Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Beverly Gage. Professor Gage is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale University. She's recently published a new book blending history and travelogue, titled, "This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History." Professor Gage appeared previously on this program to discuss an earlier book titled "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century." Demonstrating the impeccable taste of WRVO, the book won the Pulitzer Prize a couple of months later, it also won the Bancroft Prize. Professor Gage, welcome back to the program, and congratulations on those big awards.
Beverly Gage: Thanks. It's great to be here.
GR: Well, it's wonderful to have you back. So, let's talk about this new book, "This Land is Your Land." How did you get the idea to write this book?
BG: It's a very different book than the J. Edgar Hoover biography, but they are linked in the sense that I worked on the Hoover biography for about a dozen years, and when that was done, I wanted to do something really different, something that would not take 12 years. So, there was a little bit of a personal impulse, but this was late 2022, early 2023, and I was already looking ahead to where we are now, which is 2026, the 250th birthday of the United States, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And I wanted to find a way to participate in what I thought might be a sort of troubled public conversation about that history, give people a way to grapple with the country's history, all 250 years of it. And so that was really the impulse of the book.
GR: I think the idea that we've been having troubled conversations about where we are and where we've been might be an understatement. But yes, I think that certainly I can understand that timing. So, as you mentioned, this is a different kind of book for you. Were there any previous works or writers that you had in mind or were trying to follow in some way, or maybe, on the other hand, trying to separate yourself from, I mean, I know at one point in the book you invoke John Steinbeck, for instance, and saying, you know, you weren't trying to do necessarily what Steinbeck was doing. But were there other folks that you had in mind?
BG: Well, the road trip book is, of course, a venerable American tradition. And so, I very much had that in mind. Whether we're talking about, you know, Alexis de Tocqueville or John Steinbeck, that great tradition. That is, in general, quite a masculine tradition. And so I was very aware of doing this as a woman and kind of going out on the road, so it has a different vibe for many reasons. But there are also historians who have done this in one way or another. Some recent books, like Clint Smith's book about sights devoted to slavery or one of my earlier inspirations, Tony Horowitz, who wrote many great travelogues about American history. Those are often journalists, not academic historians. And so I think that's also a bit of a different sensibility. I was coming in kind of with my toolset as a historian and I think it helped me kind of weave together a lot of what I was seeing in a different way.
GR: Yeah, I want to come back to that because you anticipated very specifically to the specific author, one of the questions that I wanted to ask you later on, so I will come back to that. But, let me ask you this first, you know, you have different places you go to, and those form the basis of the chapters as well as those moments in American history that they reflect. How'd you go about choosing them? Obviously, you know, there are many others you could have chosen. How did you go about choosing the ones you chose?
BG: The book is structured with 13 chapters, and each one is both a place and a moment in time. And since I'm a historian, it's really structured chronologically rather than geographically. So, you might not want to do these trips in exactly the order in which they appear in the book, because it would mean you would make it all the way to Texas, and then you'd have to go back to upstate New York and then down to South Carolina and then to Chicago. So, that's the historian sensibility there. And I was really looking for places that captured the central national dilemmas of their particular historical moment, whatever that might be. So, it begins in Philadelphia with the American Revolution, pretty obvious place to start. But then it moves around and tries to find places that, number one, in this historical moment, came to stand in for the nation at large. So, for instance, Chicago is my chapter on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the late 19th and early 20th century, when not only Americans, but the whole world was looking to Chicago and saying, you know, this is the essence, this is going to be the future of America, the future of American urban life. So that was one criteria. And then the other was they had to be places where that history was being actively contended with. So, places with good museums and sites and tchotchke shops and battlefields, whatever it might be. Because that's really the basis of the road trip. I'm not just traveling, I'm going specifically to the historic sites in these places.
GR: So, bigger picture about this book. What are you hoping that people reading this are going to take away from it?
BG: Well, first, I hope it's a little bit of an inspiration for people to turn off the screens, get away from their desks. That was the impulse for me, certainly. And get out and really see the country and engage with it, engage with their fellow citizens, maybe, but at least engage with these historic sites where the national story is being contended with and fought about and represented. So, I guess that's one piece. The other, and this is really the conceptual premise of the book, is that in a moment like 2026, a moment of commemoration and celebration and reckoning all at the same time, I really wanted to find a way to look at the deepest and most difficult parts of American history and reconcile that with being able to love the country in this very difficult moment. And so, the way I frame it in the book is that it's about knowing your history and still loving your country. And that's sort of the tension at the heart of this book.
