Ken Burns Says Gratitude Is the Missing Ingredient in Our Politics

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1:40Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. We're chicken littles, the sky is falling, it's all bad. I'm grateful for the fact that being a student of history permits me to have a kind of sense that the human race will figure this out. Ken Burns, filmmaker, chronicler of America, and now telling the story of the American Revolution. I think gratitude is the missing ingredient in our degraded political lives these days. Everything is binary and it's not. It's so complicated. And yet I have an essential optimism. From Bloomberg Weekend, this is The Michal Hussain Show. I'm Michelle Hussain.

2:32Ken Burns has been working on stories of America for nearly 50 years. He's made epic documentaries on the American Civil War, the Vietnam War, the US and the Holocaust. And his style, bringing old photographs and documents to life, is what led Steve Jobs to name an Apple video editing feature, the Ken Burns effect, in his honour. Now, the filmmaker has turned his lens onto the United States' origin story, The American Revolution, with a mammoth 12-hour series on PBS, American Public Broadcasting. And even if you think you know everything necessary about the founding fathers, the Brits versus the colonies, I think you'll be surprised and enriched by what you're about to hear.

3:23This conversation also comes right up to the present day. And given its Thanksgiving weekend, it felt right to hear from America's best-known documentary maker with his take on his country then and now. So here's Ken Burns telling me first what he discovered as he investigated the revolutionary story. I had no idea of the complexity, the variety of individuals, the sense that it was a bloody civil war in ways that our civil war is merely a sectional war, that it's a world war, a global war, maybe the fifth global war for the prize of North America, that it has the big ideas and all the famous for Americans founding fathers, the boldface names, if you will, but also hundreds of other people that are engaged in it who are important and give dynamics and dimension and complexity to the story.

4:20And that's all we want from our stories. We don't want a superficial Madison Avenue sanitized version of our past. We want a complete one. Everyone wants that. It doesn't matter about politics. You just want dramatic stories. And we have a sign, a neon sign in our editing room that says it's complicated because in my business, the art has to be subservient to the facts. And when you learn new facts, and sometimes they're contradictory, you have to find a way that your narrative can tolerate them and understand them. And when unfortunately, we live in a media world where everything's a one or a zero, and we live in a political world where everything is one way or the other.

4:58It's a binary that does not exist, but is artificially created for the simplicity, the laziness, the cynicism of what's going on. But telling a complex story escapes the specific gravity of cynicism and offers something in return, something rich and something where you can say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And the series is out now in all its complexity, but you will have known as you did it that it's a more fractious time in America compared to the end of the Obama presidency when you start out. And indeed, in an executive order, the White House said earlier this year that they were against telling history in a way that casts the founding principles in a negative light.

5:43Well, I certainly haven't done that. I've put them in a very, very positive light. I've just put them in the correct light, which is the engagement of all the characters. It is possible, I assume, to make this a one-act, one-room play where it all takes place in Philadelphia, but it doesn't give you the dynamism. It doesn't understand the underdog story that this is. I mean, on April 19th, 1775, when British troops open up on American militia on Lexington Green in Massachusetts, the chances of their success is zero. And six and a half long years later at Yorktown, that British army is surrendering.

6:20And how that happens is 40 battles, enormous social and political, even religious change within the colonies. So you have this complex dynamic of the 500 ,000 people out of the 3 million who are free or enslaved Africans. You have Native Americans either coexisting, assimilated with the colonists, and then those nations that are as distinct and as important as, say, a France or a Prussia is on the world scene that had maintained relationships for centuries. And one of the many things that really interested and intrigued me about this series is realizing that this revolutionary spirit on the part of the colonies, how their ideas were influenced by the Native American nations, that Native American nations had what we would recognize today as a union in a way that the 13 colonies really didn't until quite late.

7:18It's really remarkable. At the very, very beginning of the film, there is a group of six native nations, first five and then six, which is often called the Iroquois Confederacy. They call it the Haudenosaunee. It permitted each of those nations to sort of retain their identity. It's sort of like the European Union. And at the same time could economically and diplomatically and militarily have a union. And Benjamin Franklin sees this 20 years before the revolution and says, I want that. That's what we need from New Hampshire to Georgia. The 13 Kongs, we need that. And he gets people to sign up for his plan of union in Albany 20 years before the revolution, 1754.

