Interview with Geoffrey Ward

Geoffrey Ward, historian and author, has written over a dozen books and has seven Emmys as a result of his writing for documentaries. Ward is a long-time collaborator with Ken Burns. This fall, PBS will premiere Ken Burns’ new six-part documentary The American Revolution. In November, The American Revolution: An Intimate History, co-written by Burns and Ward, will be published by Penguin Random House.

Much of your work is connected to Ken Burns and his documentaries. Does working in that way change your approach to your work or is it really a matter of a different audience, or even reaching the same audience differently?  

Certainly the objective is the same – to keep the reader or the viewer interested and entertained. Both require a lot of reading, and each demands the same kind of compression to keep things moving along. (Scripts call for more compression, of course, but the amount of background reading isn’t all that different.) 

For a number of years, you were the editor of American Heritage magazine. Why is history for the public/general audience so important to you? Why do you think so many academic historians struggle to work in that arena?

I suppose the central difference between academic historians and most of the rest of us is that academics often focus on making a case while we’re most interested in narrative. Both require very much the same kind of research.  I wish there were less tension between the two groups. No independent historian can do an adequate job without drawing upon the work of academics. I wish academics wrote less for their colleagues and more for ordinary people who share their interest in the past.

So many of your books, and the Ken Burns films, wrestle with American history and what it means to be American. How would you describe the American experiment?

The American experiment is an experiment. The results are always in doubt. Democracy requires tending.

What do you think Americans get wrong about ourselves? What do we misunderstand about our past or our present? What do we overvalue and undervalue?

Thanks both to Ken and to my own fascination with biography I’ve been privileged to bring the lives of all sorts of Americans to a wide audience – from Eleanor Roosevelt to Louis Armstrong, Ernest Hemingway to Susan B. Anthony. All of them were remarkable people, and all of them were also remarkably human. Understanding their failings should make us admire their achievements all the more.

It was foolish to revere our ancestors, as we once almost universally did. But it is just as foolish to patronize them, as too many of us do now. Knowing little about them as individual men and women, lacking any real understanding of the world in which they lived, Americans too often think of them as having been somehow simpler, more innocent, than our presumably sophisticated selves. 

We forget that neither times nor people were ever simple. They only seem that way because we know how at least some things turned out. 

Seeing our forebears whole -- as both bold and devious, brave and fearful, enlightened and ignorant, defeated and victorious -- should reassure, not frighten us. After all, to know them and what they did is to begin to know ourselves and see what we might do. 

If there is a utilitarian use for history, that’s it, at least for me.

You’ve written many books, on many different topics, how is it that you can have such range? So many people have such a narrow historical focus, what is different about your approach or philosophy?

Hard for me to answer this. I’ve just always been curious about a lot of things. I’ve looked into some on my own, and Ken has kindly made it possible to look into a lot more. 

I read your book A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States (2012), about your relative Ferdinand Ward, who conned many people out of a great deal of money (including Ulysses S. Grant). What was it like writing that book? Did it feel like an entirely different project compared to others without a family connection? Or because the events took place so long ago, did it not feel very personal?

People sometimes ask me whether it was especially difficult to write about a less than admirable ancestor. It wasn’t. My great grandfather was a sociopath who stole millions, ruined US Grant, betrayed his wife, kidnapped his son – and blamed others for all of it. I suppose it would have been tougher if he’d had some redeeming quality or somehow had been wronged, but he didn’t, and he hadn’t been, and I was fascinated just trying to figure out how he functioned.

Isaiah Berlin famously classified thinkers into the categories of hedgehog and fox. The hedgehog knows one thing, the fox knows many things. Do you consider yourself more of a hedgehog or a fox?

 Neither I guess, maybe a badger.

 What is your favorite topic in history?

 My favorite topic is whatever I happen to be working on. The Franklin Roosevelt era clearly attracts me and I’ve written or edited four books about him and his times. But I’ve loved looking into all of the subjects I’ve dealt with  – even baseball, about which I knew precisely zero when I started on that series and the book that followed. 

What do you think is the future of history? Where do you see the discipline/the study of the past going?

Predicting is not my strength but my hope is that academic and independent history will come closer together, not move farther apart. Fresh scholarship is essential. So is accurate, responsible story-telling if Americans are to better understand their past.

Who are your intellectual heroes? Who do you love reading?

There too many to list. But I will forever be grateful to two historians whose life-long passion for the subject and extraordinary generosity of spirit have meant the world to me: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who welcomed me into the Rooseveltian world when I  really didn’t yet belong there, and the late Bill Leuchtenberg, whose genial omniscience about American history helped carry Ken and me through forty-odd years of trying to get the story right.

You went to Oberlin and studied art as an undergraduate. How important is a liberal arts background, or at least studying a diverse range of things or having a diverse range of interests?

The more you know the better you are at whatever you do. I was an art major at Oberlin, hoping for a career as a painter. I wisely abandoned that goal early on, but it left me with a fascination with the look of the past that has stood me in good stead, both in books and on the screen.

And lastly, how do you get the work done? What is your process? Do you have recommendations for aspiring writers and historians?

My “process” is pretty simple. Read until you can read no more. Write something every day. I don’t do outlines because I’m afraid, in trying to adhere to them, I’ll skip stuff I should see. Somehow, the story begins to tell itself. Stick to chronology: You don’t know what will happen on Tuesday; neither did your characters.

Photo credit: Diane Raines Ward

Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice