Fresh Air - Steven Spielberg

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

After making ‘ET’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Steven Spielberg returns to the theme of extraterrestrials in his new film, ‘Disclosure Day.’ He spoke with Terry Gross in 2022 about how he fell in love with movies, became a filmmaker, and about growing up Jewish in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust.Also, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews ‘Two Ships,’ a new book about two conflicting versions of American identity.Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter Follow us on Instagram Subscribe to our YouTube channel Check out the Fresh Air ArchivesSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. and Cooley. We're heading into the 4th of July weekend, a time for cookouts, barbecues, parades, and fireworks. Or, if you need to escape the heat, moves. We're interrupting our coverage. There has been a threat to publicly release government material, long-shrouded in secrecy. Stephen Spielberg's latest film, Disclosure Day, is about a rogue cybersecurity expert and a TV meteorologist, and their efforts to tell the world about the existence of extraterrestrials. It stars Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor.

We're going to listen to Terry's 2022 interview with Stephen Spielberg. Spielberg has directed over 30 movies, including Jaws, E.T., Close Encounters 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 Westside Story. His movies have grossed more at the box office than any other filmmaker. And as Michael Schulman wrote in The New Yorker, Spielberg has, quote, shaped nearly half a century of the American popular imagination, unquote.

When Terry spoke with Spielberg, he had released his semi-autobiographical film, The Fableman's, 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. Stephen Spielberg, welcome to Freshire. 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 leagues under the sea. and I was probably around six, the same age you were, when you saw The Greatest Show on Earth. And 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 underwater. 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 Bito Mill. Well, first of all, you know, I sympathize with you. I too saw 20,000 leagues under the sea with James Mason and Kirk Douglas and Peter Lorry.

And that sequence with the giant squid attacking, the Nautilus was terrifying, especially because they were cutting the tentacles off with axes. And that was pretty gruesome in those days. And I remember that. But I was older when I saw that movie, but I was only six years old when I saw when 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 it was, 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 giraffes 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 it 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, grayy image and 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. started playing. And I don't know how long it took me to fall in 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 parents' shoulders. 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. My first movie was a movie that scared my pants off, and I'll never forget that.

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, you know, 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 of 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 assuage 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 Kodak 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 that I could watch the film over and over again. and it would essentially, you know, it would call me down. What else were you afraid of as a child? Everything. There was nothing that didn't scare me. 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 looked at these horrible branches, and it looked like arms and long fingers and long fingernails, and the tree terrified. I'm terrified me. Later, as an adult, when I wrote poltergeist, I created a tree out the window that actually comes to life and grabs a kid and starts to suck them into one of its notholes, its sappy knot holes. And that was a direct steal from that tree out my window that scared me. I was afraid of the dark. I was, you know, 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 set 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 an inch or two

So I had that little comfort of a hall light coming in, and that was about it. Among the things you're famous for is movies and TV about World War II, including, of course, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler'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 greatest 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 show. You get things called Million Dollar Movie back in Phoenix. And I was very influenced by all the war movies they were showing that John Wayne films like the Fighting C-Bs and other films like Patan or Back to Patan or. Guadalcanal Diary or the sands of 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 that went off to bomb Japanese bridges. And he had a couple 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, Escape to Nowhere, which I depict in the Fableman's

is an actual movie I made when I was about 16 years old called Escape to Nowhere. And because I was really obsessed with war, I made a World War II Air Force movie called Fighter Squadron and Black and White when I was about 14 years old. And so that just came out of my... sort of fascination with 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 there stories about like heroism, about, you know, 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 fighters. 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 and 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, tap the, pat the person on the back, 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 adults 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 a war? I would never have gone to Canada, but I tried everything I could not to 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, you know, I was 1A. I was not doing good in college. 1A meant that you were, like, next up on the list.

