The History Channel
Mattson, Kevin
WHEN I'M AT A PARTY and tell people that I teach American history, I often hear either, "You know, I'm fascinated by the Civil War" or a disquisition about a favorite president or something...
...It seems almost sinister, a twenty-fourhour bummer session about lonely men misleading the masses and foisting bad drinks on their guests...
...TAKE A SERIES featured in both prime and not prime time: Modern Marvels...
...Today, the leading institution that popularizes history in the United States is undoubtedly the History Channel (HC...
...Now, there have been very good histories of technological developments...
...During a show about survivors of the Holocaust, there's an advertisement for an episode on "Garage Gadgets" featuring lawn mowers and leaf blowers...
...We also know from Lance 70 DISSENT / Fall 2005 NOTEBOOK Morrow's The Best Year of Their Lives and other books, that LBJ discussed matters of state while taking a crap and that JFK screwed any woman he could...
...Now here's a man who pondered the best way to develop the arid West during the late nineteenth century, opposing shortsighted land speculators...
...After watching for awhile, I noticed strange transitions between shows and the ads placed within...
...Created in 1995, the HC is on cable television as part of the A&E Television Network...
...By now, viewers might be convinced but unclear about what this tells us about the historical record...
...Not surprisingly, one HC series simply deals with consipiracies...
...This extends to the HC, where the historical documentary, replete with reenactment, talking-head experts, and stirring music, is central...
...This comes after every imaginable theory is presented...
...After two hours, I wasn't clear why this mattered...
...A show about Robert Kennedy's assassination purports that there were other shooters beside Sirhan Sirhan...
...So when Goodwin helped hoist the curtain, what did we learn...
...perhaps it was the local police or even the U.S...
...No matter what, though, I like the response, because it suggests that people outside of academe have a desire to understand their own past...
...History as Entertainment I admit that before watching the HC seriously, my knowledge about the channel came mostly from its press scandals...
...It's a less controversial and more laid-back triumphalism...
...Academic history, especially since the advent of the 1960s, has scored a few points here...
...KEVIN MATTSON teaches American history at Ohio University and is the author, most recently, of When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (Routledge, 2004...
...Nonetheless, I was shocked to see how often entertainment trumps veracity on the HC...
...FDR's struggle with polio was known for some time, and many Americans also knew the Roosevelts' marriage centered on public life, not intimacy...
...The doubters among us learn that the visions of those hired during one summer are the same as last summer...
...The YORK representative explained how big office buildings were sweltering nightmares to work in before the engineers figured out freon...
...A hotel near Cripple Creek hosts the ghost of a previous owner, and doors open and shut in the halls...
...When history is broken down into trivialized stories and jumbled together into an entertaining stew, it loses its capacity to speak to larger questions...
...While watching the Rocky Mountain segments of Haunted History, I saw advertisements for "FDR: A Presidency Revealed...
...So what's the implicit message behind these shows about conspiracies...
...Sometimes this response sparks an interesting conversation...
...Air conditioning "came to the rescue," and the result was to "increase productivity...
...At the same time, the historian Craig Wilder reminded viewers that agricultural funds never reached the small black farmers down South, only the white landowners...
...so too slavery, so too the Cuban missile crisis, so too Vietnam...
...Satellites will continue to amaze us," explains the narrator...
...The viewer is left to extrapolate: put all the ghosts together and you've got key sources on western history...
...Following "Haunted Rockies" was another show on the history of the American West, this one a general overview of early exploration...
...Nor is it that different from the stealth marketing employed on shows where consumer products are written into sitcom scripts...
...As Jon Wiener documents, "She was forced to resign from the Pulitzer Prize committee, and she gave up her position as a commentator on the MacNeilLehrer NewsHour on PBS...
...Suddenly, the show felt like one big infomercial about the blessings of air conditioning corporations rather than a history of technology...
...Not much...
...But in general, television history frees the presenter from the demands of "professional" or academic history...
...Entertainment over veracity, good looks over good history—such are the operational principles of historical explanation in an age of entertainment...
...The jumbling is the point...
...The front desk manager at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, also reports seeing ghosts...
...You get to watch him drill a hole in the door of Lincoln's booth at Ford's Theater and then see his eye peering in at Lincoln...
...In "Satellites," the show spent much of its attention on the cold war, opening on a depressing note...
...It seems the HC has an internal divide between lowbrow and highbrow...
...But historical conspiracies leave no room for action...
...Historians, in the process, have become the paparazzi of the past, digging for dirt...
...School after school declined to invite her for commencement speeches...
...FDR's polio and his sympathy for the poor have been connected for years...
...So how could she be on...
...Fun little stories" about our presidents' martini-making skills don't really help us get a handle on our country's past and what it tells us about where we're heading today...
...It documented one mishap after another: coal mine disasters, ships with explosive boilers, life jackets with rotten cork, trains exploding, earthquakes, and fire...
...Now, there's certainly a way to connect Booth's pro-Southern, secessionist politics to the craven thinking of today's radical right...
...For those still unconvinced, there's the clinching interview with the show's most prominent talking head, Lori Clouden (now Lauren Skye), a "clairvoyant reader and healer" and minister of a church she founded...
...As historians like Wallace Stegner and Donald Worster show, Powell's life tells a great deal about central themes in American western history...
...Then there are the shows with little bearing on history: "Breaking Vegas" about a card shark, a show about "Meteors," and another about the drug Ecstasy...
...Another less sensational but more telling story, in my mind, reported that the HC circulated a memo arguing that old fogies (for example, the late Stephen Ambrose, the best-selling historian who was once a regular talking head on the HC) should receive less airtime than "younger" and more "telegenic" historians...
...Segments of the series always end with a disclaimer about a story "shrouded in mystery," demanding that viewers "draw" their "own conclusions...
...Ours is a culture that speeds past information, caring less about DISSENT / Fall 2005 73 NOTE BOOK analysis and more about factoids (which are constantly blasted onto the screen before going to a commercial on the HC...
...consider Wilder's comments about black sharecroppers or just think about popular knowledge about the legacy of slavery and fiascos like Vietnam and Watergate...
...A show about Martin Luther King's assassination explains that James Earl Ray might have been set up by the Mafia or white supremacists (the latter theory is supportable...
...When Katie Couric interviewed Doris Kearns Goodwin, Couric called history "fun little stories...
...America caught up, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration once Sputnik was released (waking up, I thought to myself, from its slumber of playing around with belt sanders in the basement...
...Instead, the viewer lies on the couch figuring that history is inexplicable, that one lunatic theory is as good as the rest...
...A psychic visited the building and ensured this was true...
...It explained, "FDR became America's shining light by keeping us in the dark...
...None of this is about thinking...
...After a commercial break, we move on to John Wesley Powell...
...In recounting the New Deal's agricultural programs, there was praise for the president's inspirational optimism...
...And the show on FDR dished, lacing its narration with terms like "illusion" and "subterfuge...
...An engineer came on and explained how air conditioning worked, moving from the old-time harvesting of ice to the development of fans...
...Turning it on one day, I found myself doing something I could never have imagined: watching an hour-long history, "Fire and Ice," that touted the stupendous offerings provided by the heating and air conditioning industry...
...We also learn FDR loved to gossip and made awful martinis, grinning while his guests suffered...
...The show then segues into a reenactment of the Oklahoma City Bombing...
...David Noble has examined how workplace technology centralized the power of modern management...
...In writing about "paranoid style" during the mid-1960s, Richard Hofstadter argued that conspiracy theories provided believers with a "will to fight things out to a finish," because "what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil...
...Charles Leale's letter about the incident read as if it were a contemporary crime report...
...Next up is a tour guide who saw ghosts in the house of Molly Brown, a wealthy woman who lived in late-nineteenth-century Denver...
