The Camera as a Defensive Weapon

This is Fresh air. I'm David B and Cooley We're heading into the Fourth of July weekend, a time for cookouts, barbecues, parades, and fireworks. Or if you need to escape the heat M We're interrupting our coverage. There has been a threat to publicly release government material Long shhrouded in secrecy Steven Spielberg's latest film, Disclosure Day, is about a rogue cybersecurity expert and a TV meteorologist and their efforts to tell the world about the existence of extraterrestrials It stars Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor We're going to listen to Terry's twenty twenty two interview with Steven Spield Spielberg has directed over thirty movies, including Jaws, ET Close encounters of the Third kind, the Indiana Jones films, The Color Purple, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Lincoln and the recent adaptation of West Side Store His movies have grossed more at the box office than any other filmmaker And as Michael Schulman wrote in the New Yorker, Spielberg has quote shaped nearly half a century of the American popular imagination When Terry spoke with Spielberg, he had released his semi autobiographical film, The Fablem'ans based on his childhood and teenage years. It tells the story in a somewhat fictionalized way of how he fell in love with movies and became a filmmaker The movie also is about tensions in his family during those years and why his parents divorced when he was nineteen Stehven Spielberg, welcome to Fresh Sare. I'm so glad we have this opportunity to talk. I wasn't sure I'd ever have that opportunity to talk with you. And congratulations on this film, which I really enjoyed Let's start with the greatest show on Earth. It's a circus movie with some very disturbing things in it And I'll preface this by saying the first movie I ever saw was twenty thousand Leagues under the seea. and I was probably around six, the same age you were When you saw the Greatest show on Earth. and I walked we walked in late, which people used to do at that time and the first thing I saw was I Douglas wrestling with an octopus underwater, and I was terrified and I begged my mother to just take me home. So tell us about what terrified you about The Greatest Show on Earth, a circus movie directed by Cecil B to Mill. Well, first of all, you know, I sympathize with you Um, I too saw twenty thousand leagues under the sea with James Mason and Kirk Douglas, and Peter Laurie And in that sequence with the giant squid attacking, the Nautilus was terrifying especially because they were cutting the tentacles off with axes and that was pretty gruesome those days. And I remember that. but I was older when I saw that movie, but I was only six years old when I saw And my parents took me to the greatest show on Earth. and they thought it was going to be a great picture having to do with circus clowns and three rings of entertainment and You know, and it was I actually thought they were saying to me We're taking you to a circus because I had never been to a movie before. We had television at home. But I had never been to a motion picture And and I thought what they meant to say was you're going to actually see giraffes and elephants and lions and tigers. And what happened was we waited in line for hours in the freezing winter and then we walked into this big theater with all these seats facing forward And it was not a big top. It wasn't a tent, it was just a structure. I just remember as a kid looking around. And it was all these seats, rememember the color of the seats, they were red And the curtain was red And then suddenly this curtain opens and this big grainy image and color comes up on the screen And I felt very betrayed. My first reaction was You said you were taking me to a circus And and and This movie started playing And I don't know how long it took me to fall in under the spell of the film. And I was enchanted, I remembember just being enchanted by didnn't understand the story, didn't understand what they were saying. But the imagery was amazing But then along came this horrible train crash And the train wreck was terrifying. And I wanted to leave the theater like you did with you know, with twenty thousand leagues and I was knocking on my parents' shoulders. I wanted to I was sinking as low as I could get in the in my seat so as not to see the screen But it was a really terrifying traumatic thing And and it never left me. My first movie was a movie that scared my pants off, and I'll never forget that So in your semi autobiographical film after seeing that movie Sammy, who's your alter ego in the film, starts to recreate what terrified him with Lion old toy trains and you crashing into things And then he starts filming scenes like that Why did you want to recreate something that was most terrifying? Like I wanted to just forget twenty thousand leeaks under the sea, which obviously I haven't done But why did you want to keep creating it Well, you know, I I I don't know because remember I'm a I'm a kid And I think that when I saw that movie for the first time and I had a Lionel electric train set And by actually crashing the train into things and watching the train derail and watching the passenger cars and a couple box cars and the cabse pile up I was able to, I think, intuitively rest back control of my fear And I really think