“The past, after all, is only another name for someone else’s present.”
– David McCullough
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This mad adventure. This daring, audacious, outlandish enterprise
When you think about it — and David McCullough has thought about it long and hard — the very existence of the United States of America is one of the wildest, unlikeliest long shots in human history, a reckless plunge of epic scope.
“I think that’s one of the most important things to convey,” McCullough says. “It didn’t have to turn out the way it did. Why didn’t it turn out differently? That’s what is so interesting.” Ah, but history plays tricks. Once events have occurred — once they are sealed off in textbooks or carved on the pedestals of statues — they seem to have been inevitable. Events, viewed in retrospect, can appear irresistibly fated.
McCullough is having none of it. The winner of the 2008 Chicago Tribune Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement, author of eight books that bring this nation and its pivotal moments and vivid characters to life, the man whose beguiling baritone narrated the PBS series “The American Experience” for a dozen years, a spellbinding lecturer and engaged teacher, still hankers passionately to get a crucial point across:
Things didn’t have to happen the way they did.
“If the wind had blown a different direction on a couple of nights in 1776 — why, we all might be sipping tea and singing ‘God Save the Queen,’ ” McCullough says. “Now, you know that the Brooklyn Bridge was built. You know that the Panama Canal was built. You know that Harry Truman became president of the United States. But I want you to be in that time, to have that sense of, ‘Gee, are they really going to be able to build this bridge?’ Or, ‘What’s going to happen to this guy next?’ More than most people are willing to admit, it all turns on that mysterious quality called personality.
“What was it like to be in the thick of it? You put yourself as much as possible in their time, in their lives.”
America’s preeminent popular historian, the man who has methodically taught his fellow citizens to love and admire our nation’s early heroes as much as he does, is sitting in a spare and sunny room in his northern New England home. McCullough, 75, is dressed this day in jeans, a blue-and-white-checked shirt, thick socks and sturdy walking shoes. He appears to be very much at home in his tall, rangy body; he moves with the supple confidence of a man who has always understood that bodies, like minds, are made to be used. If you ran into him at the post office or the hardware store, and you didn’t know beans about the two Pulitzer Prizes or two National Book Awards or the Presidential Medal of Freedom and all of the other accolades — you might guess he was a carpenter. Or maybe a landscape gardener.
“Work is a very big and important part of life,” McCullough says. “I work all day, every day. I’m often asked, ‘Why do you work so hard?’ Well, because that’s what you do. You work. And I love what I do.”
Everything he writes is intended to drive home the simple truth that human initiative matters. Everything he writes — from the massive yet breezily accessible biographies of presidents such as Harry S Truman and John Adams, to the nuanced chronicles of great engineering feats such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal — is aimed at conveying a fundamental concept: Human ingenuity and effort are the engines that make the world go.
Gumption. If there is one word that sums up McCullough’s philosophy as it forks through his books like veins through blocks of marble, it would be “gumption.” He likes to write about Americans who work hard, dream big, fall hard, then get back up and try again. He likes to chronicle those of his countrymen and countrywomen who possess guts and ambition and diligence. Lofty goals — and the down-to-earth perseverance to get the job done.
“I don’t really think of myself as a historian,” says McCullough. “Not in the usual sense, the conventional sense. I am not a great expert on the presidency. That’s not my way. That’s not what I do.
“I think of myself as a writer. A writer who has chosen to write about what happened in other times, other days. And to whom it happened. And to find, as closely as possible, the truth of what happened. And along the way, to bring that time and those people to life. Because they were as alive as we are — in some ways, more alive, because life was often more intense then. It was more of an assault on the senses than we’re accustomed to. And often very painful.”
But they kept going. Kept trying. Kept pushing. Kept fighting. And that is what so entrances McCullough: not the impediments, not the daunting odds or the constant setbacks — and not even the golden triumphs. What impresses McCullough is the endless, valiant effort, the effort in the midst of chaos and despair.
“One of the things history teaches is that you never know how it’s going to turn out. Big bad breaks happen, and big good breaks happen. And as bad as things get, it’s been worse for other people. This ‘woe is me’ attitude, this idea that the stresses of our time are unprecedented — .” He breaks off and shakes his head. “I remember, after 9/11, there were people saying, ‘This is the most dangerous, dark, perilous time we’ve ever been through.” McCullough pronounces the next word emphatically: “Nonsense! Yes, it was dark and perilous. But we’ve been through worse.
