In this episode, Kate is joined by Dr. Matthew Delmont. Matt is a professor and associate dean at Dartmouth University, and he is the author of six books. His two most recent books are Half American: The Epic Story of American Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, which came out in 2022, and Until the Last Gun is Silent: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America’s Soul, which just came out this year. Matt has also worked on numerous digital history projects, and he is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar award.
In Until the Last Gun is Silent, Matt pairs the story of Coretta Scott King’s antiwar activism during the Vietnam War with that of Dwight “Skip” Johnson, who received the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam before his life ended tragically after his return to Detroit. It’s a combination that illuminates the meaning of the Vietnam War for Black Americans. We talked about how Matt has worked on his voice and narrative style to reach new audiences, as well as how the intriguing historical narrative pairing in this book came to be.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Matthew F. Delmont, Until the Last Gun is Silent: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America’s Soul
- Matthew F. Delmont, Half American: The Epic Story of American Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad
- Matthew F. Delmont, Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African American Newspapers
- Matthew F. Delmont, Making Roots: A Nation Captivated
- Matthew F. Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation
- Matthew F. Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia
- Tiya Miles
- Annette Gordon Reed
- Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South
- Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America
Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links.
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Hey listeners, welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. I have been a fan of today's podcast guest for quite a while. His work and his writing voice is always fresh and engaging, and something I think we all can learn from. I have been eager to ask him about it. In fact, we planned to talk about his previous book a few years ago, but life and schedules got in the way, so I was thrilled to see that he had a new book coming out, which gave me a chance to welcome Dr. Matthew Delmont to the podcast.
Matthew Delmont 0:34
Thank you for having me.
Kate Carpenter 0:35
Matt is the author of six books, which you'll hear a bit more about in this episode. You could also find links to all of them in the show notes. His two most recent books are Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War Two at home and abroad, which came out in 2022, and Until the Last Gun is Silent: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War and the Fight to Save America's Soul, which came out just this year. Matt has also worked on numerous digital history projects, which is actually how I first learned about his work. And he's the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. In Until the Last Gun is Silent, Matt pairs the story of Coretta Scott King's anti war activism during the Vietnam War with that of Dwight "Skip" Johnson, who received the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam before his life ended tragically after his return to Detroit. It's a combination that illuminates the meaning of the Vietnam War for Black Americans. We talked about how Matt has worked on his voice and narrative style to reach new audiences, as well as how the intriguing historical narrative pairing in this book came to be. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Matthew Delmont.
Matthew Delmont 1:52
So the book that just came out, Until the Last Gun Is Silent, is my my sixth book. Like most academic historians, my first book was my dissertation. So it was my revised dissertation. I have to say for me as a writer, it's been trying to expand the range of people I'm trying to reach as readers, and then to try to find more of my own, I guess I'd say writerly voice, to be able to write in a way that tries to capture more narrative and tries to do more to develop characters, as opposed to writing, just to communicate what evidence I found in the archive. Usually for historians, that first book is just look at all these cool things I found and just try to get it on a page. And hopefully there's some sort of connections and arguments that come out there. But particularly for these last two books, my first two trade books, it's been a lot more about thinking about pacing, thinking about character development, thinking about narrative and trying to write in a way that hopefully will appeal to a wide range of readers.
Kate Carpenter 2:46
I have been a big fan of your work for quite a while, so it's very exciting to me to talk to you. I want to start just with these kind of like basic nuts and bolts questions. When and where do you like to do your writing?
Matthew Delmont 2:57
Wherever I can find time to do it is the honest answer. A lot of my writing takes place really early in the morning, before kids wake up and before it's time for me to get them off to school. So it's like 4:35am downstairs in our house, got a little desk set up. So it's where a lot of writing gets done, and then the other times it's usually trying to find a half hour here, an hour there, sometimes at my office here on campus at Dartmouth, sometimes at a coffee shop or in the library, if I can find time to get away from my office at Dartmouth. But I think I really had to kind of adjust myself to the realities of what it means to do this work as someone who is doing a full time administrative appointment as an associate dean, and then a parent of two wonderful children who are 14 and 11 now, but who, like other parents know, anyone who has caregiver responsibilities, it's just a huge amount of work. And so I'm, I don't have the the luxury I would have had in grad school, being able to take sort of three, four or five hours at a time. It's, where can I grab a half hour? Where can I grab an hour? But ideally, it would be a nice quiet spot at home, is my favorite place to write.
