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- [00:01]
Bank of America Representative
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- [00:33]
Podcast Host
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio news Few people have managed to
- [00:39]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
tell the American story better spanning all of its history than documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.
- [00:44]
Podcast Host
That's right. We spoke to the Brooklyn native and Emmy award winner to get his perspective on this moment in American history.
- [00:51]
Ken Burns
I was taught a kind of superficial, top down, kind of sanitized, almost Madison Avenue, bloodless, gallant story. And that's okay to begin with, but I found that more complicated story that much more inspirational and, and obviously more interesting. You know, we're born in violence. That's the one thing we don't want to, you know, talk about. We accept the violence of the Civil war and the 20th century wars we've been in, but the American Revolution is credibly bloody. Revolution and Civil War and also perhaps the fifth global war over the prize of North America. There's a lot of economics going on here between the 13 colonies that Britain has in Caribbean that are based on slavery. The less profitable North American ones though, Virginia and South Carolina, trade, obviously tariffs, obviously taxation, obviously representation, obviously inflation, obviously devaluation. It's all going on there in the midst of, you know, what is the most significant revolution in the history of humankind.
- [01:49]
Podcast Host
I do think that's a good point because I don't know what it is about reaching middle age. You suddenly get an undying affinity for history. But I was watching your series and reading up on the revolution and it was does seem to have been a much bloodier occasion than we were really led to believe or we were taught. Why do you think that is?
- [02:07]
Ken Burns
I think it's to protect the big ideas that are coming out of Philadelphia. Somehow we think they're going to be diminished, but they're not. In fact, they're even bigger when you realize the chances. The odds at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 were zero. And suddenly six and a half years later, not so much. Suddenly a very long bloody war. They're 100% how you, how we got there, who was involved, who were the characters, the top down people. But they're presented to us as these kind of perfect marble statues and Therefore, they're not accessible. If you make them human and dimensional, then they're suddenly accessible. We can be like them. But we can also find out that there's scores of other people that we introduce you to who are teenagers, little girls, French soldiers, American GIs, if you will, women, 50% of the population. They're there at every battle as our children. It is an amazing, amazing story and how we beat one of the great power, the most far flung empire on earth. Great Britain, is one of the marvels and with ideas that had never been tested. No, Everybody was a subject under authoritarian rule, and all of a sudden we were suggesting, nope, you could be a citizen. It's as powerful it could get. And it's something to really celebrate on the fourth 250 years is a magnificent achievement to have gotten there. And I think even in times of division, you want to go back and find out your origin story. That helps you sort of figure out where you, you know, where you come down on the big questions, you know,
- [03:38]
Podcast Host
and maybe because that story is more multifaceted than we may have initially been taught. I know your new series, the American Revolution, it's centered on all of this but the setting of the Declaration of Independence. We have a quick clip and then I'm going to ask you another question. The American revolutionary movement served as a model for freedom from oppression.
- [03:59]
Ken Burns
America is predicated on an idea that tells us who we are, where we came from, and what our forebears were willing to die for. Collins said, no taxation without representation.
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Narrator/Commercial Voice
The fear was, if we give in
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Ken Burns
to this precedent, what will they do in the future?
- [04:16]
Bank of America Representative
Crisis changes people. It gave different people different ideas about what they should be doing.
- [04:24]
Podcast Host
It gave them a space to make this democracy real.
- [04:33]
Ken Burns
The founders thought, we can start over again. We can begin the world anew.
- [04:38]
Podcast Host
One of the other predominant narratives when we learn this as kids is it's all these great men. You know, it's a handful of great men who did this. But in your documentary, and as I'm learning more about it, it was great men, but it was also all of us. It was everyone. It was all kinds of regular people. Do you think that's why the documentary has been so popular? We were talking before we came on about the response to this.
- [05:00]
Ken Burns
Well, the response has just been stunning. And yes, I think it is. Everybody likes a complicated story. Everybody likes, you know, Yellowstone with all its characters and dynamics. And what you don't want is to have your sense of George Washington just being the marble statue out there collecting pigeon, you know, what in the park? You get to know him as a human being. He's dimensional. And despite the fact that we have 400 first person voices read by 60 one of the finest actors in the world, bringing to life these people, including all of the other folks that are never mentioned in our textbook, in the end, one of the more exhilarating parts of this is you get to say we don't have a country without George Washington. And you begin to understand, you know his flaws, but you also know his unbelievable strengths. And so much of what we're going to be celebrating on Saturday comes and issues from his humility, his great powers of persuasion to have men fight in the dark of night and to fight for a cause that nobody had ever championed before in the history of humankind, to make people from New Hampshire and Georgia realize they were from the same country, not different countries as they thought, to defer to Congress. And then at the height of his military power to give that up and the height of his political power to give that up. And even George iii, who's not the crazy person that we think from Hamilton in our textbook, but a really interesting monarch, says, well if he did that George Washington, then he is the greatest character of the age. And guess what? He is. And so all of these revelations, just about the so called ordinary people, the bottom up folks who are making this possible, but also those top down face male names that are there at Philadelphia deserve complexion, deserve complication, deserve to understand what's going on in their lives personally and what they are, flawed flaws, warts and all. Nobody's perfect. And the idea that we've made our founders perfect has then made it harder for us to actually get inside the revolution and participate in what is truly one. I mean, I said on the road, we say in the film it's the most consequential revolution in history. I've said in the last year and a half of being out promoting it that it's the most important event since the birth of Christ.
