Ken Burns is the most successful popular historian of our time. His documentaries, incl Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), and Jazz (2001), have not only provided information on key figures and events. Through Burns’ signature blend of sonorous narration, animated still photography, and haunting musical accompaniment, they have helped define the look and sound of the past for many Americans.
As with most popular historians, however, Burns’s success tells us as much about the author and his contemporary audience as it does about distant times. Burns has never hidden his politics, expressed in video tributes he produced for Senator Ted Kennedy. And the upbeat, understated but patriotic version of American history that Burns tells seems perfectly suited to the kind of aging, soft-spoken liberals who binge-watch PBS, which broadcasts much of his work.
However, this mood has become harder to maintain. Like much of his audience, Burns’ mood has darkened over the past decade. Broadcast as the Cold War was reaching its triumphant conclusion, Civil War looked back on the turmoil of the past with more sorrow than anger—an attitude that has drawn criticism in our more censorious times. Now Burns is less forgiving.
Although it demonstrates the same technical excellence as Burns’ earlier work, USA and the Holocaust reflects this new anxiety. Ostensibly an investigation of American action and inaction in relation 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. What if we are more like our adversaries in the 20th century “good war” than we prefer to believe?
The suggestion is not at all unfounded. In the first episode, Burns points out the inconvenient fact that the Nazis claimed aspects of American practice as precedents for their behavior. Hitler himself compared the German occupation of Eastern Europe to the violent westward expansion of the United States. Nazi apologists also claimed American segregation and eugenics laws as inspiration for their policies. Many such claims were cynical attempts to avoid criticism—a tactic we now call “whataboutism.” But some scholars argue that party officials were seriously interested in Jim Crow patterns of exclusion, isolation, and humiliation of a hated minority.
However, the comparison is still a false equivalence. Even after World War II, many white Americans harbored religious and racial views that now seem repugnant. But the expression of these views, in Burns’ presentation, was not an extermination campaign, but the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe while effectively banning entry from Asia. Because the quotas were determined by national origin, they imposed no legal disadvantage on Jews per se. But the record of the formal and informal debates surrounding the issue makes it clear that stemming the tide of more than two million Jews who had entered the United States since the Civil War was among its primary motives.
Knowing what we do now, this exception looks like a death sentence – and its defenders like accomplices, if not outright murderers. But even opponents of the measure did not suggest such a thing, which was literally unthinkable at the time. And while Burns acknowledges the broad popularity of immigration restriction, he barely takes into account the factors that created a political alliance, including the American Federation of Labor and the Ku Klux Klan, leading to a 2/3 vote in both houses of Congress. Nor does he investigate the international situation at a time when liberal states were emerging across post-war Europe – and a Jewish community was thriving in Mandatory Palestine. In 1924, it was unfair but disingenuous to think that Jews had a number of attractive options outside of America.
The equation looks different a decade later, when the Nazis had taken power in Germany and worldwide liberalism was in retreat. At this point, the humanitarian justification for admitting Jews was more compelling, while a Democratic coalition that included many pre-1924 immigrants and their descendants had Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House. However, public opinion remained strongly against removing the Johnson-Reed quotas, even for children. Surely this is evidence of enduring bigotry?
The survey data that Burns cites in the film does not support this conclusion. As Europe spiraled towards destruction, the vast majority of the public expressed disapproval of Hitler’s regime. There were genuine anti-Semitic and Nazi sympathizers at all levels of American society—including the State Department, where some officials went beyond the law’s requirements to place obstacles in the way of Jewish immigration—but the main sources of opposition to a more generous policy it appears to have been a combination of economic anxiety associated with the prolonged depression, disbelief that reports of increasing violence could be true, and a desire to stay out of European problems. Once again, these motives are hardly admirable. But they do not support an analogy between the United States and Germany.
Burns also stacks the emotional deck by focusing on the relatively small number of wealthy, assimilated Central European Jews who were caught up in the Nazi religion. Even without the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to understand how such cultured, non-threatening people could be considered economic, cultural or security risks. But the vast majority of Hitler’s victims were Eastern European Jews, whose appearance, mannerisms, and lives struck most Americans—including many American Jews—as foreign and undesirable. Retelling the story of the Frank family, as Burns does here, does not leave viewers with this still uncomfortable dilemma.
Despite the accusations against American public opinion and foreign policy, the film points to the counterintuitive assessment that the United States was not the main actor in the history of the Holocaust. America could have done more, but it never had any realistic chance of accepting all or even most of Europe’s nearly 10 million Jews. And Burns admits that the Roosevelt administration had good reason to fear backlash even for its hesitant efforts to help refugees. Perhaps the release of more information about the campaign of extermination unfolding in German-occupied Polish and later Soviet territories may have shifted the political balance. However, by the time the verified reports were available, the United States itself was close to entering the war. And formal war against the Axis did not mean that America had the immediate capacity to end or even slow the killing. In fact, the camps remained out of range of American attacks until Allied forces entered northern Italy in 1944.
Such considerations do not justify refusing to help those who could have been saved. Nor do they diminish the courage of Americans in and out of government, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who used every means available to uncover, publicize and, when possible, help victims escape Nazi atrocities. But they raise the question of whether the United States was either the primary cause or the primary solution to the Holocaust. For all his faults, FDR was probably right to think that the best thing America could do for the Jews was to help win the war. But this was not good at all.
Burns’ earlier work was notable in part because it treated the United States as, in Lincoln’s words, “the last, best hope of the earth.” USA and the Holocaust it may be popular because it punctures that myth, depicting America as complicit in the worst horrors of the 20th or any other century. Despite their apparent opposition, both assessments assume that American politics is the primary influence on the course of human events. The hardest lesson is that sometimes we are more bystanders than protagonists.
Samuel Goldman, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, is the author of After nationalism AND God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America.
