The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream

by David M. Rubenstein

Montgomery Meigs, the quartermaster general of the United States, was responsible for, among other things, burials and bodies. His son was, in his view, murdered by Confederate troops after he had already surrendered, so Montgomery Meigs was extremely bitter about the South. Part of the reason, I think, that southerners were not even considered for inclusion in the national cemetery system is that he would hear none of it. He also was the leading voice in saying, “Let’s put a graveyard on the property of Robert E. Lee.”

But for me, doing the research was inspiring, as I saw people struggling with such difficult circumstances and inventing ways to be human amid a context of inhumanity. Even within the impossible world that Civil War battles involved, you could do things to retain the important values that defined you as something more than simply an animal. Soldiers will say, “We can’t throw these comrades in the ground like chickens. We need to do more than that.” Seeing the human spirit triumph even under those kinds of conditions was very moving for me.

“I’ve been drawn to stories that reveal us to ourselves. Who are we? Who are these strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans?”

Wynton Marsalis, in our Jazz series, said something to me that has stuck with me forever. He said, “Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing can be true at the same time.”

Eisenhower had asked him to intervene in an anticommunist insurgency in Laos and he’d refused. He said, “We have to draw the line in Vietnam or I do not stand a chance of being reelected.”

The Gulf of Tonkin event happens in the summer of ’64. Johnson is decisive in his response. His already overwhelming poll numbers increase more. It took away one of the main arguments that Goldwater had. Johnson had a landslide victory that fall, and by March of ’65, he put boots on the ground. But he confided to Senator Richard Russell, his good friend, “I don’t see any daylight here.” Time and again we find, with all of the presidents from Truman on, that they and their closest associates know some hard and difficult truths, but they act as if the opposite is true.

Then Nixon personally intervenes and tells the South Vietnamese through intermediaries that, even though he knows that the U.S. has to get out of Vietnam, South Vietnam will get better terms if Nixon wins. So South Vietnamese President [Nguyen Van] Thieu announces that he is going to boycott the talks.

Johnson has picked this up through CIA intercepts and FBI wiretaps on the Presidential Palace in Saigon and the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington. He calls up Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader, and says, “This is treason.” Dirksen said, “Yes, it is.” Then Nixon calls up LBJ and says, “I would never do anything like that.” And Johnson says, “Okay, Dick.” To this day one of the great mysteries of the war is why Johnson didn’t use the information to Humphrey’s benefit.

he’d walked into Paris on January 21, 1969, and basically accepted the terms then available, he would have gotten more or less what we ultimately got and there’d be 25,000 or 30,000 more Americans alive.

It’s over 58,000 names on the wall at the Vietnam Memorial, and, we believe, 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and one million—it’s impossible to know for sure—North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerrillas, and two million civilians, mostly in South Vietnam and North Vietnam, and tens of thousands, again unknowable, in Laos and Cambodia.

DR: When it’s all said and done, how much did the American people spend on the Vietnam War? KB: Hundreds of billions of dollars in 1960–70 dollars [nearly a trillion dollars today].

We say glibly, “Thank you for your service.” Now that we have an all-volunteer army, where we have a separate military class that suffers its losses apart from the rest of us, it’s a way to just end the conversation. But I say, “Welcome home. What can we do for you? Can we talk about this and have a conversation?”

And realize, with the Vietnam War, that the heroism occurred not just on the battlefield, but in moral decisions that people made around kitchen tables about whether to go or not to go. What we tried to do was honor as many of those perspectives as we could and just say that a thing and the opposite of a thing could be true at the same time.

vital and interesting aspect of the American experience: there obviously are people quite prepared to die for this country, and a great many have done so, as the following casualty numbers show: Revolutionary War: 4,435 War of 1812: 2,260 Civil War: More than 364,000 Union soldiers World War I: More than 116,000 World War II: More than 405,000 Korean War: 33,000 Vietnam War: 58,000 Various post-9/11 wars: 7,000

And the notion that was expounded by Hillel, the first-century Hebrew scholar, actually came to my mind. It was, “If not you, who? And if not now, when?”

Somebody asked a Medal of Honor recipient one time, “What about your valorous acts on that day?” He echoed the feelings of other people who have received any kind of valorous award: “There were lots of brave people on that day, many of whom didn’t come home, and I wear the award for all of them.”

