For this episode Kate Carpenter interviews Dr. Margaret O’Mara. Margaret is a professor of modern American history at the University of Washington, and the author of multiple books, including Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley and Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections that Shaped the Twentieth Century. Her most recent book is The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. I was a huge fan of this book and have recommended it to so many people, so I was thrilled to get to ask about what went into writing it. Margaret has also co-authored a history textbook, written many pieces for places including The New York Times, WIRED, and many more, and is an active public speaker. We talked about how she keeps track of so many different projects, the way her past work in the Clinton administration affects her writing, and much more.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Margaret O'Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (Penguin, 2020)
- Margaret O'Mara, Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections that Shaped the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)
- Margaret O'Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton University Press, 2017)
- More of Margaret's writing
- Zotero
- Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
- Jill Lepore and Daniel Immerwahr at The New Yorker
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter: Welcome back to Drafting The Past, a podcast all about writing history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter, and on this episode I was so excited to get to talk with Dr. Margaret O'Mara.
Margaret O'Mara: I'm really pleased to be here. Thanks, Kate.
Kate Carpenter: Margaret is a professor of Modern American History at the University of Washington, and she's the author of multiple books including Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science, and The Search for the Next Silicon Valley and Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections that Shaped the 20th Century. Her most recent book is The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. I was a huge fan of this book and I recommended it to so many people, so I was thrilled to get to ask about what went into writing it. Margaret has also co-authored a history textbook, written pieces for places including the New York Times, Wired, and many more and is an active public speaker. We talked about how she keeps track of so many different projects, the way her past work in the Clinton administration affects her writing and much more. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Margaret O'Mara, and I know you will too.
Margaret O'Mara: Like a lot of writers and a lot of historians, I started off as a bookworm, a reader reading everything I could get my hands on. I fell in love with or understood how to have my own voice as a writer I think in high school English classes with English teachers that helped me figure out how to put words on the page and make a case. And then I trotted off to college initially as an English major. And then I added on history once I got there because I realized how close that one could read and write a lot as a historian too. But I really think that the roots of how I write now, funnily enough, come from my first job out of college, which was I graduated and I went to work on a presidential campaign on the 1992 campaign of Bill Clinton and then worked in that administration for the first term in a little bit.
And in the course of that work, my job involved a lot of writing, but not perhaps very exciting writing, but it was very good discipline. I wrote briefings, briefing book for cabinet secretaries and for a while for the vice president. And so every day the people who are at the top of the government get a big binder of, here are all the things you're doing, and there's a cover memo that's summarizes the key things. And in some cases they're in events where they might not have a speech, but they have talking points. So you had to have some bullet points. And that introduced me to the importance of the rule of three, right, three things and keep it short and keep it succinct and get to the point and don't have throat clearing or unnecessary words. And I think that structure really has been a guidance for me throughout my career as a historian.
Kate Carpenter: Yeah. You can definitely see that come through in your writing. I wondered if that job had had an impact. Let's just start with the basics. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
Margaret O'Mara: I can write anywhere. My most important element of any writing discipline is a deadline. So if need be, I can make it happen, but I like to be in spaces with other people when I write. It actually helps my focus. I've long been a coffee shop writer. Fortunately I live in Seattle where there are lots of them and other people doing the same thing. But there is something about the ambient noise and the presence of others, and somehow it's the eyes on the street people. No one really cares what I'm doing, but I feel like I need to look like I'm concentrating and that in turn makes me concentrate on what I'm doing. There's something about taking oneself out of the usual space and being in another space solely to write that I find helpful.
Kate Carpenter: Do you have a routine?
Margaret O'Mara: I am usually rather than blocking my day, more often not I have days when I write and days when I do other things. I tend to be someone who sits down and goes on a big multi hour. I just need to focus on one thing at a time and I've experimented with other things. I think that one of the things that historians do, I think this is one reason your podcast is so interesting and so useful to so many of us, is that it's very interesting to see how other people do it and to play around with whether that would be a more effective way and a happier way for one to get one's own writing done.
But generally speaking, I found that blocking off my work weeks into a teaching day and a writing day or having periods of time. Right now I'm on sabbatical, so this is very much, I'm in research mode and writing mode. There's challenges to that though too because you have control over your time, but you have control over your time, so you're entirely responsible for creating the containers into which you put your work and get things done, which can be a challenge.
Kate Carpenter: How do you like to organize yourself, your research and your writing? Are there tools that you use?
Margaret O'Mara: Yes, I use a number of tools, mostly digital but some analog too. I've been a long time user of Zotero. I've been using it since almost the very beginning and it now has a very voluminous library that I periodically go in and try to be a little more organized about, but particularly because so much of what I do is modern history and particularly when I'm writing about the tech industry, there are a lot of things that exist on the Internet, either live on the internet or archived in the Internet archive and the way back machine. So having that browser add-on where I can just click and immediately save a webpage to Zotero is extraordinarily useful. So that's just really the big container into which everything goes. Then of course you have to organize from there.
I tend to use, I have tried, I've tried, I've tried to use some different tools like Scrivener, which so many writers I admire use with enthusiasm. I'm a word person and I think this is just, I'm a GenXer and I've always used it. And even Google Docs I get a little frustrated with when I'm collaborating with graduate students or scholars who are of a Google Doc generation, I will gamely try to go along, but I generally am a Word Doc person and I enjoy that.