it helped assuage the fear. It helped me get in total control over it So I was the one Uh, caausing something that was going to maybe have a chance to scare other people, but no longer myself. And the idea of taking my dad's little Kodak brownie eight millimeter movie camera and filming it It was only because I kept wrecking the trains, crasing them into things. My dad and mom threatened to take the train set away. so the idea of using a camera to film it, then I could watch the film over and over again and It would essentially, You know, it would calm me down. What else were you afraid of as a child Ething There was nothing that didn't scare me. I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of this horrible New Jersey, this horrible scary a naked tree out the window that looked like it had Tentacles, you know, And it looks see these horrible branches and it looked like arms and long fingers and long fingernails The tree terrified me later as an adult when I wrote pololtergeist, I created a tree out the window that actually comes to life and grabs a kid and starts to suck him into one of its knot holes It's sappy knotholes. and that was a direct steal from that tree out my window that scared me. I was afraid of the dark. I was, you know, I was afraid of small places and I still am today. I'm very claustrophobic I was a fearful kid And my parents didn't quite know what to do with that because my mom was fearless And my dad was extremely stoic about things like this. and no amount of bedside chats could calm me down once the sun's set and I went to bed and my parents turned the lights off and u And the only solace, I guess they had was they allowed the door to my bedroom to be cracked an inch or two. So I had that little comomfort of a hall light coming in. and that was about it Among the things you're famous for is you, movies and TV about World War II including, of course, saving Private Ryan and Schindler's list. I mean, World War I was terrifying, and you depicted one of the most terrifying aspects of it, which was D day in saving Pvate Ryan Do you see that as a continuation of what you did when you were a young boy making littleittle films about things that terrified you, like recreating the train crash scene from Greatest show on Earth Well, you know, there was a lot I was very much in those days when I was, you know, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, being influenced by television And you know, and there were a lot of movies on the Late show. You get the Late showhow, you get the late Late show, you get things called million dollar movie back in Phoenix And I was very influenced by all the war movies they were showing, the John Wayne films like the Fighting SeBes O films like Batan or Back to Batan or Guualo Canal Diary or the Sansa Iwojima and coupled with the fact that my dad was From the greatest generation, he was a veteran of World War II, He fought in the China, Burma, India, the CBI campaign And he was stationed in Karachi, sometimes in Burma and he was in charge of all the planes that would often bomb Japanese bridges And he had a couple missions in the air, but he was so good with electronics. they They sort of grounded him and put him in charge of sort of ground to air communication And my dad told me stories about World War two constantly. So I made eight millimeter war movies, Escape to Nowhere, which I depict in the Fablemen' is an actual movie I made when I was about sixteen years old called Escape to Nowhere And because I was really obsessed with war, I made a World War two,, Air Force movie called Fighter Squadron in Black and White when I was about four years old. And so that just came out of my sort of fascination with what I was watching on television or the stories my dad was telling So when your father told you stories and when his friends who were also veterans told you stories Were there stories about like hereroism about, you know, bonding with with fellow soldiers Or were they stories about the horrors of war Well, you know, sometimes it was the things I was just sort of eavesdropping about. Sometimes my dad would have reunions with other members of his fighter squadron and the four hundred ninetieth squadron. And they'd come over to the house sometimes once every couple of years and there'd be seven or eight guys together. And I'd be wandering in and out of my room or going into the kitchen, but I'd hear some of their stories and talking. And the thing that was most disturbing for me was All of a sudden, a grown man. would fold over sobbing. and my dad and everybody else would surround tap the Pat the person on the back. tryry to get a glass of water and there would be you know, tears from, you know, it's it's unusual when you're a kid and you you hear in your own home adults sobbing. And what they were they were sobbing about, it was only years later that I found out that the PTSD that came out of that war was causing, and that's why it was so healthy for these veterans to get together once every couple of years So when you were growing up, there was still a draft And you when you were of draft age, there was still a draft What did you think? I mean, you're of the Vietnam War generation So when you were eligible before the draft and stood the chance of being sent to Vietnam, whether you wanted to go or not What did you