...This one, "The Tool Bench: Power Tools," moved quickly through a glance at the Shakers' early tools for furniture making...
...HC has made deals with book companies and with the New York City public school system, doing what modern cultural corporations must to ensure exposure of their products— become conglomerates spreading into every possible market and branding themselves...
...Call it the triumphalism of the iPod...
...often I turn glassy-eyed...
...The real tragedy came on a show hosted by David Carradine, "Wild West Tech...
...But the other dark secrets explained very little about FDR's presidency...
...In the words of the New York Times, the HC has managed to "take history out of the PBS good-for-you realm and into the hurly burly of commercial television...
...Triumphalism is here to be found, but an odd sort of triumphalism...
...Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's expedition is quickly described, with Stephen Ambrose (try as they might to remove him) explaining how the expedition exited the woods after nearly starving to death and then ate food too quickly...
...Of course, expertise and professional accomplishment don't seem that important to the HC, if clairvoyants can serve as legitimate talking heads...
...The HC is careful not to endorse a single conspiracy theory, only to air all equally...
...History as Weird and Incoherent Overwhelmingly, then, history seems weird when you watch the HC...
...This is the overall message of the History Channel...
...The idea that there is something not suitable for entertainment or the ensnaring commercial seems quaint...
...We see the town's buildings and its reenacted gunfights...
...Maybe the producers were afraid that the snoozing viewer would reach for the remote...
...And the latter's a whole lot more fun...
...The HC saw an opportunity to turn up the heat under this approach...
...We have turned our presidents into celebrities, allowing a hungry public to consume dirty details...
...Sure, the Second World War still matters, but so too the latest line of Tim Allen's signature tools...
...There are no footnotes to be checked, the type of thing that ruined Michael Bellesiles's career after he released Arming America, a book scrutinized by pro-gun advocates, its smallest misDISSENT / Fall 2005 69 NOTEBOOK takes found in footnotes laid out for all to see...
...One was a communications director of the Carrier Corporation, another the marketing development manager from YORK International Corporation, and another a senior staff research engineer at Delphi Auto Systems...
...That's unfair to Goodwin, of course, and the real reason for her presence, I believe, is the content of her work, minus the scandals...
...We now know that Abraham Lincoln might have been gay and that Thomas Jefferson did it with his slaves...
...This served as a quick tag to suggest, Look, there's your history, now let's move on to the fun stuff...
...A "Manchurian Candidate" theory suggests the CIA and military hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan to forget that he murdered Kennedy...
...One woman even witnessed the kitchen grill in the restaurant turn on by itself...
...What it tells us about the popular reception of American history can only be discovered after doing what I did—sitting down and watching it for an extended period of time...
...It seems the employees are seeing ghosts...
...No time for debates about the American West when adventure calls, ideally, adventures centered on strong personalities or at least those who barf...
...Then it goes on to suggest that Ray might not have done the shooting...
...But then came that face...
...E.S.T...
...Reenactments depict the bombing and the investigation that follows...
...But this cannot be the case, I thought...
...Today, the HC stands as the most visible form of popular history—the couch potato version of popular museums, reconstructed historical towns, and military reenactments...
...74 DISSENT / Fall 2005...
...But before a sense of collective purpose might overcome the viewer, it's quickly on to learning how satellites provide better television reception and a "global village...
...Just as you think technology will save us, then you get the other side: there are things outside of our control, lurking around the corner that might just "bite" us, as Carradine explains...
...And to ensure objectivity, we hear from none other than—you guessed it!—Tim Allen, talking up his recent line of tools...
...After all, Goodwin used psychology to explore the inner terrain of the American presidency in books like No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II...
...Making history entertaining might carry distinct challenges, and it must remain slightly guarded lest it lead to another case of "The Guilty Men...
...You can see that desire all around you—in museums, best-selling books written by David McCullough, and Hollywood movies about everything from the American Revolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis...
...AFTER LEARNING about FDR's private life, ghosts in old mining towns, and Lewis and Clark's vomit, you might think American history is slightly creepy...
