(Note: I always watch Ken Burns productions, and generally enjoy them, although I have to admit I fell asleep for both Baseball and Jazz. So this is not an attack on his documentaries as entertainment.)
In writing my Eliot Ness article, I was inspired by Ken Burns’ inane comments and those of his collaborator Lynn Novick about Ness. I thought we all need to look at him, the PBS King, again. We need to recall the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect about reading a news story where you actually know the facts:
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Since Eliot Ness went to my high school, I was inspired to read up on the real person, not the Robert Stack / Kevin Costner caricatures. You can read that article, but to sum up:
No, Ness did not put Capone in prison, and
Yes, the book that catapulted him to posthumous fame was largely fiction and written by his “co-writer,” but
Yes, he did perform brave and heroic deeds, both in Chicago and later in Cleveland. He was nationally famous at the time in Chicago, and featured in national magazines for his Cleveland work, and yet
He was a deeply flawed human being and did not lead a heroic life. Cleveland got sick of him eventually, too.
Yet he and Novick dismissed him as a “PR invention.” He gets zero minutes in their 3-part movie.
According to Gell-Mann, we should therefore not assume Burns’ other work is any more truthful. “Storyteller?” No, “propagandist” is more accurate.
You’re Gonna Have to Serve Somebody
Lyrics to the Bob Dylan song (I don’t want to violate copyright by including them here). Burns in his interviews makes a point of saying his work could only be done on public television, because a commercial sponsor would object to certain things, and he holds up HBO, Discovery, and History Channel as bad examples. Those certainly are poster children for the Bad Free Market. He also says (paraphrasing), “If you wake up in the middle of the night and your house is on fire, you’re not going to call the Market.”
A lot of cities do have volunteer fire departments, actually.
But always, someone else is paying, unless you’re wealthy. It defies belief to say that they won’t object to anything you do. When Burns says he has “creative freedom,” that means his sponsors trust him not to do anything they’d find offensive; he practices self-censorship, in other words. Ken Burns is East Coast Establishment. Let’s look at that.
Some PBS Financial Stuff
Florentine Films (Burns’ organization) is not a non-profit, and it’s private. So it’s not required to file an IRS Form 990, like 501(c)(3) organizations are. We don’t know how much of its revenue comes from TV stations licensing its content, or from DVD sales & other revenue. If it’s licensing fees from public TV stations, that is ultimately tax-deductible contributions.
The Better Angels Society (members of which are credited at the end of the show) is a non-profit, however. Here’s its Form 990 for 2022. Nearly 100% of its donations go to WETA, the public TV station (also credited at the end).
WETA is a much larger organization, and its CEO, Sharon Percy Rockefeller, earned $855,000 in total compensation in 2022 (page 71 of the form). The top 12 most highly compensated employees all earned more than $300,000. Think of that next time they appeal for donations in a Pledge Drive.
(Note: WETA is not Ken Burns’ organization. Some of their money is flowing back to Florentine, and they are credited as coproducing Prohibition but we can’t tell how much.)
In his interviews below, he says he spends 75% of his time fundraising. He also says he paid back the National Endowment for the Humanities 100% for some project. This is disingenuous: if it’s payments from PBS stations for his documentaries, then it’s ultimately still charitable contributions. (Of course, if you buy the DVD from Amazon, that’s not a charitable contribution. We don’t know how the numbers shake out.)
The Prohibition Movie
The overall feeling of this movie is that Prohibition was, as Ken Burns says in his interviews, “one of America’s worst ideas” (the worst being slavery). I think it’s safe to say that most Americans agree on that (as I do, too).
Urban smugness
It’s stated repeatedly that Prohibition was pushed by rural Protestants as part of their war on “diversity” and urban immigrants. It’s eerie that we have the exact same divide now, where the blue counties occupy a tiny but very well populated part of the US map. PBS viewers can feel smug as they get to make fun of those dreary Christians from the sticks who brought us this law. It was “the old rural, Protestant America vs. the new diverse urban America.” Ken Burns knows where his donations come from.
