Stories > Facts

“The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over.” - Cormac McCarthy

There’s an interesting quality about every one of my favorite historians.

I rarely enjoy their work because of the quality of their research, the integrity of their facts, or the novelty of the perspectives they present.

My attraction to their work is almost always a function of their ability as storytellers.

They weave elements of writing normally associated with fiction into their accounts of history: elements of character, plot, pacing, and place are regular features of my favorite history books, in sharp contrast to many historians who fixate on the proper, sequential recitation of facts as the paramount aim of their books.

And I don’t think this is unique to me.

The most widely and highly regarded historians of all time were all excellent storytellers because stories are the medium by which people communicate. They are the medium by which we relate to one another. The medium by which we come to understand our sense of identity. And the medium by which we attempt to change one another’s minds.

People are rarely moved by facts or figures - they are moved by stories.

I’ve written about Robert Caro before and I will surely write about him again because he is such an endless source of fascination to me.

This is a man who dedicated his life to writing six books about two men: one about Robert Moses and five about Lyndon Johnson, each of which take around a decade to write.¹

While Caro is best known for the extent of his research (he moved from New York to the Texas hill country to better understand Lyndon Johnson and he still intends to move to Vietnam to better understand the setting of the Vietnam War) I think what I love most about Caro is his ability to portray vivid scenes and characters, much like a novelist.²³

Caro doesn’t want to hold his readers hand and spell out what they should take away from his writing.

He wants the reader to see the scenes for themselves and truly understand the motives or behavior of his subjects. He doesn’t want to tell you that Johnson came from a poor background that motivated him throughout his life, that would simply be a recitation of the facts.

Caro wants you to see and feel the desperation and determination that was born of a youth full of poverty and humiliation. That is Johnson’s story.

“Lyndon Johnson had seen firsthand the cost of wishful thinking, of hearing what one wants to hear, of failing to look squarely at reality, when his father, that “man of great optimism” sentimentally attached to the old Johnson Ranch, purchased it for a price higher than was justified by the hard financial facts. Lyndon Johnson had felt firsthand the consequences of romance and sentiment every time the reins of the fresno⁵ bit into his back. And Lyndon Johnson had been a master of the vote-counting art for a long time. Of all the aspects of his political talent that had impressed the group of fast-rising young liberal pragmatists of which, as a young congressman, he had been a member, none had impressed them more than this ability.”⁴⁶

Caro’s insistence on making his reader see and feel his subjects means that he will spend time in the places where his subjects spent time.

He will spend a night in the Texas hill country to gain an adequate appreciation of its loneliness so he can make his reader feel that sensation through his writing. He will sit in the Senate chamber for hours so he can feel the regal sense of history and responsibility that the place conveys and gain a proper ability to show that to his reader.

None of these actions are necessary to get the facts of Lyndon Johnson and his life. But they are absolutely necessary to tell the story of Johnson.

Caro’s subject, Lyndon Johnson, also understood the importance of storytelling.

While Johnson was not a particularly well educated man, in the traditional sense of the term, he was an excellent reader and manipulator of men. And one of his most powerful methods of manipulation was storytelling.

When Johnson attempted to pass the Civil Rights bill he used stories to sway the votes of the powerful and independent minded senators whose support he needed.

While hearing statistics such as the fact that in 1957 (almost a century after the Emancipation Proclamation), only 1.2 million of the 6 million black citizens in the 11 Southern states were registered to vote, may not have swayed their opinions, Johnson’s stories of teaching poor Mexican children in South Texas pulled the heart strings of the Senators.

And Johnson’s tug at their heart strings in turn made the senators pull the strings of power in Washington to enact change.

In important ways, it was Johnson’s ability as a storyteller that gave him the power to achieve his righteous political aims for civil rights of which Caro later said “It was Abraham Lincoln who struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American life.”

When Ken Burns’ The Civil War documentary series first aired on PBS it was met with the eager attention of millions of Americans.

The series had so many viewers because of the narrative style it introduced to a subject matter that was the crossroads for our nation. The point at which we, inarguably, became something that we were not before. In the words of Burns, the Civil War “insured the fact, in the most excruciatingly painful paradoxical way, that in order to become one, a nation, we had to tear ourselves in two.” Before the war we were a confederation of states. After the war we became a country.

And while that sacred history had, in preceding decades, been reduced down to a series of facts and names assigned and memorized in history classes, Burns’ documentary uniquely brought to life that history through the use of photography, music, and voice narration from the likes of Morgan Freeman.

