The American Spirit

by David McCullough

  Above all we need to know more about Congress because we are Americans. We believe in governing ourselves.

  “The boy should read history,” the first John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, about the education of their son John Quincy. We must all read history, and write and publish and teach history better.

  How can we know who we are and where we are headed if we don’t know where we have come from? How can we call ourselves patriots if we know little of our country’s past?

  Who were those people in the old bound volumes of the Congressional Record? What moved them? What did they know that we do not?

  Our past is not only prologue, it can be bracing. In Emerson’s words, “The world is young, the former great men [and women] call to us affectionately.”

  I have decided that the digital watch is the perfect symbol of an imbalance in outlook in our day. It tells us only what time it is now, at this instant, as if that were all anyone would wish or need to know. Which brings me back to Simon Willard.

  In the years when the House of Representatives met in Statuary Hall, all deliberations were watched over by the muse of history, Clio. She is there still over the north doorway. She is riding the winged Car of History, as it is called, keeping note in her book. The idea was that those who sat below would take inspiration from her. They would be reminded that they, too, were part of history, that their words and actions would face the judgment of history, and that they could count themselves part of an honorable heritage.

  The Car of History by Carlo Franzoni; clock by Simon Willard

  Clio and the Car of History are by the Italian sculptor Carlo Franzoni of Carrara. The clock in the foreground is by Simon Willard. It was, as I said, installed about 1837. Its inner workings, cut freehand by Simon Willard, ticked off the minutes and hours through debate over the Gag Rule, the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, tariffs, postal service, the establishment of the Naval Academy, statehood for Arkansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, matters related to immigration, the Gold Rush, statehood for California, the fateful Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the final hours of John Quincy Adams.

  It is also a clock with two hands and an old-fashioned face, the kind that shows what time it is now . . . what time it used to be . . . and what time it will become.

  Civilization and the City

  UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  1994

  What a day this is for all of us—for you who are graduating and for so many who’ve been with you along the way, all the generous providers and encouragers, the inspirers, the prodders, the believers in you—parents, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, grandparents, roommates, teammates, faculty, coaches, loan officers. And librarians. And all the worthy street-level dispensers of books and sneakers and haircuts and midnight coffee and pizza to go.

  For me, to be part of the day, to receive this highest of tributes from your university is a surpassing honor. For there is no recognition so sweet as in your hometown. I couldn’t be more pleased or grateful.

  So here we are. The time is midafternoon in the month of May, in the year 1994, so near the close of this tumultuous twentieth century, and over the horizon, a new and unknown century the name of which will take some getting used to.

  The place is Pittsburgh, where the Monongahela meets the Allegheny to form the mighty Ohio, longitude 80 degrees west, latitude 40 degrees 26 north, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of our nation’s best, most interesting, most promising cities. And it is this particular juncture of time and place and the promise of the American city that I wish to talk about.

  Few places there are where past and future so vividly join forces as they do here. In ways distinctly its own, Pittsburgh has been both grounded in yesterdays and ahead of its time. Once it was the gateway to the west when the west was the future. The first general hospital, the first radio station, the first educational television station when founded here were all well in advance of their time and events of national importance. And so, of course, was the rise of the steel empire, with the advent of the Bessemer process, the enterprise that more than any other put Pittsburgh on the map and started the nation to industrial supremacy. The city’s great cleanup of air and water beginning in the late 1940s became an example for the world, long before environmental concerns became fashionable. And while the old steel city, the Pittsburgh of my childhood, has vanished—the smoke and grime, the throbbing red skies at night, gone as much as the world war that kept the mills roaring then—the wonderful old neighborhoods survive as they don’t in other places, treasured old churches, temples, bridges, the great courthouse. Historic preservation has succeeded here in ways to make the rest of the country take notice and take heart.

  Your own Cathedral of Learning towers over Oakland still as it has since it was built. It rose out of the 1930s, out of the depths of the Great Depression, let us not forget, a symbol of the affirmation to a city especially hard hit by hard times.

  The university that once, in the 1890s heyday of the steel barons, enrolled all of ninety-five upperclassmen, today, in the 1990s, graduates five thousand men and women. And, as my parents’ generation would have found unimaginable, the university has replaced the steel empire as the largest employer in the city, while its economic impact on the community overall is greater than even the statistics suggest.

  Remove Pitt from Pittsburgh and the loss would be devastating. But city and university are each enlarged, each inspired by the other, and the importance of the responsibility each owes the other is paramount. They are joined in a vital past, as Robert Alberts has shown in his fine history of the University of Pittsburgh. And, make no mistake, their futures, too, are joined. Each must make good on what it owes the other, what it can do to serve the best interests of the other.

