the Supremes, up at Michie Stadium”, the home of Army football. “They bring Louis Farrakhan to talk. They institute remarkable change, which I’m arguing comes from one of the most successful protest movements in American military history that nobody knows about, and eventually it kills the Confederate monument.“So that’s the book I’m writing now.”
      Robert E Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause is published in the US by St Martin’s Press
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      Seen and Unseen review: George Floyd, Black Twitter and the fight for racial justice

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      Seen and Unseen review: George Floyd, Black Twitter and the fight for racial justiceMarc Lamont Hill and Todd Brewster’s brilliant book considers the history of communications technology in a racist society Nearly all the books I have read about the internet have deepened my fears about the net effect of social media on the health of our body politic. For example, I thought three facts from the congressman Ro Khanna’s recent book, Dignity in a Digital Age, were enough to scare anyone concerned about the future of democracy.Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRead moreKhanna reported that an internal discussion at Facebook revealed that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendations”; he revealed that before 2020, “QAnon groups developed millions of followers as Facebook’s algorithm encouraged people to join based on their profiles”; and he pointed to a United Nations report that Facebook played a “determining role” in events in Myanmar that led to the murder of at least 25,000 Rohingya Muslims and the displacement of 700,000 others.Seen and Unseen, a brilliant new book by Marc Lamont Hill, a Black professor, and Todd Brewster, a white journalist, certainly doesn’t ignore those dangers. But the authors’ focus is overwhelmingly on the positive effects of Twitter and Black Twitter, which they argue have democratized access to information, and the power of the smartphone to provide the incontrovertible video evidence needed to prosecute the murderers of men like George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.The book is a brisk, smart, short history of the effects of new communication technologies, from the photographs of the 19th century to the movies and television of the 20th and the internet of our own time.It includes terrific mini-portraits of many of the heroes and several of the villains of the Black-and-white battle which has dominated so much of American history, including the great Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who turns out to be the most photographed American of the 19th century, and the white supremacist Thomas Dixon Jr, whose novel The Clansman was the basis for the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.There is a great section about the impact of The Birth of the Nation, which single-handedly revived the Ku Klux Klan and did more to rewrite the history of Reconstruction than any other book or movie. Its director, DW Griffith, was frank about wanting to give white southerners “a way of striking back”.“One could not find the sufferings of our family and our friends – the dreadful poverty and hardships during the war and for many years after – in the Yankee-written histories we read in school,” Griffith wrote. “From all this was born a burning determination to tell … our side of the story to the world.”As the authors note: “His movie did that spectacularly.”The book also reminds us that this was the first movie shown in the White House and the host, Woodrow Wilson, was a friend and Johns Hopkins classmate of Thomas Dixon Jr. Wilson, of course, was also the president who allowed the segregation of the federal government.But what makes this volume especially valuable is the authors’ capacity to see the good and the bad in almost everything.WEB Du Bois said The Birth of the Nation represented “the Negro” either “as an ignorant fool, a vicious rapist, a venal or unscrupulous politician, or a faithful but doddering idiot”. James Baldwin called it “an elaborate justification of mass murder”.And yet the film was so egregious it also had a tremendous positive effect – it “did more to advance the NAACP”, which had been founded six years earlier, “than anything else to that date. In essence it jump-started the movement for civil rights.” At that time, that term did not yet have any meaning.Du Bois and the NAACP hoped to hit back “in kind” with a movie called Lincoln’s Dream but were stymied by “the lack of enthusiasm” of white capital.In our own time, Hill and Brewster identify the unique power of the video of the murder of George Floyd, which “resonated with whites because the cruelty inflicted on him was so undeniable, so elemental … and so protracted (nine minutes 29 seconds) that it could be neither ignored nor dismissed”.For Black people of course it was much more personal: as they watched “the last breaths being squeezed from Floyd’s body, they could see themselves in his suffering; or an uncle, or a sister, or even a long-departed ancestor”.A beautiful mini-biography of James Baldwin includes many of his most pungent observations, including, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” And, “To be a Negro in this country, and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time”.A Lynching at Port Jervis review: timely history of New York race hateRead moreIt turns out that “one of the most frequently cited BLM counterpublic voices is Baldwin’s”. He is “the movement’s literary touchstone, conscience, and pinup” as well as its “most tweeted literary authority”.That is the most positive contribution of Twitter – and particularly Black Twitter – I have ever heard of.The authors write that Baldwin “was impatient with America because he saw it as trapped in its own history”, and wanted America to admit “that it owed its very existence to an ideology of white supremacy”.There was a time in my life when I considered that an exaggeration. But once you have acknowledged that ours is a nation that was literally founded on genocide and slavery, Baldwin’s judgment becomes an indisputable truth.
      Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice is published in the US by Atria Books
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      ‘I didn’t win the election’: Trump admits defeat in session with historians

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      ‘I didn’t win the election’: Trump admits defeat in session with historiansThe ex-president also said that Iran, China and South Korea were happy Biden won, adding that ‘the election was rigged and lost’

      Review: The Presidency of Donald Trump
      Donald Trump has admitted he did not win the 2020 election.Capitol attack panel scores two big wins as it inches closer to Trump’s inner circleRead more“I didn’t win the election,” he said.The admission came in a video interview with a panel of historians convened by Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor and editor of The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment. The interview was published on Monday by the Atlantic.Describing his attempts to make South Korea pay more for US military assistance, Trump said Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, was among the “happiest” world leaders after the 2020 US election put Joe Biden in the White House.“By not winning the election,” Trump said, “he was the happiest man – I would say, in order, China was – no, Iran was the happiest.“[Moon] was going to pay $5bn, $5bn a year. But when I didn’t win the election, he had to be the happiest – I would rate, probably, South Korea third- or fourth-happiest.”Trump also said “the election was rigged and lost”.Trump’s refusal to accept defeat by Biden provoked attempts to overturn results in key states in court – the vast majority of such cases ending in defeat – and the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.Trump was impeached a second time, for inciting an insurrection, and acquitted a second time after enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal.Trump thus remains free to run for the White House again in 2024, which he has repeatedly hinted he will do.Writing for the Atlantic, Zelizer said Trump “was the one who had decided to reach out to a group of professional historians so that we produced ‘an accurate book’”.The former president called the historians assembled by Zelizer “a tremendous group of people, and I think rather than being critical I’d like to have you hear me out, which is what we’re doing now, and I appreciate it”.Trump, Zelizer wrote, “seemed to want the approval of historians, without any understanding of how historians gather evidence or render judgments”.Zelizer also pointed out that shortly after the session with the historians, Trump announced he would give no more interviews for books about his time in office.“It seems to me that meeting with authors of the ridiculous number of books being written about my very successful administration, or me, is a total waste of time,” Trump said in a statement, in July 2021.“These writers are often bad people who write whatever comes to their mind or fits their agenda. It has nothing to do with facts or reality.”TopicsBooksHistory booksPolitics booksDonald TrumpJoe BidenUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      The Presidency of Donald Trump review: the first draft of history

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      The Presidency of Donald Trump review: the first draft of history Julian Zelizer of Princeton has assembled a cast of historians to consider every aspect of four years that shook AmericaAfter thousands of articles and scores of books about Donald Trump’s mostly catastrophic presidency, it’s difficult for anyone to break dramatic new ground. But this new volume, with contributions from 18 American academics, is broader and deeper than all its predecessors, with essays covering everything from Militant Whiteness to the legacy of Trump’s Middle East policies, under the title Arms, Autocrats and Annexations.The result is a great deal of information that is familiar to those who have already plowed through dozens of volumes, enlivened by a few new facts and a number of original insights.One of the best essays, about the Republican party Trump inherited, is written by the book’s editor, Julian Zelizer. The Princeton historian reminds us that the “smashmouth partisanship” perfected by Trump actually began when Newt Gingrich snared the House speakership nearly 30 years ago. In 1992, Pat Buchanan’s speech to the Republic convention featured all of the gay-bashing Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, (and may other Republicans) have revived with so much gusto in 2022.Trump swooped in to profit from White House photographer’s book deal – reportRead moreWith major contributions from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the rightwing media machine, most of the GOP moved so far right it didn’t become Trump’s party because he “seized control” but