Kate Carpenter 4:01
How do you like to organize your research and writing?
Matthew Delmont 4:03
I would say I'm still somewhat old fashioned in that I will just read a book with a pencil in hand, mark up the book with the sections I want to come back to, and then I just keep kind of ongoing Word documents where I just make note of what page and what quote, whatever reference I want to be able to come back to in the book. Once I've sort of gone through different research materials, then I'll print off those notes, and then kind of go back through and try to outline them, figure out which parts are going to go in which chapters. But I don't use any sort of specialized software technology, and so it's kind of old fashioned notes into into Microsoft Word.
Kate Carpenter 4:37
Do you like to outline? How do you set yourself up to be able to write anywhere, anytime?
Matthew Delmont 4:42
So I do like to, I do like to try to outline whatever project I'm working on, trying to get a sense of, you know, what are the themes or the chapters that I see emerging, and then within that, trying to figure out, what are the, what are the best examples or best quotations or best sources or piece of evidence I can use to to move, move the chapter along. And I often find if I can have just a couple things in my mind or a couple of things at hand, it helps me get started writing in a given day. So if I know that I might only have a half hour or an hour, if I know that there's this great newspaper article or great archival document or a great segment of an oral history, I'll try to start there. That usually can get the ball rolling with whatever I'm trying to write next.
Kate Carpenter 5:23
Where in your research process do you like to start writing?
Matthew Delmont 5:26
So I'd say I usually will try to research maybe about 50% of a book project before I start really writing it. I mean, I'll always be kind of drafting notes and trying to get a proposal together in some shape, to get kind of the preliminary ideas on the page. But in terms of writing something that might actually be a draft of a chapter that might actually show up in the in the eventual book, I usually will do about 50% of the research before I start writing anything, just because I need to know where the story is and where it might go. I think always with historians, I'm sure with other other writers as well, there's always more research you could do. And so I think the other part of that question is like, where do you where do you stop? And so like obviously you never really stop. I think you kind of have to reach a deadline. Just recognize, you know, this is, this is as much as I'm going to be able to do for this given project. There'll always be more stuff that comes out. And all of us as authors are in conversation with the authors who come before us, and the authors who will come after us and making peace with you know, there's always one more archive you could go to, there's always one more interview you could do, always one more digital database you could consult. But at some point, enough has to be enough.
Kate Carpenter 6:32
What does revision look like for you? Do you like to revise as you go or do you like to get through a full draft?
Matthew Delmont 6:36
My preference is these days to try to get a couple of chapters together, then send it to my editor and get some kind of high level feedback on just how it's how it's shaping up, like whether the the tone and the scope of it and enough detail or not enough detail. But then, usually I'll try to get the full draft manuscript together before getting into kind of real revisions. I think I do that in part because I want to, once I can get some momentum going with writing, it's easier for me to just kind of keep that going and try to get things down the page before trying to make it perfect. And sometimes you don't really know, you don't know what chapter six is supposed to look like until you actually get to chapter 10. And so I think that sometimes you need to kind of let the story unfold and then take the step back and take some time away from it, and then try to revise it. I'd say it's one of the biggest differences for me at this stage of my career versus earlier in my career, is the really meaningful, substantive feedback I'm able to get from my editor now is much more detailed than what I was able to get earlier in my career. Just the realities of university publishing, publishing with university presses, is they typically, the editors there are more like acquisitions editors, where they kind of shepherd the overall process, but it's really the external reviewers who provide some kind of high level feedback. But in terms of line by line edits or paragraph by paragraph edits, I hadn't experienced anything like that until Half American, my last book, and I think it makes it makes the final product so much better, but also it's a lot more fun as a writer to have someone who's there with you at that level of detail throughout and can be thinking about the kind of sentence structure and and how how the whole story is coming together on the page.
Kate Carpenter 8:13
You're a very prolific writer, I would say, for a historian, but I think actually just for anyone. This is, like you said, your sixth book. You finished your PhD 18 years ago, I think.
Matthew Delmont 8:23
it makes me feel old, but yeah, I think it's right.
Kate Carpenter 8:25
And on top of that, you've done these really awesome digital projects that I love, many articles, and as you already mentioned, you have an administrative appointment. You are a parent. How do you get so much writing done? What are the structures that you have in place?
