Could We Have Done More?

Ken Burns is the most successful popular historian of our time. His documentary films, including The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), and Jazz (2001), have not only provided information about key figures and events. Through Burns’s signature blend of sonorous narration, animated still photography, and plaintive musical accompaniment, they have helped define the very look and sound of the past for many Americans.

As with most popular historians, though, Burns’s success tells us as much about the author and his contemporary audience as it does about far off times. Burns has never concealed his own politics, expressed in video tributes he produced for Senator Ted Kennedy. And the optimistic, understated, yet patriotic version of the American story that Burns tells seems perfectly tailored to the sort of aging, genteel liberals who watch a lot of PBS, which broadcasts most of his work.

That mood has become harder to sustain, however. Like much of his audience, Burns’s mood has grown darker over the last decade. Broadcast as the Cold War was reaching its triumphant conclusion, The Civil War looked back on the turmoil of the past more in sorrow than in anger—an attitude that has attracted criticism in our more censorious time. Now Burns is less forgiving.

Although it demonstrates the same technical excellence as Burns’s previous work, The U.S. and the Holocaust reflects this new anxiety. Ostensibly an investigation of American action and inaction with regard to the Third Reich, it also draws an analogy between the United States and Germany. We like to think we’re exceptional, the more critical Burns proposes. But what if we’re more like our opponents in “the good war” of the 20th century than we prefer to believe?

The suggestion is not altogether unfounded. In the first episode, Burns points out the inconvenient fact that the Nazis claimed aspects of American practice as precedents for their own conduct. Hitler himself compared the German conquest of Eastern Europe to the United States’ violent Western expansion. Nazi apologists also claimed American segregation and eugenics laws as inspiration for their own policies. Many such claims were cynical efforts to deflect criticism—a tactic