Transcript of the Christopher Collier Interview

Transcribed by Luke Feder

 

Luke Feder:                  This is an interview with Dr. Christopher Collier, interviewed by Luke Feder, June 28, 2001, Orange, Connecticut.  Could you tell me a bit about yourself?  Where you grew up?  What your family did?

 

Christopher Collier:       My family is an old Massachusetts family, of many generations old, but I was born in New York City and lived the first eight years of my life on Long Island.  I moved to Connecticut on October 2, 1938, when I was eight years old, and went through the public schools in Wilton, Connecticut, in the days before it had a high school; so I went to high school in Westport.  Went from there to Clark University where I majored in history, Clark is in Worcester, Massachusetts.  And than was drafted into the army during the Korean War and spent my military career playing a trumpet in Texas, never left the United States.  And came back, got a Masters of Arts in teaching at Columbia Teacher’s College, and began work on a Ph. D. program across the street, as they say there, in what was then called the department of political science; it was a history program I was in. While I was doing that, I taught eighth grade for three years in Greenwich, and then I taught methods of teaching history and New York State history at Columbia Teachers College.  Taught for two years in New Canaan High School, loved public school teaching, it was something I had aspired to do.  As a matter of fact, I decided I wanted to be a high school history teacher when I was fifteen years old.  From time to time I had other things I thought I might do, but that’s the one that stayed with me, and I made a career out of it.  Had an opportunity, in those days of the baby boomers hitting college, to teach in college.  I never even sought a college teaching job, but in those days they had to recruit college teachers, there weren’t enough people around with Ph. D.’s, and I was close to one at the moment.  I got recruited out of New Canaan High school to teach at the University of Bridgeport.  I finished my Ph. D. in January 1964, and began teaching at Bridgeport in 1961, taught there for 23 years, and went up to UCONN in 1984 to teach Connecticut history and to be the state historian.  That’s my academic career.

 

Feder:                          What originally drew you to American history, or history in general?

 

Collier:                         I’ve been asked that question a lot, mostly by fifth graders, so I’ve thought about it a good deal, but I can’t tell you really what it was.  Neither my parents showed any particular interest in history.  I think that they were interested in history; they came from old New England families, so it was sort of there.  I really have thought about it.  I know that the two books that seemed to inspire me was a book by Roger Butterfield, The American Past, which is a large picture book with about 300,000 words of print in it, so it wasn’t just pictures, but it was an American history book that turned me on.  I could look at the pictures and read the text and it was very livelily written.  The other book that I remember reading was a book called They Also Ran by Irving Stone.  It’s about the people who ran for the presidency and lost.  I’m a little brother, you know, I always lost every fight I ever had, I lost every game I ever played, and I think maybe I related to the losers in there, or something like that.  But, in any event, I remember those two books, which I probably read at the age of 13 or 14 or 15, something like that.  I have both copies still to this very day of the ones I read then.  That’s the only thing that I can think of that sort of turned me on.  I loved history, I was a lousy student in school, but I liked history, and did well in history, and enjoyed it, and wrote good papers, and gave good reports, and that kind of thing, and went off to college and majored in history.  But I cannot tell you what really inspired me.

 

Feder:                          Much of your early scholarly work has been about Roger Sherman.  What appealed to you about him in particular?

 

Collier:                         When I began to think about a dissertation topic, I had a number of conversations with the history professors I was dealing with.  I was married; I had one child, about to have a second child.  I was teaching full time in the public schools.  I had to pick a topic that was logistically viable for me to do, and I had five that were going around.  One of them was Indians; I’m part Nipmuck Indian, a very small part, but I’ve always been interested in Indians.  One of them had to do with George Washington’s Indian policy.  Another was a New Deal topic; I was very much interested in politics, and the New Deal was then not so far behind us as it is today.  I know that that was another topic.  The topic that I settled on was this biography of Roger Sherman; there hadn’t been one since 1936 and that was a popular one, not done by a professional scholar.  The logistics seemed good; there were some papers at Dartmouth, and some at Washington, but most of the materials that I would need were here in Connecticut, and I wouldn’t have to travel very far to consult them.  So I got involved with Roger Sherman, and I did a very long dissertation, which was a biography.

