Opinion | Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw: How Country Music Explains America’s Divided History

NASHVILLE — On Jan. 30, 1966, Ed Sullivan went on the air with a typical program. Dinah Shore was there, as were the Four Tops. There were three comedy acts, including one featuring the Italian puppet Topo Gigio. But the most resonant performance of the evening came when Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler, a member of the Army Special Forces, sang “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” Standing ramrod straight, in uniform, before an image of the Green Beret insignia bearing the Latin motto “De oppresso liber” (“To free the oppressed”), Sergeant Sadler painted a portrait of valor and strength. Later that year, the song hit No. 1.

From Woodstock to the marches for peace in Washington, it’s easy to think that the soundtrack of the antiwar counterculture defined the age: John Lennon’s call to “Give Peace a Chance” has a more dominant place in the popular memory than John Mitchum’s prose poem to the nation of Richard Nixon, “America: Why I Love Her,” which was popularized by John Wayne.

Yet for every hippie, there was a hawk — and therein lies a useful history lesson. We tend to caricature and oversimplify the past, thus making the tensions and tumult of our own time seem uniquely difficult. But we do ourselves, and the past, a disservice by falling prey to the narcissism of the present.

By failing to appreciate the complexities of history, we risk losing a sense of proportion about the relative gravity of contemporary problems and our odds of success in overcoming them. If we can more intimately and accurately grasp the nature of previous eras, we are more likely to see that debate, dissension and disagreement are far more often the rule than the exception.