we all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing
David McCullough
Historian
David McCullough was born in 1933 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and was educated there and at Yale University. Author of 1776, John Adams, Truman, Dauntless Companions, The Path Between the Seas, Mornings on Horseback, The Nifty Bridge and The Johnstown Overflowing, he has twice received the Pulitzer Prize and twice the National Book Award, likewise as the Francis Parkman Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
The following is an abridged transcript of remarks delivered on February 15, 2005, in Phoenix, Arizona, at a Hillsdale Higher National Leadership Seminar on the topic, "American History and America's Future."
Harry Truman once said the only new matter in the world is the history you don't know. Lord Bolingbroke, who was an 18th century political philosopher, said that history is philosophy taught with examples. An onetime friend, the late Daniel Boorstin, who was a very good historian and Librarian of Congress, said that trying to plan for the hereafter without a sense of the past is similar trying to establish cut flowers. We're raising a lot of cut flowers and trying to plant them, and that's much of what I desire to talk about tonight.
The task of teaching and writing history is infinitely complex and infinitely seductive and rewarding. And information technology seems to me that one of the truths about history that needs to be portrayed—needs to be fabricated clear to a student or to a reader—is that cipher ever had to happen the way it happened. History could have gone off in any number of different directions in any number of different ways at whatsoever point along the way, but as your own life can. You never know. One thing leads to some other. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Actions have consequences. These all sound self-evident. Only they're not self-evident—peculiarly to a immature person trying to understand life.
Nor was there always anything like the past. Nobody lived in the past, if yous terminate to think about information technology. Jefferson, Adams, Washington—they didn't walk around maxim, "Isn't this fascinating, living in the past?" They lived in the present only equally we do. The difference was it was their present, non ours. And just as we don't know how things are going to turn out for us, they didn't either. It's very piece of cake to stand up on the mountaintop equally an historian or biographer and find error with people for why they did this or didn't practise that, considering we're non involved in information technology, we're not inside it, nosotros're not confronting what we don't know—as everyone who preceded united states always was.
Nor is at that place any such creature as a self-fabricated man or woman. We love that expression, nosotros Americans. Just every one who'southward ever lived has been affected, inverse, shaped, helped, hindered by other people. We all know, in our ain lives, who those people are who've opened a window, given u.s. an thought, given united states of america encouragement, given u.s.a. a sense of direction, self-approval, self-worth, or who have straightened u.s. out when we were on the incorrect path. Most often they have been parents. Almost as often they have been teachers. Stop and call up about those teachers who inverse your life, maybe with one judgement, maybe with i lecture, perhaps by just taking an involvement in your struggle. Family, teachers, friends, rivals, competitors—they've all shaped us. And and so too accept people we've never met, never known, considering they lived long before the states. They have shaped us too—the people who composed the symphonies that move us, the painters, the poets, those who have written the bully literature in our linguistic communication. We walk around everyday, everyone of us, quoting Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pope. We don't know it, but we are, all the fourth dimension. Nosotros think this is our way of speaking. It isn't our style of speaking—information technology's what we accept been given. The laws we live past, the freedoms we savour, the institutions that we take for granted—equally we should never take for granted—are all the work of other people who went earlier us. And to be indifferent to that isn't just to be ignorant, it'south to be rude. And ingratitude is a shabby failing. How can nosotros not want to know about the people who have made information technology possible for us to live as we alive, to have the freedoms nosotros have, to be citizens of this greatest of countries in all time? It'southward not just a birthright, it is something that others struggled for, strived for, often suffered for, oft were defeated for and died for, for us, for the adjacent generation.
Character And Destiny
Now those who wrote the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia that fateful summertime of 1776 were not superhuman by any means. Every single one had his flaws, his failings, his weaknesses. Some of them ardently disliked others of them. Every i of them did things in his life he regretted. But the fact that they could rise to the occasion equally they did, these imperfect human beings, and practice what they did is too, of grade, a testimony to their humanity. We are non but known by our failings, by our weaknesses, by our sins. Nosotros are known past being capable of ascent to the occasion and exhibiting non just a sense of direction, simply force.
