Extended Interview: Ken Burns

0:00Hello, this is John Dickerson, co-anchor of the CBS Evening News. I spoke earlier with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns about his new film on the American Revolution. Here's our conversation. So, Ken, let's imagine it's July 3rd, 1776. What is happening in America? Well, this house is empty. What's happening in America is that in Philadelphia, the second Continental Congress, are debating this Declaration of Independence that a committee of five has drawn up. They've handed it off to Thomas Jefferson, one of the youngest, but who has a great felicity, someone said, with language, to draft. Because you've got a pretty large geopolitical situation going on that people don't necessarily appreciate, that we've got the French who are kind of interested in maybe helping us because they're so anti-British.

0:55But first of all, you have to say that you're a part, and then you have to win a battle, which is even harder to come by. And so we are here in this, you know, the early, early summer of 1776 debating. And the next day we'll sign this thing and we will become the United States of America. Someone had suggested earlier in June in a newspaper, anonymously signed Republicans, that we ought to have a real name and suggested it should be the United States of America. Just a few weeks before, it's a pretty wonderful moment. Was America united though in 1776 when they're about to make this big step? No, we've been fighting for a year and a quarter.

1:40Lexington and Concord is in April of 75. This is a civil war that's going on. More than likely, you might be a loyalist. You've lived under the British constitutional monarchy. There's no better form of government on earth. Why would I risk anything for this upstart ideas that have zero chance of success? And what happens is that this document that Jefferson principally crafts is a document that is distilling a century of Enlightenment thinking into one sentence, the second sentence of the Declaration, which is, you know, next to I love you, I can't think of a better sentence in the English language.

2:25America, you call the Revolutionary Period a civil war. Was that always your conception of the revolution? How did you come to think of it that way? I think because there are no photographs and there's no newsreels and they're in, you know, stockings and breeches and powdered wigs, there's a sense of distance from them. I think we also are so proud, rightfully, of the power of the big ideas that we just don't want to get into the fact that it was this bloody civil war, patriots against loyalists, disaffected people, native people, enslaved and free people within it, foreign powers that are ultimately engaged in this.

3:02this is a big world war by the end. I think we perhaps are fearful that those big ideas are diminished and they're not in any way. They're in fact become even more inspiring that they emerge from the turmoil. You could even look at our civil war and say, it's not really a civil war, not a lot of civilian deaths, and it's a sectional war. But the revolution, you definitely do not want to be in New Jersey or South Carolina because people are in kind of open revolt. people. There are guerrilla actions, there's little assassinations, taking things out on your neighbor who's a loyalist when the patriots are dominant, taking things out on your neighbor who's a patriot when the British and the loyalists are dominant in a particular area.

3:43It's really, really bad. How should we think about the Declaration of Independence this period in America in our present day? First of all, I think the American Revolution is the most important event since the birth of Christ in all of world history. I mean, it turned the world upside down, which is the cliche. Before this moment, everyone was a subject, essentially under the rule of somebody else. We had created in this moment a very brand new thing called a citizen. And this has had powerful effects. It's going to set in motion revolutions for the next two plus centuries all around the world, all attempting to sort of give a new expression to this idea that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.

4:31And that's a big, big deal in world history. So what happens here is I suppose you could miss the point and say it's a quarrel between Englishmen, but it is the beginning of something absolutely new in the world. And that is something to celebrate And to understand, too, that it comes out of so much division that's going on between the states. People in New Hampshire and Georgia, they're from different countries. They believe different things, that you could have the divisions of loyalists and patriots, you could have all the things that are roiling in these colonies, and understand that out of that, we could still figure out a way to come together.

5:17Americans think they're pretty divided right now. they weren't nearly as divided as they were during the revolutionary period. Here's the simple thing. We're always divided. So it ebbs and flows a little bit, but we always have big differences. You know, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal is not met with universal approval. The Civil War kills 750 ,000 Americans, we think, over the issue of slavery. We have our own revolution. There are lots of periods, the Vietnam period, when we're so particularly divided. So I think there's a little bit of chicken little. You know, oh, the sky is falling because it's now.