think about the possibility of actually Fighting in a war I was I would never have gone to Canada, but I' tried Everything I could not to be drafted, even though I was subjected to two or three physicals Um, um, I kept taking physicals because they had a draft counselor And the draft councselor had advised me how to delay U you know, I was one A, I was not doing good in college. One A meant that you were like next up on the list. I had I had a student deferment. T us to firman as a lot of us had, most of us had But when my grades dropped below a certain level, my GPA dropped a certain level, I was I lost my two S toerment became one A and was ordered up on my first physical my second physical actually. My first physical I was in I was in high school, a senior in high school turnurned eighteen up in Northern California and I was standing in line in a rainstorm outside to watch Danley Kubrick's Doror Strange Love And I was standing in the Doror Strange Love Live. a line And I hear a horn honwking And I recognize my dad's car and he's parked on the curb right opposite the theater. It was in San Jose And he's waving me over and I run over to the car and I jump in the car and he hands me a letter from the selective service And it was a letter that that was ordering me to report to have my first physical and And I'll tell you the power moovies, Terry, which is really interesting I was terrified. That letter was like a death warrant And my dad was going to drive me home and I said, No, no, no, I got to see this movie. And I had the letter and I put the letter in my back pocket and ran back in line and And I saw the movie and ten minutes into the movie, I forgot that my father had handed me what could have been my death warrant That's what that Kub film did for me. It took my mind off of anything except that story of Armageddon. And and that was another example of just the power of somebody telling me a story Yeah, well, the story that took your mind off having to fight in war was a story about possible nuclear war and all the things that could go wrong and lead to it. So it's funny that was distracting you from the possibility of going to war yourself So so how did you finally get out of being drafted? Well, because something called the lottery was enacted. I was in college at the time And they were announcing the lottery and we all ran to a friend's apartment About fifteen, maybe twenty of us And we turned on the TV and we watched the numbers come out of the drum And my birthday, my number was two hundred and seventy five. So right away, I was off the hook, but suddenly a number would come up for somebody else. It was number nineteen and that person would start screaming and burst into tears and And then another number would come over that we was on the bubble, like one hundred and ten and you didn't know whether that was going to be be the number that sent you to Vietnam. U, But that was quite a day. I'll never forget that So with all the fears that you had about war and fighting in a war and your father's friends occasionally leaning over and sobbing thinking about the war, why did you want to make war movies You know, um I just think I was attracted to the sacrifice and the gallantry W kindind of glorifies heroism and Hollywood glorified warar You know, I knew based on the stories my dad and his friends were telling about World War two that there was no glory in war And it was ugly and it was cruel and it was it was it was it was It was, you know, visually devastating And so I thought someday, if I ever do make a war movie for real, it's got to be something that tells the truth about what those experiences had been for those young seventeen, eighteen, nineteen year old boys storming Omaha Beach, let's say So when I had the opportunity makeake Robert Rodak's script into a movie, saving Private Ryan It can't be a glorification award. It's just going to have to be the low down, dirty truth of what it was like for these young boys Oh, and it's so it's especially for its time, it's so graphic in a way that like The World War Io movies that you grew up with were not. You'd see people kind of you know step on grenades in those movies and their bodies would be thrown into the air, but you didn't see like a severed limb. You didn't see another soldier carrying off a limb. You didn't see people throwing up on the boat, you know, on those little boats heading to the actual beach uid day. you didn't see you know, bloody bodies in the water. You didn't see the true chaos of war. Um, So I guess part of what you wanted to do is really show U the The complete horror. being in a scene like that and the disorientation Yes, I was willing to sacrifice um, the funding that my own company was provided with by financial backers who believed in myself and David Geffin and Jeffrey Katzenberurg when we first formed DreamWorks, it was DreamWorks money. And I was kind of convinced that it was going to lose its shirt, that every single dollar we poured into Ryan Um, the movie cost Wh which now is a bargain with the movie then cost fifty fifty nine million dollars to make in nineteen. Shot it at ninety seven came out in ninety eight Um I just wanted to tell the truth and I didn't think anyone would see that film And I was absolutely surprised that so many people around the world did go to see it You afraid they wouldn't