Steven Spielberg

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“Or, if you need to escape the heat, moves.”

We are interrupting our coverage. There has been a threat to publicly release government material, long shrouded in secrecy. Steven Spielberg's latest film, Disclosure Day, is about a rogue cyber security expert and a TV meteorologist and their efforts to tell the world about the existence of extraterrestrials. It stars Emily Blunt and Joshua Conner.

We're going to listen to Terry's 2022 interview with Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg has directed over 30 movies, including Jaws, E.T., closing counters 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 Story. His movies have grossed more at the box office than any other filmmaker. And as Michael Schillman wrote in the New Yorker, Spielberg has, quote, "shape nearly half a century of the American popular imagination," unquote.

When Terry spoke with Spielberg, he had released his semi-autobiographical film The Fablemons, 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 19. Steven Spielberg, welcome to Fresh Share. 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 20,000 leads under the sea, 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 Kirk Douglas wrestling with an octopus under water, 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 Bittemell. Well, first of all, I sympathized with you.

I too saw 20,000 leads under the sea with James Mason and Kirk Douglas and Peter Lorry. And that sequence with the giant squid attacking, the novelist was terrifying, especially because they were cutting the tentacles off with axes, and that was pretty gruesome of things.

“I remember that, but I was older when I saw that movie, but I was only six years old when”

I saw 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 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 I thought what they meant to say was you're going to actually see drafts 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 there 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. Remember the color of the seats. They were red, and the curtain was red. And then suddenly this curtain opens, and this big, great, imaging 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 this movie started playing, and I don't know how long it took me to fall under the spell of the film, and I was enchanted.

“I remember just being enchanted by, didn'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 20,000 leagues, and I was knocking on my parent's shoulders. I wanted to get.

I was sinking as low as I could get in my seat, so as not to see the screen.

But it was a really terrifying, traumatic thing, and it never left me.

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 Lionel toy trains, and 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 20,000 leagues under the sea, which obviously I haven't

done, but why did you want to keep creating it?

“Well, I don't know, because remember, 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 a caboose pile up, I was able to, I think, intuitively, rest back control of my fear, and I really think it helped to swage the fear, it helped me get in total control over it. So I was the one causing 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 codac, brownie, 8mm movie camera, and filming it was only because I kept wrecking the trains, crashing

them into things, and 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 call me down. Everything, there was nothing to disrespect, I was afraid of everything, I was afraid of this horrible new jersey, this horrible scary naked tree out the window that looked like it had tentacles, you know, and it looks like these horrible branches, and it looked like arms and long fingers and long fingernails, and the tree terrified me. Later, as an adult,

when I wrote poltergeist, I created a tree out the window that actually comes the life and grabs a kid and starts to suck them into one of its not holes. It's sapy not holes, and that was a direct steel from that tree out my window that scared me, I was afraid of the dark, I was, you know, I was, I was afraid of small places, and I still am today, I'm very claustrophobic,

“but 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 sat, and I went to bed, and my parents turned the lights off, and the only solace, I guess I had, was they allowed the door to my bedroom to be cracked at the intro to, so I had that little comfort of a halllight coming in, and that was about it. Among the things you're famous for is, you know, movies and TV about World War II,

including, of course, saving private Ryan and Shindler's List, I mean, World War II was terrifying, and you depicted one of the most terrifying aspects of it, which was D-Day in saving private Ryan. Do you see that as a continuation of what you did when you were a young boy, making little films about things that terrified you, like the recreating the train crash scene from the Great of Show on Earth? Well, you know, there was a lot, I was very much in those days when I was, you know,

12, 13, 14, being influenced by television, and you know, and there were a lot of movies on the

late show, you get the late show, you get the late late show, you get things called a million dollar

movie, back in Phoenix, and I was very influenced by all the war movies that were showing the John Wayne films, like the fighting C-B's and other films like Patan or back to Patan or Kuala Canal Diary or the Sanzi Iwo Jima, 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

of what often bombed Japanese bridges, and he had a couple of missions in the air, but he was so good with electronics, 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 II constantly, so I made eight millimeter war movies, escaped an hour, which I depict in the favourments as an actual movie I made when I was about 16 years old, called Escape to Noir, and because I was really obsessed

with a war, I made a World War II Air Force movie called Fighter Squadron in Black and White

what I was watching on television, or the stories my dad was telling me.

