David McCullough: Goodbye to all that
David McCullough, who died Aug. 7 at the age of 89, claimed to be a writer first, a historian second. A native of Pittsburgh (the 16th Street Bridge was renamed in his honor in 2013), McCullough was a master of the English language, as he demonstrated in a series of best-selling books, beginning with “The Johnstown Flood” in 1968.
His other books include “Truman,” published in 1992, and “John Adams,” which hit bookshelves in 2001. Both books captured Pulitzer Prizes. In addition, McCullough won two National Book Awards, for “Path Between the Seas,” about the Panama Canal, and “Mornings on Horseback,” about a young Theodore Roosevelt.
One of my favorites is “Brave Companions,” a collection of McCullough’s magazine articles. Brave Companions includes an absolutely marvelous piece about the discovery, in 1969, and the preservation of the blueprints, down to nuts and bolts, for the Brooklyn Bridge by an otherwise unremarkable New York City civil engineer named Francis P. Valentine.
It has gone unremarked whether McCullough ever tried his hand at fiction. In interviews and speeches, he was all about history. His artistry found its outlet in historical narrative. Back in 2001 Sean Wilentz, a noted academic historian and a public intellectual in the spirit of the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., said McCullough was in the vanguard of historical popularizers, a category of historians that Wilentz finds less than compelling.
In a review of “John Adams,” Wilentz noted: “McCullough’s specific contribution has been to treat large-scale historical biography as yet another genre of spectatorial appreciation, an exercise in character recognition, a reliable source of edification and pleasant uplift.”
To which McCullough replied, “Some people not only want their leaders to be made of clay feet, but to be all clay.”
If, as Wilentz suggests, McCullough misfired when it came to presidents Truman and Adams, then he really missed the mark with his last book, “The Pioneers,” in 2019.
According to a slew of academic reviewers, McCullough was guilty of giving the white settlers of the Ohio Country a free pass in their treatment of the region’s native sons, the Indians.
To McCullough, the settlement of the Ohio Country by pioneers trekking over from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania at the close of the American Revolution was a grand procession, a happy signaling of the spread of democracy and civilization westward.
To academics in 2019, it was one more example of white colonialists stealing native lands because … they could.
McCullough was entering the twilight of his remarkable life and career when “The Pioneers” was published. Intellectual tastes change. At the age of 86, it was probably too late for him to learn a whole new vocabulary, a whole new menu of historical rights and wrongs.
Then again, this was, one suspects, the same bunch of critics who were biting at the heels of Jefferson and Lincoln.
Wilentz, whose recent defense of the Founders against the 1617 Project crowd makes him appear just as out of step as McCullough, maybe more so, said in his 2001 review of “John Adams” that McCullough was “an admirable public figure.”
It was true. He argued persuasively against a Civil War theme park that Disney proposed to construct near the Manassas battlefield in northern Virginia. To McCullough, the very idea of such a park was vulgar in the extreme.
He said the decline in reading and writing skills evident among high school and college students kept him up at night. “I take the English language very, very seriously,” he told Brian Lamb of C-Span.
He told a Senate subcommittee that the No Child Left Behind educational changes championed by President George W. Bush took the side of math and science against instruction in history.
McCullough was something of a crusader on the topic of how history is taught, or not taught, in our public schools. Students should work in tandem on projects and they should discover whenever possible the joys of examining original documents were just two of his recommendations for restoring historical literacy to public education.
But it’s as a writer and storyteller that McCullough will be remembered, and missed. He painted with words, and his canvass was vast and compelling. Wilentz and others owe McCullough, who don’t only wrote like a dream, but urged others to “read, read, read – read everything.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.