‘Citizen Chronicler of the American Story’ David McCullough hooked readers on U.S. history. By James Freeman
What would we do without experts? The era of Covid has seen immense damage inflicted on Americans by some of the most highly credentialed people in our society. So let’s remember a remarkable man who didn’t leave something as important as U.S. history to the professoriate.
Bill Eville reported this week for the Vineyard Gazette:
David McCullough, a towering force in American literature and biography, winner of the President’s Medal of Freedom, two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards, died on August 7. He was 89 years old.
He died of natural causes at home in Hingham, the family confirmed, where he had lived for the past few years, with all five children by his side.
Candice Millard remembers in the Atlantic:
The first book I read by McCullough was John Adams, one of his many masterworks that begins with men on the move. “In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter,” he wrote, “two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north.” For me, that was all it took. I wanted to know who these men were, where they were going, what was going to happen next. I did not care that the book was nearly 800 pages long. I was hooked.
So were countless others. McCullough didn’t spend a career on campus, and readers may have been better for it. In 2003 Librarian of Congress James Billington wrote:
David McCullough is the citizen chronicler of the American story for our time… As an independent scholar, he is not beholden to any of the ideological causes or methodological fads that often take possession of otherwise good historians in bureaucratized academia–and cause them to end up writing more for each other than for a general audience. Unlike many revisionist historians, McCullough basically likes what he is writing about; yet he seeks to clear away myths for which he can find no factual basis.
In an age of deconstruction and taking things apart, McCullough is a partisan of putting things together–preferably in libraries with gardens, the two ingredients he seeks above all to include in the national memorial in Washington that he is championing for John Adams. McCullough wants the Adams memorial to be small and modest like the house that Adams lived in for most of his life. McCullough himself writes in a small room and insists that nothing of quality has ever been written in a very large space…
It is inevitable that such a popular historian should be subjected to a variety of challenges and criticisms by academic historians. A frequent professorial complaint is that there is too much storytelling and not enough social and psychological analysis. But his accuracy and eye for illustrative detail have been widely recognized–as have the frequent insights embedded in his narratives. He is sometimes faulted for being too admiring of his subjects. He does infuse his work with the optimism, energy and exuberance of awakening America at the end of the nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century, the period of his first three books, and he extends this positive approach in his massive biographies of Truman and Adams.
Let’s hope the professoriate will consider indulging in less social and psychological analysis and more fact-gathering. They might find, as McCullough did, that there actually are a few things to admire about the Founders.
McCullough wrote for the Journal in 2007 about a national treasure:
No painting by an American artist has been so familiar to so many people for so very long as John Trumbull’s “The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.” … The common understanding, of course, is that the painting portrays the birth of the nation at the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, on July 4, 1776. And certainly the official title would seem to confirm that. But the common understanding is wrong. The signing of the document (which was indeed dated July 4) did not begin until August 2, and even then not all delegates to the Continental Congress were present. Those who were absent did not sign until weeks, even months later. One man did not add his signature until 1777.
What the scene appears to depict is the moment on June 28 when a committee of five named to draw up a declaration of American independence—John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin—presented Jefferson’s unedited first draft. But again no such ceremonial moment with all present took place. And besides, nearly everything about the setting is quite inaccurate…
But what is accurate about the painting is of far greater interest, and it was this, to Trumbull, that mattered above all—the faces. He was determined that every one be a true-to-life likeness. He wanted to show them as the identifiable, accountable free men that they were, taking one of history’s most courageous steps.
In London he painted John Adams from life directly on to the original small canvas, which he then carried across the Channel to Paris in order to do Jefferson. For years following, back in the U.S., he traveled up and down the Eastern seaboard sketching or painting as many of the signers as were still to be found. He had no desire to flatter his subjects, only to record them for all time, for history, “in my language,” as he said, and in this he succeeded brilliantly.
***
Comments are closed.