 

Feder:                          In the seventies, you started writing young adult books.   What was the reason for switching over?

 

Collier:                         Well, I didn’t switch over, of course.  I continued to do my scholarship.  The young adult books are an extension of my teaching.  I think of myself as a teacher primarily.  I love teaching, I love the classroom work, and hate the grading of papers; but I do a huge amount of paper grading.  When I was teaching eighth grade, I found that the kids were reading a textbook, and studying for the tests, and getting good grades on the tests, and forgetting everything the next day.  I tried to think of ways that would be more engaging and more memorable.  That is, what’s a way to teach so that kids can remember what they learned?  One of the ways, of course, is not to try to teach them so much, cutback and teach a few things well, rather than try to slide over everything.  In those days, kids read novels much more than they do today; I’m talking about the mid to late fifties.  I thought gee, you know, if I could write an exciting historical novel that would carry the teaching elements that I thought were important, maybe the kids would read it and remember it.  I had never written a novel, so I got my brother, who was a regular full time writer, who had written some novels, to help me, and we wrote My Brother Sam is Dead.  That was such a huge success that our publisher said she wanted more, so we ended up writing nine altogether, of which eight have been published.  More recently, we’ve done a twenty-three volume non-fiction history of the United States for middle school kids.  Teaching middle school kids is very rewarding, because they don’t know anything.  The first impression they have of many topics is what you give them.  There’s probably, I was going to say tens of millions, but I don’t think that’s an exaggeration, of kids out there who are now as old as thirty-five years, who read My Brother Sam is Dead as their first introduction to the American Revolution.  Their very first impressions of the American Revolution were through my eyes, and that has an impact.  That has a very large impact.  Teaching at the middle school level, I think, is hugely rewarding, it has a great product, an immense social product, an intellectual product.  It is very rewarding.

 

Feder:                          You mentioned My Brother Sam is Dead, that’s been banned quite a bit; another one too is Jump Ship to Freedom.  How does that make you feel?  What are your thoughts on censorship?

 

Collier:                         Censorship is a problem, no question about it, I’m sure it hurts sales.  We want these books out there.  I want them out there so kids will get better educated, but it’s also nice when we get our royalties checks to know that they’re selling well, and censorship hurts sales.  There’s much more censorship out there than we ever know about.  We hear about it and the American Library Association Committee on Intellectual Freedom; I guess that is the name of it, tries to keep track, but mostly the way that censorship happens is some parent objects to the principal; the principal quietly goes to the teacher, and they do away with it.  You don’t even know what’s happened, so it’s distressing on one hand.  On the other hand, it’s nice to know that you’re noticed (laughs).  My Brother Sam is Dead is always one of the ten most censored books every year, year after year, and that’s not because it’s so bad; it’s because it’s so widely used.  There’s nothing much in there, there’s some “damns” and some “goddamns,” and maybe “hell;” that’s one area of objection that parents have.  Another one is two graphic scenes of death and mayhem they object to and, for a while, people were objecting to the fact that the Meeker family lived in a tavern, which they associated only with alcoholic beverages.  One publisher wanted me to change tavern to restaurant, which, of course, was ridiculous for the times; I think this was for an anthology.  They wanted to excerpt something.  I think we compromised on the word inn, which worked better, so there was a while people where objecting to alcohol in it.  Timmy, the protagonist of the book, also has a scene where he’s drinking a bottle of wine, and they didn’t want us to have fourteen-year-old kids drinking bottles of wine; that was another area of censorship.  I don’t like it, at all, but I’m not willing to do a whole lot to avoid it.  We did a book called With Every Drop of Blood, which is about the Civil War, and we were taking such a beating, because of curse words that I said, “let’s write a book without any curse words and let’s see if we can,” and we did.  In retrospect, there were places in that book where there should have been a damn or a hell.  The book would have been a better book; it would’ve had more edge to it, more bite to it, if there had been a couple of strong scenes.  There are some strong scenes in it, but if those strong scenes had included some harsh language, it would have been a better book.  Maybe it would have been censored.

 

Feder:                          You write with your brother.  What’s the writing process like between the two of you?