see it because it it was too disturbing I was afraid that the first people who saw it would just say it's too bloody, Don't put yourself through it. I know that you didn't storyboard The Day scene, at least that's what I've read And so a lot of it was kind of figured out on the spot. And I don't know how you do that, how you could do that because there's so much chaos But it needs to be like controlled chaos in a way. You need to know what you're shooting. How did it do How do you improvise? a massive scene like that with explosions and dead bodies and Bodies floating in the water and things blowing up. I mean, there's safety precautions you have to take You have to need you need to know where the camera is and the crew and the actors need to know what they're doing Well, the first thing was I didn't shoot it all in a couple of days. I mean, obviously it took twenty five days. It's a twenty five minute sequence and it took twenty five days to shoot twenty five. min So I was only shooting a minute a day and because I hadn't storyboarded anything But I knew what the mission was. They had to get up the Verville draw to get to the top of Omaha Beach So I decided to shoot the entire sequence in continuity So I began in the Higgins boats. And then we got them out of the Higns boats when they came under an intense fire. We got them behind the Belgian gates, those tank traps, those big crosses in the sand. And we just in real time taking one little segment at a time, we progressed up to beach until on day twenty five, we got to the top And and and so, you know I love improvising scenes. I mean, I love improvising shots.'s what I've done my whole life. It's what I did. I didn't do storyboard when was a kid making eight millimeter movies. And in this sense It allowed the chaos to be chaotic You know, there's he's great uh, u shots that Bob Kappa, the wartime correspondent and brilliant photo journalist had made he was on Omaha Beach when those that first wave landed But unfortunately mayaybe at two hundred or more still photographs he took got ruined in a lab They ruined every single shot except nine And those nine shots really gave me a visual style. I said, if I can get those nine Kappa shots with the blurry, shaky messed up imagery I can make the whole Omahw beach sequence look like the Bob Kappa salvage photos, it might give us a little glimpse into what it was like to actually fight a war like that Steven Spielberg, speaking with Terry Gross in twenty twenty two His newest film is Disclosure Day, now in theaters After a break, will'll continue their conversation And book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Two ships, the latest book by cultural historian David S. Reynolds I'm David Ban Cooly, and this is fresh air This is fresh air. I'm TV C critic David B. Coolley. Let's get back to Terry's twenty twenty two interview with director Steven Spielberg. At the time, he had released his film The Fablemans, based on his early years as a boy and a teenager when he first saw movies and started making Part of your new movie is about, you know growing up Jewish and when you moved to a largely Gentile suburb of California facing anti Semitism at school I know you lost over fifteen relatives in the Holocaust who were you know, relatives who are still in Europe, And your grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors in America And you knew Holocaust survivors who had numbers tattooed on their arms from their days in concentration camps and death camps And you've said that's how you learned to count. That's how you learned math. How did that work? Well, it's not how I learn math. It's how I learn my numbers U it's it's a very kind of perverse version of Sesame Street Where I'd be sitting at these tables. I was just a kid. I was like three years old. It was back in Cincinnati. We didn't move till. We didn't move to New Jersey until I was Probably three, four years old And I just remember sitting around the table and a lot of very, very old people. and these people probably weren't very old. They were probably in their thirties or early forties and they were mainly speaking either Yiddish or they were speaking German or they were speaking Hungarian, mainly Hungarian. And my grandmother would teach them English She was teaching them how to they resettled in this country and they were learning English. My grandmother was their English teacher And was it was she was teaching a class in the Cincinnati House, maybe you know, a large dining room table filled with survivors And one man in particular I kept looking at his numbers, his number tattooed on his forearm and he started you know, when during the dinner break, when everybody was eating and not learning point to the numbers and he would say that is a two and that is a four And then he's saying And this is a age and that's a one And I'll never forget this. And he said And that's a nine. And then he crooked his arm and inverted his arm and said, and see it becomes a six. It's magic. And now it's a nine and now it's a six. And now it's a nine, and now it's a six That's really how I learned my numbers for the first time And the irony of all that and the gift of that lesson Never really dawned on me until I was much older Did you understand at the time that those numbers were basically the ID numbers tattooed on arms The Jews