And so I will use Word Docs as a place to be containers, subject-specific containers for notes on something. Particularly if I'm writing something shorter like an op-ed or even working on an essay or a journal article, I will have subject-specific Word Docs that try to consolidate notes from Zotero and relevant quotes and put them in one place where I can look at it all at once and see how those things relate to one another. And then I have yellow pads and I write things down on yellow legal pads, and I have lots of those and lots of pieces of paper strewn around my house and my office. My family gently tolerates them, but that just oftentimes writing things down on paper and certainly when I'm listening to something, whether it be a lecture or recording of something, I sit and I write down notes. I take notes on paper and somehow that really helps my attention and my retention.
Kate Carpenter: Do you keep both your primary and secondary sources then in Zotero?
Margaret O'Mara: I do. I do. And in part because I think this is also a reflection of where I'm getting a lot of things and certainly when writing the code, I was working with archives, but I was also building my own archive of a sort. I was working with subjects that many of which weren't that interested in archiving their materials, so I had to be creative. But yes, I keep them all and I try to organize them by subject, subtopic, chapter, a chapter I'm writing or a certain event and cluster them that way rather than dividing them one in the other.
Kate Carpenter: So where in your research process do you like to start writing? Do you start writing from the beginning?
Margaret O'Mara: I do start writing from the beginning. I think that part of this is psychological, a blank Word doc, a blank document is very daunting. I encourage all my graduate students do the same thing, just start writing stuff. The stuff you write early is not going to be the stuff that often it's the things that get thrown away, but then you get comfortable with also the process of killing your darlings, which I think is really important.
And also being more selective, figuring out what goes in and what stays out, that you don't have to write up every single source. But I think getting in the habit of writing and having running documents and having drafts, and even if they're just squibs and incomplete bits, getting words on paper and trying to make that a regular habit. I don't want to say a daily habit because even I don't make it a daily habit, even though I aspire to, but I think the more you can just spend time writing things, the stronger that muscle is and also the less daunting it becomes to embark on particularly a long form writing project, like a book.
Kate Carpenter: How do you transition from those sorts of little bits of writing then to completing a full draft?
Margaret O'Mara: I will combine documents. I do a lot of cut pasting. I always, and this is my security blanket strategy, when I'm cutting anything, I throw it in another Word Doc, eclipse document. Usually it is a dustbin to which I never return, but somehow knowing I'm saving those words makes me feel better and it's easier to cut them. But I do spend a lot of time playing around with structure when I have some things on the page. I will certainly have outlines. That's actually one thing that I use those yellow pads for. It's very useful to do outlines and reiterate on those. I'm a big fan of Post-it notes on the wall. Here are the things I want to write about. And just making a note of that and then putting it on the wall when I'm deep into bookwork. Then it definitely is a bit of a so-called wall of crazy. There's a lot of things up there, but that is useful.
I have a big whiteboard in my office that I use to put down things that I try to figure out relationships between different things and people. That being said, I am a chronological person. It's interesting. I've played around in a couple of instances both with not less so with books, but more with other writing and not moving chronologically, moving thematically. And my brain really rebels against it. I have a harder time with narrative structure when it's not this happened, then this happened, then this happened. I like names and dates. I like that chronology. And so having timelines I always find very useful and I love the synergy of this person was doing this thing and then halfway around the world, this other person was doing this thing and thinking about how at the same moment these seemingly unrelated things were happening and helping to put whatever your main action is in broader context.
Kate Carpenter: What then does your revision process look like?
Margaret O'Mara: My revision process is pretty comprehensive, but I will say my writing process is pretty intense too. And I say this with, I wish it were otherwise, I wish I were better at the bad first draft, just being comfortable with getting words on the page. I certainly will do that in other, just as the writing discipline, I'll make sure I'm putting words on the page in some way, but somehow when I'm writing something, I tend to polish every stone a bit. That being said, I still revise a lot. So I've come to realize that this is the way I write. It works. It's more painful or it feels more painful than just, I'm just going to put everything out there and not really care about how pretty it is. But I think it's really important as a writer to acknowledge this is the way my brain works, my neurons fire, this is how it works for me.
Rather than feeling like, "Ah, darn it, why aren't I doing it this way? This other person seems to do it so effectively or why can't I go faster?" I think historians in particular, we're always berating ourselves for not going faster. And certainly having worked with journalists and the very, very fast pace of newspaper and magazine journalism relative to history, that makes you feel even more self-conscious about I just go as I go and I try to get it done as quickly as I can, but sometimes it just doesn't come as quickly because what we do is quite complex and does require a lot of thought about content and structure as well as argument.
Kate Carpenter: You said though that your revision process is comprehensive. You edit your drafts as you go, do then step back and take out a big picture edit?
Margaret O'Mara: I do. I do. I will do a big picture edit. I will come back to something and I don't completely tear everything up and start again. But particularly when you're working long form, when you're looking at book chapters and sections and structure just going in, and then just giving it a rest. The other wonderful thing about writing a draft or a second draft or something that's still in progress and then going away from it for a while and returning to it, you feel so much more charitable about it. It's so much better than you thought. So when I just come off writing something, I'm like, "Oh, I guess this is good enough sending it off, or I'm going to let it be." And then I come back, I'm like, "Oh, no, that's really good. Oh, yeah." And I even to this day, will find big chunks of the code that didn't make it in the code for narrative reasons, and I'm like, "Oh, that's pretty good. I should do something with that."
