Interview with Russell Freedman
Children’s Author Explores the History
Behind Today’s Hot-Button Issues
“Imagine that you are sound asleep,
adrift in the ebb and flow of dreams. . . . You awake with
a start. Police are pounding on your door, shouting for you
to open up! It is four o’clock
in the morning. . . . They burst into the house, push you against
the wall, and frisk you. . . . Was it something you said? A meeting
you attended? A book you borrowed? A phone call that the police
overheard?”
Excerpt from IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY
By Karen Magnuson Beil
Put together the starred reviews of Russell Freedman’s
recent book, IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY, and you wind up with a full-blown
constellation. Booklist, Kirkus, Horn Book,
School Library Journal,
and The Bulletin all praised this book.
One of a handful of nonfiction authors to receive the Newbery
Medal, Russell Freedman has also earned two Newbery honors and
the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal. Reviewers talk about his “signature
clear, conversational prose,” his “impeccably authentic
text.” They say he makes his readers feel they are witnesses
to history.
Mr. Freedman grew up in San Francisco in a literary family and
graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. After
serving with the Second Infantry during the Korean War, he worked
as a reporter for the Associated Press, a writer for J. Walter
Thompson Advertising Agency, and a publicist for network television.
He has written more than 40 nonfiction books for children. Mr.
Freedman talked with us from his home in New York City.
ABOUT THE BOOK
One reviewer says “readers eager to join in debate on
the day’s hot-button legal issues can bring themselves
up to speed” with this book. What prompted you to write
it?
As a college student during the McCarthy Era, I cut classes
to watch the hearings on television. That’s when I became
aware of the Bill of Rights. It’s the first time I can
remember feeling a sense of political outrage and a very strong
sense of injustice watching [Joseph] McCarthy and [Roy] Cohn
destroy people’s reputations. It was so blatant and so
obvious. That radicalized me in the sense of making me very politically
aware. I’ve been interested in civil rights and civil
liberties ever since.
For a long time I’ve wanted to do this book, but it
seemed like a tough assignment, a dry subject, extremely difficult
to handle. But when I read a very grisly account of the use
of torture to extract a confession, I had the angle for it:
a series of narrative explanations giving the background of
the amendments. Each of the Amendments was written to correct
injustices of one kind or another.
I had no idea that the Bill of Rights would be such a hot button
issue when I signed the contract to do the book in 1999. That
all started to develop as I was working on it, so it made the
work very exciting. The fact that the book came out when it did
was a coincidence. I had wanted to do a book on the Bill of Rights
for a long time.
What do you hope your readers will get from this book?
It would be wonderful if it informed readers enough that they
would want to go on and do something in defense of the Bill of
Rights, or specific rights which are under attack more and more
all the time. Certainly I hope any book I write opens a window
into the world for readers.
ON WRITING
The term ‘nonfiction’ has always puzzled and annoyed
me. What is nonfiction, and why doesn’t it have a name
of its own?
It’s history, it’s biography, it’s natural
history. And isn’t poetry even included in nonfiction?
Nonfiction is a term I’ve always objected to. At one time,
I suggested the term “faction,” but faction has been
preempted to mean “dramatized nonfiction,” a blend
of invention and documented material. The term nonfiction does
have a negative connotation. And it’s such a blanket
term that it becomes almost meaningless.
Does your news background influence you as a writer?
My experience as a news reporter taught me how to write. I learned
more about writing in my first day at the Associated Press than
I had in four years at the University of California as an English
major. It taught me about respecting sources and having at least
three sources for every assertion.
But there’s no such thing as objectivity—no such
thing as an objective treatment of history or of an issue. You’re
always writing it from the point of view of your own values.
Otherwise it’s like a textbook written by a committee.
I made an attempt to give both sides of every issue in this book.
But as one review pointed out, it’s obvious where I stand
on the Second Amendment, for example. I don’t think it’s
possible to write a book about the Bill of Rights and be objective.
I have definite opinions about gun control, about abortion,
about capital punishment.
The book’s opening (excerpted here) is heart-pounding
high drama. How do you use the intersection of fiction and nonfiction
techniques and storytelling?
You want to find a dramatic opening no matter what subject
you’re
dealing with. Nonfiction—history, biography—is based
on narrative, as fiction is. Storytelling is what holds a person’s
attention. Writers of history and biography use the same fictional
techniques that novelists and short story writers use to keep
the reader turning pages:
-- focusing on a specific scene that the reader can visualize;
-- creating a visual image through words;
-- using dialogue from documented sources, memoirs, diaries
(invented dialogue hasn’t been used in nonfiction for
years); and
-- using anecdotal material (“Anecdote” goes back
to the Greek word for “gossip”).
