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The Documentary Film:
Its Role in the Study of History
by Ken Burns, Filmmaker
That was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. He could have just as easily been speaking about the experience of this country in the last several months as he was his own heroic acts 130 years ago during the Civil War.
Good evening. I am delighted to have this opportunity to speak with you today, to try in our brief time here together to fathom a little about history, about the Civil War, about television, about creativity, about what we all strive for. I am particularly delighted, indeed proud, to be here at Harvard, the center of so much activity during the Civil War. You sent your sons, you suffered their loss, but most of all you led the way in the larger struggle for emancipation and human freedom.
For many years, I had hoped to do a history of the Civil War on film, but had never been able to get up the courage. Then on Christmas Day, 1984, I finished reading a book which literally changed my life. It was a novel of the battle of Gettysburg called Killer Angels and it was written by a man named Michael Shaara. It had won the Pulitzer Prize in the mid-seventies and had been recommended to me by many friends.
Killer Angels told the story of three of the most important days in American history; the high-water mark of the Confederacy, the mistake of all mistakes by Robert E. Lee, indeed, the price the South would have to pay for having Robert E. Lee as its general: Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.
But what was important to me about the book was that it introduced me, for the first time, to Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. And for all intents and purposes, it was the life of Chamberlain which convinced me to embark on the most difficult and satisfying experience of my life. I am therefore very grateful for him, and for you, who have deemed what I have to say about the war and history and television worthy of your attention.
It is my belief that Chamberlain represents the best kind of history, the best kind of American. His is the story which always gets overlooked in the superficial aerial views of history we are usually presented with. He enlivens, though, page after page of history, as we learn first of his early life as a professor at Bowdoin, then as the green colonel of the twentieth Maine, finally as hero at Fredericksburg, Petersburg, and Gettysburg--especially Gettysburg, where on Little Round Top he executes an obscure textbook maneuver that saves the Union army and quite possibly the Union itself.
Chamberlain was given the task of receiving the flags of the tattered Confederate Army during the formal surrender which took place a few days after Lee and Grant had met so poignantly in Wilmer McLean's parlour to discuss in preliminary fashion the terms. Now, at this solemn ceremony, where Chamberlain had already forbidden his men to cheer or taunt their rebel counterparts, he made an extra-ordinary gesture. John B. Gordon, the Confederate general who had the painful task of supervising the final march of his army, saw and said it best I think, and I quote: "Chamberlain called his men into line and as my men marched in front of them, the veterans in blue gave a soldierly salute to those vanquished heroes--a token of respect from Americans to Americans." In reconciliation, Chamberlain made his greatest contribution to war.
For many years and some generations after the war, Chamberlain's story was overlooked, the actions of this citizen-hero for the most part forgotten. That is the way it is in history. Many worthwhile events and people get lost in the interpretive shuffle and it takes a new generation, a later generation to rescue and save that which it finds important. I find Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain important. He rose to every occasion.
It is important to add that it was not all solemn and serious. Despite the great carnage he watched inflicted on his species, besides the useless death he saw, besides his own six wounds, Chamberlain still found time to record sweeter moments. A few weeks after the battle of Fredericksburg, that unmitigated disaster for the Union, Chamberlain told his brother Tom that he had never felt so well and so alive in his life, and added, "What makes it strange, is that I should have gained 12 pounds living on worms."
Humor, of course, played an important role in the Civil War, easing the pain and relieving the horror we were visiting on our own family members. During the long, cold, rainy winter of 1863, Confederate forces huddled in defensive positions south of the Duck River, near Tullahoma, Tennessee. Confederate officers liked to explain that Tullahoma came from the Greek word "Tulla" meaning mud, and "homa" meaning more mud.
Abraham Lincoln said if he ever saw a man homelier than himself, he'd shoot the wretch and put him out of his misery. Stonewall Jackson never ate pepper because he thought it would make his left leg ache. He rode into battle, in fact, with one arm raised, to keep, he said, the blood balanced, and he never mailed a letter if he thought it would be in transit on a Sunday. The bombastic John Pope, a terrible Union general, so often signed his dispatches "headquarters in the saddle" that Lincoln finally said Pope had his headquarters where his hindquarters ought to be. Grant said he knew only two tunes: one was Yankee Doodle and the other wasn't. And Sherman hated newspapermen so much that he said if he killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast.
