Ken Burns on America’s Next Story

0:00Ken Burns:I'm opening up crossplay. I've been playing against Dan, my colleague at the New York Times. Kat's played another move. She played stoop for 36 points. I've got a Z, which is 10 points. I'm guessing tanga is not a word. Let's see. Tanga is a word. Oh. Dan played his last turn. Let's see who won. It's so close, but I did win. New York Times game subscribers get full access to Crossplay, our first two-player word game. Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games. This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:46Ken Burns:I'm David Leonhardt, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion. And this is America's Next Story, a series about the ideas that once held our country together and those that might do so again. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

1:08David Leonhardt:America is too great for small dreams. Change is what's happening in America. And we will make America great again. God bless you and good night. I love you.

1:25Ken Burns:Today, my guest is the filmmaker Ken Burns. And in preparing for our conversation, I found a nice quote. Ken Burns decides what America thinks of itself. Through his documentaries on jazz and baseball, wars and politicians, he has told the story of America to America. His next project will come out this fall, and it covers the American Revolution. That revolution, our revolution, is a profoundly complicated story. It involves soaring idealism that changed the world, and also terrible hypocrisies. And both the good and the bad still shape our country almost 250 years later. In fact, every major American story since the revolution has borrowed heavily from its ideas and its language.

2:12Ken Burns:So I thought Ken Burns would be the perfect person to ask, what should America's next story be? In the conversation that follows, you'll hear us talk about why the revolution has never really ended and what he considers to be the greatest existential threat facing us.

2:33David Leonhardt:Ken Burns, thank you for joining me. It's my pleasure. Thank you, David.

2:38Ken Burns:Before we talk about America's next story, I want to look back to the country's origin story. The American Revolution was many things, as you explained in the new film. It was a battle to control valuable land. It was a civil war. But it really was an ideological struggle, too. And I wonder, what was the story that the revolutionaries told themselves and told the world about why they were risking their lives to break with England?

3:05David Leonhardt:What a wonderful question, David. it. It's so complicated because it is informed by so many other, not ulterior, but just other common motives. Many people, rich and poor, wanted Indian land on the Western border. And big land speculators like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and Patrick Henry, all of them saw this as a westward thing. And then, of course, a bankrupt treasury needs more taxes and the Americans were the least taxed. And so we know a lot of that story. So they're telling different stories about it, but it's all one of essentially not having a voice, not being heard, not having direct representation.

3:48David Leonhardt:That's what the grade school stuff talks as taxes and representation. But what happens in an interesting way is that what becomes an argument between English citizens suddenly breaks out into a discussion about natural rights. This is, after all, the Enlightenment, and it's a really heady moment, and it's got a lot of stuff to it and undertow to it. The folks who were arguing in Philadelphia were all fairly well-to-do, certainly property owners, certainly assumed a kind of Republican, elite aristocracy that would run this new version of things. Up to this point, the British constitutional monarchy is the best thing on earth.

4:31David Leonhardt:And so if you're a loyalist, you go, I already live under the best form of government on earth. Why are we going to try this radical thing? And in order for that radical thing to actually succeed militarily as well as politically, you're going to have to offer other stuff. And so it means that democracy is not an intention of the revolution. It's a byproduct. It's a consequence, perhaps even an unintended consequence of it. Because in order to win those battles, you're going to have non-property owners. You're going to have second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance. You're going to have felons.

5:07David Leonhardt:You're going to have ne 'er-do-wells. You're going to have recent immigrants, none of whom sort of fit the bill of the original configuration, but are the people who don't disappear when things get tough. And it's a pretty fluid and dynamic and kind of remarkable thing. You know, Ecclesiastes says, what has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. That means human nature doesn't change. Mark Twain is supposed to say, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. I've spent my entire professional career realizing the extent to which that human nature superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events, and we perceive patterns and themes and echoes and rhymes.

5:53David Leonhardt:But there is something new under the sun.

5:55Ken Burns:Tell me if you think this is fair, that in many ways it starts as a low-concept fight between rich Brits in England and rich Brits who are colonists. But in order to inspire people to fight the battle here in America, here in the colonies, one of the things that the American side does is summon these larger ideas of the Enlightenment.

6:19David Leonhardt:That's correct. And I don't think there's any conscious intention. I'm looking for this wonderful quote that I want to read to you that, if you can permit me. Of course. This is from Edmund Burke. And he said, the Americans have made a discovery or think they have made one that we mean to oppress them. We have made a discovery or think we have made one that they intend to rise in rebellion. Our severity has increased their ill behavior. We know not how to advance. They know not how to retreat. Some party must give way. And so rather than even attributing, David, any kind of intentionality to it, you begin to see that escalating rhetoric.

