Posterity
Authors: Dorie McCullough Lawson
Doubleday
N
EW
Y
ORK
L
ONDON
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ORONTO
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YDNEY
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UCKLAND
Posterity
L
ETTERS OF
G
REAT
A
MERICANS TO
T
HEIR
C
HILDREN
Dorie McCullough Lawson
C
ONTENTS
W
ILLIAM
H
ENRY
S
EWARD
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LIZABETH
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ADY
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TANTON
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LBERT
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INSTEIN
J
OHN
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.
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OCKEFELLER,
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R.
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NSEL
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DAMS
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ENRY
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OUIS
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ATES,
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R.
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OHN
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DAMS
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LEXANDER
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RAHAM
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ELL
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ACK
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ONDON
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INCOLN
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UGENE
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OUGLAS
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HOMAS
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AMES
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ATLIN
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ILLIAM
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AMES
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OHN
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ERSHING
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ARL
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ANDBURG
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ILLIAM
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ARLOS
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ILLIAMS
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UTHRIE
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UME
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RONYN
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OHN
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ONATHAN
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DWARDS
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ANIEL
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EBSTER
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ARRISON
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RAHAM
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ICKENBACKER
B
ARBARA
B
USH
For my parents,
David and Rosalee McCullough
F
OREWORD
This is an uncommonly wise and important book full of much wonderful writing and invaluable observations on life. It is also unprecedented, the first rich anthology of letters from eminent Americans to their children, selected from many thousands of letters written down the years in times of peace and war, flush times and times of extreme hardship and stress.
The authors of the letters include a number of the giants of American literatureânovelists, poets, playwrightsâas well as soldiers, explorers, artists, and inventors. Eight of the authors were presidents of the United States. Three were first ladies. Two were the mothers of presidents, and two, the fathers. At least one, Thomas Edison, was an acknowledged “wizard.”
There are besides a pioneering physician, a world-famous industrialist, a brilliant lyricist, an actor, a photographer, a clergyman of the eighteenth century, the most influential physicist of the twentieth century, a legendary president of Harvardâaltogether sixty-eight acclaimed Americans, each of whom did something exceptional in a multitude of fields over a span of more than three hundred years. But here they sign themselves “Ever yours, Father and Friend,” “Your affectionate Mother,” “Papa,” “Dad,” “Daddy,” “Your Old Pal,” or “Mama Bess.” For that was who they were, heart and soul, when composing these letters, and so, inevitably, understandably, they expressed themselves in ways they did not in other correspondence, often saying things that they never would to anyone else.
To get the most from the letters, one needs, of course, to know something of the setting and circumstance in which they were writtenâthe sometimes surprising contextâwhich makes the clear, perceptive biographical material provided here of the utmost interest and value.
Had the letters been written by people of no particular renown, one would still, I think, be struck by their great range and variety. But because the affectionate father happens to be Benjamin Franklin or General Patton, or the affectionate mother Abigail Adams or Barbara Bush, the force and importance of the letters are enormously compounded. And so it was, too, very often, for the recipients. Imagine being told by General John J. Pershing that it was past time for you to shape up!
Naturally, as parents, they were of many moods and wrote from a range of motives. They exhort and they sympathize. They caution, upbraid, tease, joke, teach, preach. They take pride and they take offense. And, of course, they offer no end of advice. Some of the letters are supremely entertaining. A few, written in anger, are hard to bear. Yet over and over, in ways obvious and subtle, even at times unkind, they are missives of love.
Often the authors want only to save their children from making the mistakes they have. When photographer Ansel Adams writes, “I have spent a good part of my life trying to understand the obligations of a parent,” he could be speaking for the authors of many of the letters, not to say all of us who in raising our children have had to learn as we go.
The oldest letter in the collection was written by the seventeenth-century poet Anne Bradstreet, who with her husband, Simon Bradstreet, was among the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, arriving from England in 1630. Other letters date from our own time.
Some of the letters go on for pages, while one of the most moving in the collection, by Robert E. Lee, is only two paragraphs. And nearly all come from a time when writing letters was considered part of life. It was something you did as a matter of course. It was expected of you. “Write no matter how tired you are, no matter how inconvenient it is,” Theodore Roosevelt tells his son Quentin in a letter dated 1917.
