Ken Burns and the American Revolution

25:47There's so many, just a list of these leaders that understood on some level for this to feel real, these ideas has to feel real in people's lives, where people feel like there's a. And right now what I'm worried about is I'm not pointing to any particular leader, but I think we've had a series of leaders and just generally our leadership in Congress who don't seem to understand that these ideas don't mean anything if they don't feel like they're real in people's lives, if they don't feel like they can. That's exactly right. And so we tell stories about these people. So let's take, go back to the revolution and take the most important person in the history of the United States, which is George Washington.

26:24Without him, we do not have a country. we just don't he's indispensable he's also deeply flawed he owns hundreds of human beings he's rash he rides out on the battlefield risking his life and therefore the cause he makes some bad military decisions but he's able to inspire men in the darkest of night to fight for a cause that nobody had ever fought for before in all of human history he is willing to sacrifice as the last line of the declaration says we mutually pledge to each other our lives our fortunes. He may be one of the richest men in America, and he spends most of his time living in other houses and tents for most of the war, never gets back to Mount Vernon.

27:02I think he spends four days during the war at Mount Vernon when it sees named commander-in-chief. He's willing to do that and his sacred honor. He knows how to pick subordinate talent, unafraid or jealous of the fact they may be better generals than him. Some are. He knows how to talk and defer to Congress, which is the important example of a democracy, of a republic. He's able to convince people from Georgia and New Hampshire that they're not from individual countries as they think they are, but a one thing, Americans. And more than anything else, he gives up power twice. First his military commission and that.

27:38And he didn't know he was George Washington. He didn't know there was going to be a dollar bill or a quarter or a big spiky monument in the national capital that's named for him or that'd be on the other side of the continent, a state name for him, or then every other state has either a county or a town name for him. He didn't know that. He didn't know how it was going to turn out. Even when the French came in on our side, he was worried when the British took Charles and he really thought, okay, this is over. I'm not going to be able to pull it off. And if you have the arrogance of the present thinking, ah, well, we know how it turned out.

28:07What could there be? Then you miss the interiors of the contingency. Good history is staying tuned because you think it might not turn out the way you know it did. And that's great. I have lots of people who write me letters or stop me on the street and say, you know, I watched the Civil War again, and I went into that last episode thinking maybe this time at Ford's Theater, the gun will jam. And I just give them a hug, and I said, hallelujah, me too, me too. I want that gun to jam, and it never does. He always gets killed. He always gets killed. But that is the understanding of the contingency.

28:42David McCullough said, and Rick Atkinson, who is this great historian, a writer in our film, likes to quote it. He says, in history, there's no foreseeable future. Right? Right? There's no foreseeable future. There's no, nobody knows that Washington, as he rides out just like a couple miles from here at Kips Bay in Long Island, I mean in Manhattan, he rides out and one of his aides is grabbing the horse. He's going to be shot. If he is shot, we're speaking English. English or French or Spanish. We're not who we are. And to then understand in way, I mean, we lament today and you were lamenting today.

29:25You know, we sort of don't have heroes, but a hero is not a perfect thing. A hero is, and the Greeks brought it to us, it's their idea, that heroism is a negotiation between the person's strength and their weaknesses. And sometimes that negotiation, it's all internal, is a war, a kind of psychological war. Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths and powers. And so if you just want some sanitized Madison Avenue, top-down version of the past, it's bankrupt. if you just say it's only bottom up and you throw out the Washingtons and the Jeffersons and in that unforgiving revisionism, it's bankrupt.

30:08And yet if you tell a complicated narrative that goes, yep, this is who they were. And sometimes as Wynton Marsalis said to us in our jazz series, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. We don't understand that in our friendships, in our loves, in our relationships and stuff, but we don't apply it to our politics because everything's binary. Everything's one thing, my way or the highway, or it's red state or blue state, or it's on or off. It's like the same in our computer world. It's either a one or a zero. And it doesn't work like that.

30:41Coming up, 250 years later, where a divided America goes from here.

