Instant History

Clio, the muse of history

From Thucydides to Winston Churchill, history has been one of the prestige genres of literature. And so it is proper that we ask the position and prospects of this mode of knowledge on what has become the central medium of American civilization.

Television, like every other new medium, imitates older media while timidly seeking out its own aesthetics. This is almost a “law” of communication history: the first type faces imitated manuscript characters; the first lithographs copied the styles of earlier graphic media like the engraving and the etching; early movies sometimes tried to film stage plays whole, literally, without translation; the first television studies copied radio’s glass-enclosed, soundproof director’s booth, pane for pane, even though this hampered television directing.

So we should not be surprised if television has not completely discovered its own proper aesthetic in even any single literary genre during its first decades. It is precisely the responsibility of formal education to accelerate the search for more accord between media form and intellectual content, especially in the new media where commercial pressures work against open-minded curiosity.

History as a form on American television is particularly complex to understand because of the peculiar ambivalence of Americans to history as a way of apprehending reality. Henry Ford aptly symbolizes this ambivalence. His vision of a mass-produced car literally destroyed rural America in a generation; yet cheek by jowl with the great River Rouge complex is his nostalgic paean to rustic virtue, Greenfield Village. That bewildering array of half-classified memories might also be the best possible argument on behalf of that impatient activist’s philosophy of history: “History is bunk.”

Ford saw that America was a future-oriented culture, and “history” to such superficial observers was Europe’s established church, its status-frozen aristocracy, its regal trappings. History, to the innocent American Adam staring creation afresh in a Virgin Land, was exactly what we were trying to get away from. What was in fact happening, of course, as we see from the hindsight of history is that America was merely the place where the latent ambitions and energies of Europe found a congenial arena.

Just a few hundred years later, ironically, many Americans have already become “tired of the future”; too few of us can see the meaning of our revolution for the new one of rising expectations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. If Europe’s trinity of limitations was church, king, and nobility, ours is the Establishment of Mediocre Aspirations symbolized by Las Vegas, Miami Beach, and Disneyland.

Lulled by trivial dreams, we desire the reassurance of a soft version of our history; a Colonial Williamsburg that celebrates the integrity and courage of eighteenth-century patriots in a Virginia that will not integrate its schools; a Civil War Centennial geared to tourism and pageantry—and the ritual fantasy of a Southern victory; and on television itself, massive escape from the arduous present into the pseudo-history of the American West as well as a fatuous celebration of our ignorant decade of moral failure in The Roaring Twenties and The Untouchables. Flabby fictions as well as distorted facts twist a nation’s sense of its past. This is an idea hard for popular culture entrepreneurs to accept, for it belies their facile division of programming into entertainment or information, fun or seriousness, diversion, or message.

To summarize, it takes a new medium time to find its own special aesthetic and this search has been complicated for history as a genre on American television because of the national ambivalence about its own past. In spite of this sizable handicap, history on television has a respectable, even enviable record. But there are problems and dangers that can be solved and averted if considered carefully enough.

There are several categories of the story that ought to be considered: the “past as present” tradition; the ”instant” history school; anthologies on the twentieth century—the “most interesting” of centuries; “history for the future” in interviews of statesmen recorded for posterity; biography; depth documentaries on the leading edge of history. A consideration of each will tell us a great deal about medium which specializes in actuality, that that knife-edge of awareness between what is irrevocably past and what is just about to happen.

“The past as present” tradition of television history attempts to capitalize on television’s powers of immediacy, the sense it gives the viewer of being “in” on Big Things. Building on Edward R. Murrow’s I Can Hear It Now sound anthologies of “historic” figures and events (FDR’s “the only fear” speech, London’s Big Ben in the Blitz, Churchill on “blood, sweat, and tears”), television developed See It Now, interpretive essays in very recent history, You Are There, an early series still available on film for the schools: The Murrow–CBS tradition is best considered a part of the final category—depth documentaries.

The You Are There series plunges the view into the middle of momentous events. At great turning points in history, or at typical occasions in bygone eras, Everyman has a front-fow center seat. This re-creation of a critical moment in human history is a great aid to sluggish imaginations, but it has dangers. It tends to over-personalize history: great men (they can be seen in dramatic close-up) overshadow great trends (who wants to look at a graph?). It tends to oversimplify causation and motivation: a half hour is not time for historiographical quibbling.

