Ken Burns Discusses his New Series "The American Revolution"

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2:24Ben Meiselas:Restrictions apply. See full terms at fanduel.com slash sportsbook. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or 1-800-MY-RESET. The MAGA Republicans in Donald Trump's cabinet and in the House of Representatives and Senate losing their minds after the release of those 20 ,000 Epstein emails. And also, they're now hiding the economic data. They're saying that the Bureau of Labor Statistics no longer has good data. They're blaming the shutdown and they may not provide data into the future. Then you have Trump's top economic advisor, Kevin Hassett, saying, well, maybe we're just going to have to concoct some information.

3:01Ben Meiselas:Who knows? Maybe we'll concoct it. Here, play this clip. And the household survey wasn't conducted in October. So we're going to get half the employment report. We'll get the jobs part, but we won't get the unemployment rate. And that'll just be for one month. But yeah, it is true that we probably will never, we'll maybe be able to concoct something that we'll never actually know for sure what the unemployment rate was in October. We'll never know. We'll just maybe concoct it. I mean, when it comes to important financial data, the word concoct isn't the word that you like to hear. Then they bring in the other economic advisor, Peter Navarro, who says he toggles between there's no inflation and then the inflation is all Biden's fault.

3:38Ben Meiselas:And let's blame Biden for everything. Here, play this clip.

3:43Ben Meiselas:Explain really carefully about this Democrat con job. And let's be clear what it is. They want to blame Donald Trump for what is Biden legacy inflation. And we have to be very clear about two things. One, go category by category. Housing, food, transportation, health care. Exactly what we're doing. And we also have to remind people that everything the Democrats do pushes inflation up and that the only reason. So let's take no responsibility for anything 10 months into this administration. And it's going to keep saying Biden's name 20 years from now. And they bring in MAGA Republican Congress member Pete Sessions.

4:32Ben Meiselas:And he's asked a very basic question. What's your reaction to these eftene emails that mention Trump's name? I'm sure you have to have some view sessions, right? I mean, you're on the oversight committee. Anything you want to share here? Here, play this book. You say there are many questions. You still have a question about whether Donald Trump knew about the sexual abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein? Well, I've not gone through all of the documents. As you said, there's 20 ,000 pages. Our staff is going through this. I have been back home in Waco, Texas for the last three weeks dealing with the shutdown there.

5:12Ben Meiselas:I will get back to it. We will get this done. But what we're doing right now is taking this huge number of emails, of data, of pages, and going through it. And there and there will be, on a bipartisan basis, an agreement about how we're going to hold formal hearings, who we're going to ask. Now, I want to do something different here. Now, normally I'd show you a few more clips and I'll show you how I think insane and crazy and dangerous these MAGA Republicans are being and the gaslighting the lies. But what we talk about here on the network very frequently is these broader values about our democracy, our nation's founding.

5:50Ben Meiselas:So I want to do something different and remind us of that. I want to bring in right now Ken Burns. Ken Burns, incredible filmmaker, documentarian, my favorite documentarian ever. you've been making films about the American story, about the American struggle for democracy for five decades right now. And you're out with a new one. I think it's very timely. Enough of that political stuff. As you're talking about the American Revolution, how we moved away from kings into the country that we are today. And I think that's relevant and salient. I want to speak to you about that first. Let me ask you just about that.

6:29Ben Meiselas:And then I want to show people the trailer here because it brought chills to me when I saw it, especially in light of all the craziness. Just talk to us about American right now. So I've been working for almost 10 years on a history of the American Revolution. I began it when Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. And of course, there's been a lot of water under the American bridge in the time then. Mark Twain is supposed to have said that history doesn't repeat itself. He's right. No event has happened twice, but it rhymes. And for 50 years, I've been making films about subjects in American history, and it always rhymes.

7:07And those rhymes change, particularly over the course of projects like this one that took 10 years or the Vietnam War that took 10 and a half years. The rhymes are pretty obvious. However, as filmmakers, we have to have blinders on. We want to just acknowledge them and just be disciplined to not say, isn't this so much like today? Because they change. We have a German, the voice of a German officer's wife who's crossing the Atlantic to join her husband, part of the Hessian mercenaries the Brits have hired to augment the British army. And she's heard a rumor that Americans eat cats. Now, if the film had, for some reason, The Grace of God and funding come out last year, that would be a big deal.

