Beverly Gage is a professor at Yale and has a new book, timed for our 250th anniversary: This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip through U.S. History. In a Q&A, we talk about this book and plenty more.
“Q&A,” by the way, is the name of my podcast. For an interview show, it is not an especially imaginative name, but it serves.
Professor Gage grew up outside Philadelphia. “When you were a girl,” I ask her, “did you read history like a fiend or did that come later?” She read “pretty widely,” she says. This reading included the trilogy by John Jakes about the Civil War—North and South. They were huge sellers, those books.
Beverly was a musician: violinist, pianist, conductor. In college, however, she gravitated to other interests. She went to Yale and then, for graduate school, to Columbia.
Can she name us a few of her favorite historians? Historians of the U.S., that is? She gives me two names: W. E. B. Du Bois (who, in addition to everything else he did, wrote a history of Reconstruction) and Richard Hofstadter. One thing those two had in common is: they could write like angels.
That counts, when it comes to engaging a reader …
In 2022, Professor Gage published a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, G-Man. It won the Bancroft Prize, the top award in U.S. history. And the Pulitzer Prize and yet others.
I ask her a few questions about Hoover—including, “Was there anything good about him?” Well, he was “a believer in nonpartisan professional government service.” He was an “institutionalist.” He would not have liked the current FBI director.
Was Hoover guilty in the matter of Martin Luther King? Did he and the FBI treat the civil rights leader unfairly? Very much so, answers Professor Gage.
One more question, which is interesting in light of the FBI’s hounding of gays: Was Hoover himself gay? By all appearances, yes.
Professor Gage’s new book, This Land Is Your Land, takes its title from a famous song: Woody Guthrie’s number from 1940. The song was, in part, a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Guthrie was a leftist, a supporter of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
His song is an interesting story, but suffice it to say, here and now: it is part of the American treasury. You know the words:
This land is your land, this land is my land,
From California to the New York Island,
From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf Stream Waters.
This land was made for you and me.
The subtitle, remember, of Professor Gage’s book is “A Road Trip through U.S. History.” That is an American rite, and right, you could say: a road trip. I’ve always wanted to do the Maine-to-California thing. Never have. Beverly Gage has, two or three times.
In this new book, she starts in Revolutionary Philadelphia and winds up at Disneyland, in SoCal.
I tell her, “I think your book belongs in the category of civic education, which has been one of my causes in recent years.”
“Very much so,” she says. “I mean, it’s not civic education in the sense of saying, ‘There are three branches of government, and here’s how they work,’ but it’s civic education in that it prods people to go out and get to know their country.” (I have paraphrased.)
Last year, Yale formed a Committee on Trust in Higher Education. It delved into a number of issues: grade inflation, tuition prices, admission policies, political bias, etc. Professor Gage was a co-chairman of the committee. It issued its report in April.
We talk about this a bit. And I ask her, “If you were czar—if you could wave a wand—what would you do, to improve higher ed?” She would get costs down. And she would get laptops and the like out of the classroom (except where strictly necessary).
Maybe I have typed enough and should let you get on with hearing or watching our podcast. Beverly Gage is an excellent conversationalist and teacher.