- [07:10]
Podcast Host
I want to ask you, you have done so many documentaries on so many different significant moments in America's 250 year history. I think about the Civil War, which, which aired more than 30 years ago, Vietnam War documentary. When you look at those really divided times in American history, how does that compare to where we are now?
- [07:28]
Ken Burns
Christine, that's the question for the moment because I think that all of us have a kind of arrogance. Those in the present sort of think, oh, it's the best or the worst, this couldn't be, you know, we' where, you know, the sky has fallen. We're way more divided during our revolution than we are now. Way more divided, as you suggest, in the civil War, in the period after civil war called Reconstruction, which I'm working on a film series about right now during the Vietnam period, other times of great stress and trauma. And so I think what happens when you're in crisis, you want to go back as an individual and go to that pastor, that professional who's going to ask you very first thing, where'd you come from? Who are your parents? What's your origin story? And I think by going back to the origin story, it can give us some strength, strength to go forward. And clearly it's working. You know, for the first time in history, a PBS program entered the top 10 of streaming shows back in November when we first broadcast with extraordinary numbers, more than 20 million old fashioned broadcast viewers. And that represented 565 million minutes of streaming. It's now well over 4 billion people are starved for a sense of where we were so that we can know where we are. Just think about it almost as, as, as mathematics or astron. You're going to fix where we are right now by knowing more about where we were. You can't possibly know where you are unless you know where you are, where you've been, and more importantly, where you may be going.
- [08:53]
Podcast Host
I do want to ask what your thoughts of how people are approaching history in this country at this moment, especially given that you, you work for pbs. The funding there has been cut. It is. I don't think of your documentaries as politically controversial, but more and more, trying to tell even a neutral story can be very difficult and very fraught, especially with these topics. How do you navigate that?
- [09:16]
Ken Burns
Well, it's, it's always been tough, but it's more tough for us inside. You know, Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. It means we're constantly working on things that are rhyming. Sometimes those rhymes last throughout the entire production and will last for the entire life of the film. Sometimes, you know, there's a German wife of a German officer coming to the United States who's fearful that Americans eat cats. So if the film had come out last year in 24 or in the fall of 24, year and a half ago, you know, that was the operative thing, Americans eating cats, long gone, nobody mentioned it and that was it. So we are very, very conscious of not putting our thumb in the scale. We don't have a political ax to grind. I've taken stuff out Because I don't want it to be misinterpreted as somehow a political commentary. And that's why we've attracted people young and old, both sides of the aisle. But we are in a period where people are trying to limit the history, saying it's only one kind of history, which is the way it has worked throughout American history. And quite frankly, though the funding cutbacks PBS have have really made it tough for us. We're not going anywhere. This has been a huge, big win for them. And we have the opportunity to tell stories that I can't tell anywhere else. I could, I could go to a streamer, I could go to a premium cable and ask, you know, for $30 million to make a film in the Vietnam War. But they're not going to give me ten and a half years to make it. There's going to be layers of suits telling me how to make it. And I'm as proud of that film as any I have ever done. Because of the complexity that went into it and because fact, we were able to avoid the narrow partisan politics that afflict our, our daily news. And that's what Americans want to have. What's the long view? What happened? I mean, I had a friend come up to me in the 08 meltdown, which I'm sure you remember, in early October of 2008, and said when he was in the financial services, he said, this is a depression. And I looked at him and I said, in the Depression. And I'd been studied the depression. Four or five of the various films that I've worked on, I said, in, in the Depression, in many American cities, the animals in the were shot and the meat distributed to the poor. When that happens, I'll say we're in a depression. But for right now, it's a painful, really serious, very deep recession. But you could see his face change, his countenance change. There was a little bit lighter step, as if, oh, you know, the sky isn't falling. And I think this is the great gift of history and everybody is interested in that gift. It doesn't matter who you voted for. It doesn't matter how old you are, how rich you are, what your sex is. It's. It's a good story, is a good story, is a good story. And may I say, Christina, there's no better story than the story of how we came into being.
- [11:56]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
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