  Cities are civilization. And all great cities are great composites—more than marketplace only, or production or financial center only, or where we wine and dine or feel the lift of soul from great music, drama, and art, but all of these. In our cities are our vital centers of learning, law, scientific inquiry, publishing, the seats of government, our meeting places, medical centers, centers of ideas. Our whole way of life in America depends on our cities, on the heartbeat of places like Pittsburgh.

  The Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh

  We are an outdoor-loving people. We sing of spacious skies and purple mountains and go off pioneering by four-wheel drive. We turn nostalgic about small towns and build ever more suburbs. But the strength of America, the great concentration of wealth, culture, opportunity, the great mother lode of human resources is in the American city, and the American city is in deep trouble. As a consequence, our way of life is threatened and more seriously than we seem willing to face.

  We cannot escape this. We cannot possibly ignore it or cling to some foolish hope that somehow it will just go away.

  What can be done, we ask—about violent crime? About drug addiction? About the epidemic spread of AIDS and its consequent suffering and loss? What can we do about the thousands of homeless in our streets? The continuing degradation of the poorest among us? And of their children most of all? What can we try? What will work?

  I have a suggestion and it is this: We must enlist the power and resources of our universities in a new way.

  As through the years of the Cold War our leading universities, with millions of dollars in federal support, were actively involved in research and development for military purposes, let the leading universities centered in our cities become actively involved in helping to understand and solve the terrible problems of our cities.

  If there is to be a “peace dividend,” let a substantial part of it be put to work for this purpose, in the form of major grants to our big-city universities to examine the troubles that persist where they are, to be resourceful, innovative, and so share more of the responsibility for the city’s future. But “peace dividend” or no, let strong support come from the corporations, businesses, financial inst
itutions, and foundations that have such a high stake in the city.

  A Marshall Plan for the cities has been talked of repeatedly and so far has come to nothing. This could be the positive, creative first step.

  And why not let it begin here in Pittsburgh, this city of firsts, with the University of Pittsburgh leading the way?

  The core of such a program, I suggest, should be history, for the specific and realistic reason that all problems have histories and the wisest route to a successful solution to nearly any problem begins with understanding its history. Indeed, almost any attempt to solve a problem without an understanding of its history is to court failure—as example our tragic plunge into Vietnam with hardly a notion of its past.

  What is the history of homelessness in Allegheny County? How much do we know about that? What has been the community-wide experience down the years with alcohol and drug addiction? What can be learned about community response to epidemic disease from the terrifying experience of 1919 when influenza swept western Pennsylvania? Or from the annals of violent crime here one generation to another?

  Let the university marshal its resources, its immense, multiple capacities for investigation and analysis, its concentrated brain power to help. Let the surrounding city be the university’s lab, its terrain for fieldwork, its case study to a degree far beyond anything done to date. Let there be a broad range of projects at both the undergraduate and graduate school levels—in history especially, but in other disciplines as well: economics, public health, government, urban studies, social work, environmental engineering.

  The history of Pittsburgh is already part of the curriculum at Pitt, in a course taught by Professor Ted Muller. But it’s only one course and limited to just forty students, about a third the number who would like to take it. I propose not only enlargement of Professor Muller’s program, but the creation of much more.

  At Yale in the 1940s, a new American studies program was launched, a new American studies department established, and the idea quickly spread to other universities. A new department of Pittsburgh studies could be Pitt’s contribution now. And, yes, there would be a major in Pittsburgh studies.

  The new department could draw on so much that the university already has in talented faculty. It could bring into focus and be the means of coordination for a variety of programs already concerned in part with the subject of Pittsburgh.

  “Too limited intellectually,” some might protest. No more limited than the study of anything. It all depends on who is teaching, who is inspiring students to think anew. The horizons of this protean city are after all worldwide.

  Others might question the “market value” of such an education. Where might one go with a degree in Pittsburgh studies? It’s hard to imagine anyone graduating from the University of Pittsburgh well grounded in how this city works and not finding a welcome in business, government, education, here especially but elsewhere, too.

  And think of the value to the community of twenty to forty or more graduating every year with Pittsburgh their specialty. Think of the accumulative value of research, of the gathering expertise over a period of ten or twenty years. Imagine the outpouring of ideas generated when students discover the excitement of breaking new ground in a field and have the added motivation of knowing that what they are doing is important.

  Think what needless, costly mistakes might be avoided here and elsewhere in urban America if the idea of such university involvement were to catch on. In St. Louis, a new high-speed transit system to the airport was routed through a historic black cemetery because its importance to the black community wasn’t understood or even considered, with the result that the project has come to a halt and no one knows how much money wasted.

