A gifted speaker, Mr. McCullough has lectured in all parts of the country and abroad, as well as at the White House. He is also one of the few private citizens to speak before a joint session of Congress. Born in Pittsburgh, Mr. McCullough was educated there and at Yale, where he was graduated with honors in English literature. He is an avid reader, traveler, and has enjoyed a lifelong interest in art and architecture.
He is as well a devoted painter. For more information on the use of the name of the Church, go to our online Style Guide. To download media files, please first review and agree to the Terms of Use. Download a photo or video by clicking or tapping on it.
And I like to get a sense of scale--whether it's a battlefield or a room or a house. The house that the Adamses lived in in London--our first embassy there--still stands. It's the only eighteenth-century house left on Grosvenor Square, and it's tiny. I find that eloquent that it's so small. It's like Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia. That's a beautiful little Georgian red brick structure, about fifty by fifty.
It has all the ideals of the eighteenth century: balance and light. You go in there and you think: This is where the first Continental Congress met? One of the greatest beginnings in all of history began in this little room? Cole: I was amazed about the populations of New York and Boston--how small they were and how big the British army was.
That does help put it into perspective. McCullough: When I read that the British army had landed thirty-two thousand troops--and I had realized, not very long before, that Philadelphia only had thirty thousand people in it--it practically lifted me out of my chair. They landed an army bigger than the entire population of the largest city in the country.
Cole: That's an amazing fact. It would be wonderful if there were more historians working in the way that you do. It seems to me that many academic historians are writing more and more for specialized audiences.
It's always seemed to me that if you're passionate about something, you want to communicate that to the widest possible audience. McCullough: I feel I'm working in a tradition that goes all the way back to Thucydides or Gibbon, if you want.
They weren't academic historians either. I can fairly be called an amateur because I do what I do, in the original sense of the word--for love, because I love it. On the other hand, I think that those of us who make our living writing history can also be called true professionals. McCullough: I don't feel that there is a great divide between the work that I and others do and those in the academic world.
And there are people who are trying to write history for the general reader who can be quite tedious. That said, I do feel in my heart of hearts that if history isn't well written, it isn't going to be read, and if it isn't read it's going to die. McCullough: I feel that what I do is a calling. I would pay to do what I do if I had to.
I will never live long enough to do the work I want to do: the books I would like to write, the ideas I would like to explore. I have to have the form in mind before I can write the book. Cole: You find the architecture.
Then when you get into it, do you find all sorts of surprises? McCullough: Absolutely. It's why everybody should be able to go into the stacks. You find the books you didn't know you were looking for.
Cole: One of my mentors said, "Never use the card catalog. Get into the stacks and you'll make wonderful discoveries. McCullough: I could not do what I do without the kindness, consideration, resourcefulness and work of librarians, particularly in public libraries. It happens all the time. I have librarians that will call up and say: "You remember that thing you were looking for a year, two years ago, and we didn't know where it was? Well, we found it. What started me writing history happened because of some curiosity that I had about some photographs I'd seen in the Library of Congress.
McCullough: They were photographs taken of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after the flood. A Pittsburgh photographer had somehow gotten his heavy glass plates and all that paraphernalia over the mountains into the city. My wife and I--it was a Saturday--had gone to the Library of Congress to look up some things in the old prints and photographs department. There was a marvelous man there named Milton Kaplan, a specialist on prints and photographs.
He took me to a table where they had just spread out these photographs they had acquired. We stopped to look. I was astounded by the violence of what had happened and the drama of it. I grew up in that part of Pennsylvania and I had heard about the Johnstown flood all my life. I knew that a dam had broken, but beyond that I didn't know anything, and I was curious. I took a book out of the library, and it wasn't very good.
I took another book out and it was, if anything, even less satisfactory. I remembered a line from an interview that Thornton Wilder had given to the Paris Review about how he came up with the ideas for the novels and the plays he wrote. He'd said, "I imagine a story I'd like to read in a book or see performed on the stage and if I find nobody has written it, I write it so I can read it in a book or perform it on the stage. McCullough: Yes.
