← Alive with Steve Burns
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- [00:02]
Ken Burns
Lemonade.
- [00:06]
Lemonada Media Host
For nearly half a century, Ken Burns has told the story of America, its characters, its contradictions, its ideals and its failures. From the Civil War to World War II to Vietnam. And now, with his new documentary on the American Revolutionary War, Ken Burns has given dads across America and countless hours of television to watch alone on their sofas, wondering why they don't have a closer relationship with their son. As a documentary dad myself, I was so excited to talk to Ken that I kept interrupting him like a thirsty man on his first date, which is.
- [00:46]
Ken Burns
Going to allow the British to capture Philadelphia. And they do. So he makes mistakes from the stories of us. Yeah, not just the US but us. And that's a big, big.
- [00:57]
Lemonada Media Host
Can I show a map real quick? Remember, we'll talk about something that's so.
- [01:00]
Ken Burns
Locke said, life, liberty and proper. When Eisenhower in the late term says, just like more perfect union is process words. And the other thing I want to.
- [01:10]
Lemonada Media Host
Say is, and Ken has such an encyclopedic knowledge that I honestly could have just let him go. I didn't even have to really be there at all, but I was there. And if you want to make your dad proud, you will watch this entire interview, including the ads, and then try to connect with your dad about it over the holidays. But he won't have seen it because he doesn't know how to get YouTube to work on the big TV. Sorry your relationship still sucks. When we found out you were coming, everybody on staff literally said the same thing. My dad is going to lose his shit. Ken Burns. Why do our dads love Ken Burns documentaries so much?
- [02:04]
Ken Burns
It's a good question. I think a lot of it has to do with the Civil War series that came out 35 years ago.
- [02:11]
Lemonada Media Host
1990. Icon.
- [02:13]
Ken Burns
1990. And that. That the dads, as they get older, get into history in the way that as we're younger, we don't think history is important, which is to our detriment. But as you get older, you sort of understand how important what came before is to what's happening now and where we may be going. And then they begin to invest in, if you're an American, particularly American history, and what's going on. And that's where I live. And so there's an interesting synergy. There was a moment after the Civil War series came out where an older woman, a middle aged woman, came up to me and said, I love the Civil War so much. What are you working on next? And I said, a history of baseball. And she goes, oh, my son and my husband will like that. I said, so you're a military history expert? And she goes, no, no, no. I just love the stories. I said, your husband and your son are going to watch baseball. I made it for you because it's about those stories and it is about the sort of emotional archeology that emerges from the stories of us. Not just the us, but us.
- [03:25]
Lemonada Media Host
I was meaning to ask you this as someone, because you spent a decade living in the edit. Yeah, I have this theory also as a writer, as a filmmaker. But when I look at history, and I've been spending time reading history, now that I've turned 40, I've become that dad too. But I think I have a theory. I think it's three things and I would love your analysis on this. I think there is a notion of comfort that we get from the past. Bad times in the past always have this little bow that wraps up. There's also this underlying feeling where the present can be so anxiety inducing because it fundamentally tests our complicity. When I read about brave people in the past and what they did, their moral compass had to be articulated through their actions.
- [04:12]
Ken Burns
Right.
- [04:13]
Lemonada Media Host
And the present is so anxiety inducing and at times nauseating because the present is testing my complicity.
- [04:24]
Ken Burns
That's correct.
- [04:24]
Lemonada Media Host
What am I current? Am I courageous enough to act out my moral compass? Am I thinking about this the right way?
- [04:33]
Ken Burns
Yeah, I do think there is, I wouldn't say so much a comfort, but there's a kind of an essential guarded optimism that you get from studying the past. Because people go, right now, the Chicken Little, the sky is falling, we're so divided. I go, yeah, we've been divided just about all the time. And the revolution which we've smothered in gallant bloodless myth is in fact a bloody civil civil war which has lots of civilian deaths in the way that what we call our civil war is a sectional war that doesn't have.
- [05:04]
Lemonada Media Host
But we're not implicated as main characters in the story.
- [05:06]
Ken Burns
Right. So then I would like to address this idea of the anxiety producing present. I would still suggest that if you are truly present and you know this from your own work. I know this from my own work. If you're truly present, you're liberated. If you're worrying about the future, you're anxious. If you're obsessed with the past, you're depressed. And so the only real obligation is to be in the present. But what you bring up about this moral obligation is interesting. I've been working on this film about the American Revolution for almost a decade. I showed about A year plus ago, what was then the introduction, the overture to the series to a dear friend. And she looked at it, it's like nine and a half, ten minutes. She goes, it really makes me wonder what I would have done. Would I have been a loyalist? Would I have been a patriot? Could I have taken up arms in defense of an idea? Could I have killed somebody else in defense of that idea? Would I. Could I have given up my own life? And you got to go, whoa, we just did that in the first 10 minutes of the film. Yeah, that's really great. But I also went, how come I didn't think about that? How come I wasn't like, of course, that's the central thing. Who would I be? I mean, to be a loyalist back in the revolution, to beat this to death a little bit to. Is to be a conservative, is to say the British constitutional monarchy is the best form of government on earth so far. Why would I get rid of this? All of my prosperity and my health and my. My education and the land that I own is. Is. Comes from that. Why would I go with some crazy.
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Lemonada Media Host
Idea you're rocking with the nanny state, The British nanny state. They're taking care of me. I got my land.
- [06:43]
Ken Burns
We're good. Yeah.
- [06:45]
Lemonada Media Host
And. And kind of what the. The people who fought in the revolution were saying. No, no. Now you chose. We're here, we're sitting this. It comes out in November, the do century.
- [06:55]
Ken Burns
Right.
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Lemonada Media Host
But we are sitting upon the 250th anniversary.
- [07:02]
Ken Burns
Didn't plan that. Like, I started this.
- [07:04]
Lemonada Media Host
But you chose a very different approach than Lin Manuel Miranda. No rapping. You can't lay down.