So we are very hard on ourselves and it's really valuable to go away from it and give yourself some rest. It's kind of like exercise or strength training or anything intense. You just have to give yourself a break and then come back and you see things in a different light, and you also can see the flaws more clearly. You're like, "Oh, wait a minute. What am I talking about there? Well, maybe what if I just switch the order of these paragraphs? Oh, that's so much better." So we can't just grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, and expect to have a clear sense of what's possible for your manuscript.
Kate Carpenter: Speaking of giving yourself a break, I was struck while I was preparing for this interview that you have so much going on both professionally and personally. You have a family and a life. How do you keep writing from getting lost in the shuffle of all of that?
Margaret O'Mara: It's not like, yes, it does occasionally get lost in the shuffle. I think, again, this is part of, these are the mind tricks that we play on ourselves, both positive and negative. I think part of it is understanding that it's a marathon, not a sprint, and that life has a rhythm. There are times when personal things take precedence and there are times when there's more room for professional things, including writing. I think it's really important I was working on… My kids are teenagers now, so they're more self-sufficient, but when my kids were really little, I would feel very self-indulgent to be hiring a babysitter or caregiver to go sit in a coffee shop for an afternoon and try and work on something and maybe leave with a couple hundred decent words, and that was it. That's a really difficult thing I think for caregivers, parents and others to do when others depend on you.
I think this also counts for, it's a lot easy to let teaching and other professional obligations that other people are essentially asking you to do, to take up the space and not feel bad about it. And so writing becomes this selfish act, but it's not. It's actually fundamental to what we do and it's fundamental to what we give and so I think we all… Forgiving myself for imperfections, trying to get the plate as less full or making sure that whatever is on the plate are things that in which I am invested and I believe are important for me to do. Sometimes those are things that other people want me to do and I agree that they should be a priority, and other times they are things that I want to do and I have to assert that that's what I want to do.
And saying no, and sharpening that ability to say no and not be too helpful to everyone sometimes has to be what one has to do, but it's never entirely smooth. I don't think anybody has it fully figured out. We're all spinning the plates and it's like, "Oh, one might fall at any time." But as time has gone on, and look, I am deeply aware of how lucky I am. I am a senior tenured professor at a research university, and I do have the ability to say no to things in a way that I didn't at earlier points in my career.
But appreciating that even at any point in my career, when I look back to when I was on the tenure track or even before when I wasn't on the tenure track and was trying to get on it, there were things I was saying yes to that looking back, I'm like, "I didn't really have to put myself through that. That did not help me, nor did it help the people I was supposed to be helping." So it's good to remind ourselves that we're not indispensable. We don't have to be indispensable to everyone all the time.
Kate Carpenter: Absolutely. Well, I want to ask about, you have written about or you do write about and specialize in history in very different areas, particularly tech history and then presidential history, although there are definitely connections between them too. But I'm curious both why are you drawn to those two different subjects and then how do you keep that balance between them?
Margaret O'Mara: I'm interested in power and I think that really I call my time working in Washington and the Clinton administration both in the White House, and I was at Health and Human Services as my first graduate school because so much of what I observed there, experienced there really colors what I pursue. Now, I already talked about the writing discipline. I think there is that the core, the talking points in the briefing book and are still there in my soul. Although part of the reason I went to graduate school, I was like, "I would like to write something in my own voice, please. I do not want to write an Al Gore's voice anymore. I know he's the vice president, but I need to move on." And again, it was what an extraordinary experience to have in your early twenties, but still I'm really glad I had that time in my life and I'm glad I moved on from it.
But what I did observe there is I was in the room where it happened occasionally on the periphery of the room to be clear against the wall as the support staff, I was not making any decisions, but really observing up close how the most powerful people in the world were just human beings trying to muddle their way through. And that there was no heroes, no villains, that these are complex beings. There's historical contingency at work. The other thing that was really interesting and why I chose history graduate school as opposed to law school or public policy school was there was not a lot of historical thinking going on in the room where it happened, that everyone was barreling forward from the present tense to the future tense, occasionally calling in historians to sit and talk to the President about what would Lincoln do in the situation?
But at the moment there was not a sense of, "Okay, 40 years ago we did this and this is how it played out. Maybe we should keep that in mind as we craft this new piece of legislation." Because there just really isn't time and bandwidth to appreciate it and understand it. And so that was my what drove me to grad school. I went to grad school to study politics. I actually had worked on social policy and anti-poverty programs. And so I went to graduate school to study that, the history of that. And I came out of graduate school studying very, very wealthy people in Silicon Valley, which of course, it's all the same political economy. So it wasn't that much of a difference, but it still was how power works, who the haves and the have-nots are. And I'm very interested, I think both in the case of presidents, modern presidents and then certainly 21st century Silicon Valley, you have some similar phenomena happening where there's extraordinary concentration of power.
There is a bubble surrounding the people at the center of it. It is very, very hard to keep a bead on reality and how most people are living their lives when you are either a modern US president or a tech billionaire. It depends, in the case of presidents, having people around you, hiring good people and having people who will say no to you and give you good advice and having a moral compass that will help you guide you. And I think the same thing goes for the titans of tech today are even more interesting in that they, at least someone who becomes president, well, most of them, that was a lifelong project. Bill Clinton was thinking about being president at a very young age and worked towards that and had a long career in government. Even someone like Ronald Reagan who was considered to be terribly inexperienced when he was elected, had been governor of California for two terms. It was not nothing.
