The Loss of a Hero

 

As I explained at the opening of my book, Prairie Bachelor, I wrote "for readers not terribly different from Isaac and his neighbors, ordinary Americans who care about our history."  The author who has greatly inspired me, David McCullough, passed away August 7, 2022.  His quote appears on page xxvi of my book:  "No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read." Academics do not own history, although one critic who reviewed my book seemed to think so, basing his primary criticism not on what I had written but rather on how he wished I had written in a more academic style.  There is nothing wrong with writing books for other academics, but if history is told only to scholars, how will other readers learn about our past?  David McCullough was my hero because he wrote history in a way that ordinary people wanted to read.

I am far from being unique as a fan.  His book Truman won the Pulitzer in 1992, and John Adams won the Pulitzer in 2001, both also familiar because they were made into television movies.  I won't even begin to list all of the other awards his books have won.  Probably many of you would recognize his voice as a narrator.  In 2006 President Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom.

"To me," McCullough wrote, "history ought to be a source of pleasure.  It isn't just part of our civic responsibility.  To me its an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."  One of his books holds the record for selling the most nonfiction books on the day of his book's release.   Fans couldn't wait to read it!  What a tribute to an author that is.

I own most of his books, although not all of them...yet.  One of the things I did this morning before I began writing this blog was to make a list of McCullough's books that I do not own, (only three, I believe), but I intend to remedy  that quickly. 

 

David McCullough quote

He entered Yale University in 1951, and one of his professors was Thornton Wilder, who apparently had a significant influence on him.  After McCullough had graduated with honor, receiving a Bachelor's Degree in English, he had various jobs related to his education, but he did not publish his first book, The Johnstown Flood, until 1968.  When his first book did well enough for him to consider a career as an author, he remembered the advice Professor Wilder had given him:  Find something you want to learn about, see if anyone has already done that, and if they haven't, write it yourself.   What wonderful advice.  

McCullough already knew that he loved the "endless fascination of doing the research and doing the writing," and I believe that shows in what he has written.  I too love discovering information, perhaps information that other writers have not found or did not choose to include it in their writing, and I too love sharing what I found.  I have written in other blogs about the delight of utilizing overlooked research sources and finding new information to include in my writing.  Perhaps I sense that fascination in McCullough and that is why I love his books.

I am grateful that there are still a few of McCullough's books I have not read.  It makes my sadness of his passing slightly less to know I still have books left to read.  Somehow, it also comforts me to learn that his wife Rosalee, whom he met when they were teenagers, shared nearly all of his life with him.  Rosalee died June 9, 2022, and David McCullough followed her in death on August 7, 2022.  

The Historian's Responsibility

From my first blog entry to the present, I have written of my belief that so many of our personal and our political mistakes can be avoided if only we learn from history.  (See "I Love History," 1-3-2012 and "Year's End," 12-30-2011 in the Blog Archives.)

 

I follow a wonderful blog titled "Brain Pickings" that always gives me ideas for reflection when I find time to visit it, and a recent posting inspired this week's blog with ideas taken from Erich Fromm (1900-1980), William James (1842-1910), and contemporary Dominican American writer, Junot Diaz.  A common thread in their writing inspired me to consider the challenge of creating interest in information in a world so filled with competing distractions. 

 

Artist:  Artero Espinosa

German psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm used the analogy of the development of a rose bush to our own power to direct our lives. He explained that while we have come to understand the impact of soil nutrients, optimal temperatures, sunlight and shade to aid in the growth of a rose bush, that does not prohibit the ability of the rose bush itself to bend its growth in reaching for the sun.  Likewise, each individual can reach for his or her own potential growth, despite external factors.  Fromm wrote:  "The goal of living [is] to grow optimally according to the conditions of human existence and thus to become fully what one potentially is; to let reason or experience guide us to the understanding of what norms are conductive to well-being, given the nature of man that reason enables us to understand."

 

My desire to tell Isaac's story and share the important history of a region that was the center of the Progressive Movement in the late 1800s is driven by what I see as the importance of knowing that history so that its experience can guide us today.

 

A contemporary Dominican American writer, Junot Diaz, (born 1968) expresses how art can play a role in educating readers in a rapidly changing world.  In an interview, Diaz said:  "One of the best things about art, as anyone who's studied a Victorian text knows, is that the future comes faster than we imagine, and there is a future coming up, of young artists and young critics and young scholars, who are thinking in ways that make the current conversation about our art look incredibly reductive." 