7:49And people would say, can you put that in there because of the crazy arguments about immigrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio. I think it's going to go on Sunday the 16th over everybody. Nobody's going to notice that, but there may be other rhymes that they pick up. I pay that no mind, but let me just say, as you suggested, that the Old Testament says there's nothing new under the sun. On July 4th, 1776, there was. everybody up to that point had been under authoritarian world, had been a subject. It was in the interest of their rulers that they'd be uneducated, that they'd be superstitious, that they'd be distracted by conspiracies, and that suddenly had something new.

8:31And they were speaking not just about their present moment, but all of us, the unborn millions, John Adams said, who would benefit from the success of this revolution. And they were creating a new thing, citizens, and that the pursuit of happiness for them uniformly was not the pursuit of objects in a marketplace of things, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. Because if you continue to educate yourself, you would become more virtuous, less susceptible to, as Adam said, ambition and avarice and greed, and that virtue would allow you to enjoy and be able to have the active idea of citizenship.

9:10This is brand new in the world, and this is one hell of a story. And it isn't just guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts. And we try to remove the opacity of many of them. But we introduce you to scores of other folks who didn't have their portraits painted, who are as important to the story of the revolution. And they're women, half the population. There's out of 3 ,500 ,000 free and enslaved black people who've been imported from Africa, There are native nations coexisting and assimilated within the 13 colonies. And to the West are native nations really hoping what is going to happen, regardless of who wins, that their lands will be protected.

9:51And they're, of course, not. It's an incredible dynamic. It's a revolution. It's a civil war, as bloody a civil war as we have. Our civil war is not really a civil war. It's a sexual war. And it's a world war, the fourth world war for the prize, global war, for the prize of North America. And that's a really interesting and complicated story that we, it's taken us 10 years. And when we started, nobody was talking 250. Nobody was talking about all this stuff. And of course, as I said, Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency.

10:24Ben Meiselas:Right. Because the film should transcend administrations and it should appeal to our basic identity of Americans. I hope the Supreme Court justices are watching this because us, oftentimes they like to claim that they have historical perspectives or they're originalists and that they interpret these doctrinal issues through their view of history. That's their new The last nine months I've been touring the country and I've said the same thing to everybody. Said the same thing to a two and a half hour conversation with Joe Rogan and you and Theo Vaughn, as I said, to the editorial board of the New York Times, to inner city school kids in Charleston, South Carolina, and Detroit, Chicago, to general audiences from Seattle to Los Angeles, from Charleston to Boston, and every place in between.

11:16And I say the same things. We're umpires throwing balls and strikes, but that's exactly what you want is to, you know, we live in a world in which it's just a highlight film, right? So Babe Ruth, if you're going to show Babe Ruth, you could just show him hitting a home run. Well, Babe Ruth strikes out more often than he hits home runs. And he comes up only once every nine times at bat. And sometimes it's that middle infielder, the second baseman or the shortstop, who's making diddly, who comes up batting ninth, who's the star of the thing, the last World Series to the Blue Jays' ever-loving despair is about that.

11:52So what we try to do is engage all of these stories. I was talking to the conservative scholar Yuval Levin. And he said, you know, the founders would come to this moment, they would be unsurprised that somebody was seeking kind of monarchical power. They'd be devastated that Article 1 of the Constitution, which is about the legislative branch, that that would have abdicated their, what they felt was fundamental role in being the check, the governor, the determiner of what the executive was going to do. And that would be the big shame of it. And that's from a conservative scholar. So I have a feeling that when we're in the moment, we're so dialectically preoccupied, everything's red state or blue state, rich or poor, young or old, gay or straight, North, South, East, West, we forget the reconciling power of a good story.

12:43The novelist Richard Powers said that the best arguments in the world won't change a single point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. It's a kind of benevolent Trojan horse that comes out in the night not to murder the citizens of the city or to burn that city, but to remind them of the complexity of human life, that the dialectic of politics and of our computer system, everything's a one or a zero, do not permit us to enjoy. And so So I've labored really long in this field. It's really tough to be disciplined, but the rewards are great because you do have a chance to speak to people that not necessarily agree with your particular politics or one side or the other.

