Civility lecture tour at Salt Lake library Thursday night

When politicians didn't get along in the early days of the United States, they'd occasionally solve their problems with an old-fashioned gunfight.

Today, they might instead stand at a pulpit and, with eyes aimed right at the camera, call their colleagues fascists, communists, Nazis — or terrorists.

It could be argued that it's less violent to duel with words, but neither approach is very civilized, says Jim Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Individuals got killed in the first scenario, but in the second, the health of America's entire public system is threatened.

"If you have greater civility, you're more likely to resolve the greater issues of the age," Leach told the Deseret News during a telephone interview this week. Leach will speak in Utah Thursday night as part of the Utah Humanities Council's 22nd Annual Human Ties Awards ceremony.

"We have foreign policy issues with dramatic significance of the moment and we have domestic challenges that are graver than we've had since the Great Depression and it will take people working together to make these things right. That doesn't mean there aren't strong cases for more conservative concerns … and also certain liberal concerns … but we have to resolve them in ways to make clear there is a better future for the next generation. And this is going to take a lot of people working together," he said.

Leach, who spent 30 years as a Republican congressman representing Iowa in the U.S. House of Representatives before his appointment by President Barack Obama to the NEH last year, will speak 6 p.m. at the Salt Lake Main Library auditorium, 210 E. 400 South, in conjunction with his 50-state American Civility Tour launched in November.

Though Leach refers in his speeches to early disputes in American politics that were uncivil — U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr firing his dueling pistol early one morning in 1804 at former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, mortally wounding him; and South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks beating Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner with his cane in 1856 until it broke are examples — he says the current political atmosphere is "bordering on a civility crisis at home and a civilization crisis abroad."

"We have all kinds of people calling each other communists and fascists, and if you go to the meaning of these words in American history, these are words that summoned Americans to war and strike at the heart of American values, and if they are used in a certain way they can not only reflect the vision of a polarized society but they can impel violence if we're not careful," Leach said.