It tends to focus on surface exotica at the expense of significant explanation; the strange clothing, the odd custom, the telegenic detail—all these come to the surface of a television screen more easily than human motivation, social tension. Finally, violent action fills a screen more arrestingly than below-the-surface transformation. In spite of these limitations, “the past as present” tradition is of enormous value as motivation for school children. As long as a probing teacher is there to ask questions, this historical genre is of inestimable benefit, especially in a culture like our where the historical sense is either despised, underdeveloped, or satisfied with mere nostalgia.

“Instant” history is not nearly as impressive a television development. This too is based on television’s vaunted ability to be there, “soaking up history like a sponge.” This point of view suggests that television can chase history around the world and corner it for posterity. There is sure plenty of history in the making these days, and “historic” events do abound—from the national vigil for John Glenn to the latests jet-flown film from a global hot spot.

But history as reality (everything happening) must be distinguished from history as document (the raw material a historian has to work with) and the final stage of the historical creation, history as artfully displayed knowledge, is the trained historian’s explanation of the former events based on a careful and considered study of the latter remains. To create “history as an art,” one must have more than an ability to dispatch film crews to troubled areas of the world.

He must be able to sort out from the million possibilities, on the basis of background reading and independent thought, what to film to best illustrate trends that bridge the fitfully illumined past with an almost totally dark future. Then with these materials of “history as document,” he must create as balanced a picture of his interpretation as possible with the documents time and chance have allowed him to obtain. The closer his deadline to the event, the less room there is for thought, the liess likelihood that he will in fact create “history as knowledge.” The only way he can compensate for deadlines pressure is by reading more than thinking deeply. But deadlines keep him from doing much of that. Therefore his history skims. Its surface pictures give only the illusion of understanding—often worse than freely confessed ignorance.

Let me give some recent examples of “instant” history. On Mrs. Kennedy’s recent trip to India and Pakistan, Eyewitness host Walter Cronkite bragged about how quickly the jet has rushed the program’s opening film to the U.S.—it had been shot that very day. But what was this rush about? Cliché visuals, Jackie getting off a plane, Jackie shaking hands here, Jackie laying wreaths there. Jackie being photographed by scores of the photographers here. Precious little about what she was learning about the Indian people, what they thought of her visit.

One is reminded of Thoreau’s misgivings about the invention of the telegraph in Walden. Speed is no good at all if it doesn’t lead to understanding.

Lat year, when the public was still reeling from a two-plane crash over Manhattan, CBS put on a late night special a few hours after an Aeronaves de Mexico jet crashed on take-off at Idlewild. In their rush to cover a sensation event, the producers went on the air not really knowing what had happened. During the program itself, they scaled down the casualty figure from almost all the passengers to just a handful. Waiting for rush film, the narrator recounted the “vital” statistics of the last several crashes and marked time by discussing the high flash point of kerosene jet fuel. (All the promised film never did arrive.) What did, were trite visuals of firemen wetting down ashes. It is appalling to think of how much cumbrous and expensive equipment was put to such trivial uses.

Another incident with more claim to “historic” significance came about by accident when CBS was covering Adlai Stevenson’s important speech on the Congo “live” at the U.N. All of a sudden a mêlée between African factions broke out in the galleries. The on-the-air television cameras swung round and also recorded the fracas for posterity. So bemused were the network policymakers by their “seeing it now” that they re-ran that “fight” several times in its entirety during the day. It explained nothing about crucial history in the making in the Congo. It was sheer visual excitement, a kind of global television wrestling match. The network praised itself publicly on this historic coverage. It might better have asked itself in private whether its public affairs staff has a complex enough view of current events to guide its editorial judgment. The examples I have cited are no reflection on CBS to the exclusion of the other two networks; actually for a long time CBS has the most distinguished record in covering and interpreting current history; it is surely no worse than ABC and NBC, probably on the whole better.