31:13Hi, this is Johnny Cox from Oakland, California, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. I love Third Line because y 'all share stories that otherwise I wouldn't know. And I think they often have to do with topics and subjects that knowing about them really will, I believe, make me a better person. So thanks so much. Part Three, America's Unforeseeable Future

31:56We are in the very midst of a revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of nations. Objects of the most stupendous magnitude and measures in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested are now before us. John Adams

32:24Early in the film, in the series, there's a clip from John Adams describing how the early resistance to the British was fueled by resentment, that there was a resentment towards the occupation. And what that made me think about is like, that's like in the DNA of the American psyche in a lot of ways. It's a human thing, you know, that you've got this cause and it's really improbable that you have so-called ordinary people that don't have any property that are fighting for an idea of liberty, of freedom, of equality. What the hell does that mean? And then, of course, they're having to deal with at various times an occupying army, which always does bad things.

33:03It loots, it forages, it steals crops, it rapes women, it destroys houses, it breaks your china, all of those things which create resentment. And in Adams, John Adams is realizing that the kind of, you know, supercharged combination of both cause and fury is what is going to animate the reaction. It's true, particularly in New Jersey and South Carolina, where the fighting is so bloody and it is citizen to citizen, loyalists killing patriots, patriots killing loyalists, and not just set pieces of battles. what you find is this great animus that comes from people not only dedicated to an idea. A lot of people are dedicated to the ideas and disappear when the first shots are fired or disappear when their crops need to be planted or harvested.

33:50But this revolution begun by propertied men to protect their property and their rights suddenly get blown into natural rights, talking about things that all human beings have, which means enslaved people and Native Americans and women and people in the margins, as the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk says in our film, they're deeply influenced by the Declaration. So all these people are moving and changing sides. And in one season, more British and Ashton soldiers were killed in kind of ambushes and guerrilla actions that reminded me having the previous film on war of being Vietnam, just made me feel like we were in South Vietnam.

34:27They're talking about pacifying provinces. And all of a sudden, there's having to admit that province isn't pacified any longer. Exactly. And that made me think about how this is at the root of our existence as a country is a violent resistance to the excesses of an occupation. Then why do we struggle to understand whether it's Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan or Palestine? Why do we struggle as Americans to then understand or have empathy for other anti-occupation movements? Well, the Bible, the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes gets it. What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again.

35:04There's nothing new under the sun. Human nature doesn't change. And that human nature superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events. And we hear the echoes, we see the motifs. Mark Twain is supposed to have said history doesn't repeat itself, But of course, of course, it doesn't. No event has happened twice. But it rhymes. And that's exactly right. I've never made a film where it wasn't rhyming in the present. And our responsibility, our discipline as filmmakers is not to point signs saying, oh, isn't this rhyming like today? because that not only dates the film, it makes you fall out of the complexity, but that this thing needs to have a complex and nuanced story of what actually happened and not some sanitized Madison Avenue version of the revolution that we've normally been taught in large measure because there are no photographs and there are no newsreels and the paintings, they seem different from us.

36:02They have buckles on their shoes. They wear hose and they got breeches and that. And you think it can't be like us. They're exactly like us. The same degrees of virtue and venality of generosity and greed obtained then as they do now. And so you don't need to spend your time wasting your time as filmmakers going, oh, isn't this so much like today? You can just let it go. There's a failed invasion of Canada. We wanted to make it the 14th state. there's a continent-wide pandemic in which there are huge arguments about inoculations and Washington makes as the historian the distinguished historian Joe Ellis says the greatest military decision was to inoculate his troops there's a total eclipse there's lots of stuff that rhymes but you don't have to say hey doesn't that seem so much like today because you want to do something that lasts and you want to have something that you know our civil war series, today is a school day in America, as you and I are talking.

37:01And my Civil War series, which is more than 35 years old, is being shown in hundreds of classrooms. Not the whole thing, but a 20-minute or a 40-minute gulp about the Battle of Gettysburg or about black troops or about Lincoln and the White House and issuing demands. Whatever it might be, it's in use. And it wouldn't be in use if everybody's going, oh, isn't this so much like today? And I appreciate you saying that because I think one of the pressures in the podcasting world in which we work because it was born out of individual narrative, which is obviously nothing wrong with that. You profile many individual people, but it's done within a context, within a world.

