From Reconstruction to the Red Scare to the civil rights movement, Meacham views US history through a simple yet convincing dichotomy: fear versus hope. By extension, politicians use fear to divide individuals along racial and cultural lines, while hope is used to unite Americans by offering equal protection to as many as possible, given the constraints of the era. When Meacham writes about the battle over America’s soul, fear and hope are the two combatants.

For example, rather than attempt to unite the country across regional and racial boundaries, Andrew Johnson tied his political fate to making appeals to just one passionate constituency: white Southern Democrats who wanted to preserve white supremacy in the South. This political strategy—along with his own white supremacy—led Johnson to make deplorably racist statements like this: “Whenever [black Americans] have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism” (62). And while white postbellum Southerners needed no encouragement in their racism, Meacham believes that such presidential proclamations can set the tone of the nation, for good or ill.

By contrast, Meacham identifies Theodore Roosevelt as a president who trafficked in the politics of hope more often than not.