- [07:09]
Ken Burns
No, no, no. Well, look, I'm not going to go near Hamilton because it is. We're 25 years into this century, 25 years into this new millennium, and he has already created the single greatest cultural phenomenon, work of art. I mean, when my young girls are. And my granddaughter are. Could. Could. Like if you said, I'll give you a million dollars if you can do all of Hamilton right now, two and a half hours, they two out of three get a million bucks. Wow. Because they know it.
- [07:38]
Lemonada Media Host
You're gonna let your grandchildren open with. How could a bastard or open with bastard?
- [07:43]
Ken Burns
They've got. They've got even more. You know, it gets a little bit more down and dirty than that, but they love it. And they know things like who John Laurens is, and they understand the tensions between a kind of strong federalist thing versus a Jeffersonian ideal. And you go, wow, there's no Way to compete with that. But when I started this, I was in the middle of our finishing the Vietnam series in. In December of 2015, Barack Obama still had 13 months to go in his presidency.
- [08:10]
Wise Ad Voice
Yes.
- [08:11]
Ken Burns
And I. I realized that I had to do the revolution. I saw a map. There's no pictures or newsreels from the revolution. And that's a huge obstacle to overcome. But I thought we could figure out how to do it. And we did, over the 10 years, do it. But I said, we're going to do the revolution. No one was ever thinking 250. I got about four years into it. I said, you know, if we can accelerate just a little bit, we could be ready with all six episodes in 12 hours by the spring of 25, which is the 250th anniversary of Lexington and Concord when the war began. And Sarah Botstein, my co director, said, yeah, we're not gonna do that. It'll be the fall. I said, okay, at least we'll get in ahead of whatever they're gonna do for the 250th. I assumed it would be treacly fife and drum stuff. And then all of a sudden, the 250 things happen. It's a big hot potato politically. People are arguing about whether you can it's woke or whether you're gonna celebrate or all the different things.
- [09:08]
Lemonada Media Host
Well, you did not shy away from its importance. And you have said, quote, in regards to this moment, the American Revolution, you've said the American Revolution was, quote, the most important event since the birth of Christ. You have been saying this on the press tour. Now, here's the thing. I have a question for you. You are basically having a Shania Twain position when it comes to every other event from 0 to 1776. You know her hit single, that don't impress me much, do you?
- [09:38]
Ken Burns
No, I don't, but thank you. I should be.
- [09:40]
Lemonada Media Host
Well, Isaac Newton's discovery of gravity in 1665, you're like, that don't impress a meme.
- [09:45]
Ken Burns
It does. It's up there. Let's just think about it. Everybody on Earth is a subject. Yeah. In 1776, there's some people clinging to the Eastern seaboard who are now citizens. It's never happened before. Jefferson says a little bit after the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration. All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, meaning not hard to understand. It means that we're just. We kind of put up with being under the boot of the. Of the tyrant. We kind of deal with it. And we're creating something that's going to require a lot more energy, meaning citizenship. It's going to have a lot more responsibility. And by the way, pursuit of happiness doesn't mean the acquisition of stuff in a marketplace of things, but it means lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. And then if you pursue this with virtue.
- [10:35]
Lemonada Media Host
Yeah.
- [10:36]
Ken Burns
You have then gained the right to be a citizen with all of the responsibilities. This is brand new in the world. The world. Ecclesiastes, that's the Old Testament, says there's nothing new under the sun, meaning human nature doesn't change. And that's really true. And you understand that. That's why when people say history repeats itself, it never has repeated itself ever. No event has happened twice. But we do understand that, that human nature superimposes itself on stuff. And so we see the echoes and the motifs and the rhythm occurrences and things like that, what Mark Twain called the rhymes. History doesn't repeat itself. He's supposed to have said it rhymes. So I've spent my entire professional life working really hard on a story, knowing that in December of 2015, one month before the Iowa caucuses, out of which Donald Trump was not supposed to emerge, there are certain rhymes to the revolution that will not be the same. There's a wife of a German officer that we track in this film coming over to join her husband for the battle of Saratoga. And she's waited for the birth of a third daughter and is making Perilous Crossing. And she's worried because she hears that Americans eat cats. Okay? So if that, if our film had come out last fall, they would be, Ken, you did that because of what's going on in Springfield. They're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats.
- [11:58]
Lemonada Media Host
They're eating.
- [12:00]
Ken Burns
They're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. You go, no, it's actually been in there forever. There may be other rhymes when it comes out next month.
- [12:11]
Lemonada Media Host
And what you're saying is there's a.
- [12:13]
Ken Burns
Failed invasion of Canada trying to make it the 14th state, not the 51st state. There is a continent wide pandemic, or pandemics, plural, that kill more people than the revolution does. There's a total eclipse. You know, stuff happens and then it recurs or it rhymes, as Twain would say. And our job is to focus not on pointing arrows and making neon signs to that, but saying, this is the story of what happened, warts and all being umpires, calling balls and Strikes. And, and as much as it kind of disconcerts my colleagues to say that I. It's the most important event since the birth of Christ. It gets people's attention and it asks them to ask of themselves, well, what do I think? It's more. Yesterday I did an event at a business and an English guy came up to me and said, what about, you know, the Magna Carta? What about this? What about Cromwell? What about all? And so you go, yeah, these are all important. But now we're having a conversation that has a little bit more substance to it, to just then, what's the latest thing that drops? Sure.
- [13:17]
Lemonada Media Host
But let's talk about the main character of your movie.
- [13:19]
Ken Burns
Okay.
- [13:20]
Lemonada Media Host
And I'm going to apply him vis a vis the culture war that's happening right now in the comment section and on Reddit, but let's let it rock. George Washington, the main character of your movie, is he a hero or a piece of shit?
