It never got to the point that sports bar patrons were chanting ”Turn off the game,” but the 11-hour documentary, ”The Civil War,” which aired last week on PBS, caught the interest of a surprising 14 million viewers nationally, engrossing many, angering some.
The series, which ran in the prime evening hours from this past Sunday through Thursday, attracted the largest viewership for any PBS series. Locally, the ratings on WTTW-Ch. 11 for ”The Civil War” were about triple what they normally are; and on Wednesday, the prime-time ratings equalled those of CBS` Chicago affiliate, WBBM.
Made largely of still photos of the era, this unlikely hit gave Americans the chance to look into the eyes of men who were young 130 years ago, many of them doomed to an early death. This eye-to-eye encounter was made all the more poignant at a time when we also were looking at the televised faces of young American soldiers in Saudi Arabia.
Some 620,000 Americans died in the bloody welding together of the nation, the evolution of ”The United States are” to ”The United States is.”
We heard those long-gone voices in letters surpassingly eloquent and sensed what we have lost in becoming a society in which families no longer communicate by written words. No viewer will forget the letter Union Maj. Sullivan Ballou wrote to his wife the week before he was killed at Bull Run:
”If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they love, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights . . . always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.”
”I cried at the letters; I was mesmerized all week,” said Mary Jo Malone, an executive assistant at the American Medical Association in Chicago and a native of Galena, Ill., where Ulysses S. Grant lived. ”I usually go to bed early, and this series really screwed up my sleep. I converted a lot of people to watching it. We would talk about it the next day at the office. It was like `Roots` that way. I think it`s been terrific television, and I want to know how I can get Shelby Foote (the novelist/historian who frequently pops up in the series to comment) to have dinner at my house.”
Willie Dixon, a lecturer at the Du Sable Museum of African American History, said, ”I watched the series on TV, and I thought, `I wish I was there.` It sounds crazy, but that`s how I felt. I`d like just to have been part of it but also, because I`ve got two master`s degrees, I`d probably have been a field grade officer in charge of a black brigade. Maybe I`d have made a difference.”
At Stuart Brent Books on Michigan Avenue, a sales clerk said, ”We`ve reordered the companion book for the series (`The Civil War: an Illustrated History`) three or four times, and they`ve cleaned us out of Foote`s three-volume `The Civil War: a Narrative.` We noticed the increased activity right away. I`d say there`s definitely a boomlet for the Civil War.”
Why such great interest in a 130-year-old conflict? Ted Karamanski, who teaches American history at Loyola University and is working on his own book about the Civil War, said, ”I think no event in American history has more pathos. It is a story laden with emotion occurring at the peak of the romantic movement, a time when people were encouraged to express their feelings.”
Many Southerners have hailed the series. But in the South, where Confederate monuments and rebel flags remain as much a part of the landscape as moss-draped oaks and red clay hills, the show has rankled at least a few, notably some members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which is made up of descendents of those soldiers.
Group members reached in Atlanta, where the percentage of TV viewers tuned to ”The Civil War” lagged slightly behind the percentage for Chicago, said they admired the series-as propaganda. They objected, however, to it becoming the definitive version of a war that ravaged the South in spiritual and economic ways that are still felt today.
The group, which claims 15,000 members, including a number of prominent politicians, unsuccessfully lobbied PBS for rebuttal time.
”The show ends up showing Southerners to be evil,” protested Charles Lunsford, 41, a member of the group who works in the Georgia Office of Consumer Affairs. Particularly offensive, he said, is the suggestion that the war was primarily about slavery.
”We fear that people are going to think that the simplification seen in
`Uncle Tom`s Cabin` was the truth in the Old South,” Lunsford said.
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”Northerners did not invade the South to free black people. They did it to get the South to rejoin the Union.”
Dixon at the Du Sable Museum agreed that slavery was not the central issue of the war and said, ”American history is fascinating, but what is really fascinating is how the role of blacks in the Civil War has been completely skewed. When did the tide of war turn? I`ll tell you when-1863. That`s when blacks entered the conflict, 93 percent of them ex-slaves. Until then, the South had been kicking the pants off the Union. Here`s what Lincoln said: `Were it not for the Negro, the outcome of the war would have been doubtful.` ” (The series shows that, although blacks were less than 1 percent of the North`s population, they would, by the war`s end, constitute 10 percent of the Union army.)
Lunsford noted that Ken Burns, the series producer, and Geoffrey C. Ward, the principal writer, are Northerners and said he is miffed that the Sons of Confederate Veterans was not consulted for the series.
Instead of a Northern bias, historian Karamanski sees an East Coast bias. ”There`s an almost minimal treatment of the Western campaign,” he said. ”This is not a new complaint. Right after the war, veterans and journalists said all the attention had been on the Army of the Potomac, which suffered defeat after defeat, rather than on the Army of the Cumberland, which eventually won the war.”
Sons of Confederate Veterans members scoffed at the suggestion that their viewpoint was represented by Southerner Foote in 100 on-screen appearances, more than anyone else in the series.
”Ken Burns has cloaked himself in a lot of very carefully chosen Southerners, and he`s edited their words very carefully,” Lunsford said.
”But not one of them is considered Confederate.”
”I`ll match my Confederate credentials to his or anybody else`s,”
countered Foote, 73, a Mississippi native who lives in Memphis-and is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
”It`s a remarkably well-balanced show,” he said. ”But I understand their objections. One of them is quite simple. If their great-grandfather fought and got wounded or killed, they don`t think that what he stood for should pass away.
”The other one is more interesting, and psychologically true. This is a television series, and television deals with emotions, whereas books deal with reason. Let`s say you show a picture of Jefferson Davis stating the states`
rights case, then you hear him and you see his portrait. Then you see a slave with scars on his back and hear about the underground railroad. You might be tempted to say that`s out of balance because the slavery statement made a bigger emotional impact.”
Foote was surprised by his sudden celebrity, which has kept his phone busy with fan calls from all over the country.
But he was not surprised by the series` popularity.
”The Civil War is the central event of our being,” he said. ”It determined what kind of country we were going to be, good things and bad things.”
”The Civil War” will be repeated on WTTW sometime during the first half of 1991.