 

Collier:                         The books are my idea.  My brother writes his own books.  He’s published sixty or seventy books, and those books are his idea.  But these books we do together are my idea; they grow out of something that I think ought to be taught.  What is something that kids really ought to know about?  One of the ones we did was about the industrial revolution; it takes place in 1810 in what is now Seymour, Connecticut.  Kids have lost this pre-industrial lifestyle, of course, and I thought they ought to know that “progress” hasn’t been all good.  It’s been mostly good, but we’ve become prisoners of time; our lives are not nearly so relaxed as they once were.  The name of this book is The Clock, because the clock becomes symbolically the representation of the industrial revolution and how it changes lifestyles.  So it starts with an idea like that, and then I just sit and search my own mind.  What are some episodes or incidents in American History that will help exemplify this particular idea or concept?  I begin to do some research and I look for some dramatic and exciting real episodes and I find these episodes; I arrange them in a sequence, so that there’s a story, there’s a narrative going there.  I do all of the research I think that is necessary.  What were the names of the streets?  What was the name of the pond?  What did they eat and how did they get from here to there?  How did you harness a mule and so on and so forth?  And I pack it up and I send this, or carry this, stuff to my brother, so he has a big box of materials in front of him—photocopies of maps, and all the stuff I’ve written out on yellow lined sheets of paper with a pencil.  He’ll go through it and we’ll have a conference on the telephone; he lives about an hour, an hour and a half away.  Then he’ll write a draft.  He’ll just write the whole thing, and then it comes back to me for review, and he rewrites, and it goes back and forth several times for review and rewrite.  We sometimes make large changes, sometimes not so large.  He sometimes needs more anecdote, or I’ve given him too much, or he needs something here that I haven’t given him, so it always happens that he needs stuff that I haven’t given to him.  It just goes back and forth until we have a manuscript that we like, and then it goes to our editors, and they usually want some changes, minor changes usually, which we’re happy to make, and it’s done.  It takes me about three months to do my initial part, and it takes my brother about three months to write a first draft, and then it becomes part time for each of us.  He’ll send me stuff that will take me a couple of days or three days to review or get him new material, and then it’ll take him a couple weeks to rewrite— or maybe longer— and he’ll send it back.  Meanwhile, I’m making some maps or one thing or another, but for me it’s a part time matter; I’ve always been a full time teacher.

 

Feder:                          What are your future writing plans?

 

Collier:                         Well, I’ve just completed two monographs; one on Connecticut and the Constitution.  The premise of the book is that when the delegates went from each of the states to the Constitutional Convention in 1787; they did have some national objectives.  They wanted to reform the government to make it a more viable instrument of national policy.  But each of the delegations from the thirteen, only twelve went, from the twelve states also had some very specific and concrete state objectives that they wanted to fulfill there.  They would never get the document ratified at home if they didn’t bring home the bacon.  The name of that book is All Politics is Local, and the point of it is to show what was it that Connecticut wanted in particular that was different from what other states wanted; and did they get it and how did they get it?  The second half of the book is ratification in Connecticut.  There were forty Anti-Federalists who voted against the Constitution, and I wanted to look at those forty people.  Why did they vote against the Constitution?  By 1788, when the ratifying convention was held in January, it was clear that this Constitution was going to be a wonderful thing for Connecticut.  Connecticut’s economy would flourish.  Connecticut was very concerned about security, Massachusetts people were talking about consolidating and there were threats from the English and so on and so forth, so this also had some very important security elements in it.  But it did a number of things that Connecticut people very specifically wanted.  Therefore, the question arises, why did anybody vote against the Constitution?  It was such a wonderful thing, and it turned out, in retrospect, that it really was a wonderful thing for the state of Connecticut.  So I tried to figure what these forty people had in common, because there’s a great deal of literature these days about the ideology of Anti-Federalism.  What were these Anti-Federalists thinking about?  What I discovered was that there was no ideology whatsoever.  There were three different groups of Anti-Federalists.  One of the groups contributed thirteen members to the forty.  They were all related to each other, they all lived in neighboring towns, and they all were cousins and uncles and things like that.  They all also belonged to the same militia regiment, so there was a local connection.  Then I looked at each of the other towns, and I found very local politics determined who was sent to the state ratifying convention.  I tried in this book, then, to describe the politics that lay behind sending these particular individuals to the ratifying convention.  The point of it is that ideology was irrelevant; there wasn’t any ideology.  It all had to do with personal, individual, and local matters.  That’s one book.  Another book is a book on rights in Connecticut before the Bill of Rights.  What kind of individual rights did we have?  How did the state either protect them or abuse them, or the colony either protect them or abuse them, before there was a federal Bill of Rights?   What one infers is, these were the views that Connecticut people had about individual rights before there was a Bill of Rights.  Did this play into the shape of the Bill of Rights as it was written?  Those are two things I just completed.  We’re just finishing volume twenty-three of this twenty-three volume middle school American history text.  I’m so busy with other kinds of things at the moment that I’m not beginning on any writing.  One of the things that I’ve been asked to do is to update my bibliography of Connecticut History that I did with my wife Bonnie that goes through 1981.  I’ve been collecting cards; as a matter of routine I keep up with everything that’s published in Connecticut history.  I don’t read everything, but I find out what’s out there, so a revision of that is probably going to have a high priority in determining what I do next.  I have a bunch of other stuff that’s half written or is in my head or I have already done the research on.  So I have more writing to do, and I’ll be long dead before I ever finish all that writing.

