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- [00:01]
Ken Burns
If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:17]
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- [00:48]
Ken Burns
for details I'm Archmanning I'm Madison Skinner.
- [00:51]
Anita Arnand
I'm Eva Jovic. I'm Decoria Moore.
- [00:53]
Ken Burns
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- [01:03]
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- [01:06]
Ken Burns
So good, so good, so good.
- [01:08]
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- [01:42]
Anita Arnand
Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. Now, as the United states marks its 250th birthday this July, we really wanted to sit with somebody who has spent his entire professional life thinking about what America is, what, what it promised, what it actually delivered. Ken Burns has 50 years on the clock documenting the American story from the inside. He's covered the Civil War, jazz, baseball, Vietnam, the national parks, the American buffalo and the Revolution itself. And no surprise then that he's earned the title America's Historian. Ken, a very warm welcome to Empire.
- [02:23]
Ken Burns
Thank you. It's great to be with you, Anita.
- [02:25]
Anita Arnand
How does that fit America's historian? I mean, is that a coat that's comfortable?
- [02:29]
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No.
- [02:30]
Ken Burns
I live in a tiny little village in New Hampshire and all of the notoriety +50 gets you a cup of coffee. You know what I mean? It just doesn't matter. I have in my kitchen a framed New Yorker cartoon that shows three men standing in hell, the flames licking up around them, and one guy says to the other two, apparently my over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing. And of course they don't. So I'm interested in trying to figure out how to tell complicated stories that resist the temptation, which is everywhere, to sort of engage in a d dialectic or to say that it's an on, off, switch, a good or bad. And of course, the real stories are way more nuanced. There's no opposites like that in nature.
- [03:15]
Anita Arnand
Do you think Americans know, and I mean really know their history?
- [03:20]
Blinds.com Announcer
No.
- [03:20]
Toast Announcer
No.
- [03:21]
Ken Burns
And it's something that, because we're relatively young, for a long time we didn't feel that. We sort of burned it behind us like rocket fuel. Kind of proud of stuff. Taking superficials. In the opening of the American Revol, the scholar Maya Jasanoff says that our relationship to it is detached and unreal. And she is in sort of this incredibly important part in the opening of the film because. And we're showing Washington crossing the Delaware, standing up in the boat. Nobody would stand up in a boat in the middle of a snowstorm in an ice clogged Delaware River.
- [03:56]
UPS Store Announcer
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- [03:56]
Ken Burns
So all of a sudden our relationship with it is superficial. The revolution is encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia. We focus on the big ide that take place in Philadelphia, which is why we're celebrating the Fourth of July. The revolution had started, you know, 15 months earlier in Lexington, Massachusetts. Right, 15 months earlier. And it's not gonna end until the semiquincentennial of the Treaty of Paris will be in 2033. Right. So we've got a big, huge period in which Americans are woefully ignorant of it. And as Jasanoff says again at the opening of our third episode, that we do a disserv when we sort of think it's just about great men signing documents. She says the United States is born in violence. So one of the reasons to do the series is to tell the complete story. Can't be complete, but as complete as you can, as comprehensive as you can about this revolution, which is also a civil war, like the Grand Canyon. It's got lots of layers.
- [04:59]
Anita Arnand
See, you're doing Empire bingo now and just ticking boxes as you go. Maya Jasanoff is a great friend of this podcast and has been on many times.
- [05:06]
Ken Burns
She's a great friend of our series. She did an extraordinary job, remarkable. Reminding us of the darker interiors of the struggle for the revolution. And it's important to wean people from that idealized version.
- [05:20]
Anita Arnand
Okay. So, I mean, you touched on a thing that has been much in our mind here on this podcast. The American Revolution is a paradox wrapped up in an enigma, wrapped up in confusion for many of us who aren't Americans. Because on the one hand, as you say, it's described as a war of independence from an empire. On the other, some people feel that it's the beginning of an American empire. I mean, where do you sit with that?
- [05:46]
Ken Burns
It most definitely is. I just would resist the temptation to create a dialectic on the one hand. On the other, it is all those things and many, many more things. And what you want to do is use the power of narrative to disentangle from the dialectic and to understand it for all the competing interests. Look, when they met in Philadelphia, they didn't call their organization the Eastern Seaboard Congress, nor did the Eastern Seab Congress put George Washington in charge of the Eastern Seaboard Army. They called it the Continental Congress. And the Continental army, they knew where they were going and what they wanted. And at the end of the revolution, when the states are beginning to fall apart and disagree, Washington is in anguish. You're drowning our rising empire in blood. He admits it. People were looking to the West. They knew that California was out there and they wanted it all. And so, while you can get a good grade in school, in America, if you say the reason the revolution happened was taxes and representation, you have to add land, because at the heart of it is the land. It's the fifth global war over the prize of North America. And when you say prize, you mean land, and when you mean land, you mean Native American land. And you cannot escape a story of the revolution without engaging that. You also. It's a struggle for idealism, for freedom, for liberty. And yet a quad quarter of the population or a fifth of the population is enslaved. These are all important. Half the population will not be enfranchised by these radical ideas.
