I speak as an American. McCullough deftly praises Congress while subtly reminding his audience that history will judge them for their actions, be they laudatory or otherwise. As history abundantly shows, Congress, for all its faults, has not been the unbroken parade of clowns and thieves and posturing windbags so often portrayed.
It was Congress that paid for Lewis and Clark and for our own travels to the Moon. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor? I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist. Cole: It seems to me that so much of history is about vast, impersonal forces which act on people. Your books are not about that. Your books are about people, their strengths, their flaws, their heroism. I think that's one of the reasons that people are so drawn to your books.
McCullough: Well, Barbara Tuchman said, "There's no trick to interesting people in history or children in history. People ask, "Are you working on a book? I'm inside it. First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past.
Nobody lived in the past. McCullough: They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don't know how it's going to come out. They weren't just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can't understand them if you don't understand how they perceived reality and you don't understand that unless you understand the culture. I wish we had a less fancy word than "culture," because it sounds too pretentious. What did they read?
What poetry moved them? What music did they listen to? What did they eat? What were they afraid of? What was it like to travel from one place to another then? Cole: One of the most vivid experiences I've had in that way was taking a couple of years to read all of Pepys's diaries.
Cole: It took me years. It was bedtime reading. But that is exactly what I found so riveting: the sense of night without any illumination, no telephones, the communication, the hygiene, and the like told in this marvelous prose. It does transport you.
McCullough: That's one of the reasons I began John Adams as I did, with these two lone men on horseback riding through a bleak, cold winter landscape. For all intents and purposes, they're anonymous. They are coming through that winter scene, the snow and the wind, and they're going to ride nearly four hundred miles in that kind of weather, on horseback, to get to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. These were tough people. We see the men in their frilled shirts and their satin pants and the powdered hair and they look like fops.
They look like softies. Nothing doing. They were tough. And life was tough. And yet, of course, they were not gods. Particularly talking to college audiences, I say, never, never think of them as gods. They're human beings with all the failings, flaws, and weaknesses that are part of the human condition.
They were imperfect. Life was short and they knew it could end almost at any time. I've gotten so fascinated with the eighteenth century, I'm going to stay there. I once told my wife, "I may never come back. It's about the Revolution, with the focus on the year It's about Washington and the army and the war.
It's the nadir, the low point of the United States of America. McCullough: No. The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning.
Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind. McCullough: I expect so, or maybe it's just we've all been so conditioned by movies. I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene. He said, in his great admonition to writers, "Make me see. I want to know what they had for dinner. I want to know how long it took to walk from where to where. You get into it almost the way an actor gets into a part.
I want to get into this material. You scratch the supposedly dead past anywhere and what you find is life. McCullough: There are innumerable writing problems in an extended work. This book on Adams took a little more than six years. You, the writer, change in six years. The life around you changes. Your family changes. They grow up. They move away. The world is changing. You're also learning more about the subject. By the time you're writing the last chapters of the book, you know much more than you did when you started at the beginning.
McCullough: The voice has to stay the same. So you go back and work on them, in a way, as a painter will work all over the whole canvas. I work on the front and the back and the middle all at once. I think it's best to pick a biographical subject who lives to a ripe old age.
Older people tend to relax and speak their minds. They're dropping some of the masks that they've been wearing. There's a candor. With Adams, for example, I had a character who was in motion virtually all of his life up until he left the White House in He was going to go back to Braintree, Massachusetts, and never leave there for twenty-five years, holding no office, having no influence.
How in the world was I going to sustain that? As it turned out, that's when the inward journey begins for John Adams, and that to me, in many ways, was the most interesting part of the book. He begins to realize that many of the things that he has thought or held to for so long he doesn't see as he did before.
The concept, for example, of the Enlightenment, that if one applied the combined intellectual efforts of a good society, there was no answer that couldn't be found. Well, he decided that really wasn't so, that inevitably there were unsolvable mysteries about life and that it was best that way.
Many of his reflections on his friends and what events in his life had mattered most went through transitions. Cole: What promised to be an uneventful passage turned out to be quite an interesting segment of Adams's life, didn't it? Cole: You mentioned that your new book is about the American Revolution. That brings to mind a study done not too long ago that surveyed fifty top colleges and universities.
