David Herbert Donald Interview (page: 5 / 8) Two Pulitzer Prizes for Biography	Print Interview

How did you first become interested in American history? You've spent your adult life writing about it. Was this an interest that started when you were young?

David Herbert Donald: When I was a little boy, I didn't have access to a lot of books, but my mother had bought a series called, The Real America in Romance. I don't think anybody has heard of it since that time. It was about twelve volumes and it was a beautifully illustrated narrative history of America from discovery down to whatever the present date was, maybe the 1920s. Looking back on it, it was sappy, it was sweet, it was altogether a story of triumph, but it was fun to read, and I learned a lot about the Aztecs and the Mayas and things like that, as well as about American history. I think that got me interested in American history, trapped by American history so to speak, and I have been with it since.

So when you were reading those books, did you think you'd want to be a historian, an author and a history professor?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. David Herbert Donald: I was pretty sure until I graduated from college that I wanted to be a band director. I played the clarinet rather well, if I may say, and my expectation was to get a job as a band director in some high school in Mississippi, where I grew up, and that would be my life. Maybe I'd teach social studies on the side. Well, I have a little story about that. Like Lincoln, I have a little story. It was summer. I was in my senior year. I heard of a job over at Indianola, Mississippi, which is in that flat delta area. It goes on and on and on, no hills, no anything, hot as Hades. I heard there was a job there. I went over to see it. I had no money. So I hitchhiked over there. I came -- rather dusty I'm afraid, by the time I came to the principal's office -- but he seemed pleased to meet me, and we talked about the job and what I would be doing, would be teaching this, that, and the other, and there were a couple of things that bothered me about it. One was, as we went around, he said, "You will be leading the band, and the band is financed by this Coca-Cola machine." I said, "Oh. I don't think that's very sound financing." "Oh," he said, "You don't know Mississippi and Indianola in the summertime where it's 100 degrees. That coke machine is a steadier source of income than the state taxes ever would be. You would be fortunate that it would be dedicated to you." Well that sort of took care of that. I went back to his office. He said, "Now if you come, you will want to find a place to stay. There's a boarding house right up the street here. I will introduce you if you like." I said, "That's fine." So he got up and collected his papers and such, and I got whatever little thing I had and followed him. He turned and he said, "Where's your hat?" I said, "I never wear a hat." He looked at me and he said, "You teach in my school, you'll wear a hat," and I decided I don't want to be a high school teacher. So after that, I went off to graduate school.

When you decided to go to graduate school, were you just following your curiosity about American history or was there a goal in mind that you wanted to accomplish?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. David Herbert Donald: When I graduated from college, I had no idea what to do, and I certainly had no skills that were marketable, and I heard about graduate school. I didn't know anything about graduate school at all, what you did, except that it would be a substitute for a job. So I applied at, I believe, 12 different places. A little story about that: I went to Millsaps College, which is an excellent small college in Jackson, Mississippi, but it's small. I had a professor that I leaned on a lot and loved, Vernon Wharton, an American historian. So I told him I had been applying to these 12 places. He said, "David, I'm glad to write for you, but I don't have a secretary, and I don't have the time. I cannot sit down and write 12 letters for you." I said, "But I'm applying at 12 places." "Well," he says, "this is what I'll do. You write the letters, and I'll sign them, whatever you say about yourself." So I went back to my typewriter, and I wrote 12 letters recommending me most notably. I'm kind of amused to say that ten of them got me fellowships. Well, a long time after that -- one was the University of Illinois, which I attended -- a long time after that, Illinois asked me back to give a lecture or some such thing, and we revisited and so on, and because it was a long time ago and I hadn't remembered everything, I had asked could a graduate student look over my graduate records, just to remind me what I had been doing when I was there, and he came up with something interesting. In my file there, there was a letter of application signed by Vernon Wharton and written by me, of course, and on the margin was a note of the dean. "Admit this man," he said. "He has excellent letters of recommendation." So I've always felt rather fraudulent, but I certainly enjoyed my years in Illinois.

Did your parents encourage you to pursue this career? Did they think you were a gifted child?

David Herbert Donald: I don't think I was treated as a gifted child. I was hardly a spoiled child, in a large family of children. I don't think they had any idea about a professional career as a historian and so on. It would be conceivable to take up a career as a lawyer. It would be conceivable to be a doctor, though that required more money than my father had to put into for one child. So the idea was simply the children got a good college education and they were on their own. All of us did different things. My one sister became a bacteriologist, my brother became an agronomist, and things like that. I didn't really have any skills to do anything, except I'm a good typist, so the idea was maybe you should keep on going to school until you learn something.

Was there a particular book you read that inspired you, in your high school or college years?

David Herbert Donald: There were several books that inspired me, one of which I don't think I'd recommend particularly these days. But H.G. Wells's Outline of History is a wonderful book that tells all about history from the prehistoric down to the present, and it for the first time gave me some perspective of where we stand: a very long history of the world and a very small segment. That kind of book did fascinate me a great deal, and perhaps it got me steered in the direction of history.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When I started graduate school, I had no idea that I would wind up studying Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War and such things. You don't hear a lot about Abraham Lincoln or the Civil War in central Mississippi, you know. I just was going to school, as I said, to have something to do. I got to the University of Illinois where, fortunately for me, the great professor on the American history side was James G. Randall. Professor Randall and his lovely wife, Ruth Randall, took a liking to me, partly I think because she was very Southern, and I was very Southern too, at that time I guess, and they, in effect, virtually adopted me. I was at their house time after time for dinner, for supper, particularly if they took me to plays. They took me to movies. They treated me like an adopted child, and so when the chance came to be his assistant, a graduate assistant, I leaped at it, and even so, I had no idea what I was going to do. I just had it as a job. He was working on his big biography of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln the President, and he needed somebody to check references and look up books and so on, and so I was doing that. After a year or so of that, Professor Randall came -- I can't remember clearly. He came stomping over to my apartment saying, "You know, the time has come for you to think about a thesis subject," and I said, "You know, I do think that's right, but I don't have anything." "Well," he said, "you have been working on Abraham Lincoln now for about a year for me, and you have accumulated a lot of information. It would be a pity for it to go to waste. So I suggest that you might want to write a biography of William H. Herndon." Herndon was Lincoln's law partner and biographer. His papers had just become available in the Library of Congress, and we had them on microfilm, and he said, "With what you already have, you can work on these papers and write a life of Herndon. It would also be about Lincoln," and I thought, "Hey, that's an interesting idea," to sort of capitalize on what I did know. I worked on it. That was my doctoral dissertation. I was fortunate enough to have it accepted by Alfred Knopf first round, and they published it in 1948, and that sort of, can you say, trapped me in the Lincoln Civil War figure.

Would you say James Randall was the teacher who had the greatest influence in shaping your career?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. David Herbert Donald: Professor Randall was a great advisor and a great mentor. He taught me, I think, in the best possible way. He was not a brilliant lecturer. His courses were fairly pedestrian. I didn't think his seminars were particularly interesting, but working with him on a one-to-one basis as his assistant, I think that's the way one has to learn to be a historian. That is, he was writing, and if he needed some particular reference, I had to go find it and get it. If he was writing, he wanted everything checked meticulously over and over again. So I had to take the manuscript over to the library and check it all out. So that by working closely with him, I got to see, first of all, a lot of the library and its extensive holdings, but I got, even more important, to understand what a scholar is about. It is about care. It is about pains-taking. It is about judgment, as well as it's about very skillful writing. He was an excellent writer as well. So in that sense, Professor Randall and Mrs. Randall shaped my future career.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

David Herbert Donald Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8