- [13:32]
Ken Burns
Well, see, that's the problem is if you live in a binary media culture in which you have to decide somebody either has to be great, perfect, a hero, meaning we presuming that heroes are perfect, when in fact heroes are a combination of strengths and weaknesses, and it's the negotiation or the war between those strengths and weaknesses that divide heroism, or we're in a computer world in which it's all a one or a zero, then that question has some relevance. But in fact, we're human beings and we're deeply, deeply complex. We introduce, or we. I mean, the problem with George Washington is that he comes to us so opaque. He's like, as the historian in our film, Jane Kaminsky said, like a marble statue. You can't, you can't get at him. He's just collecting pigeon shit. And that's, that's, that's what it is. But this is somebody who is. Without him, we do not have a country. And we can say that we introduce you. We take, we hope, the opacity off him and many of the other bold face names of the period, but we introduce you to literally scores and scores of people you've never heard of. They may have not had their pain pictures, portraits painted. 99.9% people didn't, but didn't mean they didn't exist and weren't central to the success of it. And they weren't, say, female or enslaved or free blacks or Native Americans or Spanish or Germans or Irish or Welsh. And so it's a great combination of stuff. But going back to this main guy who is only person so fascinating. When we say fascinating, it's that we're not all one thing or all the other. So, you know, the tendency in historiography is to cancel people or to rescue them or whatever. He doesn't need rescuing. He doesn't need canceling. He's just. He's deeply flawed. He is rash. He rides out on the battlefield at Kips Bay, not far from where we are right now, risking his life. And if the life is risked, there's no revolution anymore. He's an aide, grabs the reins of the horse and pulls him back. He does the same thing a little bit later at Princeton, at a battle where his aide puts his hands over his face, certain he's going to be killed. At Monmouth in New Jersey, he stops a retreat, a Patriot retreat, just by riding out into the middle of the battlefield, where I'm sure every British or Hessian soldier is trying to kill him. And he makes really bad decisions on the battlefield. The largest battle of the Revolution is what?
- [15:59]
Lemonada Media Host
The largest battle of the Revolution. Yeah, you're quizzing me right now, Ken.
- [16:02]
Ken Burns
Yeah, but this is our origin story, and no one knows it. The largest battle is right here. It's the Battle of Long Island. And George Washington makes a tactical mistake, even worse for the fact that he's a surveyor and should have known the land of leaving his left flank exposed. So the British, led by loyalists, take 10,000 men through the undefended Jamaica Pass in the Gowanus Highlands, completely surround our army, and it's only through a providential rain and fog that we're able to survive. And he can get his army back to New York to surrender. And New York, by the way, is the hotbed of British activity and loyal activity for seven years, more than seven years. They get it on September 15, 1776, and they don't let go of it until two years and a month after the surrender at Yorktown, when evacuation day, November 25, happens, he does the same mistake again, leaving his right flank exposed in another gigantic battle, the Battle of Brandywine, which is going to allow the British to capture Philadelphia, and they do. So. He makes mistakes, and yet he is someone who knows how to inspire people in the dead of night to fight for a cause which no one on earth has ever fought for, the idea that all men are created equal. He's able to pick talented subordinate generals who. He's not afraid of their intelligence or their initiative. He's able to work with Congress and to defer to them. But most importantly, he can convince a Georgian and a New Hampshireite. That what they call their country, Georgia and New Hampshire, is actually a state in a new thing, and that you're an American and you share something in common. And most important of all, he gives up his ultimate power twice. He resigns his military commission when he could have become the dictator and been the military ruler of the United States, and everybody wanted it thus. And he then gave up his presidency after two terms, setting an example, which has been an extraordinary American example for all of these reasons and more. George Washington is the main character of the story.
- [18:09]
Lemonada Media Host
You know, what's so interesting is that he is this fascinating character. And I'm watching this and I'm thinking to myself, holy shit, he was a modern aristocrat, very wealthy, maybe the wealthiest guy in America.
- [18:24]
Ken Burns
Right?
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Lemonada Media Host
So now. So now, for someone who's watching this, just think of the richest hedge fund bankers or the current technocrats that you see that hold all of the wealth, but simultaneously, this guy's on horseback fighting as a general. He didn't need to do this, is what I'm saying, Ken. He didn't need to have the smoke.
- [18:42]
Ken Burns
So you are so right when they say at the end of the Declaration of Independence, we mutually pledged to each other.
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Lemonada Media Host
Yeah, yeah.
- [18:49]
Ken Burns
Our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor at Valley Forge. He lost at least 500 officers, major officers who got letters from home going, hey man, we're making lots of money off this war. Why don't you come back? And they did. Yeah. I mean, they stuck it out.
- [19:04]
Lemonada Media Host
But, Ken, think about the people. We're blocks away from Wall Street.
- [19:06]
Ken Burns
Yeah.
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Lemonada Media Host
You think these guys on Wall street would really be on horseback fighting a war in Long Island?
- [19:13]
Ken Burns
No.
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Lemonada Media Host
They're in front of a Bloomberg terminal. They don't want that fucking story.
- [19:16]
Ken Burns
No. And they're trying to figure out how to live forever when, hey, bad news. None of us get out of here alive. And George Washington understood that better than any one of them and was willing, along with many of the other founding fathers. But more important, all the. That we haven't been taught about who equally did this. We think of the people who fought the militia, the Minutemen, and stuff like that. They're great and they do wonderful things, but they tend to be frightened in battle. Understandably, they're not trained soldiers. They have crops to plant, so they leave. They have crops to sow, so they leave. So what becomes a continental army? Teenagers ne' er do wells, second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance. Recent immigrants, people who are not propertied when they're forming a government to support the rights of well, to do property owners. And all of a sudden they realize we've won this war, we have to give them something. So democracy is not the intention of the American Revolution. It's an unintended consequence of it. Because there was a realization that, you know, we didn't get here without.
- [20:20]
Lemonada Media Host
That was so wild for me too, that it was fundamentally a land play for them.
- [20:24]
Ken Burns
Yeah.
- [20:24]
Lemonada Media Host
And democracy was the side dish. So check it out.
- [20:27]
Ken Burns
It's not even a sijist they're worried of. Democracy meant the rule of the mob. And there's two ministers in Boston that are talking said, what do you want a tyrant who lives? One tyrant who lives 3,000 miles away, or 3,000 tyrants not a mile away? And that's a big, big.