  You have to know what people have been through to understand what people want and what they don’t want. That’s the nub of it. And what people have been through is what we call history.

  In 1996, a new Pittsburgh regional history center will open downtown, a combination museum, library, research, and archival facility. It will be a major new attraction for the city, the finest center of the kind in the country, and it could be the perfect adjunct to a new Pittsburgh studies program at Pitt. The opportunities couldn’t be better, the time is right, the plans for such a joining of forces could begin at once.

  The University of Pittsburgh’s extraordinary trail blazing in medicine is known to the world. The newly announced University of Pittsburgh Press project to produce the twentieth-century literary works of the Caribbean and Latin America in excellent English translations is one of the most exciting and ambitious international publishing ventures ever. Bold innovation is a University of Pittsburgh tradition. As the Cathedral of Learning, a university concept like no other, became a symbol of affirmation in the dark times of the 1930s, let it be so again now, when so much that we hold dear about American life is at stake. Let’s do something about it.

  In that spirit, I say to you of the Class of 1994, you who are going on to graduate school, in order to pursue careers in the professions, you who will enter directly in the workforce, you couldn’t be more welcome. You couldn’t be more needed.

  Be generous. Give of yourself. Have the courage of your convictions. And whatever path you take, whatever your work, enjoy it—because, for one thing, if you’re happy, you’ll think better.

  The Spirit of Jefferson

  INDEPENDENCE DAY NATURALIZATION CEREMONY AT MONTICELLO

  Charlottesville, Virginia

  1994

  This is a thrilling occasion—for all of us, whoever we are, however little or far we’ve journeyed to be here. And it is for me a great privilege to speak to you who are today becoming citizens of the United States.

  You are sixty-two in number and come from twenty-four countries. You begin now your new lives as Americans on this most American day of celebration, July 4th, the nation’s birthday, and here at this beloved place called Monticello, home of the incomparable American who wrote what is rightly called the nation’s birth certificate.

  Monticello

  Here Thomas Jefferson lived, here he died, in this house in his bedroom on the first floor and also on this, of all days, July 4th, in the year 1826.

  In Massachusetts, on that same day, John Adams, too, died. And for much of the country, the timing was far more than a strange coincidence. For Americans everywhere, it was taken as a “visible and palpable manifestation” of “Divine favor,” and who could blame them for thinking so.

  In Philadelphia, fifty years earlier, in 1776—now two hundred and eighteen years ago—young Thomas Jefferson was one of a committee of five, including Adams, chosen to prepare a Declaration of Independence. But to Jefferson alone fell the task of putting it into words.

  He had thought Adams should do it. But Adams insisted, telling him, “You can write ten times better than I can.”

  Jefferson was thirty-three, tall, six foot two, slim, reserved, brilliant, and homesick for his wife and child and this green mountaintop. But there he sat in a Windsor chair in the front parlor of his two-room rented quarters on the second floor of a brick house at the corner of Seventh and Market Streets. There he sat through sweltering Philadelphia summer days, working at a portable writing box of his own design. He had no library at hand, no supply of books to draw upon, this most bookish of men, and he needed none because, as he later explained, he wanted only to say what everyone already knew.

  The object was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments,” he said “. . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent. . . . Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”

  “An expression of the American mind,” he said. . . . He read seven languages. He was a lawyer, surveyor, ardent meteorologist, botanist, agronomist, archaeologist, paleon
tologist, Indian ethnologist, classicist, brilliant architect. Music, he said, was the passion of his soul, mathematics, the passion of his mind.

  He wanted, in what he wrote, to be plain and in spirit to rise to the occasion, he said. And what an occasion!

  The Revolutionary War had begun at Lexington and Concord more than a year before. So it was not a declaration of war that was wanted. To Jefferson the Revolution was more than a struggle for independence, it was a struggle for democracy, and thus what he wrote was truly revolutionary.

  Why do some men reach for the stars and so many others never even look up? Thomas Jefferson reached for the stars:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . .

  Never, never anywhere, had there been a government instituted on the consent of the governed.

  Was Jefferson including women with the words “men” and “mankind”? Possibly he was. Nobody knows. Was he thinking of black Americans when he declared all men are created equal? Ideally, yes, I think. Practically, no. He was an eighteenth-century Virginia planter, it must be remembered, as the slave quarters along Mulberry Row, just over there, attest. He was an exceedingly gifted and very great man, but like the others of that exceptional handful of politicians we call the Founding Fathers, he could also be inconsistent, contradictory, human.

  And more important than how he interpreted his ringing words is their sustaining power to inspire, beyond the influences of time and place.