Sandburg in the Civil War Monitor

[JMadonna]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-history...1495755666

Good article by Peggy Noonan on David McCullough’s observations on history from his new book.

• It is a story. “Tell stories,” said the historian Barbara Tuchman. And what is a story? Mr. McCullough, paraphrasing E.M. Forster, observes: “If I say to you the king died and then the queen died, that’s a sequence of events. If I say the king died and the queen died of grief, that’s a story.”

• What’s past to us was the present to them. “Adams, Jefferson, George Washington, they didn’t walk about saying, ‘Isn’t this fascinating, living in the past?’ It was the present, their present.” They were acting in real time and didn’t know how things would turn out.

• They were never certain of success. “Had they taken a poll in Philadelphia in 1776, [the founders] would have scrapped the whole idea of independence. A third of the country was for it, a third of the country was against it, and the remaining third, in the old human way, was waiting to see who came out on top.”

• Nothing had to happen the way it happened. “History could have gone off in any number of different directions in any number of different ways at almost any point, just as your own life can.” “One thing leads to another. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Actions have consequences.” These things sound obvious, he says, but are not to those who are just starting out and trying to understand life.

• We make more of the wicked than the great. The most-written about senator of the 20th century is Joe McCarthy. “Yet there is no biography of the Senator who had the backbone to stand up to him first— Margaret Chase Smith, ” a Maine Republican who served for 24 years.

• America came far through trial and error. Mr. McCullough tells the story of iron workers in 19th-century Johnstown, Pa. For months they’d been devising a new machine to produce steel. Finally it was ready. The engineer in charge said, “All right boys, let’s start it up and see why it doesn’t work.” Progress has come to us largely through empirical methods.

• History is an antidote to the hubris of the present. We think everything we have, do and think is the ultimate, the best. “We should never look down on those of the past and say they should have known better. What do you think they will be saving about us in the future? They’re going to be saying we should have known better.”

• Knowing history will make you a better person. Mr. McCullough endorses Samuel Eliot Morison’s observation that reading history improves behavior by giving examples to emulate. He quotes John Adams: “We can’t guarantee success [in the Revolutionary War], but we can do something better. We can deserve it.” This contrasts, Mr. McCullough says, with current attitudes, in which success is all.

And happy Memorial Day—our 47th since it was designated a federal holiday, under Richard Nixon, in 1971. It was earlier known as Decoration Day, created just after the Civil War to honor the brave and noble who gave their lives while serving in the U.S. military.