 

Feder:                          Where do you see historical scholarship headed?  Right now, it’s primarily social history.

 

Collier:                         Well, there’s already beginning to be a reaction against social history.  For the past thirty years, twenty years anyway, social history has been what everyone wants to do, and it’s a certain kind of social history.  It’s this anthropologically based social history where you look at tiny little episodes and try to infer from them whole systems of ideology or mentalité or however you want to describe it.  My own personal view of the matter is that it has been very much overdone; its so fragmented the profession you can’t even talk to other historians.  I had a doctoral candidate whom, he and I, in a very friendly way, came to a parting of the ways, because he wanted to write a theory based feminist dissertation full of jargon.  I said, “Why do you want to do this; only six people will read it?  Why don’t you do the same subject, but treat it differently, in a more generalized way and for the general public?”  That’s one of the great glories of the discipline of history; it doesn’t need any jargon, it can be communicated to the general public.  A sophisticated history can be communicated to the general public.  I think that there’ll be a move back to political history.  I think political history goes on and on and on anyway.  There are all these fads like cliometric history and psychohistory.  These things come and go, and these anthropologically based social histories will go.  There will be some new fad that hits the historical profession.  I mean the profession is just fad ridden and its graduate students have to jump on this most recent fad in order to be current, and to get the job, and to get noticed.  I think it’s too bad.  You know where the profession is going?  The most widely read historical works are written by non-professionals.  Barbara Tuchman, David McCullough, these are the people who are dominating television, like the History Channel.  David McCullough has, I’m not sure his is on that channel, but he has a regular thing.  Historians have got to begin to talk to the general public.  I’m a public historian, I work with museums, I work with lawyers, I work with legislators, I work with schools and school kids and school systems.  I write for the general public, I write op-ed’s, I write these middle school books, I write novels.  All of this is an effort to bring sophisticated history to the general public, and it’s what I think every historian should try their hand at.  They shouldn’t devote themselves to it; of course, they’ve got to do their own special professional research.  Every historian, however, should get out there and participate in the world, and they don’t, I’ve asked them to.  One case I was doing some research on Indians.  This was quite a few years ago and I needed a research assistant.  I went to a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut and said, “I would like to have you be my research assistant, I will pay you very well,” more than twice what she could earn as a T. A.; I was offering, this was eight years ago, twenty bucks an hour.  She asked her mentor about it, and the mentor said, “ no don’t do it, you don’t want to get mixed up in this sort of thing.”  That’s what you find.  I don’t know whether historians are afraid that they’re going to be compromised.  You don’t need to get compromised, that’s up to you.  I’ve told people I wouldn’t work for them or I’ve written reports that they didn’t like, so they pay me, but they wouldn’t let me be a witness on the stand.  You don’t have to compromise yourself.  I think the profession has got to get out there and do this kind of work.  If the profession doesn’t write for the public, journalists are going to write for the public, and they’re going to do lousy history.

 

Feder:                          On behalf of the Center for Connecticut Studies, I’d like to thank you for this interview.       

 

Collier:                         My pleasure.