GR: I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Yale historian Beverly Gage, and we're discussing her new book titled, "This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History." I wanted to pick up on exactly that last point that you made about coming to full reckoning with the history, but still loving the country. One of the main themes and findings that I got from reading through it was that, exactly what you said, that in important respects the nation is struggling with these big challenges right now and these difficult conversations, as you said earlier. And the fact that, you know, the facts of our history are the facts of our history, and, you know, like all other countries, there are things there that we might not wish that that were part of our story, but that we're still strong. You know, we're still ultimately a great country. And I have to say, first of all, I guess you've already answered, I wanted to make sure that I was not projecting onto your book, because that's my sense. I mean, that's my own personal sense about where we are. And I've had some of my own difficult conversations with some of my colleagues about, you know, what do we make of the current moment we're in and what does it mean for us? So, it sounds like I have your message right. I was wondering if you could just elaborate a little bit more on that then. How do you get to that place that you just described?
BG: Well, I think our historical discourse, at least our public historical discourse has, like many things in this country, fallen into two big camps at the moment. One is that if you are a patriot, it means you only say great things, you ignore the most difficult parts of the past, and sometimes, even in this moment, try to erase them. And as a historian, I find that wildly objectionable and also not true to history as it actually happened. I think we have a counterweight to that which says that the only things that have mattered in the American past are the worst things that the country has done. And that to me also seems not actually true to the history, but it does seem to be one of the things that's really driving what I see this year, which is a real ambivalence about the idea of celebrating anything in the American story or in the American past in a moment like 2026. I think that that's a little bit of a dereliction of duty. I think that a moment like this is about really trying to put the pieces together, doing a little bit of soul searching nationally and maybe personally about what these strains are in American history that might be worth honoring or thinking about in a moment like this. And a lot of this book is about Americans in the past who had to contend with exactly these questions. There's a chapter on upstate New York in the 1830s, 40s, 50s, a place you might know something about. And what's interesting there is that so many of the characters who populated the Erie Canal corridor in those days were dealing with exactly this question, right? Frederick Douglass there in Rochester is saying, you know, how can I be an American? How do I think about the 4th of July in a country where I was once enslaved, that still enslaves millions of people? And so, these are not new tensions and new dilemmas. And, to think that we are so special in this moment, I think is also not entirely true to our history.
GR: Not to put you on the spot as an expert on upstate New York history, because that's not necessarily what you've studied, but I did want to ask you about that. One of the things that struck me when I first got up here and started learning more about upstate New York history, I had, you know, known about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and some of the other figures. But there were all these different movements that all, like, were within a couple decades of each other that had really deep roots here that, you know, from the Oneida perfection community, utopian communities to the anti-slavery to even Mormonism. I mean, it's just, it had this nickname of the burnt-over district. And I don't know if you have any thoughts as a historian of the nation, like, what was going on in upstate New York that was in the water that created all this?
BG: Right, well, I think the water is a good word to use because the first thing that was going on was that the Erie Canal opened. And, so, we tend to think of the Erie Canal as this economic engine, this economic driver, and it was that. But it also meant that lots of people could move and settle in this region and many of them were full of these energies, right? They were seekers and travelers and some of them visionaries. And I think what's really interesting about upstate New York as a region during that period is that they're often in these little tiny towns and cities, so they are neighbors with each other, they're sharing ideas, and so there's a way in which that spirit and that ambition really built on itself. I should also note that one of the characters I got very interested in was a man named Garrett Smith who lived in Peterboro, the tiny little hamlet of Peterboro. And I think Garrett Smith is part of the answer to that too, because he was one of the richest men in the country in his day. He was willing to fund a lot of these reform movements, temperance, women's rights, abolition. And so, when you have one rich guy who's willing to support your cause, a lot of people also go in that direction. So, I think he's not very well known, but a very important factor in all of this.