Matthew Delmont 8:40
I think for me, it's trying to get a little bit done each day, and then trying to keep momentum on whatever project I'm working on. And when I say a little bit done each day, I think there's some days where you can, you can make meaningful progress in terms of writing a couple pages, when those sort of ideas are flowing, you've got the sources at hand. Other days, you know, the words are just not coming in that way. But those can be good days to do some additional research or to tidy up the footnotes or do something. So I always try to make just a little bit of progress each day, if I can, and then, usually, week over week, things start to kind of flow together. I think I do it in part because it helps keep me balanced and sane. So I think part of my productivity might have to do with the sort of state of the world overall because I feel like there's so much craziness in the news that I try to not, I don't read much real news. I don't listen to NPR much anymore. Like I'll look at some sports news in the morning and then try to try to shut that off and just get to work, honestly. I'll go for a run. And so I think for me, it gives me a kind of a more manageable space to feel like I'm engaging with ideas without feeling like I'm overwhelmed with the pace of everything that's going on with social media and everything that's going on in politics and with the world these days. I also like do it because I like it. I think that my favorite part of being a historian, is that you get to be just a nerd professionally. You get to be professionally curious. And so being able to do research, trying to fit the puzzle pieces together, I think I keep going back to it each day, each week, project to project, because I love it. So that that for me, feels like I ended up in the right profession, because it doesn't feel like work. It feels like something I really enjoy.
Kate Carpenter 10:14
You books interest me because there are some sort of broad thematic connections between them, but they're all pretty different projects, really. And I've always wondered, how do you move from book to book? How do you choose what you're going to work on next?
Matthew Delmont 10:28
Yeah, it's a good question. So I'd say it's usually one thing from the last project leads me into the next one. And so to kind of go all the way back, my first book project was on the TV show American Bandstand and struggles over civil rights in Philadelphia in the 1950s but a key strand of that work was about school desegregation. And so that made me interested in bussing, which became my second book, bussing for school desegregation, looking at a number of different cities, but really particularly interested in how television media was covering these school protests. For both those projects, television was an important piece of it. And so I was for what became my third book project on Roots, the TV show, mini series Roots, I was trying to think about, you know, what are kind of these major moments in TV history that haven't really been covered in a kind of greater level of detail? And so that kind of led me to jump into that one. The next one was actually a digital book project, Black Quotidian. That was, I would say, the historical context we were living in. So this was the mid 2010s with the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests. I felt like in the classroom, I was using a lot of the same examples, and so I wanted to try to find a way to break myself out of that mode of teaching, that mode of research, and try to find things that might be new to me. So I kind of just explored different parts of the Black press, and created this digital project that was called Black Quotidian. That led directly into the last book on World War Two, Half American, because I kept finding all these examples of Black men and women in military uniform during World War Two in the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and it was really seeing all those examples that made me curious and made me want to learn what more there was the story. And so that led to the research on World War Two. And then when I was presenting on the book on World War Two, people kept asking, what's different about the Vietnam era. And so that's eventually what led me to do this most recent book, which focuses on a lot of the kind of similar themes about patriotism and dissent, but understanding how much changed between World War Two and the Vietnam era.
Kate Carpenter 12:22
You mentioned already that one of the big differences in working with a trade press versus university presses is just the kind of editing that you get. Have there been other things that have defined that switch for you between academic presses and trade presses?
Matthew Delmont 12:36
I think editing is definitely a big one. The pace at which everything moves is a huge difference. With my first book with a trade press was Half American, and when I sent that to my my agent, they sent it to a number of different editors, like the time between when the proposal was submitted to my agent to when I signed a book contract was three weeks. Wow, right? Which with university presses, it can be sort of six months, nine months, a year. And I should be clear, I absolutely love University of California Press and Stanford University Press that I worked with for my other projects, and I think they're incredibly important in the broader ecosystem of ideas and supporting the work that we do. But the pace was just so much different, and the kind of warmth that the editors expressed when they were talking to me about the book project-- academics can be, can be less friendly when talking about ideas, and so you get those external reviewer reports back, and sometimes they like, they'll say a couple positive things, but they largely focus on what's not in the project and all the things that are critical. My experience talking to trade editors was, you just felt so excited and so so encouraged by by the project. And then obviously, the other big difference is the resources that trade presses have to be able to support a book. And so, you know, to, you know, they have a whole team that's trying to get it in front of reviewers, trying to make connections, to be able to help me give presentations on the book, make as many readers know about it as possible, get it into bookstores. It's it's almost a completely different industry than what university presses are, and I think they're, and they're all important for scholars and for other writers to be able to work with. But I'm certainly grateful for these last two books, that they've had the kind of support they've had from Viking.
