The Civil War Comes Home

By Richard Zoglin

Patrons at the Blue Mill Tavern in New York City's Greenwich Village last Monday were greeted by a rare sight: the TV set in the bar was tuned not to Monday Night Football but to a documentary on PBS. On Capitol Hill, Senator Ted Kennedy, a Yankee Democrat, and Senator John Warner, a Virginia Republican, were riveted by the same show. Across the U.S., people debated the battlefield tactics of Robert E. Lee, marveled at the letter-writing eloquence of Civil War soldiers and traded stories of ancestors who fought in the nation's great holocaust.

It may not quite have been another Roots, but the TV event that swept the country last week was no less stirring. The Civil War, Ken Burns' beautifully crafted series, got virtually unanimous raves from the critics before it was telecast. Even so, few expected that an audience of great size would sit still for the 12-hour, five-night history lesson -- a lesson, moreover, with almost no film footage to enliven it, no Hollywood gimmicks to romanticize it and no network publicity machine to hype it.

Yet for one week America became, improbably, a nation of Civil War buffs. The Civil War got the highest ratings of any series in PBS history: a score of 9.0 in Nielsen's 24 major markets, equal to 14 million viewers, more than quadruple the public network's usual prime-time audience. Video stores, meanwhile, reported a burst in sales of blank cassettes to people who wanted to tape the episodes.

Not since Gone With the Wind has a mass-media rendering of the war so thoroughly smitten the nation. "I've had more Civil War conversations in the last three days in elevators and waiting in line than I've had in the last 10 years," said Christopher Nelson, a Washington business consultant and self- described Civil War nut. "I always thought American history was so dull," raved Carolyn Randolph, a retired schoolteacher in Livermore, Calif. "But I'm learning so much." Others regarded the show in more personal terms. One New York City woman unearthed an old photo of her great-grandfather, a colonel in the Union Army, and plans to scrutinize the series on tape to try to spot him.

| The show promises to have a healthy life beyond last week's telecast. A companion book is selling briskly (Knopf; $50), and a nine-volume set of videocassettes is being offered by TIME-LIFE Video ($188.82). More than 7,000 schools and libraries have queried PBS about acquiring the cassettes and accompanying teaching materials. PBS has already scheduled a rerun for January.

And creator Burns has suddenly become a star. The phone in his home in Walpole, N.H., has been ringing almost nonstop. When he drove into nearby Windsor, Vt., last Tuesday, people on a street corner cheered. "That doesn't happen to documentary filmmakers," he says. Though surprised at the outpouring, Burns finds it explicable. "I have a healthy respect for the power of the Civil War as a subject to command this kind of attention and emotion. It's our great traumatic event, and now we seem to be all collectively reliving it."

Burns, 37, grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., and studied film and photography at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. The films of John Ford inspired him to become a director; photographer Jerome Liebling, a professor and mentor, urged him to try documentaries. Burns got an Oscar nomination for his very first film, Brooklyn Bridge, and followed it with acclaimed works on the Shakers, the Statue of Liberty and Huey Long.

He spent more than five years on his daunting Civil War project. Recruiting his brother Ric and historian Geoffrey C. Ward, Burns tracked down and photographed 16,000 old pictures in 150 different archives, hired such actors as Jason Robards and Morgan Freeman to tape 2,500 first-person quotes, and, all told, shot 150 hours of film.

Though widely praised for its objectivity and comprehensiveness, the series has drawn a few cavils. Some Southerners complained it put too much stress on slavery as a cause of the war. Historian James McPherson, one of the experts interviewed for the series, noted a number of factual mistakes. The Union Army, for example, did not have 100,000 soldiers younger than age 15, as the documentary states; there were closer to 1,000. Still, says McPherson, "the Civil War is The Iliad of American history, and maybe Ken Burns is its Homer."

The filmmaker already has two more documentaries in the works: on the pioneering days of radio and the history of baseball. The networks, meanwhile, will almost certainly speed up plans for their own Civil War projects. CBS has a mini-series on the Battle of Gettysburg, and NBC is making a movie based on the 1989 novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Most important, The Civil War may have revived Americans' flagging interest in their history. Says Shelby Foote, the Civil War historian who contributes wise, anecdotal commentary throughout the episodes: "People who see the series will have a much better understanding of what made this country what it is." And of what television at its best can do.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York and Don Winbush/Atlanta, with other bureaus