Alistair Cooke’s America and the Problem with TV History

Article by Tom Hercock. Edited by Cathy Humphreys. Additional Research by Andrew Shepherdson.

I first saw America: A Personal History of the United States, presented by the Anglo-American journalist Alistair Cooke (usually known as Alistair Cooke’s America) on DVD in 2006 – when I was halfway through my A-Levels. At that point, I had studied United States history for only one term and in hindsight, watching the thirteen-part series from 1972 was an important step that led to me taking every bit of US history that I could throughout my University career. Having recently watched parts of the series again, I still consider it to be the best TV history of America yet made, yet in many places, it now seems to jar. I now believe that Alistair Cooke’s America tells us as much about how the American past was viewed in 1972, and about Alistair Cooke himself, as it tells us about American history itself.

The most troubling section of the series was Cooke’s discussion of Reconstruction: the aftermath of the American Civil War that spanned the 1860s and 1870s. It was not just that this pivotal period of American history was reduced to about one minute at the end of the programme on the Civil War, and to just one of nearly four hundred pages in the accompanying book – I surely did not spend eighty hours of seminars studying a topic which could be dismissed so quickly! It was more how Cooke described these years, when the black population of the South (briefly) held equal political rights with the whites:

‘So, several Southern states were put under military control, and in these and others, the whites were totally disenfranchised, and the state governments were run by Negros who could barely read or write. And they were controlled by Northern idealists to be sure, but also by Southern renegades, and by Northern businessmen and salesmen who descended on the South like locusts’.

To put it mildly, this does not match with the view of Reconstruction that I embraced last year, or with nearly all of the scholarship of the last thirty years. The size of the military presence in the Reconstruction South and their operations, compared to the size of the land and of the population, makes it difficult to argue that they were truly “under military control”. Indeed large areas of the South would not have seen a single soldier for the entire length of Reconstruction. Similarly only whites who had actively aided the Confederacy lost the right to vote. This was far from the whole white population, especially in the Upper South. In fact, in seven of the eleven former Confederate states, either no or a negligible number of Confederates lost the vote, and most of the disenfranchisement laws in the remainder were quickly repealed. Recent historians have argued that the picture of black legislators as illiterate and ignorant is a gross caricature, not least when considering that many were educated former members of the freeborn elite. Finally while Cooke’s “Southern renegades” and “Northern businessmen and salesmen” did exist and did indeed create a culture of corruption which helped to discredit and end Reconstruction, corruption was a nationwide problem for 1860s and 1870s America, and was not unique to any one part of the country.

Had the historiography supported Cooke’s view at the time, such problems would be excusable. However by the 1960s, the racist assumptions of the traditional “Dunning School” had been rejected by most historians. Indeed W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction, the first major work to dissent from the Dunning School, was published as early as 1935, although it was largely ignored at the time. In 1972, Cooke presented, on the BBC, a view of American history that most historians had already rejected, and one which today would only receive a serious hearing in the more extreme sections of the American right.

Although this was by far the most worrying example of Cooke’s view of American history being rather outdated, it was not the only one. He described Franklin D.  Roosevelt’s coming to the United States during the Depression “as a saviour”, and in the final episode, on contemporary America in the 1970s, waxed lyrical about how Roosevelt’s New Deal and its emphasis on “deficit financing” had made possible the post-war explosion in consumerism. Although we need not go as far as those historians and conservative politicians who argue that the New Deal actually prolonged rather than ended the Great Depression, I suspect most observers would be more critical of Roosevelt and the New Dealers today. Even fans of the series consider the last episode on (then) contemporary America to be a mistake – it immediately dated the series and many of its observations and predictions were proved wrong within a few years. On the video and DVD releases, Cooke appears at the beginning in a piece to camera, filmed sometime during the 1980s, acknowledging this and commenting where he had been mistaken. This is a problem when any history, not just TV history, attempts to go right up to the present day – the pre-superinjunction Andrew Marr’s BBC2 History of Modern Britain, aired in 2007, commented at its conclusion that the independent Bank of England had “delivered low inflation and steady growth”, a judgement which seems a lot longer than four years out of date.

I do not believe Cooke was racist – although some of his colleagues at The Guardian believed he had a “blind spot” about the civil rights movement – but that his view of the USA was formed when he first arrived in the 1930s, and did not change much before America was filmed in the early 1970s. Although it is a tendency for all history to be the opinion of one person and to be revised in time, this does seem to be particularly true with TV history. The smarter ones recognise this: Cooke did, after all, call his series America: A Personal History of the United States by Alistair Cooke. Similarly Simon Schama was reportedly determined that his series on British history would not be The History of Britain, but A History of Britain. Whatever its other merits (and I believe these to be considerable), TV history rarely does equivocation or balance well. Where there is a single, on-screen narrator, as in all the programmes mentioned so far, together with others such as Niall Ferguson’s work, this problem is particularly acute – the version of history presented is really what the presenter thinks. Therefore, what happens if what the presenter thinks is quickly revised by other historians, or worse, as happened with Alistair Cooke’s America, already revised before being aired on TV? With an audience many times that of any academic publication, surely it is the role of TV history to at least aim for responsibility in this regard – without compromising on the entertainment of course.

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