I had a student deferment, a 2S deferment, as a lot of us had, most of us had. But when my grades drop below a certain level, my GPA dropped a certain level, I lost my two S deferment, became 1A, and was ordered up on my first physical. My second physical, actually. My first physical, I was in high school, a senior in high school, turned 18, up in northern California, and I was standing in line in a rainstorm outside to watch Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. And I was standing in the Dr. Strangelove 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 Kubrick 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. me a story. Yeah, well, and the story that took your mind off having to fight in war was a story about possible nuclear war and all the things that could 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 was enacted. I was in college at the time, and they were announcing 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 and burst into tears and then another number would come over that was on the bubble like 110 and you didn't know whether that

was going to be the number that sent you to Vietnam. But that was quite a day. I'll never forget that. So with all the fear that you had about war 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. You know, I knew based in the stories 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, you know, 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. in for those young 17, 18, 19-year-old boys storming Omaha Beach, let's say. So when I had the opportunity to make Robert Rodak's script into 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 it's so, 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 of, you know, step on grenades in those movies and their bodies would be thrown into the air.

But you 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 D-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 is 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 19.

Shot it in 97, 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 afraid they wouldn't see it because it was too disturbing? I was afraid that the first people saw it would just say it's too bloody. Don't put yourself through it. I know that you didn't storyboard the D-Day 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, seen like that with explosions and dead 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, you 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 and it took 25 days to shoot 25 minutes. So I was only shooting a minute a day. And because I hadn't storyboarded anything, but I knew what the mission was. They had to get up the Virville draw to get to the top of Omaha Beach. So I decided to shoot the entire sequence and continuity. So I began to the Higgins boats and then we got them out of the Higgins boats when they came under an intense fire. 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.

progressed up to beach until on 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 my whole life. It's what I did. I didn't do storyboards when I was a kid making 8mm movies. And in this sense, it allowed the chaos to be chaotic. You know, there's these great shots that Bob Kappa, the wartime correspondent and brilliant

photojournalist had made. He was on Omaha Beach when that first wave landed. But unfortunately, maybe 200 or more still photographs he took got ruined in a lab. They ruined every single shot except nine. And those nine shots really gave me a visual style. I said, if I can get those nine Kappa 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.

Stephen 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 Maureen Corrigan reviews two ships, the latest book by cultural historian David S. Reynolds. I'm David B. and Cooley, and this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David B. and Cooley. Let's get back to Terry's 2022 interview with director Stephen Spielberg.

At the time, he had released his film The Fablemans, based on his early years as a boy and a teenager, when he first saw movies and started making them. Part of your new movie is about, you know, 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 learn 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 to New Jersey until I was probably three, four years old. And I just remember sitting around the table, a lot of very, very old people. And these people probably weren't very old.

probably in their 30s or early 40s. And they were mainly speaking either Yiddish or they were speaking German or they're speaking Hungarian, mainly Hungarian. And my grandmother would teach them English. She was teaching them how to, they resettled in this country and they were learning English. My grandmother was their English teacher. And she 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. 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 inverted 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, and 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 I was much older. Did you understand at the time that those numbers were basically the ID numbers tattooed on arms because the Jews were not humans to the Nazis, and they were just going to be work to death or just put in ovens.

And so this is just like the math to 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 a three-year-old kid down and explain the Holocaust to them. 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 grandkids. grandparents would fill me in with 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, you know, 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 Shoah.

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 the stories, there's only so much a story can do to scare a child. But imagery is a powerful. 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 sixth or 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'll just never forget 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 that something had happened that would change me forever. How did it change you? I became obsessed with learning more about it. And Schindler's List was 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 written about the Holocaust either. And we didn't have access to the books 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. Stephen Spielberg speaking with Terry Gross in 2022. His film The Fableman's is based on his life,

and his early love of movies, and also his family life. This is fresh air. This is fresh air. Let's get back to Terry's 2022 interview with Steven Spielberg. His film from that year, The Fableman's, is based on the story of how he became obsessed with watching movies, then 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 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, you know, leaves your father to be with this other man. And it was similar in your life. How did you learn, if I may ask, that your mother was, you know,

romantically involved with the person you thought of as an uncle? Well, you know, 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 don't want to go into too much detail about it. it because it's sort of the turning point of the story. But just to say that, you know, I had always looked at my mom and my dad as my parents, my mom is my mom.