Kate Carpenter 14:15
To talk a bit more about Matt's writing, especially in his trade books, I asked him to read an excerpt from his latest. Here's Dr Matthew Delmont reading from the preface of Until the Last Gun is Silent.
Matthew Delmont 14:27
"To tell Skip’s story fully, I needed to speak with the person who had loved him most. So I booked a flight to Detroit to meet his widow, Katrina May. As I drove my rental car to Starter’s Bar & Grill in Southfield, Michigan, it struck me: I wasn’t sure I would recognize her. We had spoken several times on the phone, but the only photos I had seen were more than fifty years old. I was relieved when she waved to me outside the restaurant. ‘I recognized you from the picture on your book,’ she said. ‘And the cross-body bag gave away that you are a professor.’ Katrina was a spirited septuagenarian, dressed in navy slacks and a gray cardigan. From our phone conversation, I already knew she was matter-of-fact and funny. (‘I could never have been a preacher’s wife—I couldn’t hold my tongue long enough,’ she once told me.) In person, she had a warm smile and eyes that sparkled with mischief. We found a table near the back, and I opened the recording app on my phone, unsure what the mic would pick up over the nineties R&B pulsing through the speakers. Katrina told me her son, Christopher, would join us later—and that he was the spitting image of his father. ‘God must have listened when he said, ‘I want a boy who looks just like me,’ she said, recalling what Skip had told her when Christopher was born. She described how, when they were teenagers, Skip had flirted with her for months before she finally agreed to go out with him. During his deployment, they wrote letters back and forth, making each other laugh and falling in love through the mail—a kind of epistolary romance, like a Jane Austen novel set in Detroit. Katrina stood by him when he returned home, through moments of celebration and spirals of despair. She spoke of a young man who had his whole life ahead of him—until he didn’t anymore. As Katrina filled in details from our earlier phone conversations, I found myself reflecting on how much Skip’s story echoed the experiences of so many American GIs. The US Army was filled with young men like Skip—poor and working-class guys drawn from Detroit, South Boston, Watts, and thousands of small towns across the country’s heartland. The more I learned about what made Skip’s story unique, the more I saw how emblematic it was of a generation shaped—and forever changed—by the Vietnam War. Like so many others, Skip began basic training just months after graduating high school. During my research, I had come across a copy of Skip’s 1966 high school yearbook—the Norwester, from Detroit’s Northwestern High School—on eBay. After lunch, I gave it to Katrina. She ran her finger along a photo of Skip in the Glee Club, a teenager in a white shirt and black tie, smiling. ‘He looks so young,’ she said, chuckling softly. ‘We were so young.’”
Kate Carpenter 17:14
Okay, so this section is amazing, and you do it so deftly that it's really easy to miss. But this is just like a little less than 500 words. You give us an introduction to Skip's life. You kind of put him in this larger context of young men serving in Vietnam. You introduce us to one of the most important sources in your book, who is Skip's widow, Katrina. It's also very moving. And I even noticed when you were reading it this time, what I didn't notice the first time, which is that her quote about never being able to be a preacher's wife is such a nice then gesture to the fact that Coretta Scott King is the other figure in this book, who, of course, is a preacher's wife. Anyway. I love it. It's amazing. How, how did this come together? How did you think about structuring the prologue?
