The Greater Journey: A Review
08.19.22
When asked how he chose subjects for his historical epics, David McCullough got personal: “It’s like picking a roommate,” he said, explaining why he passed on Pablo Picasso. “After all, you’re going to be with that person every day, maybe for years, and why subject yourself to someone you have no respect for or outright don’t like?”
A literary giant and public intellectual for over half a century, McCullough is remembered by many as the “greatest historical author of the generation,” a democratizing force who saw the best in all things Americana and who singlehandedly managed to revive American history for millions of devoted readers. “No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read,” he once preached.
This week, to honor his passing on August 7th, 2022, and to remember the time-worn tradition of Americans visiting Paris during the dog days of summer, we reviewed his work The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. The book covers a seventy-year period (1830 to 1900) including the Belle Époque, a time when Paris reigned as the international center of cultural, artistic, and technical knowledge. “It is in Paris that the beating of Europe’s heart is felt. Paris is the city of cities,” wrote Victor Hugo, begging the Prussians not to sack the city during the Siege of 1870. “There has been an Athens, there has been a Rome, and there is a Paris…”
For this journey, McCullough’s chosen subjects are the first generation of Americans who migrated to Paris in search of the promised land; a group of artists, writers, architects, doctors, and intellectuals who turned to the City of Lights to bring cultural excellence back to their own young and ambitious homeland. While not all were seduced by Francophilia (Mark Twain famously skewered Parisians in his classic, The Innocents Abroad. The women, he concluded, were the great disappointment of all: “You could tell by their looks that they ate garlic and onions.”), dozens of other luminaries, including Samuel Morse, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and Charles Sumner, found that Paris served “as a dreamland.”
American Art, Literature, and Invention Arrives
“The thought of going abroad makes my heart leap. I feel, when I commune with myself about it, as when dwelling on the countenance and voice of a lovely girl. I am in love with Europa.”
— Charles Sumner, American statesman
One of the more interesting relationships chronicled by McCullough was the lifelong friendship between James Fennimore Cooper and Samuel Morse. Together, they changed the course of history, upsetting European expectations for American art, literature, and innovation, all while altering the pace of modern communications forever.
Cooper, a Yale dropout whose original career ambitions consisted of gentleman farming, was forced to take up the pen at age thirty after discovering his father’s numerous debts. Faced with bankruptcy, he quickly pounded out a succession of adventure tales, including The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans. By the time he arrived in France in 1826, his historical romances had achieved international acclaim, making Cooper America’s most famed novelist. “The people seem to think it marvelous that an American can write,” complained Cooper. “Most of them appeared ignorant that any book had ever been published in America, ‘except by Dr. Franklin and M. Cooper Américain, as they call me.”
Morse, the son of an orthodox Calvinist preacher and a woman whose motto was, “The main business of life is to prepare for death,” was the more sober and industrious of the two. Intent on becoming a master American painter, Morse became a “cultural evangelical” set on “bring[ing] the good news of time-honored European art home to his own people, for their benefit and for the betterment of his country.” His first international break came when he was chosen by the city of New York to paint a full-length portrait of Lafayette, the French hero of the Revolutionary War. Despite Lafayette’s “advancing age” and unfortunate features (Morse was warned that “the jowls seemed to have taken over,”) he managed to put together a “noble” portrait that all parties were pleased with.
His next project — The Gallery of the Louvre, which compiled nearly forty of the Old World’s masterworks into one 6’x9’ panoramic portrait — was intended as his magnum opus, an enterprise that would require a year’s worth of toil, six-days-a-week (Cooper, meanwhile, quit work at one, only to scamper off to the Louvre and spend the rest of the day watching Morse paint). Sadly, the American public had little interest in the final product, and the painting was a commercial failure. After yet another career setback shortly afterwards, Morse quit painting entirely. “Painting has been a smiling mistress to many, but she has been cruel to me,” he wrote to Cooper. “I did not abandon her, she abandoned me.”
Instead, Morse set his sights to science and his dreams of an electromagnetic telegraph. Inspired by a system used outside Paris to send overland messages by telescope, Morse put his Calvinist work ethic to invention, devising a “strange, almost ludicrous-looking assembly” of wooden drums, wheels, wires, an electromagnet, and battery. The result was so embarrassing that he was “reluctant to have it seen.” Cooper, meanwhile, watched from the sidelines in horror. “I confess I thought the notion evidently chimerical, and as such spoke of it in my family,” Cooper later told Morse. “I always set you down as a sober-minded, common-sense sort of fellow, and thought it a high flight for a painter to make to go off on the wings of the lightning.”
Still, five years later, after Morse had solved his initial problems of insufficient voltage and distance, the Committee on Commerce funded a fifty-mile test of the telegraph. Inspired by the results, Morse went on to open a telegraph line — built with Congressional funds — between Washington and Baltimore, a distance of thirty-four miles. In July of 1844, Morse sent a message from the Bible to his financial partner Alfred Vail in Baltimore: “What hath God wrought!”
A few days later, interest in the device reached a fever pitch after news from the deadlocked Democratic National Convention was delivered to Washington instantaneously. “This is indeed the annihilation of space,” concluded Galignani’s Messenger in Paris. The American patent commissioner, Henry Ellsworth, presciently predicted that “another revolution is at hand.” “I do not doubt that within the next ten years, you will see electric power adopted between all commercial points of magnitude on both sides of the Atlantic, for purposes of correspondence,” he wrote. “The extremities of nations will be literally wired together.”
