David McCullough’s magnificent speech on “American History and America’s Future,” delivered February 15, 2005 at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar (quoted below by permission from IMPRIMIS, Hillsdale’s national speech digest) is worth reading in its entirety (hat tip: Scott Johnson). I’m extracting a couple of themes here because they hold some lessons for our Passover Seders on Saturday and Sunday.
McCullough’s principal theme was that history is the story of people we’ve never met but who affect our daily lives:
The laws we live by, the freedoms we enjoy, the institutions that we take for granted — as we should never take for granted — are all the work of other people who went before us. And to be indifferent to that isn’t just to be ignorant, it’s to be rude. . . [I]t’s something that others struggled for, strived for, often suffered for, often were defeated for and died for, for us, for the next generation. . . .
George Washington, when he took command of the continental army at
Cambridge in 1775, was 43 years old, and he was the oldest of [the Founders]. Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was 40. Benjamin Rush — one of the most interesting of them all and one of the founders of the antislavery movement in Philadelphia — was 30 years old when he signed the Declaration. They were young people. . . They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn’t a bank in the entire country. There wasn’t but one bridge between
New York and Boston. It was . . . a little fringe of settlement along the east coast. What a story. What a noble beginning. And think of this: almost no nations in the world know when they were born. We know exactly when we began and why we began and who did it.
Not that all the iconic images of American history are literally true. Some of them (George Washington’s cherry tree) are apocryphal. Others are wrong in significant detail, but the details are beside the point:
In the rotunda of the Capitol in
Washington hangs John Trumbull’s great painting, “The Declaration of Independence, Fourth of July, 1776.” It’s been seen by more people than any other American painting. It’s our best known scene from our past. And almost nothing about it is accurate. The Declaration of Independence wasn’t signed on July 4th. They didn’t start to sign the Declaration until August 2nd, and only a part of the Congress was then present.
They kept coming back in the months that followed from their distant states to take their turn signing the document.
The chairs are wrong, the doors are in the wrong place, there were no heavy draperies at the windows, and the display of military flags and banners on the back wall is strictly a figment of
Trumbull’s imagination. But what is accurate about it are the faces. Every single one of the 47 men in that painting is an identifiable, and thus accountable, individual. . . . And that’s what
Trumbull wanted. He wanted us to know them and, by God, not to forget them.
McCullough’s concern in his address was that we are raising a generation of young Americans who are historically illiterate, with potentially catastrophic consequences:
[W]e have to know who we were if we’re to know who we are and where we’re headed. This is essential. We have to value what our forebears — and not just in the 18th century, but our own parents and grandparents — did for us, or we’re not going to take it very seriously, and it can slip away.
If you don’t care about it — if you’ve inherited some great work of art that is worth a fortune and you don’t know that it’s worth a fortune, you don’t even know that it’s a great work of art and you’re not interested in it — you’re going to lose it. . .
And there’s no secret to teaching history or to making history interesting. Barbara Tuchman said it in two words, “Tell stories.” That’s what history is: a story.
Perhaps the analogy to Passover and Jewish history is obvious. It is a story — our story — of a people that revolted against impossible odds, spent decades in a wilderness, built a country, survived the destruction of sacred buildings and territory, preserved a Book, never gave up, never gave in, recovered from a Holocaust, never forgot (lest their right hand wither) — and in a few days will celebrate a holiday thousands of years old in historically unparalleled freedom and comfort.
And — to borrow McCullough’s words — we know exactly when we began and why we began and Who did it.
We don’t know all the details, and some of the details we know may be wrong — but what a story, what an inheritance. It is worth a fortune.
McCullough ended his speech with a story about John Quincy Adams — the “most superbly educated and maybe the most brilliant human being who ever occupied the executive office . . . a wonderful human being and a great writer.” This story too is relevant to Passover:
[A]fter the war was over, Abigail [Adams] went to
Europe to be with her husband, particularly when he became our first minister to the court of Saint James. And John Quincy came home from Europe to prepare for Harvard. And he had not been home in Massachusetts very long when Abigail received a letter from her sister saying that John Quincy was a very impressive young man — and of course everybody was quite astonished that he could speak French — but that, alas, he seemed a little overly enamored with himself and with his own opinions and that this was not going over very well in town.
So Abigail sat down in a house that still stands on Grosvenor Square in
London — it was our first embassy if you will, a little 18th century house — and wrote a letter to John Quincy. And here’s what she said: If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world and obtaining knowledge of mankind than any of your contemporaries. That you have never wanted a book, but it has been supplied to you. That your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. How unpardonable would it have been in you to have turned out a blockhead.
McCullough concluded his address by noting how “unpardonable it would be for us — with all that we have been given, all the advantages we have, all the continuing opportunities we have to enhance and increase our love of learning — to turn out blockheads or to raise blockheads.”
Leon Wieseltier has called the current generation of Jews the “spoiled brats of Jewish history.” We have been given an unparalleled history and live in unparalleled times with unparalleled opportunities. The seder is a moment for us to appreciate it, to learn and re-learn from it, and to pass it on.