Nonfiction should have a strong narrative thread tying it together.
That, however, was almost impossible to do in this particular
book because every chapter or every discussion of each individual
amendment is almost a separate free-standing unit.
So without the narrative thread, how did you keep readers interested?
Each chapter uses storytelling techniques and this structure:
Here’s a human problem. Here’s what was going on.
Then what happened. And here’s how was it solved. That’s
what every novel is about. And of course, I deliberately looked
for lots of landmark cases that involved kids and students
because they are the primary audience for the book.
ON RESEARCH
In your research, did you discover any historical facts that
surprised you?
I was surprised, for one thing, by the brutality and the cruelty
of the justice system in England and by extension everywhere
else, I guess, really up until the Colonial Period. They did
terrible things to people. This is one of the things which led
to the Fifth Amendment.
And I was very surprised that abortion was legal in Colonial
America. It didn’t become illegal until the middle of the
19th Century, and it was mainly because so many women died due
to unsanitary conditions. They didn’t have the medical
know-how to perform safe abortions then. The Catholic Church
didn’t get on the abortion band wagon until the 1800’s.
That was a big surprise.
How do you go about researching?
Normally I find two or three good basic recent sources. I mine
their bibliographies. Then I work backwards in time.
For IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY, I started with VISIONS OF LIBERTY,
published by Ira Glasser, and a couple massive books on every
Supreme Court decision since the beginning, published by Oxford
University Press. I looked up the original newspaper stories.
So this was a matter of book research and library research.
For a lot of my books, I do the same type of field research
you did with firefighting. That’s where the fun is so often.
You know, go out and follow the Lincoln trail, and visit every
place Lincoln ever lived. That wasn’t something I could
do when researching IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY. The primary materials
I used for this book were mainly newspaper accounts.
And photo research?
When I wrote a dozen or more illustrated books on animal behavior
and ethology, I became aware that there were wonderful photographs
available. If I could learn to do photo research, I could get
full royalties, instead of half-royalties. So I taught myself
how to do photo research.
I did layouts, just as an artist would. I’d actually
submit a dummy showing where I thought the photographs should
go and the adjoining text. IMMIGRANT KIDS was my first book
using archival photographs of people. I keyed every single
photograph to a specific paragraph so that each photo would
appear on the same spread as the relevant paragraph, if possible.
How do you keep your work fresh?
You don’t want to fall into a formula and keep repeating
yourself. I kept getting all these reviews saying, ‘Oh
the book is pretty good, but the photographs are wonderful.’ So
I said, ‘I’ll show them.’ I started work on
CRAZY HORSE. I knew there were no photographs of Crazy Horse.
And since I’d already used a lot of the best photographs
from that era in previous books, I thought I’d use a
drawing to open each chapter. But while I was working on the
book, I discovered the pictographs at the Little Big Horn National
Monument in Montana, made by his cousin, Amos Bad Heart Bull.
That changed the whole concept.
Can you offer any tips to writers on doing historical photo
research?
I start with recent publications for the bibliographic reasons,
but I’m also looking for illustrated books. I go through
them and see what all their sources are. I keep a list of sources
and begin to get an idea of where the stuff is on a particular
subject. In time you learn which collections specialize in
which types of material.
For THE VOICE THAT CHALLENGED A NATION: MARIAN ANDERSON AND
THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS which is coming out this month
from Clarion, I researched her papers online. All the Marian
Anderson papers are at the University of Pennsylvania in the
Annenberg Rare Book Collection. Some rich wonderful person gave
them the funds to put the whole collection online. I just sat
here and looked at 4,000 photographs. I did 90 percent of the
photo research for that book on the computer.
I also went to the Schomburg Collection for Research in Black
Culture and to the Library of Congress. And to the Annenberg
Collection at the University of Pennsylvania to look at Marian
Anderson’s correspondence and posters and playbills.
So you do your photo research from home?
It’s happening more and more. The New York Public Library
is putting its entire picture collection online later this year,
as well as photos from several other divisions. You always have
to check out the Library of Congress. The first time I became
aware of this, 10 percent of their photo collection was online.
As of last year, it was about 50 percent. Whereas the National
Archives, which I use frequently, has stuff online, but it’s
very skimpy. You just have to go there.