For many of us, we are brought to our history in just this fashion, with story, memory, anecdote, feeling. These emotional connections become a kind of glue which makes the most complex of past events stick in our minds and our hearts, permanently a part of who each of us is now.
But for most of the life of this republic, the way we have formally told our history was from the top down. This has been called the history of the State or of great men, and it basically focuses only on presidents and wars and generals. It relies, like certain current economic policies, on an erroneous belief that this history trickles down and touches experiences common to us all. It rarely does. It does exhibit, or has exhibited an understandable arrogance and we have had to rely on family memory and community recollection for the good stuff. Or at least the stuff that made all that political history meaningful.
But as we have grown older as a country, as we have moved around more, lost touch with place more, these personal histories have dried up for most people, and we began to forget. History became a kind of castor oil of dry dates and facts and events of little meaning, something we knew was good for us, but hardly good tasting. History became just another subject, not the great pageant of everything that has come before this moment.
About twenty or thirty years ago we woke up, partially, to this problem and began to insist on relevance in our teaching of history and on a new social history that would focus on real people doing real and recognizable things. This would be history from the bottom up, not top down, and people would respond. They did not. Relevance became an excuse for not even teaching history. And the new social history became so bogged down in statistical demographics and micro-perceptions that history began to sound like the reading of the telephone book. A new arrogance replaced the old, equally understandable, but equally devastating to the national memory. Someone expressed the new tyranny quite well when they said a history of Illinois could be written without mentioning Abraham Lincoln. Something had to change.
I'm pleased to report that in some ways it has. We have, as an Academy, begun to speak of a synthesis of the old and the new histories, a way to combine the best of the top down version, still inspiring even in its "great men" ad-diction, with the million heroic acts of women, minorities, laborers, ordinary people. And we have begun to use new media and new forms of expression to tell our histories, breaking the stranglehold the Academy has had on historical exchange for the last hundred years. Remember, until we adopted the German academic model at the end of the nineteenth century, our greatest historians, like Parkman and Adams, were essentially amateurs, popular writers concerned with speaking to large audiences, not just a handful of colleagues unconcerned with how one wrote.
Listen to what Francis Parkman had to say about the historian's responsibility: "Faithfulness to the truth of history," he wrote, "involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in all their bearings, near and remote: in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or spectator of the action he describes." The telling of history is a tension between art and science. The science of history would enumerate the myriad details equally, without discrimination; the telephone book at its worst. The art of history has produced Gone with the Wind, and worse, the Birth of a Nation and recent mini-series dramas which try to convince us that it was not brother against brother, but heaving bosom against heaving bosom.
Good history has always struck a balance between these two polarities, never allowing formal considerations to overwhelm and capsize the truth of events, nor allowing a dry recitation of fact to render its meaning unintelligible or worse--boring. In an age of changing media, these dangers and pitfalls become even more critical, require even more of our vigilance and attention if we are to survive. For it is a question of survival. Without any past, certainly the current national elective, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impressions of our being.
If I said I had been working on a film series about an imperial presidency, about a growing feminist movement, about an ever-present civil rights question, about greedy Wall Street speculators who stole millions trading on inside information, about unscrupulous military contractors who sold inferior goods at exorbitant prices to the government, about a prying, often meddlesome and insensitive media, about new weapons capable of mass destruction on a scale previously unheard of, it would be clear that I was speaking of the present. But I am speaking of only a few issues of the American Civil War, a war that continues to speak to central questions of our present time.
It is, therefore, no accident that the best selling non-fiction book two years ago was The Battle Cry of Freedom, that the Hollywood movie Glory did so well, that the library of America's best selling volumes are the collected writings of Lincoln, that from editorial page to opinion page, from Playboy to The New York Times, writers are quoting and citing Lincoln, that battle field reenactment groups continue to grow, that dozens of books seeking to explain the war's special significance are published each year, that Hollywood plans still more films, that we have released our five year labor of love. Each generation, Lewis Mumford once said, rediscovers and reexamines that part of the past which brings the present new meaning and new possibilities. The Civil War, like no other time in our history, now brings that special correspondence to our present, shocking us with its power to inform and invigorate.