Once I started doing the research I realized there were survivors of the flood still alive that I could interview--and I just knew I'd found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research. McCullough: People are so helpful.
People will stop what they're doing to show you something, to walk with you through a section of the town, or explain how a suspension bridge really works. McCullough: I do get enthusiastic. I have this urge to say, "Come on over here. Look at this. This is really worth your time. McCullough: All you are trying to do is to make it as interesting and as human as it really was.
You don't have to gussy it up. The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor? I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.
Cole: It seems to me that so much of history is about vast, impersonal forces which act on people. Your books are not about that. Your books are about people, their strengths, their flaws, their heroism. I think that's one of the reasons that people are so drawn to your books. McCullough: Well, Barbara Tuchman said, "There's no trick to interesting people in history or children in history. People ask, "Are you working on a book? I'm inside it. First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past.
Nobody lived in the past. McCullough: They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don't know how it's going to come out. They weren't just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can't understand them if you don't understand how they perceived reality and you don't understand that unless you understand the culture.
I wish we had a less fancy word than "culture," because it sounds too pretentious. What did they read? What poetry moved them? What music did they listen to? What did they eat? What were they afraid of? What was it like to travel from one place to another then?
Cole: One of the most vivid experiences I've had in that way was taking a couple of years to read all of Pepys's diaries. Cole: It took me years. It was bedtime reading. But that is exactly what I found so riveting: the sense of night without any illumination, no telephones, the communication, the hygiene, and the like told in this marvelous prose.
It does transport you. McCullough: That's one of the reasons I began John Adams as I did, with these two lone men on horseback riding through a bleak, cold winter landscape. For all intents and purposes, they're anonymous. They are coming through that winter scene, the snow and the wind, and they're going to ride nearly four hundred miles in that kind of weather, on horseback, to get to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. These were tough people. We see the men in their frilled shirts and their satin pants and the powdered hair and they look like fops.
They look like softies. Nothing doing. They were tough. And life was tough. And yet, of course, they were not gods. Particularly talking to college audiences, I say, never, never think of them as gods. They're human beings with all the failings, flaws, and weaknesses that are part of the human condition.
They were imperfect. Life was short and they knew it could end almost at any time. I've gotten so fascinated with the eighteenth century, I'm going to stay there. I once told my wife, "I may never come back. It's about the Revolution, with the focus on the year It's about Washington and the army and the war. It's the nadir, the low point of the United States of America. McCullough: No. The title always comes last.
What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind. McCullough: I expect so, or maybe it's just we've all been so conditioned by movies. I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene. He said, in his great admonition to writers, "Make me see.
I want to know what they had for dinner. I want to know how long it took to walk from where to where. You get into it almost the way an actor gets into a part. I want to get into this material.
You scratch the supposedly dead past anywhere and what you find is life. McCullough: There are innumerable writing problems in an extended work. This book on Adams took a little more than six years.
You, the writer, change in six years. The life around you changes. Your family changes. They grow up. They move away. The world is changing. You're also learning more about the subject. By the time you're writing the last chapters of the book, you know much more than you did when you started at the beginning.
McCullough: The voice has to stay the same. So you go back and work on them, in a way, as a painter will work all over the whole canvas. I work on the front and the back and the middle all at once. I think it's best to pick a biographical subject who lives to a ripe old age. Older people tend to relax and speak their minds. They're dropping some of the masks that they've been wearing. There's a candor. With Adams, for example, I had a character who was in motion virtually all of his life up until he left the White House in He was going to go back to Braintree, Massachusetts, and never leave there for twenty-five years, holding no office, having no influence.
How in the world was I going to sustain that? As it turned out, that's when the inward journey begins for John Adams, and that to me, in many ways, was the most interesting part of the book.
He begins to realize that many of the things that he has thought or held to for so long he doesn't see as he did before. The concept, for example, of the Enlightenment, that if one applied the combined intellectual efforts of a good society, there was no answer that couldn't be found. Well, he decided that really wasn't so, that inevitably there were unsolvable mysteries about life and that it was best that way. Many of his reflections on his friends and what events in his life had mattered most went through transitions.
