How to Understand America, According to My Father
My father believed a simple mental picture of history could make anyone a lifelong learner. So, he developed a three-century “Time Map.” The education establishment wasn’t interested.
Daddy left a lot of intangible legacies for us, his four children, and for the world at large.
But one legacy, which he tried for years to give away for free, no one seemed to want. He called it his Time Map, an ultimate learning tool to connect the American history he loved with the daily news he had reported (as the Southern bureau chief for Newsweek from 1961 to 1979) and taught (as a journalism professor at West Georgia College from 1981 to 1991).
After retiring, he continued to look for the sparkle of any kindred mind that understood how his Time Map could be the holy grail of learning. He took rejection with good humor.
“If you don’t read any of these, you won’t be the first,” he wrote when he sent his Time Map documents to an opinion columnist at the Atlanta newspapers. “Local response ranged from .001 downward.”
And so, the Time Map emerged. It’s not a timeline, he would tell you. Not boring dates to memorize. Picture a football field, he would say. Three football fields, lined up goal to goal: the 18th century, 19th century, and 20th century, 100 yards/years each. Picture the fifty-yard lines marked off. Now rough in the four major wars—Revolutionary, Civil, and World Wars I and II—as important scrimmages. Now picture these three football fields/centuries turned up like proscenium stages, curtains opened, full of actors wearing the costumes and the look of their time (e.g. presidents clean shaven, then bearded, then clean shaven). And include a few scientists and their inventions, the camera from the 1839 “yard line,” the telegraph from 1844, and so on.
And woven through the three centuries were four Big Ideas.
- Democracy
- Free Press
- Checks and Balances
- Free Enterprise
Daddy was a visual learner in an unusual sense. He would transform knowledge into a picture. His mind worked by transmuting any fact or notion into a scene—a physical, textured, colorful, moving picture. His frustration with the education bureaucracy for not getting his Time Map, for the blank stares and non-responses, may have snagged on the fallacy of his belief that everybody learned this way.
But as I remember him now, I would also say he was a wildly auditory learner. He could hear, in his head, the music of poetry and the poetry of music. He once took in a painting of two owls by the artist Athos Menaboni (Time magazine had called Menaboni the “Audubon of the South,” for his hundreds of bird paintings), and typed out a witty poem of owl sounds for the painting’s unveiling. (The artist was a family friend, and the painting was for my aunt and uncle’s house.)
To you who’ll sit to see the how-of-
(not to hoot at) owls—
To seek the key which is to wit:
To woo the muse of fowls. . .
At our 1992 family Thanksgiving gathering in our parents’ house in Carrollton, Daddy told us about his attempt to offer his Time Map as a crash course in Georgia high schools. It would be called “Preparation for College Learning.” He had invited high school principals and other administrators from various school systems to gather in a classroom to listen to his presentation. They were polite, but quiet. He felt (as I often felt in my disorganized college teaching) that time ran out before he had finished. But he had delivered the concept.
An education consultant from the Athens area, a friend, confided afterwards, “I don’t want to be brutal, but. . .”
Still, not all was lost. The next day, The Times-Georgian, the local newspaper, had a front-page story on his “Preparation for College Learning,” with a color picture of him. He started a new folder with that clipping and other notes, labeled “MRA,” Moving Right Along.
By the following April, he had changed the name to “College Head Start,” and was working on it with a woman who taught history at Carrollton High School. One Saturday, I drove from Atlanta with my two-year-old daughter to observe their workshopping the Time Map idea. I was covering education for the Atlanta newspapers, so I would presumably bring a useful perspective.
The history teacher, who was as excited about history as Daddy, had some practical advice about what would work with her students and what would flop. They need to do things with their hands, she said. Many of them don’t think visually. They get images of the 20th century from movies, but little of the 19th century and less of the 18th century Age of Enlightenment. They see the Founding Fathers as myths, maybe true but outside any historical context and not at all “political” or relevant in the manner of Bill Clinton or the candidate he had just defeated, George H.W. Bush.
I don’t know what happened after he finally taught the Time Map to her Carrollton High students, but that was the end of it as a revolution in American high schools.