Matthew Delmont 17:54
Thank you so much for asking. Because one of the funny things as a historian, as writers, people very seldom may ask about craft or ask about the actual writing process, and so I really appreciate it. So it starts with just having the opportunity to talk with Katrina, both on the phone, and then to meet her in person. She is such an amazing, feisty woman, and I'm so grateful that she was willing to speak with me and to share her time with me. And so when it came time to write that section of the book. I mean, I didn't write the prologue until I had finished the whole draft manuscript, and so Katrina's voice and her recollections and her memories were already all throughout the manuscript. But I knew in starting the prologue I wanted to try to try to get at what it was like to hear her describe and to see her describe some of her recollections with Skip. And so I as much as possible, I just tried to kind of put myself back in that restaurant, back hearing her talk about it for the first time, and try to bring that that to the page with a couple quotations from her, to just get a sense of what her voice sounded like. I think it's, it was really important for for me to write a version of Skip's story that would both be true to her, but also that she would feel, she feel comfortable about, and would be, would be supportive of. And so I, in a person, probably I wanted to do that. I wanted to sort of get her front and center. I also wanted to introduce her early on in the book to readers, because I, well, the books two char- two main characters are definitely Coretta Scott King and Skip Johnson, Dwight Skip Johnson. Katrina is definitely one of the main characters as well, and so I wanted her voice to come in come in early.
Kate Carpenter 19:28
You've talked now a little bit about this, but I'm interested about your relationship with Katrina as you were working on this book, what it was like to work with her and interview her. But you also mentioned in the acknowledgments that she read a draft of the manuscript. I was curious about that. Was that something that she asked to do ahead of time, was that just something that you felt was important?
Matthew Delmont 19:46
It was something I felt was important. And I could say a bit about how I met Katrina. So as I outline in the book, Skip's story received a lot of national attention in the early 1970s and so every 10 years or so, some reporter would reach out to Katrina and interview her and ask about either the most recent theater production or film or something that related to Skip's life, or just kind of, where are they now 30, 40 years after the fact. It was actually, she did an interview with someone, a reporter at the Detroit Free Press in 2021 I think it was, it was through him that I was able to get her contact information. Because Katrina May is a pretty common name for someone in Michigan, so I wasn't able to find her just by Googling her through the typical ways. But the reporter was kind enough to reach out to Katrina and ask if she'd be willing to connect with me, and so she said yes, and he gave me her contact info. But then, you know, the first three or four times I reached out via text and via phone call, she didn't reply. And so I actually didn't know what was going to happen without the ability to talk to her and get some of her her story. There wasn't really enough there to be able to tell Skip's story in the way that I wanted to be able to tell it. And so I did two things. I sent her a copy of my last book, Half American, to kind of give her a sense of, you know, this is what I'm up to as an author. And I told her, which I meant, is that I think her story and Skip's story is as important as any of the stories that were in Half American, and that helped to give her sort of a sense of what I was up to as a historian. But then the other thing I tried to do is just sort of think, you know, how would a Midwesterner approach this? I'm from, from Minnesota, so I was thinking, how can I try to break the ice so to speak with, with someone who I have no other connection with. And so it was Thanksgiving time. I sent her flowers. I sent her a Thanksgiving flower arrangement. And that's eventually what did it. After she sent me a text with a picture of the flowers and said, Oh, Matt, thanks so much for sending these. And then we settled a time for our first phone conversation a couple weeks after that, and talked about a half dozen times on the phone before I went out to Michigan to meet her. She's about my mom's age, my mom has passed now, but she's about my mom's age. And so I wanted to, I've done other oral history interviews for other book projects, but none were the person I was interviewing was one of the central characters of the book, and was speaking about one of the other central characters of the book. And so I knew that I wanted to, I wanted to do right by Katrina in doing this. I didn't want it to be something where I was sort of extracting her story just to to make it into the book. And so throughout the interview process and throughout the book writing process, I kept her updated at each stage, shared what I had at different draft stages, and then once I had the full draft manuscript, I wanted to send it to her, both to make sure that the way I had recorded her memories was how she wanted them recorded, but also to make sure that the larger framing of the story felt right to her, because I complement her memories of Skip with other newspaper accounts, interviews with men he served with in 69th Armor, the tank battalion he was in. And I wanted to make sure that she was comfortable with the book. And so I was, I was nervous when I sent it to her, because I I thought I had done a good job, but one never knows. I mean, to see, I tried to put myself in her shoes, to see one's life on the page in that way. And so I was extraordinarily grateful that she took time to read. That she took time to read it, and that she she liked it, and that she it felt it felt true to her. I think, for for me, this book was, it felt very personal, I think, to have the chance to try to to learn more about Katrina's stories, to see how much-- and she was only 21 years old when she became a widow, right? And to try to try to get her story recorded more so than it had been the past. She usually showed up sort of as a only reference to Skip. But I wanted to try to really emphasize the point that I think for Katrina and for other family members like her, of people who are Vietnam veterans, who either lost their lives in Vietnam, or who whose lives were changed by Vietnam, they were part of the larger cost of the war, right? The war changed her life as much as it changed anyone else's. And so I wanted to, I want to make sure that perspective came through clearly, but also in a very kind of personal way.