Cole: What promised to be an uneventful passage turned out to be quite an interesting segment of Adams's life, didn't it? Cole: You mentioned that your new book is about the American Revolution. That brings to mind a study done not too long ago that surveyed fifty top colleges and universities. The students were asked questions taken from a high school curriculum, and the lack of historical knowledge was really appalling. That is, our country has been attacked.
Not only the World Trade Center but really the idea of our country, the ideas generated by the founders.
How are we going to defend this if we really don't know much about it? McCullough: I have been lecturing at colleges and universities continuously for twenty-five years or more.
From my experience I don't think there's any question whatsoever that the students in our institutions of higher learning have less grasp of American history than ever before. We are raising a generation of young Americans who are, to a very large degree, historically illiterate. It's not their faults. There's no problem about enlisting their interest in history. The problem is the teachers so often have no history in their background. Very often they were education majors and graduated knowing no subject.
It's the same, I'm told, in biology or English literature or whatever. If we think back through our own lives, the subjects that you liked best in school almost certainly were taught by the teachers you liked best. And the teacher you liked best was the teacher who cared about the subject she taught. There was a noted professor of child psychology at the University of Pittsburgh named Margaret McFarland, whose most influential disciple is Fred Rogers, who has taught more children than any human being who ever lived.
Fred Rogers likes to say that all he's done with his programs is based on the teachings of Margaret McFarland. What she taught in essence is that attitudes aren't taught, they're caught. If the attitude of the teacher toward the material is positive, enthusiastic, committed and excited, the students get that. If the teacher is bored, students get that and they get bored, quickly, instinctively. In my view, we have to rethink how we're teaching our teachers.
There's very good work in this field being done by the National Council for History Education, which conducts summer seminars or clinics primarily for grade school teachers from all over the country. They are the ones that got this going. McCullough: It's not just something that we should be sad about, or worried about, that these young people don't know any history.
We should be angry. They are being cheated and they are being handicapped, and our way of life could very well be in jeopardy because of this. Since September 11, it seems to me that never in our lifetime, except possibly in the early stages of World War II, has it been clearer that we have as a source of strength, a source of direction, a source of inspiration--our story.
Yes, this is a dangerous time. Yes, this is a time full of shadows and fear. But we have been through worse before and we have faced more difficult days before. We have shown courage and determination, and skillful and inventive and courageous and committed responses to crisis before.
We should draw on our story, we should draw on our history as we've never drawn before. If we don't know who we are, if we don't know how we became what we are, we're going to start suffering from all the obvious detrimental effects of amnesia. McCullough: Furthermore, we face an enemy who believes in enforced ignorance.
And it's what all that we stand for. McCullough: --the generous spirit, the ideal of tolerance, freedom, education, opportunity. All that is in the paragraph that John Adams included in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which is the oldest written constitution still in use in the world today.
It predates our national constitution by ten years. Then he goes on to say what he means by education. And what he means by education clearly is everything. No boundaries. It's all important. There had never been any such statement in any proclamation or constitution ever in the history of the world. This was radical in its day. It's saying not just that it would be a good idea to educate people, it's saying it's the duty of the government.
The pursuit of happiness. What did they mean by "the pursuit of happiness"? They did not mean material wealth. They did not mean ease, luxury. McCullough: As near as I can tell, they meant the life of the mind and the life of the spirit. Adams wrote a letter to his boy, John Quincy, concerned that the boy not just be studying Greek and Latin, but that he be reading the great works in his own mother tongue, and particularly the English poets. He says, "Read somewhat in the English poets every day.
You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life. Then he says, "In all the disquisitions you have heard concerning the happiness of life, has it ever been recommended to you to read poetry?
McCullough: Even more to the point is a very well known paragraph where he says, "I must study politics and war, so that my" McCullough: Absolutely right. At the very end of Adams's life, Adams's doctor wrote a letter to John Quincy to say, "I've just been to see him. But as weak as was his material frame, his mind was still enthroned. One of the regrets of my life is that I did not study Latin.
