I met David McCullough once.
It was years ago at the Allen County Public Library, and I brought a copy of "Truman" with me, and he signed it. It was right after the Ken Burns doc on the Civil War came out. McCullough narrated it, and so his voice was American comfort food, one of those deals where he opened his mouth and everyone said "Oh, yeah, that guy," and were immediately on familiar ground.
(If you don't know who David McCullough is, you may exit the Blob now. We're going full history nerd on you, and we'll revisit Sportsball World tomorrow sometime. 'Bye.)
We're going full history nerd because David McCullough was America's most popular historian, and he died yesterday at 89. He wasn't a trained historian -- his Yale degree was in English lit -- but few trained historians ever brought American history to the masses the way he did. His books, two of which ("Truman" and "John Adams") won Pulitzers, occupy our bookshelves; besides the aforementioned, you'll find "The Path Between The Seas" and "The Greater Journey" and "The Great Bridge" and "Mornings On Horseback" and "The Johnstown Flood" and "1776."
We like our McCullough, in other words.
His genius was in making American history accessible to Americans whose grasp of it is notoriously tenuous, and very often the product of disinterest. It is the timeless lament of history nerds that America's understanding of its own history is at best inaccurate and at worst almost childlike. There is so much myth to hack through, after all. Who has the time?
This is especially true today, with those of a certain ideological bent feeling so threatened by, well, history. It tends to bore them anyway, but if they must consider it, and their children must learn it, please, only the good parts. Anything else is a Marxist plot to make our children Hate America.
And so the current movement to whitewash American history, which has been whitewashed enough as it is. That process has been carried to absurd lengths in some quarters; in Texas, for instance, there's a movement to banish even the word "slavery" in second-grade history textbooks. The wholly sanitized (and wholly misleading) recommended replacement? "Involuntary relocation."
God forbid anyone try slip into little Johnny's History O' Texas that the heroes who died at the Alamo were fighting in part to preserve slavery -- which was, at the time, the underpinning of the cotton trade that drove the Texas economy. And which Mexico wanted to abolish in all its territories.
Bring that one up in a Texas school board meeting sometime. And then duck.
Point is, we like our history in simple parables, and history doesn't work like that. It's messy, it's non-linear, and even those we rightly consider its paragons often saw their best intentions stumble over unforeseen consequences. No chronicle of humans -- and that is what history is -- would be worth the ink and paper it's written on that suggested otherwise.
The most extreme of the aforementioned ideologues, however, want that not just suggested but shouted from the rooftops. Which must surely distress actual students of American history who understand George Washington never chopped down that cherry tree, but he did grow up to be the Father of Our Country -- and also a man who bought and sold human beings to maintain his homestead.
The ideologues would consider that inconvenient fact bad form. Kind of like the woman who visited the site of a plantation and then complained on Twitter that the guide talked too much about slavery. What did she expect, a discourse on Scarlett's hoop skirts?
David McCullough's passing makes me wonder what he must have thought about such willful ignorance. And if he heard some of the nonsense being spewed about American history teachers by foaming-at-the-mouth extremists, and died of apoplexy as much as anything else.
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