7:05David Leonhardt:You're a radical. You act more radical. You're a despot. You act more despotically. These sorts of things are the kind of natural destabilization like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which all of a sudden, you know, becomes destabilized and crashes. And that's what happens in the American Revolution. And while you can say that there is a phenomenal appeal to this word liberty, and that that becomes a huge force, it's also exchanged in letters and in newspapers and Reddit dinner tables and people at the margins, as the scholar Maggie Blackhawk says in our film, are completely inspired by this. Jane Kamensky, now the head of Monticello, says, you know, that liberty talk, it's heard by everybody.

7:53David Leonhardt:And then all of a sudden, you've opened the door. The second you mention gay marriage, it's going to happen, right? You know, the second you mention abolition, it's going to happen. It may take an enormous cost of blood and treasure in time, but it's going to happen. And so the American Revolution essentially, accidentally on purpose, opens the door.

8:18Ken Burns:So it becomes this inspiring cause, but of course, the revolution never lives up to the concept of liberty that it uses. And I think that's very hard for many people to think about because on the one hand, these ideals are so inspiring. And on the other hand, of course, the revolutionaries treat the native population, including natives who fight with the revolutionaries, just horrendously. And the sentence in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal. Well, of course, that isn't how the colonists treated the enslaved people in the Americas. And I think many people today can struggle to keep both these ideas in mind at once.

8:59Ken Burns:Either they minimize the injustices of that period, or they say that the injustices are everything and that the ideals never really mattered. So how can you at once view the revolution as inspiring and also take account of its deep hypocrisies?

9:17David Leonhardt:You call balls and strikes. That's it. That's it. And it allows contradiction and undertow to obtain because that's the part of human experience. If you try to superimpose an expository theory on it, it's always going to fail. Babe Ruth comes up once every nine times. He strikes out an awful lot. The highlights of everything show him hitting home runs. If you see all the dynamics here, not just of the George Washingtons and the John Adams and the Thomas Jeffersons and Benjamin Franklins, but bottom-up people who themselves wrestle with these contradictions, they are contradictory. This is Whitman-esque.

10:08David Leonhardt:Do I contradict myself? Yes. So you just permit that. You don't need to superimpose a fashion of historiography to interpret this. You actually just have to call balls and strikes. Were there people who, because of the limited name, I mean, when he says we hold these truths to be self-evident, there's nothing self-evident about these truths. Nothing. Nothing. As someone said in a film we made about Benjamin Franklin a few years ago, it's an old lawyer's dodge, right? Just say it's self-evident, you know? But there's nothing self-evident about the idea that all men are created equal. But once you've said it, you've opened the door.

10:45David Leonhardt:It's too late. And you can sit there and keep score. Well, you didn't treat this right. That's true. But in fact, Washington, by the end of his life, is freeing his slaves, right? Jefferson is saddled with the debt and sort of tries to dance around it. But Jefferson says, you know, it's like holding a wolf by the ears. You don't like it, but you dare not let it go. So there's lots of temporizing and you just have to say it. The complicated narrative, it finds comfort in contradiction. George Washington is an extremely flawed person. He's extremely rash. He also makes horrible tactical mistakes.

11:23David Leonhardt:It's the biggest battle of the revolution, and yet we do not have a country without him. Full stop. We live certainly in a computer world in which it's a one and a zero. We live in a media culture where it's an on and off switch, politics in which it's binary. There's nothing binary in human existence. There's nothing binary in nature. And so a good story, Richard Powers said, the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. Because good stories permit us the connection and the familiarity with all of these things. We want so to decide, good or bad, white hat, dark hat.

12:04David Leonhardt:And sometimes you just have to go, this is the way it happened.

12:08Ken Burns:As I often say to my kids,

12:09David Leonhardt:people are complicated. It's really important to remember. You know what, David? I have in my editing room, that main editing room that I've been working in for 34 years has a neon sign in it, in lowercase cursive, and it says, it's complicated. And we are offering, we being Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, my co-directors, are offering this 12 hours, six parts, as a way to say, you know, it's complicated, but I think it's worth seeing that by revealing that complication, those ideas are not even diminished. They're made more spectacular and more miraculous.

12:48Ken Burns:Let's bring some of these strands up toward today. One of the other ideas that the film talks about is possibility. Possibility defines the American story in so many ways. Moving West, great scientific inventions, great social movements that force the country to live up to its stated values. And then you come to modern times, and boy, I have to say, it often feels like we have lost some of our belief in possibility today. We're so angry, we're so cynical. And so I want to ask you if you can kind of imagine a future Ken Burns in the 21st century or the 22nd, looking back on the last several decades.

13:31Ken Burns:How would he explain how American society today has ended up as it has?

13:39David Leonhardt:Well, it's a tough, it's an impossible question because I'd have to be 20 or 30 years out to be looking back. I mean, I go back first to the words pursuit and to more perfect. One in the Declaration, one in the preamble of the Constitution. So we're in the process of becoming. So all of those big ideas are all never realized. They're partly, they're always unrealized. And you see progress. And I think right now what we perceive is just huge backwards movement. I don't think that the essential promise, the objective has been lost. And my feeling is you have to presume that human nature will be as it's always been.