Joe Cumming’s life experience also filled the Map and each hour of his class with film clips, photographs, and stories as if he had witnessed the history himself. He was a brilliant performer.
For almost twenty years, he field-tested and refined the Time Map and all of its visual paraphernalia. The students lucky enough to be exposed to this were getting it for free, without grades or credit. Most of them were friends, relatives, and fans of Joe Cumming. Like me. Anytime he tried to insert it into real classrooms, through the deadening acoustic tiles of the Education Establishment, it was rebuffed, and died.
Undeterred, in the late 1980s, he offered it to grown-ups (called “Continuing Education”) in a West Georgia College classroom, once a week for six weeks. He spread the word through family and friends. Some car-pooled from Atlanta, more than an hour away, because they knew Joe Cumming and knew it would be fun. The course presented the Time Map in layers, starting with the three centuries, six presidents, four wars, and four big ideas. From this cognitive framework, he showed how it could be filled in over time (or backfilled in this case, for these were adults who already had plenty of unorganized knowledge of the past). Joe Cumming’s life experience also filled the Map and each hour of his class with film clips, photographs, and stories as if he had witnessed the history himself. He was a brilliant performer.
They loved it, from what I heard. They said they wished someone had given them this schematic when they were young.
“I’m such a visual person,” recalled my cousin Mimi Kiser, who later taught at Emory. “It was the most fantastic class I’d ever had.”
A few years after that, he wrote to a grandson, Alston Cumming, who had finished high school and was going off to Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He recommended all four surviving members of Alston’s family watch a Tommy Lee Jones movie about the American Revolution, April Morning. He sent worksheets for Alston to administer to his family, “to be ready” to see the movie.
The first worksheet started with the most basic idea of the Time Map—how a map is an abstract structure that you can fill in with your real-life experience. It was an empty outline of Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.
“Put circle for Birmingham, Atlanta, Augusta, Columbia, Savannah, Chattanooga, Macon,” the worksheet instructed. You know where those cities are from life experience, or is it from maps? Anyway, that’s how you fill in the Time Map with…Andrew Jackson…the Dred Scott case…the Muckrakers….the Marshall Plan, and so on: the highlights of American history, like that. It begins to take shape.
I don’t know if Alston helped his mom and younger siblings prepare to watch April Morning. The Time Map and its visual fill-ins aren’t for everyone. Alston didn’t stay long at Appalachian State, taking the kind of dark detour many his age will take. He found his way back by another path, not American history, and has turned out very well.
After 2001, I heard little from Daddy about the Time Map. I was getting a Ph.D. in “media history,” then teaching for the next twenty years at universities in New Orleans and Lexington, Virginia. The subculture of American universities during those twenty years was changing in a way that made Daddy’s Time Map feel awfully remote and antiquated. Historians questioned how a coherent Grand Narrative could explain the changes in American life from “settler colonialism” to the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of America’s indigenous people. The reforms of Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era, the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, the Civil and Voting Rights acts, rural electrification, winning the World Wars—these no longer fit the Time Map, which traced patterns of fulfilling, through democratic struggle, 18th century ideas out of the Age of Reason.
“Paul Revere’s Ride,” the Gettysburg Address, and Emma Lazarus’s “Give me your tired, your poor” (words that could bring tears or goosebumps to my father) had no place in the academy. If there were patterns to map, they were patterns of greed, violence, injustice, and exclusion. You approached history, society, economics, technology, and the law through many new lenses of critical studies and various “isms.”
A simplistic framework of American history seemed a hopeless project, especially one as liberal and democratic as Daddy’s. He would laugh at the irony of Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump trying to kidnap a liberal, self-correcting Enlightenment story and turn it into an un-evolved, Bible-blessed, right-wing American history. But Daddy was not a real historian. He was a liberal journalist. Journalism was not quite a real profession, like the law or medicine, and not quite a real academic discipline. It was an American improvisation, like jazz. Journalism was applied liberal arts, without certification.
