Don't forget the Old Negro Space Program
Posted on 04/22/2005 8:51:47 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
BENTON HARBOR - His award-winning trilogy took Ken Burns 17 years to make, but the documentary filmmaker acknowledges that with "The Civil War," "Baseball" and "Jazz," in many ways "I have made the same film over and over again."
"Each production asks one deceptively simple question: Who are we? What does an investigation of the past tell us about who we were and, more importantly, what we have become," Burns told The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan Wednesday night at Lake Michigan College's Mendel Center.
Studying civilization 2,000 years from now, it is predicted that Americans will only be remembered for creating three things - the Constitution, baseball and jazz music.
"After 17 years, it's absolutely correct," Burns said. The Civil War proved to be the Constitution's "greatest test."
His 10-part documentary broadcast in January 2001 depicted jazz, "an utterly American art form. The genius of America is improvisation. The Constitution is the greatest improvisational document ever created. Four pieces of paper written in the18th century is able to adjudicate our thorniest problems in this new 21st century."
Its vitality rests in it identifying the nation as "in the process of becoming, always striving to become a more perfect union."
The Declaration of Independence dwells on the pursuit of happiness. "It insures our future by making Americans unusually curious and unsatisfied."
Jazz exceeds the mere boundaries of music. It is "a window through which so much of American music can be seen. It is a curious and unusually objective witness to the 20th century, so our series necessarily became a story again about race relations and prejudice, about slavery, minstrels, Jim Crow, lynchings and civil rights, about progress forward and progress backwards. African-American history is a minor, inconsequential, politically correct addendum to our national heritage, relegated to February, the shortest, coldest month.
"Jazz offers the perhaps explosive hypothesis that those who have had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land might actually be at the center of our history," Burns said.
"African Americans in general and black jazz musicians in particular carry a complicated message to residents - a genetic memory of our great accomplishments and our great failures. Music they created and then generously shared with the rest of the world reconciles the contradictions many of us would rather ignore. In the unfolding drama we call American history, jazz, like baseball, attempts to change in an always-changing world ... in clubs and on the concert stage, jazz has helped keep the American message alive. Jazz is the story of two world wars and a devastating Depression. Jazz is about sex and the way men and women talk to each other and negotiate the complicated ritual of courtship. It is the sophisticated and elegant mating call that has all but disappeared from the execrable music that passes for our popular music today." Applause interrupted his remarks.
"American history is a loud, raucous collection of noises," yet also "the sweetest kind of music I know, and we have tried to listen to this music. It's a kind of emotional archaeology we're attempting, listening to the ghosts and echoes of an almost expressively wise past."
"Top-down history" relies on wars, presidents and generals - "our political narrative, the history of the state."
As the nation matured and lost touch with place by moving around, personal chronicles dried up in most communities.
"We as a people began to forget," Burns said. "History became a kind of castor oil" of dull facts we considered good for us though it didn't taste good. "Not the great pageant of everything that has gone before."
Half a century ago "we partially woke up to this problem and began to insist on relevance in our teaching of history," which yielded "social history," a bottom-up endeavor "focusing on real people and recognizable things," Burns said.
But people did not respond. "Relevance became an excuse for not even teaching history in our schools."
Swathed in statistical demographics and political correctness, this "new era" became "equally devastating to our national memory."
The pendulum swung so far the other way, "A history of Illinois could be written without ever once mentioning Abraham Lincoln. Something obviously had to change, and I'm pleased to report in some ways it has," Burns said.
"We have as an academic community begun to speak of a synthesis of the old and new histories - a way to combine the best of the top-down versions that still inspire everybody because those great men did do great things - with the million heroic acts of women, minorities and ordinary people like you and me," said the father of three daughters, the youngest 10 weeks old, he noted, flashing a snapshot at the crowd.
"We've begun to use new media and new forms of expression" to "break the stranglehold on historic exchange for the last 100 years," Burns said. "Remember, until we adopted the German academic model at the end of the 19th century, our greatest historians, like Francis Parkman, were popular writers concerned with speaking to larger audiences - not just a handful of colleagues and scholars, isolated in their ivory towers."
For the Red Sox fan who lives in New Hampshire, "Baseball offers a unique prism through which one could see refracted much more than the history of a simple sport. This is the story of labor and management ... of immigration and assimilation ... citizenship is made not by a sheet of paper from the State Department, but by participating in the national pastime of their adopted land. This is the story of popular culture, advertising and mythmaking - how the country really is and how we would like to see ourselves. This is the story of heroes, villains and fools ... a story of growth, decay and rebirth of American cities ... and, of course, the story of race.