GR: Yeah, his name comes up among local historians all the time. And you're right to bring up Seneca Falls, the women's movement and the center there and what happened there. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Beverly Gage. The Yale University history professor is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning, "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century." She's talking with me today about her newest book, it's titled, "This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History." I wanted to ask you about the book's title, because on the one hand, you know, the Woody Guthrie song has become an informal national anthem over the years. But I think it's also fair to say it's somewhat of an anthem for the left. And so, I was just wondering if there was any significance in the choice of that?
BG: There was. One of the things that I really like about that song, that moment, a figure like Woody Guthrie, but "This Land Is Your Land" in particular, is that it was both a celebration and a protest at the same time. So often today, it comes down to preschool children who are learning to sing it, and this sort of nice, innocuous song about the country. But in its day, it was both celebratory and a form of protest. It came out in the early 1940s in the wake of the Great Depression, as World War Two is getting underway and it's an incredibly troubling moment, like many moments in history. And Woody Guthrie is contending with all of those things together. It's also a little bit of a call to readers to claim this land as their land, to get out, to see it, to engage it, to not retreat from its history and its complications, but instead to be in it together.
GR: It's got a little bit of a double meaning there, maybe even a triple meaning. So, I'm going to come back to the writer that you invoked earlier, Tony Horowitz, one of my favorites too. In reading through this book, I was reminded of him, you know, he blends history with reportage travelogue. The difference though, that I thought of immediately you already kind of alluded to it is, he was a journalist who then became a historian of sorts. You're a very serious historian who became a journalist of sorts. And so, what did you find the most difficult in making that transition in terms of the way that you approach this book and the way that you wrote it?
BG: Well, I loved Tony Horowitz's books, and his most famous book, "Confederates in the Attic," came out in the 90s or so when I was just graduating from school, entering graduate school and learning to become a historian. And I remember driving around with the audiobook of that book. And so it was, in some sense, my introduction to this way of thinking about history. I do myself have a background for a few years before I went to graduate school as a journalist, and so there was a little bit of that sensibility as well. But I would say that the main difference is that I think my background as a historian kind of gave me the knowledge and maybe the confidence that I needed to try to take on 250 years all at once and to really just be selective. This book is all about making choices, where to go, what to include. It is not an encyclopedic overview of American history. And I think that came from my training as a historian. I think I also organized the book, as I said earlier, chronologically rather than geographically. And so, it's really about me as a historical observer going around and doing this sort of thing. The last thing I would say is this is not an interview driven book. I talked with lots of people as I went around, tour guides, people who round sites, fellow tourists. But it's really very much me in the guise of an ordinary tourist going on the same tours, staying in the same hotels of varying quality, you know, driving my rental car or my own not terrific car around. So that was also the conceit, it's not about kind of, backroom interviews or special access. It's really just sort of the chronicle of a citizen and a traveler and a historian.
GR: Which are the two types of things were more difficult for you, doing the reporting travelogue stuff, and you do blend them together, or trying to take 250 years of American history, breaking it up into these chapters and treating it pretty quickly, I mean, you know, this is not the normal, I mean, you wrote this enormous book on one guy, so which one was a tougher challenge for you?
BG: Well, I'd say the toughest challenge for me, actually, were the little parts when I was writing about myself, which is not something I'm accustomed to doing. But of course, in a book like this, you have to be there as the eyes and ears and kind of include a little bit about yourself. So, that just constitutionally, I like writing about other people much more than I like writing about myself, so that was a challenge. But I would say, yeah, the greatest challenge of the book was really synthesis, really trying to find, just make a set of choices that would get us through these moments in the past and through these locations, while also leaving out a whole lot of stuff. And so, the difficult part is the leaving out, because I wanted to describe every single place I saw, and I wanted to go to every single place, but of course, that's not really possible.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is Beverly Gage. She's the author of "This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History". Sticking with Tony Horowitz and the, "Confederates in the Attic" book, by the way, really quick personal aside, my favorite book of his is, "Blue Latitudes," but, "Confederates in the Attic" was what made me think of this question I wanted to ask you. He almost like, confesses a couple times in that book that a couple instances he let, I don't know his own sort of confidence, maybe arrogance as a successful journalist put him in situations where he realized I'm in over my head and, you know, I've gone to this place and I've just waltzed in here starting to talk to people, and I am now in a difficult and a couple instances, dangerous situations. I mean, he has a story about basically jumping in his car, driving away as fast as he could. Did you have any kind of similar missteps along the way where you thought, wait a minute, I've got something wrong here, you know, I've got to be careful?