rather because “he fit so perfectly” with it. Most Republicans were “all in” for Trump, from Mitt Romney, the ex-never Trumper who voted with his former nemesis more than 80% of the time, to “moderate” Chris Christie, who gave Trump an “A” four months after his four years of scorched-earth governance were over.Nicole Hemmer, from Columbia, offers an excellent primer on the irresistible rise of rightwing media, reminding us that in the last year of the first George Bush presidency, Limbaugh was spending the night at the White House. By 2009, the shock jock “topped polls asking who led the Republican party”.By the time Trump started his run for the presidency, in 2015, he had “grown far more powerful than the political media ecosystem that had boosted his rightwing bona fides”. This became clear after his dust-up with Megyn Kelly. Moderating a primary debate, the Fox anchor challenged his long history of sexist statements. Trump declared afterwards: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”The Fox News chief, Roger Ailes, “stayed silent”, Hemmer writes. Another executive, Bill Shine, “told on-air anchors not to come to Kelly’s defense”.By the spring of 2016, Fox was becoming less important than Breitbart, an extreme-right website which researchers at Harvard and MIT declared the new anchor of a “rightwing media network”. It was Steve Bannon of Breitbart who “armed Trump with something like a cohesive political platform … built on anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-liberal politics – the same agenda Breitbart.com was promoting”.“Sure enough”, Trump’s Twitter feed “during the campaign linked to Breitbart more than any other news site”.Eventually, just about everyone on the right became a Trump disciple. Glenn Beck compared him to Hitler in 2016. By 2018, Beck was wearing a red Make America Great Again hat, though he blamed the media’s “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for “forcing him to become a Trump supporter”. As a former rightwing radio host, Charlie Sykes, explained: “There’s really not a business model for conservative media to be anti-Trump.”A Brown historian, Bathsheba Demuth, demonstrates that Trump was also a perfect fit for a party that endorsed a propaganda initiative of the American Petroleum Institute that portrayed environmental protection as “a dangerous slide toward communist authoritarianism”. Among loyal constituents were evangelicals, who either saw human dominion over nature as “a doctrinal requirement” or just thought the whole debate was irrelevant because of “Christ’s imminent resurrection”.The most surprising fact in this chapter is that the fossil fuel industry was so sure Trump was a loser in 2016, it gave the bulk of its contributions to Hillary Clinton.Margaret O’Mara, of the University of Washington, describes big tech’s key role in our national meltdown. She reminds us of a key, mostly forgotten moment 10 years ago, when “Google and Facebook successfully petitioned the Federal Election Commission for exemptions from disclaimer requirements” that required political ads to say who paid for them and who was responsible for their messages.The companies argued the requirements would “undermine other, much larger parts of their businesses”. Disastrously, the FEC went along with that pathetic argument. After that, no one ever knew exactly where online attack ads were coming from.O’Mara also recalls that Facebook provided the 2016 Trump campaign with “dedicated staff and resources” to help it purchase more ads on the platform. O’Mara mistakenly reports that the Clinton campaign received the same kind of largesse. Actually, in what may have been the campaign’s single worst decision, it refused Facebook’s offer to install staffers in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters.Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRead moreAnother chapter, by Daniel C Kurtzer of Princeton, analyses what Trump supporters consider their president’s greatest foreign policy achievement: the initiation of diplomatic relations between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan and Morocco.A conservative journal summarized the accomplishment this way: “Washington is strengthening repression in Bahrain, underwriting aggression by UAE, sacrificing the Sahrawi people [of Western Sahara, to Morocco], undermining reform in Sudan and even abandoning justice for Americans harmed by Sudan. The administration calls this an ‘American first’ policy.”The last chapter focuses on the two failed attempts to convict Trump in impeachment trials. Those outcomes may be Trump’s worst legacy of all. Gregory Downs, from the University of California, Davis, writes that the failures to convict “in the face of incontrovertible proof” may convince all Trump’s successors “that they have almost complete impunity as long as they retain the support of their base, no matter what the constitution says”.