"When Jackie Robinson walked out onto that ballfield in the spring of 1947, it was the first real progress in civil rights since our Civil War - a literal sequel to our 'Civil War' series. And that glorious moment, ladies and gentleman, occurred not at a lunch counter in North Carolina, not on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., not at a school in South Carolina or Topeka, Kan., not even in the barracks of our military, but on diamonds."
"When that grandson of a slave made his way to first base at Ebbets Field, his miraculous and heroic example of turning his cheek for three years" against abusive crowds made an incalculable impression upon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"When baseball became in truth what it had always claimed to be - the national pastime - the struggle did not stop, as it has not stopped in our country at large. Curt Flood, Henry Aaron, have been forced to confront again and again and again the pernicious racism that persists in 'this favored land.' "
Yet "emotional connections" from anecdotes, stories, memories and feeling "become a kind of glue" that makes the most complex of past events stick in mind.
Terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, "ruptured our sense of invincibility and safety that we had gradually acquired as the Cold War receded into the past. Still, as we struggle to define ourselves in the wake of that rupture," he said, "it's interesting that we come back again and again to the Civil War and Mr. Lincoln for the kind of sustained vision why we Americans ... are still stitched together by words and their dangerous progeny, ideas. It was altogether fitting and proper that some of those powerful words and ideas of Lincoln's echoed at Ground Zero on the first anniversary of Sept. 11 ... We have counted on Abraham Lincoln for nearly a century and a half to get it right when the undertow in the tide of human events has threatened to overwhelm us. We return to him for a sense of unity, conscience and national purpose. And still, he and the Civil War have so much they can tell us."
Fifteen years ago, in September 1990, PBS broadcast Burns's Civil War series featuring Dowagiac visitor Shelby Foote. "Paradoxically, to become one, we tore ourselves into two" in the Union and Confederate War Between the States. Though fought more than a century ago, it depicts "the real cost of war."
Before the bashers and smashers get here, I'll just say: these productions are landmark pieces in american television and contribute a lot of interest in american history. They are creatively done and interesting to watch.
Don't forget the Old Negro Space Program
Yes, it's called, "Bad White People."
There's a lot to like about Burns's films, but he can be Johnny One-Note on the race angle.
Yes, they were well done, especially the baseball series. I'm looking forward to Ken Burns doing a new documentary about baseball teams not located in New York City and Boston.
Other than that, halfway reasonable documentaries. Parts of ''Jazz'' were actually informative. ''The Civil War'' was an embarrassment to any marginally honest historian, a multi-episode bleat of unadulterated PC and post-modern revisionism.
If this is the state, indeed the paradigm, of documentary these days, who needs it? Propaganda by any other name would (fill in your favourite blank here).
Flame suit ON!
I'm really looking forward to the new 6 hour Ken Burn's special on 19th century silverware
Regardless of what one thinks of his biases and faults, Burns inspired a resurgence in the study of history.
...with Doris Kearns Goodwin holding forth as an Expert Thereon.
I rather expect to see such a programme heavily peppered with ''commentary'' from his usual crowd of professional race-baiters. (can we say ''no-brainer'' on this notion?)
Not unless DKG can find a source from which to ''borrow'' (cough, choke).
Burns did his best stuff when Gracie was still alive...
:o)
ROFL!! Great shot!
That was TOO MUCH!
The Civil War was truly great television. It offered historical photographs, a great musical score, and it introduced historians like David McCullough and Shelby Foote to a mass audience. I love the game of baseball, but I found Burn's series unwatchable, it was simply too undisciplined a presentation. After that, I did not have the stomach for his take on jazz. But the elements he brought to the screen in the Civil War were very powerful.
Agreed. There are a lot of criticisms one can make of Burns, but on the whole his influence has been benign and positive. A lot of people have come to take an interest in American history because of Burns, and that's a good thing.
Of course Ken does carry victim-history too far, but so do a lot of his critics. They just choose different victims to cry about. I doubt their version of history as victimization is any better or truer than his, and shudder to think of what kind of documentary our latter-day Confederates would shovel together.
It's really distressing to read some of the comments therein fron "scholars" who rip him for not being P.C. enough.
I didn't get the impression that there was overemphasis on race in Baseball and the Civil War. I thought the time and mentions were appropriate. I don't know how you do a history of Jaxx without a lot of racial references and starting back to the africans coming her and making mkusic on the plantations.
or Jazz and music for that matter. : )
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.