“I like to quote a line from Winston Churchill. He came over here right after the new year began in 1942, when the prospects for Western civilization were about as bad as they’d ever been. England was on her last legs. Hitler was almost to Moscow. The Nazis were winning everywhere. We had no Army, no Air Force. Half the Navy had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor. And Churchill came across the Atlantic — a very dangerous thing for him to do, a brave thing to do — and gave a speech in which he said, ‘We haven’t journeyed this far because we are made of sugar candy.’
“He understood what we’d been through,” McCullough says. “He knew the story of this country — the story of the world.”
To know the story of David McCullough, you have to envision Pittsburgh, a city known for its rivers and its steel mills, its chilly winters and its gritty spirit, its toughness and its resilience. He was born there in 1933 to Christian McCullough, owner of an electrical supply company, and his wife, Ruth. By that time, five generations of McCulloughs had called Pittsburgh home.
David McCullough and his three brothers had a splendid childhood, the author says. Their education in public schools was rigorous and challenging, and by the time McCullough was starting to think about college, a high school English teacher — and Yale graduate — who had taken note of the young man’s talent was adamant.
“I told Mr. Innes I was thinking about the University of Virginia,” McCullough recalls, “and he said, ‘No, McCullough, you’re going to Yale and I don’t want to hear another thing about it!’ “
That recollection is followed by a great deep laugh. McCullough is a man who relishes a good yarn, both the telling of a story and the hearing of one, and expresses his delight in a wonderfully unself-conscious laugh.
So off to Yale he went. And it was the making of him, McCullough says. His goal at the time was to be a painter, and he majored in English, but his history courses were the ones that left him awed and inspired.
“My father did not go to college, and all four of his sons went to Yale,” McCullough continues. “That was one of his proudest accomplishments.” He shakes his head with an astonishment that, even after all these years, has not diminished. “How I would love to be able to tell him what I got out of that education! The people I was exposed to!”
After graduation in 1955, McCullough took a writing job with Sports Illustrated in New York. By now he was married, having been instantly smitten by a smart, graceful woman named Rosalee Barnes; they’d met back in Pittsburgh, where she was visiting friends.
A turning point came in the early 1960s, when McCullough found himself inspired by the call to public service by a vigorous new president named John F. Kennedy. McCullough and his family moved to Washington, where McCullough worked for the United States Information Agency. In the shadow of the massive monuments that serve as ballast for this most volatile and shifty of cities, McCullough began to think about America in a whole new way: as a country that had been created by hand, a country sweated over and fretted over — not a place that simply popped up one day because somebody thought it was a good idea.
At night, McCullough began to research a book about the Johnstown Flood. The idea came to him, he remembers, after he and Rosalee studied, aghast, a batch of photographs of the aftermath of the terrible 1889 flood.
“The Johnstown Flood” — which is dedicated to Rosalee — begins with measured description of the book’s setting, which enables the reader to see, feel and hear: “Again that morning there had been a bright frost in the hollow below the dam, and the sun was not up long before storm clouds rolled in from the southeast. By late afternoon a sharp, gusty wind was blowing down from the mountains, flattening the long grass along the lakeshore and kicking up tiny whitecaps out in the center of the lake. The big oaks and giant hemlocks, the hickories and black birch and sugar maples that crowded the hillside behind the summer colony began tossing back and forth, creaking and groaning.”
In future books, McCullough would once again take raw historical facts and shape them into a captivating story — not by changing those facts, of course, but by gathering them from so many different sources, about so many different aspects of life, until the past is not just the product of consensus, of settled recollection, boringly inert, but a dynamic panorama, a shifting cavalcade of sights and sounds and smells and perspectives.
In the opening paragraphs of “Truman,” his biography of the misunderstood Missourian that sparked a major reassessment of the man, McCullough evokes the journey of Truman’s forebears as they headed west in the 1840s, staring from the cluttered decks of steamboats: “Day after day, the heavy, shadowed forest passed slowly by, broken only now and then by an open meadow or a tiny settlement where a few lone figures stood waving from among the tree stumps . . . On summer mornings the early filtered light on the water could be magical.”
On the less-than-magical side, McCullough’s devotion to rendering the way history really feels — as opposed to a bloodlessly objective chronicle of names, dates and the location of treaty signings — occasionally has made him the target of exasperated scorn by academic historians. But McCullough’s reaction to their harrumphing is a polite variation of “So what?”
“I’ve never written for the intelligentsia or for academic approval,” he explains. “I hope they like it, but that’s not who I write for. My feeling has always been: If I can make it clear and interesting to me, then it will be clear and interesting to other people, too.”