“So when your father told you stories and when his friends who were also veterans told you”

stories, were they stories about heroism, bonding 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 490th 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 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 and tap the path of person on the back and try to get a glass of water,

“and there would be, you know, tears from, you know, it's unusual when you're a kid”

and you hear in your own home adult sobbing, and whatever 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 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 for 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 war? I was, I would never have gone to Canada, but I tried everything I could not

be drafted, even though I was subjected to two or three physicals. I kept taking physicals because I had a draft counselor, and the draft counselor had advised me how to delay. I was one A, I was not doing good in college. One A meant that you were next up on the list. I had a student deferment, a two-est deferment, as a lot of us had, most of us had, but when my grades dropped below a certain level, my GPA dropped below a certain level, I lost my

two-est deferment, became one A, and was ordered up on my first physical. My second physical, actually, my first physical, I was in high school, senior in high school, just turned 18, up in Northern California, and I was standing in line in a rainstorm outside to watch Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strange Love, and I was standing in the Doctor Strange Love Live line, and I hear a horn honking, 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 was ordering me to report

to have my first physical, and I'll tell you the power movies, 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 I saw the movie, and 10 minutes into the movie,

“I forgot that my father had handed me what could have been my death warrant, that's what”

that poop film did for me. It took my mind off of anything except that story of Armageddon, and that was another example of just the power of somebody telling me a story. Yeah, well, in the story that took your mind off having to fight and war was a story about possible nuclear war. All the things that go wrong and lead to it, so it's funny that

that was distracting you from the possibility of going to war yourself. So how did you finally get

out of being drafted? Well, because something called the lottery, it was enacted. I was in college at the time, and they were now seeing the lottery, and we all ran to a friend's apartment about 15, maybe 20 of us, and we turned on the TV, and we watched the numbers come out of the drum, and my birthday, my number was 275. So right away, I was off the hook, but suddenly a number would come up for somebody else. It was number 19, and that person would start screaming at

births and it tears, and then another number would come over, that it was on the bubble, like 110, and you didn't know whether that was going to be the number that sent you to Vietnam,

and fighting in 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, I just think I was”

attracted to the sacrifice and to the gallantry war, kind of glorifies heroism, and Hollywood glorified war. I knew based in the stories of my dad and his friends were telling about World War II that there was no glory in war, and it was ugly, and it was cruel, and it was, it was it was 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 17, 18, 19 year old boys storming Omaha Beach, let's say. So when I had the opportunity to make Robert Rodex scripted to a movie, saving private Ryan, it can't be a glorification of war, it's just going to have to be the low-down dirty truth of what it was

“like for these young boys. Oh, and especially for its time, it's so graphic in a way that”

like the World War II movies that you grew up with were not. You'd see people kind of, you know, step on grenades, and those movies, and their bodies would be thrown into the air, but you did 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 on the day. You didn't see, you know, bloody bodies in the water. You didn't see the true chaos of war.

So I guess part of what you wanted to do was really show the complete horror of being in a scene like that, and the disorientation. Yes, I was willing to sacrifice the funding that my own company was provided with by financial backers who believed in myself and David Geffin and Jeffrey Katzenberg 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,

the movie cost, which now is a bargain, but the movie then cost $59 million to make in

1997 came out in '98. 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'd say they wouldn't see it because it was too disturbing. I was afraid that the first people would saw it would just say it's too bloody, but yourself through it. I know that you

“didn't storyboard the D.D. 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 controlled chaos in a way you need to know what you're shooting. So how do you improvise a massive scene like that with explosions and then 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 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 25 days. It's a 25 minute sequence that took 25 days. It's shoot 25 minutes. So I was only shooting a minute a day, and because they hadn't storyboarded anything, but I knew what the mission was. They had to get up to a rear-viewed draw to get to the top of Omaha Beach. So I decided to shoot the entire sequence in continuity. So I began to the Higgins Boats, and then we got them out of the Higgins Boats when they came under intense fire, and 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 our day 25 we got to the top. And so, you know, I love improvising scenes. I mean, I love improvising shots. It's what I've done in my whole life. It's what I did. I didn't destroy boards when I was a kid making eight millimeter movies. And in this sense, it allowed the chaos to be chaotic. You know,

there's his great 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,

maybe a 200 or more still photographs he took got ruined in a lab. They ruined every single

those nine capture shots with the blurry shaky messed up imagery, if I can make the whole Omaha