The students were asked questions taken from a high school curriculum, and the lack of historical knowledge was really appalling. That is, our country has been attacked. Not only the World Trade Center but really the idea of our country, the ideas generated by the founders. How are we going to defend this if we really don't know much about it? McCullough: I have been lecturing at colleges and universities continuously for twenty-five years or more.
From my experience I don't think there's any question whatsoever that the students in our institutions of higher learning have less grasp of American history than ever before. We are raising a generation of young Americans who are, to a very large degree, historically illiterate.
It's not their faults. There's no problem about enlisting their interest in history. The problem is the teachers so often have no history in their background. Very often they were education majors and graduated knowing no subject. It's the same, I'm told, in biology or English literature or whatever.
If we think back through our own lives, the subjects that you liked best in school almost certainly were taught by the teachers you liked best. And the teacher you liked best was the teacher who cared about the subject she taught. There was a noted professor of child psychology at the University of Pittsburgh named Margaret McFarland, whose most influential disciple is Fred Rogers, who has taught more children than any human being who ever lived.
Fred Rogers likes to say that all he's done with his programs is based on the teachings of Margaret McFarland. What she taught in essence is that attitudes aren't taught, they're caught. If the attitude of the teacher toward the material is positive, enthusiastic, committed and excited, the students get that.
If the teacher is bored, students get that and they get bored, quickly, instinctively. In my view, we have to rethink how we're teaching our teachers. There's very good work in this field being done by the National Council for History Education, which conducts summer seminars or clinics primarily for grade school teachers from all over the country. They are the ones that got this going. McCullough: It's not just something that we should be sad about, or worried about, that these young people don't know any history.
We should be angry. They are being cheated and they are being handicapped, and our way of life could very well be in jeopardy because of this. Since September 11, it seems to me that never in our lifetime, except possibly in the early stages of World War II, has it been clearer that we have as a source of strength, a source of direction, a source of inspiration--our story.
Yes, this is a dangerous time. Yes, this is a time full of shadows and fear. But we have been through worse before and we have faced more difficult days before. We have shown courage and determination, and skillful and inventive and courageous and committed responses to crisis before.
We should draw on our story, we should draw on our history as we've never drawn before. If we don't know who we are, if we don't know how we became what we are, we're going to start suffering from all the obvious detrimental effects of amnesia.
McCullough: Furthermore, we face an enemy who believes in enforced ignorance. And it's what all that we stand for. McCullough: --the generous spirit, the ideal of tolerance, freedom, education, opportunity. All that is in the paragraph that John Adams included in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which is the oldest written constitution still in use in the world today.
It predates our national constitution by ten years. Then he goes on to say what he means by education. And what he means by education clearly is everything. No boundaries. It's all important. There had never been any such statement in any proclamation or constitution ever in the history of the world.
This was radical in its day. It's saying not just that it would be a good idea to educate people, it's saying it's the duty of the government. The pursuit of happiness.
What did they mean by "the pursuit of happiness"? They did not mean material wealth. They did not mean ease, luxury. McCullough: As near as I can tell, they meant the life of the mind and the life of the spirit. Adams wrote a letter to his boy, John Quincy, concerned that the boy not just be studying Greek and Latin, but that he be reading the great works in his own mother tongue, and particularly the English poets. He says, "Read somewhat in the English poets every day.
You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life. Then he says, "In all the disquisitions you have heard concerning the happiness of life, has it ever been recommended to you to read poetry?
McCullough: Even more to the point is a very well known paragraph where he says, "I must study politics and war, so that my" McCullough: Absolutely right.
At the very end of Adams's life, Adams's doctor wrote a letter to John Quincy to say, "I've just been to see him. But as weak as was his material frame, his mind was still enthroned. One of the regrets of my life is that I did not study Latin. I'm absolutely convinced, the more I understand these eighteenth-century people, that it was that grounding in Greek and Latin that gave them their sense of the classic virtues: the classic ideals of honor, virtue, the good society, and their historic examples of what they could try to live up to.
Cole: Yes. It is aimed at getting people in all walks of life thinking about what it means to be an American--our liberties, all those things we were attacked for. That's why it is so alarming that you have this kind of historical amnesia.
McCullough: There is a notable rise in popular interest in history as measured by the success, for example, of The History Channel on television. The level of knowledge of those we're educating seems on the decline while the general interest seems to be on the rise. Cole: That's the paradox. McCullough: Maybe because so many people didn't learn these things in college, they're curious to find out.