I was drawn to the Civil War because it seemed to be the central influence on all the other subjects I had made films about. I assembled a first-rate team, including my brother Ric, the writer Geoffrey C. Ward, editor Paul Barnes, narrator David McCullough, the incomparable Shelby Foote--a genuine national treasure--and more than three dozen remarkable "voices," men and women in arts and letters who read from diaries, journals, love letters, military dispatches, and newspapers that give our presentation of the war an experiential feeling.
We concerned ourselves with ordinary soldiers as well as the great politicians and generals, followed the fortunes of two towns, North and South, as well as the great battles of the war. We looked at the diplomatic struggles, the role of women, and most important, reported the true and heroic story of American Blacks--not as mere passive bystanders to the struggle, but active, dedicated, self-sacrificing soldiers in an intensely personal drama of self- liberation.
Interestingly, we also found in the Civil War series that creativity was complexity. Too often we manipulate the facts of history to paint a simplistic, often rosy, view of what happened. We found that by lifting up the rug of history and sweeping out the dirt, we did not in any way diminish the force of our narrative. Indeed, we strengthened it. Characters like Lincoln and Lee who have been smothered in myths of perfection over the years were now real people, flawed as you and I are, but real, and that brought us closer to them and their struggles, personalizing the past like no Madison Avenue sanitized version could ever do. We learned more, retained more, and most important, cared more for these men, knowing as we did, of their sins, as well as their virtues. It seems to me true of any endeavor, that in simplification, we murder, and in complexity, we are faced with untidiness, to be sure, but also a good deal of truth.
We wrote our script unconcerned with whether there were images to fill what we wanted to write about. We shot the old photographs unconcerned with whether there might be a scene in the script which these images could illustrate. In fact, we avoided illustration, preferring to take the harder, more time-consuming route of discovering the new and unique relationships that could be forged between the word and image when freed from the tyranny of doing it the quick and dirty and formulaic way. All of this liberated our filmmaking and liberated us. It allowed us to begin to tell the story of what happened during the war in a new and, for many people, vivid way, where the past, at rare but surprising dramatic moments, came alive.
At 4:30 am on the twelfth of April, 1861, General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard directed his Confederate gunners to open fire on Fort Sumter, at that hour only a dark shape out in Charleston harbor. Thirty-four hours later a white flag over the fort ended the bombardment. The only casualty was a Confederate horse. It was a bloodless opening to the bloodiest war in American history.
Shortly after Appomattox, Walt Whitman, a Brooklyn journalist and sometime poet who worked in the appalling Union hospital, warned posterity of what he had seen. "Future years," he wrote, "will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war," Whitman insisted, "will never get in the books."
The writers and historians of future years have not been scared off by Whitman's admonition. In the century and a quarter since the war's conclusion, more that fifty thousand books have been published on the Civil War: countless personal diaries and regimental histories, biographies and military narratives, pictorial essays, social analyses, works that have treated causes and effects, demographics, crop statistics, even the weather. There have been books of maps, books of letters, books of orders, books of books, slim philosophical essays and three volume narratives, novels, poems, and music. Each year dozens of new titles appear, again offering to revisit the war, to reinterpret or rearrange those strange days and hard events--faint traces and distant signals now--looking still for the coherent, the conclusive, explanation.
In the past fifteen years I have learned many things, but that history is our greatest teacher is perhaps the most important lesson. However, this enthusiasm is by no means shared by all. History--and its valuable counsel-- continues to recede in importance in schools across the land. The statistics are now very frightening. A majority of high school seniors do not know who Joseph Stalin or Winston Churchill were. They did not know, of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence, which came first. Many thought we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War. And a Majority could not tell the correct half-century in which the Civil War took place.
Why do we forget? Who and what is to blame? Well, film and television mostly. Television is rapidly eroding the strength of our Republic from within, substituting a distracting cultural monarchy for the diversity and variety and democracy promised in its conception and unveiling. Instead of dozens of options on the tube, we now see nearly the same thing everywhere, always presented the same way, on dozens of clone-like channels. Television has equipped us as citizens to live only in an all-consuming, and thereby forgettable and disposable present, blissfully unaware of the historical tides and movements that speak not only to this moment, but to our vast future as well. This environment insures that we have no history. And by so doing, insures that we have no future.
