An Interview with David McCullough

In this episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough discusses his book "The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris," which follows the experiences of American expats in the French capital. Tune in to learn more about McCullough's work.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blame a truck recording and I'm fair Dowdy
and listeners are always asking us to mention or recommend
historical biographies and other books that they might enjoy, and

(00:23):
in this episode, we're gonna do a little better than that.
We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to talk
to Pulitzer Prize wing author David McCullough recently about his
new book, and we've included a portion of that discussion
here in this podcast. Yeah, and we were obviously excited
to get the chance to interview Mr McCullough, but we
were especially excited when we found out his latest book,

(00:43):
called The Greater Journey, is really a collection almost of
miniature biographies that covers so many people through this large
span of time eighteen thirty to nineteen hundred Americans going
to Paris to perfect their trade. Really ambitious people not
just going to travel, not just going to to see
the world, but to become something new and make something

(01:05):
of themselves. Yeah, and they held a variety of professions.
They were doctors, artists, writers, politicians, and the book really
covers their journey, their experiences in Paris, and also what
they brought back to America with them, probably most importantly
what they brought back how they shaped their own country.
And even though it has those large overarching themes that
I mentioned, it's also a personal book too. I really

(01:28):
thought it as a visual book, partly because it is
about so many writers and artists and architects. I kept
on looking at pictures because we were working from from
proofs that didn't have paintings and illustrations included yet. But
it just very much came to life in front of
my eyes. Yeah, and to me it seemed a lot
like a travel narrative, and not just because of those

(01:49):
visual aspects that you mentioned, but also just because of
the feeling you get. You can feel what it's like
to be one of these protagonists arriving in Paris for
the first time and experience seen all of these things
that anyone who's ever traveled, I think can really relate
to that. Mr McCullough himself has described it as a
literary historic guide book, and that's sort of a different
way of thinking about history books. And it is unique

(02:13):
in McCullough's own work. I'd say he's written several biographies,
he's written books that focus precisely on a single building
event or a single year, even with seventeen seventy six.
Yet this book has such a broad focus. And so
the first thing we wanted to talk to him about
was how he picked a topic like this in the
first place. And here's what he had to say. Well,

(02:36):
I've been very interested for a long time in the
part of the American story that has taken place in Paris,
and particularly the period between the post Jefferson Adams Franklin
time of the eighteenth century and the Gertrude Stein Scott

(02:59):
fitzger Old Hemingway time in the nineteen twenties and thirties.
For one thing, it's been largely overlooked, and for another,
the people who are part of that story are immensely
important to American life, American history, and the way we are,

(03:22):
and their time in Paris was instrumental in what they
became and therefore instrumental in the way we are. And
I also feel very strongly that history isn't just about
politics and the military or social issues. The great deal
of it, of course, is but it's also about art

(03:45):
and music and medicine and philosophy and learning and poetry,
and its history is human, and and the arts and
the creative nature of a society are an immensely big
part of the human experience. We found that point really interesting,

(04:08):
especially how he says that history is human, because this
is such a human book. There are, as we mentioned,
so many protagonists in it, and so we were curious
to know how Mr McCullough picked who to include. Well.
I could have could have included maybe a hundred and
twenty people, but of course that wouldn't have been a book.
That would have been a catalog, and I had no

(04:30):
interest in writing a catalog. I also had no interest
in writing about tourists or people who went to Paris
for business purposes or because they were assigned to go
there by our government, with one or two exceptions, because
what happened to those one or two exceptions was truly exceptional,

(04:52):
particularly Ellie Hugh Washburn, our minister to Paris at the
time of the Franco Prussian War. But by and large,
most of my characters are men and women of talent,
in some cases exceptional talent, who were ambitious to excel
in their chosen careers, not ambitious necessarily to become famous

(05:17):
or rich or powerful, but to excel to be the
best they could possibly be. And that's a wonderful pursuit.
And in all cases they had very interesting lives, and
in some cases are surprising if they spring out of
seemingly seemingly nowhere, like Augustus St. Gauden's who was the sculptor,

(05:39):
who was who was an immigrant shoemaker's son, or George
Healy who was an Irish kid from Boston with no
money and no contacts in France, no knowledge of French,
who went off because he was determined he was going
to become a painter. And we had no art schools

(06:01):
at that time, we had no schools of architecture, We
had no museums where one could go and look at paintings.
If you wanted to to be tops in your field,
in the field of art, architecture, sculpture, you almost had
to go to Paris. And those are the people that
interested me. And I should say too, very importantly that

(06:24):
how much of what happened to them did they themselves
record in letters and diaries? That was all important And
in the case of all the major characters in this book,
everything is drawn from their letters or diaries, or the
letters or diaries of their friends, or their wife or
others who were close to them, and so they in

(06:48):
a sense have left this rich record that, as I
said earlier, has been surprisingly overlooked. I have, I have
worked with all kinds of rich materials in my historical
research and research into the lives of some of the
biographies that I've written, but I don't know as I've

(07:09):
ever had such a wealth of richness of material too
to work with as I have for this book, and
I've enjoyed it immensely. That point that he makes about
primary sources like letters and journals using sources that contain
protagonists own words as research that comes across I think

(07:30):
very clearly in the book, and it made us even
more curious about his research process. We wanted to know
what that process entailed, especially since this story happens on
two different continents. We wanted to know what did the
research in Paris involved, and and the state side research
as well well. I just spend a good deal of
time in Paris, but really it was more to soak

(07:51):
up the place to to uh absorbed as well as
I could everything about Paris and all seasons to know,
to know that setting as thoroughly as one can. The
real research, however, is all here in the United States.

(08:12):
It's at university libraries. It's in the Library of Congress,
or Massachusetts Historical Society, the Virginia Historical Society. I think
that some thirty six institutions altogether have been involved in
in the total body of my research work. And in

(08:37):
some cases they were documents or portions of documents that
nobody literally had ever looked at. And and often the
most revealing material is to be found in what might
be called the secondary characters, not the major characters, but
those who, much as in a play, deliver lines, deliver

(09:01):
explanations or descriptions that bring to bring the the principle actors,
the protagonists and what happened to light into vivid into
vivid focus the way nobody else has. So those those
people have been of huge importance to me also, and

(09:22):
I researched newspapers, photographs, paintings. Paintings are very important source
for one thing, because, unlike black and white photograph, they
give you the color of someone's eyes or the or
the tone of their complexion, of the color of their hair,
and so forth. And since a number of these people

(09:42):
were themselves painters, that's of considerable consequence as well. So
we're always interested in the secondary characters in history. A
lot of times they do write the most interesting stuff down,
and Mr McCullough himself had noted that in the source
notes for a Greater Journey. He wrote of Charles Beecher,
who he was the one, even though he's the less

(10:03):
famous brother of Harriet Beecher Stow, he was the one
who wrote the detailed account of her time in Paris,
something that makes her story really come to life. So
I was curious if there were any of those secondary characters.
Obviously it didn't quite happen for Charles Beecher, but any
other secondary characters in the research process that really became
primary characters in the book once who to Mr McCullough,

(10:26):
just deserved their own mini biography. Yes, indeed, that's a
very perceptive question. Gussie st Gunn's the wife of of
Gus st He was Augusta Augustus and she was Augusta
Gussie sat guns went to Paris with her new husband.

