[Bret L]

The Unbearable Whiteness of Ken Burns

by Steve Sailer on August 12, 2009




"The publicity machine is now gearing up for documentarian Ken Burns’s twelve-hour extravaganza, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, which will run for six straight nights on PBS starting September 27.

This being a Ken Burns series, the predominant theme of The National
Parks will be “diversity.” So, if you go camping in a national park
this month, check out the diversity of your fellow visitors. You’ll
likely notice tourists from all over the world, including busloads of
punctual Germans and amenable Japanese.

But, foreign tourists aren’t the right kind of diversity for Burns.

Although Burns has spent his career explaining stuff, he’s never quite
figured himself out. That’s why, judging from his documentary’s
preview materials, The National Parks is shaping up, after six years
of work, as Ken Burns’ Worst Idea.

Burns became famous in 1990 with his magnificent eleven-hour
documentary The Civil War.

Could he top it? Anticipation in the press for his 18-hour Baseball
series in 1994 was intense.

Well, it turned out Burns couldn’t top The Civil War. As Baseball
slogged on, reaching some kind of apotheosis of pompous tedium when
interviewee Stephen Jay Gould sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” all
the way through a capella, my wife started asking unkind questions
about why the media would never get so excited over a documentary of
this numbing length on the history of, say, soap operas or some other
feminine timewaster.
Still, adrift inside the vast hulk of Baseball was an excellent two-
hour documentary on the one topic that truly engaged Burns: the Negro
Leagues and the Jackie Robinson story.

As more Burns documentaries piled up, it became clear that what he
cares most about is telling stories about African Americans. This was
acidly pointed out in the famous parody, The Old Negro Space Program:

It was a different time, you understand. In 1957 or 1958, if you
were black and you were an astronaut, you were outta work.

In 2007, Latino pressure groups successfully exploited Burns’
notorious lack of interest in nonblacks by raising a stink over the
shortage of Hispanics in his WWII documentary The War. He ended up
caving in and inserting an extra 28 minutes of Latino Lore, that, in
the words of a New Yorker reviewer, felt “tacked-on.”

In a better world, Burns could devote himself solely to making
documentaries about African American subjects. There is plenty of good
material, and he’s the best at it. But, in this world, he can’t: he’s
white. It would be like a white actor in 2008 or 2009 being the
world’s best at playing Othello: he’d be outta work. It is a different
time, you understand.

(Indeed, Burns is about as white as a white guy can get. His general
affect is reminiscent of the liberal social worker in the pilot
episode of King of the Hill whom Hank dubs “Twig Boy.”)

Hence, Burns typically makes bloated documentaries about some subject
expansive enough to give him an excuse to slip in the black stories
that interests him. If the topic is right, such as Jazz, it works.

But … National Parks?

I’m sorry, but black people don’t like national parks. Less than one
percent of visitors to Yosemite, for example, are black. National
parks were largely dreamed up by Progressive descendants of New
England Puritans, and they remain too spartan for most black
vacationers’ tastes. Consider what it would take to lure black
celebrities to a national park. If you want Michael Jordan to visit,
you’d better put in a golf course. Oprah Winfrey? A spa. And Beyoncé
is not going to sleep on the ground.

Thus, the online 25-minute preview video of Burns’ series gives off a
whiff of self-parody, as if Burns is trying to top The Old Negro Space
Program. His teaser is dominated by a black park ranger named Shelton
Johnson. Mr. Johnson seems like a fine fellow, with a worthy cause of
getting African Americans more interested in nature; but only in Ken
Burns’s mind would he be a prime figure in the story of the national
parks.

Not surprisingly, the basic idea for this documentary was dreamed up
not by Burns but by his writer, Dayton Duncan, who was the press
secretary for the 1988 Dukakis campaign. When Duncan first pitched the
history of national parks, Burns was bored until Duncan mentioned that
the first proto-park, Yosemite, was instituted in 1864 by … Abraham
Lincoln.

Unfortunately for Burns, Honest Abe turns out to be almost the only
overlap, even tangential, between his obsession and the actual history
of the national parks.

If the National Parks really are “America’s best idea,” the problem
for Burns and his financial backers is that this best idea was
invented by the worst sort of people. The founders of the conservation
movement in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were,
overwhelmingly, white Protestant males. Moreover, many of the heroes
of the preservation of the American landscape were active in the
immigration restriction movement that triumphed in 1924. And, they
often had other, even less respectable, enthusiasms, such as social
Darwinism and eugenics.