Beach sequence look like the Bob Kappa salvaged 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 2022. His newest film is Disclosure Day, now in theaters. After a break, we'll continue their conversation and book critic Moring Corrigan reviews two ships, the latest book by cultural historian David S Reynolds. I'm David B. and this is fresh air. As America marks 250 years,

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On npr's wildcard podcast actor and director Danny McBride says he has finally aged into

his looks. I'm lucky because even when I was 21, I looked like I was 50 years old, so I'm now I look at my fingers at me when I'm here like I was older there somehow. This is weird. Watch or listen to that wildcard conversation on the npr app or on YouTube at npr wildcard. This is fresh air. I'm TV critic David B. and Kooley. Let's get back to Terry's 2021 interview with director Steven Spielberg. At the time, he had released his film The Fablements based on his early

years as a boy in a teenager when he first saw movies and started making them. Part of your new movie is about growing up Jewish and when you moved to a largely gentile suburb of California facing anti-Semitism at school. I know you lost over 15 relatives in the Holocaust who were you know relatives who were 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 learned math. It's how I learned my numbers. 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 30s or early 40s. 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 how to they resettled in this country and they were learning English. My grandmother was their English teacher. And it was, it was, it 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, he would point to the numbers. And he would say that is a two. And that is a four. And then he'd say, and this is a eight. And that's a one. And then

“I'll never forget this. And he said, and that's a nine. And then he crooked his arm and then”

verdict 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. Now it's a six. And 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

as much older. Did you understand at the time that those numbers were basically the ID numbers tattooed on arms because, you know, the Jews were not humans to the Nazis. And they were just

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 as three-year-old kid down and explain the Holocaust to them. I there was no way I'd be able to comprehend anything. There was only years later that I had these recollections and my mom and my grandparents would fill me in with what what what those days were like. 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 in contact with so many Holocaust survivors. Did the whole

idea of the Holocaust like 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 show. 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 great murders. Plural. And what stories there's only so much a story can do to scare a child. But imagery is a powerful kind of bracing way of shocking you into realization of some kind. And they actually wheeled a 16-millimeter projector. I believe into our six-year seventh grade classrooms in Phoenix, Arizona. And they showed us a 45-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 of 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 just never forget I was I was repulsed and 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 as something had happened that would change, you know, it would change me forever. How did it change you? I became obsessed with learning more about it. And Shindra's list was the 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 being written about the Holocaust either. And we didn't have access to the books that were that had been written, you know, and so it was not until I was really in my I would say 30s that there was more and more written about the Holocaust and I started reading everything I could. Steven Spielberg speaking with Terry Gross in 2022. His film The Fablements is based on his life and his early love of movies and also his family life. This is fresh air.

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At MPR we are here for your right to be curious about the world around you. Follow shortwave wherever you get your podcasts because the more you ask, the more interesting the world gets. This is fresh air. Let's get back to Terry's 2022 interview with Steven Spielberg. His film from that year, The Fablements, is based on the story of how he became obsessed with watching movies

than 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 is in love with him and then your mother

if I may ask that your mother was romantically involved with the person you thought of as an uncle? Well, I learned it at a very young age when I was 16 and I learned it not because of anything I observed with my naked eyes. It was something that I could only see on film and I didn'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 I had always looked at my mom and my dad as my parents and my mom as my mom but after

this I had a secret and I had a secret between myself and my mother and no kid should ever be allowed to hold that kind of information secret but I did to my mom wanted me to 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 a as a peer because we you know we both had secrets and and it was a powerful it was a powerful load of responsibility just to not say to anyone especially my father

would I had discovered I was a very painful part of my life I can imagine when your parents divorce though you blame your father for the divorce and I guess I I don't understand why you blame

“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 protect my mom who was very fragile even though she was an adventurer had a huge adventurer's personality

and always we always saw her as Peter Pan the you 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 97 years but my dad knew that about her and wanted to protect her and let her have that