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Lemonada Media Host
Can I show a map real quick so our audience can see this? I mean, one thing that surprised me was how tiny America was when it started. I mean, look at this. This is basically the parking lot at MetLife Stadium. Basically, right?
- [20:52]
Ken Burns
No.
- [20:53]
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- [21:51]
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- [23:05]
James Corden
Hello, I'm James Corden, and on my new show, this Life of Mine, I sit down each week with some of the most fascinating people on planet Earth. From Dr. Dre to Julianne Moore to David Beckham to Cynthia Erivo to Martin Scorsese to Jeremy Renner to Denzel Washington to Kim Kardashian, we talk about the people, places, possessions, music and memories that made them who they are. These are intimate conversations full of stories that you've never heard before. This Life of Mine premieres October 21st, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [23:44]
Lemonada Media Host
Now. My question to you, though, is this, is that when you think about the American Revolution, was it fundamentally a war of conquest and about expanding west, or was it about democracy?
- [23:57]
Ken Burns
It was not about democracy. It was about a quarrel between Englishmen that broke into a much bigger thing because we're at the Enlightenment, so it becomes about natural rights. And so when Thomas Jefferson said we hold these truths to be self evident, nothing was self evident about these truths that all men are created equal. The word all meant it was over. Slavery was over, even though it took four score and nine years to make it so women are going to vote. Even took 144 years before that's happening. But one of the reasons that's so interesting and your question is to the point, they did not meet in Philadelphia for the first and second Congress, calling themselves the Eastern Seaboard Congress. Congress, they didn't make George Washington the head of the new army, not the militias from certain states, but this new Eastern Seaboard army. They called it the Continental Army. They knew where they were going. And we're taught in school that it's about taxes and representation. And it is. They wanted to, to have a voice in the say of what taxes. Yeah, but it's about Indian land. That's what it's about. It's that the British, once they won the French and Indian War, which we, which the rest of the world calls the Seven Years War, put a line of demarcation across the Appalachians where that red line is, and said, you cannot go any farther than that because we can't afford to Protect you. And that pissed everybody off from the ordinary guy who his family has been dependent and worked somebody else's property for a thousand years in Wales or Scotland or Ireland or England, and now owns something and wants more in the Ohio Valley or the big land speculators like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin who want to make a killing in this land that they don't own.
- [25:38]
Lemonada Media Host
Remember, we'll talk about something that's.
- [25:39]
Ken Burns
So Locke said, life, liberty and property. That's more accurate than life, liberty and pursuit of happiness because these were property owners looking to protect it. But saying pursuit of happiness was great lifelong learning. And it's the pursuit. So basically it opened us up to a nation in the process of becoming. It's a process word pursuit, just like more perfect union is process words. And so. And the other thing I want to say is this is gigantic. What they don't understand is the weather. They can't predict it, of course. And the distances blow. The British think of how small England is. The distance between Boston and Charleston is greater than the distance between London and Venice. And they are trying to conquer a territory which is relatively small in our mind's eye today. But as a British soldier complains, it says what looked like America doesn't look much bigger on a map than Yorkshire. You know. And then they run into the fact of just how flipping big this place is. And that's one of the. And they're 3,000 miles away from the home office and reinforcements and whatever. And even though they've got the greatest navy in the world and can project their power anywhere along that, they're screwed. They can't. As Thomas Paine said, you know, we conquer by a drawn game, meaning we don't have to win. You always have to win. We just. We just have to be not defeated. And if that happens, you're screwed.
- [27:05]
Lemonada Media Host
This is the rocky one strategy. I just gotta go the distance against Apollo Creed. But in this case, Apollo's the British. Now, here's something really interesting that I was thinking about. Check out this letter that you guys unearthed. That George Washington, he's writing to other generals because incentives matter in these words. Take a look at this. He says, quote, the expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the six nations of Indians. The immediate objectives are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more. That the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed. You will not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of, of their settlements is affected. God damn. George Washington was nuts. I mean, this basically is a call for genocide or domicide.
- [28:06]
Ken Burns
It's a call to the native peoples of the Haudenosaunee, the six nations of what was called the Iroquois Confederacy, which was ironically the way we open our film because it's the inspiration for Benjamin Franklin to propose the idea of a similar union between the colonies. And it passes, but then nobody can sell it back in the colonial capitals. And so it dies. His, his, his war cry, join or die, becomes a war cry in the revolution 20 years later. The irony is that many of the native peoples, in fearing further encroachment onto their land, begin to fight back in northern Pennsylvania and in upstate New York and Washington in the middle of the war, where it's not really happening in New England at all and not happening much in the Mid Atlantic states because the Brits have pursued a Southern strategy to hang on, to think are the more profitable, meaning more enslaved people. Washington directs his General Sullivan to go into upstate New York and basically destroy the orchards and the towns. And let me just say, they're not living in teepees. They're living in permanent villages. Some of them have clabbered homes with glass panes in the windows. So you as a, as a explorer might come across a town, you wouldn't know instantaneously that this was not a European settlement or a Native American settlement right away. And the idea is that we're going to eradicate this. They know where they want. When they say Continental army and Continental Congress, they know where they're going. And that is an important story that we have left out of it. And we are not.
- [29:48]
Lemonada Media Host
You're not shying away.
- [29:49]
Ken Burns
We're not shying away. And if you go back to the baseball metaphor that we're calling balls and strikes, then you can, you can just play the highlight reel of Babe Ruth and all he does is hit home runs. But Babe Ruth also strikes out an enormous amount of times. And also, by the way, he only comes up once every nine times at bat. And other people, sometimes a low paid middle infielder is the person of the moment that you're depending on. And that is a pretty good metaphor. If you call balls and strikes, then you're not throwing anybody out because they've done a bad thing.
- [30:18]
Lemonada Media Host
Yeah, you're just calling a spade a spade.