But we need to get them young. Little children can learn anything, just as they can learn a foreign language. The mind is so absorbent then. There ought to be a real program to educate teachers who want to teach grade school children about history. Another good classroom program has the children act a part. In my granddaughter's fifth-grade class, two sections are doing the American presidents. I was astounded by how much they know.
The child who is Dolley Madison or James K. Polk--they're never going to forget that. I'm absolutely positive it's in our human nature to want to know about the past.
The two most popular movies of all time, while not historically accurate, are about core historic events: Gone With the Wind and Titanic. There is a human longing to go back to other times. We all know how when we were children we asked our parents, "What was it like when you were a kid?
For nine-tenths of the time that human beings have been on earth, knowledge that was essential to survival was transmitted from one generation to the next by the vehicle of story. My strong feeling is that we must learn more about how we learn.
I'm convinced that we learn by struggling to find the solution to a problem on our own--with some guidance, but getting in and getting our hands dirty and working it. Cole: So we really understand it. When we do it that way, we really know it. It's not superimposed. McCullough: If you had to take that typewriter or that automobile engine apart and put it back together, you'd never forget it.
McCullough: I opened a closet in the attic of the old library at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute one beautiful fall afternoon, and there were all the records and the private correspondence and the scrapbooks and the photographs and the drawings of the Brooklyn Bridge, just stashed in that closet, no catalog, no index--nobody really knew what all was there--bundles of letters tied up with shoestrings the way it had been when the Roebling family turned it over.
I spent three years trying to untangle all that, trying to understand it. It's been thirty years, and I'm sure I could sit down now and take a test and do extremely well on that subject. I'll never ever forget it. McCullough: We've all crammed for exams, maybe did very well on the exams, and three weeks later McCullough: --it's gone. So I think we have got to bring the lab technique to the teaching of the humanities to a far greater degree than we have.
There are ways that can be done. And they're exciting. I am adamant that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it. If a child learns nothing but that as a guide to life, that's invaluable.
You can't learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can't learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can't learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard. McCullough: Exactly. We all know the old expression, "I'll work my thoughts out on paper. That is why we must have more writing in the schools, more writing in all subjects, not just in English classes.
The talent, including the talent for history--and I do think there are people who just have a talent for it, the way you have a talent for public speaking or music or whatever--it shouldn't be allowed to lie dormant.
It should be brought alive. Cole: Terrific. Thank you for taking the time to talk about the making of history--and the writing of it. Cole, ladies and gentlemen, to be honored as I am tonight in the Capital of our country, in the presence of my family and many old friends, is for me almost an out-of-body experience.
Had someone told me forty years ago, as I began work on my first book, trying to figure out how to go about it, that I would one day be standing here, the recipient of such recognition, I would, I think, have been stopped dead in my tracks. I've loved the work, all the way along -- the research, the writing, the rewriting, so very much that I've learned about the history of the nation and about human nature. I love the great libraries and archives where I've been privileged to work, and I treasure the friendships I've made with the librarians and archivists who have been so immensely helpful.
I've been extremely fortunate in my subjects, I feel. The reward of the work has always been the work itself, and more so the longer I've been at it. The days are never long enough, and I've kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone.
Some I've come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don't get to read other people's mail.
I have also been extremely fortunate in the tributes that have come my way. But this singular honor, the Jefferson Lecture, is for me a high point, and my gratitude could not be greater.
Among the darkest times in living memory was the early part of -- when Hitler's armies were nearly to Moscow; when German submarines were sinking our oil tankers off the coasts of Florida and New Jersey, within sight of the beaches, and there was not a thing we could do about it; when half our navy had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor. We had scarcely any air force. Army recruits were drilling with wooden rifles. And there was no guarantee whatever that the Nazi war machine could be stopped.
It was then, in , that the classical scholar Edith Hamilton issued an expanded edition of her book, The Greek Way , in which, in the preface, she wrote the following:. I have felt while writing these new chapters a fresh realization of the refuge and strength the past can be to us in the troubled present Religion is the great stronghold for the untroubled vision of the eternal; but there are others too.
We have many silent sanctuaries in which we can find breathing space to free ourselves from the personal, to rise above our harassed and perplexed minds and catch sight of values that are stable, which no selfish and timorous preoccupations can make waver, because they are the hard-won permanent possessions of humanity David McCullough preaches importance of history to enthusiastic crowd at Missouri Theatre.
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