A year ago, I thought I knew America. I had relatives in California, friends
in New York. I’d read Saul Bellow, loved its music, loathed its fast food,
studied its foreign policy. I’d visited New Orleans before Katrina, worked
in Washington, holidayed in Disney World. I’d even been to Texas. Twice.
But then, last summer, I started work on a documentary series about America,
looking at both its political present and its historical past. During the
process I began to realise how little I really knew about the place.
The American Future: A History is written and presented by Simon
Schama, the British historian who has been living and teaching in America
for more than two decades. The idea was to take the temperature of the
nation in the run-up to the presidential election: a time when the very idea
of what America was, and what it was to become, was up for grabs.
Post 9/11, post Katrina, in the face of domestic concerns about the economy
and healthcare, America was looking inwards, reflecting on its values and
obligations. Living with an increasingly unpopular Republican
Administration, a war with no apparent end, and fast escalating oil prices,
it was also looking outwards, to its responsibilities and burdens in foreign
policy. And all the while America was also asking itself some profound
questions about its genesis and history. Where had its values come from?
Who imbued this nation with its sense of difference? To whom in the past
should we look when trying to fathom the present? As well as the candidates
readily filling up airtime, was it, in fact, the founding fathers and their
descendants who still held many of the answers?
This, anyway, was the thesis, battered out on Simon’s roof terrace in West
London over the late summer of 2007. But it also became the strange reality
as I set off on my first story-finding mission, one of several road trips
that found me grappling as much with self-service gas pumps and 12-lane
freeways as with key questions about America’s future and its past. As a
producer, my job was to find the contemporary stories that would dovetail
with Simon’s historical narratives; the people to interview, the locations
to film.
The first thing that struck me was the election fever. You couldn’t miss it. I
kept finding myself in places – bars, airports – where people shouted and
shook their fists at CNN. Over the next ten months, everyone we met had an
opinion on who was to replace Bush: from farmers to priests, soldiers to
students.
The historical narratives dictated which area of the country we focused on in
each programme. Although we toyed with Alaska and pushed for Hawaii, we also
had to be realistic about how many states we could take in, how many
internal flights we could justify. Each of the four programmes focused on
one smaller circuit within Simon’s bigger overall journey. War
was set mainly on the East Coast and Texas; Plenty in Colorado,
Wyoming, Nevada and Arizona; Fervour in the South and Appalachia; and People
on the Mexican border, Detroit and California.
While much of the historical research was done in the calm of the British
Library, we needed to find living people and places to bring the history to
life, and the election into play. But in such a vast country, how do you
choose a single location? Why does one battlefield feel like a meadow and
another reverberate with history?
I learnt soon that you cannot tell until you get there. I would often arrive
to find a building site in the background or – a frequent finding that I
could never quite fathom – that an entire historic building had been moved,
intact, from its original site. I spent many depressing moments eating
Krispy Kremes in the driver’s seat of my enormous car after a disappointing
monument visit. The humbling lesson, of course, is that the best spots were
often found by chance.
Once we’d found the right place, it was always worth the wait. We were allowed
to stroll the empty galleries of the Detroit Institute of Art, to visit the
immigration station at Angel Island when it was officially closed. We had
access to the caucuses in Iowa, to political rallies, to the Super Tuesday
victory parties, to the Democrat Convention. Simon was invited into
churches, mosques and homes across the country. People talked candidly about
their backgrounds and let us listen to their political arguments.
We tried to visit places that had personal meaning for Simon. We filmed in
Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, to whose congregation Washington wrote his
extraordinary letter, offering the Jews not only religious freedom but
equality, something that had been previously denied. In Mississippi, Simon
met Vergie Hamer, the daughter of the civil rights activist Fannie Lou
Hamer.
Years earlier, as a young British reporter covering the 1964 Democrat
Convention, he had heard Fannie Lou challenge the exclusion of blacks from
the Mississippi delegation. He remembered her singing defiant church songs
on the Atlantic City boardwalk outside the convention hall. So it seemed
both fitting and poignant that Simon should retrace Fannie Lou’s journey
back to her native Ruleville, where he listened to her daughter sing the
same haunting songs of freedom and redemption.
Simon would often wait until he had arrived at a location to write the final
version of his piece to camera, in order to react to the place emotionally,
instinctively. It was this intuitive way of working that produced what are,
for me, some of the most moving moments in the series: Simon at the site of
the Battle of Gettysburg; pacing the dry, cracked bed of the Colorado River;
or wandering among the rows of white crosses at Arlington.
We got it wrong, of course, plenty Simon and the crew around Washington
looking for 2,000 marching war veterans, not realising the annual march had
been the day before. Or the Sunday morning that found us waiting with two
Secret Service agents under the rotating shadow of a helicopter. We had been
promised an impromptu meeting with the Republican candidate Mike Huckabee,
who had been preaching at the nearby megachurch.
Needless to say Huckabee went out the front door, the heli took off, and we
were left with nothing more than a few shots of Simon pacing the car park.
Bags went missing, camera batteries were left up mountains. We spent days in
domestic airports brought to a standstill by storms. We missed boats, got
speeding tickets, lost the light, lost our tempers, lost the plot.
And as the year went on I became less sure I knew America – but all the more
fascinated by it. I am less sure than ever now who will win its presidential
race on November 4.
The American Future: A History, Fri, BBC Two, 9pm
Can you please tell me the title of the music, songs & singers from this first episode of "The American Future"
Donald Bamforth, Meltham, Holmfirth, England