- [30:20]
Ken Burns
You're just saying this is what happened.
- [30:21]
Lemonada Media Host
But what's important here, Ken And I think the reason why I wanted to.
- [30:24]
Ken Burns
Share this and it's so powerful in our film.
- [30:26]
Lemonada Media Host
That's in the film. Exactly. But what you did to give it modern context is, hey, I subpoenaed George Washington's imessage. The reason why this is important is it's not how you and I act on podcasts or in Instagram stories. Let me see those whatsapps. Let me see those imessages. You found the text messages he's sending his generals. This is what he's really about. And say it with your chest. He's saying, eradicate and destroy their crops. Make it so they don't come back.
- [30:54]
Ken Burns
So Thomas Jefferson, much earlier in the war, is faced with the Cherokee deciding that because it's now the time to fight back against colonial encroachment, and they attack. The older elders are against it, but young warriors like Dragon Canoe say, no, no, no to time of doing. And what happens is all the inactive militias in the south, in Virginia and the Carolinas and Georgia, mount up an attack. And George Washington says, you know, we should not have an Indian alive from here to the Mississippi. They've already decided that this entire region to the Mississippi. And it's very interesting that the Treaty of Paris, the treaty that ends the Revolutionary War, gives us everything to the Mississippi. This has been the plan all along. If you look at the Declaration of Independence, it's got great poetry at the beginning and the end, but it's mostly a list of the grievances against the king. And the last one is he has, you know, encouraged insurrections, meaning, you know, urged blacks, enslaved blacks to rise up against their rebel masters. Not their loyalist masters, only their rebel masters. The British. Entire British economy is based on slavery. I mean, it's got the Commonwealth. The profitable colonies in North America are actually the 13 in the Caribbean because we are the least profitable, except for Virginia and North and South Carolina. But he, you know, he just says. And he has, you know, had the natives at our edges, you know, whose merciless Indian savages, whose only known form of warfare is the destruction of every age, sex and condition. And that's in the Declaration of Independence. It's right there.
- [32:40]
Wise Ad Voice
Yes.
- [32:41]
Ken Burns
So are some of the most important words. I. I would say the second sentence is the second most important sentence in. In the English language.
- [32:49]
Lemonada Media Host
Well, fun fact, the Declaration of Independence. Is it true that you read it to Your family every 4th of July?
- [32:53]
Ken Burns
Every 4th of July.
- [32:54]
Lemonada Media Host
Do you also include the Indian savages?
- [32:55]
Ken Burns
No, I don't.
- [32:56]
Lemonada Media Host
Okay, so you do the radio Edit.
- [32:57]
Ken Burns
I do the radio edit, I do the. I go pretty far into the thing and I get to the list of usurpations, as Jefferson called it, the complaints, and then think, you know, it goes on for most of the. Oh, no, no, no.
- [33:10]
Lemonada Media Host
He waxes poetic.
- [33:11]
Ken Burns
And then I just sort of. But I do tell them you shouldn't.
- [33:14]
Lemonada Media Host
Publish that on LinkedIn.
- [33:14]
Ken Burns
And my kids already know of this stuff because they're, you know, the kids are now being taught a much more complete history in school.
- [33:20]
Lemonada Media Host
Well, one of the things that I love about your documentaries is you don't shy away from the pimples and the blemishes of our country and you give voice to people that often were not given a voice in history. I'm talking about the indigenous people, the women and the slaves. Before making this, did you know that slaves fought on both sides of this war?
- [33:37]
Ken Burns
Yes, but I did not know the extent to which African Americans making a really profound decision choice about how. What is best for their future, that 3/4 of the 20,000 who fought supported the British, mainly because the British, I.
- [33:57]
Lemonada Media Host
Mean, Washington had a slave that fought.
- [33:59]
Ken Burns
For the British there. He escaped, who, who was partially. And then. And then got away. And then there are 5,000 black Americans who were fighting from the very beginning at Lexington and Concord on Breeds Hill. And so James Forten, who's a freed black man In Philadelphia, Kid, nine years old, I think, in 1776, he hears the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence and doesn't for a second think it doesn't apply to him, doesn't see it as just white men. And he fights for the patriot cause. He's captured, he's given a chance to go back, to go to England without any punishment because he's the same age as the ship captain son. And he goes, no. And he gets put in a prison ship in the east river and nearly dies and makes his way home, becomes a very rich man in the merchant marine and helps fund the abolition movement. And when he's encouraged to apply for a pension which is available, he said, no, I volunteered to do this so you can say one thing or the other. And there's always a time in which the opposite may not also be true at the same time moment. And that's what good storytelling is. The novelist Richard Powers said, the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do is argue, won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. And that why is because a good Story is not taking sides. It's understanding that Achilles has his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strength.
- [35:27]
Lemonada Media Host
So do you think documentaries can change minds?
- [35:30]
Ken Burns
Yeah, I know they can. I know I've seen the evidence at the margins where all things take place. Not like, oh, wow, I think I'm going to become this as opposed to this. I think what happens is that we're so up in arms about propaganda these days, we're so sensitive and thin skinned about it. But at the end of the day, I don't think anybody really just says, oh, I've just seen this great documentary. I'm gonna change my political registration or I'm going to throw away my guns or I'm going to buy more guns, whatever it might be. I think what happens is that you begin to understand that the complexity and the majesty therefore of our story is the most important thing and that anybody who tries to misuse it. You know, there's a wonderful. We follow this Hessian soldier grunt, right, Johan Evald, and he's contemptuous of the Americans and their, you know, Thomas Paine and this radical stuff. And he's happy when they win at Germantown and all of this sort of stuff. And then he's there at the surrender at Yorktown and he says, who would have thought 100 years ago that out of this multitude of rabble would come a people who could defy kings?
- [36:44]
Lemonada Media Host
Wow. Yeah.
- [36:46]
Ken Burns
That's what this story is about. The multitude of rabble who defied kings.