 

One important role for writers of history, I believe, is to make what we write relevant to young readers so that their perspective is not limited to their own experiences.  There is a certain arrogance that distances both young and old from each other.  A positive thing about young people is their confidence in themselves, but it tends to blind them to lessons of the past; a positive thing about older people is the wisdom they have gained from experience, but it tends to blind them to the innovation necessary in a changing world.  Writers of history must find a way to bridge both of those chasms in attitude that separate young and old.

 

William James (1842-1910)

A quote from William James (1842-1910) expresses the challenge of bridging those widely varying daily perceptions of our common world.  "Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience.  Why?  Because they have no interest for me.  My experience is what I agree to attend to.  Only those items which I notice shape my mind--without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.  Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground, intelligible perspective, in a word.  It varies in every creature, but without it consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive."

 

Any parent or teacher already knows that the typical teenager only pays attention to what interests him or her.  Likewise, if we are honest, by middle age most adults no longer pay much attention to the culture shaping teenagers. If capturing the attention of differing ages of people living at the same time in order to create a common experience is difficult, it is understandable that writers of history face an even greater challenge to capture the attention of readers about a historic period about which the relevance to their lives is not immediately apparent.

 

Newsboys (eyeing newsgirl) from the 1800s

To bring this discussion into today's news, I offer two examples from the same day's New York Times.  Nicholas Confessore, writing about how the GOP elite lost its voters to Trump, pointed out that "...faithful voters, blue-collar white Americans, who faced economic pain and uncertainty over the past decade [while] the party's donors, lawmakers and lobbyists prospered" were paying attention to different events. As William James explained, "Only those items which I notice shape my mind..."

 

In the same day's newspaper, Yamiche Alcondor, who is covering Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side, described the world his supporters were experiencing:  "the anger at Wall Street; the indie rock anthems; and the kiwi slices consumed aboard his campaign plane" align Sanders's appeal to the cultural moment "for liberals, young people and union workers."  In short, again quoting James, "Interest alone gives accent and emphasis..."

 

Whether you are a politician shaping history or a writer sharing history, you will not reach potential voters or potential readers unless you can capture attention in a world so filled with distracting appeals, or as stated by James: "My experience is what I agree to attend to..."  No matter how compelling nor how significant the lessons of history may be, they can only shape the minds of those living today if they are noticed.  Providing a reason for reading history is the responsibility of writers who believe it is important to share that history.  

What is History? An Update on my Manuscript

Rossville, IL

My first blog at this site shared my love of history. (See "I Love History," reposted January 3, 2012, where it can now be read in the blog archives.)  My feeling that history has so many lessons for us, to make each generation wiser than their predecessors by learning from past experiences both good and bad, was a big part of why I wanted to share Isaac's story.  The late 1800s have much in common with the problems we face today, making Isaac's experiences not only interesting but also relevant.

Recently, an internet friend and I were exchanging face book posts about the challenges of teaching young people history.  I shared my opinion that for students who have celebrated no more than 18 birthdays, their frame of reference makes even 20 years seem like ancient times.  I liked his reply so much that I wrote it down.  He said he had learned to appreciate the importance of history from his parents.  He concluded:  "I loved history in high school and could not understand why the other kids...did not understand how important it was.  It [history] is where we came from and points in the direction we are likely to go.  It is a huge puzzle with many pieces which one cannot possibly learn in a lifetime."  For me, his description of viewing history as a giant puzzle, some of whose pieces can be fitted together over a lifetime, seemed a wonderful analogy.

Dressed for Victorian Tea 2010

I believe my appreciation resulted from a natural immersion in family history.  I was raised in the house built by my paternal grandfather and his mother.  We had my paternal great grandfather's Civil War journal, from which I remember my mother reading aloud.  On Memorial Day we put flowers on the graves of paternal and maternal grandparents of several generations, joined in doing the decorations by aunts and uncles whose shared memories made me feel as if I had known the people whose graves we visited.  History was something real for me, not just names and dates from textbooks.