7:58And then they go home to try to sell it and nobody wants to give up any autonomy. So the plan dies, but it gets resurrected as the revolution begins to become a shooting war. And it's very interesting. It's also, I have to say, the Enlightenment. And the Americans are reading. They're very literate, in some ways, percentage-wise, more literate than the British population. They're freer. They own land in ways that ordinary folks in Britain do not own land. They pay less taxes. They've got great health. Their literacy is second only to Scandinavia. And they're reading Montesquieu. They're reading the French philosophers of the Enlightenment.

8:37They're reading Locke and Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers. And so when you marry this idea of a practical example sitting at your Western doorstep of the possibility of union and you merge it with these arguments you're having with your own countrymen that suddenly get blown out into universal rights, yikes. And they're very powerful. The word liberty means something to everybody. It means something to George Washington, who owns hundreds of human beings, and Thomas Jefferson, who owns hundreds of human beings. But it also means something to those hundreds of human beings. And it means something to women who are a majority of the population.

9:13And it means something to Native Americans. And that animating spirit makes the American Revolution not just this important origin story for the United States. It makes it one of the most important events in all of world history because that revolution is going to spawn 200 years of revolutions all around the globe. It has a kind of force and a power that is going to destroy the French monarchy. It's going to change Europe. It's going to change Latin and South America and then later Asia and Africa. And it comes from the idea of this, you know, anti-colonial movement that, strange to say in this day and age, the United States invented.

9:55And yet, when that anti-colonial movement is ultimately successful in 1776 and then finally against the British a few years later, what it results in is the westward expansion, which dispossesses Native Americans of their land. And those African Americans who were runaway slaves are hunted down. And George Washington, the great hero, if there is one, although there are many of your story, is keeping those runaway slaves imprisoned so that their owners can come back and get them. This is the story of human beings, the contradictions, the hypocrisies, all of that is there. We don't have a country without George Washington, but yes, he owns other human beings.

10:38He wants those escaped enslaved people to be returned to their owners. They don't make George Washington the head of the Eastern Seaboard Army. They make him the head of the Continental Army, which is directed by the Continental Congress. They know where they're going. So first of all, the irony that settlers dumping the tea, colonists dumping the tea in Boston Harbor are crudely dressed as Native Americans. Every school kid in America knows that. And then when you ask them why, they say, oh, to put the blame on the Native Americans. That's not the reason. It's this attempt so ironic and so bittersweet and so complicated, so moving in a way.

11:14They're trying to tell Britain, we're not of you. We're not of the mother country anymore. We're aboriginal, like the people we've spent the last 150 years dispossessing of their land so that we can have these 13 colonies and the people that we're going to spend the next 150 years getting rid of all the rest of the land all the way to the Pacific. So there's ironies throughout. Well, don't you struggle with that hypocrisy? No, this is what, what do you mean? There's a wonderful moment when the great scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, who is a black woman, says, you know, that slavery bound Thomas Jefferson's life from beginning to end.

11:50We're in the middle of a section on the Declaration of Independence where he is declaring that all men are created equal. We hold these truths to be self-evident, he says. They're not self-evident. These are brand new in the world that all men are created equal. And he knows slavery is wrong. George Washington knows slavery is wrong. And she said, well, how could you do something if you knew it was wrong? She said, that's the human question for all of us. She's not taking Thomas Jefferson off the hook or by extension, George Washington off the hook. She's putting us on the hook for our tis-tis presentism about how we're so different.

12:23We're all complicated. This is what your William Shakespeare has given us in so many ways of what's going on, the contradictions. Here's the good news, though. Those words, when Thomas Jefferson meant them, he meant all men of property, free of debt, who were white. We don't mean that anymore. And everyone who heard those words began to argue for something that changed the world. Now, the second he says the word all, slavery's over. Now, it will take four score and nine years before that happens. Women will have to wait just an excruciatingly, impossibly long 144 years in our country to receive suffrage.