- [36:50]
Lemonada Media Host
You've obviously defined an art form and we see a lot more documentaries in the space today. But what is the difference between. And some of them are very bad. What is the difference between documentaries and propaganda?
- [37:04]
Ken Burns
Well, you know, propaganda is obvious. It has a. And let's not even just say propaganda because that has a built in pejorative sense. We have still the First Amendment among which it gives us the rights of free speech. So if you want to say whatever you want to say, you have the right to say whatever you want to say so far. Let's hope that lasts. So let's not call it prop again. Let's just say you want to advocate for something. You want to say that the migrant workers in the 1960s in the Central Valley of California, as a famous CBS white paper harvest of Shame pointed out, are mistreated and abused and not paid well, that's fine. You want to say you're Michael Moore, want to do Bowling for Columbine about guns or about health care or about 911 Fahrenheit 9 11. You're advocating a particular point of view. Totally fine. That's a doc. They're all documentaries, and that's fine. And there's some documentaries that are incredibly stylized, like Errol Morris that ended up getting a condemned man freed, Thin Blue Line. There are ones that Werner Herzog, the great German director of feature films like Fitzcarraldo, are incredibly stylized things that, you know, fit. There's my historical stuff. There's Frederick Wiseman, who doesn't add narration, who doesn't add music or sound effects to anything. It's just what's called cinema verite. There are so many different kinds of things. What I object to is this branch of documentaries, which I would say is not part of documentaries, which are the reality things. No one eats bugs on national television. No one proposes to the person they. They think that they want to spend the rest of their life with on national television. So I think, you know, I. I'd.
- [38:57]
Lemonada Media Host
Weed all that Love is Blind.
- [39:00]
Ken Burns
You want to get rid of Love is Blind. I need, I need to call. Can I. Do. I have one phone call. Can I call a daughter and, and, and. And get the. The latest on Love is Blind? Because I don't have time to. I mean, I know I've heard of it, but I don't know what's going on. I, I do think that we. There's a lot of bread and circus. We're distracted by a lot of stuff and that the stuff that matters to me is the consequential and dimensional stuff. Whether it's advocating, which is an honorable democratic thing or not, we choose not to advocate for any particular point of view. We're just saying, here are the balls and strikes. This is how this went down. But usually the story is so complex that people on both sides. I have traveled the country. You've said you've done your homework. You know who I've talked to. I have never said anything different, different to Joe Rogan than I did to the New York Times editorial board. That I'm saying to you that I said to some school kids, high school kids in Chicago and inner city high school kids in Detroit and hundreds of other places where we've been talking to people. I have not changed. I haven't needed to. We are calling balls and strikes. And to a person, they've all been, whoa, I had no idea. Meaning the complexity. Meaning we have been burdened by our lack of knowledge of the past, not by any kind of knowledge of it. There's not too much. Harry Truman is supposed to have said the only thing that's really new is the history. You don't know. And I agree with that. This is what we're all talking about, what we don't know.
- [40:30]
Lemonada Media Host
One of the things I didn't know was this was at the time, about 20% of America's population was enslaved African Americans. What did people at the time think when they read something like, quote, all men are created equal. Did they have a wink emoji after that?
- [40:48]
Ken Burns
No, but it's a really. It's a central point. People spoke, but not that much about slavery before the revolution. People would address, as the historian Bernard Bailyn says in our film, the late historian Bernard Bailyn that about its evils, but nobody really talked about it. The second you say all men are created equal, that's all people talk about. Because that's heard not just by the people who wrote it, the propertied white men for whom these new ideas were going to benefit, but they're heard by the people who don't own property, but are working laborers. They're heard by enslaved people who are serving it. The liberty talk, as Jane Kaminsky says in our film, is really leaky. People are hearing it everywhere. So from then on, slavery is the cause.
- [41:33]
Lemonada Media Host
But are women and slaves rolling their eyes at this?
- [41:37]
Ken Burns
No. They're going, we want it too. You, you've opened the door. See, there's a conservative scholar named Yuval Levin who said, you know, once you say the word all, it's done. It's over. Like, there's no way you can take back the word all. So when on July 4, 1776, these men, white men, ratify, we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created. Slavery's over. May take four.
- [42:01]
Lemonada Media Host
Did they know that? And these 49 men know that.
- [42:03]
Ken Burns
They did not know that. They opened the door. They may have understood it. They knew Jefferson knew that slavery was wrong. The. The African American historian Annette Gordon Reed says, well, how could you know if you knew something was wrong? How could you do it? She looks at the camera and just says, well, that's a question for all of us. She's not letting Jefferson off the hook. She's not letting you off the hook for all the things that you did and have done and will do that aren't true to whatever moral compass you actually, probably, maybe actually agree in including me. That is really the key to all of this. But the most important thing is these words are vague enough and powerful enough that even though women are not gonna get the right to vote, for 144 years they're there. I mean, Abigail's writing her husband when they're trying to formulate all of this, saying, remember the ladies, that's all we take. But then she said, all men would be tyrants if they could. And if you don't give us some sort of help, some representation, we're likely to fo a rebellion.
- [43:05]
Lemonada Media Host
Were they writing about their own personal interest, or were they writing knowing that 144 years later, women.
- [43:11]
Ken Burns
Yeah, of course they don't know that. They don't know that, but they're writing for their own personal thing. They're just saying, if you are. If you're in the middle of an enlightenment and you are articulating things and these complaints you've had against the British are suddenly now broken out into natural laws, right? Then everybody's asking it. There's a legal scholar that we interviewed, Maggie Blackhawk, and she said the Declaration of Independence is deeply significant to people at the margins, indigenous people, enslaved people, women, who all of a sudden can find a way to make the inherent hypocrisy of that document real and not hypocritical. And that's been the American story for the Founding Fathers.
- [43:51]
Lemonada Media Host
Signers knowingly or unknowingly created a PDF riddled with hypocrisies that did not apply to other people, but that they could then use later. And to test this capital D democracy idea against it, of like, hey, you.
