THE WORKS OF DOUGLAS SOUTHALL FREEMAN

 

One of the penalties for living a long life is that those who are younger generally will ignore what you have gleaned from those years, and now that I have passed my threescore and ten I suppose that I will be no different in that regard from anyone else. Each new generation tends to assume that it has arrived at all truth, but it may be regarded as a truism that that man who refuses to learn from the lives of his predecessors is among the biggest of fools, for that method of learning is vastly less painful than trial and error. There is no need for us to be insulted because of this neglect, however, for in that respect we are no different from any other generation. What follows is merely a suggestion, but it is one whose benefit I have personally experienced.

 During the brutally hot and dry summer of 1980, I received an advertisement from the History Book Club. If you agreed to buy two more offerings, you got the first one free, which seemed to be a good deal to me. One of their books was R. E. Lee, the four volume Pulitzer Prize-winning biography written by Douglas Southall Freeman. I chose it, and I readily confess that the reading of those four volumes was one of the most powerful character-development projects that I have ever undertaken. General Robert E. Lee was in every respect a remarkable man.

 Douglas Freeman went on to write a three-volume follow-up to the biography of Lee entitled Lee’s Lieutenants, which established him as the preeminent military historian in the country, and led to close friendships with United States generals George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Freeman’s final work was his biography of George Washington, for which he won another Pulitzer Prize posthumously.

The biography of Washington is in seven volumes (the final volume written by his associates). I own and have read all fourteen volumes of Freeman’s major works. My copy of George Washington is an original edition.

 Even as much as from the biographies themselves, I gained much from the reading of these monumental works of Dr. Freeman (he received his Ph.D. in History in 1908). Not only was he the Editor of The Richmond News Leader, in which position he wrote an estimated 600,000 words of editorial copy every year between 1915 and 1949, but his twice-daily radio broadcasts made him one of the most influential men in Virginia. Between 1934 and 1941 he commuted twice weekly to New York City to teach journalism at Columbia University. He also taught as a lecturer at the United States Army War College for seven years.

 Suffice it to say that Dr. Freeman did not suffer from idleness. In fact, his work ethic was legendary. When at home, he rose at three every morning and drove to his newspaper office, saluting Robert E. Lee's monument on Monument Avenue as he passed. Twice daily, he walked to a nearby radio studio, where he gave news broadcasts and discussed the day's news. After his second broadcast, he would drive home for a short nap and lunch and then worked another five or six hours on his current historical project. He was in great demand as a public speaker. In 1937, the peak of his labors in that field, he spoke eighty-three times to various audiences.

 At the beginning of Volume Six of the Washington biography, Dumas Malone wrote a preface entitled “The Pen of Douglas Southall Freeman,” from which we learn several interesting facts about the biographer. Freeman’s father was a Confederate veteran who was at Appomattox at the surrender.

 After accuracy, the quality that Freeman most valued in newspaper writing was brevity. “Don’t gush, and don’t twitter,” he told his juniors. “Play it straight.” Above his desk was a sign that read, “Time alone is irreplaceable. Waste it not.”

 One of the reasons that Freeman was able to accomplish so much as a biographer was because he held himself to a strict standard. From 1926, when he began keeping tabs upon his work on R. E. Lee, until 1933, when he finished it, he spent a total of 6100 hours on that work. In 1936, he began work on Lee’s Lieutenants, and spent 7121 hours on it. Two weeks after his 58^th birthday, Freeman began the Washington biography, which occupied his attention for the rest of his life, and upon which he spent 15,693 hours. According to Malone, he wrote the Washington biography in longhand, “having concluded that his typewriter by its very speed led him down false trails that had to be retraced and into inaccuracies that had to be painfully corrected.” Freeman described his work on Washington as “the most delightful intellectual experience” of his life.

 Malone finished his preface thusly: “National heroes can be cast from their pedestals by unholy hands and the ideals that patriots lived by can be dishonored. Unlike stones, literary monuments have life within them and they often prove more enduring. The creators of noble books about noble men are public benefactors, and such a creator was Douglas Southall Freeman.”

 Much of my reading of Dr. Freeman’s works was late at night after my wife and children were in bed, but I have not regretted either the time nor the sleep that it cost me.