5:55Things are always worse now than they ever were. The only reason why historians, and God knows I'm an amateur historian, feel a kind of optimism is because there's something familiar. There's, you know, the Bible says there's nothing new under the sun. Human nature essentially doesn't change. And that's true. What's great about the revolution is for a moment, there was something new in the world. And that's the thing that we need to use. That's the leverage we have to bring us back to the ability to speak to one another, to understand how you solve your differences as opposed to the sort of soup of anger and distrust that seem to be everywhere now.

6:39John Dos Passos said that when men in times of where men feel quicksand under their feet, history is a lifeline from the past to the present. What lifeline do you see from the revolutionary period? If we're always divided, what's the lifeline to the present from the revolutionary period? That's a wonderful phrase. I think it's manifest in so many different ways. Obviously, we're the only country, we know exactly when we were born, and we're the country that's held together not by language, not by religion, not by even geography, we're held together by words. And so I think to me it always comes back to words and why being here you begin to realize the incredible power and import of those words.

7:23That we hold these truths to be self-evident and you know John there was nothing self-evident about those words. As someone said in an earlier film we made about for about Benjamin Franklin, this is the lawyers dodge, right? It's like there's nothing self-evident about this, but if you say it's self-evident, we just like we of course all agree this is true and then say something that is so new in the world that it is still inspiring. I mean I would normally be home on July 4th reading to my children the Declaration of Independence because it has so much import and so much meaning even today. And I think it doesn't take as much effort as we think it does to reinvest in those things that we share in common.

8:10What is a citizen's obligation now? A citizen's obligation now is the same as it's ever been. And that's the most important thing. There's a wonderful phrase a little bit later from the famous words where Jefferson says, All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. Meaning, we all kind of have gravitated to be under authoritarian rule. You know, the trains run on time or we get at least this. But we're going to require of you to be a citizen something more. It's got to be active. The pursuit of happiness is not the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas.

8:53That's what the founders said, to be virtuous, to live a virtuous life, to continually educate yourself is what was required to sustain this republic. And I think that's what we've gotten away from. Everything is sort of all individualized. We're all free agents. We don't realize that freedom, the thing that we tout, is not just what I want, but also that's intention with what we need. And I think what happens is that when we study these words, we can go back to the sense of newness and freshness that they represented and rededicate ourselves, and that means me, for me, and you for you, to this idea that the pursuit of happiness is about lifelong learning.

9:35It's about becoming ever more educated to the responsibility of citizenship, and that's a huge, huge responsibility. Not just to take your feed, not just to go with this flow, not just to get your information that sort of ratifies what you already thought, but to actually explore what my neighbor thinks. Being an American as Jefferson saw it, as the founders saw it, was a continuing obligation to engage with its history. That's exactly right. And this is really important in order to form the government. They had to reach back through the Middle Ages, through the Dark Ages, back to antiquity to bring up these ideas like virtue and temperance and moderation and all of the things that all of them were looking for.

10:21I mean the The amazing thing is we're here at Thomas Jefferson's house, but we don't have a country without his words, but also we don't have a country without George Washington. And yet we know about all of these men. They're deeply flawed in many important ways. And I think today in our binary culture, you know, where everything's a one or a zero, or it's a red state or a blue state, it's my way or the highway, we've forgotten that that it's possible to tolerate as we do with the people we love, their strengths and their weaknesses. So heroism is not perfection, right? The Greeks told us that.

10:59Heroism was a negotiation within someone, sometimes a war between somebody's great strengths and their great flaws. Like Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths. And so I think that if we can take a historical view that permits us to see a Jefferson and Washington in these very complicated understanding of them, then it's possible to then breathe, to have some room to understand who we are now, who we were then, and where we might be, which is of course the most important thing. All the anxiety about this present moment is really not so much about the present moment, but about will we survive?

11:41Where will we be? and you can go back to this moment and be completely inspirited by possibility. Is it necessary to understand the flaws of the founders so that they become more real and therefore their lessons are more accessible? I think so. I think we know what a superficial story means. Its half-life is so insignificant. When you put everything into sort of cartoon stuff, into the white hat and the black hat and what that means. Yes, when you understand, Keats said that Shakespeare possessed this thing called negative capability, that you could hold in tension someone's strengths and someone's weaknesses for as long as you possibly could.