13:06But those walls are broken down. They're done. They're over. And you can extend it to all other kinds of things, child labor, gay marriage, whatever it might be. This has changed. So they start something by saying the words all. They start something, even though they're not prepared to deliver it themselves. The late historian Bernard Balin, who died at 101, God bless him, we interviewed him when he was 98 or 99, says nobody talked about slavery as an evil before the revolution. There were people who spoke to its evil, but it was not part of the common conversation. The second the revolution started, and for every moment through to our civil war, it was the number one topic in America.

13:47So by bringing up what you're calling the hypocrisy of these natural rights by people who owned other human beings, just because Jefferson didn't see the hypocrisy. I mean, he did see the hypocrisy. He just couldn't act on it. There's too much money to be made in slavery. And may I point out that the British Empire's wealth, its profit centers are in the Caribbean. Only South Carolina is profitable. We're just the most populous. And we also are the most literate and we make things. And so we're great trading partners with Britain before the revolution. But the 13 colonies in the Caribbean, like Jamaica and Barbados, which are 90 % enslaved people, that's where the engine of wealth for the British empire comes from.

14:32And so when we deal with hypocrisy, it's kind of like saying oxygen. This is like human behaviors. I mean, there would not be a William Shakespeare if there was not hypocrisy and irony and contradiction and undertow, not between people, but within individuals. So you can see that in Washington. You can see that in Jefferson. You can see that in many of the founding fathers, though the Adamses were vehemently opposed to slavery. And John Adams's wife, Abigail, who may be the best writer of the whole lot, is from the very get-go just totally uncomfortable with the idea that we're going to be talking about liberty and we can't rid ourselves of this horrific hypocrisy right in our own midst.

15:16So this is what makes the story dramatic. Ken, I hear you on the universality of hypocrisy. My family are from India and Pakistan, and the impact of the revolution on the British, as far as India was concerned, is that no way are we going to lose India. Look at what the Americans did to us. We're not going to have the same thing happen again. Can I tell you what my connection is to Lexington Green and to 1775? Yes, please. Do you have one? I do have one, which I had no idea about until I was on a TV Ancestry program. And they traced six generations back. One of my forefathers, Michael Farley, was the head of the Massachusetts militia.

15:52His four sons were all soldiers of the revolution, one of them killed. And essentially, the link to me is that one of the grandsons ends up in India, so goes off by 1820 to seek his fortune. But it gives me this connection to exactly the period that you're talking about. And I have to reconcile myself to the fact that when they were fighting for their liberty, they didn't mean everyone's liberty. I learned that I have on my mother's side an enslaved person. It was a household, one person. And I took that with equanimity. The thing that really bothered me was that I have an ancestor also on my mother's side in Massachusetts named Eldad Tupper, who had to move to New Brunswick because he refused to sign a loyalty oath after the revolution and had been a loyalist throughout that.

16:38I do have one saving grace, perhaps, for those of you in the UK that I am also related to Robert Burns, the national poet of Scotland, who still says in his poem, to a louse, one of my favorite lines in the English language, oh, would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us. And that becomes an animating part of how we tell stories not sort of imprisoned by the binary that we've been talking about, but tolerant of or just aware of all of these contradictions and undertow, which makes drama more interesting and makes us able to deal with one another. If it's that binary, you can't be married.

17:20If it's that binary, you can't raise a child. But somehow we permitted our politics to descend to this, you know, abysmal level of one thing or the other that actually, frankly, doesn't exist in nature. Can I understand a bit more, Ken, about your own nature and the story of how you came to do this work that you have? Over decades now, you started with the Brooklyn Bridge documentary and the Civil War, of course, was an amazing American TV moment. One of our producers was nine when it came out and she remembers everyone sitting and watching it. So how did that work begin? What was it in your early life that led you to it?

17:58You know, as many things for many people, the thing that has been the most significant for my growth has had to do with loss. My mother had cancer, began when I was two or three. She died when I was 11, just a couple months short of my 12th birthday. I remember sometime after my 12th birthday, I saw my father looking at an old movie and crying. And I'd never seen my dad cry, not when my mother was sick and not when not when she died or not at the impossibly sad funeral. And the film was Sir Carol Reed's Odd Man Out about the Irish Troubles, starring James Mason. It's a beautiful film, still works today.