      The Presidency of Donald Trump is published in the US by Princeton University Press
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      Lincoln and the fight for peace: John Avlon on a president in the shadow of new war

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      InterviewLincoln and the fight for peace: John Avlon on a president in the shadow of new warMartin Pengelly The CNN analyst says the 16th president’s example can guide America through dark times – at home as well as abroadJohn Avlon has published a book about Abraham Lincoln and peace in a time of war. He sees the irony, of course.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead more“I’d like to think that sometimes I can look around corners,” says the CNN political analyst, a former editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast. “But I didn’t anticipate that Putin would invade Ukraine opposite the book.“But there is a foreign policy dimension to the book that is probably unexpected.”In Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, Avlon offers both narrative and analytical history. He retells and examines the end of the American civil war, Lincoln’s plans for reuniting his country, his assassination and how in the former slaveholding states Reconstruction was defeated and racism enshrined in law.He also considers how Lincoln’s ideas about reconciliation and rebuilding lived on, ultimately to influence the rebuilding of Germany and Japan after the second world war, and how the 16th president’s politics of “the golden rule” – treat others as you would have them treat you – offers a model for solving division at home and abroad.More than 15,000 books have been written about Lincoln, but Avlon’s arrives in an America still subject to the attentions of Donald Trump, while from Russia Vladimir Putin pitches Ukraine into war and the world into nuclear dread.“When people pick up a book about Abraham Lincoln now,” Avlon says, “I think the flow-through is [about how] we belatedly realised the dangers of taking democracy for granted, of embracing or encouraging these tribal divides, which can wreak havoc.“So, too, there’s a real danger at taking for granted the liberal democratic order that has preserved a high degree of peace and prosperity in Europe over the past 75 years.“… There are moments where we abruptly remember that defending democracy at home and abroad is a cause that can be as heroic as winning it in the first place, and no less urgent.“It gets back to, ‘Let us have faith that that right makes might’” – a key line from Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860 – “and the flip side of that is what’s being tested [by Russia]. There are people in the world who believe that might makes right.”‘Despotism taken pure’Lincoln said a famous thing about Russia in a letter in 1855, five years before his election as president.“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” he wrote to a friend, Joshua Speed. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal’. We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes’. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics’.“When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”Other than that there isn’t much to go on, Russia-wise. But as Avlon points out, Lincoln was writing not just about the curse of slavery but about a domestic political threat: the Know Nothings, a nativist-populist party.The link between the Know Nothings and the Republican party of Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene has been made before, including by Avlon himself.“It’s obviously safe to say that Lincoln wouldn’t recognise today’s Republican party. His Republican party was the modern progressive party of its time, it was a big tent party, dedicated to overturning slavery.“I think, as you are trying to root Lincoln in the context of contemporary politics, you definitely need to go beneath the party label. And the fact that the Republican party now finds its base among the states of the former Confederacy is a clue … The labels may change but the song remains the same, to a distressing extent.“I was struck by what [Ulysses S] Grant said in 1875. And I checked that quote three times, because it seemed too on the nose: ‘If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.’”‘Our nation is not evenly divided’Many observers think a second American civil war is possible, along fault lines widened by a white supremacist far right which may see Putin and Putinism as a model for negating demographic change. Avlon, whose book has been well received in the political centre and on the never-Trump right, does not think civil war is imminent.“I thought Jamelle Bouie made a great point in a column a few weeks ago,” he says, “where he said, ‘Look, we don’t have structural issues like slavery.’“I do think that the current trend of polarisation, where politics becomes a matter of identity and the incentive structures move our politicians towards the extremes, rather than finding ways to work and reason together, is incredibly dangerous.“But first of all, if you look at the numbers, our nation is not evenly divided. We’re not a 50-50 nation on most issues. We’re 70-30 nation and many issues, whether it’s gay marriage, marijuana, [which] run through the country [with 70% support].“The section that believes the big lie [that Trump’s defeat was caused by voter fraud], they’re very loud. But they’re 30%, a super-majority of the Republican party. We often forget that a plurality of Americans are self-identified independents.‘What it means to be an American’: Abraham Lincoln and a nation dividedRead more“That does not diminish the danger to democracy when one party buys into a self-evident lie. Or when around a quarter of the country refuses to get vaccinated during a pandemic.“But you have to have faith in American democracy, when you look at history, because we have been through far worse before. Every generation faces great challenges. And if you’re overwhelmed by them, or pessimistic … that will not help solve them. You know, difficulty is the excuse that history never accepts.”Histories like his, Avlon says, can help readers “draw on the past to confront problems and then aim towards a better future”. His book aims “in part to give us perspective on our own problems. We’ve been through worse. We’ll get through this.“We need to be aware it’s dangerous to play with these tribal divisions for short-term political gain. And that we have an obligation to form the broadest coalition possible to defend democracy and our deepest values, which we forget sometimes.“Rooting things in the second founding and Lincoln, I think, can be clarifying and can help build that big tent again.”