...How do affairs and loneliness explain FDR's decision to enter World War II or the New Deal or his unwillingness to help out black sharecroppers...
...instead, we get a triumphalism of technology, a display of the brainpower behind the gizmos that litter the life of the baby boomers who are the HC's key audience...
...Haunted History is on at 5 p.m...
...You know the ending: "America finished first," the show explains by showing Neil Armstrong making his "first step...
...The HC fits this world perfectly, packaging history in bite-sized morsels for a bored and jaded audience...
...It appears to be about lies or ghosts or bad digestion...
...Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised, considering that our culture constantly blurs lines between news (facts) and entertainment (think the Daily Show), and our country's most recent cultural breakthrough seems to be "reality television...
...Consider Haunted History, an episode of which, "Haunted Rockies," featured the ghost town Buckskin Joe, a reconstructed mining town that tourists visit today to relive the "Wild West...
...Suspenseful music played throughout...
...As the show plodded on, I started to take note of the talking heads...
...In merging education and entertainment, the HC exemplifies what I call postmodern middlebrow culture...
...Some historians have pointed out that air conditioning allowed for the growth of the American Sunbelt in the postwar years, which had transformative effects on American politics...
...These younger historians didn't "have to be the leading academic on the topic," the memo went on to clarify...
...You sense the HC didn't think the New Deal and World War II could really entertain enough...
...It really hurts people's productivity," he explains, when they're hot...
...Revelation came without explanation...
...The only social impact of air conditioning seemed to be its benefit for business...
...There's the ghost of Emma Crawford, buried on Red Mountain near Pike's Peak...
...or the wee hours, while shows about the Second World War or the American presidency—the serious stuff—come on at 8 p.m...
...If viewers still doubt, there's the Reverend Clouden again to explain why they shouldn't...
...But the show does not do this...
...In chimes the narrator: "Though at times unnerving, these spirits are all part of the rich history of this unique Colorado landmark...
...It seems the Soviets beat Americans twice: First, by releasing Sputnik and then, by launching a man into space...
...For those partial to the scientific method of verification and hungry for other case studies, the show delivers...
...The first episode I watched reenacted John Wilkes Booth's assassination of Abraham Lincoln...
...One optimistic episode of Modern Marvels was followed by a show featuring interviews with survivors of Dachau...
...In the end, the show produced a string of personal stories that ran alongside the broad narrative of public events, each twining its way, but never the twain meeting...
...Instead, it opened with a shot of Las Vegas gamblers living it up in "climate controlled comfort...
...The show pressed on to more familiar terrain for its viewers—the electric drill and the belt sander...
...Public Record as the Personal The shows just recounted were not aired in prime time...
...After all, the Civil War's been written about...
...It shows that contexts and larger institutional forces often mold individual decisions in the past (and therefore the present...
...It is not about the marvels of the American nation vanquishing enemies abroad or about the superiority of our ideas and civilization—the old-time triumphalism that our age of irony shuns...
...Those with heavy-handed interpretations like Thomas Fleming, who argued that FDR lied about the Second World War, made their case, but they balanced out against others...
...I knew of the HC's open playing field before watching...
...After all, no matter how it's done, history points to longer, slower developments that shape our current circumstances...
...I was surprised to be staring at the visage of Doris Kearns Goodwin, who in 2002 ruined her career by covering up plagiarism...
...Army...
...A spooky soundtrack reminiscent of the Twilight Zone plays behind a reenactment of Booth arming himself...
...Nationalist triumphalism seems out of place...
...It simply points out that McVeigh wore a T-shirt bearing Booth's cry against tyrants...
...He was a "lonely" and a "complex man...
...In 2004, the HC apologized for showing "The Guilty Men," which purported that Lyndon Johnson was complicit with the assassination of John F. Kennedy...
...One show documented the problems of nuclear power, another the difficulty of controlling the urban water supply (though both shows made it clear that science itself could solve these problems...