The Green Acres ridicule of the rubes is endless: we learn that the laws had loopholes for “medicinal” alcohol, “sacramental” wine, and wine used in Jewish ceremonies (the number of people claiming to be “rabbis” skyrocketed, we learn). “Everyone” was still drinking, and whether or not that was true, the urban PBS audience is constantly invited to feel morally superior to those bumpkins who pushed Prohibition on the country.
The only thing that’s missing is that they don’t call the Prohibition supporters a basket of deplorables.
Personalities
One of the things that makes Ken Burns productions so fun is the stories that you probably didn’t know, at least not well, but you enjoy learning them. Often, though, you get only the Establishment’s view.
Al Smith
Al Smith was the Governor of New York State and Democratic candidate for President in 1924 and 1928. He lost the 1928 election overwhelmingly, and failed to get the nomination in 1924.
After this movie, you wonder why he hasn’t already been canonized by the Catholic Church. The movie is virtually a campaign commercial for Al Smith (Newsflash: the election is over). He was urban, he was Catholic, he was liberal, he spoke like a New Yorker, and he was a “wet.” But somehow, hard as it is to imagine, the voters rejected him. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick apparently can’t believe it, still. We hear about the evil campaign tactics that were used against him. We don’t hear anything good about Hoover.
The 1924 Democratic convention was a standoff between the wets (Al Smith) and the dries (William McAdoo), requiring 103 ballots before a compromise candidate was finally chosen. We learn that the Ku Klux Klan was having a resurgence after the Birth of a Nation movie, and “there may have been as many as 300 Klansmen among McAdoo’s delegates.” (No support for that statement.)
On the other hand, “Al Smith has the courage to stand up to the Prohibitionists.” Sainthood incoming.
Mabel Walker Willebrandt
She was one of the first women to argue before the US Supreme Court. Mrs. Willebrandt was personally opposed to Prohibition, but she took it as the law of the land and vowed to enforce it as the Assistant Attorney General from 1921-1929. No one else wanted the job! I take that as a badge of honor, actually. She was willing to do the unpopular thing and did the best she could with a lousy job.
Prohibition makes sure to tell us that, in 1928, she committed the unpardonable sin of being a Republican and attacking Al Smith. We don’t hear about other highlights of her life, which included:
Defending 2,000 women in LA who were accused of criminal offenses, mostly prostitution, on an unpaid basis.
Adopting a child as a divorced woman, raising her with the help of friends
Personally arguing 40 cases before the Supreme Court
Successfully prosecuting thousands of Prohibition cases, and
Teaching herself to fly and getting a pilot’s license, at the age of 50
She seems like a pretty amazing woman, actually.
Pauline Sabin
Sabin was a wealthy New York socialite who turned against Prohibition in the later part of the 20’s. She and some other wealthy women formed the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, and this was significant because, before that, the leading supporters of Prohibition had been women. Their activity gave political cover to men who had been afraid to campaign for repeal, for fear of misogyny accusations.
The WONPR reached out to women across the country, enlisting over a million members, and was extremely effective in making Repeal happen. And Sabin endorsed FDR for President in 1932, thus qualifying her for Ken Burns sainthood. She also supported Alf Landon in 1936, but we don’t hear about that.
George Remus
Remus was a very successful bootlegger in Cincinnati in the early part of the 20’s. (Segment from the show). From the Wikipedia article:
In addition to becoming the "King of the Bootleggers", Remus was known as a gracious host. He held many parties, including a 1923 birthday party for his wife Imogene, in which she appeared in a daring bathing suit along with other aquatic dancers, serenaded by a fifteen-piece orchestra. Local children saw Remus as a fatherly figure, and some played on the estate.[ In 1922, Remus and his wife held a New Year's Eve party at their new mansion, nicknamed the Marble Palace. The guests included one hundred couples from the most prestigious families in the area. As parting gifts, Remus presented all the men with diamond stickpins, and gave each guest's wife a brand new car. He held a similar party in June 1923, while he was having problems with the government, at which he gave each female guest (of the fifty present) a brand new car.