By the time “The Johnstown Flood” was published in 1968, McCullough and his family had moved back to New York. He was working as a writer and editor for American Heritage magazine. Ideas for books, though, just kept rushing at him, McCullough says. He craved time to focus exclusively on his writing. But for a man with four children — a few years later, the number would be five — that meant taking a great leap of faith. “Had it not been for my wife,” he admits, “I probably would not have had the courage to have proceeded with my writing life. I wanted to cut loose from my job. I wanted to see if I could make it. And she was for it. So that’s what we did — but it was a long time before we were out of the woods, financially.
“The number of writers who are self-supporting from their writing is very small,” he acknowledges. “I’ve never had a sinecure or a full-time teaching job. I like teaching, but I didn’t want to be involved in other occupations that would absorb my time and my focus.”
He is no recluse, however. “I like getting out. I like meeting people and finding out what’s on their minds. I like to find out what they’re reading, how much they know, what they’re curious about.”
Following the thread of his own curiosity has led McCullough to some interesting places: to Panama, where he researched his monumental study of the building of the canal; to eastern Kentucky, where he walked the mountainsides destroyed by strip mining to compile his portrait of Harry Caudill that appears in “Brave Companions”; to an island in the St. Lawrence River, home to the painter Frederic Remington, another subject who appears in “Brave Companions”; and, of course, to the iconic scenes of American history, the places that show up in “John Adams” and “1776,” the spots in Boston and New York and Washington where the nation had its bloody, far-from-certain birth.
McCullough is a walker, a man who believes that historians should wear out at least a few pairs of shoes per book. “I think you have to walk the walk,” he declares. “You have to smell the air and see how the light falls in a room. I strongly believe in that. When I was writing the Panama book I wanted to go down and feel that heat and humidity — and I wanted to go in the rainy season, not the dry season. I always learn something from it. It’s a way of getting closer to the people I’m writing about.”
He’s equally passionate about viewing the past as something other than a list of presidents and generals. “It’s a mistake to see history as primarily about politics, the military and social issues. Yes, history is an awful lot of that. But if you leave out art and music and architecture and medicine and science and money, you’re leaving out the humanity. The flavor. The things we can connect to.”
McCullough’s success is a validation of his ideas about what makes history appealing to readers. Several of his books are best-sellers. “Truman” and “Adams” have been made into cable miniseries. All eight of his books are still in print, a fact he announces with pride.
Joseph Ellis, history professor at Mt. Holyoke College and, like McCullough, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about American history, says McCullough “has a nose for where the story is. What comes through is his infectious enthusiasm, his glee, his passion for getting to know characters. He asks himself, ‘How can I make this story come to life?’
“I think that as a writer of books about American history, McCullough has interested more Americans in reading about their past than any writer or historian in the past quarter-century,” Ellis adds. “Academic historians have, for good or ill — and I think it’s mostly ill — abandoned the general public. They write for each other. David McCullough has filled the gap.”
And there’s one more thing, says Ellis. “His success hasn’t gone to his head. This is a man of great generosity of spirit and rock-ribbed integrity. He’s an incredibly decent fellow.”
Orville Vernon Burton, author and historian who retired in August from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after 34 years, says McCullough was the inspiration for his most recent book, “The Age of Lincoln” (2007).
“He’s a magnificent writer,” declares Burton, winner of the Tribune’s Heartland Prize for nonfiction last year. “He helps people to understand the importance of history to democracy. When I was writing ‘The Age of Lincoln,’ it was his work I looked to, because I’m an academic historian, and I wanted to make sure that I was able to reach out to the general public, as he does.
“He has influenced a love of history in extraordinary ways through his writing.”
And yet to hear McCullough himself tell it, the job of making Americans aware of their own past is not going well at all. The author is usually genial and even-tempered, but one subject gets his back up: the way history is taught — or not taught — to today’s students. “If you’re raising a generation of young Americans who are historically illiterate — which we are — it does not bode well,” he declares. “But it’s not the fault of our young people. It’s our fault. You can’t blame them for not knowing what they’ve never been taught.
“Will knowing history make you a better citizen? Absolutely. No question. Will knowing history give you a greater appreciation of the blessings we enjoy? That they didn’t just fall out of the sky as a birthright? That they had to be achieved? Struggled for? And that generation after generation went through difficulties beyond imagination to make possible what we take for granted? Is that important? Sure.
“But I think we ought to learn to enjoy history as a part of enlarging the experience of being alive. Why would you want to close yourself off to all of that human story? Why would you want to limit yourself to this little bit of time that we’re allowed by our biological clocks — when it is all there for you? It’s against our nature not to know about times past. We need stories. We need stories the way we need bread or water.”