Whereas we look at some of the people who are the most powerful people in the tech world today, and they are as very young people, as young men who had really done very little other than just software engineering and coding, suddenly come into immense success and wealth and don't have a broader sense of the world and may not always have people around them who are willing to speak truth to power. So they have to build that education while they're actually flying the airplane. And I just find all that very, very interesting. I see a lot of parallels. And also the two worlds are very closely connected. I came to Silicon Valley in part because Silicon Valley was a place that certainly when I started writing about it in the late nineties, they were in denial that the government had anything to do with them ever. And of course that was catnip to me. I'm like, "Aha, I shall show you." And so that's how my dissertation project took shape. That became my first book, Cities of Knowledge.
Kate Carpenter: We've talked about how your first job really influenced your writing. You also write a lot in public forums, whether that's op-eds or essays. How has that type of writing shaped your approach?
Margaret O'Mara: A number of ways. I feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to publish in these public forums and also to be edited by extraordinary editors. I've learned so much. That's the secret to good op-eds is a good editor. That's the secret. People like, "Oh, that was a great piece. How did you do that?" I'm like, "I had a great editor." It was useful, one of the things I realized soon after I started doing more public writing is I had prided myself on being like, "Oh, I have this background in politics, talking points, speech writing. I'm clear crisp, I'm not getting sunk down in academic writing, the problems that some academics have and kind of rising above and telling a story." Oh no, I felt very fuddy-duddy when I was first sending in pitches and drafts. And they're like, "No, you're not getting to the point. What's your lead? Be more crisp."
And I think that it was a reminder of the importance of simplicity and how quickly you do have to get to the point and be very clear about, this is what my hook is, this is what my point is. And to be learning how to be very economical in writing about complex things, but yet not giving up the complexity. That was something too that I really tried to do with the code is to be reader friendly to people who were maybe tech users but not technologists themselves, but also not to do away with all of the complexity that was going to communicate that this was not something that was just one and done. So I've learned how to write. Of course, writing short is much harder than writing long. And so it's been a good reminder of being very economical with words.
The other thing that writing for the public really built my muscle for is certainly when I was writing pretty often for the New York Times, I was being asked to write about things that I hadn't written a book about or more pointedly someone else had written books about. And my initial instinct is like, "Oh, no, no, no. That's not my area of specialty." You defer to other historians rightly who've done the work. And so finding, I think one of the… And this counts for public writing, this is not for academic writing. But when one is writing for the public as a historian and you're the only historian in the room, what I tried to do was first have the confidence to say, "Well, look, I teach about the nineteenth-century tariff. I can write about it like I teach about it. And as when I teach about it, I'm going to draw upon the extraordinary work that others have done, and I'm going to give them credit."
So what I really sought to do, of course you can't footnote an op-ed, but I really, really tried to really mindfully draw on the other scholarship to quote from other scholars, not in a way that was clunky and would send a regular op-ed page reader to scurry to another section of the paper, but something that made it clear that there is a body of work about this. And what I also tried to do after a column came out, this is when Twitter was still Twitter and not X, I would go on Twitter and do a thread that had links to all of the work that I drew upon to. I wrote a column on presidents paying their taxes, on presidential tax returns. That was a wild ride, which was really fun. But that was an example of something where I knew enough to write something coherent, but I was really digging in deep and doing a lot of research and drawing upon the work of other historians and other scholars of taxation.
Kate Carpenter: To talk about how so many things come together in Margaret's writing, I asked her to read an excerpt from The Code and talk to me a bit about it. Here's Dr. Margaret O'Mara reading from The Code Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.
Margaret O'Mara: The morning fog hadn't yet burned off the plum orchards as the rented blue Pontiac rumbled down the country road a few miles south of Palo Alto. Bill Draper was behind the wheel. His friend and business partner Pitch Johnson was doing the same thing in another orchard in an identical blue Pontiac. They did this every morning in those heady early days of Kennedy's new frontier, wake up early, hop in the rental cars, go on the hunt for deals. Draper slowed down as he spotted a wooden barn looming up among the trees. A farmer had built it years before to dry the harvest, but as he got closer, Draper could tell it wasn't full of prunes any longer. Nailed up over the door was a sign with a company name on it, syllables of techs and trons that signaled a fledgling electronics operation inside.
Rolling to a stop, Draper hopped out of the Pontiac and headed to the door. A brisk knock the door opened another young man in shirt sleeves, squinted out into the morning light. Draper introduced himself and got right to the point, "I'm a venture capitalist. We buy minority interest in companies like yours and turn over money to you to grow your business." That was all a cash-poor entrepreneur needed to hear. "Come on in," the young man replied. Draper had just snagged another one morning after morning company after company Bill Draper and Pitch Johnson became the Go-to guys if you were a young and hungry electronics company.
Kate Carpenter: I had such a hard time choosing what passage. It's such a good book. What goes into writing a passage like this?
Margaret O'Mara: As I'm reading it, I am thinking about when I first heard this story, I was sitting at lunch at the retirement community, very high-end retirement community that's just across the street from the Stanford Shopping Center on Sand Hill Road on the border of Palo Alto and Menlo Park talking to Bill Draper, who in his mid-eighties at the time was still very vigorous, had just come from a game of tennis and him telling the story, which I know he had told to other people many times before.
