Giving History the Human Touch
America owes all her triumphs to the humans who crawled across battlefields, toiled in factories, blasted through mountains, sermonized on soapboxes, and experimented in labs. American history—world history—is human history more than anything. The late David McCullough understood this as well as anyone, and in the posthumous collection of his essays and speeches, History Matters, this basic idea is a consistent throughline.
The collection, compiled by his daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson, and Michael Hill, a longtime collaborator, includes various McCullough ruminations on history, writing, art, and America. McCullough made a career as a Pulitzer-winning historian, but his craft was more storytelling than anything. It’s no wonder he was a highly sought-after orator, on occasions ranging from university fundraisers to architectural preservation conferences.
When McCullough tells history, he focuses on the people who drove the stories. He prefers to follow the story chronologically, too. He reminds aspiring writers that “you’re writing about people who didn’t know how things would work out, any more than we do.”
McCullough emerged onto the popular history scene in 1968 with the publication of The Johnstown Flood. In researching for the book, he interviewed many of the people who lived through the tragedy. When writing about deceased subjects, such as early American presidents, McCullough had a knack for getting to know his subjects personally in the archives. This became the formula for an impressive body of work.
“History from the mountaintop may take in the large view,” McCullough writes, “but it can also be a kind of looking down on the people of other times.” Walking a mile or more in the shoes of, say, Teddy Roosevelt, as McCullough did in his Mornings on Horseback, can be a more intellectually honest projection of history. Especially with titans of the past like American presidents, it can be tempting to tell their stories from the outside looking in, but that approach ignores the humanity of their trials and errors.
For McCullough, “anyone who writes history and leaves out feeling isn’t writing history.” In a 1995 speech paying tribute to Herman Wouk at the Library of Congress, McCullough professed his admiration for the narrative form of history. There really is little that separates a novel from a biography: In both there are characters, triumph and tragedy, heartbreak and happiness. A biographer is restrained by the facts of history, but McCullough says real life can be even more vibrant.
An amateur painter, McCullough believed that telling the stories of people is akin to painting a scene. Instead of brushing on canvas, the historian blends the past onto hundreds of pages with words. History is art, he says. McCullough admired John Trumbull, the great painter of the American Revolution, because of his ability to capture the spirit of the people involved. McCullough quotes Abigail Adams, who, upon seeing Trumbull’s “The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill,” wrote of his ability to “transmit to posterity characters and actions which will command the admiration of future ages.” This is likewise the historian’s mandate.
The virtue of McCullough’s approach is that it doesn’t dismiss historical actors as evil for actions too quickly deemed inappropriate today. People don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re products of both their contemporaries and the people who came before them. The narrative form, the one that dwells on what drives history, is an empathetic form of history. It recognizes the push and pull of competing interests, arguments, and especially emotions. What seems like an easy call now wasn’t when it was made.
The perils of contingency and uncertainty especially surrounded one of McCullough’s favorite characters, President Harry Truman, the subject of his first Pulitzer-winning book from 1993. Included in History Matters is a lecture given by McCullough in the 1990s for a series and book titled Character Above All. McCullough admired Truman because he was the “seemingly ordinary American who when put to the test, rises to the occasion and does the extraordinary.” Rising from humble beginnings, Truman made some of the hardest, and most consequential, decisions of the 20th century.
The most famous, of course, was his decision to deploy the hitherto experimental atomic bomb against Japan. It was a decision that has since elicited plenty of aspersions. It was a tough conclusion to reach, one with grave consequences. But it was also a judicious and justifiable one. McCullough notes, however, that the most difficult call of Truman’s presidency was the decision to go into Korea in 1950. It was a popular option, but still a hard one to choose. On the other hand, Truman’s most unpopular move was one he made with ease: He fired General Douglas MacArthur, and despite the onslaught of contempt, he went about his day with little care for the naysayers.
Character, for McCullough, is having the guts to move forward with what you think is right despite the devil’s whisper in your ear. Truman did that when he recognized the state of Israel. Secretary of State George Marshall, a man whom he respected dearly, was concerned that American support for the Jewish people would anger Arab states and disrupt oil supplies. Because he had a “profound sense of history,” Truman set aside emotions and made the right call.
Our history is replete with remarkable men and women. McCullough devotes a speech to the “greatest American ever,” George Washington. He was a courageous man, a man of character and integrity. He was human. History matters because it tells the stories of people who were very much real. They show us what once was in order to tell us what we can be.
History Matters
by David McCullough
Simon & Schuster, 192 pp., $27
Dalton Swenson is a senior at Dartmouth College and a former Washington Free Beacon intern.
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