David McCullough’s posthumous book celebrates America

Next year marks America’s 250th anniversary, or semiquincentennial. There will be celebrations and a lot of new books to mark the occasion.

For those who can’t wait, the late historian David McCullough’s posthumous new volume is a delightful primer. History Matters is a collection of essays that celebrate America, the figures who have inspired McCullough, and the art of writing history.

The essays in History Matters offer a simple message: Be grateful for America. We are lucky to live here, and things very easily could have turned out differently. Love the United States and appreciate the Founding Fathers.

“Ingratitude was one of the human failings that George Washington, as it happens, disliked intensely,” McCullough writes. ”Our gratitude to George Washington should be beyond measure and to have had that particular man with his integrity, his courage, his decency, his stability, his sense of duty to the common good, as our first president is almost miraculous. And to think who he had in his cabinet — the people of such stature coming forth out of a tiny country. We had about two and a half million people in the whole country at the time of the Revolutionary War. And what people fail to understand is how dark — how unlikely seemed the chances of American success in the Revolutionary War.”

History Matters and America’s 250th birthday may once and for all cure the malady of “punitive liberalism.” An idea first offered by historian James Piereson, it argues that liberalism in the last 100 years has gone from a patriotic, anticommunist philosophy of government programs and expanding freedom to violent, secular, paranoid, and utopian. Punitive liberalism teaches that America was to blame not only for President John F. Kennedy’s death but for everything wrong in the world. It’s cool to hate America, which deserves to be punished.

Punitive liberalism is evident in the recent controversy over the display descriptions in some of the exhibits in the Smithsonian museums. Rather than an attempt to accurately describe a painting or historical item, many of the descriptions are heavy with academic and Marxist renunciations of the U.S.

McCullough’s new book is a wonderful antidote. He defends building great monuments against the protests of the environmentalists, who say “any intrusion by construction by humans will lessen the power and beauty and meaning of a particular landscape.” The Golden Gate Bridge “makes that place more powerful, more meaningful. It gives both scale and a sense of humanity and time to that magnificent, natural wonder of the gateway, the entrance to the harbor.”

McCullough reminds readers that the country we see outside our windows every day took effort: “Nothing of lasting value or importance in our way of life, none of our proudest attainments, has ever come without effort. America is an effort. We are a nation born of risk and adversity — of fearful seas to cross just to get here in the first place, of land to clear, floods, epidemic disease, of slave chains and city slums and terrible winters on the high plains. Everything we have took work: our institutions, our wealth, our freedoms.”

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He also reminds us that there have always been critics. Here’s how George Washington was treated by the media of his time: “He was denounced as pompous, vainglorious, a spendthrift. He was compared to Oliver Cromwell. He was called a traitor. And no less than the apostle of liberty Thomas Paine, called him treacherous in private friendship and a hypocrite in public life. Almost anything that you can think of that’s been said about political leaders in our time was said about those political leaders in that time. In many ways, it was even worse to have to think about, particularly if you go back as far, say, as the eighteenth century.”

McCullough also celebrates the spiritual foundations of America. He writes that Paul Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is “absolutely one of the essentials because virtually everyone who could, read The Pilgrim’s Progress through the nineteenth century, along with Shakespeare and the Bible. Pilgrim’s Progress is really powerful and a source of strength for anyone today, all these hundreds of years later.”

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