were not humans to the Nazis and they were just going to be worked to death or just you know put in ovens So this is just like the math to keep count of them and identify them. Did you understand the horror of that when you were learning math on their arms? No, I didn't know anything about that. I didn't know who they were And I'm sure You don't sit a three year old kid down and explain the Holocaust to them. There was no way I'd be able to comprehend anything. U it was only years later that I had these recollections and my mom And my grandparents would fill me in with what those days were like. U you said that when you were growing up, you were afraid of everything Once you learned about the Holocaust and realized that you'd been you know, in contact with so many Holocaust survivors Is did the whole idea of the Holocaust terrify you and haunt you and did you worry about Something like that ever happening again You know, the first time I really became, my parents talked a lot about the Holocaust, but it was never called the Holocaust. They never referred to it as the shoa They always called it The great murders, they referred to the Holocaust as the great murders. And as a kid, that's a very dramatic thing to hear, G murders. U Surl U and I what The stories There's only so much a story can do to scare a child But imagery is a powerful powerful kind of bracing way of shocking you into realization of some kind. And they actually wield a sixteen millimeter projector, I believe, into our six or seventh grade classrooms in Phoenix, Arizona. And they showed us a forty five minute or so, maybe an hour long black and white documentary called The Twisted Cross And it was the first time I ever saw imagery death. I had never seen a dead body until that documentary was shown to my class and stacked up like cordwood, you know, And I'll just never forget I I was repulsed and I was I was terrified. and I really when I came home that day told my parents what they had shown us. And that was the first time after all the dinner table discussions about the great murders and who we lost, that was the first time. It was a film that got me really to realize that something had happened that would change you It would change me forever. How did it change you I became obsessed with learning more about it And Schindler's list was the culmination of all of the interest that from the seventh grade, I had just been obsessed with it. Nothing was being taught, nothing was being shown. There were no movies made of it. And it was just and not a lot was being written about the Holocaust either We didn't have access to the books that had been written, you? And so it was not until I was really in my, I would say thirties that there was more and more written about the Holocaust and I started reading everything I could. Steven Spielberg speaking with Terry Gross in twenty twenty two. His film The Fableman' is based on his life and his early love of movies and also his family life This is fresh air. This is fresh air. Let's get back to Terry's twenty two interview with Steven Spelberg His film from that year, The Felmans, is based on the story of how he became obsessed with watching movies then making them When he was a boy. It's also a story focused on his family and on his parents' divorce In the movie, you learn and I won't say how you learn this, but you learn that your mother has been having an affair and is in love with your father's best friend who's also on his on his team at work And you think of him as your uncle And it's very disturbing when you find out that he is in love with your mother and your mother's in love with him and then your mother you know, leaves leaves your father to be this other man And it was similar in your life. How did you learn, if I may ask, that your mother was you know, romantically involved with the person you thought of as an uncle You know, I learned it at a very young age when I was sixteen. And uh and I learned it becauseuse of anything I observe with my with my naked eyes It was something that I could only see on film. And And I don't want to go into too much detail about it because it's sort of the turning point of the story. but just to say that that you know, I had always looked at my mom and my dad as my parents. My mom is my mom Um But after this I had a secret And I had a secret between myself and my mother And you know no kid should ever be allowed to hold that kind of information secret. But I did. as my mom wanted me to. And And at the same time, I went from looking at my mother as a parent and I started seeing her as a person for the first time almost in a way as as a peer because we we, you know, we both had secrets and And it was a powerful It was a powerful loot of responsibility just to to not say to anyone, especially my father, what I had discovered That was a very painful part of my life I can imagine When your parents divorced, though, you blamed your father. for the divorce. and I guess I don't understand why you blamed your father. knowing that your mother was in love with someone else I think I blame my dad because my dad went to great lengths to make it safe for my mom to move back to Arizona and start a new life by basically falling on the sword and telling all of us that it was his decision to separate and it was his decision to divorce and he he he He