12:25And then, even then, you didn't necessarily have to make a decision. So you can understand George Washington as flawed, as rash. He rides out on the battlefield, as making bad decisions as a general. And yet, without him, we do not have a country. You know, we're speaking English or we're speaking French or Spanish, whatever it is, but we're a different place without the leadership that he exhibited. And, of course, that leadership was exhibited most spectacularly when he resigned his military commission and then left the presidency because he was giving up power and setting in motion an American example that it isn't the person, it's the law, it's the form of government.

13:07And these sorts of things have held us in good stead for 249 years. You've named so many instances in which basically America was thought into being. In other words, a set of ideas, just words, just the stuff that was going on in a bunch of heads of people ended up shaping an entire nation and, as you're saying, a course of history. So it isn't just Jefferson's words, right? You have before it in January, this Englishman who comes ashore at Philadelphia half dead. He's a failure in everything in life. And he writes this little tiny pamphlet called Common Sense. His name is Thomas Paine. And he gives just spectacular, almost poetic voice to this impulse.

13:52Like, up here to four, people are not sure they're one to separate from Britain, not sure about independence. They certainly would like to believe it's really not the king's fault. It's really parliament's fault. And all of a sudden, he reminds people what monarchical and authoritarian rule is all about, and that, you know, this idea that you could install yourself by virtue of your family for generation after generation isn't right. And so lots of words. Earlier, Sam Adams is keeping everybody alive to their grievances, he said. That's his job, right? He's a failure as a brewer and as a tax collector, but, boy, he's really good at keeping people upset at what the British are doing, or maybe not even doing, but may do, right?

14:32And so words are hugely important, and we are the sum total of the words we've talked about rather than just necessarily always the actions or the money or the place or the position or the celebrity. It's, you know, Washington is interesting in that he's also a great judger of character. He knows how to pick subordinate talent like you can't believe, like you can't believe. I mean, even this committee that essentially has served by his age that Benjamin Franklin is the sort of the senior of all seniors. But Adams says, you know, to Jefferson, you write it. Because like, I'm short and fat and ugly and people don't like me, I'm obnoxious.

15:18But you have this great felicity with words. We're here in Jefferson's house. What if Tom walked in? What would you want to ask him? Oh, my goodness. A lot of them are deeply personal questions about his own life and what he couldn't deal with. He knew, as everyone knew, that slavery was immoral. It's only later generations are going to try to justify it. As the abolition movement grows in the 19th century, we're going to have to make black people inferior in all of this. But there is a sense that, you know, Jefferson himself said slavery was like holding a wolf by the ears. You didn't like it, but you didn't dare let go.

16:02I'd want to ask him deeply question, why don't you let it go? Your neighbor freed his slaves. Your cousin freed his slave. They both urged you to do the same thing, and you couldn't do that. You temporized. You bought more statuary and more wine from Europe. And what was that about? Because, of course, you could articulate these universal, self-evident truths and yet couldn't live that out in his own lifetime. Can you talk about the genius and brilliance of his words without sitting right in the middle of Jefferson's owning of slaves and slave people? Can you talk about the two? I mean, can you talk about Jefferson's words without talking about?

16:50No, I think this is the important thing. And somehow we've gotten to the idea that you just don't want to mess with the good stuff. And let's just pretend, pay no attention to that man behind it. You can't do that. A good story is a good story is a good story. And this is a really good part of the story. It's complicated. It's dark. There are human beings in this house who are owned by a person who has articulated universal rights for everyone. And what's so great is that the vagueness of the words has allowed everybody to plow through and make it their own. Not just here, but all around the stuff.