I'm absolutely convinced, the more I understand these eighteenth-century people, that it was that grounding in Greek and Latin that gave them their sense of the classic virtues: the classic ideals of honor, virtue, the good society, and their historic examples of what they could try to live up to.
Cole: Yes. It is aimed at getting people in all walks of life thinking about what it means to be an American--our liberties, all those things we were attacked for. That's why it is so alarming that you have this kind of historical amnesia. McCullough: There is a notable rise in popular interest in history as measured by the success, for example, of The History Channel on television. The level of knowledge of those we're educating seems on the decline while the general interest seems to be on the rise.
Cole: That's the paradox. McCullough: Maybe because so many people didn't learn these things in college, they're curious to find out. But we need to get them young. Little children can learn anything, just as they can learn a foreign language. The mind is so absorbent then. There ought to be a real program to educate teachers who want to teach grade school children about history.
Another good classroom program has the children act a part. In my granddaughter's fifth-grade class, two sections are doing the American presidents. I was astounded by how much they know. The child who is Dolley Madison or James K. Polk--they're never going to forget that. I'm absolutely positive it's in our human nature to want to know about the past. The two most popular movies of all time, while not historically accurate, are about core historic events: Gone With the Wind and Titanic.
There is a human longing to go back to other times. We all know how when we were children we asked our parents, "What was it like when you were a kid? For nine-tenths of the time that human beings have been on earth, knowledge that was essential to survival was transmitted from one generation to the next by the vehicle of story.
My strong feeling is that we must learn more about how we learn. I'm convinced that we learn by struggling to find the solution to a problem on our own--with some guidance, but getting in and getting our hands dirty and working it. Cole: So we really understand it. When we do it that way, we really know it. It's not superimposed. McCullough: If you had to take that typewriter or that automobile engine apart and put it back together, you'd never forget it.
McCullough: I opened a closet in the attic of the old library at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute one beautiful fall afternoon, and there were all the records and the private correspondence and the scrapbooks and the photographs and the drawings of the Brooklyn Bridge, just stashed in that closet, no catalog, no index--nobody really knew what all was there--bundles of letters tied up with shoestrings the way it had been when the Roebling family turned it over.
I spent three years trying to untangle all that, trying to understand it. It's been thirty years, and I'm sure I could sit down now and take a test and do extremely well on that subject. I'll never ever forget it. McCullough: We've all crammed for exams, maybe did very well on the exams, and three weeks later McCullough: --it's gone. So I think we have got to bring the lab technique to the teaching of the humanities to a far greater degree than we have.
There are ways that can be done. And they're exciting. I am adamant that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it.
If a child learns nothing but that as a guide to life, that's invaluable. You can't learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can't learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can't learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking.
To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard. McCullough: Exactly. We all know the old expression, "I'll work my thoughts out on paper. That is why we must have more writing in the schools, more writing in all subjects, not just in English classes.
The talent, including the talent for history--and I do think there are people who just have a talent for it, the way you have a talent for public speaking or music or whatever--it shouldn't be allowed to lie dormant. It should be brought alive. Cole: Terrific. Thank you for taking the time to talk about the making of history--and the writing of it.
Cole, ladies and gentlemen, to be honored as I am tonight in the Capital of our country, in the presence of my family and many old friends, is for me almost an out-of-body experience. Had someone told me forty years ago, as I began work on my first book, trying to figure out how to go about it, that I would one day be standing here, the recipient of such recognition, I would, I think, have been stopped dead in my tracks. I've loved the work, all the way along -- the research, the writing, the rewriting, so very much that I've learned about the history of the nation and about human nature.
I love the great libraries and archives where I've been privileged to work, and I treasure the friendships I've made with the librarians and archivists who have been so immensely helpful.
I've been extremely fortunate in my subjects, I feel. The reward of the work has always been the work itself, and more so the longer I've been at it. The days are never long enough, and I've kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I've come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don't get to read other people's mail. I have also been extremely fortunate in the tributes that have come my way. But this singular honor, the Jefferson Lecture, is for me a high point, and my gratitude could not be greater.