basically gave up the truth to protect my mom who was very fragile even though she was an adventurer, had a huge adventurous personality. And always we always saw her as Peter Pan, know, the kid that never wanted to grow up and she sort of saw herself that way and I think my mom lived a lot of childhoods in her ninety seven years But my dad knew that about her and wanted to protect her and let her have that childhood in adult in her adult you know, time And I think that was the greatest sacrifice and that showed how much my dad so deeply loved her. So he made this like self sacrificing act. by taking the blame for the divorce And you believe that, and you were estranged from him for years, right Well, yeah, when I say a strange is a strong word. I always talk to my dad. We talked, you know, but we talked on my birthday or we talked when I was having a movie premiere and he would come to the premiere, but we were not close any longer. We didn't spend time with each other We didn't visit each other at home and have long talks. U that was that was suspended for I would say, about fifteen years That's heartbreaking. I mean, that could have been avoided. You know like You both knew about your mother's other relationship and you were both keeping it secret from each other. You both knew and you wouldn't share it with each other Um I don't know. it's you know, for, you know, making this movie forty million dollars of therapy and turn turning my story into a motion picture is never going help me assuage my guilt about how I separated emotionally from my dad for all those years My dad and I made up for it And my dad lived to one hundred and three and a half years old. than God because it gave us so many more years together in in a kind of communion of closeness and and humor and involving each other in our in our interests and We really, really made up for those that those gap years And your mother never stepped in and said it was really M H Oh no, she did later she confessed that to I mean later, of course she did When I was growown up and She had the restaurant. We talked we would talk about it all the time You're in the Fable Mens U teenage version of your alter ego mix a film of the annual school beach party in nineteen sixty four and shows it at the prom. And one of the kids in the film is actually depicted in a very florified way so angry with the young filmmaker because he doesn't like how he's depicted. He thinks I'm not really that person Was there a moment in your life when you realized that being behind the camera gave you the power. to portray somebody as you know, an almost like mythical godlike figure or to kind of take them down a few notches. Well, you know, the camera isn't just a tool to you know, through which to tell a story or by which to tell a story, a camera is could be a defensive weapon. And I think I was so sort of ostracized in that last year of high school that the camera became my defensive weapon and, um And just as the camera had made some pretty scary discoveries for me as I was growing up with it It also, I used it to my advantage to to just try to get debate of my existence in high school this bully simply to say You know, good job. Hey, I liked I likeed put you shot, you know Um,, you know, and what really took place I couldn't and to the day can't figure out why that happened because I never got to know him that well. and caus such a surprising reaction to my glorifying him, whereas he didn't think I was glorifying him. And so I'll never know really, we in our movie we make some we basically try to explain it. But in real life, it was never explained to me. You know, it just shows that sometimes it's more interesting not to show something to try to explain it deeply and make all ends meet and make everything you know, come out logical for an audience at the end. sometometimes, you know, there's no logic to the choices and the emotional reactions people have to things. You just have to I just felt I had to tell it the way it happened to me You mentioned the scary discoveries that you made through Shooting movies, can you mention what There's many different discoveries, but one of the discoveries that happens all the time. is that u And this is about acting. is that what looks subtle to the eye When I'm standing next to the camera and watching actors engaging ins seene study as the cameras are turning And what you see as the eye with your eye And you think it's subtle and you think it's perfect, When you see it back on film, everything is louder bigger than life on the screen. And I learned from a very early age directing television TV show I directed. was when I was twenty two years old. And I made a lot of mistakes byjust trusting My evaluation of performance on on a set And then realizing that, oh my goodness, I let my actors all go too far. How come it's louder on the screen when it seemed perfectly natural on the day And that is it took me years to figure out how to modulate performances So the The actors would be at a level that I was seeking Stehven Spielberg, thank you so much and continue to make movies that give us so much pleasure and also pain Thanks, Terry. This is a pleasure for me Steven Spielberg, speaking to Terry Gross in twenty twenty two His newest movie, Disclosure Day, which revisits the themes he tapped decades ago in close encounters of