17:28So when he says pursuit of happiness, that may be the key word. When we say a more perfect union in the Constitution later on, that may be the key word. That this is process that we're engaged in. And so maybe the poetry, but also the vagueness of the words, have opened a door that have allowed women to come through, that have allowed enslaved people to have citizenship, that have expanded in so many different ways, and all around the world. This is progress. This is, you know, this is, and also the course of human events, right? we're you don't flick the switch and it's all perfect all at once and so I think going back and understanding them for the deep undertow that's present and sometimes really discomforting undertow about it is okay it's nothing is diminished nothing is diminished in fact I think it's made more familiar yet you know what when it is when you're in a conversation with a friend and the friend says you know I should have said this before but I really hate this or or you know what, I did this.

18:37There's something, suddenly there's dimension now to the possibilities of the connection one to the other. And I think when we look back and don't try to sanitize it, don't make a Madison Avenue version of our past, but celebrate the grittiness. And I think in this case, the violence of the American Revolution, we do a service to those ideas that we think need to be protected. I mean, this is not ideas that are fixed in amber. You know, this is gritty, gritty stuff. People died, lots of people died fighting for this in just horrific struggles when the main form of killing was a bayonet. That's not fun.

19:20More authentic, more true, and therefore more real and accessible. Yeah, and then I think more powerful. That's, what we're looking for is meaning. At the end of the day, it's all about meaning. And so the stories that we tell, the truer, the more complicated they get, actually the meaning increases. It's not decreased. It's only an authoritarian that wishes to, you know, in the old Soviet thing where all of a sudden that photograph no longer has so-and-so in it. He's no longer there watching the May Day parade. They've cut him out because he's out of favor. We don't need to do that in this country.

19:55We can actually be big enough to accept these contradictions within our founding and within ourselves. I mean, Jefferson is certainly the embodiment of deep and very complicated, you know, differences in internal psychology. President Trump has issued an executive action in which he says basically history's gotten out of balance, says that the American government either funds it through museums or national parks. And he said instead that this federal role in history should instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and the progress of the American people. So President Trump thinks there's an imbalance in the way we talk about history.

20:39How do you see that? I don't see the imbalance. I think we need to celebrate the greatness of the American people. The greatness of the American people comes from telling these complicated stories. And that's a good story is a good story is a good story. That's what you're looking for. You don't want to just say it. Otherwise, it's just sort of slogans that are put up on the wall. We want to feel that we know who Thomas Jefferson is. We need to understand the internal struggles that Abraham Lincoln had. We have to understand what was going through Rosa Parks mind when she you know refused to give up her seat on the bus.

21:14This in no way takes away from the glory. It just makes the story fuller and richer and and permits purchase for everyone. You want a history to be complicated because it gives everybody a chance to own or have access to it. There is my door where I'm going through. There's a wonderful scholar, Maggie Blackhawk, in our film who says after our scene on the Declaration of Independence that it's deeply significant to people at the margins, that these words that do not include them, they do not include women, they do not include the poor, they do not include any enslaved or free African-Americans, they do not include Native Americans, but the words themselves are so inspirational that they begin to suggest a much larger and more, what we would say, kind of American polity, that a bunch of us all together of different varieties doing lots of different things and pursuing happiness, this idea of virtue and lifelong learning.

22:15Along those lines, the stories you tell in this documentary and the people who tell it, there's a real diversity. Was that an important part of your storytelling? Absolutely, I think that we tend to have the revolution, we think of it as just the guys in Philadelphia, which is really important, thinking great thoughts and writing them down, the boldface names, if you will. What we wanted to do is take those boldface names and make them not just kind of inaccessible, but real, so you could understand dimension to them, but also realize there's scores of other people that have voices and that are important.

22:53And they're 0.01 % of people had their portraits paid. That doesn't mean that everybody else didn't exist or everybody else didn't do something, particularly if you gave your life on Bunkers Hill to start this new nation or at Yorktown or at Brandywine or Long Island. Just because you don't have a portrait paint, it doesn't mean that you're not somebody. So we're trying to give everyone a voice And so that what you have is a chorus. So it all goes back to music, always goes back to music.