The Greeks said that character is destiny, and the more I read and sympathise of history, the more convinced I am that they were right. You look at the great paintings by John Trumbull or Charles Willson Peale or Copley or Gilbert Stuart of those remarkable people who were present at the creation of our nation, the Founders as we call them. Those aren't just likenesses. They are delineations of character and were intended to be. And we demand to sympathize them, and we need to sympathise that they knew that what they had created was no more perfect than they were. And that has been to our advantage. It has been good for united states of america that information technology wasn't all just handed to united states of america in perfect condition, all ready to run in perpetuity—that information technology needed to exist worked at and improved and made to work better. There'southward a wonderful incident that took place at the Cambria Iron Company in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in the 19th century, when they were edifice the first Bessemer steel mechanism, adapted from what had been seen of the Bessemer process in Britain. There was a German engineer named John Fritz, and subsequently working for months to get this machinery finished, he came into the plant i forenoon, and he said, "Alright boys, let's showtime her up and see why she doesn't work." That'southward very American. We will find out what's not working right and we volition fix it, and then maybe it will work right. That'southward been our star, that's what we've guided on.
I accept but returned from a cruise through the Panama Canal. I think often most why the French failed at Panama and why nosotros succeeded. One of the reasons we succeeded is that we were gifted, nosotros were attuned to adaptation, to doing what works, whereas they were trained to do everything in a certain way. We accept a souvenir for improvisation. We improvise in jazz; we improvise in much of our architectural breakthroughs. Improvisation is one of our traits every bit a nation, as a people, because it was essential, it was necessary, because we were doing over again and again and once again what hadn't been done earlier.
Keep in mind that when we were founded by those people in the late 18th century, none of them had had any prior experience in either revolutions or nation-making. They were, as nosotros would say, winging it. And they were idealistic and they were young. We see their faces in the old paintings washed later in their lives or looking at u.s. from the money in our wallets, and nosotros see the bad-mannered teeth and the powdered hair, and we think of them as elder statesmen. But George Washington, when he took control of the continental army at Cambridge in 1775, was 43 years old, and he was the oldest of them. Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was 40. Benjamin Rush—one of the most interesting of them all and ane of the founders of the antislavery move in Philadelphia—was 30 years former when he signed the Proclamation. They were young people. They were feeling their way, improvising, trying to do what would work. They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn't a depository financial institution in the entire country. There wasn't simply one bridge between New York and Boston. It was a little state of 2,500,000 people, 500,000 of whom were held in slavery, a little fringe of settlement along the due east coast. What a story. What a noble beginning. And retrieve of this: almost no nations in the world know when they were built-in. We know exactly when we began and why we began and who did it.
In the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington hangs John Trumbull's neat painting, "The Announcement of Independence, Fourth of July, 1776." It's been seen past more than people than whatever other American painting. It's our best known scene from our past. And almost nothing about information technology is accurate. The Proclamation of Independence wasn't signed on July quaternary. They didn't start to sign the Declaration until Baronial 2nd, and but a part of the Congress was and so present. They kept coming dorsum in the months that followed from their distant states to take their turn signing the document. The chairs are wrong, the doors are in the wrong place, in that location were no heavy draperies at the windows, and the brandish of military flags and banners on the back wall is strictly a figment of Trumbull's imagination. Merely what is accurate about it are the faces. Every single one of the 47 men in that painting is an identifiable, and thus accountable, private. We know what they await like. We know who they were. And that's what Trumbull wanted. He wanted united states of america to know them and, past God, not to forget them. Because this momentous stride wasn't a paper beingness handed down by a potentate or a king or a arbiter, it was the determination of a Congress acting freely.
Our Failure, Our Duty
We are raising a generation of young Americans who are by-and-large historically illiterate. And information technology's not their fault. There accept been innumerable studies, and there's no denying it. I've experienced it myself again and once more. I had a young adult female come upward to me after a talk one forenoon at the University of Missouri to tell me that she was glad she came to hear me speak, and I said I was pleased she had shown up. She said, "Yes, I'grand very pleased, because until now I never understood that all of the 13 colonies —the original 13 colonies—were on the eastward coast." Now you hear that and you think: What in the globe have we done? How could this young lady, this wonderful young American, become a pupil at a fine university and not know that? I taught a seminar at Dartmouth of seniors majoring in history, honor students, 25 of them. The start morning we sat down and I said, "How many of you know who George Marshall was?" Not one. There was a long silence and finally 1 young homo asked, "Did he accept, maybe, something to do with the Marshall Plan?" And I said yes, he certainly did, and that'south a good place to begin talking about George Marshall.
