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Dec 27, 2003

Homilist for Hire



David McCullough's run of fawning press coverage appears to be over. The Voice of America's latest prestigious honor is the NEH Jefferson Lecture, an ironic or perhaps just inappropriate selection considering the way McCullough used Jefferson in John Adams (as a foil to make the Duke of Braintree look better). While others have used the lecture to make grand, original statements appropriate to the occasion, McCullough seems to have treated the occasion as another homily-for-hire paycheck. The Washington Post's Philip Kennicott more or less trashes his performance on the front page of the today's Style section, emphasizing the recycled nature of the material:

Much of what he said has been said before, and by McCullough himself. He quoted a charming line from John Adams to his son John Quincy Adams: "You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket." It got a chuckle, though readers of the Adams biography will remember it from Page 260.

Good stuff, and of course historians repeat themselves, but none of it was enlivened by substantial rethinking of the meaning, context or importance. What ideas there were were mostly paraphrased from McCullough's earlier work. Early in the speech he noted that history is not really about the past because, "if you think about it, no one ever lived in the past." Our past was their present. True enough, and you can read it all from an earlier interview, with Bruce Cole, posted on the endowment's Web site.

Of course, McCullough's biggest applause line was a swipe at us nasty academic historians for being such friggin' brainiacs and writing books that journalists and popular authors don't get: "He harped on a familiar theme, the necessity of history being entertaining and pleasurable, and he delivered one line that got particular applause: 'No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.'" ( It's so true, if I had a dollar for every time I said to myself, "Uh oh, self, someone might want to read that paragraph -- better cut it." That's just the way we academical types are.) 

 Kennicott's goes on to make some surprisingly on-point remarks criticizing the McCullough style and explaining the origins of its current high regard:

There is a considerable effort, in this country, to make history merely a stable of stories domesticated for the entertainment of the comfortable classes. McCullough's speech last night met that unfortunate standard. But McCullough is a serious historian, and a best-selling historian who has managed to negotiate the pressures of publishing without the plagiarism scandals that have disgraced his peers in the pop-history biz. And he is also deeply and sincerely concerned that history isn't getting out there enough, that it isn't reaching young people.

If he wants to know why it isn't, he should read his own speech. Here, in distilled form, is the kind of history that turns off people who don't belong to the establishment, history that presumes we're all charmed by the same stories of flawed but decent White Men founding an imperfect but noble union. It is lively, yes, and richly anecdotal, but it is also clubby, complacent and platitudinous.

As Kennicott implies, this kind of thing is particularly culpable in our present historical circumstances, when it would be nice to hear respected Founding Father profiteers like McCullough occasionally checking their "What Would John Adams Do? bracelets" (as Kennicott puts it) and comment on current events. Adams might have taken some of the same shots at civil liberties, but the relentless politicization, habitual deception, financial irresponsibility and foreign aggressiveness of the present administration were exactly what Adams did not stand for. Adams withstood conservative pressures for a cathartic foreign war (against France no less), and it would not kill McCullough to actually work some content into his inspirational talks. Pretty sad to think that the Dixie Chicks are more capable of honest public commentary than the Jefferson Lecturer.



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