37:37You build a world and then the people live in that world. I think often if you tell the story without someone living in a world out of the context, then in a way you're missing the whole point of the story. I appreciate that you take that approach, which makes me think about this idea that you're just pointing to about like not knowing the possible futures we may know possible futures from reading about history but you're never going to know exactly what's going to happen and so looking forward um this always brings me to my like future prediction a question but listen as we both acknowledge we are in a moment of division and difficulty uh in our country how it compares to things in the past that will will only be able to know as things proceed, right?

38:22Like you can't predict the future. But given coming out of making this film over the course of 10 years, and also let's just note a 10 years in which the country changed drastically. Yeah, we started Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency, you know, then so the things that were rhyming then don't rhyme now or some do and stuff comes and goes. We have a, the wife of a German general, Hessian general, who's traveling to the United States alone. She'd waited for the birth of her third daughter and was now making the perilous thing. She's anxious because she hears that Americans eat cats.

38:55Now, if it had come out when we're in the middle of the presidential campaign and people were talking about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats, completely made up, completely not true. But that would have said, oh, can you put that in to do that? I think this year it'll go over and nobody will notice it. But it's a beautiful moment and you begin to realize rumor conspiracy you know disinformation has always been when the first human being started having a conversation with one another somebody told a lie you know and that lie i mean if you think about the lie is at the is at the root of storytelling that that so so this brings me to what i kind of want to get to here which is your your films have almost a mythical quality, even though they're dealing in fact, they're told in a way that I felt that, you know, in my own tradition, you know, my parents have always taught me that it's important to remember your ancestors and the things that have happened, because if you're not rooted in anything, you're out there sailing out in the ocean with nothing to hold you down.

40:01Have you viewed your career up till now in a lot of ways as creating that anchor, not creating it or pointing to it, maybe, even in all of its complexity, that in some sense, we have to kind of understand and appreciate our ancestors because without understanding that, what are we? Where are we? Exactly. If you don't know where you've been, you can't possibly know where you are or where you're going. I agree with that. I'm a filmmaker. I'm not a historian. I'm not professionally trained in the scholarly sense, but I happen to choose history the way to tell my stories, the way some painter might choose oil as opposed to watercolor.

40:37And fortunately, the word history is mostly made up of the word story plus high, which is a good way to begin a story. So I don't want to overindulge it. I don't want people to take a certain thing away from this. We've worked for 10 years so that you can take away whatever you want to take away. But I promise you that every person in this country, I did not make it for a certain subset. I made it for everybody and I've traveled the country. I've said the same thing to Joe Rogan for three hours, as I said, the New York Times editorial board, as I said to inner city kids in Charleston and Detroit and Chicago, to suburban kids, to general audiences.

41:15I say the same thing about the story that we've told because everybody within the sound of my ears is a product of that, can get involved in that story. And other than that, what they do with it is what they'll do with it. And I hope, if I had a wish, I would say that I hope that the film might help put the us back in the US. I think one of the questions me and a lot of other fans of your films over the years have asked is like, what happens when Ken Burns stops making these films one day for like whatever reason, right? How important to you is it to kind of pass on the baton of this work, of this kind of documentary storytelling as you're looking into the future?

42:01How important is that for you? I don't think it's this kind of documentary telling because everybody is individual and unique. And we've been working together, many of us, for 50 years, for 45 years. I've got two or three production teams. We have a really rigorous and disciplined way of working, which I don't for a second think will not be carried on. Our fact-checking is as good, I think, as the New Yorkers. We're interested in facts. Our scripts, as we're working on them, they're not coming down from Mount Sinai and then informing, shooting, and editing. We are shooting before there's a script.

42:42We're shooting after there's drafts of scripts that sometimes will go to 20 different iterations. We're always researching. We're always changing up until the very last moment. And we have to be able to tolerate complexities. We have in our editing room and have had for years and years and years a neon sign in lowercase cursive. And it just says simply, it's complicated. Because you just want to respect the fact that if you think that scene is working and it's perfect, and then you learn some contradictory information, nobody wants to change it, but we change it. We go, we're willing to sacrifice, destabilize a scene that's working because the facts have to win out over the art every single time.