Among the darkest times in living memory was the early part of -- when Hitler's armies were nearly to Moscow; when German submarines were sinking our oil tankers off the coasts of Florida and New Jersey, within sight of the beaches, and there was not a thing we could do about it; when half our navy had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor.
We had scarcely any air force. Army recruits were drilling with wooden rifles. And there was no guarantee whatever that the Nazi war machine could be stopped. It was then, in , that the classical scholar Edith Hamilton issued an expanded edition of her book, The Greek Way , in which, in the preface, she wrote the following:. I have felt while writing these new chapters a fresh realization of the refuge and strength the past can be to us in the troubled present Religion is the great stronghold for the untroubled vision of the eternal; but there are others too.
We have many silent sanctuaries in which we can find breathing space to free ourselves from the personal, to rise above our harassed and perplexed minds and catch sight of values that are stable, which no selfish and timorous preoccupations can make waver, because they are the hard-won permanent possessions of humanity When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.
In the Rotunda of the Capitol hangs a large painting of forty-seven men in a room. The scene is as familiar, as hallowed a moment in our history as any we have. John Trumbull's Declaration of Independence has been a main attraction on Capitol tours for a very long time, since It draws crowds continuously, as it should, every day -- about three to five million people a year.
It's probably been seen by more Americans than any painting ever -- and the scene as portrayed never took place.
Trumbull said it was meant to represent July 4, , and that's the popular understanding. But the Declaration of Independence was not signed on July 4. The signing began on August 2, and continued through the year as absent delegates returned to Philadelphia. No formal signing ceremony ever took place. The scene comes closer to portraying June 28, when Thomas Jefferson submitted his first draft of the Declaration.
But then, too, there was no such dramatic gathering. The room is wrong, the doors are in the wrong place. The chairs are wrong. They were Windsor chairs of the plainest kind. There were no heavy draperies at the windows. The decorative display of military trophies and banners on the back wall, is purely Trumbull's way of dressing the set.
Yet none of this really matters. What does matter greatly -- particularly in our own dangerous, uncertain time -- is the symbolic power of the painting, and where Trumbull put the emphasis. The scene proclaims that in Philadelphia in the year a momentous, high-minded statement of far-reaching consequence was committed to paper. It was not the decree of a king or a sultan or emperor or czar, or something enacted by a far-distant parliament.
It was a declaration of political faith and brave intent freely arrived at by an American congress. And that was something entirely new under the sun.
And there Trumbull has assembled them, men like other men, each, importantly, a specific, identifiable individual. The accuracy is in the faces. Before he was finished, Trumbull painted or sketched thirty-six of the faces from life. It took him years and he spared no expense, because he wanted it right. He wanted us to know who they were. Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin stand front and center exactly as they did in the real drama of the Revolution.
Most conspicuous by his absence is George Washington who had departed Congress the year before to take command of the army. Lord Bolingbroke, the eighteenth century political philosopher, said that "history is philosophy teaching by examples. Daniel Boorstin, the former Librarian of Congress, has wisely said that trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers. One might also say that history is not about the past.
If you think about it, no one ever lived in the past. Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and their contemporaries didn't walk about saying, "Isn't this fascinating living in the past! Aren't we picturesque in our funny clothes! The difference is it was their present, not ours.
They were caught up in the living moment exactly as we are, and with no more certainty of how things would turn out than we have. Nor were they gods. Indeed, to see them as gods or god-like is to do disservice to their memories.
Gods, after all, don't deserve a lot of credit because they can do whatever they wish. Those we call the Founders were living men. None was perfect. Each had his human flaws and failings, his weaknesses. They made mistakes, let others down, let themselves down. Washington could be foolhardy and ill-tempered. Adams could be vain, irritable, Jefferson evasive, at times duplicitous. And even in their day, many saw stunning hypocrisy in the cause of liberty being championed by slave masters.
