Jan. 23

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Jan. 23, 1783: Birth of French writer Stendhal.

Jan. 18

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Jan. 18, 1882: Writer A.A. Milne born.

Q&A with author Guy Gugliotta

Guy Gugliotta

Guy Gugliotta, a journalist who has worked for The Washington Post, among other publications, is the author of Freedom's Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War.
 

Q: Why did you decide to write about the Capitol in the mid-19th century, and how long did it take to do the research for Freedom's Cap?

A: I first became interested in writing about the Capitol in 1998. I was covering Congress at the time for The Washington Post, and most of what we would do that year involved the impeachment of President Clinton. A lesser reported event, but ultimately more important for me, was a decision by the Architect of the Capitol, the appointee responsible for construction and maintenance of the congressional properties on and around Capitol Hill. These include, besides the Capitol itself, the Library of Congress, the Government Printing Office, the congressional office buildings and assorted other holdings.

The architect, Alan Hantman, determined that the cast iron dome of the Capitol was cracked, leaking, rusty, covered with too many layers of paint and had suffered badly from years of bird droppings and other indignities. It needed a total facelift. A detailed survey was made and a report sent to Congress (the Senate Rules Committee). This event went almost totally unreported, but I was able to write a front page story on the troubles plaguing the Capitol and the difficulties involved in repairing a one-of-a-kind national icon. You have to think everything through before you start, and you can't make any mistakes. "Oops," is not an option.  

In writing the story I became hooked on the building and learned a little bit about its history. My plan was to check back with Hantman once the project got underway so I could report its progress, but in the end, the project was postponed for a decade because of 9-11. After that the Architect's number one priority was to design and build the Capitol Visitor's Center. Everything else was put on hold. The dome was sealed up and forgotten. Curiously enough, however, the facelift finally began last year and will resume after President Obama's second-term inauguration.

Q: What surprised you most in the course of your research?

A: I undertook to write Freedom's Cap in 2008 after a conversation with the editor of Farrar Straus and Giroux. I was interested in selling him a completely different book, and over lunch I could tell he wasn't interested at all. Instead he asked me what were the ten most interesting things I had come across during my years at The Washington Post (I had taken a buyout and retired in 2006, and was working as a freelance writer at the time).

As I mulled this question it suddenly occurred to me that the story of the modern U.S. Capitol would make a great book. I knew it had never been done, and I knew immediately what the obvious selling point would be. Jefferson Davis, as a senator and as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce in the 1850s, had, I knew, been an active promoter of what was at the time called the "Capitol Extension."

Once I began the research I discovered that Davis was the leading political patron of the project for the entire decade. This amazed me because it required a national vision possessed by few people in the United States at that time. Davis, quite simply, believed that a great nation deserved a great seat of government. This sentiment was not shared by his congressional colleagues, most of whom were interested in getting post offices for their districts, breakwaters for their harbors and subsidies for their railroads. 

Jefferson Davis

It continues to amaze me that Davis was able to push the Capitol project along at the same time he became one of the most forceful advocates for slavery and state's rights in the country. Even as it was being built, the modern Capitol came to epitomize the preeminence of federal power over the states, a concept that southerners (and a considerable number of northerners) reviled. Davis had no problem being at once a sectionalist and a nationalist. A remarkable balancing act, until it didn't work anymore.

Q: As a former congressional correspondent, how would you compare the politics during the years leading up to the Civil War to those of modern times?

A: Eerily similar, both in style and substance. It took me two years to research and write the book. I spent a lot of time reading the Congressional Globe, the forerunner of today's Congressional Record. The style of debate and the political gambits and strategies of lawmakers in the 1850s are exactly the same as what we see today.

You have bait and switch: demanding an amendment that you never expect to see passed simply so you can withdraw it later and leave what you really want in the bill. Ballet: in which senators or congressmen decide how they're going to present a measure, then carefully choreograph the floor action to win the outcome they are all seeking. Riders: senators and representatives were shameless in tacking on tidbit amendments on large bills to give favored constituents a break on some local issue.

As far as substance is concerned, slavery, of course, was the major issue of the day, and debate over its rightness or wrongness escalated with increasing savagery over the decade. Southern sectionalists often couched the slavery question as a debate over states rights versus the power of the federal government. This was just as much a core issue for the young United States, but not as explosive. I find that today's debates over health care, gun control and other hot topics are frequently cast as cases of the federal government treading where it does not belong. Some dissenters are once again even floating the idea of secession. 

Capitol's Freedom statue

Q: In the book, you describe the "liberty cap" originally proposed for the Capitol's Freedom statue, and the negative attitude of then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis toward such a hat. How does that cap symbolize the debates over slavery and freedom during the pre-Civil War years?

A: The liberty cap is a soft, fore-and aft hat used as a symbol of liberty during the American and French revolutions. It is derived from the Phrygian cap of classical antiquity, the mark of a manumitted slave. Sculptor Thomas Crawford made three plaster models of the Freedom statue, and the second one had a liberty cap. Davis did not like liberty caps because, as he wrote the engineer in charge of the project, they only worked for a people had been slaves and were now free, and in the United States people had always been free.

I am unable to see this as anything other than mealy-mouthed nonsense. The fact is that it would have been hard to put a manumitted slave atop the dome--literally the pinnacle of American democracy--in a country that at the time held 40,000 people in bondage. But because of Davis, the statue does not have a liberty cap. Check out the other two plaster models, which are on display at the Capitol complex (pictures in the book, as well), and make your own judgment.
 
Q: What are you working on now?

A: I am writing magazine pieces mostly on scientific topics at the moment and thinking about another book. I have a couple of good ideas and should reach a decision in the coming months.
 
Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Freedom's Cap was chosen one of the top ten non-fiction books of the year by Jonathan Yardley at The Washington Post (I have never met the man), and one of the top 100 non-fiction books of the year by Kirkus Reviews.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Jan. 17

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Jan. 17, 1820: Writer Anne Bronte born.

Q&A with novelist Francesca Segal

Francesca Segal

Francesca Segal is the author of the award-winning first novel The Innocents, an updating of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence that takes place in Northwest London's Jewish community.

Q: Why did you decide to model your book on Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence?

A: It found me -- I certainly never intended to use the scaffolding of a classic novel for anything of my own. But when I read it there was just something so intensely familiar, and once the idea had occurred to me it was impossible to dislodge. There were questions explored in the Wharton that still felt immediate, and relevant, within the contemporary community I describe. 

Q: Why did you pick the Jewish community of Northwest London as the setting for The Innocents? What about that community is similar to the New York that Edith Wharton describes?

A: As I said, the parallels just felt immediate, the more I read. Which is odd, because Gilded Age New York has very little, on paper, in common with 21st century Jewish north west London! But there is something I recognised in the social climate.

Q: Do you have a favorite among the characters that you created?

A: Well, one ought not to have favourites, it should be like children. But I am very fond of Ziva. 

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I'm beginning the second novel, with great pleasure, which is put on hold quite frequently for the very lovely interruption of events and lectures about this book. But I am very much, in my head, in the world of the new book. 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Erm - not sure! I'm still reeling from the news, yesterday, that I won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction -- I suppose that is relevant to an American reader, although I can't yet quite believe it's true!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Jan. 16

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Jan. 16, 1933: Writer Susan Sontag born.

Q&A with writer Tony Horwitz

Tony Horwitz is the author of six books, including Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes, and his most recent, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War.

Q: Why did you decide to write about John Brown and his raid on Harpers Ferry, and was there anything in particular in the course of your research that surprised you about him?

A: I’ve always been intrigued by John Brown and Harpers Ferry, but when I began doing some research I was stunned by how much of the story I didn’t know. For instance, the cast of characters apart from Brown includes Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Robert E. Lee, John Wilkes Booth, and a radical underground of young idealists. I wanted to get inside their heads and understand how they and the nation were propelled towards violent conflict.

One of the many surprising things I learned about Brown was that for most of his life he was a clean-shaven family man and entrepreneur—in essence, a fairly conventional American on the make. Imagining him, as we often do, as a fringe character, driven by madness or religious zealotry, makes it easy to dismiss Brown as a crazed lone gunman. In reality, he was representative of his times, and radicalized by them. His life is a window into the country at large and its decades-long plunge towards civil war.

Q: One of your best-known books is Confederates in the Attic, which also focuses on the Civil War. What about that conflict intrigues you, and do you plan to write about it again?

A: I’ve been a Civil War nerd since boyhood, when my father read me books about the conflict and took me to battlefields. As I got older, my interest shifted towards the issues at stake in the war, race in particular. Also, I can never get enough of the writing and photographs from that period. The Revolution seems very distant to me; not so the Civil War. I can walk a battlefield in Virginia, read letters, or stare at sepia images of young soldiers and feel instantly transported to the America of 150 years ago. It’s time travel to an era that’s still very relevant to our own. 

I don’t have plans to write another book about the Civil War—there are enough volumes on the subject already! But I may revisit the pre-war period I explored in Midnight Rising. As a nation, we tend to obsess on the 1861-1865 drama, the great battles and leaders. I’m now more drawn to probing the conflict’s roots and the question of how Americans came to slaughter each other by the hundreds of thousands in the first place.

Q: Of all the places you've been over the years as you've researched your books, are there some that really stand out in your mind as especially fascinating?

A: My writing has taken me to about 40 countries, so it’s hard to choose. Yemen may be the wildest and weirdest land I’ve visited. The landscape seems out of Arabian Nights—mud towers, jagged mountains, baked desert, labyrinthine bazaars—and Yemenis are both ferociously armed and pleasantly addled by qat, a mildly narcotic leaf. I felt stoned there, even when I wasn’t. Not the safest place on earth, but certainly among the most exotic.

Outback Australia also stands out. When I hitchhiked across it, 25 years ago, the harsh empty landscape felt lunar, and the people almost as alien. Drivers measured distance in the number of beers consumed en route; i.e. a hundred-mile stretch was “about a six pack.” And Aboriginal culture is the most ancient and profoundly non-Western I’ve encountered. I felt very far away, as in Yemen.

Q: Your wife, Geraldine Brooks, is also a writer--do you discuss your writing with each other as you're working on your books?

A: We write at desks about 10 feet apart, and have for most of the past 28 years. We consult on ideas and sentences and metaphors throughout the day, and edit every line of each other’s work before anyone else sees it. So it’s hard to separate our marriage from our writing. That being said, like most couples, we devote 90 percent of our conversation to such lofty topics as, “who’s meeting the schoolbus?,” “has the dog been fed?,” or “did you pay the Comcast bill?” The Iowa Writers’ Workshop it’s not.

Q: What are you writing now?

A: At the moment I’m writing magazine stories, principally on historical topics for Smithsonian, and noodling on a next book project. But I haven’t committed to anything yet. A book is a long-term commitment and I need to be sure I’m truly in love with a topic before I tie the knot.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I’ve written six books and it never seems to get easier. Many people imagine writing as a romantic craft, but for me at least, it’s about getting your butt in the seat for as many hours a day as you can and piling one word on top of another, whether you feel inspired or not. The best writing advice I ever got was from Judith Viorst, the most disciplined and hard-headed author I know. As she put it: “When there’s no wind, row.”

 --Interview with Deborah Kalb