The Sheila Variations

“And so many of the blessings and advantages we have, so many of the reasons why our civilization, our culture, has flourished aren’t understood; they’re not appreciated. And if you don’t have any appreciation of what people went through to get, to achieve, to build what you are benefiting from, then these things don’t mean very much to you. You just think, well, that’s the way it is. That’s our birthright. That just happened. [But] it didn’t just happen. And at what price? What grief? What disappointment? What suffering went on? I mean this. I think that to be ignorant or indifferent to history isn’t just to be uneducated or stupid. It’s to be rude, ungrateful. And ingratitude is an ugly failing in human beings.”

–David McCullough

In this wonderful 2005 NY Times interview with David McCullough about his book 1776 and about New York in the Revolutionary era comes this comment:

“It is all still happening for me,” [David McCullough] said, gesturing out toward the Manhattan skyline. “A lot of what is here vanishes in my eye and I can put myself in that place and that time.”

“A lot of what is here vanishes in my eye and I can put myself in that place and that time.”

That’s it, isn’t it, that’s the key to David McCullough’s extraordinary gift as a writer and historian.

I found that interview really moving at the time, I remember – I kept it bookmarked – mainly because of his sense of imaginative (and yet research-based) leaps of faith – which were a distinguishing characteristic of McCullough’s beautiful writing: attempting to see the Then alongside the Now, squinting at a landscape to see all that had happened upon it, making the Past come alive, if you squint, maybe you can see the Past. I love doing that when I travel.

I came to David McCullough, like many people did, through his award-winning best-selling biography of John Adams. Anyone who’s read me from the beginning of this site (in 2002) knows my passion for that era in American history. I don’t write so much now about it, but back in the day, it took up months of space on this here site. So when John Adams came out, I, of course, devoured it – but I had already read Catherine Drinker-Bowen’s wonderful bio (as well as her classic Miracle at Philadelphia), and of course the rich correspondence between John and his wife Abigail, AND the correspondence between Adams and Thomas Jefferson. My grandmother said once that the only woman she was ever jealous of was Abigail Adams: she thought her husband (my grandfather) had a crush. lol. It’s very well-worn territory for me. My aunt and uncle live, to this day, in Quincy, so we’d go there for Thanksgiving and we’d drive past “John and Abigail’s house” and somewhere, in my grade school mind, I felt like they were members of my family. No last names necessary. John and Abigail.

So what I’m saying is: the subject matter was not in any way, shape, form, new to me, but I was pulled in by McCullough’s elegant writing, and artful structure, the way he weaves in quotes to tell his story, but also takes the time to discuss all of the philosophical implications of these momentous events: not just to us, but to THEM, back then. Like: what did THEY think they were doing? What did it look like to THEM? That shit MATTERS. There’s altogether too much dismissal of the past as “problematic”, and a yearning for some kind of Maoist Year Zero. Silliness. If you actually READ history as opposed to DISMISS it, then you would know that there is no such thing as a Year Zero. In fact, if someone suggests there should be a Year Zero … run. John Adams made me a McCullough fan overnight.

1776 was, if anything, an even bigger “hit” than John Adams. I REALLY love that one as well.

I read his first book last. His first book, The Johnstown Flood: The Incredible Story Behind One of the Most Devastating Disasters America Has Ever Known, was published in 1970 and has never been out of print. McCullough hit the ground running. McCullough’s meticulous description of that horrifying flood is unforgettable, and he weaves together eyewitness accounts (of those who survived) which he dug out of dusty archives no one had really looked at before. The Johnstown Flood was heavily covered by the press at the time, it was a Titanic-like event, but memory of it had subsided into obscurity. McCullough rebuilt that world in his writing. By the time the flood comes in the book, you understand 1. the era and its challenges 2. the people who lived in the area 3. the class hierarchy of the different groups of people 4. and finally – how the river/hills were shaped, where the dam was, what the problem was with the dam, and how the whole thing was a disaster waiting to happen. The Johnstown Flood is not a long book, but you get all THAT in the book.

One of his gifts was in telling stories, based on contemporaneous material, piecing it together to craft a narrative. For instance: one of my favorite anecdotes from the American Revolution (maybe my favorite is the young woman who donated her stockings to wrap around the oars of the boats for the “one if by land two if by sea” mission), is the image of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams sharing a bed during a short “road trip”, and bickering about whether or not to keep the window open or closed. Here’s McCullough’s telling of it: it’s filled with charm and humor. Nothing too fancy. Just story-telling.

They were to meet His Lordship on Staten Island, and on the morning of September 9, in “fine sunshine”, they set off, the whole city aware of what was happening. Franklin and Rutledge each rode in a high, two-wheeled chaise, accompanied by a servant. Adams went on horseback, accompanied by Joseph Bass. Congress, in the meanwhile, could only sit and wait, while in New York the admiral’s brother, General Howe, temporarily suspended operations against the rebels.