      Lincoln and the Fight for Peace is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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      Top 10 books about US presidents | Claude A Clegg III

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      Top 10 books about US presidentsFrom the anguish of Lincoln to the showbiz of Reagan and Obama’s introspection, these books show the power and helplessness of America’s commanders-in-chief The US presidency was supposed to be something different, something novel, compared with the fossilised monarchical rule that it supplanted after the American revolution. Born of Enlightenment theory, settler colonialism and 18th-century warfare, the US constitution gave the chief executive primarily an enforcement role, with the authority to lead armed forces in the event of foreign encroachment or domestic unrest but stripped of the capacity to legislate or issue judicial decisions. The architects of the new republic meant for the president to preside over a citizenry well-endowed with rights, not to rule over cowed subjects.Chief executives from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan have been sorely tested by both the responsibilities and the limitations of the country’s highest, loneliest office. Through civil war, economic catastrophes, foreign misadventures, social upheavals and plagues, the presidency has endured, but it – and the 45 men who have occupied the job – has been moulded and often humbled by the promise and perils of the office.Is the US presidency – indeed, American democracy – equal to the dire challenges of the 21st century? One could certainly argue that it isn’t, based on the ongoing bungling of the Covid-19 response, the horrifying (and presidentially inspired) insurrection of 6 January 2021 and the glacially slow and fickle efforts to address everything from climate change to widening social inequality. If the founding fathers meant to circumscribe the power of the presidency out of a well-founded fear of kingly abuses, then they would surely comprehend the creeping threat that authoritarianism and political extremism present to the US system of government today. Nevertheless, they probably could not have guessed that the hard lessons that they had learned about the fragility of democracy would be so fiercely resisted or blithely ignored more than two centuries after they beseeched a patrician general from the Virginia countryside to preside over their fledgling experiment in government by the people.Of the many works that I have found useful in thinking about the history of the US presidency and for writing my newest book, The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama, these 10 have been among the most helpful. They are a mix of biographies, memoirs and reportage which, taken together, represent some of the best writings by and about the small group of powerful people who have occupied the White House.1. Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (2017)Dunbar’s important book is less a biography of George Washington, Martha Washington, or Ona Judge, the runaway enslaved woman whom the first couple made such extraordinary efforts to recapture, than a look into the power and privilege of a slaveholding elite forcing its way through a new republic rhetorically committed to liberty. The relentless pursuit of Judge by the Washingtons after her bold flight from the new US capital in Philadelphia is expertly told by Dunbar.2. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (2008)This history of overlapping, intertwined families vivifies the world around Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, while skilfully making more legible the travails and aspirations of the enslaved people on his storied estate at Monticello. The decades-long relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of the Black women he owned and who bore several of his children, occupies the core of the book, but Gordon-Reed manages to craft a complicated and often contradictory history that extends far beyond the tangle of race, gender, and status that marked the Jeffersons and the Hemingses’ commingled journey through US history.3. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2005)This book follows the intersecting biographical tributaries of the powerful, ambitious men whom Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s 16th president, was able to steer toward the rushing river of his own turbulent civil war presidency. Lincoln as political strategist and savvy tactician is the frame that Goodwin points up most dramatically. But the book also succeeds at conveying Lincoln as a beleaguered and empathic head of state whose mettle is tried time and again by those around him and news from the battlefield.4. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant (1885-1886)Rightly considered by many historians and literary critics as among the best of presidential autobiographies, this book was completed a generation after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox as Grant succumbed to a slow strangulation by throat cancer in the 1880s. The memoirs provide a vantage point on the nation’s bloodiest and most defining conflict that only a soldier elemental to the war and its aftermath could offer.5. Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris (2001)As the best biographical volume on America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, Morris’s book draws bold-coloured portraits of outsized historical figures, with equally knowing shades of nuance and frailty. Morris has the contextual eye of the historian and sets scenes that are alive and convincing. He also conveys mood and meaning as well as any novelist.6. Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 by William Leuchtenburg (1963)Dated, frayed, and surpassed by newer research and more eloquent storytellers, Leuchtenburg’s volume on the first two presidential terms of Franklin Roosevelt still stands the test of time as a scholarly, well-researched, and jargon-free narration of arguably the most consequential presidency of the 20th century. It is the tale of the rise of the liberal welfare state against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the gathering clouds of world war. Leuchtenburg tells the story well and sets the standard for future researchers.7. The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White (1961)White’s fascinating chronicle of the 1960 presidential race is the starting point of quality, book-length journalistic coverage of modern American politics. Writing in the moment, White had an eye for discerning the essential character of men such as John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon who sought the country’s highest office, even as the media ecosystem of his day made such discernment more difficult to achieve.8. Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years by Haynes Johnson (1991)Johnson captures the zeitgeist of the 1980s by juxtaposing the countervailing forces of American optimism – or the desperate need of many Americans to again believe in their scandal-wracked government – against the greed, corruption, militarism and debt that threatened to unmask the soothing myths of American exceptionalism. At the centre of Johnson’s story is a self-made man, an actor by training and temperament who through force of will, theatrics – and a good dose of luck – led the country through domestic and external perils whose ramifications are still being felt today.Top 10 books about the Roman empire | Greg WoolfRead more9. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (1995)Of Obama’s autobiographical writings, this one provides the best understanding of his origins and burgeoning sense of self. His early and more frank ruminations on race are present here, and the book is not encumbered by the exigencies of political campaigning. At once a memoir, travelogue and deeply introspec­tive meditation, it is a fluent self-study of his efforts to reconcile himself with his eclectic lineage and to discover his place and pur­pose in the world.10. Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (2010)The essential volume on the 2008 presidential primaries and general election. Heilemann and Halperin had generous access to many of the historical players – including Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin – and their staffs. It is a fast-paced, even breathless read, and anyone who paid even casual attention at the time to the historic events chronicled here will recognise its richly drawn characters, plotlines and twists of fate.
      The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama by Claude A Clegg III is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from the Guardian bookshop. Delivery charges may apply.
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      Republican school bill mocked for claim Frederick Douglass debated Lincoln

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      Republican school bill mocked for claim Frederick Douglass debated LincolnVirginia bill banning teaching of ‘divisive concepts’ confused black civil rights campaigner with white senator Stephen Douglas A Republican bill to ban the teaching of “divisive concepts” in schools in Virginia ran into ridicule when among historical events deemed suitable for study, it described a nonexistent debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.David Blight on Frederick Douglass: ‘I call him beautifully human’Read moreLincoln did engage in a series of historic debates hinged on the issue of slavery, in the Illinois Senate campaign of 1858. But he did so against Stephen Douglas, a senator who had ties to slavery – not against Frederick Douglass, the great campaigner for the abolition of slavery who was once enslaved himself.The Virginia bill was sponsored by Wren Williams, a freshman Republican sent to the state capital, Richmond, in a tumultuous November election.Identifying “divisive concepts” including racism and sexism, the bill demanded the teaching of “the fundamental moral, political and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government”.In part, this was to be achieved with a focus on “founding documents” including “the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Federalist Papers, including Essays 10 and 51, excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and the writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States”.The teaching of history has become a divisive concept in states across the US, as rightwing activists have spread alarm about the teaching of race issues. In November, the winning candidate for governor in Virginia, the Republican Glenn Youngkin, made it a wedge issue in his win over the Democrat, Terry McAuliffe.Youngkin successfully seized upon critical race theory, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society – but which is not taught in Virginia schools.Why Frederick Douglass’s struggle for justice is relevant in the Trump era | Ibram X KendiRead moreNor, it turned out, will Williams’s bill be enforced in Virginia courts. As the Washington Post reported, “by Friday morning, Frederick Douglass was trending on Twitter, and the bill had been withdrawn”.Online, ridicule was swift. “New rule,” wrote Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor. “If you don’t know the difference between Frederick Douglass and Stephen Douglas, you don’t get to tell anyone else what to teach.”Many were also happy to point out that Douglass has caused embarrassment for Republicans before. In 2017, Donald Trump at least gave the impression he thought the great campaigner was alive.“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognised more and more, I notice,” the former president said.On Friday, Sidney Blumenthal, a Guardian contributor and Lincoln biographer, said: “Lincoln did not debate Frederick Douglass. Historians may search for the video, but they will not find it.”Blumenthal also pointed out that Lincoln and Douglass did meet three times when Lincoln was president, from 1861 to 1865 and through a civil war that ended with slavery abolished.How did Republicans turn critical race theory into a winning electoral issue?Read moreTheir conversations included a discussion about inequality in pay between Black and white soldiers, upon which Lincoln ultimately acted, and Confederate abuse of Black prisoners. There was also a famous meeting after Lincoln’s second inauguration, in 1865, when Lincoln greeted Douglas at the White House as a friend.Blumenthal also offered a way in which students in Virginia and elsewhere might use Douglass’s life and work to examine divisions today.Speaking a day after two centrist Democratic senators sank Joe Biden’s push for voting rights reform, Blumenthal said: “Frederick Douglass’s great cause became that of voting rights.“If there is any debate that is going on now, it is not between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is between Frederick Douglass and all the Republican senators who refuse to support voting rights – and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema too.”TopicsBooksFrederick DouglassAbraham LincolnAmerican civil warHistory booksVirginiaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More