13:28And I was just recently on C-SPAN, which has this morning call-in show. They have a Democratic line, a Republican line, and an independent line. and I've been on it before and usually you're dodging bullets from one or the other and all of them began their questions which is, we really love your work and so I just thought, okay, great. Maybe a story, when a person's in crisis, you go to a pastor or a professional and they ask about your parents and when you were born and your childhood, maybe for a country in crisis, in division, way more divided during our revolution, They're loyalists that the patriots are killing civilians and and and and vice versa.

14:13Maybe have a chance to go back and be healed to put, I hope, the us back in the U.S. And maybe the divisions are a mile wide, but only an inch thick.

14:23Ben Meiselas:You know, what's interesting is, as you say, Article one, total capitulation, Article three at the district court level and circuit court level, by and large, the checks hold at the Supreme Court level, in my view, recognizing the doctrine of absolute immunity and using a historical perspective to justify absolute immunity to me makes no sense. because the very nature of our country, as when people watch the American Revolution will see, was against authoritarians, against the concept of absolute immunity. But then the only thing that seems to be kind of holding in an interesting way, in an ironic way, is federalism in states' rights and seeing blue states, and I'm not trying to get into political here, but states asserting themselves and the vastness of our country and it making it difficult for an authoritarian to control, say, something like California.

15:25Ben Meiselas:That would be the fourth largest where I live, the fourth largest GDP in the world if it was a country or Illinois and sending in ICE agents there. But states fighting back in a way that. Well, you know what? I really urge your listeners and you to watch this six part 12 hour series, because I think it will arm you with an important set of facts, not opinions, not reactions, but facts about what the United States is. There's a wonderful, we follow, as I was saying, scores of people that I'd never heard of. And I'm pretty sure you've never heard of either about it. And the wife of German officers, There's a German soldier, Johann Evald, don't mean to pick on the Germans, who's openly contemptuous throughout the film about the rebels, as the Brits and the Germans call the patriots.

16:18And yet he's in the surrendering army at Yorktown. And he said, who would have thought 100 years ago that out of this multitude of rabble could arise a people who could defy kings?

16:31Ben Meiselas:Are we defying kings right now? How do you see us in this moment? I'm totally focused on the moment of the revolution where we were most definitely defined. I mean, the odds at Lexington Green were zero of success of this new idea. And the loyalists aren't enemies in our film. They're people who say, look, all of my health, my prosperity, the land I own, my family had spent a thousand years working as dependents on somebody else's land in Wales and England and Scotland and Ireland. And now I've owned some land. why would I throw this away for this untested idea? But a lot of people did. And it turned out to be a pretty good experiment.

17:10And I think by going back and gathering the threads of all the complexity, democracy was not the object of the revolution. It was a consequence of it. You know, these guys were forming an elite, as people would complain today, of a Republican, small Arab Republican experiment. But in order to win that war, teenagers were fighting the Continental Army. There were second and third sons, laborers without a job, second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance, recent immigrants with no property. And a war that began to protect the rights of property males becomes fought by people who had little or no property.

17:49So democracy becomes part of the reward for helping the success of this. That alone is an interesting thing. And we also have phrases like pursuit of happiness, more perfect union. We're a nation in the process of becoming. This story of the revolution is the big band. And it's an ever expanding universe. Do we take steps back? Yes, we do. Does the acceleration slow? Yes, it does. But there are lots of ways in which the story of the revolution can give courage, can give hope, can provide optimism. I mean, today, optimism is looked at as a kind of naive and pejorative condition. But jadedness and snark, I mean, jadedness is only for journalists and jet setters, it seems to me, and that you got to be a citizen.

18:35And citizen is actively engaged in reminding people what the American project has it been about, good and bad. I mean, you can get an A on your test in eighth grade if you say taxes and representation, but we put Indian land first. That's what we wanted more than anything else. This is the fourth global war over the prize for North America, and that prize is the land. And that land is occupied for 22 ,000 or 12 ,000 or whatever number you're going to say by people who don't have the same sense of property and deeds and things that inherited from Europe, but they nonetheless have that land. And Benjamin Franklin himself impressed by the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, this sort of six nations that had figured out a way to have their own trade and foreign policy, but protect the state's rights.

