Presidential historian describes election choices during UB talk

Jon Meacham says he’s neither Democrat nor Republican, and if you heard the presidential historian’s Distinguished Speakers Series address Wednesday night, you’d be hard pressed not to believe him.

He spoke repeatedly of his personal relationships with both Joe Biden and George H.W. Bush. He praised Franklin D. Roosevelt and even gave an impromptu defense of Richard Nixon.

Yet Meacham was unequivocal — despite taking nearly 90 minutes to mention Donald Trump by name and not uttering the name Kamala Harris a single time — on who he believes voters should select as the next president of the United States.  

“I would feel it to be a … failure to meet the moment, if I didn't say clearly: The choice is there. There’s no mystery. There's a constitutional choice, and there is an ethnic nationalist choice,” Meacham said from the Center for the Arts Mainstage Theatre. 

Taking place just under three weeks from Election Day, the kickoff to UB’s 2024-25 Distinguished Speaker Series reflected the current moment of heightened polarization. But much like his New York Times bestseller, “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels,” Meacham took those in attendance through several other perilous moments in American democracy, from calls for a dictatorship in the years following the Great Depression, to the civil unrest of the 1960s. 

He argued that America has only been a democracy since 1965, with the passing of the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act.

“My argument is that the American story has been punctuated by dark and dangerous and debilitating hours, and it has been also marked by hours in which we have, in fact, decided to do the right thing,” he said.  

He also kept things light — effortlessly shifting from grave warnings about the rise of nationalism and authoritarianism to self-deprecating humor and an uncanny impression of George W. Bush. His joke about a Biblical-era goat won’t be repeated here. 

Introduced by President Satish K. Tripathi as one of America’s foremost public intellectuals, Meacham quipped that it was like being described as “the best restaurant in a hospital.”

“It’s not that hard,” he said to a bevy of laughter from the crowd.

Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize recipient for his book on Andrew Jackson’s presidency, took attendees back 100 years, when the U.S. was coming out of a global pandemic, many Americans thought they were losing their country due to a lack of a strong border, and a technological revolution was afoot — via the home radio.

“So you had majority white folks anxious about immigrants, anxious about shifting demography, uncertain about how information was coming to them, [and] the fear of foreign infiltration,” he said. “So what happened? I think Franklin Roosevelt happened.”

Roosevelt took office at a time when there was an open question of whether the U.S. needed a strongman, nationalist leader to compete with dictatorships around the world that could conceivably move quicker, Meacham said. However, Roosevelt ultimately followed the Constitution, like accepting defeat when Congress blocked his court-packing plan.

“It didn’t occur to him to have a rally and send folks to the Capitol,” Meacham said. “It just didn’t.”

Meacham denounced the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol several times, noting his Republican friends say he’s overly obsessed with it but that he “[doesn’t] know how you can be overly obsessed with an insurrection.” 

Meacham warned there is “an authoritarian force on the march” in the U.S., later saying to look to countries like Russia and Hungary “if you want to know how bad things can get.”

“People may think that’s hyperbolic. It’s always hyperbolic until it isn’t,” he said.

Noting he’s often asked what history tells us about efforts to overturn an election, Meacham argued that theology may actually tell us more. 

“If you believe we are all created in the image of God ... [then we should all] have, as Abraham Lincoln said, an open field and a fair chance to pursue our industry, intelligence and enterprise,” he said.

“And if you don’t believe that — if you believe that because of where you came from or what color you are or how you identify should foreclose certain rights and paths and fields … you have a candidate. And if you believe in the patriotic constitutional vision that I just described, you have a candidate.” 

He argued that empathy is the oxygen of democracy but cautioned that you don’t have to be a perfect person to be empathetic. To make the point, he told a story about George H.W. Bush helping an overweight classmate out of a barrel during an obstacle course race. 

Meacham, who wrote a biography of the elder Bush in 2015, asked him why. 

“He said, ‘I’ve never been stuck in a barrel, but if I had been, I’d want somebody to pull me out,’” Meacham recalled. “It’s a covenant. He didn’t say because my mother told me so. He didn’t say because the Bible says be nice. It was a pragmatic empathy. It was an empathy that we can get on board with because it doesn’t require purity of soul. It acknowledges that our self-interest drives us and it always will. The remarkable thing is, we’ve come this far.”

Meacham also reflected on Biden, who he described as a friend. Meacham has contributed to some of Biden’s most significant speeches. 

“I think he stepped in to defend American democracy in its hour of maximum danger, and he has supported democracy abroad in ways that will echo down the decades,” he said. “I believe he is a consequential, good and decent man, and he has served his country now for half a century with grace and distinction.”

During a Q&A discussion with moderator Carla Martínez Machain, professor of political science, Meacham was asked what gives him hope. He pointed to civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis, whose life he said exemplifies America at its worst and best.

Lewis was born in a southern county where two lynchings occurred the same month he was born, never met a white person until he was a teenager and was arrested more than 40 times and injured while protesting for civil rights. Yet when he died in 2020, his body was laid upon the same catafalque that Lincoln’s did.

 “That arc gives me hope,” Meacham said.