Within two decades, 50,000 miles of Western Union wire carried more than 2 million news dispatches a year. And, best of all, Morse, at the age of sixty-seven, finally attained the acclaim and renumeration he had longed for: in 1858, after the laying of the Atlantic Cable — an event that would change transatlantic communication forever — Morse was awarded a sum of 400,000 francs (approximately $80,000) by the governments of Europe (led by France) to honor his status as a “benefactor of mankind.”
The Medicals: Reforming American Medicine
“We live indeed in darkness … I believe that we admit many things in America as axioms, which are very far from being proved. We have too long believed that because demonstration on many points was impossible in medicine, it was not worthwhile to study it like an exact science. It is a very false position.”
— James Jackson Jr., American medical student, Paris, 1933
McCullough attributes the migration of physicians — wherein ambitious young American students traveled to Paris, the “medical mecca” of the world — with transforming the American medical landscape from a colonial backwater dominated by quacks into the “gold standard” of international medical education that it remains today.
“The medical practice in America was pathetic, it was primitive,” explained McCullough. “There were no schools of medicine. You became a doctor by being taught by another doctor.” And most doctors were little more than “rural dispenser[s] of pills and powders,” according to one practitioner. France surpassed America in terms of number of patients, students, hospitals, and educational accessibility. The École de Médecine, a “showpiece of French education,” was free to all qualified young men (including foreigners). Enrollment at the École alone reached 5,000 students — approximately twice the number of students enrolled in every American medical school combined.
But McCullough also points to a number of cultural differences that materially impacted the quality of French medical education: 1) physicians’ treatment of women and 2) their public policies towards the dead. “Students making the rounds of the wards in the hospitals of Paris had ample opportunity to examine female patients as well as men,” writes McCullough. “This was not the case in America, where most women would have preferred to die than have a physician — a man — examine their bodies.” Indeed, “a great many American women did die,” since most physicians lacked even a rudimentary understanding of their basic anatomy.
Paris, meanwhile, trained midwives inside the cloistered walls of La Maternité, the world’s foremost maternity hospital. As one astonished Philadelphia surgeon observed, “The French woman … knows nothing at all of this queasy sensibility. She has no hesitation, not only to describe, but to permit her physician to see every complaint.” He continued: “In this respect, therefore, the Paris educated physician enjoys superior advantages to the homebred man.”
Another advantage was the widespread availability of cadavers. In the United States, innovative medical students — particularly in the North — were forced to become grave robbers or pay extortionary rates should they hope to obtain a cadaver for medical study. Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Illinois, and Tennessee all enacted draconian laws towards dissection, permitting “only the use of corpses buried at public expense,” aka prisoners or slaves (with the consent of slave owners).
In Paris, cadavers were treated as yet another commodity. One medical student, who lived near the hospitals, remembered watching carts deliver cadavers to the dissecting rooms. “[Carts] arrive and dump a dozen or so of naked men and women, as you do a cord of wood upon the pavement,” he wrote. Thanks to the trifecta of disease, poverty, and fatal surgeries, cadavers were “readily available and cheap — about 6 francs for an adult, or $2.50, and still less for a child.” The remains, once practiced on, were fed to caged dogs.
Still, despite their superior skillset when it came to surgery or anatomy, some found the “surgical prima donnas” lacking in basic humanity towards their patients. Their callousness towards bodies extended to the living as well as the dead. One celebrity doctor, Guillaume Dupuytren, “[thought] nothing of striking his patient or abusing him most harshly,” if his orders were not immediately obeyed. “A very favorite practice of his during his consultation is to make a handle of the noses of his patients,” observed a shadowing student. “Whenever a man enters with any disease of the head, he is immediately seized by the nose and pulled down onto his knees.”
The Americans, it seemed, held the advantage with treating the patient first, disease second. “While medicine is your chief aim, remember that I want you to see all you can of art and music,” wrote Henry Bowditch, a prominent American physician, to his son. “I often think I have done more good to some poor, weary patients by sitting down and telling them of a delightful European experience than by all the drugs I have ever poured down their throats.”
A Cultural Debt Repaid
Despite the huge cultural debts accumulated by Americans during the seventy-year timeline, Parisians, too, felt that Americans had their own cultural lessons to impart by the end of the period. After decades of political unrest, which included the toppling of Louis Phillippe’s monarchy, the onset of the Franco-Prussian War, and the unbridled brutality of the Paris Commune (all of which destroyed many of their cultural wonders), the French looked to the New World for political hope.
“For those whose faith in the ideal of a republican form of government held firm, America remained the shining example,” wrote McCullough. “Indeed, one group of the faithful had conceived the idea of creating an unprecedented gift from France to the United States, to coincide with the approaching centennial of American Independence in 1876.” That gift was Lady Liberty, a colossal statue that reached 151 feet above street level. “She was a startling spectacle even to Parisians accustomed to spectacles,” concluded McCullough.
The Americans — despite their provincial outlook, repressed sensibilities, and appalling dress — had found something priceless of their own to offer. The American, Nathanial Willis concluded, was always distinguishable by “the independent, self-possessed bearing of a man unused to look upon anyone as his superior in rank, united to the inquisitive, sensitive, communicative expressive which is the index to our national character.”
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