For his part Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most prolific correspondents ever, pouring out more than 150,000 letters in one lifetime, and those to his children are among the most charming he ever wrote. Even in his busiest days as president, he would take time to write to his sons and daughters and always with infectious enjoyment, as his letters included here well demonstrate.
That so few of us write to our children any longer, that we so rarely write personal letters of any sort, is a shame. I think often of how little we will leave about ourselves and our time in our own words. Maybe some of the e-mail will survive, but I doubt it. How will future generations ever come to know us? Historians and biographers a hundred or three hundred years hence will have almost nothing of a personal kind to work with. Our story, consequently, will be a lot less interesting, less human, perhaps even impossible to write.
Beyond that we're denying ourselves the pleasures and benefits of putting our thoughts and feelings down in words of our own. Nothing so focuses the mind as writing. We've all known the experience of a new idea or insights coming suddenly, almost miraculously to mind, as we write, and as probably they never would were we not writing. Working your thoughts out on paper, it used to be called.
In this spirit, many of the authors here are writing as much for themselves as for the recipients of their letters. Jack London's rant about his first wife, the mother of the daughter to whom he is writing, is a case in point.
By contrast there are the selections in the chapter called “The Pleasures of Life” written mainly for fun, and what a different side they show of the eminent figures who penned them. I'll never think of the renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted the same way again, having read his exuberantly playful speculation to a four-year-old on the reproductive capacities of cats. Nor do I know of a more ingenious example of how to tell a child no.
The unabashedly corny jokes shared by Alexander Graham Bell with his grown daughter are pure gold to me, as I suspect they will be to other readers. And my fondness for Groucho Marx is greater than ever, now that I have read what he had to say in the voice of his dog.
The quantity of sound advice offered is considerable. That life is short and uncertain is a repeating theme. The importance of one's work is stressed again and again. “Work you know is your work, which belongs to you. That's the best thing about it,” writes Eugene O'Neill. “Because any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish is the only way to be happy.”
In an effort to convey to his gifted son Andrew what his work means to him, the great illustrator N. C. Wyeth quotes a line from Michelangelo: “It is only well with me when I have a chisel in my hand.” “But work, real work for what we call duty or the truth, that is more fun than tennis,” writes Lincoln Steffens.
It is gratifying, also, to find that some of the comeuppance delivered had good effect, as in the case of young Warren Pershing.
Many of the letters make one want to know more of the lives and achievements of those who wrote them, or in the case of the professional writers, to read more of their work. Anyone who could convey with such understanding to a nine-year-old the meaning of Valley Forge as does William Henry Seward was plainly a good deal more than just the man who bought Alaska.
I've not thought of John O'Hara's novels since college, but his letters to his daughter Wylie make me eager to read him again. And the same goes for Sherwood Anderson. The guidelines he gives on art and life, for the son studying painting in Paris, ought to be pinned up as reminders for all who paint or write or teach. “Try to be humble. Smartness kills everything,” Anderson says. “The point of being an artist is that you may live.”
But then nearly all the writers here are trying in one way or other to impart what life has taught them, and it's the sum total of such observations, and the sincerity of expression, that give these pages their inordinate value.
“If you feel the blues coming on you, get a book and a glass of wine,” advises the august, learned Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard. “Know history,” George Patton tells his son. “Great necessities call out great virtues,” Abigail Adams reminds young John Quincy Adams.
The trials and suffering of life, the horrors of disease and war, the fierce inner struggles many suffer, are all to be found in these letters. It is hard to imagine, for example, anyone ever forgetting Woody Guthrie's letter as he was being destroyed by Huntington's chorea.
Every reader will have his or her own favorites. To my mind what W. E. B. Du Bois writes to his daughter Yolande is both a surpassing lesson in human understanding and a beautiful expression of a father's devotion. The letter should be required reading everywhere. I love Sidney Lanier's letter about his newborn son. Oscar Hammerstein's beautiful, autobiographical letter to his son Bill may be my favorite of all.
Dorie McCullough Lawson is my daughter, I'm proud to say, and I have thought often of a comment she made as she first embarked on the research for the book. “Think how much I'm going to learn,” she said. I know how much I have learned from the collection and from her very skillful editorial commentary.
This is a book to pick up and read at almost any page, a book to keep close at hand, to return to for nourishment and guidance, yes, but also for reassurance and pure pleasure.
âDavid McCullough
West Tisbury, Massachusetts