Love of Country: McCullough Tells Our Nation’s Stories

American historian David McCullough is fond of closing commencement remarks by challenging students to “do something for your country.”   He invokes the spirit of John F. Kennedy, Jr., whose 1960 inaugural address urged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” 
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In an age when we are increasingly encouraged to consider ourselves “citizens of the world,” and when many elementary school curricula include units on “global citizenship,” how relevant is love of country anymore? McCullough, who has dedicated a lifetime to telling America’s stories, would say: very.  We are still a planet of sovereign nation-states – 195 of them by last count.  We pass our laws, inherit our mores, formulate our aspirations, shape our futures, and realize our daily potential in the context of a national framework and heritage.  We flounder or flourish in that context, and ours is worth knowing. 

McCullough has worked for over five decades to reveal America to herself.  Indeed, in 1968, when Simon and Garfunkel “walked off to look for America,” so did McCullough, publishing his first major work, The Johnstown Flood. With drama, suspense, and a storyteller’s compass, McCullough told the tale of the nation’s worst flood disaster and introduced a new genre:  narrative non-fiction.  His novel-like read was spectacularly successful, spotlighting the foibles, missteps, heroism, and lessons to be learned, as well as earning him accolades as the nation’s leading social historian.  (Much to the chagrin of academic historians.)

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In the years that followed McCullough told less horrific and equally riveting stories. He wrote about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal.  Those epic undertakings were not accounts of infrastructure so much as tales of driven, idealistic, relentlessly persevering, and sometimes misguided people.  McCullough is quick to emphasize that: “history is the story of people” not abstract forces. And so, in the 1980s, his own work turned to biography.  He chronicled the life of the irrepressible Teddy Roosevelt in Mornings on Horseback, then went on to tell rich and neglected stories of John Adams, Harry Truman, and the improbable triumph of The Wright Brothers.  

In the past two decades no major movement in American history seems to have escaped his lens.  He has written on the American Revolution, the early pioneer experience and how it projected the American Revolution into the west, and on World War II.  A capstone book of his essays (many of them commencement speeches) were collected in his volume, The American Spirit.

So, how does he characterize that spirit?  What’s to love?  The editors of Time Magazine asked him that in 2017.  Was America in any way exceptional?  Should kids be taught that?

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“I think America has come further in giving opportunity to the best that’s in human nature than any other country ever in history, and we seem to be holding on for over 200 years already. We’ve greatly improved the inequalities and the shortcomings of our way of life as we’ve moved forward.”  He didn’t end there. “One of the things I feel is that we are a country of good people. We are a country of well-meaning, hard-working, conscientious people — 90% of us. And we are blessed with progress in a number of fields today, the likes of which no people on Earth have ever enjoyed in all of history.” He pointed to progress in medicine, in the opportunity for education, and in the quest for equality itself.  America is a can-do nation, and as long as we educate our children in the nation’s stories, “I am optimistic,” said he. 

The key is to educate our children in the nation’s stories.  Martin Luther King Jr. knew them and loved them, and it made him a powerful agent for change. “History is an antidote to the hubris of the present. History should be a lesson that produces immense gratitude for all those who went before us." When McCullough points out that “there are still more public libraries in this country than Starbucks,” he affirms his fundamental optimism about the American experiment.

We still have lots to be optimistic about.  In the past three weeks my husband and I have been traveling by car up and down the east coast – “all come to look for America.”  If you travel from Anne Hutchinson’s Portsmouth, Rhode Island to the Founders’ Philadelphia to the Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk, then on to guess who’s Jacksonville, and come back through George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore and George Washington’s Mount Vernon, you’ll be mightily impressed too.  Of course, you’ll be impressed by the stories of all those titans of the American past, but not incidentally by the people you meet working in each location in each city each day.

Americans of all races, genders, and ethnicities are ploughing ahead (like Washington at Mount Vernon) with pretty good humor.  They’re keeping their heads down as we close out this pandemic, and they’re fed up with restrictions.  But everywhere you go, one meets hard-working, conscientious, decent, and fundamentally positive people, who truly live out the ideals of liberty and justice for all. 

The African American manager at the Hampton Inn in Alexandria, Virginia—when I told him I was from Rhode Island—pointed out to my delight that we were practically family because his aunt was from Rhode Island too, and wasn’t it great that Viola Davis got her start there? I practically hugged him.  (But then again, there was an acrylic placard between us.) Still, our nation’s Home Away from Home (the Hampton Inn in Asheville NC), neatly sums up the national creed on the placard in its halls: “Today is going to be amazing!”  Ya gotta love it.
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Go ahead and teach the kids:  love your country.  Do something for your country.
 
Mary Beth Klee

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