It showed us that the people who fought in the Civil War 125+ years earlier were just like us, full of desires, dreams, and fears. Both driven by ideals yet deeply flawed. Both conscious of what was at stake yet unaware of how great the country that their bloodshed would birth could become. Both regular soldiers and god-like generals portrayed with the flaws and virtues of their personas.

These weren’t blots of ink in a textbook, they were tragic, heroic, and contradictory figures whose triumphs and defeats each contributed to the righteous path our country embarked upon after the war.

Burns recognized that our historical inheritance as a country was worth preserving and in order to be preserved it had to be popularized and in order to be popularized it had to be relayed through the medium of story. Not the medium of memorized facts, names, and dates.

Burns told The New Times “Academia has essentially run history for the last century, and academia has taken away the idea that the word ‘history’ is most made up of one word ‘story’”.

One of the focal points of Burns’ Civil War series is a Mississippian named Shelby Foote whose The Civil War: A Narrative trilogy became a smash hit after the popularity of the documentary series. Foote litters the documentary with colorful stories of the Civil War and the impact it had on our country and its people.

The interesting thing about Foote’s prominent inclusion is that he is a novelist first and a historian second.

He only began writing The Civil War: A Narrative after finishing his 5th novel and only intended to do a single volume. Those intentions gave way to a herculean undertaking that consumed his waking hours for 20 years and resulted in over 1.2 million words by the time he finished in 1974.

Along with Burns’ documentary, Foote’s trilogy is one of the most popular vehicles through which Americans come to understand the war, much to the chagrin of professional historians who detest aspects of Foote’s writing like his refusal to add citations. Foote refused to include citations because he felt it would detract from the story, and a story is ultimately what he wanted to tell.

Like Caro and Burns, Foote believed that the academics had much to learn from the novelist - “I think a historian and a novelist are doing the same thing except one of them gets his facts out of documents and the other gets his facts out of his head. They both have an enormous respect for the facts. But the novelist knows how to handle them, to put the juice in there, not falsely, but the real thing. And the historian thinks you’re wasting your time if you try to write well.”

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If words are written but no one reads them, are they meaningful?

Morgan Housel summarized this idea perfectly when he said “Understanding that Ken Burns is more popular than history textbooks because facts don’t have any meaning unless people pay attention to them and people pay attention to, and remember, good stories.”

The greatest historians are the greatest storytellers because it is the ability to weave the past into stories that makes their work resonate with us.

Robert Caro said that above all he wants his books to endure. The sensation of winning the Pulitzer Price, for him, pales in comparison to the thrill he gets when he hears his books are being taught in a classroom to the next generation of Americans.

Caro once told Richard Heffner, “If you want a work of non-fiction to endure, it must be written… the prose, the rhythms, the narrative style, le mot juste, that finding the right word must be at the same level as a work of fiction.”

In other words, to endure it must be a story.

1  The Power Broker took seven years, The Path to Power took six years, Means of Ascent took eight years, Master of the Senate took 12 years, The Passage of Power took 10 years, and Caro has been at work on the fifth volume since 2012.

2  For more on Caro and his process, check out his book Working.

3  Both Caro and Shelby Foote insist not only on going to the places where the events they write about occurred, but going at the same time of day and year to fully grasp the sense of the place.

4  This scene is from Master of the Senate. Another one of my favorite scenes is from the perspective of one of Johnson’s former classmates in The Path to Power: “Twenty-five years later, Vernon Whiteside, a tourist in Washington, was sitting in the visitors’ gallery of the Senate of the United States when, below him, the doors of the Senate cloakroom swung open, and the Senate’s Majority Leader walked into the Chamber. As he began restlessly roaming the floor, a few of the more knowledgeable tourists nudged each other and whispered as the tall man, talking to each Senator, draped a long arm around his shoulder, seized his lapel and bent into his face, eye to eye, for they recognized these characteristics from articles in newspapers and magazines. Whiteside recognized the characteristics, too, but not from an article. The man gripping lapels and peering into eyes was a heavy man, clad in a suit of rich fabric, and he was grabbing and peering in a setting grave and noble, but so familiar were the gestures to Whiteside that these differences faded away, and he was seeing again a scene he had seen before - many times before - on a dusty campus on a hill in San Marcos, Texas. ‘To me, he was just like he was,’ Whiteside says. ‘He was the same Lyndon Johnson he always was, exactly.’”

5  A Fresno is a machine used to pave roads. The harness painfully digs into the body of the wielder. Johnson had to use one because of the dire financial conditions his father committed their family to when he attempted to restore the Johnson ranch using large amounts of debt financing.

6  Johnson is a great vote-counter because he see’s reality for what it is, not what he wants it to be, unlike his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son.