Free of the city, out of doors and riding again, Adams felt a wave of relief from his cares and woes, even to the point of finding Edward Rutledge an acceptable companion. The road across New Jersey was filled with soldiers marching to join Washington, mainly Pensylvania men in long, brown coats. But for the “straggling and loitering” to be seen, it would have been an encouraging spectacle.

The journey consumed two days. With the road crowded, progress was slow and dusty. At New Brunswick, the inn was so full, Adams and Franklin had to share the same bed in a tiny room with only one small window. Before turning in, when Adams moved to close the window against the night air, Franklin objected, declaring they would suffocate. Contrary to convention, Franklin believed in the benefits of fresh air at night and had published his theories on the question. “People often catch cold from one another when shut up together in small close rooms,” he had written, stressing “it is the frowzy corrupt air from animal substances, and the perspired matter from our bodies, which, being long confined in beds not lately used, and clothes not lately worn … obtains that kind of putridity which infects us, and occasions the colds observed upon sleeping in, wearing, or turning over, such beds [and] clothes.” He wished to have the window remain open, Franklin informed Adams.

“I answered that I was afraid of the evening air,” Adams would write, recounting the memorable scene. “Dr. Franklin replied, ‘The air within this chamber will soon be, and indeed is now worse than that without doors. Come, open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.’ ” Adams assured Franklin he had read his theories; they did not match his own experience, Adams said, but he would be glad to hear them again.

So the two eminent bedfellows lay side-by-side in the dark, the window open, Franklin expounding, as Adams remembered, “upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep.”

I am in that room with those two men. Thank God they both kept diaries.

And then this, on the famous writing of the Declaration of Independence:

[Jefferson] worked rapidly and, to judge by surviving drafts, with a sure command of his material. He had none of his books with him, nor needed any, he later claimed. It was not his objective to be original, he would explain, only “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.”

“Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”

He borrowed readily from his own previous writing, particularly from a recent draft for a new Virginia constitution, but also from a declaration of rights for Virginia, which appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post on June 12. it had been drawn up by George Mason, who wrote that “all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights – among which are enjoyment of life and liberty.” And there was a pamphlet written by the Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson, published in Philadelphia in 1774, that declared, “All men are, by nature equal and free: no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent: all lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it.”
But then Mason, Wilson, and John Adams, no less than Jefferson, were, as they all appreciated, drawing on long familiarity with the seminal works of the English and Scottish writers John Locke, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Henry St. John Bolinbroke, or such English poets as Defoe (“When kings the sword of justice first lay down,/They are no kings, though they possess the crown. / Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things, / The good of subjects is the end of kings”). Or, for that matter, Cicero (“The people’s good is the highest law.”)

Adams, in his earlier notes for an oration at Braintree, had written, “Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike – The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man to endanger public liberty.”

What made Jefferson’s work surpassing was the grace and eloquence of expression. Jefferson had done superbly and in minimum time.

“I was delighted with its high tone and flights of oratory with which it abounded [Adams would recall], especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly would never oppose. There were other expressions which I would not have inserted, if I had drawn it up, particularly that which called the King tyrant – I thought the expression too passionate; and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document; but as Franklin and Sherman were to inspect it afterwards, I thought it would not become me to strike it out. I consented to report it, and do not now remember that I made or suggested a single alteration.”

A number of alterations were made, however, when Jefferson reviewed it with the committee, and several were by Adams. Possibly it was Franklin, or Jefferson himself, who made the small but inspired change in the second paragraph. Where, in the initial draft, certain “truths” were described as “sacred and undeniable”, a simpler stronger “self-evident” was substituted.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

It was to be the eloquent lines of the second paragraph of the Declaration that would stand down the years, affecting the human spirit as neither Jefferson nor anyone could have foreseen. And however much was owed to the writing of others, as Jefferson acknowledged, or to such editorial refinements as those contributed by Franklin or Adams, they were, when all was said and done, his lines. It was Jefferson who had written them for all time:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

David McCullough wasn’t just a good writer. He takes you back so that the people of history seem real, in all their flaws and inconsistencies. You get the sense of them as humans living in a specific time, shaped by events, by atmosphere, by other people, by all the things that shape us in our own time.

I am happy to have lived in the era where McCullough’s star rose, where books like 1776 and John Adams dominated the best-seller lists. Where you could actually look forward to his next book. I will very much miss that, but I am so grateful for him, for spending his life trying to step back into history, and see what the world looked like from the people who lived back then. And I am grateful for him taking us with him.

RIP, David McCullough, and thank you.

“Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.”
― David McCullough