Thank goodness for the historians
Thank goodness for Margaret Leech.
For as Sean Wilentz, one of the country’s great academic historians, has written, “When describing history, more is at stake than the past.”
Past, present, and future is more like it. How aware would we moderns be, and how significant would we view it, had not Edward Gibbon first described the end of the Roman story, in his “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?”
Cullen Murphy, in this month’s Atlantic, contextualized Gibbon and the Fall, in writing about the events of Jan. 6: “The scenes at the Capitol … were remarkable for all sorts of reasons, but a distinctive fall-of-Rome flavor was one of them… Ever since Gibbon’s (history), the prospect of a Rome-inflicted apocalypse has cast its chilling spell.
“Britain’s former American colonies, which declared their independence the year Gibbon’s first volume was published, have been especially troubled by the parallels they discerned. The Founders feared the stealthy creep of tyranny.”
It was the historian Frederick Jackson Turner who, in 1893, almost single-handedly signaled the end of one period of our national life and the beginning of another, and in the process created a narrative – some would say myth – that has had profound consequences right up until the present day.
Turner’s thesis, contained in a paper he read to the American Historical Association called, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” was based on the idea, initially promulgated in the 1890 census, that “the (U.S.) frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
Turner went further than the Census, however, by arguing that the frontier had made the United States unique. Facing frontier hardships, Americans became resourceful and self-reliant. They developed strength and “rugged individualism,” which in turn fostered the development of democracy.
Almost by definition, Turner wrote the story of native Americans right out of the national narrative.
In 1962, Barbara Tuchman, though maybe not intending to, created a cautionary tale for the management of future political-military crises, with her book, “The Guns of August,” about the miscalculations attending the start of World War I in Europe in 1914.
President Kennedy, for one, took the book’s examples to heart in navigating the the Cuban Missile Crisis. There has never been a more fortunate melding of historical narrative and statecraft as the Tuchman-Kennedy connection.
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 book about the Lincoln Cabinet, “Team of Rivals,” established a rough criteria for how to view the makeup of future presidential cabinets, including the Obama, Trump, and Biden “teams.”
The latter two examples are important in regard to Margaret Leech, who was born in Newburgh, N.Y., in 1893. First, Tuchman, Goodwin, and Leech were, and are, so-called popular historians. Story-telling sells books.
For another thing, all three are women. Tuchman, who died in 1989, and Goodwin, who turned 78 in January, collected a Pulitzer Prize (or two of three) in the course of their distinguished careers.
Leech was the very first woman Pulitzer winner, in 1942 for “Reveille in Washington,” about the national capital during the Civil War. She won another in 1960 for “In The Days of McKinley.” She was the first woman to win two.
She was a marvelous writer – one of the very best, if not the best. Summarizing McKinley’s speeches during his first campaign for president, Leech writes, “He slipped smoothly from sound money to high wages, from good dollars to good times, from free silver to free trade, from open mints to open mills.”
For goodness sakes, I wish I could write a sentence like that.
“Reveille” is her masterwork, the book critic Jonathan Yardley declaring, “Its portrayal of Washington transcends time…. The prose … sings.”
A lush carnival of odds and ends, vivid personalities, and revelatory stories, “Reveille” spends considerable time with the social climbers, the rebel spies, the young toughs, and the ladies of the evening who flooded Washington’s dusty thoroughfares and muddy alleys in the years 1861-65.
She could very well have lavished most of her time and attention on Lincoln and the rest of official Washington. And while the president puts in an appearance now and again, he is not the focal point of “Reveille” by any means.
The book teases out the unexpected, the hitherto unexamined. Leech once told an interviewer, “There is a challenge in taking something obscure and trying to find out what you can.”
That certainly is one of the duties of the historian, and one of the delights of her job. All honor to Leech.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book, “JFK Rising,” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.