And then he again told it to me again. Pitch Johnson told it to me again, it's the story they tell about themselves. But I love how we were eating club sandwiches and talking about it. And during those lunches, and this is one of the reasons that the venture capitalists became big figures in the book, because they are this connective tissue across the generations. I realized a couple of things about these people. First of all, they've been friends eating club sandwiches together for lunch and playing tennis since the fifties. They're very close. And how I got to interview so many of these people is because they all knew each other. I talked to one, they're like, "Oh, you need to talk to my friend so-and-so."
And they're retired. So they had nothing but time and they were still very with it and energetic and it was great. But this sense of possibility and beginnings and wide openness and they talked about, they'd always bring up the blue Pontiac. They had these matching cars. And what I really loved about the story, what I wanted to do was situate the reader in a Silicon Valley that was before it was Silicon Valley, when it was really not a place that anyone at the time would've thought destined to be the high-tech capital of the world. This was an agricultural valley in California. And Draper and Johnson and others like them were young guys. They were not particularly rich and famous or even particularly techie. Draper came from, he had a pedigree. He went to Yale, he had an ivied background. He was the exception.
Almost all of the people in this generation and certainly the one starting companies were out in California because they didn't have connections. They were scholarship kids. They were all white men to be clear. But in the world of mid-century, mid-twentieth century America, they were suddenly given this opportunity because of their engineering interests and skills, and because of Cold War spending that was causing the electronics industry to boom, to become entrepreneurs and in some cases become spectacularly successful. So these very, very rich men that I had club sandwiches with in the middle of the twenty-teens started off their careers as poor boys working on the oil rigs in Texas for the summer to pay for their college expense, for their books for college or from small towns in Iowa or small towns in South Carolina. They were not people that were expected to be titans of industry. And I thought that was a really revealing thing about helping to show how mid-century America, mid-twentieth century, that the era of prosperity and of public spending created this escalator of opportunity for so many people.
Kate Carpenter: When you're interviewing people for a book like you were here, are you also looking for details as a writer that you can include for scenes? So I know that they brought up the blue Pontiac, but do you ask what was the day like that day day? What were you wearing? What were you thinking? That sort of thing.
Margaret O'Mara: That is actually most of what I'm looking for when I interview people. And that's something I learned through the process of doing this book. I started off being like, "Oh, you're going to tell me things." And look, human memory is fallible. It's actually something that really came home to me when I was writing my second book, Pivotal Tuesdays, which is about presidential elections, including the election of '92, which I worked on, and I was like, "This is going to be a breeze. I remember everything." Oh heck no, I forgot two-thirds of it. So oral history is an extraordinarily valuable source, particularly when conducted by a trained oral historian, which I am not. But you are relying on someone, and it's the cases of the people I was talking to, you're relying on people to remember details from many decades prior and also details that have been burnished and may have altered over many decades of talking about them and remembering them.
So the things that I really appreciated and I loved about talking to these people, most of whom were toward the end of their lives, were the personality details I could pick up and the things about them. So for example, one of the venture capitalists I spoke with who I was talking about lobbying for lower taxes, and he's like, "Oh, you know what? Let me next time we meet, I'm going to bring you a copy of my calendar from 1976, and I'll show so you. You can keep track of all the meeting, all the people I met with on Capitol Hill." So A, he still had the calendar. B, when he brought me the copies, it was a color copy because he had color blocked and coded everything so neatly and tidily.
And I thought that was just a wonderful detail about him. So I think that's the value of having these conversations, not to expect, oh, I'm going to discover something factual that an archive won't show me, or another kind of archive won't me. Maybe you will, maybe something will slip out. But I came to appreciate them more by I could write about them. I could bring them to life on the page after I talked to them in a way that I could not, had I not had these conversations.
Kate Carpenter: That's fantastic. Your writing is so clear, such a delight to read. I know from experience that making writing look so easy is often actually really hard work. At this point, does it come fairly naturally to you to write so clearly or does that get pared down in the revision process?
Margaret O'Mara: It does not come to me easily. I don't know if that makes listeners feel better or worse. No, it does not. It doesn't get easier. I wish it would. Don't we all? I wish it were easier. Sometimes you're like, "Why did I choose to do this for a living? What?" Yeah, it doesn't. But there is something that is exciting about the process, certainly when you get in the flow of it that you can't replicate it any other way. It is gorgeous. And of course nothing's better than closing the computer and being like, "Oh, I wrote some good words today." It doesn't get easier. I think that what has gotten easier is I do start with the people. I have an argument, I have ideas, but when I'm thinking about actually writing the thing, I'm like, "Okay, what are the stories that can carry my ideas? Who are the people that can carry my ideas?"
And so in a way that's shifting a bit to thinking more journalistically or novelistically than a lot of academic writing. That isn't mutually exclusive. I think there's actually more historians than not who write narrative. We're all storytellers and the old chestnut of clunky historical writing, I honestly, don't know where that exists anymore. I think there's just brilliant stuff being written if it ever really existed. I think it's a bit, yes, there can be really complex ideas that can be hard to… You've got to think hard to grapple with them, but that doesn't mean it's hard to read. So I do think about who are my people? And I think a lot, and this is something that my students, my graduate students and my undergraduates, I think get tired of me. My comments on drafts when I never like it when an acronym is doing the action, when it's like an agency when there's something like, "Oh, HHS, blah, blah, blah."