I’ve seen a picture of you with a manual typewriter. So
I’m surprised to hear you do Internet research.
I only started using a computer about a year ago. I keep the
typewriter in the storeroom downstairs in case of a power shortage.
I was afraid the computer would change the way I write. I still
write in long hand and then type it out on the computer. I make
revisions in pencil on hard copy.
But I love the computer and could not have done IN DEFENSE
OF LIBERTY without the internet. There are several crucial
websites that bring you right up to date. You can check them
out in my bibliography. For example, on the Second Amendment
and the death penalty, there are so many things happening.
It was on press, we’d stop the presses to add a paragraph. And now, four
months later, it’s already out of date. I have a thick
file of possible changes in case we do a revision.
ON DINNER GUESTS AND FAVORITE CHILDHOOD AUTHORS
I understand when you were a child, your family’s
supper table was a place of great writerly discussion. What
was it like as a boy to sit across from literary legends like
John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, John Masefield, and Margaret
Mitchell?
My father was a very gregarious person and enjoyed entertaining
writers. He was sales manager of Macmillan’s San Francisco
office, an American outpost of the British Macmillan. He dealt
with all the California authors one time or another and was a
liaison with Hollywood. He took me with him visiting libraries
and movie sets. He was instrumental in selling GONE WITH THE
WIND to the movies. Margaret Mitchell came to our house, and
I have a first edition, signed copy of GONE WITH THE WIND. So
if I can’t sell my next book, I can sell that [laughter].
I remember meeting Roddy MacDowell, a child actor who was more
or less my age, during the filming of HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY.
And I remember dinner with John Masefield who was then the
Poet Laureate of England and a very tall and commanding presence.
The adults were all talking. Then my father from his place
at the head of the table says, “Russell, tell them what your
teacher said the other day.” I was sitting next to John
Masefield, this towering, intimidating creature from England
who stared down at me. I was struck. I was speechless. I stuttered,
and I couldn’t squeak out an answer. So they changed the
subject and went on to something else, but I think that’s
affected my ability [laughter] to engage in public speaking
ever since.
I was in awe of these people, but my real hero was Howard
Pease who wrote SHANGHAI PASSAGE and boys’ adventure stories.
I read every book he ever wrote. When he spoke at my school in
San Francisco, I found out that he lived in our neighborhood.
I rode my bicycle over. I wanted to ring the doorbell and say, ‘Oh,
you’re my favorite author.’ But I didn’t have
the nerve to do it. It would have been a stupid thing, just show
up at somebody’s door and—especially a writer—and
ring the doorbell, it’s crazy. At 8 years old, it didn’t
seem that crazy. But I froze on my bicycle, then rode away.
I would lie in bed at night knowing he lived seven or eight
blocks away. I would hear the foghorn out in the bay and think
of Howard Pease sitting in the quiet at his typewriter, writing
these books. He seemed like a real writer to me, not John Steinbeck
or Margaret Mitchell who were these talking dinner guests who
were very impressive, but Howard Pease . . . .
Did you have a teacher who encouraged you to write?
In the fifth grade, Miss Tennessee Kent. She was born in Tennessee.
(Her sister, also a teacher, was named Virginia.) Miss Kent would
go out of her way to praise any writing I did. She was very generous
in her praise and her encouragement. It was the first time I
thought I could really write something that someone would like.
I knew I would have a hard time pleasing my father. So I started
doing a lot of writing in elementary and junior high school,
thanks to Miss Tennessee Kent.
Do you have mementoes in your office?
I have many icons and souvenirs: a big poster of my book,
LINCOLN: A PHOTOBIOGRAPHY framed in gold of course [more laughing],
the original jacket painting from CRAZY HORSE which Holiday
House gave me, lots of photographs, and my Lone Ranger bank.
I listened to the radio show as a kid and sent in Wheaties
box tops for it. It’s a wonderful bank. [Rattle, rattle] Hear it? There’s
a penny in it. I have an embroidered cat hanging on a string
that I bought from a boy in Xinjiang province in China.
ON WRITERS AND TRAVEL
I’m told you’ve just returned from an exotic
trip?
I just got back from Key West.
That doesn’t count.
Exotic? Well, you can go almost everywhere in the world, and
there’s a Banana Republic. It’s very discouraging.
I’d say my last exotic trip was to Confucius’s birthplace
in Shandong province, mainland China,150 miles southeast of Beijing.