The national park system, which was formalized with the creation of
the National Park Service in 1916, was an outgrowth of the Progressive
movement, much like the 1924 immigration restriction act. The
intertwining of immigration limitation and nature preservation seemed
obvious to Progressives, especially Northern Californians. Indeed, the
Sierra Club stood for immigration control until David Gelbaum donated
$100 million in the mid-1990s on the condition of Club leaders not
opposing immigration.

All the minorities in American history played less of a role in the
crucial decades of the conservation movement than just the eugenics
advocates alone, such as Teddy Roosevelt, TR’s founding chief of the
Forest Service Gifford Pinchot, Madison Grant (co-founder of the Save-
the-Redwoods League and author of the bestseller The Passing Of The
Great Race Or The Racial Basis Of European History), Alexander Graham
Bell (the telephone inventor who was crucial in the early history of
the National Geographic Society), John Muir’s close friend Henry
Fairfield Osborn, David Starr Jordan (co-founder of the Sierra Club
and president of Stanford), horticulturalist Luther Burbank, and so
forth.

The Progressives’ reputation, long sky-high because they were seen as
the forerunners of today’s liberals, has shrunk as their WASP
chauvinism has become politically radioactive. Many of the
Progressives’ favorite causes—anti-machine political reform,
conservation, publicizing birth control, eugenics, muscular
Christianity, immigration restrictions, and Prohibition—formed a
fairly coherent agenda for maintaining WASP hegemony of America in the
face of decades of heavy immigration.

A major monetary supporter of Burns’ documentary is the Evelyn &
Walter Haas Jr. Fund. (Haas was the great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss,
who founded the San Francisco jeans company during the Gold Rush):

A portion of the Haas Jr. Fund’s grant for the production of the
film supported “Untold Stories,” a research effort to discover people
of diverse backgrounds who have had a profound impact on the history
of the parks.

Under the leadership of Ira S. Hirschfeld, diversity is a very big
deal to the Haas Jr. Fund. For example, the other frontpage story on
the Fund’s website complains:

While many things have changed dramatically in the 40 years since
Stonewall, one thing has not: the leadership of lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgender (LGBT) organizations has remained overwhelmingly
white.

So, how is Burns going to deal with the fact that “America’s best
idea” was dreamed up by the kind of men whom Mr. Hirschfeld despises?

Apparently, Burns and Co. are just going to distort history by
overemphasizing minor figures of the proper skintone.

Burns’ writer Dayton Duncan asserts:

It is indisputable that for generations, the national parks have
been viewed as the bastion of predominantly white, upper middle-class
Americans.

(Personally, I always viewed national parks as being a bastion of
people with tents.)

Dayton and Burns, however, intend to fix all that by fixing history,
even if the result sounds like crushingly boring TV. According to
Duncan, they will show “an increasingly diverse American population”
stories in which:

… they will invariably meet people like themselves: The Buffalo
Soldiers and their dynamic leader, Captain Charles Young, who rose
from slavery to be the third black man to graduate from West Point,
and the first to be put in charge of a national park. A Japanese
immigrant named George Masa, who devoted his life to saving the Great
Smokies. Federico Sisneros, who protected the ruins of New Mexico’s
San Gregorio de Abó until the day he died in 1988, four days shy of
his 94th birthday—the nation’s oldest park ranger. Sue Kunitomi
Embrey, who crusaded to preserve the Manzanar internment camp as a
reminder of a shameful mistake in our past; and Adina De Zavala, who
helped preserve the San Antonio Missions and therefore a more complete
memory of American history. Lancelot Jones, the son of a former slave,
who resisted the temptations of quick money and in doing so rescued
the last undeveloped islands between Miami and Key West from
commercialization. Chiura Obata, who found inspiration in Yosemite and
passed it along through his exquisite paintings. Gerard Baker, the
descendant of Indian people informed by Lewis and Clark in 1804 that
their homeland now belonged to someone else, who was put in charge of
the Park Service’s commemoration of the expedition’s bicentennial and
then became the first Native American superintendent of Mount Rushmore
National Memorial. Robert Stanton, the second African-American to
become a park superintendent, who then went on to lead the entire Park
Service.

Now, that’s entertainment!

It’s often said that history is written by the victors. Yet, how true
is that? For example, the South lost the Civil War, but a long line of
Southern historians, down to the star of Burns’s The Civil War, Shelby
Foote, made sure that the Confederacy’s side of the story was told and
told well.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that history is written not so much
by the victors, but by the writers of history.

And he who pays the piper calls the tune."

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