...Yes, Reverend Clouden tells us, when a murder is particularly brutal, such as the hanging in this case, ghosts will appear...
...Remember, the show was to lift the curtain on the activities behind closed doors, not just what sharecroppers faced in the fields or what FDR said in his speeches...
...WHEN I'M AT A PARTY and tell people that I teach American history, I often hear either, "You know, I'm fascinated by the Civil War" or a disquisition about a favorite president or something about a family's past...
...In 2002, USA Today, itself a premier institution of postmodern middlebrow culture, reported that "the lines are rapidly blurring between documentary-style series produced by entertainment divisions and those produced by network news...
...The potential for advertising revenue, DISSENT / Fall 2005 71 NOTEBOOK if nothing else, would seem to demand it...
...At such moments, the HC provided a serious treatment of the past...
...One episode of Modern Marvels even managed to graft onto this commercial boosterism a story of national progress...
...They got sick and were "barfing" everywhere, food coming "out of all the orifices of the body," Ambrose explained to my delight...
...It is about consuming disjointed facts and stories...
...What we need is gossip...
...The message became clearer in another episode of Modern Marvels...
...Ours is a culture for which a strange sort of intellectual populism, nurtured by the Internet and cable television, can make a clairvoyant the equivalent of someone who has spent a lifetime plumbing archives, just so long as the talking head is "telegenic...
...A Ryohi Power Tools vice president explained how his company introduced plastic into power tool manufacturing, thereby eliminating electrical shock...
...Then we learn what's really happening...
...The remaining question was, Who will get a man 72 DISSENT / Fall 2005 NOTEBOOK on the moon first...
...At least the show on FDR seemed to be serious stuff, but then I listened more closely to the ad that showed Roosevelt waving to adoring fans...
...The show then culminated by displaying a line of power tools introduced by television celebrity Tim Allen, who portrays the host of a home improvement show on a series of the same name...
...Does knowing about them help more than knowing about the spread of fascism throughout Europe or FDR's unwillingness to lose the South to Republicans by addressing racial injustice...
...Even if the HC isn't exceptional, it is telling that entertainment has invaded the terrain of historical reconstruction...
...In many ways, the HC is no different from CNN, which asked commentators to speculate about what the late John Paul II was doing in heaven at that moment, or Bill Maher interviewing journalists alongside celebrities (if you're wondering what the Dixie Chicks think about judicial review, just tune in there...
...Although Hegel might have seen rationality unfurling itself teleologically in history—winding up in his dearly beloved Prussia—the History Channel suggests another teleology, the grand synthesis being the abundance of corporate blessings that make life simpler and Tim Allen richer...
...Postmodern images merged, and decontextualized stories about the past whizzed by...
...Ours is a culture of instantaneity and fast stories on demand sandwiched between commercials...
...Since the Clinton presidency, popular and academic historians have been more comfortable examining the private lives of public figures...
...I just didn't know how open it was...
...Still, when it stuck to the historical narrative, it raised a fairly high bar...
...But all we learn about Powell here is how he smashed his boat in a Lodore Canyon rapid...
...This is no sales job, the viewer is encouraged to conclude, just the impartial documentation of progress promised by the commercial use of science and technology...
...But this sort of broader thinking—linking facts to wider trends—was absent from the show...
...Perhaps, I thought, the HC hopes to entice viewers with the trashier stuff and then draw them onto a highbrow plane...
...Even with this sort of triumphalism, all is still not well...
...The infamous shot is fired, and viewers hear Dr...
...Respectable historians like David Kennedy and William Leuchtenberg got plenty of face time with the cameras...
...As much as American history is weird and about lies, there's still got to be some hope...
...This genre seems to appeal to viewers, even if it might do a disservice to some of the subject matter it treats...
...It documents his affair with Lucy Paige Mercer...
...Pushing further in this direction, the show portrays FDR as a loner enjoying female friends more than his wife...
Vol. 52 • September 2005 • No. 4