It’s this wonderful farming town where Confucius spent
most of his life. I went for his birthday party, 2,501 years,
I think it was. It is quite an elaborate ceremony that attracts
people from all over the world.
What do you do if you get stuck in your writing?
I do a lot of writing in Riverside Park while I’m walking.
Between books, I try to take a long interesting trip. I’ve
been all over the world—Malaysia, Penang, Indonesia,
mainland China three times, Yunnan province, the border of
Tibet, Australia, Europe several times. My last trip was to
Spain in October.
In April I’m going to Singapore to speak at the American
School for a week. From there I’m going to visit a famous
ruin in Cambodia. There’s always the hope that a book will
come out of it. If you’re a buyer for Bloomingdale's, you
travel, right? You go to Europe, what are you doing? You’re
looking. ‘Oh, this is just what Bloomingdale's needs in
the Lingerie Department.’ If you’re a restaurateur,
you travel to see what’s going on in restaurants.
Writers of fiction or nonfiction (to use that dreaded term)
travel a lot because they need the stimulation. They want to
maintain that childlike curiosity which can only be kept alive
by seeing new things, through new eyes. So there’s nothing
like travel to wake you up a bit or to refresh you after your
eighth draft. It’s to clear the head, to look for ideas,
and, in many cases, to pursue a specific project such as my
trip to Qufu, Confucius's hometown for my book CONFUCIUS: THE
GOLDEN RULE.
If I know I’m going to do research for a specific book
though, I like to have a first draft done before I take the trip.
Otherwise, you don’t know what you’re looking for.
I could have written about Confucius without ever going anywhere.
There’s plenty of material. But by spending one week
in his hometown, several experiences I had found their way
into the book.
For example, I was traveling with a friend who is fluent in
Mandarin. North of Qufu is a wonderful forest and the Confucian
family cemetery. Over a hundred thousand people are buried
there, including Confucius. At 2500 years old, it’s probably the
oldest known grave in the world. Because they built a temple,
there’s been historical continuity ever since. It’s
very moving. You stand there and think, my god, he’s still
alive. He’s so powerful today—his ideas. And there
he is under this pile of earth.
A Chinese tour group came by, a dozen people or so, with a
guy holding a flag—the tour leader. He went into this spiel.
And my friend said, he just told a wonderful story about Confucius's
grave and the emperor Chin. The emperor, who built the Great
Wall three or four hundred years after Confucius, wanted to wipe
out all signs of Confucianism. He buried Confucian scholars alive
or burned them in boiling oil. He wanted to get rid of Confucius's
remains. So he went to the cemetery with a group of soldiers,
opened the grave, and went in. Inside there was a bed and a table
and a book. Written on the book is, ‘You have disturbed
my grave.’ The emperor was astounded. There was a rustling
sound and a rabbit jumped out of a hole in the ground. The
emperor thought it was the spirit of Confucius and ordered
the troops to chase the rabbit into the woods. He led the charge.
It was a cold winter day. He caught pneumonia and, a day or
two later, he died.
You have the freedom when you’re writing about someone
in extreme antiquity to include interesting mythological elements
as long as you identify them as such. So it’s easy to
include a story like this one since, of course, no one really
believes it.
It’s much easier to write about someone in extreme antiquity
about whom not much is known than it is to write about Eleanor
Roosevelt, for example. You can say almost anything about Confucius.
Who knows if it’s right or wrong? I point out at the beginning
that there are a few facts known about Confucius. And that a
lot is mythology and imagining and different interpretations.
I try as I go through the book to say ‘We know this, but
here’s what tradition says.’
ON THE ULTIMATE HOBBY
What do you do when you’re not writing?
When I’m not writing? Writing is my hobby, let’s
say that. If I retired, which I think writers never do, I wouldn’t
know what to do. Writing is such an ingrained part of my daily
routine. I love to write, however painful it is. Even when you’re
doing a first draft, you know you’re going to get to
the third draft when it really becomes exhilarating.
**********************************
Karen Magnuson Beil is an Albany-area children's book author,
cofounder, and former president of the Children's Literature
Connection. Her books include FIRE IN THEIR EYES: WILDFIRES AND
THE PEOPLE WHO FIGHT THEM (Harcourt, mid-grade nonfiction); A
CAKE ALL FOR ME (Holiday House, picture book); and MOOOVE OVER
(Holiday House, fall 2004).
An excerpt of this interview appeared in the newsletter of the
Children’s Literature Connection, Spring 2004. The interview
took place on February 18, 2004.
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