First, I think it’s commensurate with wearing the uniform in the first place, performing any kind of community service. The motivator is being part of something bigger than you are.

The second thing, I think, is optimism that it isn’t going to happen to you. I’m prepared to die for my country. I’m prepared to die for my colleagues. They’re also prepared to die for their country. They’re also prepared to die for me. But it isn’t going to happen. The perception that it’s not going to happen figures heavily. The

third thing that motivates people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do is the notion that the other guy would do it for you. And he would, too. I’ve seen it time and time again. You don’t think you’re going to die. You are part of somet...

“But after Black people were freed and then Black men had the right to vote, the genie was out of the lamp, and you had to try to put the genie back in the lamp again. You had to convince Black men and the larger society that they were not only inferior, they were subhuman.”

And if you want to know how effective that was, in Louisiana, which was a majority Black state, there were 130,000 Black men registered to vote in 1898. By 1904, that number had been reduced to 1,342.

We tend to forget this, but until 1910, 90 percent of the Black community lived in the South. That changed with the Great Migration, which continued until 1970, when reverse migration took effect. More and more Black people moved from the North to the South than the other way around.

“Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chastening rod”—that is one of the verses of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Negro national anthem. I happen to love that song, though I have to say Bill Clinton and the late Vernon Jordan are the only two people I know who know all of the verses. But that’s where it came from, and it’s a beautiful song.

“Some of the most powerful, sometimes beautiful, harrowing aspects of Douglass’s autobiographies are the ways in which he reconstructs those years of his youth, and what this system of slavery was doing to him, not so much physically as psychically and mentally. Douglass always argued that the worst impact of slavery was on the mind and not on the body.”

He was born at a horseshoe bend along the Tuckahoe River, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. His father was white, he knew that. The two principle candidates are his two owners, Aaron Anthony and Thomas Auld. His mother was a woman named Harriet Bailey, who was owned by Aaron Anthony. She had five children between roughly the age of eighteen and thirty-one, when she died. Douglass saw her last when he was six years old.

Literacy is power. Literacy is a means to potential dignity. And it’s the potential of escape. Teaching a slave to read was illegal in virtually all slave states. However, that didn’t stop some people from either allowing or teaching slaves to read.

Douglass makes that story into the pivot of his autobiography. He makes it into a kind of a resurrection story. He’s resurrected from his bondage through violence, through standing up in self-defense.

Then, as they were leaving, Johnson was overheard [saying]—Douglass heard him say it—“That Douglass is just like every other N-word I’ve ever seen. He will sooner cut your throat than not.”

Douglass, in his 1,200 pages of autobiography, never says anything, or almost anything, about his family. There’s one mention of Anna in 1,200 pages. Fourteen months after Anna died, he married Helen Pitts. A woman twenty years younger. A white woman. It became the most scandalous marriage of the nineteenth century.

Douglass became brilliant at converting racism into humor when he had to. What do you do with the absurdity of racism sometimes but find some way to laugh at it if you can? Otherwise you’d go crazy. He said, “In my first marriage I honored my mother. In my second marriage I honored my father.”

“One thing we have to understand is that the idea of women’s rights actually stems from the abolition movement…. The idea of all humans having the divine spark and having the right to freedom and a voice in their government really comes out of abolition.”

Then I read an account that this age requirement was put in because Great Britain had lost more than a million men in World War I, and they felt if they allowed all women over twenty-one to vote, there’d be an imbalance. There’d be too many women voting. So it’s not for another decade—1928—that all British women over the age of twenty-one get the right to vote.

It’s one of the great romantic stories in American history. That morning, he has received a letter from his mother back home in East Tennessee. She’s written to him and said, “I’ve noticed you’ve not been supporting suffrage. Do the right thing, Harry, and be a good boy and vote to ratify.” In that moment, when he realizes he can make the difference, he can kill the amendment or pass it, he has his mother’s note in his breast pocket, and he changes his stance and he votes aye.

all time. Howard Baker once said that the art of politics lies to some extent in the art of listening eloquently. And John Lewis did that. And when he spoke, he did so with this prophetic voice, this deep voice.