But after this, I had a secret, and I had a secret between myself and my mother. And, you know, no kid should ever be allowed to hold that kind of information secret. But I did because 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 peer, because we both had secrets. And it was a powerful load of responsibility to not say to anyone, especially my father, what I had discovered. It was a very painful part of my life. I can imagine. When your parents divorced, though, you blamed your father for the divorce.

And I guess I don't understand why you blamed your father, knowing that your mother was in love with someone else. I think I blamed 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 basically gave up the truth to protect my mom who was very fragile, even though she was an adventure, had a huge adventurous personality.

And we always saw her as Peter Pan, 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. dad knew that about her and wanted to protect her and let her have that childhood 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 were estranged from him for years, right? Well, yeah. When I say a strange is a strong word. I always talk to my dad.

We talked to, you know, but we talked on my birthday, or 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 have long talks. That was suspended for, I would say, about 15 years. That's heartbreaking.

I mean, that 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 both knew and you wouldn't share it with each other. I don't know. It's... You know, making this movie $40 million of therapy and turning my story into a motion picture

is never going to 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 to 103.5 years old. Thank God, because it gave us so many more years together in a kind of communion, of closeness and humor and involving each other in our interests. And we really, really made up for those gap years. And your mother never stepped in and said it was really me. who left.

Oh, no, she did later. She confessed that to, I mean, later, of course she did. When I was grown up and she had the restaurant, we would talk about it all the time. You know, in the Fableman's, 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 film who's actually depicted in a very glorified way is so angry with the young filmmaker because he doesn't like how he's depicted. He thinks, I'm not really that person. Was there a moment in your life when you realized that being behind the camera gave you the power to portray somebody as an almost like mythical godlike figure or to kind of take them down a few notches? 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 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 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.

advantage 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 what you shot, you know. And what really took place, I couldn't, and to this day, can't figure out why that happened because I never got to know him that well. that caused such a surprising reaction to my glorifying him, whereas he didn't think I was glorifying him. And so I'll never know, really, in our movie, 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 to try to explain it deeply and try to, you know, make all ends meet and make everything, you know, come out logical for an audience at the end. Sometimes, you know, there's no logic to the choices and the emotional reactions people have to things. You just have to, I just felt I had to tell it the way it happened to me. You mentioned scary discoveries that you made through shooting movies.

Can you mention one? Oh, there's many different discoveries, but one of the discoveries that happens all the time is that, and this is about acting. is that what looks subtle to the eye, when I'm standing next to the camera and watching actors engaging 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, aged directing television. First TV show I directed was when I was 22 years old. And I made a lot

of mistakes by just trusting my evaluation of performance 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

seemed perfectly natural on the day? And that is, it took me years to figure out how to modulate performances, so the actors would be at a level that I was seeking. Stephen Spielberg, thank you so much and continue to make movies that give us so much kind of pleasure and also pain. Thanks, Terry.

This was a pleasure for me. Stephen 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, Mooring Corrigan reviews Two Ships, a book offering conflicting versions of American identity. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Award-winning cultural historian David S. Reynolds is the author of books about Walt Whitman, John Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln. His latest book, Two Ships, focuses not on a lot on.

a person, but on the forgotten legacy of a powerful metaphor. Our book critic, Maureen, has this review. Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds' 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 Jamestown 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 ascribe to them that made them such a powerful metaphor for two

conflicting visions of American identity. To simplify, the Mayflower's passengers were separatist 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 Jamestown 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-ship's metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, southern descendants 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 of the other of the same of the same. 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 Mayflower 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 the white lion, the slave ship, back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery's place in the national story. The 1619 project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds' book.

Still, it seems too momentous a 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 Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrim's more cynical descendants might say in response to that sentiment, isn't it pretty to think so? Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed two ships by David S. Reynolds. On Monday's show, writer Rachel Aviv spent years reporting stories about other people's mothers and daughters. Then she became a mother-of-shoot. herself, went 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 B. Inc.