Kate Carpenter 19:48
Did you worry that that interaction with her would color your perception of the history too much? You know, there's that, like Jill Lepore, historians who love too much. You know, did that, did you think about that, or did you did it not seem like the kind of story where that would be a problem?
Matthew Delmont 22:32
It's a good question. And I think for historians, or for all scholars, it's always important for us to to recognize the perspectives and potential biases that we're bringing into our different projects and to triangulate sources, right? So I think any oral history, one wants to sort of connect it to other first person accounts, or other archival sources, other newspaper accounts. And so all that I would do that for any project, I certainly do that for this one as well. But I think there's a through line. It's not unique to African American history, but it's definitely part of African American history about being accountable and being accountable to the communities we're writing about, and so I think that necessarily involves a level of care, and I think love for the subject matter and love for engaging people, right? I think that historians are storytellers, right? We're trying to tell more full, accurate, nuanced, rich stories about the past, and I think in the course of doing that, it's, I've certainly found it appropriate to recognize when people are, when their storytelling abilities are vital to the lar- to filling in parts of the historical record that we wouldn't otherwise have access to.
Kate Carpenter 22:29
I want to talk about your writing voice a little bit, because one thing I love about your writing is that it's just, it's so clear, it's so direct, it's such a, it's a pleasure to read, but it also sort of gets out of the way, if that makes sense. Does that come naturally to you? Have you worked to shape that voice in your writing?
Matthew Delmont 23:02
I appreciate you saying that. I definitely have worked to shape the voice, I - and increasingly, I've tried to write the way I would teach. And what I mean by that is trying to find examples that I think will resonate with students in the classroom or with readers, but to not, not use a lot of jargon, not not dump everything I might know on a topic under each example. But think about, you know, how can I best sequence examples in a way that will illuminate without overwhelming? And so I think that's, I've tried to sort of take that voice out I would use in the classroom and and get it more on the page, but also recognize that the way one writes things work differently, like in terms of selecting quotations, in terms of finding, setting scenes and finding ways of introducing characters and and moving narrative along. I'm much more attentive to that now than I was at the start of my career I think. But I've always, I've always tried to be the kind of scholar who, if I'm going to use, use theory, or cite other scholars' work, I want to do it in the service of advancing whatever argument I'm trying to advance. And so I don't feel overburdened by the kind of scholarly apparatus that we learn how to do it in graduate school. Also, I think I gravitate towards topics that are exciting and fun to read about. And so part of the get out of the way is like, whether it's World War Two or this one, like, these are amazing characters, and my job is to try to bring them fully to the to the reader, without without messing it up. I don't try to do too much, too much scenery chewing or anything like that. I try to set the stage and then keep the narrative flowing as much as possible. But it means a lot to know that people, to know that anyone's reading anything these days, is great. To know that people actually like the way it's written. It means a lot to me, so I appreciate it.
Kate Carpenter 25:20
So I'm intrigued by this note that you have in your acknowledgements about discussing with your editor, sort of how you would tell the story. And it gives, I mean, I'm sort of trying to read between the lines so you can elaborate, but it gives sort of the impression that maybe it took a while to kind of figure out how you wanted to tell this story and which characters you wanted to pair, and how it would work out. Can you talk more about that process, how this book kind of took its final shape?