23:30Lincoln talks about the mystic chords of memory. These are not ropes. These are celestial chords. That the chorus of Americans has an emotional power to it. that the singularity of just making it about a great man theory, the problem has been in that at times, and may have to do with Trump's initiatives, is that we've, in order to tell a bottom-up story, we sometimes thrown out a top-down story. There's no need. You can do a top-down and a bottom-up, and that's actually the most vigorous and active and most powerful form of history is when they meet. when as you are in a tent a few hundred yards from Rochambeau's tent outside Yorktown you being George Washington that you also know that that group that's taking redoubt number 10 has led by Lafayette includes Alexander Hamilton But also has Joseph Plum Martin who signed up a couple days after the declaration at age 15 and has just seen unbelievable action and violence and whatever is rushing the abatis, the spiked logs that are going to protect them, along with Rhode Islanders who have been promised their freedom after the war is over, both runaway and enslaved.

24:50I mean, this is who takes Redoubt number 10 that permits us, along with Redoubt number nine that the French take, to roll the big guns in to make Cornwallis painfully aware if he has not been aware of it up to that point, that his cause is lost and will precipitate the surrender that will come a few days later. Diversity of voice and storytelling was important to you. That also is under assault at the moment. The president basically is trying to remove all efforts to keep diversity in mind. Is there something that is lost in that? Well, you know, there's a strength in a wagon wheel of all the different spokes into the hub.

25:31We're all looking for the hub, whatever the hub is, meaning, you know, something that pulls us together, that chorus, that's what we're all about. And so the strength of that wheel has to do with having the spokes and having a multitude of perspectives. The impulse for some is to say there's only one perspective. And that's true of many different things. And it isn't just from a top-down sort of a sense, so let's make this simpler. It's also a lot of people mistake. And what we've tried to do is be liberated from any fashion of what's called historiography. Sorry to, you know, on a Sunday morning make the words so big.

26:12But it's sort of the fashions of the way we study history sometimes say it's got to be only from this perspective. It's got to be Freudian or it's got to be Marxist economic or it's got to be symbolic or it's got to be, you know, postmodern or whatever the thing is. You don't need that. All you need to do is say, if a kid was involved, I want to understand what that kid felt. If a great person that George Washington, I want to know what he did and what he felt. Did he really need to ride out into the battle at Kips Bay and risk his own life? I mean, at one time at Princeton, he does the same thing, and his own aides are covering their eyes, afraid they're going to see their commander in chief.

26:53If he's shot, it's all over. There's no country, right? and then watch him make mistakes and at the same time see the way he held like the strongest of glues the country together as it's going. You say history is the best teacher we have. What did working on this documentary about the revolution teach you? You know here's the lead that has been buried. This is the most important experiment in human government that the world has seen. And we bury that light under a bushel all the time, either through our internal doubts, either through our struggles with one another, through this kind of binary sense of, you know, I'm wrong, you're right, I'm right, you're wrong, whatever it might be.

27:46We've missed the most important thing, that the creation of the United States of America was one of the great things that have ever taken place in human history. And that's something to celebrate. So in looking in the past, you discovered something that should be and is, and you're seeing, very much alive today. This is what makes history the best teacher because it permits you to understand that it wasn't always some beautiful, great time beforehand. It's always been complicated. There's always been enormous divisions, and we always have had an ability by using the force of the system we created.

28:26I mean, these guys at the Constitutional Convention, they are worrying constantly about, you know, how to, well, what if this happens? Well, what if that happens? How do we protect about this? How do we protect about that? And they're all trying to, I mean, with the exception of the preamble, the Constitution is extraordinarily just boilerplate language. It's an operating system, right? But it's so good. And the fact that it's immediately amended, it wouldn't have even been able to go into effective use without the Bill of Rights that were sort of essentially codifying what everybody thought they had been fighting for over the last many, many, many years.

29:06And remember, this is a battle that's been, you know, with the British, the struggle's been going on from well before Lexington and Concord with the Boston Massacre or the Tea Party or other, you know, acts of collective disobedience. But in April 19, 1775, it begins and it's not over until 71 when the surrender happens in the fall. So six and a half years, but it's not going to be until the last British troop leaves another two years and the Treaty of Paris is formalized. So you're talking about a huge period of time that we're engaged in a revolution. And there's lots of stuff going on. Why did you originally want to make this?