Nosotros have to do several things. Kickoff of all we have to go across the idea that we have to know who we were if we're to know who we are and where we're headed. This is essential. We take to value what our forebears—and not simply in the 18th century, merely our own parents and grandparents—did for united states, or nosotros're not going to have it very seriously, and it can slip away. If yous don't care about it—if you've inherited some great work of art that is worth a fortune and you don't know that it'due south worth a fortune, you don't even know that it's a great work of art and you're not interested in it—you lot're going to lose it.
We accept to do a far meliorate job of teaching our teachers. We have too many teachers who are graduating with degrees in education. They get to schools of didactics or they major in instruction, and they graduate knowing something chosen education, but they don't know a subject. They're assigned to teach phytology or English literature or history, and of course they tin't perform equally they should. Knowing a subject is of import because you want to know what you're talking virtually when you're teaching. But beyond that, yous tin can't love what you don't know. And the great teachers—the teachers who influence you, who change your lives—almost ever, I'm sure, are the teachers that love what they are teaching. It is that wonderful instructor who says "Come over hither and look in this microscope, y'all're actually going to get a kicking out of this."
There was a wonderful professor of child psychology at the Academy of Pittsburgh named Margaret McFarland who was so wise that I wish her teachings and her ideas and her themes were much meliorate known. She said that attitudes aren't taught, they're caught. If the instructor has an attitude of enthusiasm for the discipline, the student catches that whether the pupil is in 2d grade or is in graduate school. She said that if you evidence them what y'all dear, they'll become information technology and they'll want to get it. Also if the teachers know what they are didactics, they are much less dependent on textbooks. And I don't know when the final fourth dimension you picked upwards a textbook in American history might take been. And there are, to be sure, some very skilful ones still in impress. But most of them, it appears to me, have been published in social club to kill any interest that anyone might have in history. I remember that students would be better served by cutting out all the pages, clipping up all the page numbers, mixing them all upward and then asking students to put the pages dorsum together in the right order. The textbooks are dreary, they're done by commission, they're frequently hilariously politically right and they're non doing any good. Students should not have to read anything that we, you lot and I, wouldn't desire to read ourselves. And there are wonderful books, by and nowadays. There is literature in history. Let's brainstorm with Longfellow, for example. Let's begin with Lincoln's Second Countdown Address, for example. These are literature. They tin read that too.
History isn't just something that ought to be taught or ought to exist read or ought to be encouraged considering it's going to make us a better citizen. It will brand us a better citizen; or because information technology will make us a more thoughtful and understanding human being, which information technology will; or because information technology will cause united states to behave better, which it will. Information technology should be taught for pleasure: The pleasance of history, like fine art or music or literature, consists of an expansion of the experience of being alive, which is what education is largely about.
And we need not leave the whole task of teaching history to the teachers. If I could take yous come up away from what I accept to say tonight remembering one affair, it would be this: The pedagogy of history, the emphasis on the importance of history, the enjoyment of history, should begin at home. We who are parents or grandparents should be taking our children to historic sites. We should be talking near those books in biography or history that nosotros have particularly enjoyed, or that character or those characters in history that have meant something to us. We should be talking most what it was like when nosotros were growing up in the olden days. Children, especially little children, love this. And in my view, the real focus should be at the course schoolhouse level. We all know that those lilliputian guys can larn languages and then fast information technology takes your breath away. They can learn annihilation and then fast it takes your breath away. And the other very important truth is that they want to larn. They can exist taught to dissect a cow'south eye. They tin be taught anything. And in that location's no secret to pedagogy history or to making history interesting. Barbara Tuchman said it in two words, "Tell stories." That's what history is: a story. And what'south a story? E.M. Forster gave a wonderful definition to it: If I say to you lot the king died and and then the queen died, that's a sequence of events. If I say the rex died and the queen died of grief, that's a story. That's human. That calls for empathy on the office of the teller of the story and of the reader or listener to the story. And we ought to be growing, encouraging, developing historians who have heart and empathy to put students in that place of those people before usa who were but equally man, just as existent—and perchance in some ways more real than we are. Nosotros've got to teach history and nurture history and encourage history because it'south an antidote to the hubris of the present—the thought that everything nosotros have and everything we exercise and everything nosotros recall is the ultimate, the all-time.