(10:47):
She was a bride in Paris, which was unusual for
American women, and she did not speak for him. She
was a painter, so she was eager to be there
for that reason as well. And she wrote over two
letters back to her parents describing their life, their days,
their problems, their shortages of this or that, and and

(11:12):
and what she was struggling with and what she was
worried about. She was quite deaf, and her deafness was
a very serious handicap, and so she was dealing with
that as well. But those letters are all at the
at the library at Dartmouth College, and I thought they

(11:32):
would be of use and that they would be interesting.
But as I read into them, and as as she
opened up herself to her parents and consequently therefore to us,
she became more than a minor character. She became a
very important character. And I found her to be an

(11:55):
admirable character as well as extremely interesting. As he man
being hearing him talk so admiringly about Gussie, and they
just wonder if he had a favorite protagonist in this story.
And he kind of turned it around on us and
turned it into the old historical question, that classic question
of who would you have lunch with? If you could,

(12:15):
And this is what he had to say. I was
fascinated by Emma Willard uh And and Elizabeth Blackwell, the
first woman to become a doctor. If I could spend
time with one of my characters or any length of time,
I suppose it might be Oliver Wendell Holmes or Charles Sumner.

(12:37):
Charles Sumners immensely important figure in American history. He was
the great voice for abolition in the United States, and
it's the most powerful voice for abolition really effectively in
the country. And the idea that he went to Paris
because you just simply he didn't know enough, and he
went over there to attend lectures at the Sorbonne uh

(12:59):
And it was then that he discovered that black people
need not be treated any differently than anyone else and
wondered why, as he recorded in his journal, that we
did so in this country at that time. And they
asked himself again in the journal, is it because of
the way we've been taught? Or is it in the

(13:22):
natural order of things to have no bias, to have
no prejudice, Because he saw the black students at the
surban Um had exactly the same kinds of ambitions for
themselves as he did. They dressed no differently, they they
were treated no differently, And it was an epiphany for him,

(13:44):
and he came home determined to do something about it,
and he certainly did. I'm very interested in what they
brought home physically, literally or figuratively, and what he brought home,
needless to say, was of immense value, just as the
the training that the young American architects received it the

(14:05):
cult of Bose arts in architecture had a huge impact
on the look of American cities and and people like
John Singer Sergeant and Mary Cassatt paintings. Their paintings now
are our treasures and to be seen in most of
the major museums of our country. They stand out as

(14:29):
as geniuses, American geniuses, and they only achieved that not
just because of their talent, but how hard they worked.
I think that's one of the one of the many
things I learned from the four years I spent on
the book, is how hard these brilliant people worked, and

(14:53):
without exception. And John Singer Sergeant, who probably was the
most naturally gifted of them all, he was a prodigy
and painting, worked harder than anybody, never really never stopped
working his whole life. So I made a note of
the part where he mentioned Oliver Wendell Holmes, because one

(15:14):
of the most striking scenes in the book was where
Holmes returns to Paris as a much older man. He
of course studied there as a youth, and he's just
sort of struck by the fact that so much is
the same, yet so much has changed, and he he
considers that his own fountain of youth. So we were
curious if Mr McCullough himself has been visiting Paris throughout

(15:36):
his lifetime. It just seemed very personal in a way.
Here's what he had to say. I have gone there
for fifty years, and I went back just last fall,
and I can tell you I am just about exactly

(15:57):
the same age that Holmes was, and he went back.
And when I wrote that scene, uh, there was a
lot of empathy at work because I know exactly how
he felt. And I particularly loved when when he went
to the old cafe that he and his friends at

(16:18):
all attended, which is still there, the procope Um, that
he said, you don't have to go to Florida's to
find the mountain of youth. It's right here. And I
have felt that strongly in Paris. I think lots of
people do. Um, there is something quite magic about it.

(16:40):
And uh and they all they all said it one
way or another without exception. And I think that's a
way that I tried very hard in my work to
get closer to these banished people, the imminent and if
you will, and and one of the ways you do

(17:05):
it is you go where they were. The setting of experience,
of any human experiences of the utmost importance to understand
not just what happened, but the mood or the the spell,

(17:25):
or the or the challenge that a given setting presents.
And I've always felt in my work that I had
to go soak it up myself. When I was writing
about Panama, I had to spend time in Panama, feel
that heat, feel the humidity, wonder try to imagine as

(17:46):
best I could what it would have been like to
work in a climate like that. And when Sumner and
others talk about the the bone cutting chill of a
Paris winner, that damn chill air the huts right through
to you, I knew I had to go there and
experience it. I didn't realize that we experience it every

(18:10):
single day, day after day for several weeks. I don't
think the sun came up once and for more than
about ten minutes. But when I read Sumner's account of
how he was trying to get warm by the fireplace
wearing his overcoat inside, I was very, very much more

(18:32):
sympathetic than I would have been if I'd been just
sitting at home trying to imagine it. And conversely, on
a beautiful spring morning, to walk through the garden of
the Tuileries and the Luxembourg Gardens, it's you could be
transported in time in a matter of seconds. Hearing Mr

(18:54):
McCulloch described Paris as a good indication of what you're
in store for if you read the book, and Paris
is so much at the center of the story. You
learn so much about the city through the experiences of
the Americans spending time there, and some of the histories
of the French people in the story as well. But
you also learn a lot about America too, So it
made me wonder whether Mr McCullough really thought of this

(19:15):
as more of a history of America or a history
of Paris. Here's what he had to say. I see
it as a book about the lifelong adventure of learning,
and part of learning is to get out of our realm,

(19:36):
out of our milieu, out of our of ourselves for
a while. I also see it as a lesson, a
reminder that so much of what we feel and proudly
but not always correctly is strictly an American creation or

(19:58):
invention or way of seeing things are thinking, isn't at all?
People people past that magnificent statue of General Sherman at
the corner ninth and Fifth Avenue, New York, they think, ah,
there's a great American figure and done by a great

(20:18):
American sculpture. Well, if if it were possible to pick
it up and turn it over and look at the bottom,
you see made in Paris, made in Paris, by an
American in Paris. Vanuel Hall in Boston one of the
most popular historic sites in all of our country, and
rightly so. Up on the stage, filling the most the

(20:42):
whole backdrop of the stage is a huge painting of
Daniel Webster's reply to Hayne, Senator Haynes, done by the
Boston painter George Healy in Paris. Enormous painting was painted
by the while he was living in Paris. Paris was

(21:03):
the cultural capital of the world, the way we might say,
I think fairly that New York is the cultural capital
of the world today in our time, has been since
the end of World War two. And and also you
have to remember how behind we were in medicine and

(21:24):
in training, in art and music and and and in ideas. Uh.
The Surbane was probably the greatest university of the world
at that time, and of course it had France had
the policy, which seems almost unimaginable, that if you're a
foreign student, you could go there for nothing, as you

(21:46):
could study at their medical their great medical college university.
The occulta medicine for nothing if you were if you're
a foreigner, and so many of these young Americans were
taking advantage of that. So it was great getting to
conduct that interview with the David McCullough and UH, a
pleasure to read the book too. I really enjoyed it.

(22:06):
And you guys are in luck too, because our interview
actually went on quite a bit longer than that, and
we asked him some questions about his personal career and
some insider tips on his research style. So there's gonna
be a whole another podcast coming where he'll talk about
all that, and we'll also discuss some more of our
favorite parts about this book in the meantime. If you

(22:27):
do have a chance to read the book, it's called
The Greater Journey Americans in Paris and it just came
out it did, Or if you have any opinions or
things you want to say about some of the protagonists
that are included we've named if you here, we've talked
about a lot of them on this podcast before. We'd
like to start a little book club discussion book club
esque discussion about it, and you can contribute to that

(22:47):
by visiting our Facebook page or hitting us up on Twitter.
That wouldn't be much of a discussion, but you know,
you could leave us a comments discussion or we should
brief comment, or you can write us at history podcast
at how Stuff Work Stoff Calm, or you can join
us on the blogs and talking about it. I think
probably the best place to do it. Yeah. I think
we'll be contributing some thoughts there about it, and you

(23:08):
can look up those blogs by visiting our homepage at
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(23:28):
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