They were imperfect mortals, human beings. Jefferson made the point in the very first line of the Declaration of Independence. And of course their humanity is not evident only in their failings. It's there in Adams's heart-felt correspondence with his wife and children, in Jefferson's love of gardening, his fascination, as he said, in every blade of grass that grows. Washington had a passionate love of architecture and interior design.
Everything about his home at Mt. Vernon was done to his ideas and plans. Only a year before the war, he began an ambitious expansion of the house, doubling its size.
How extremely important this was to him, the extent of his esthetic sense, few people ever realized. He cared about every detail -- wall paper, paint color, hardware, ceiling ornaments -- and hated to be away from the project even for a day. The patriotism and courage of these all-important protagonists stand as perhaps the most conspicuous and enduring testaments to their humanity.
When those who signed the Declaration of Independence pledged their "lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor," that was no mere verbiage. They were putting their lives on the line. They were declaring themselves traitors to the King. If caught they would be hanged. Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, who suffered from palsy, is said to have remarked as he signed his name, "My hand trembles, but my heart does not.
Hopkins was a grand old figure who had seen a lot of life. You can't miss him in the Trumbull painting. He's at the back with his broad-brimmed Quaker hat on. In after-hours he loved to drink rum and expound on his favorite writers. We must never forget either how hard they worked. Nothing came easy. Just getting through a day in the eighteenth century meant difficulties, discomforts, and effort of a kind we seldom even think about. But it is in their ideas about happiness, I believe, that we come close to the heart of their being, and to their large view of the possibilities in their Glorious Cause.
In general, happiness was understood to mean being at peace with the world in the biblical sense, under one's own "vine and fig tree. It didn't mean long vacations or material possessions or ease. As much as anything it meant the life of the mind and spirit. It meant education and the love of learning, the freedom to think for oneself. Jefferson defined happiness as "tranquility and occupation. Washington, though less inclined to speculate on such matters, considered education of surpassing value, in part because he had had so little.
Once, when a friend came to say he hadn't money enough to send his son to college, Washington agreed to help -- providing a hundred pounds in all, a sizable sum then -- and with the hope, as he wrote, that the boy's education would "not only promote his own happiness, but the future welfare of others ….
John Adams, in a letter to his son John Quincy when the boy was a student at the University of Leiden, stressed that he should carry a book with him wherever he went. And that while a knowledge of Greek and Latin were essential, he must never neglect the great works of literature in his own language, and particularly those of the English poets. It was his happiness that mattered, Adams told him.
The Revolution was another of the darkest, most uncertain of times and the longest war in American history, until the Vietnam War. It lasted eight and a half years, and Adams, because of his unstinting service to his country, was separated from his family nearly all that time, much to his and their distress.
In a letter from France he tried to explain to them the reason for such commitment. I must study politics and war [he wrote] that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. That was the upward climb envisioned for the good society in the burgeoning new American republic.
And Adams was himself vivid proof of the transforming miracle of education. His father was a farmer, his mother almost certainly illiterate.
But with the help of a scholarship, he was able to attend Harvard, where, as he said, he discovered books and "read forever. His Harvard studies over, Adams began teaching school at Worcester, then virtually the frontier. One crystal night, twenty years before the Declaration of independence, he stood beneath a sky full of stars, "thrown into a kind of transport.
But all the provisions that He has [made] for the gratification of our senses He has given us reason to find out the truth, and the real design and true end of our existence. He had decided to study law. Of all the sustaining themes in our story as a nation, as clear as any has been the importance put on education, one generation after another, beginning with the first village academies in New England and the establishment of Harvard and the College of William and Mary.
The place of education in the values of the first presidents is unmistakable. His gift was the largest donation ever made to any educational institution in the nation until then, and has since grown to a substantial part of the endowment. Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. But then it may be fairly said that Jefferson was a university unto himself. The oldest written constitution still in use in the world today is the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, drafted by John Adams in , just two years after the Declaration of Independence and fully a decade before our national Constitution.
In many respects it is a rough draft of our national Constitution. But it also contains a paragraph on education that was without precedent. Though Adams worried that it would be rejected as too radical, it was passed unanimously. Listen, please, to what it says:. Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.