Going through the Panama Canal, I couldn't aid only call back about all that I had read in my enquiry on that story of what they endured to build that great path, how much they had to know and to learn, how many different kinds of talent it took to achieve that success, and what the Americans did nether John Stevens and George Goethals in the face of unexpected breakdowns, landslides and floods. They built a culvert that cost less than it was expected to cost, was finished earlier it was expected to be finished and is still running today exactly the same as it was in 1914 when information technology opened. They didn't, by present day standards for case, empathise the chemistry of making concrete. Only when nosotros go and drill into those concrete locks at present, we find the deterioration is practically nil and we don't know how they did it. That ingenious contrivance past the American engineers is a perfect expression of what engineering ought to be at its all-time—man'due south creations working with nature. The giant gates work considering they're floating, they're hollow like airplane wings. The electric motors that open and shut the gates use ability which is generated by the spillway from the dam that creates the lake that bridges the isthmus. It'southward an boggling work of civilization. And we couldn't do it any better today, and in some ways we probably wouldn't practise information technology too. If you were to take a look, for case, at what's happened with the "Large Dig" in Boston, y'all realize that we maybe aren't closer to the angels by any means near a hundred years subsequently.
Nosotros should never wait down on those people and say that they should accept known better. What do you think they're going to be maxim near the states in the time to come? They're going to exist proverb we should accept known better. Why did we practice that? What were nosotros thinking of? All this second-guessing and the arrogance of information technology are unfortunate.
Listening To The Past
Samuel Eliot Morison said we ought to read history because it volition assist us to deport ameliorate. It does. And we ought to read history considering it helps to break down the dividers between the disciplines of scientific discipline, medicine, philosophy, art, music, whatsoever. It's all role of the human story and ought to be seen as such. You can't understand information technology unless you see it that manner. You tin't empathise the 18th century, for example, unless yous understand the vocabulary of the 18th century. What did they mean by those words? They didn't necessarily mean the aforementioned thing every bit we do. There's a line in 1 of the messages written by John Adams where he's telling his wife Abigail at home, "We can't guarantee success in this state of war, but we can practise something better. We can deserve it." Think how different that is from the attitude today when all that matters is success, beingness number ane, getting alee, getting to the meridian. However y'all betray or gouge or claw or do whatever awful thing is immaterial if y'all get to the tiptop.
That line in the Adams letter is saying that how the war turns out is in the hands of God. Nosotros can't control that, but we can control how we behave. We can deserve success. When I read that line when I was doing the research on the volume, it practically lifted me out of my chair. And so about three weeks later I was reading some correspondence written by George Washington and there was the same line. I idea, wait a infinitesimal, what's going on? And I thought, they're quoting something. So, equally nosotros all often do, I got down good old Bartlett'southward Familiar Quotations, and I started going through the entries from the 18th century and bingo, there it was. It'south a line from the play Cato. They were quoting something that was in the language of the time. They were quoting scripture of a kind, a kind of secular creed if you will. And you can't sympathise why they behaved as they did if you don't understand that. Y'all can't understand why accolade was and then important to them and why they were truly ready to put their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honour on the line. Those weren't just words.
I desire to read to you, in conclusion, a letter that John Quincy Adams received from his mother. Little John Adams was taken to Europe past his father when his begetter sailed out of Massachusetts in the midst of wintertime, in the midst of war, to serve our country in France. Nobody went to bounding main in the wintertime, on the Northward Atlantic, if information technology could maybe be avoided. And nobody did it trying to cut through the British battlement outside of Boston Harbor because the British ships were sitting out at that place waiting to capture somebody similar John Adams and take him to London and to the Tower, where he would have been hanged as a traitor. But they sent this piddling ten-twelvemonth-old boy with his father, risking his life, his mother knowing that she wouldn't come across him for months, possibly years at best. Why? Considering she and his father wanted John Quincy to be in association with Franklin and the great political philosophers of French republic, to learn to speak French, to travel in Europe, to exist able to soak it all up. And they risked his life for that—for his education. We have no idea what people were willing to practice for instruction in times past. Information technology's the one sustaining theme through our whole country—that the side by side generation will exist better educated than we are. John Adams himself is a living example of the transforming phenomenon of education. His father was able to write his name, we know. His mother was almost certainly illiterate. And because he had a scholarship to Harvard, everything inverse for him. He said, "I discovered books and read forever," and he did. And they wanted this for their son.