My experience is not common in today's world.  I read somewhere that the average American family lives in a house only five years before moving elsewhere.  Doing genealogy research I discovered that many people do not know their grandmother's maiden name.  Follow the news on television and the internet and you will see how headline events are abandoned within days or hours to report the new headlines in the next news cycle.  Not only is history given little attention, but also current events are quickly treated as irrelevant and forgotten.  Today's children grow up in a very different environment. 

FDR's Museum & Library

Not many families make history an intriguing puzzle for their children like my friend's parents did for him, nor are many children today raised in a home and community where evidence of their ancestors' lives surround them.  How do we make history interesting enough that people want to read about the past?  How do we make the lessons of history more than dates and names, not only for school children but also for adult readers?  That has been the question I asked myself as I wrote Isaac's story.

David McCullough has said, "No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read."  I agree. I have had the benefit of Isaac's own words in his journal from which to tell his story, but my manuscript is not just Isaac's biography.  I researched his community, using ancestry.com, family documents, legal documents, old photographs, tomb stones, and personal interviews to get to know the people Isaac mentioned in his diary.  I also researched the history of that period, becoming familiar with the biographies of famous people in politics, religion, business, and the arts.  I learned about the events that shaped the times.  Only when I had spent incalculable hours of research to become familiar with all of this was I able to put Isaac's story in context.  The challenge was to make the history during Isaac's time "something someone would want to read," as David McCullough said.  I believed that writing the manuscript like a doctoral thesis or a text book was the wrong way to share history with the readers I wanted to reach.

Visit to Isaac's Hometown

My manuscript has an extensive bibliography with footnotes to document the research I have done.  However, I have chosen to bring Isaac and his friends and acquaintances to life, revealing this exciting time through them.  Occasionally, that means I imagined conversations to share important information that would be deadly dull to most readers if presented as text.  For example, the People's Party, which shaped not only the politics of Isaac's time but also laws and social programs years later when the People's Party itself had faded away, evolved from smaller political movements coming together to form a powerful movement.  I could have written a paragraph or a few pages describing each of these separate groups and how they united.  Instead, I imagined a conversation between Isaac and his friend, William Campbell, a member of the Kansas House of Representatives who was a delegate to the organizing convention at which the People's Party was formed.  I know from Isaac's journal the night Isaac went to visit Campbell to "talk politics."  I am confident that they discussed the convention, its leaders, and the mix of political groups that were represented there.  However, I do not have a transcript of their conversation.  Instead, I have my research from original documents, newspapers, and secondary books and articles, and I have my imagination to put that information in the form of a conversation between Isaac and William Campbell the night Isaac went for a visit.

In those few places in my manuscript where imagination joins research to make history more readable to those who are neither scholars nor researchers, I identify in a footnote the sources used to create the scene and indicate what has been imagined, making the content enjoyable to casual readers but also documenting sources for more serious historians.  These passages in the manuscript are limited, but they do raise objections by some who believe my decision takes my manuscript out of the strict definition of history and moves it to some realm between historical fiction and authentic history.

Victorian Tea 2011

I disagree.  History is defined as the study of past events; the branch of knowledge that records and analyzes past events.  Yet, Voltaire said:  "History is the lie commonly agreed upon."  Even the most thorough research about a person or event cannot establish each detail with certainty, and analysis unavoidably introduces the bias and experiences of the analyst.  If only two people are present in a conversation, they will take away from their meeting a different recollection of what was said.  We can try to capture history accurately, but an absolute record of events is nearly impossible.  I have researched the subjects of my manuscript thoroughly.  If I make that research more accessible to readers by occasionally using my imagination to present the facts, while warning them in a footnote what I have done, is it any less accurate than the scholar's text where gaps are filled with analysis and supposition?

History is so important that rulers, politicians, and historians have manipulated it for generations.  As George Orwell said, "Who controls the past controls the future:  who controls the present controls the past."  I believe in the manner in which I have documented the history of a period, most commonly known as the Gilded Age, but presented from the perspective of those farmers and other laborers who lived their lives covered in sweat, dirt, and tears rather than gilt. My efforts will serve no purpose if I fail to make history something someone would want to read.  One publisher did not feel that my method met their criteria for  presenting history.  I remain hopeful that I will find a publisher who shares my enthusiasm for telling Isaac's story and the exciting events of the late 1800s as I have done.