And we argued for twenty-eight years about a very fundamental point, which was that John Lewis believed that if you and I put our hearts and minds in the right place, if we oriented ourselves correctly, we could bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. That the vision of Isaiah, the vision of Micah, the vision of the Christian New Testament could come into actual, tangible reality.

You and I know a lot of folks who had exemplary early careers who tended to take care of themselves as life went on. They started out doing good and they ended up doing well. John Lewis didn’t do that. He stayed in the fight, he stayed in the arena. And I wanted to explore what the roots of that had been.

He overcame a childhood stutter by preaching to the chickens in his farmyard. He took care of the chickens for the family. It was one of the ways his theological vision became manifest as he would baptize them and marry them. Once, when he was baptizing one, he drowned it, and that was a problem. He said his first act of nonviolent protest was refusing to eat chicken at dinner. He thought it was the death of one of his soulmates.

had come back to the United States and ran into Martin Luther King. When King realized that Lawson had both a theological background in the American church and the experience of knowing what Gandhi had done, he said, “You’re exactly the kind of person we need in the South.” And so, under the sponsorship of the Fellowship for Reconciliation, Lawson comes to Nashville.

Only once, in Selma, before Bloody Sunday. Dr. King had come to town. He was desegregating the Hotel Albert, the old downtown hotel in Selma, and a white supremacist came up to King, struck him, tried to kick him in the groin, and Lewis reacted for the first and only time in that long life of civil disobedience by throwing his arms around the guy. He embraced him in a hug.

They get on the buses and head south. And he’s beaten in Rock Hill, South Carolina, by a Klansman, man named Elwin Wilson, who, in 2009, moved by the election of Barack Obama, reaches out to John Lewis to say, “I’m the one who beat you in Rock Hill, South Carolina, in 1961, and I want to apologize.” And John accepted his apology, forgave him, and they became friendly. Again—biblical. Jesus told us to love our enemies. Who does that? Well, John Lewis did.

John Seigenthaler, the personal representative of the president of the United States and the attorney general, a Nashville newspaper man, was also knocked unconscious.

I argue in the book that he was a saint, and it’s not to make a stained-glass figure or say that he should be removed from the ordinary run of human experience, but saints aren’t saviors. Saints are just believers who are a little more virtuous than the rest of us.

No, he saw his life as a series of sequential chapters that were about bringing the Declaration of Independence into fuller realization and trying to bring about that beloved community. I don’t think he had a hierarchy of satisfaction about what he’d done.

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” —John F. Kennedy’s moonshot speech at Rice University, September 12, 1962

“My view of American capitalism is that it’s more like an operating system, rather than a rigid ideology. It requires adjustments, updates, patches, safeguards, and constant iteration to work properly.”

The major thesis of my work is that America was shaped by discoveries and deployment of what I think of as next big things. The voyages to the New World, to America itself, were the next big things of that era. Some of these discoveries, like Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, are accidental and incredibly significant.

Similarly, the telegraph, when Samuel Morse stumbled onto this in the 1830s, was a very significant thing. When George Washington died, it took seven days for that news to travel back from Washington to New York. With the telegraph, they’re transmitting details from one of the nominating conventions in 1844 within seconds. You’re looking at light speed for information transmission, whereas before, the physical speed of mankind was how fast information could travel. It was like magic. There just was no reference point for how such a thing could be possible. People were bewildered and awed by that. It suggested immense possibilities and sped up commerce.

turns out to become this highly energetic mediator between powerful business interests and labor unions, between the consumer and businesses. He uses the power of U.S. Navy contracts to end child labor. Within months of assuming the presidency, he makes the argument that since the corporate form itself is a creation of the law, meaning that the idea of limited liability does not exist in nature and only exists because the government recognizes it as such, it made little sense to him that the government should not have any regulatory authority. His presidency set the trajectory for American capitalism in a big and underrated way.

That said, I think Henry Ford is very significant. In 1914, when he basically comes out with a $5 workday—for a full day of work, an eight-hour shift, you get $5—it was double the prevailing wage. Black men included. The announcement was stunning. It was front-page news. It leads to this equation that, to some degree, still awes me.

That’s an amazing thing. That doesn’t happen in China today. If somebody is earning $250 a month making iPhones, three months of labor gets you a new iPhone. Whereas in 1914, three months of labor was the equivalent of a brand-new Model T.