Well, it was a horrendous voyage. Everything that could have happened to go wrong, went wrong. And when the picayune boy came dorsum, he said he didn't always want to go across the Atlantic again as long equally he lived. And and then his father was called dorsum, and his female parent said you're going back. And hither is what she wrote to him. Now, keep in mind that this is being written to a picayune kid and listen to how unlike it is from how we talk to our children in our fourth dimension. She's talking as if to a grownup. She'southward talking to someone whom they want to bring along quickly because there'southward work to exercise and survival is essential:
These are the times in which genius would wish to live. It is non in the nonetheless calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that groovy characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities phone call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, and then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.
Now, there are several interesting things going on in that letter. For all the times that she mentions the mind, in the final sentence she says, "When a mind is raised and blithe past scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman." In other words, the heed itself isn't enough. Yous have to have the centre. Well, of course he went and the history of our country is dissimilar because of it. John Quincy Adams, in my view, was the most superbly educated and maybe the well-nigh vivid man who e'er occupied the executive office. He was, in my view, the greatest Secretary of Land nosotros've ever had. He wrote the Monroe Doctrine, among other things. And he was a wonderful man and a cracking writer. Told to go on a diary by his father when he was in Europe, he kept the diary for 65 years. And those diaries are unbelievable. They are essays on all kinds of important, heavy subjects. He never tells yous who he had lunch with or what the weather'due south like. Simply if you desire to know that, there's another sort of little Cliff diary that he kept about such things.
Well after the war was over, Abigail went to Europe to be with her husband, particularly when he became our offset government minister to the court of Saint James. And John Quincy came dwelling house from Europe to prepare for Harvard. And he had non been home in Massachusetts very long when Abigail received a letter from her sis saying that John Quincy was a very impressive fellow —and of course everybody was quite astonished that he could speak French—but that, alas, he seemed a little overly enamored with himself and with his own opinions and that this was not going over very well in town. And then Abigail sat down in a firm that still stands on Grosvenor Square in London—it was our first embassy if y'all will, a petty 18th century business firm—and wrote a letter to John Quincy. And here's what she said:
If you are witting to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that yous have had greater opportunities of seeing the world and obtaining knowledge of mankind than whatever of your contemporaries. That you lot take never wanted a book, but information technology has been supplied to yous. That your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. How unpardonable would information technology have been in yous to have turned out a blockhead.
How unpardonable information technology would exist for us—with all that we have been given, all the advantages we take, all the continuing opportunities we have to enhance and increase our love of learning—to turn out blockheads or to enhance blockheads. What we practice in education, what these wonderful teachers and administrators and college presidents and college and university trustees practise is the all-time, most important piece of work there is.
So I salute you all for your interest in education and in the education of Hillsdale. I salute yous for coming out this night to be at an event like this. Non just sitting at habitation being a spectator. It's important that nosotros take part. Citizenship isn't just voting. We all know that. Permit'south all pitch in. And let's non lose heart. They talk about what a hard, dangerous time we live in. And it is very difficult, very unsafe and very uncertain. But so it has e'er been. And this nation of ours has been through darker times. And if you don't know that—as and so many who broadcast the news and bailiwick u.s.a. to their opinions in the press don't seem to know—that'due south because we're declining in our understanding of history.
The Revolutionary War was as nighttime a fourth dimension as nosotros've ever been through. 1776, the year we then consistently and rightly gloat every year, was one of the darkest times, if not the darkest time in the history of the country. Many of us hither remember the first months of 1942 later Pearl Harbor when German submarines were sinking our oil tankers right off the coasts of Florida and New Jersey, in sight of the beaches, and there wasn't a thing nosotros could do about it. Our recruits were drilling with wooden rifles, we had no air forcefulness, half of our navy had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor, and there was zip to say or guarantee that the Nazi machine could be defeated—nothing. Who was to know? I like to remember of what Churchill said when he crossed the Atlantic after Pearl Harbor and gave a magnificent speech. He said we haven't journeyed this far because nosotros're made of sugar candy. It'due south equally true today as it ever was.
Source: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/knowing-history-and-knowing-who-we-are/
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