Sounds like quite a guy. Eventually, he was prosecuted by Mabel Willebrandt and sent to prison.
Roy Olmstead
Segment from the show. “He became one of the biggest employers in the Seattle area.” Another Ken Burns hero. He also went to prison, and was eventually pardoned by President Roosevelt.
Eliot Ness
Nothing.
Frank Wilson
(Wilson was the Federal tax investigator who ultimately put Capone in prison.)
Nothing.
The film does feature one talking head, saying the Federal investigators couldn’t find an elephant in a phone booth. Apparently this guy thinks he could have put Capone away single-handed.
Vietnam
Let’s look at one different Burns production and see if we find the same biases. Why yes, we do: there is one way to look at this story, and no other ways are even acknowledged.
I remember watching this when it first aired, hoping to learn something new on this very old subject. In the end, I found that almost everything in it was a cliche; it has all been said a thousand times before: conventional wisdom, in other words.
No, It Was Not a Guerrilla War
One of the tired cliches about Vietnam was “It was a guerrilla war. Our tactics alienated the very people we needed. They wanted independence and the US out, like the French before us.”
This movie is all about those cliches. A few quotes from Episode 2:
On the heavy firepower tactics of the South Vietnamese army and the US, and concomitant civilian casualties:
as the people’s anger grew, so did the ranks of the Viet Cong
On the morale advantage of the VC over the ARVN:
the side whose soldiers have fewer doubts will always win
On the venality and unpopularity of the South Vietnamese government:
our leaders were corrupt and incompetent
Neil Sheehan said,
if you were in a cafe when Diem was giving a speech, somebody would get up and shut the radio off…. He was not connected to his own population.
Phan Quan Tue, a South Vietnamese, said,
Diem was simply the opposite of what democracy was. South Vietnam, in the competition against the North, that should have been a golden opportunity to have that society open with the free press, free expression. But there was not much choice.
Denmark, but with Rice Paddies
Implicit in these cliches is a goal of South Vietnam as a middle-class democracy, free from foreign influence (especially that of North Vietnam), run by honest politicians who respected human rights. Sort of “Denmark, with rice paddies.”
That goal was never attainable, so the conventional wisdom is correct on that score. Given that Kennedy, Johnson, and “the Best and Brightest” (McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, Rostow) implicitly accepted that goal, they deserve the real blame for the debacle it became. And as Col. Summers explains in On Strategy the military leaders who accepted this goal and strategy instead of pushing back or resigning also have blood on their hands.
That book by Col. Harry G. Summers, analyzing the war in terms of Clausewitz’s teachings, gives the clearest explanation of Vietnam that anyone’s ever written. Listen to some reviews from the (mostly) liberal press:
“On Stategy is just about the best thing I have read on Vietnam.”—Drew Middleton, The New York Times
“This investigation of the U.S. army’s role in the Vietnam War is widely recognized as the single most useful postmortem on the unpopular war.”—The Washington Post Book World
Naturally, Burns’ movie doesn’t even mention this. It might annoy his viewers to hear something they haven’t heard before. In the following analysis, the criticism is not so much that Vietnam doesn’t adopt this point of view, but that it doesn’t even tell you it exists. “America’s Storyteller” only wants to tell us stories we already believe.
Much of the national opposition to the War was the perception that we were losing. Indeed we were, if you believe the war aim was “Denmark with rice paddies.” The history of US wars suggests the public will make huge sacrifices if convinced it’s a good cause and the war will succeed. By not confronting that, Ken Burns’ Vietnam is a failure.
So What Is the Point?
The war was an invasion of South Vietnam by North Vietnam, right from the start. It was not an indigenous rebellion by South Vietnamese against their corrupt government. Without armed support from the North, the rebellion would have been crushed.