the Third kind and ET the Eraterrestrial is now in theaters comoming up Maing Corrigan reviews T ships, a book offering conflicting versions of American identity This is fresh air This is fresh air Award winning cultural historian David S. Reynolds is the author of books about Walt Whitman, John Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln H latest book two ships focuses not on a person But on the forgotten legacy of a powerful metaphor book critic Maureen Corrgan has this review just in time for a contentious two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the United States of America. Historian David S. Reynolds's latest book two ships helps us realize that any country that couldn't agree on its own origin story destined for divisive times Two ships is about the complicated conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the pilgrims to Plymouth in sixteen twenty and the White lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier Bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia As Reynolds demonstrates, It's not so much the facts of these two voyages as it is the meanings ascribed to them that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity To simplify, the Mayflower's passengers were separatist puritans Dsenters to the reign of the English king James I As the United States develops The Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New worldorld O in which all men, in theory at least were equal before God In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were royalists, also known as cavaliers Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy The meaning of the images of the two ships shifted, depending on who was invoking them and when Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War In abolitionist speeches and writings, the white lion or the slave shhip, as it was commonly called was condemned for infecting America with the plaguepot of slavery Reynolds says that Frederick Douglas resorted to the two ships metaphor frequently while Lincoln avoided it preserve a unified ship of state Meanwhile, southern descendants of cavaliers invoke the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance cruel persecuting character of the Puritans. comment that resonates for our own times. Reynolds says It didn't matter to the South that by the mid nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations A few of which resembble the faith of the Plymouth colonists Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias For southerners, the Mayflower had brought puritanism which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism Now a threat to the Union In a brief but fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction Reynolds observes that the South's fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne's anti Puritan novel, The Scarlett Letter And even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott bolstered its nostalgia for a largely imagined feudal society Reynolds quotes the always quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scotts as saying that Scott did measureless harm more real and lasting harm, perhaps any other individual that ever wrote Two ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the eighteen nineties, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again Southern and Northern whites feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce By the later twentieth century image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into pilgrim hats and black Friday sales. powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist Seven years ago, however, the sixteen nineteen project piloted the White lion The slave ship into view ored it at the center of debates about slavery's place in the national story. The sixteen nineteen project has been faulted for its historiography And it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds book Dill It seems too momentous a reappearance of the White lion not to at least acknowledge in this book. Criticism noted I think reading two ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular fourth of July It's wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood, and often flattened each other into stereotypes O as Ernest Hemingway One of the Mayflower pilgrims's more cynical descendants might say in response to that sentiment Isn't it pretty to think so Maureen Corggan is a professor of Literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Two Ships by David S. Reynolds On Monday show Writer Rachel Lviv spent years reporting stories about other people's mothers and daughters Then she became a mother herself to her own work and saw everything she'd missed. One story she'd told, as a daughter who vanished, she saw again as a mother who never stopped searching. Join us We'll close with this recording of Marvin Gay performing the Star Spangled banner on national television for the NBA All Star game in nineteen eighty three Most likely, you'll be hearing a lot of performers singing this song this weekend. But not many that will top this version Happy fourourth of July and for the country Happy two hundred fiftieth birth. For Terry Gross and Tanya Moseley, I'm David B and Cle They And you see O the door. What so bd We h at the twine Let please. St stripes Th the perarilous by W Wh Y gallery is S No M go W