I'm like, "Who in HHS? What people? This is human choices." The building, the White House didn't do it. Other people did it. Facebook didn't do it, who did it? So who are the human beings? And I think forcing that discipline on myself too and being really, really trying to dig down into who did what, when, where, how, which is what historians, as part of what we bring to the party, we make it clear that these are human choices and that there is agency here. And that's not just these, nothing's inevitable. There are no monoliths, no acronyms do things.
Kate Carpenter: I want to talk a little bit about the structure of the code. You mentioned earlier that you're definitely a chronological person and the book is largely chronological, but you've structured it in four acts, but then there are these series of what you've called arrivals where you introduce characters. How did you settle on this structure for the book?
Margaret O'Mara: Well, part of it was whenever you're writing a book, you're reading a lot of other books and thinking about how structure is effective. And I really enjoy, I found myself drawn to structures, books where you do take that beat in between parts where you have these short interludes. One book that very directly influenced my thinking as I was thinking about the structure was Richard White's Railroaded, which is about the transcontinentals. And he has these wonderful interludes that they take you out of the narrative, but give you something that is related to the narrative and set you up. As I thought about the structure, I knew from the start that I wanted to delineate that there have been several different, there have been multiple Silicon Valleys. There are many existing today, but there have been different eras that are pretty distinct.
And I thought that it would be also fun to make them analogous to the process of launching a startup or a new product, which is thinking about Silicon Valley, the place as analogous to a company. That was a bit of shtick, but also it was trying to make my point about the long evolution. We would not have gotten to now if we hadn't had the then, that these things are connected. It isn't this is a nice historical plaque and we've moved on. That's definitely the way that a lot of technologists, not all but many, think about history. They're like, "That's not relevant to what I'm doing. I'm building the future." I wanted to make the human… The other thing I really want to do with this book, because so much of it's so easy to again write about just like we don't want acronyms doing the action, it's so easy to write about technology and talk about technology as if it's doing it on its own.
Just think about how the public discussion about artificial intelligence goes. AI this, AI that. Well, an AI is a thing built by people and controlled by people and it has humanity. And that was part of what I wanted to do with this book was to show the human beings and the range human beings, not just software engineers, not just electrical engineers or hardware makers, but people from a range of backgrounds, a demographic diversity I wanted to illustrate and also it's fun going into people's lives and bringing, there's some really great personalities. It's a range of personalities. It isn't just like a wacky tech guy. They're also stereotypes that I wanted to transcend and I wanted to play with.
Kate Carpenter: For all historians, but I have to imagine maybe especially for someone writing about subjects that are so influencing our lives still right now, although what history does that not apply to? I don't know. One of the struggles is to make sure that we're not making history seem like something inevitable. The way things are today was how it would always go. We talk about historical contingency. Do you have a strategy as you're writing for making sure that both you and the reader are back in that place of possibility rather than feeling like you're just foreshadowing what we already know is coming?
Margaret O'Mara: I do. I do. While I think ultimately in the final draft of The Code, my organizational structure was very much when I went in those final revisions, I was like, "How is what I'm talking about helping us understand how we get to now? How we get to the now of big tech and platforms?" But also to be very clear, and I think this is what this book sought to do, was to place this funny place out in California, where those wacky tech guys, place it in broader historical context in political history, nestle it in social history. This is a history of America. This is a modern American history from the 1940s to the present. And tech is part of that and is a product of that and a shaper of that, the tech industry is. So what I sought to do, for example, in talking about the years right before the second World War, when companies like Hewlett-Packard and other Stanford spin-offs are starting up in garages in Palo Alto.
What I also mentioned in that discussion is there were guys in garages all over the United States in this the beginning of the 20th century tinkerers in garages were a thing. So you could go to Dayton, Ohio, you could go to a lot of places where you could find much more, many, many more of them to be clear, Wright brothers in Dayton for example. But go to any community town, city of any significance, any region of the country, and you would find some garage startups, a handful here and there. Because that handful of garage startups near Stanford included Hewlett-Packard and other companies that became extraordinarily successful and was the germ of what came next. That doesn't mean that this was destined. Now, at the same time, there were other things in place earlier that did even before the Second World War, which was very much a hinge of history and was a propulsive force in making Silicon Valley an electronics center, but there were other things there.
In that region of the country, there was a specialization in small electronics and communication devices, which makes sense in the Bay Area because far away and needing to do long distance communication, including communication at sea. So remote communication was a priority. It was of an interest. So no surprise that there is a regional specialization in that. And then what turns out to happen is, again, this is not inevitable, but the electronics industry as it grows in Silicon Valley, before it was Silicon Valley in the fifties and sixties, mostly defense-oriented and space-oriented is small electronics and communication devices. Well, those are the building blocks for the consumer technology world that we have today. Right. The computer industry though, which obviously is important to the story, but that was all in the East Coast. All those companies were headquartered in the Northeast. So I think showing that geographic variety.
Also, I really wanted to talk a lot about Boston as the symbiotic relationship between Silicon Valley and Boston, not a competitive one. Silicon Valley was too small, too insignificant it for a while. But that also, putting it in context I think helps with that to show readers that nothing was inevitable. And that's really exciting. That's the fun part when you're like, "No, this was not destined to be." And that also puts agency back in human agency, human choice and the choices that were made on the ground by people there to not only just have history happen to them, but also to try to bend the arc really made a difference.
