2024 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival: Jon Meacham says 'history is a tactile thing'

As a child growing up on a Civil War battlefield in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jon Meacham would find spit bullets in the yard of the family home. It left him with the opinion that “history is a tactile thing.”

“The story of the country, to me, was not remote but quite real, and I fell in love with the story of how we got to where we are,” Meacham said during a recent interview.

Being immersed in U.S. history, Meacham — an author, historian and biographer — has chronicled the founding of America with a tender and inculcating voice on every page of his books on presidents, the Civil Rights Movement, the partnership between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during World War II, and moments when the country endured and overcame contention.

Meacham will appear during multiple events Jan. 31 through Feb. 2 at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival. The festival is sold out.

Meacham uses the human story to shape narratives of presidents

Even though Meacham views history as the only data we have in human affairs to understand what happened in the past, it’s not an indicator of the future.

“If we don’t know what previous epochs and generations went through, it’s as if we’re unilaterally disarming and we’re like Miranda in ‘The Tempest’ who walks out and says, ‘O brave new world, that has such people in it.’ The world isn’t new, and there is an incredibly rich reservoir of experience for us to draw on if we choose to,” Meacham said.

As the public has long pondered the political and religious intentions of the founding fathers, Meacham’s 2006 book “American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation” details the human story to shape an evaluation. He’s done the same in his biographies of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson. He said there are certain perennial themes the founding fathers confronted and attempted to address, which he said “can be illuminating.”

“They understood human nature, appetite, ambition, tried to create a constitutional order that would endure in the face of the vicissitudes of human experience, and they were imperfect,” Meacham said. “The fact they didn’t fully live into the implications of their arguments is important for us to confront because no generation as of yet fully lives into the implications of the good and (moral) right. The fact they failed should make us weary and put us on guard as we assess what we’ve gotten right and what we are getting wrong.”

His 2022 biography on Abraham Lincoln, “And There Was Light,” examined the Civil War president’s life and legacy. The profile is a worthy companion to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 book “Team Of Rivals” on the conflicting personalities and political differences among members of Lincoln’s cabinet.

“The moments where (Lincoln) made a decision, it was not primarily political but primarily moral,” Meacham said. “He was not merely our greatest politician and was our most important moral actor by refusing to compromise during the winter of 1860 and 1861 by reinforcing Fort Sumter, refusing to put emancipation back on the table and in 1864 when it looked like he might lose, he was putting the right and good ahead of the expedient and the practical. To me, that’s to some extent a definition of bravery.”

'Understanding and exploring religious impulse is an essential element'

The role of religion in the lives of presidents and historical figures is present in all of Meacham's chronicles. He's analyzed the role of faith in the lives of Civil Rights Movement and its activists, notably Martin Luther King Jr. and the late U.S. Congressman John Lewis, the latter of which was the subject of the 2020 biography, “His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope.”

As an Episcopalian and Canon Historian of Washington National Cathedral since 2021, he's also explored the seven last sayings of Jesus recorded in the Gospels, which was the subject of his 2020 book "The Hope of Glory: Reflections on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross."

“Understanding and exploring the religious impulse is an essential element if you want to understand humankind, including its aspirations, failures and possibilities,” Meacham said. “John Lewis, Martin Luther King, the abolitionists, the suffragists – they were driven not least by religious impulses. Religion can be a force for ill, it can be a force for good, but what matters is the people who are wielding those arguments.”

Meacham has appeared at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival several times over its 10-year history and described it as a “congenial and rewarding atmosphere.”

“I get to have conversations with people I admire and people I’m just meeting that I don’t have anywhere else all year, so that’s lovely. I’m looking forward to re-engaging. If you do what I do, you spend a lot of time alone in a room. Being able to engage with readers is a reminder of why we’re doing this.”

Desert Sun reporter Brian Blueskye covers arts and entertainment. He can be reached at brian.blueskye@desertsun.com or on Twitter at @bblueskye.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Rancho Mirage Writers Festival: Jon Meacham says history is 'tactile'