McCullough’s books have all been written on the same black Royal manual typewriter. It sits on a stand in a small square building he had constructed just across the way from his house, a replica of the writing hut in which he worked for three decades on Martha’s Vineyard. The McCulloughs have kept their home on the island, but moved inland five years ago to be closer to their children and 18 grandchildren.
The 68-year-old house is large and roomy but not ostentatious. On the walls, McCullough’s hauntingly beautiful watercolors hold forth like quiet, rectangular reminiscences of places to which the author has traveled — sometimes for research on one book or another, sometimes just because it’s where he wanted to go.
At any given time, McCullough says, he is juggling at least 27 different ideas for books. “I try to write the book I would like to read. I find a great story, a subject that really interests me.” And then he dives in, gathering armloads of books and reading them and filling them with slips of paper to mark important passages. He types a first draft, corrects it with an unsparing pen, types it again, then sends that version to an assistant, who turns out a word-processed copy on a computer. Then, using the printout, he revises yet again.
Rosalee McCullough explains his working method this way: “David’s not a writer. He’s a re-writer.”
She should know. Along with raising their children, she has accompained him on most of his research trips. When McCullough has a plan, a vision, an inclination, a preliminary passion for what may turn out to be his next book, Rosalee McCullough is the person in whom he first confides his idea.
Right now, the subject that has besotted McCullough is Paris, and the Americans who traveled there in the first half of the 19th Century — writers, artists, dancers, doctors.
“The writing of a book is an adventure,” McCullough says. “It’s an expedition to a place I’ve never been before.” And best of all is the realization that no matter how everything turns out — it could have been, exhilaratingly, otherwise.
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America as seen through the eyes of a citizen-historian
To critics who chide him for portraying the past as it must have felt to those living it, McCullough says, ‘So what?’
“The drowning and devastation of the city took just about ten minutes. For most people they were the most desperate minutes of their lives, snatching at children and struggling through the water, trying to reach the high ground, running upstairs as houses began to quake and split apart, clinging to rafters, window ledges, anything, while the whole world around them seemed to spin faster and faster. But there were hundreds, on the hillsides, on the rooftops of houses out of the direct path, or in the windows of tall buildings downtown, who just stood stone-still and watched in dumb horror.”
“The Johnstown Flood” (1968)
“The creation of a water passage across Panama was one of the supreme human achievements of all time, the culmination of a heroic dream of four hundred years and of more than twenty years of phenomenal effort and sacrifice. The fifty miles between the oceans were among the hardest ever won by human effort and ingenuity, and no statistics on tonnage or tolls can begin to convey the grandeur of what was accomplished. Primarily the canal is an expression of that old and noble desire to bridge the divide, to bring people together. It is a work of civilization.”
“The Path Between the Seas” (1977)
“[Theodore Roosevelt’s] own brave and cheerful front was what the world knew him for, what the large proportion of his countrymen most loved him for. No one seemed to do so much or to enjoy what he did so thoroughly. Yet . . . the robust, quick-stepping, legendary ‘T.R.’ was a great deal more pensive and introspective, he dwelt more upon the isolation and sadness in human life, than most people ever realized . . . “
“Mornings on Horseback” (1981)
“I feel sorry for anyone who misses the experience of history, the horizons of history. We think little of those who, given the chance to travel, go nowhere. We deprecate provincialism. But it is possible to be as provincial in time as it is in space. Because you were born into this particular era doesn’t mean it has to be the limit of your experience. Move about in time, go places. Why restrict your circle of acquaintances to only those who occupy the same stage we call the present?”
“Brave Companions” (1992)
“It could be said also they had seen and heard for themselves a President [Truman] who was friendly and undisguised, loyal to his party, fond of his family, a man who cared about the country and about them, who believed the business of government was their business, and who didn’t whine when he was in trouble, but kept bravely, doggedly, plugging away, doing his best, his duty as he saw it, and who was glad to be among them. He wasn’t a hero, or an original thinker. His beliefs were their beliefs, their way of talking was his way of talking. He was on their side. He was one of them. If he stumbled over a phrase or a name, he would grin and try again, and they would smile with him.”
“Truman” (1992)
“[Washington] was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgment. But experience had been his great teacher since boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.”
“1776” (2005)
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The Chicago Tribune Literary Awards
David McCullough will receive the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize at 10 a.m. Nov. 2 at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.
Ticket information: chfestival.org or by calling 312-494-9509.
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jkeller@tribune.com