Kate Carpenter: Are there people that you rely on for feedback as you are writing?
Margaret O'Mara: Yes. My husband is a big truth teller. He's not an academic, which is-
Kate Carpenter: That's helpful.
Margaret O'Mara: Tremendously helpful. His bullshit detector is very, very finely tuned, and that has been extremely, extremely helpful in both talking through ideas and having him give feedback on drafts to the degree that he patiently will do it. Sometimes I try not to put too much on him, but I think even just having conversations, talking through ideas is really, really generative. I also try to, I get really good feedback both from colleagues like work shopping as early and often as you can, even when it's scary is very, very helpful. Sometimes you come with too many ideas, but it also is helpful saying, "No, this is what I'm saying." So sometimes when someone is giving you advice that you actually don't think is right for the project or then you're like, "No, no, no. Okay, clearly I'm not making clear what my point is."
So there's something about if I'm getting advice that I think is off base, let me pause a bit and say, "Well, maybe this is something about the current draft or the current conceptualization of the project that I need to more fully flesh out and be more clear in writing about, or even just think about more hard." And so that's really useful.
And then editorial feedback, both stylistic and content wise at the later stages, the more eyes upon it, you don't want too many eyes, too many cooks. But one of the things I did for my first book manuscript that was extremely valuable, is I actually did a second round of, there was obviously peer review, it was published with Princeton, but I had another set of mentors who were gracious enough to read the book too and give me feedback. And they came from, the diversity of their disciplinary specialties was such that it really, really was very generative because they were asking different questions and pointing out different things and they were all… And I think having other people whose writing you admire, read your writing and not be defensive about it and be brave enough to do it, sometimes it can be really scary. That can be so, so helpful.
Kate Carpenter: Are there other people, speaking of people who's writing you admire, but are there other people whose work you like to read as inspiration as a writer or maybe even other media that you look to?
Margaret O'Mara: Oh, gosh. I read widely and deeply and I love, I'm just so excited by all of the… There's such a flood of books that have come out even in the last three or four years. I can't even name them all. But I think one of the things that's happened with historians with history books and books by historians, both those working in academia and those out is there have been more and more of the academic trade hybrid, books published by academic presses that are written with a broader audience in mind and in some cases marketed very effectively to those broader audiences and vice versa. You have trade houses that are really supportive of and putting out books that are narratively compelling but also are really important works of scholarship. It was such a pleasure to work with Penguin Press for The Code. And one of the things that in addition to all the fantastic editorial support I got and it made it such the book it is, but also being able to… Those footnotes are dense.
No footnote was stripped down for this. This was I got to really show my work and leave a lot of breadcrumbs for other scholars and others to pick up on. There's a lot of stories in the book that I give a couple paragraphs to that could be books in themselves, and that's really what I tried to do. So there are a lot. And I read fiction. I always have something, a work of fiction going on. I wish I read more there. I go on these big jags when I'm on vacation and I'll just tear through lots and lots and lots and lots of books and then there'll be a dry spell. But I think the more that one reads, the more you absorb. And I read very carefully and with great admiration historians writing in the public. I think that it's very exciting to see historians like Jill Lepore and now Daniel Immerwahr and others in the New Yorker and seeing historians who are writing long form work in magazines like the Atlantic and the New Republic and others.
Those are things that I read avidly and carefully and with great cheering along. Because I think one of the things, when I first started grad school back in 1997, after working in Washington, as I was introduced to all this extraordinary literature and coming at it from my public policy policy wonk hat, I'm like, "Ah, I feel like there's just, all these wonderful lights are under bushels." They're being published in academic journals. They're being published by university presses, and they're hot topics of conversation within academia and in graduate seminars, and they're not out in the public. And you didn't have as many historians writing for the public. And this is what I call the silver lining of the very, very dark cloud of the collapse of the job market. And also the proliferation of online outlets is you have so many more historians who are writing for public audiences.
And I think that is just a net good. Now we just got to make it economically feasible. We need to find a way to make that people make a good living doing that. But I think that's so different. 2024 is so very, very different from the late nineties in terms of historians as public intellectuals and how many of us there are and you don't have to choose a lane. Which I certainly felt at the beginning of my academic career, I had to choose a lane and maybe downplay the public work I was doing and the more applied public policy related things I was doing. I didn't really trumpet them on my CV. And now I see them all as of a piece. I write an op-ed, it relates to my teaching, it relates to my research and versa. All these things are generative.
Kate Carpenter: What's the best piece of writing advice you've ever gotten?
Margaret O'Mara: There've been a number of pieces of writing advice. There has been, strangely, one of the best pieces of writing advice was from my graduate advisor, the late Michael B. Katz, who was just extraordinary and shapes, taught me how to be a great advisor, incredible, incredible human being. But when I would finish my comprehensive exams, I announced to him that I was moving to San Francisco from Philadelphia, I was at Penn, to work on my dissertation there. At that time, my dissertation was not necessarily California-centric. I was moving there because my husband was taking a job at a dot-com company. And he knowing, and this was a Jedi mind trick that I admire in retrospect greatly. He gave me this long sigh and he's like, "When graduate students move across the country to when they're writing the dissertation, they rarely finish it."
