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“We do ourselves no favors by pretending American history is either cheerfully grand or unrelievedly bleak, for American history is a human undertaking and is as subject to selfishness and greed, to cruelty and injustice, as we are in our own lives. Yet it is also true that the United States of America has grown stronger, freer, and more just when it has opened its arms rather then clenched its fists; built bridges, not walls; and understood that the promise of the Declaration of Independence includes not some but all.”

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Book:American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union: An Anthology
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“In the wake of World War II, Truman said, “We have learned that nations are interdependent, and that recognition of our dependence upon one another is essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of all mankind.” Everything was linked. “So long as the basic rights of men are denied in any substantial portion of the earth, men everywhere must live in fear of their own rights and their own security,” Truman said. “No country has yet reached the absolute in protecting human rights. In all countries, certainly including our own, there is much to be accomplished.”

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Book:The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
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“There is a rich history of discussion of what the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, writing in 1944, called the American Creed: devotion to principles of liberty, of self-government, and of equal opportunity for all regardless of race, gender, religion, or nation of origin. Echoing Myrdal, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, 'The genius of America lies in its capacity to forge a single nation from peoples of remarkably diverse racial, religious, and ethnic origins….The American Creed envisages a nation composed of individuals making their own choices and accountable to themselves, not a nation based on inviolable ethnic communities….It is what all Americans should learn, because it is what binds all Americans together.”

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Book:The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
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“The creed of which Myrdal and Schlesinger and others have long spoken can find concrete expression only once individuals in the arena choose to side with the angels. That is a decision that must come from the soul—and sometimes the soul’s darker forces win out over its nobler ones. The message of Martin Luther King, Jr.—that we should be judged on the content of our character, not on the color of our skin—dwells in the American soul; so does the menace of the Ku Klux Klan. History hangs precariously in the balance between such extremes. Our fate is contingent upon which element—that of hope or that of fear—emerges triumphant.”

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Book:The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
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“What is the American soul? The dominant feature of that soul—the air we breathe, or, to shift the metaphor, the controlling vision—is a belief in the proposition, as Jefferson put in the Declaration, that all men are created equal. It is therefore incumbent on us, from generation to generation, to create a sphere in which we can live, live freely, and pursue happiness to the best of our abilities. We cannot guarantee equal outcomes, but we must do all we can to ensure equal opportunity.”

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Book:The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
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“I know of no soil better adapted to the growth of reform than American soil,” [Frederick] Douglass said after the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857. “I know of no country where the conditions for affecting great changes in the settled order of things, for the development of right ideas of liberty and humanity, are more favorable than here in these United States.”

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Book:The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
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“Harry Truman—the man who won the four-way 1948 presidential campaign, triumphing over the segregationist Thurmond, the Progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace, and the Republican Thomas E. Dewey—once said: “You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.”

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Book:The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
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“Harry Truman—the man who won the four-way 1948 presidential campaign, triumphing over the segregationist Thurmond, the Progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace, and the Republican Thomas E. Dewey—once said: “You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.” Truman understood something his legendary immediate predecessor had also grasped: that, as Franklin D. Roosevelt observed during the 1932 campaign, “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.”

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Book:The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
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“There was nothing, Lyndon Johnson remarked, that “makes a man come to grips more directly with his conscience than the Presidency. Sitting in that chair involves making decisions that draw out a man’s fundamental commitments. The burden of his responsibility literally opens up his soul. No longer can he accept matters as given; no longer can he write off hopes and needs as impossible.” The office was a crucible of character.”

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Book:The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
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“His person, countenance, character, and actions, are made the daily contemplation and conversation of the whole people,” John Adams wrote in 1790. After his own presidency, Adams observed, “The people…ought to consider the President’s office as the indispensable guardian of their rights,” adding: “The people cannot be too careful in the choice of their Presidents.”

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Book:The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
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“moments the forces of reaction thrive. In our finest hours, though, the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists; to look out rather than to turn inward; to accept rather than to reject. In so doing, America has grown ever stronger, confident that the choice of light over dark is the means by which we pursue progress.”

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Book:The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
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