After 1972, North Vietnam didn’t even pretend that the Viet Cong was a significant force. In fact, the 1968 Tet Offensive pretty much destroyed the VC as a fighting force. The war was won in 1975 by regular North Vietnamese army units with tanks.
It follows, then, that shutting off the flow of arms and troops down the Ho Chi Minh Trail was both necessary and sufficient. The “neutrality” of Laos was held up as an insurmountable barrier, but Laos was never neutral. This “fact,” along with the accepted inviolability of North Vietnam from invasion, together did make the war unwinnable.
The Baby Boom generation grew up opposing the Vietnam War and would rather die than rethink that. In Was Vietnam Winnable? Mark Moyer says that his views got him blackballed from academia.
When a profession that claims to thrive on new ideas and debate instead ostracizes those who challenge certain orthodoxies, it deprives students of access to serious thought and encourages the rest of society to ignore it. The only way for the profession to regain its relevance is to show that it is open to challenges, and that it will give serious consideration to new ideas.
A Realistic Goal
The terms “realpolitik” and “raison d'état” have a bad odor nowadays. It sounds like 19th Century diplomacy: Bismarck, Metternich, and all that. Nonetheless, it is the correct approach to foreign policy; the problem being, the US public doesn’t love it. “Nation-building” and “spreading Western values” poll much better.
Maybe you’re one of the folks repulsed by realpolitik. If so, you might want to stop reading right now.
The Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Dictatorships
Criticism of Diem and all his successors, culminating in Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, is that they were puppets, didn’t have popular support, didn’t have a free press, no meaningful opposition was permitted, etc. etc.
The answer is “So what’s your point?” Let’s look at some other Asian countries in the early 60’s:
Indonesia
President Sukarno ran the country as a “guided democracy.” He was allied with the Soviet Union. He was eventually overthrown in 1965 by a pro-Western general, Suharto, who was also a dictator.
South Korea
A dictatorship led by Park Chung Hee. Much later became a democracy.
Phillipines
Ferdinand Marcos was elected in 1965 and subsequently became a dictator, ruling by decree.
Myanmar (Burma)
Ruled by a dictator, Ne Win.
Malaysia
Malaysia was still sorting out its postcolonial past, with Brunei and Sarawak uncertain about joining. It was officially a democracy, but with parties that were almost purely ethnic. An Internal Security Act allowed for detention without trial.
The Future of Independent South Vietnam
Given the state of democracy and human rights across Southeast Asia in the early 1960s, why should we expect that an independent South Vietnam would be so much more Western?
Is It a “Real Country?”
The accepted wisdom is that “Vietnam” deserved to be one country, always was, and we were fighting history by refusing to accept that.
The counter-argument is: “things change.” National boundaries are often artificial and created by wars and their subsequent treaties. The same statement could be applied to Korea, or Germany, or Sudan. Or Hungary. Or Austria. Or Iraq.
Conclusion
We examined two Ken Burns productions: Prohibition and Vietnam. In both, we find an Establishment bias and a refusal to even acknowledge contrary opinions.
In his interviews, Burns expresses a yearning for the old days of the trusted Walter Cronkite, with three national networks and everyone exposed to all points of view. This is in supposed contrast to now, where people are free to read only the news that they like.
In fact, though, what he really wants is to BE Walter Cronkite, and to tell us his version of history with no dissent allowed.
I haven’t watched that many, but a year or so ago I watched the Country Music series. It was good, but I was disappointed it talked very little about the music itself.
Not one minute talking about what a waltz is or a shuffle or swing. Nothing about how a steel guitar is played. I got the feeling that Burns isn’t a musician and wasn’t as interested in the actual music as the personalities or the business.
My kids and I still have a standard tag line we use as a joke after watching: “… and that country girl/boy went on to sell a million records!”
Interesting, I did not know that Cleveland had a connection to Ness. The microbrewery movement hit Cleveland sometime after I moved to California. I remember coming back to visit my parents and seeing locally-brewed beer that was named after Ness. I wondered at the time why Ness.
Famous alumnus from my high school: Roger Zelazny.