Matthew Delmont 26:29
Yeah. So my editor at Viking I've worked with the last two projects as Ibrahim Ahmad, who's great, I really like working with him. But I knew coming out of Half American, before it was even published, we started talking about what this next book project would be. I knew I wanted it to about the Vietnam War, but beyond that, I didn't yet know what it was going to be about. And so that's where it was a lot of iteration, kind of back and forth conversation about, should it be structured similar to how Half American was, where I try to cover a lot of ground in terms of what was happening in the war front, was happening on the home front. I took a kind of approach in that way. At one point I thought about making Wallace Terry, who's the Black journalist who spent a lot of time in Vietnam, wrote a really important book called Bloods. It was an oral history of a lot of Vietnam veterans, I thought about making him one of the main characters in constellation with a couple other folks. And so I'd say there were three, four or five moments like that where I thought, you know, is it? Is it this, is it this, is it that? And none of them really, really stuck. They didn't feel like they resonated. And so it was a series of conversations that eventually led me to Coretta Scott King and the anti war side. And then once I learned to look for Skip Johnson's story, I realized that was a story that I could tell so much through that story. Part of the challenge then for me was, I'd never written a book that had just two central characters in quite the same way. I mean, obviously, I think Katrina's story is an important part of it. Martin Luther King's story is an important part of it. You see Julian Bond there as kind of a supporting character. So there, there are other characters who are there, but the book is, structurally it alternates chapters between kind of Coretta Scott King and Skip Johnson. That felt a little scary to me, to really have to hone in on just two people. But I think it was the right choice, and I definitely give credit to Ibrahim for helping me sort of think through that and talk through it, and giving space to to not feel like I had to rush into the next book, but to really think about how, how best to tell a larger story.
Kate Carpenter 29:32
I think it's a really it's an interesting pairing that's working really well, but not an obvious one. And it strikes me that, you know, Coretta Scott King is obviously a person who not only has had so much written and said about her, but has produced so much herself. You know, there's a lot a lot of material to draw on. And Skip Johnson, on the other hand, has had many things written about him, but it's, he doesn't have the same sort of archive, so to speak, of his life. Was it hard then to balance their stories as you worked? I think you do a great job of balancing it. But I wondered if it was a challenge.
Matthew Delmont 30:02
It was, it was, and I think to your point of like, it is something of an unexpected approach to the topic, or an unexpected pairing. For Half American, obviously, a lot of books have been written about World War Two. I think at some point someone else would have written a kind of big picture history of World War Two, focusing on the black perspective, right? So it was only a matter of time. I think with this one, I think it is like unless I came along to put these two figures in conversation, it's not obvious that this kind of book would have ever been written exactly this way, and that's kind of fun for me. Like, I'm glad that I was able to kind of bring it into the world, but it did create a challenge of trying to find balance, because Coretta Scott King is a name that I think almost everyone should know, and there's been so much-- in some ways, there has been a lot written about her, but in other ways, there hasn't. She often is the kind of that figure who is Martin Luther King's wife and then widow. She's written, she had her own two autobiographies, but even those were, they were limited in some respects, because they were very careful about presenting a very certain portrait of her that emphasized some parts of her anti activism, but didn't emphasize others. So I think the challenge for telling her story was gathering as much of what had been written about her, but then trying to find things that had not yet been written. Looking at historical newspapers was actually a really key moment for me, and figuring out how to search for her in those historical newspapers. If you search for Coretta Scott King you get, let's say, about 300 examples. If you search for Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr, you get three times as many examples, because that's how she was referred to in that era. Even if she was the main person on the podium, she was still Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr. And so there's a lot there that scholars haven't really worked with before. For Skip, oral history was a much bigger part of it, because I had to talk to Katrina, being able to talk to the soldier's in the 69th Armored, and then being able to try to look for other kind of contextual clues about what his life would have been like growing up. So the high school yearbook I mentioned earlier, that was actually a really key source, because I could get a sense of how the school changed once they had a Black principal, and how they had a really well, well resourced Black history section in the library, how they had a current events club. And so even though, on paper, it would have been a poor, under resourced school, economically, demographically, most students were working class or poor. There was, there was a intellectual liveliness in the school that I was able to get from other sources. And so then I think the, in terms of sort of structuring the different chapters, it was trying to, it was really trying to find enough, I guess I would say the complimentary parts, of each person's story, so the chapters, the whole story was moving, I'd say, cohesively, in unison. I think on the Coretta side, that meant keeping her in the foreground and not letting Martin's story take over in the key parts. And then, for Skip's story, it was keeping his story in the foreground, not letting the war take over.
Kate Carpenter 32:46
Well, to switch gears a little bit in the last bit of our time, I want to ask some about your influences. Are there other people you read, books or writers that you look to for inspiration?