“childhood in adulthood 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 are strange from him for years right

well yeah I was I don't when I say a strange is a strong word I always talk to my dad we talked

you know but we talked on my my birthday 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 and have long talks that was that was suspended for I would say about 15 years that's heartbreaking I mean I 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”

like you you both knew when you wouldn't share it with each other um I don't know it's you know you're making this movie 40 million dollars of therapy and turning my story into a motion picture is never gonna help me assuage my guilt about how I separated emotionally from my dad for all those years but my dad and I made up for it and my dad lived a 103 and a half years old thank God because it gave us so many more years together in a in a kind of communion of closeness

and and and and and humor and 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 me who who left oh no she did later she confessed that I mean later of course she did when I was grown up and she had the restaurant we talked we would talk about it all the time you know in the fable men's um the teenage version of your alter ego makes a film

of the annual school beach party in 1964 and shows it at the prom and one of the kids in the

doesn't like how he's depicted he thinks I'm I'm not really that person was there a moment in your life when you realize that being behind the camera gave you the power to portray somebody as you know an almost like mythical god like figure or to kind of take them down if you're not just 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 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 the bane of my existence in high school this bully simply to say you know good job or hey I liked I liked but you shot you know um you know and what really took place I couldn't and to the stay can't figure out why that happened

because I never got to know him that well and that it caused such a surprising reaction to my glorifying

him whereas he didn't think I was glorifying him and and and so I 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 that tried to explain it deeply and try to you know make make all ends meet make everything you know come out logical for an audience at the end sometimes you know there is no logic to the choices and the emotional reactions people have to think you just have to I just felt I had to tell the way it happened to me you mentioned scary discoveries that you made through shooting movies can you mention one

or there's many different discoveries but one of the discoveries that happens all the time is that um and this is about acting is that what looks subtle to the eye when I'm standing next to the camera and watching actors and gauging and in scene 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 and bigger than life on the screen and I learned

from a very early age directing television first TV show I directed it was what I was 22 years old

and I made a lot of mistakes by just trusting my evaluation of performance on on 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's seen perfectly natural on the day and that is uh it took me years to figure out how to modulate performances so the the actors would would be at a level that I was seeking Steven Spielberg thank you so much and um continue to make movies give us so much

kind of pleasure and also pain thanks Terry this is a pleasure for me Steven Spielberg speaking to Terry Gross in 2022 his newest movie Disclosure Day which revisits the themes he tapped decades

ago in close encounters of the third kind and ET the extraterrestrial is now in theaters

coming up moring Corrigan reviews two ships a book offering conflicting versions of American identity this is fresh air I'm Jesse Thorne this week on Bullseye Craig Ferguson on his love of all things American including you New York City people have their own little things but

“these somehow think New York is not America as the rest of America but I feel the opposite I think”

is full on America that's Bullseye find us in the NPR app at maximum fund.org or wherever you get your podcast. This week on Wayway Jontali we talked to best selling author Caro Clare Burke about how it feels to write the hip-book of the summer. I've been very dissociative so that's a problem for my future therapist. Yeah I say let's talk about the fact you're not in therapy that's fast don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games listen to the wait wait don't tell me

podcast and the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast. This is fresh air award winning cultural historian David S. Reynolds is the author of books about Walt Whitman John Brown, Harriet Beecher

legacy of a powerful metaphor. Our book critic Moring Corrigan has this review. Just in time for a

“contentious 250th 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 is 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 1620 and the white lion which arrived in James Town 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 separate as Puritans,”

dissenters to the reign of the English King James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the new world, one in which all men, in theory at least, were equal before God. In contrast, the European settlers of James Town were royalists, also known as Cavaliers, loyal to the monarchy they believed in a strict hierarchy. But 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 ship,”

as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the plague spot of slavery. Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the two ships metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, southern dissentants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and cruel persecuting character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times,

Reynolds says, "It didn't matter to the South, that by the mid-19th century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations. Few of which resembled 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 Scarlet 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 Scots,

as saying that Scott did measureless harm, more real and lasting harm, perhaps than 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 1890s, 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 may flower

celebrations helped reinforce. By the later 20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into pilgrim hats and black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist. Seven years ago, however, the 1619 project piloted

slavery's place in the national story. The 1619 project has been faulty for its historiography,

and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds' book. Still, it seems two momentous or reappearance of the white lion, not to at least acknowledge in this book. That 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, or as earnest Hemingway,

one of the Mayflower pilgrims more cynical descendants might say in response to that sentiment, isn't it pretty to think so?" Moring Corgan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed two ships

“by David S. Reynolds. On Monday's show, writer Rachel Evive spent years reporting stories about”

other people's mothers and daughters. Then she became a mother herself when back 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 Gaye performing the Star Spangled Banner on national television for the NBA All-Star game in 1983. Most likely, you'll be hearing a lot of performers singing this song this weekend,

“but not many that will top this version. Happy 4th of July, and for the country,”

Happy 250th birthday. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bean Poo. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

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