And he goes on to define what he means by education. It is literature and the sciences, yes, but much more: agriculture, the arts, commerce, trades, manufacturers, "and a natural history of the country. Years before, while still living under his father's roof, Adams had written in his diary, "I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.
They were nearly all young men in , it should be remembered, young men who believed, as Thomas Paine proclaimed, that the birth of a new world was at hand. Jefferson was thirty-three, Adams, forty, Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician, was all of thirty when he signed the Declaration of Independence.
Rush, one of the most interesting of them all, was a leader in the anti-slavery movement, a leader in prescribing humane treatment for the insane, and the first to champion the elective system in higher education. When George Washington took command of the army, he was forty-three. He had never led an army in battle before in his life, any more than the others had had prior experience as revolutionaries or nation builders.
His name was Amos and he was a mouse, an eighteenth century church mouse to be exact, one of twenty-six children who with their mother and father lived in Old Christ Church in Philadelphia. I can never be in Old Christ Church without wondering if perhaps some of Amos's line are still there, back behind the paneling.
Amos, who took up lodging in Benjamin Franklin's fur hat, is the narrator of a little book called Ben and Me by Robert Lawson. Most so-called historians have had Franklin all wrong, according to Amos. I was six, as I say, and I was hooked.
I learned all about Philadelphia, printing presses, electricity, Franklin stoves, and the Palace of Versailles. I got to know Benjamin Franklin and, like Amos, relished his company. And that was the start.
I learned to love history by way of books. Edmonds, The Last of the Mohicans , with those haunting illustrations by the N. That was in the day when children were put to bed when sick, and I remember lying there utterly, blissfully lost in those illustrations. I was fifteen years old. In a book shop in Pittsburgh, I picked up the book from a table, opened to the start of chapter one, read the first sentence, and knew I had to have that book:. The fourteenth of August was the day fixed upon for the sailing of the brig Pilgrim , on her voyage from Boston, round Cape Horn, to the western coast of America.
Growing up in Pittsburgh, I had never seen the ocean or heard the cry of a sea gull or smelled salt air. I thank my lucky stars for Robert Abercrombie, who taught history my senior year in high school and made Morison and Commager's The Growth of the American Republic required reading. Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox , a graduation present, started me reading about the Civil War, and started me thinking that maybe some day I might try writing something of the kind.
I loved all those books, and they're all still in print, still being read, which is no mystery. They're superbly well done, wonderfully well written. There should be no hesitation ever about giving anyone a book to enjoy, at any age. There should be no hesitation about teaching future teachers with books they will enjoy. No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.
We are what we read more than we know. And it was true no less in that distant founding time. Working on the life of John Adams, I tried to read not only what he and others of his day wrote, but what they read.
And to take up and read again works of literature of the kind we all remember from high school or college English classes was not only a different kind of research, but pure delight. I then began to find lines from these writers turning up in the letters of my American subjects, turning up without attribution, because the lines were part them, part of who they were and how they thought and expressed themselves. But we do the same, more often than we realize.
Every time we "refuse to budge an inch," or speak of "green-eyed jealousy," or claim to be "tongue-tied," we're quoting Shakespeare? When we say "a little learning is a dangerous thing," or "to err is human," or observe sagely that "fools rush in where angels fear to tread," we're borrowing from Alexander Pope, just as when you "slept not a wink," or "smell a rat," or "turn over a new leaf," or declare "mum's the word," you're quoting Cervantes?
When young Nathan Hale was hanged by the British as a spy in New York in , he famously said as his last words, "My only regret is that I have but one life to lose for my country.
Washington, who loved the theater, is believed to have seen it half a dozen times. Imagine how it must have been for Nathan Hale, about to be hanged. Who, in such a moment, could possibly think of something eloquent to say. I think he was throwing that line right back at those British officers. After all, Cato was their play.
I imagine him delivering the line, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. One needs to read the great political philosophers -- Hume, Locke, Ferguson, Montesquieu -- whose writings had such profound influence on the founders.
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