Even the best of those in television, and that includes all of us in public television, get caught up in near constant self-congratulation about their role in the medium, in near constant self-righteous invocation of shadowy "chilling effects" and influences that would limit their Constitutionally-initiated rights, but always forgetting to stress to themselves and their audience how much the medium must improve, how little of its brain it actually uses, how by striving for a superficial ideal of balance it has insured mediocrity, how by its almost comic unearthing of simplistic villains, it has forgotten to select for heroes.
Television can remind us too, if we let it. We know the horrible statistics about television, how it divides us, encourages us to see ourselves as economic units rather than as spiritual beings, as Vartan Gregorian says. But we mustn't throw the medium out, turn away, or surrender its great power to those disingenuous people for whom it is merely the tool of some temporal or financial end. It is not enough to blame it all on television. Lincoln, in 1862, forced to place George McClellan, a slow, timid, but experienced general back in charge of his humiliated army, said, "We must use the tools we have."
Let us use these tools now. As we gradually become a country and a society without letter writing and diary keeping, more and more dependent on visual signs and language, television will become more and more an important part of the making of history. More and more we will be connected to the past by the images we have made, and they will become the glue that makes memories.
I firmly believe that we are at the dawn of a new completely legitimate literature of imagery. Much like Gutenberg, half a millennia ago, we are poised to embrace new ways of speaking to one another. Not just the indistinct smoke signals of our last century of development and experimentation with these new visual media of photography, film, and television, but a whole new literature, a poetry for the eye as well as the ear. This new form will not reject or replace the old, but it will surely alter it, has altered it, permanently.
We must also change what we think is history. "The Civil War," the series, is like a poem--selective, impressionistic, to be sure, but a legitimate form of historic expression. When I began this project I asked one of our senior advisors, the distinguished historian C. Vann Woodward, what books I should begin to read to understand the Civil War. He said, "John Brown's Body by Stephen Vincent Benet." To Woodward, a Homeric epic poem was the place to start. Poetry and history are not disparate, but one and the same. That is the way it has been for 5,000 years, the last 100 notwithstanding.
Eventually, television will, I suggest, become our new Homeric form, (told around an electronic campfire), the way we can and must speak to succeeding generations. It seems too easy to dismiss its cruder aspects, to turn away from its clearly manipulative elements, or cave in to its seductive power. We must learn how to use it, make it speak our truths and tell our stories, our histories, in an honorable fashion.
We forget, though, in our enthusiasms as a species to go to war, its real cost. If we entered the fighting knowing what really came home in those opaque, sanitized body bags, if we knew we would have to list the dead again in yet a new memorial of crushingly personal anguish, if we knew, as history shows us time and again, that eventually we will always seek reconciliation with our enemies, would we be so enthusiastic? So forgetful? The Army of the Potomac's finest moments I believe were in brotherly embrace with the veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia at the end of the war. We now seek out our former enemies the Japanese and Germans at poignant reunions. The Germans now generously feed the Russians when once, a generation ago, they starved millions of them to death.
Here is another message, from Henry Adams, the great nineteenth-century historian. He was writing just after the battle of Shiloh in April of 1862. The two days of fighting had produced more casualties than all previous American wars combined: the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War--in two days! This is what Adams said, "I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race will commit suicide by blowing up the world."
We have become a nation of addicts. Not just to drugs and alcohol, the obvious. We are addicted in many other equally destructive ways: to money and power, to food, to fashion, to forgetting, to prejudice and hatred, to waste, to cynicism (perhaps the worst), and to television. Our task, your task, must be to free ourselves from as many of these addictions as possible, as quickly as possible, or Henry Adams' striking prediction, now a possibility, will be our fate. History, all history, can help. It is a powerful tool.
The series has touched a chord which is still vibrating and will continue to vibrate as long as the Republic lives. If you see the history of a country in the same sympathetic and personal way you see the life of a human being, then it is clear that the Civil War was the great traumatic event in the childhood of this nation. Disguise it as we may, ignore it as we usually do, distort it as we have so often done, we cannot ultimately not be continually influenced by this terrible, terrible memory of the four years during which we came close to ending our national life.
Finally, Lincoln, of course, said it best. Early in 1861, at his first inauguration, when he still hoped to keep his country together, he implored Southerners not to go to war. "We must not be enemies," he said, "we must be friends." But then he went on, "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature." Isn't that it?
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