BG: Well, I certainly felt that I got things wrong or learned things along the way that I didn't expect to learn. I mean, I was doing a much more conventional kind of travel than Tony was doing. He was, you know, interviewing all sorts of people in that case from, you know, Confederate groups and Confederate subculture, etc.. So, I think our methods were quite different. I would say the main thing that I found in doing this was that I was just quite isolated a lot of the time. So, when you're from the East Coast or the West Coast or the more populated parts of the country, you forget how much of the country really is rural, at least in its geography, right? So, if you think about the country in terms of population, it's very concentrated in certain parts of the nation. But as you're driving, one of the things that you see is that, geographically, so much of the United States is still rural and so I was often going to, you know, little out of the way monuments or markers or little historic sites that no one goes to. And so, I would say I was often very aware of being in, quote unquote, “the middle of nowhere” all by myself. And so there was a little charge to that, but I never had experiences of being in danger in any way.
GR: I've had similar experiences when I've done similar kinds of travel. You just realize how enormous the country is, you don't get the same sense from an airplane. Let me ask you this, was there one place that was most powerful for you that you've taken away more than any others?
BG: Well, there were, of course, a lot of them. I guess I was most interested in some sense in the places that I knew the least. So, there's a chapter on Tennessee, which is about the 1820s and 1830s. It's partly focused on Andrew Jackson, who was from Tennessee, his home is just outside of Nashville. But I was really struck by the many memorials and parks and small museums that have sprung up over the last 20 or 30 years trying to mark the experience of Indian removal, and, in particular in Tennessee, Cherokee removal. And those are really haunting places because they're marking an absence for the most part, an absence and trying to tell a story of a historical wrong, but also of a kind of alternate history, a reimagining of, you know, what would this place be like if those things hadn't happened? So, they were really quite deep and moving.
GR: We got about three minutes or so left, and I want to try to squeeze in two more questions if I can. The first one is kind of a follow up to that one I just asked you about, what places were most powerful to you. It's not an interview driven book, but you did meet lots of people. I wonder, is there 1 or 2 people that have stayed most in your mind since you encountered them?
BG: Well, when I went to the Eugene Debs house in Terre Haute, Indiana, I was there with just one other person, one other tourist who was a local union president, who was taking the day off from work to find out more about Eugene Debs. And we ended up spending almost three hours on this tour with the executive director of the museum and just talking about the legacy of labor, how hidden its history often is in this country, why most people don't remember a figure like Eugene Debs, who was one of the great socialist figures of the late 19th and early 20th century, so those conversations really, really stuck with me.
GR: Well, I want you to look forward now. this is a, sort of last big topic here. You're a historian, you look backward, but looking backward you have a lot of good basis to look forward. Let's say that this book is being written 50 years from now at the 300th anniversary, instead of the 250th one. And the writer is doing what you're doing, wants to find a place to illustrate this moment in time, talk to people that are going to tell him or her about this moment in time, they're going to have that as one of the chapters. Where would that be and who would they be talking to?
BG: Great question. I guess two places come to mind. One is Silicon Valley, which is only starting to tell its own history and build its own museums and monuments, but I think that history will be very important and alive. It may be being told by AI or some technology as yet been imagined.
GR: (laughter) Let's hope this book is not being written by AI 50 years from now. I'd rather have Beverly Gage writing the book. Go ahead.
BG: And the other is Minneapolis, which has been the center of so many conflicts and controversies. And I think Minneapolis is a good example of a lot of the places that I went, which is to say, for a moment in time, it really crystallized the essential dilemmas and conflicts that the rest of the nation was facing in some way, that the world was watching within the United States. And so, I would point to them as another possibility.
GR: Yeah, two very interesting choices. Well, we'll have to leave it there. It's a fascinating book. It's really just a magnificent tour through both history and the entire country. But that was Beverly Gage, and again, this new book of hers is titled, "This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History." I'll also mention that the Campbell Conversations web page does have in its archives my earlier conversation with Professor Gage regarding her previous book, "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century," and that book was awarded the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes. Professor Gage, thanks so much again for talking with me, and thanks for writing this book, it’s really fascinating.
BG: Great. Thanks for having me.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