14:34David Leonhardt:that we've looked and we've seen these institutions disintegrating before our eyes, a social contract that's sort of fraying at the edges and undermined already by social media and other forces that we think are unique. I remember in one film we have somebody talking about the telegraph as the death of letters. In 1858, Pete O 'Brien says, you know, they don't play baseball the way they used to when I was a child. I've heard that every single generation. And so we are a nation of chicken littles, as well as a nation of sort of forthright, patriot optimists. And history makes you kind of optimistic only because you can watch and see what happens.

15:19David Leonhardt:So our job now to land the plane is repair, restoration, reconciliation. And let me add one other R, which is sort of like respiration. You just have to breathe. These things happen in a way. I am not minimizing the existential threat to our way of life after 249 years. The Civil War, the Depression, the Second World War, these are big deals. But in the North, at least, free and fair elections took place. There was an independence of the judiciary. There were other things that were intact, all of which seem now in danger of slipping away. And it just becomes our job not to fall back. You know, Jefferson says a few phrases after Pursuit of Happiness, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

16:18David Leonhardt:It's not that hard to parse. He means that everybody heretofore has been subject to an authoritarian rule, and we basically accepted it. And it's been the want of every authoritarian to make sure that people are uneducated, they're suspicious, they're a peasantry, they are subjects. And we've created a new thing called Citizens, and that requires all that virtue, all that lifelong learning, all that responsibility, all of that energy to overcome that. I do not think that that is gone.

16:48Ken Burns:You have this moment in the final episode in which you explain how the founders came together to write the Constitution. The architects of the Constitution divided the federal government into three branches, the legislative, executive, and judicial, in a delicate balance by which each was meant to check the others to ensure against overreach that could result in tyranny. They feared that a demagogue might incite citizens into betraying the American experiment. Alexander Hamilton was concerned that an unprincipled man would mount the hobby horse of popularity and throw things into confusion in a government like ours.

17:25Ken Burns:He would write, No one is above the law. That certainly feels meaningful in today's America. Mark Twain would say, there you go, David, rhyming again, right? And like you, I'm an optimist and I take optimism from history, but I also never expected our country to be in the condition that it is today. And so I'm curious how you think of just how significant the dangers are.

17:53David Leonhardt:I think, as I said before, I think that the increase in the executive power, it is a great, perhaps the greatest existential threat to the existence of the United States right now. I mean, the patriots, the rebels, they're mainly selecting against a despot, against an authoritarian. And they knew human nature and they knew there was somebody would come down the pike that would be that way. And they're trying to figure it out. Jefferson wrote from he's in Paris, right? He's he's writing to Madison. And and Jefferson says, what if someone should lose an election, but pretend false votes and reap the whirlwind?

18:33They're like, they're not idiots.

18:36David Leonhardt:They are really super smart, and they've been trying to guard against that. And I think that in our own democratic, small d democratic DNA is all that we need in order to sort of try to right the ship. And I am optimistic, though I have never been as pessimistic as I am.

18:59Ken Burns:We talked before about how the revolution became something different from what it began as. It became something bigger and more inspiring. And that's a reminder of just how important national narratives are to shaping the future of countries. When you look at the United States today, what do you think are the kinds of stories that today we can tell ourselves about ourselves that might help us get out of this moment? Yeah.

19:29David Leonhardt:When I began this film and I turned and we were in the editing room on Vietnam, it wasn't completely locked yet. And I said, we're doing the revolution. And people were like, oh no, because there are no pictures. There's no newsreel, right? But when I said that in December of 2015, Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. Donald Trump was not supposed to emerge from the next month's Iowa caucus. Not a single person predicted a victory. And yet the story that we've told, and we've been so disciplined to not sort of try to do, to point to the rhymes, to say, oh, isn't this so like today?

20:12David Leonhardt:Because they keep changing. There's a moment we follow this beautiful story of this German, wife of a German officer who's bringing her three little kids across the ocean to join her husband, but she's over there traveling on the Atlantic worried that she hears that Americans eat cats. So if our film had just by sheer luck come out last year, oh, can you like you trying to put your thumb on the scale? It may just go by this fall without without a thought. Maybe what you read of Hamilton is more resonant, but that's not my job. I just, going back to balls and strikes, have to tell that. So I think that I am offering a good story.

21:01David Leonhardt:I am not offering it as a Democrat or a Republican. I'm not offering it as anything other than trying to tell a complicated story to make that story come alive. And that maybe it is possible to coalesce around the complexity of our origin story and revel in the complexity and reject the sort of attempt to make it a kind of binary, simple story. And within that complexity. It may be possible to draw people to the ironies, to the tragedies, to the exultant ideas, because this is the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ, period, full stop. And I'll defend that, including all of the hypocrisy that you've brought up, all of the unable to do this, all of the failure.