Part of the trouble is television’s picking up yellow journalism by osmosis from newspapers; part is overplaying the “actuality” aspect of its own nature. Actually television’s vaunted coverage of conventions and space flights and congressional hearings is not nearly as “pure” as network press releases would have one think. When television decides to cover an historic event, its very presence changes what happens. Sometimes it can even give grossly misleading images of the event. For example, when Truman sacked MacArthur in Korea, MacArthur’s homecoming parade in Chicago was covered live. On television it looked as if everyone was having an exciting time; along the parade route, however, it was as dull as dishwater without Dash.

More ominously, there were complaints from the press that television cameramen tried to egg on teenagers at Little Rock when there was nothing exciting to the eye happening. No views is bad news, when you’ve carted television and technicians a thousand miles to cover “historic” events. The temptation is to make history, as indeed Meet the Press and other panels interrogating history-makers do when they aim to squeeze a Monday-morning headline out of their guests rather than probe for meaning.

Television had even tried to help the historian of the future by putting great men on film or tape. NBC’s Wisdom is a notable example of this fine television tradition. These kinescopes are all available to the schools too and should be used often, as long as the teacher is there to remind his students that seeing Robert Frost is not the same as reading him—more fun, perhaps, but not nearly as permanently satisfying. Still, a well-trained high school teacher should know of these new resources just as much as should know about good paperback series on poetry or the best editions of a particular poet.

Another television achievement are the anthologies on the twentieth century; chiefly NBC’s Project XX and CBS’s The Twentieth Century. For the most part these are also available on kinescope, the latter series free from its sponsor, Prudential. The NBC series had a tendency to show evil as something outside the U.S., making a good-guy-bad-guy melodrama out of the twentieth century. First it started with Russia in Nightmare in Red, then German fascism in The Twisted Cross, and only then did it give us a salutary dash of cold water in the face with The Jazz Age, a brilliant analysis of the flabbiness of the 1920s in America. Its documentary on Life in the Thirties was rough and reliable; not so its Bob Hope level survey of recent times. The series also has a tendency to nostalgia when analyzing America; for example, Mark Twain’s America, there is a great deal of Tom Sawyerism, hardly a whisper of “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg.” Its Meet Mr. Lincoln is also elegaic, but it deserves repeating every Lincoln’s Day as it has been for the past few years.

The Prudential leasehold on the twentieth century has always seemed to me too dependent on tracer bullets and naval bombardments, reminding us of the paradox that the exigencies of war reconnaissance leave our film archives heavily slanted in memory of Mars. The series also has a tendency to assume America is the turning point of the universe, as in its half hour on contemporary Sweden which almost assumed the Swedish middle way was guilty unless it could prove its innocence to us free enterprise Americans—as if planning was a concept foreign to an insurance company! Security, indeed. But, limitations of raw material and viewpoint aside, this series is a highly prized worker in the vineyards of Clio. Extensive classroom assignments are especially recommended because of the fine free study guides DeWitt of Teachers College, Columbia, has been preparing for years.

Finally, the depth documentary and experts forum are television’s best contributions to clarifying the “leading edge of history” for the teacher and his students. History moves faster in the twentieth century: more events are happening to more people with more irreversible consequences than ever before in the history of man. Historians can no longer take only geologic type time spans to periodize their subject. Five years may be as crucial as fifty or five hundred in slower, less explosive times. Textbooks lagging as they do, the curriculum must depend in part on CBS Reports, ABC’s Closeup, and NBC’s White Papers.

This is not a matter of “jazzing up the curriculum” or “motivating” slow learners. Television documentary is probably the only way enough Americans can get enough sense of their most recent history to make valid choices. This very dependence of the curriculum on television’s harried appointment book with history around the world makes it all the more important for teachers to add to the new medium’s coverage a Socratic needling that will wring out the illusion and cant about our part and our role in the world’s future.

In this way, the teacher can repay a serious debt to the television historian; the best kind of repayment, for a more mature audience, we have our best opportunity for more and better coverage of history on television. If television can resist its strong internal temptation to settle for “instant” history—which is to say for almost no historical understanding at all—then Clio’s uneasy alliance with the latest medium can become a most important source of insight for Americans who need more of a past to base their future on.