Matthew Delmont 32:56
I don't get to read as much as I would like to, sadly, but I think some of my favorite work, I love Tiya Miles's books, all of them. I think Annette Gordon Reed is really amazing. My friend who's a historian, Jeanne Theoharis, has written a really amazing biography on Rosa Parks, and then a more recent book on Martin Luther King in the North. We trade ideas back and forth on our mutual research interests, and so she's definitely an influence. She told me several years ago, when we were co-writing something, to not pull my punches in writing, and that that sticks with me, and sort of thinking about how I choose to write the way I do, I think I have to give a lot of credit to Jeanne on that. And then there's a book by a historian who's who's passed away, named Peggy Pascoe. And she wrote a really important book on anti miscegenation laws, called What Comes Naturally. And what I remember about that book, I mean, it's definitely an academic, more academic focused book, but she was one of the first people I read who used the term white supremacy in a very kind of matter of fact way, which is kind of introducing why so many states had these laws that prevented marriages between whites and African Americans, or whites and Latinos, or whites and Asian Americans. Just very matter of fact that introduction says this was about white supremacy, right? And this is 2006, maybe 2007 when the book came out. Like seeing a historian, just the clarity with which she marshaled her evidence to advance just kind of a very direct argument and claim has always stuck with me. And I think just think about the importance of evidence, allowing scholars to be able to make claims, make arguments with backing. That's one things that stuck with me about her work,
Kate Carpenter 34:32
Aside from don't pull your punches, what is the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Matthew Delmont 34:37
So I can't attribute it to any single person, but I would say it would be two things. I think one is to treat writing as a practice, by which I understood the various advisors and mentors who helped guide me to mean both do it regularly and know that you'll continue to improve as you do it. I think as opposed to it being something that-- I think honestly, when I was an undergraduate student, I didn't really understand that people wrote books. Like they just seemed to kind of come from up on high, right? But when you actually get into sort of the work of doing research and the kind of messiness of it, you recognize that there are 1000 different ways any of these projects can go, and that part of it is just being comfortable with the messiness of it, and just sort of get in the just get in there and and practice it and work on it. And then the other thing is to not be precious about your writing. To put a lot of effort into it, put a lot of of your of your energy and your and your ideas into it, but then also be comfortable sharing it, being revised, being edited, and not, not worry so much on creating the perfect sentence or the perfect paragraph right from the start, but recognize again, it's a practice and it'll improve over time
Kate Carpenter 35:44
Before I let you go, I'm curious to know if you have another project in the works, and if you're up for talking about it.
Matthew Delmont 35:50
I appreciate you asking. So earlier this month, I had a chance to give three presentations on Until the Last Gun Is Silent. I was in St Louis, in Detroit and in Philadelphia. Great audiences, great questions. I got this question three times, and each time I had to say, I don't know what I'm working on next, which is, it's really scary for me. This is the first time in 20 years I haven't known what I'm doing next, because always, if you haven't picked up on it, one of the ways I manage sort of stress or anxiety is by work. Okay? I run, I run long distances, and I work, right? Those are the things that help sort of keep me balanced. I'm a very calm person. Everyone says I'm very calm, but I'm calm because I have things that calm me. But yeah, right now I don't know. I still plan to work with Viking, hopefully, to work with the same editor, and I've been running through various different ideas over the last six, eight months. None have really landed. And so I don't know what will come next. I'm hopeful. I'm still kind of iterating on some things. Hopefully by the summer, I'll know what's coming next. In part, because I love researching. Like, that's part of why, like, I want to know what I'm gonna do next is like, it gives it gives shape and balance to my work life, to know what I should read, what I should be researching, and what I should be trying to write. So hopefully, if you were to follow up six months from now, I would know what I'm working on. But I but I'm in a very weird spot right now. I don't know what my next book project is.
Kate Carpenter 37:06
I will look forward to it, whatever it is, and I'm very grateful to have read Until the Last Gun is Silent. Dr. Matt Delmont, thanks so much for talking to me for Drafting the Past and talking about the craft of writing with me.
Matthew Delmont 37:15
Thanks so much for the conversation. It was really fun to talk about it.
Kate Carpenter 37:20
Thanks again to Matt Delmont for joining us for this episode of Drafting the Past. You can find links to Matt's books and other books mentioned in this episode in the show notes and at draftingthepast.com. Thanks for listening to the podcast and for sharing it with all of the history writers you know. After all, friends don't let friends write boring history.