Understanding the four ideas historically means seeing a faint light shining behind today’s news. Okay, so we’re a nation divided, both left and right claiming they are the bulwarks of “democracy.” In the Time Map framework, Democracy has deep roots in ancient Greece and blooms in the writings of John Locke and Jefferson’s Declaration, the self-evident truth that all of us are created equal and have equal rights. Really? Yes, but only under the law, such as we have it—equal on a jury, in the dock, and with a voting ballot.
But voting isn’t equal under the Electoral College, you say. True, and that brings us to Checks and Balances. As a concept from the 18th century, checks-and-balances was not a compromise but a scientific principle. Montesquieu (1689-1755) wrote about the Spirit of Law as if it were a philosopher’s version of the clockwork universe of Sir Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler. Religious tolerance, to him, was a law of history and natural philosophy. The Founding Fathers drew on Montesquieu and his age.
Free Press? Way before TikTok and Deep Fakes, understand why the First Amendment from 1791 protected freedom of the press. “The press,” at that time, was a marvelous machine that had changed little since it was designed by Johannes Gutenberg around 350 years earlier. The printing press, with movable type, had such power to change the Western world, the English Crown limited who could operate one. Daddy was a journalist who would trace ideas of freedom and truth back to the poet John Milton and his famous defense of an unlicensed press. In 1644, Milton said: Let Truth and Falsehood grapple in a fair contest. “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
He would laugh at the irony of Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump trying to kidnap a liberal, self-correcting Enlightenment story and turn it into an un-evolved, Bible-blessed, right-wing American history.
Milton!, to quote Wordsworth, thou shouldst be living at this hour!
Free enterprise? Capitalism is blamed for a lot of ills today, and rightly so. But the theory behind free enterprise is another one of those 18th Century Big Ideas that needs to be understood in its place and part of this imperfect self-fixing system. Conveniently, Adam Smith’s classic on the theory, The Wealth of Nations, was published in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence.
Economies of scale and division of labor gave the world an unparalleled abundance, after centuries of hoarding by the strong and scarcity for the rest of us. Capitalism harnessed the dirty human energy of greed, domesticating it into the profit motive. Yes, it went off the rails. Or rather, monopolized the rails (and steel and oil) and made consumers pay whatever was asked. The beauty of Daddy’s Time Map is that things change in time. The muckrakers and Teddy Roosevelt broke up the trusts, taxed the Robber Barons, and made the income tax “progressive” by graduating tax rates upward for high incomes. Government regulations shut down quack medicines and made meat safe.
It's 2024. Daddy died in November 2020, just after Joe Biden beat Donald Trump for president. I read the news every morning, and it still makes sense to me. I keep the faith.
Daddy was too busy and creative to be discouraged for long. But when I dig into old letters and emails from him—when I need his special kind of love—I find notes of discouragement about giving away the Time Map (copyrighted and tried on elementary school classrooms and professors).
In one of his obsessive daily notebooks (not the ring-binder journals archived at Emory, but the box full I’ve barely looked into), he wrote on March 14, 2009, of “one hot-focused goal” for the day: sending his Time Map material to retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Every morning, these days, I face the political news of this year with dread and hope. Joe Cumming, thou shouldst be living at this hour!
About the author
Doug Cumming is an associate professor emeritus of journalism at Washington & Lee University with 26 years experience at metro newspapers and magazines. After getting at Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in mass communications, he has taught multimedia reporting and feature writing at Loyola University in New Orleans and at W&L in Virginia. Earlier, he worked at the newspapers in Raleigh, North Carolina, Providence, Rhode Island, and Atlanta, Georgia; was editor of the Sunday Magazine in Providence; and helped launch Southpoint monthly magazine in Atlanta. He won a George Polk Award and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. He also plays a mean saxophone. He now lives in Decatur, Georgia.
- Doug Cumminghttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/doug-cumming/
- Doug Cumminghttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/doug-cumming/
- Doug Cumminghttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/doug-cumming/
- Doug Cumminghttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/doug-cumming/
I’m a visual learner who disliked history classes because I’m a visual learner. History teachers made me sleepy. If my first exposure had been Joe Cumming’s Time Map, his teaching method would have sparked a fire of curiosity in me that would have kept me alert. This essay is such a timely way to honor a father’s resourcefulness and celebrate journalism.