43:23given all that and your wish do you think right now after making this film and after making all the other films you've made that the moment we're living here in the US right now is part of just part of is it lean more towards just being part of a cycle or that it's a uniquely tenuous moment it's a uniquely tenuous moment unprecedented and an existential threat but history makes you optimistic because I can point to many other films that I've made that have been about similar existential threats you know they're not as unprecedented in this case but you know in human history there have been and in smaller moments i made a film by huey long who was sort of this dictator politician in in in louisiana that was going to run for president and was assassinated and you know it's got echoes of today but i don't need to say oh isn't this i mean just don't i made it in 83 it seemed to exist by itself.

44:19It had theatrical distribution and won a lot of awards. But if you dust it out and show it today, you go, oh, I know what Ken's trying to say. And you go, no, you don't. I'm just trying to tell a complicated story. So that actually leads me to kind of a, this is a little bit of a personal question, but I'm fascinated by it, which is I've interviewed over the years now doing this show, so many historians or people who have been so interested and fascinated. And like, you know, it's a catnip for them, history. And I thought about one common thing I see across a lot of those stories when I ask people personal questions about why they've been interested in it is usually people have experienced, like I did, some major loss as a young person.

45:04And, you know, I read that you lost your mom when you were young, I think just 11. When I was 11, and she'd been sick for all of my conscious life. So there was never a moment. And And yeah, no, I had a crisis later on in my life. And my late father-in-law, who was an eminent psychologist, I said, I seem to be keeping my mother alive. I could never remember. I could see the date that she died coming up, April 28th, but then it would be receding. And he looked at me and he said, I bet you blew your candles out on your cake, wishing she'd come back as a kid. And I said, how did you know? And he knew a lot of other stuff.

45:37And 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? And that intimacy was very helpful for me to go back and try to heal some of the things from that loss, but to realize that many of us are defined, and it sounds like you, by loss. And that it's interesting that we're always trying to design our lives kind of almost with a gated community and as if we can ensure that everything's running smoothly when in fact we're mostly defined by these difficult times and how you negotiate these difficult times or don't becomes the measure of who you are as a person.

46:20I feel incredibly lucky. I was once asked by a sociologist what my mother's greatest gift to me was and I said unblinkingly dying. I didn't want her to die. I started to cry when I answered it. But what I meant is that I wouldn't be here talking to you. I wouldn't have made these films if I wasn't constantly dealing in, you know, it's made me a good dad and a good filmmaker, I think. It's made me terrible in lots of other ways. But that loss has had a profound thing. I think that's true. If you're supported and have a life in which that you're able to not just bounce back from that, but use that, as you're saying, as fuel for your own interests, to expand, to make art, whatever it is, then it's a really positive thing.

47:04Yeah, I don't think you ever bounce back. I thought that the half-life of grief was endless. But that somehow you learn to transform some energy. I mean my mom's been dead for 60 and a half years which is I have to say way too long to be without a mother but I also know that the reason why I'm talking to you the reason why I just finished a film on the American Revolution and the films before that some of them 20 hours long some of them like this one 12 hours long some of them one hour I mean has been because of this and and it's not that I'm running away from it. It's just that whatever is part of the negotiation with our inevitable mortality, no one within the sound of my voice is getting out of here alive.

47:52And many of us don't deal with that. And that along the way, we will be challenged by extraordinary and at times unbearable loss. And that this is what human beings are kind of burdened with by consciousness, by language, by memory, by feeling, by art, all of those things that distinguish us from the prehensile thumbs from most other creatures also deliver this potentiality for enormous suffering.

48:38You know, out in the real world, you have the example of a perfect nature and imperfect human being. So nature can be a great guide and you can tell stories, which are always complicated, the ones that we like the most. And then out of those, you form a much more sophisticated and complex view of the world that helps you negotiate what's going on. And it helps you remain optimistic that the system is terrific. But, you know, you have to get through some of these speed bumps. And maybe they're there just like our own private losses. Maybe they're there for a reason for us to figure out how to overcome them.

49:24That was filmmaker Ken Burns talking with me about his new documentary series, The American Revolution. You can watch it now on pbs.org. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me, and me, and... Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Kadiyama. Irene Noguchi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Also, thank you to Johannes Dergi, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Maggie Luthar. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

50:13Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at throughlineatnpr.org. and make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.

50:54Thank you.