And so that was like, he knew exactly what he was doing. I'm like, "Darn it, I'm going to finish this. I'm going to do it. I'm going to prove him wrong." He knew exactly. So sometimes that was very helpful. But I think in terms of writing advice, concrete writing advice, I think some of the aphorisms, the hackneyed ones are true. Write what you know. I was working on a grand comparative project on high-tech regions around the world and flailing a bit. And my then literary agent, Geri Thoma, was like, "Write what you know. Write about Silicon Valley." I'm like, "Oh, yeah, that's what I know." And then I also got a wonderful piece of advice when I was in the early stages of The Code and thinking about it, in a way writing around the big story waiting think, feeling like I'm not the one to write the comprehensive history of Silicon Valley. Someone else is going to do that. Some journalist is going to do it.
And my friend Fred Turner, who's at Stanford, he and I were on a fellowship together and we were sitting down having coffee, and I was like, "Oh, I just don't know what I…" He's like, "Just write the whole thing. You write the thing. You're supposed to write it." I'm like, "You're right. I am supposed to write it. Yeah. I can't wait around for someone else to write it. I'm going to write it." And so these are less about the process of writing. There are other things like just put your butt in the seat and turn off the Internet and all the things we know we should do.
But the other last one operational piece of writing that I should also mention that has been very valuable to me and I feel like he didn't say it quite this way, but I think the idea really came to me from feedback I got from Richard White on the manuscript from my first book. And essentially it's a version of the Joyce Carroll Oates, "You can't write the first line of the projects until you've written the last line." And it's the advice I give all my graduate students and undergraduates and myself, which is, "Write the introduction or revise the introduction last, because it's when you get to the very end, you realize that's what this is. This is really what I need to say and I need to say it early and punctually. I need to put that out there as quickly as possible." And so the first line usually comes after the last line. The first line is the last thing I write.
Kate Carpenter: Well, speaking of, I know you're on sabbatical now and working on another book project. Can you talk a little bit about what you're working on?
Margaret O'Mara: Yeah, depending on the day, I would say I'm happy playing in the sandbox, or that's on the good days. And the other days it's I'm wading through the fire swamps and might sink at any minute, which is the early stages of research and exploration and thinking about a book that I'm thinking of as a history of extreme wealth in America from the 19th century to the present. And the inspiration of it comes from in a way, well, these are questions that I've… A question I've been asked repeatedly over the last several years since The Code came out from a variety of sources, students, journalists, colleagues interested members of the public that are essentially some version of, "So what does Jeff Bezos have in common with John D. Rockefeller? Or how are Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates alike or different? Is this a second Gilded Age? Or how does our second Gilded Age compare with the first?"
So I'm playing around with that. I'm not entirely sure what it's going to look like. I would like it to be not a weighty tome for my own sanity and also just for the reader. I would like this to be something that helps people understand and contextualize properly the extreme wealth creation and the American billionaire in historical context. So a lot of it is TBD, but what I'm doing one of the things in the stage of this project, and this is partially, this would be my fourth book, so I'm both fortunate in that I don't feel like got to get it to get tenure, got to get it done to get something. I have latitude again, as I said at the top, it's like a great blessing and also a great curse because I don't have a deadline yet. It's just all self-imposed. But I really am trying to give myself lots of time.
I'm having some really great conversations and giving it oxygen and talking to people. So anyone listening, if you would like to, I'd be delighted to hear your thoughts about the idea that has been. I think that's a luxury I have right now in my career. And also one of the things I wanted to do, and I've gone and given workshops at other universities and my university about this book, essentially, the proposal as it stands now and the early ideas I have for it is trying to model this, particularly for graduate students and scholars earlier in their career, is the stop and start the messy process of book creation. It's very easy to come and give a presentation on something that you've already done, and it's all sharpened and it's gotten all its feedback and it's all nice and tied up with a bow.
It's a little more, can be humbling, but also very, very intellectually rewarding in having conversations that are more open-ended and saying, "I have this idea. I know it's only not even half-baked, maybe a quarter baked. It's a little warm. What do you think? And what would you have? What ideas might you have? What are your reactions to it?" And that's been great. And so I'm having a lot of fun with that.
And I'm writing some shorter form things that are playing around with different elements of it. Quite frankly, I'm also getting pulled into the maw of AI mania. So I am writing some things about that and trying to contextualize that and giving speeches about that type of thing. So there are other things that are other strands I'm chasing. I am letting this do a slow burn, so don't ask me when it will appear in print. But it's been really interesting and it's been really, really fun and so rewarding to go deep into the 19th century again. Where I'm a 20th century, 21st century historian, so it's been really great to just marinate in that literature and think about that strange foreign country that is the past.
Kate Carpenter: Fantastic. Well, Dr. Margaret, O'Mara, thank you so much. It's been such a joy to talk with you about your writing process on Drafting The Past.
Margaret O'Mara: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Kate Carpenter: Thank you again to Dr. Margaret O'Mara for that excellent conversation. And thank you for listening. You can find links to all of the books we talked about as well as the transcript of the episode at draftingthepast.com. A quick programming note, I am reluctantly taking a break from the podcast for April and May while I focus on getting my dissertation finished. Don't worry though, Drafting The Past isn't going anywhere, and I will be back in June with some wonderful interviews that are already lined up and ready for you. Thanks for your patience. In the meantime, check out some of the back episodes you might've missed or want to revisit and remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