19:23You're talking about California or Illinois or whatever it might be. And at the same time, protect the interests of their independent nations, sometimes with different linguistic roots, certainly with different kinds of people. and he says, why can't we do that? 20 years before the revolution. It doesn't work. Nobody wants to give up their autonomy, but 20 years later, the war cry that he had put at the beginning, join or die, the picture of the snake cut up into pieces, the snake representing the various colonies, becomes the war cry in the most consequential revolution in history. So it's a good story and it will, I think, I don't want to say arm, I think it will provide provide enough information to understand the complexity of then, to understand how they're way more divided then than now.

20:12And that that might provide a new way or a new approach, a new tack to how you don't, as the novelist Richard Powers says, don't make arguments, but tell stories that have the way of reconciling and sort of ignoring the dialectic, which is the enemy of anything, right? We know this in our personal lives. We know this in our love. We know this in our art and our literature. One in one equals three. Our faith, one in one equals three. You can't build a bridge, but every, you know, or airplane without one in one, always equaling two. But the thing we look for, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

20:53You know, here's the whole, here are the sum of the parts. What's this? That's why I make films about that.

20:58Ben Meiselas:Ken, can we watch the trailer together? I want people to be able to see it before you go because I think the trailer is so powerful. Yeah, sure, sure. I just want to say I didn't edit this. This is PBS pulling from our 12-hour film. All right, let's play it. Park kindled in America. A flame has arisen. Not to be extinguished.

21:25Ben Meiselas:We think about independence movements of the 20th century. you don't always recognize the fact the united states actually started that the american revolutionary movement served as a model for freedom from oppression america is predicated on an idea that tells us who we are where we came from and what our forebears were willing to die for it collins said no taxation without representation the fear was if we give in to this precedent what will they do in the future crisis changes people it gave different people different ideas about what they should be doing it gave them a space to make this democracy real

22:11Ben Meiselas:the founders thought we can start over again we can begin the world anew the british objective is to suppress the rebellion force them to acknowledge the authority of the king. Washington understands the war he's fighting. He doesn't have to win. He only has not to lose. He becomes quite eloquent in trying to persuade people. We're all Americans. We see regiments with individuals who are not carrying arms, doing essential labor, including women. They are at the forefront of this movement. one of the most remarkable aspects is that you had such different places come together as one nation it mushrooms into a global campaign that touches europe and all parts of the world it so excites us that we are the product of a revolutionary moment where the world turned upside down

23:14Ben Meiselas:To believe in America is to believe in possibility.

23:27Ben Meiselas:Sunday, November 16th, the first part, it will run until Friday. To believe in America is to believe in possibility. And she goes on and says, even those people who lack the ownership of themselves on either side has something to believe in. Because these arguments between Brits suddenly get blown out into transcendent liberties. And that's why these people would continue fighting against all odds, against one of the great military powers, are certainly the greatest Navy on the face of the globe, and to win in six and a half long, bloody years is just as... And Washington, who's the most important person, we don't have a country without him, for all his flaws and all of his rashness and all of his bad tactical mistakes he makes throughout it, nonetheless is the person who convinces people that you're not a Georgian, You're not a New Hampshireite.

24:24You're an American, this new thing. And he gives up his power twice, which is just the stunning thing. He's able to inspire people in the dead of night to fight. He's able to pick subordinate talent, unjealous of whether they're better generals, and many of them were than him. But nobody had the rectitude. Nobody had the command. Nobody had the dignity. Somebody says, Benjamin Rush, the only physician who signed the thing, he said all other monarchs in Europe would look like valet de chambre next to him, right? You know what a valet de chambre is? The guy who's pouring out the piss pot next to George Washington.

25:02So you have to wrestle with the complications. You've got this guy who owns other human beings, this guy who rides out and risks the whole cause in the battlefield, and a guy who makes some tactical mistakes, particularly I'm in New York, in Long Island. His failure to protect his left flank causes the biggest battle of the revolution to be lost and be a humiliating patriotic defeat that will just in a few days lose him not just Brooklyn, but all of Manhattan as well. And New York becomes for seven years and two months, a loyalist and British headquarters. And it's not until two years after Yorktown that he gets to ride back in and kind of reclaim the city that his own mistake had lost.