- [44:04]
Ken Burns
Wrote this Now, I wouldn't bring in the word democracy. Yet even with the Declaration of Independence there, it's again an unintended, or a consequence, at least a consequence of it, not an intention of it. But they have created this relatively short document, 1337 words, I think, that is incandescently important to us right now, in this moment. And not just the pursuit of happiness, not just all men are created equal, but almost all of the stuff of the responsibilities of citizenship and of what it means to be not a subject. I mean, the authoritarians need people to be superstitious peasants distracted by conspiracy theories. Right. They don't need people to know what actually happens happen.
- [44:53]
Lemonada Media Host
And obedient obedience, well, comes from peasants.
- [44:57]
Ken Burns
The idea that. This is what I was saying earlier when Jefferson said, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. People put up with this stuff if the trains are running on time or if they're just fearful of what the consequences of are of rocking the boat. Our founders, to their credit, despite all the asterisks, risk that you can append all the attachments you can append to your PDF that are accurate are extraordinarily brave in the idea that they were willing to risk their lives and their fortunes and their sacred honor. Which goes back to the question for you and me, which side would I have been on? Would I have been willing to fight for a cause? Would I have been willing to give up my life for a cause? Could I have killed someone else in support of that? All of these are fundamentally and should be boat rocking questions totally for everyone who comes in contact.
- [45:50]
Lemonada Media Host
Are you willing to stand on it? Are you willing to be on the right side of history? You're not on the right side of your Reddit comments.
- [45:55]
Ken Burns
That's right.
- [45:55]
Gretchen Rubin
Hello, I'm Gretchen Rubin. And I'm Lori Gottlieb. We're two friends, one a happiness researcher and the other a therapist, and we are here to tackle the problems of everyday life with all of you, from.
- [46:07]
Ken Burns
Big issues to small.
- [46:08]
Gretchen Rubin
We'll share advice and fresh perspectives, and we'll also highlight responses from you, our listeners to the question we discuss whether it's that pet peeve that's been bugging you for years, a tricky dilemma, or just something you've always wondered about. We'll talk it through the since you asked podcast from Lemonada Media premieres on September 23rd. Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [46:31]
Lemonada Media Host
Now, you get a ton of praise for your body of work and people love your Vietnam War doc. But I want to ask you about a line from the opening narration because it stuck with me. Me. Let's put up the quote. It was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculation. Are you sure they were decent people acting in good faith?
- [46:58]
Ken Burns
Yeah, yeah. Now, are there people among them that are venal? Yes. But you're not showing the image that I'm showing, which is a bespectacled early American soldier in Vietnam who'd signed up because John F. Kennedy had said, ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you could do for your country. The thought was that global Communism was a threat to this American way of life, of freedom, and that they were going to help protect that. The whole tragedy of Vietnam is that those decent people are used to initially as fodder and then later begin to change their mind. I totally stand on that. Overconfidence and miscalculation, all of that is what is happening at the baseline. It's not everybody. There are of Course, people who have already decided there's money to be made off the perpetuation of the military industrial conflict. When Eisenhower, in the late term says that there is a military industrial compact, he's not talking about something that started last Thursday. He's talking about something that started the Second World War II was over. And those people who had made fortunes Prosecuting World War II did not want those profits to end. And one of the ways you do not have that profits end is to have a cold war. All of which is delineated in the film. But it's interesting that that sentence was like a lightning rod, particularly for people on the left who went berserk. There are people who cried at that line because they wanted to be absolved of the evil American guilt that everything we've ever done has been bad. And we were saying neither either. We're just saying it's complicated. Like the neon sign in our editing room.
- [48:37]
Lemonada Media Host
Right?
- [48:37]
Ken Burns
It's complicated.
- [48:38]
Lemonada Media Host
Aren't all wars started in good faith, Wink?
- [48:42]
Ken Burns
Yeah, I think that that's true. But I think if you looked at the Second World War, which is called the Good War, this is the worst war in human history, the greatest cataclysm in human history. 60 million people perished, we think, in the Second World War. We call it the Good War. Our first episode of our film on the Second World War, called the war Just the War, which is what everybody referred to it as.
- [49:05]
Lemonada Media Host
I think we call it the Good War because we came late to the party.
- [49:07]
Ken Burns
No, we call it the Good War because of the undertow of both Korea and Vietnam that would come later. And the idea that this was the Greatest Generation rather than the indulgent subsequent boomer generations and others who are interested in navel gazing or just themselves. But it's a necessary war. That's how one pilot that we interviewed, Samuel Haynes, who became a scholar at Princeton University, called it and gave accidentally, not on purpose, our first episode, the title the Necessary War. So you can't make a blanket statement about any wars. It's really, really complicated. We had parachuted in during the end of the Second World War in January, I think, of 45 into what is now northern Vietnam. And we. He saved the life of a radical nationalist leader there who was fighting the Japanese named Ho chi Minh. On September 2nd of that year, when the Japanese were formally surrendering in Tokyo Bay on the USS Missouri, he was in Baden Square in Hanoi declaring Vietnamese independence, citing word for word, Thomas Jefferson's declaration. And standing next to him are OSS officers who are supporting Him. Within a few weeks, those OSS officers had said, no, he's a communist. We're now against the communists, even though we've been fighting with the Soviet Union for the duration of our involvement in the Second World War. It's so super complicated. The French are there. It's a French colony. They need our help. We try helping them. We send in military advisors, and then it just grows. But the initial impulse is that you need to do exactly what the British thought they were doing when they were stopping this American insurrection is they believed in the domino. If we lose North America, we could lose Ireland, we could lose Gibraltar, we could lose the subcontinent, meaning India. We could lose what is now the Philippines. That was their empire. And they were, you know, we could lose the Caribbean. The real profit centers there. So everybody's acting in lots of different competing motives, and none of them are all in good faith. But a lot of the men that we interviewed that signed up to go off early to the Vietnam War were decent people. Still are decent people, and acting in good faith.
- [51:26]
Lemonada Media Host
Do you believe can invasion ever be a noble undertaking?