18:36And I realized that film had given him a safe haven that nowhere else in his life could he express these emotions. And I was sitting there late at night with him. It was a school night. He was letting me stay up and he cried. And I just went, at that moment, I want to be a filmmaker. her. And later on in life, my late father-in-law, who's an eminent psychologist, I said, you know, I could never be aware of the date that my mother died, April 28th. It'll always be approaching and then, you know, receding, but I was never present. He said, I bet you blew out your candles on your birthday cake, wishing she'd come back.

19:08And I said, how'd you know? He said, look what you do for a living. You wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? But I then, by 39 or 40, I began to really work to understand what it was that I had not dealt with as a little boy with this tremendous loss. And it enriched my work even more. But it's born in tragedy. It's born in loss. My mother's gift, in a funny, perverse way, was dying. I don't want her to be gone. There's not a day that I don't think of her. My oldest daughter named her first child after her, my first grandchild.

19:46And it is It's a poignant and positive response in the middle of a lot of draped black funereal crepe that has attended my life like the Spanish moss and the live oaks in the South. But it's born of loss. And it's interesting. Your mother's been gone 60 years, I think. Sixty and a half. It's way too long. I will tell you that it is way too long. I talk about this with my brother. You know, it's funny. My dad died much later. He had moved from daddy to dad. She never left mommy. So you have two 70-year-old men in their 70s who refer to their mother as mommy. And we talk about that, you know, every time we talk.

20:24We just say mommy. And it just is what it is. She left at a time when he was 10 and I was 11. Do you think you're still grieving? Yes. The half-life of grief is endless. I think that's true.

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23:29The style that you have made your trademark, Ken, the use of paintings, fragments of letters, photographs with your more recent work where you zoom in and you're panning across, you're using music, you're using sound effects. How much of that was born of necessity in that let's take the Civil War documentary, you didn't have a lot of great visuals to work with. Well, we had a lot of photographs. And that's where the American Revolution is at an even greater deficit, because photographs are real. You show a picture of Abraham Lincoln with his general at Antietam, and you just know what's going on.

24:06But you don't have that. The variety of portraits of Washington are widely varied. Some look cartoonish, some don't look at all like him, some do look like him. And so you have to figure out a way in this case to make them come alive. It's the filmmaker's problem. Like you have to have a complex sound effects track. In this case, in addition to a third person narrator, I have been pioneering since the first film on Brooklyn Bridge. First person boys is read by the finest actors in the world. And I would submit that the cast list for this film is better than any film or television series that's ever happened.

24:38I think that Sir Kenneth Branagh could have read every single part except the female parts, and maybe I'm selling him short, but also Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep and Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney and Claire Danes. And I've probably listed a fifth of the voices that make this. Jeff Daniels, Josh Brolin. Josh Brolin is the voice of Washington, right? And I wonder, just let us into how you direct them, because I think that you are very specific on how you want these people to sound. So how do you know that that's how Washington would have come across? I don't know. Sometimes it's hard. And Washington was particularly hard.

25:19Last year, I was at the Rome Film Festival and I was flying back home and Dune 2 was playing and I was falling asleep and nodding out. But at one point I just sat up straight because I heard Josh's voice. He's in both the Dune films. And I just said, OK, let's give this a try. I said, look, you know, as everybody, I've told everybody this, you don't have to project. This is not the theater. It's almost like the way if you're reading to your kids or your grandkids, you actually lower your voice, which brings people closer. And so I said, you need to just inhabit the words. And in the case of George Washington, you have an impossible task.

25:53This is an opaque and unknowable person by design. He kept that rectitude so firmly there, but there is in the writing little glimpses. So I need you to be both opaque, but give me the little bits where you feel the emotion, you feel the passion. And he did it fantastically. I told Tom Hanks, you know, I'd make you George Washington in a second. He said, but then everybody would be saying, oh, Tom Hanks is George Washington. I said, right. So I gave him 14 different voices and every 14 is in the film. He is such a good reader that he actually slips in and hides with perfection behind the eight or 10 people that he plays in these 14 quotes.