- [51:31]
Ken Burns
Yeah. June 6, 1944. The greatest invasion in the history of the world took place where British, Canadian and American forces landed at five beaches in Normandy. The worst was Omaha Beach. Entirely American. It was horrific. And they got a foothold into the continent, and the end of the Nazi regime was at hand. And those people who gave their lives there, there in that beach, or survived it. We're not there for money or for conquest or for land or for territory, but in support of an idea that's definitely an invasion. And the Beatles, I think, would argue in the British invasion of the early 60s that that was, you know, as. As. As wonderful a takeover as you could possibly have.
- [52:12]
Lemonada Media Host
Recently, your home PBS has been a target by the Trump administration. Are you worried about the future of PBS?
- [52:22]
Ken Burns
Of course. And I have testified during the 1990s several times in either the House or the Senate, either in support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Arts, or for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was just put out of business, incredibly shortsighted. This is a network that supported the number one conservative in the country, William F. Buckley, who had a show called firing line for 32 years. Most of it, you know, most of the effects of this, it's devastating for some of our budgets, but will survive. So will pbs. But most of the pain will be felt by the local rural stations that will have to go belly up because there's no support, because the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, this government entity that's been involved for more than 50 years in distributing these grants. They're not about politics. If somebody hears something that they don't like and the impulse is to get rid of that place, even though it's one voice image, a cacophony of voices. These are local stations where the PBS may be the only signal they get. They will now be a news desert. No one will be covering the school board or the city council meeting. It's where people are dependent not just on children's and primetime schedules, but on classrooms of the air and continuing education. I know this, this doesn't sound sexy, but they also get emergency warning stuff. What happens in the tumult of climate change and just the normal pattern of disasters? What happens when you don't have that signal available? This is a serious thing, hugely devastating for Alaska, for the Dakotas, for eastern Tennessee, for lots of other places that really stand a chance of losing this last communications. I actually think that public broadcasting is the Declaration of Independence applied to communications.
- [54:10]
Lemonada Media Host
Well, look man, I love your work because you establish big ideas and I.
- [54:13]
Ken Burns
Couldn'T have done that without pbs. I could not have done that. And that's because it took me ten and a half years to make that Vietnam series. I could have walked into a premium cable or a streaming service and gotten the $30 million I needed instead of spending 10 of the 10 and a half years with my cup out raising the money. But they wouldn't have give. I could have walked out in one pitch with the check, but they wouldn't have given me ten and a half years. They would have said a year and a half tops. Come on. And I just want to be here 50 years from now talking to you and telling you that I'm still proud of that work. And I'm. I don't think that would be the case if it, if they'd been made in circumstances of BBS and that's that.
- [54:53]
Lemonada Media Host
16 month turnaround versus a half decade to 10 year turnaround. Final question. In 1985 you did the Statue of Liberty documentary and you interviewed the brilliant James Baldwin. And in that documentary the first question you asked him was what is liberty? And this was his answer.
- [55:13]
James Baldwin (clip)
Liberty is the individual. But this passion, this will, is always contradicted by the necessity of the state everywhere. For as long as we've heard of mankind, as long as we've heard of states. I don't know if it'll be like that forever. It for a black American, for a black inhabitant of this country, the Statue of Liberty is simply a very bitter joke to you.
- [55:43]
Lemonada Media Host
Ken Burns, what is liberty?
- [55:45]
Ken Burns
I think James Baldwin really described it. And I think because he has experience, that's not, not the opening quote. It's deep in the film in which there's lots of nuance and context that that's taken out of at the beginning. He just says, what is liberty? And he said, I can quote the Declaration. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. And then he stops. He goes, but it didn't necessarily include me. So. So what we've talked about is this idea of an expanding understanding of what it might mean. Many people believe, as Baldwin did, that the Statue of Liberty with its back to the United States, was turning its back on those people who were enslaved, the 4 million people in 1861 when the Civil War began, that were owned by other people. How is this possible in a country which four score and five years before had proclaimed that all men are created equal? How could this happen? And how could those scenes, same kinds of things, still be going on 100 years or more, 120 years past that event? And so Baldwin is a kind of form of our conscience, our collective conscience, speaking not just for black Americans, but for all Americans, that we are not done until we can live out, as Dr. King said, the true meaning of our creed. Just as he quoted Thomas Jefferson's, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are creed created equal. So there's work to be done. But much foundation has already been laid and ironically, or perhaps magically, mysteriously, spiritually laid by people who didn't fully agree with the full interpretation of the words.
- [57:32]
Lemonada Media Host
Ken Burns, this was an amazing conversation and thank you so much for being here.
- [57:36]
Ken Burns
Thank you.
- [57:36]
Lemonada Media Host
This was really, really wonderful.
- [57:38]
Ken Burns
Great. Thank.
- [57:44]
Lemonada Media Host
You. If you haven't subscribed to Lemonada Premium yet, now's the perfect time because guess what? You can listen completely ad free. Plus you'll unlock exclusive bonus content like Halle Berry on how to be a good partner during menopause or Mehdi Hassan on the dumbing down of media clips you won't hear anywhere else. Just tap that subscribe button on Apple podcasts or head to lemonadapremium.com to subscribe on any other app. That's lemonadapremium.com. don't miss out.
- [58:19]
Lemonada Premium Promo Voice
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- [58:52]
Gretchen Rubin
Are you looking for ways to make your everyday life happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative? I'm Gretchen Rubin, the number one bestselling author of the Happiness Project, bringing you fresh insights and practical solutions in the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast. My co host and happiness guinea pig is my sister, Elizabeth Craft.
- [59:10]
Elizabeth Craft
That's me, Elizabeth Craft, a TV writer.
- [59:12]
Ken Burns
And producer in Hollywood.
- [59:14]
Elizabeth Craft
Join us as we explore ideas and.
- [59:16]
Gretchen Rubin
Hacks about cultivating happiness and good habits. Check out Happier with Gretchen Rubin from Lemonada Media.