- [07:19]
Anita Arnand
Oh. So, I mean, we'll get into those in. In more detail. But another thing you sort of touched on, and I just. Just let's ask the simple question, because I know you're going to say it's not a simple answer. Was the American Revolution then a civil war that got out of hand, or was it more akin to a world war? I mean, after all, you've got all these other countries wading in.
- [07:38]
Ken Burns
Yeah, it's a good question. It is first a revolution against the ruling British. It is, a priori, therefore, a civil war. Because while Americans think that the bad guys are 3,000 miles across the ocean, there are Many people, at least a fifth, maybe a quarter, and in some places a majority of the population who are understandably loyalist. And then you have lots of other people who are trying to make decisions, free and enslaved black people, about what side to fit on. Native American people who've been assimilated or are coexisting, those on the western border that are hoping to forestall the further usurpation of their land. This is great drama at many, many levels. So it's all those things. It's first and foremost a revolution. And what happens is that this disagreement, this argument between British citizens gets broken out because it's the Enlightenment into natural rights. So instead of saying, you're wrong and I'm right, they're saying, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. They meant white men of property. But everybody got it at the moment. Everybody wanted it. Native Americans, women enslaved and free blacks understood that it also applied to them. There's a man that we follow, boy actually, who hears the first reading of the Declaration, a free black kid in Philadelphia, and he joins the revolution and he fights for that. He doesn't for a second think it doesn't apply to him. He's captured. He has a chance to go to England and be the playmate of the ship captain's son. He says no, and he's sent to a prison ship in harbor. And later on, he becomes very wealthy in the merchant marines and supports the growing abolition movement in funding the first abolitionist paper, the Liberator. And his granddaughter goes down during the Civil War to help newly freed black people in territory the Union army has claimed to restart their lives, to start farms and churches and schools. It's an amazing thing that happens. That's why we say in the very beginning the most consequential revolution in history, without a doubt, because it is all of those things.
- [09:51]
Anita Arnand
You mentioned Washington using the term empire. And he does it again and again and again. It's only in our United States as an empire that our independence is acknowledged. He writes to Lafayette. He uses the word independence. He uses it in a letter to Hamilton. I mean, I did my homework here and it kept coming up again and again in his head. Is he then thinking that actually we are going to be a counterbalance to the British Empire? We will be an American empire beyond sea to shining sea.
- [10:23]
Ken Burns
So I think that no, in the sense of the global chess, they understand that they wish to govern themselves. And so there is in Washington, he's the one who coins the phrase avoid foreign entanglements There is not so much an isolationist thing, but a sense that we need to focus on how we develop this new thing in the world. Everybody is more or less up to this point, a subject, and he is. We are creating this thing in which there are citizens with enormous responsibilities. But at the heart of it is this vision that it's not back to Europe and the old entanglements and the old things. Countries with one single established religion. The First Amendment. Oh, it's about freedom of speech or freedom to redress agreements. It is those things. But those are the second and third things of the First Amendment. The first is that we will make no establishment of a religion because they saw what religions had sponsored in the past. So there's this attempt to sort of focus on how human beings might govern the themselves and at the same time knowing that the Pacific Ocean is way out there and wanting everything between it.
- [11:32]
Anita Arnand
And I suppose it's easy to think reductively about this.
- [11:37]
Ken Burns
That's right.
- [11:38]
Anita Arnand
This was about the Americans and it was about the British. But let's not forget the French waded in, the Dutch waded in. The Spanish had their little go as well. I mean, they weren't involved where they can because of a love of liberty. There are other things going on here.
- [11:53]
Ken Burns
You know, it's, it's. That's a really, really wonderful point. No, and this is what. It's not just the patriots and the British. It's a very, very complex geopolitical dynamic. As you said, the Dutch and French and Spanish are involved. And if they'd won or the British had won, they'd been after the whole continent too. It's not like the inevitable destruction. I would like to add that there are many Native American nations that are on that level. And we say that in the opening sentence of the main introduction of the film, that it would engage more than two dozen nations as well as Native American, because for more than 150 years many of these tribes have been players, economically, militarily, diplomatically, on a world stage. They've been to London, they've been to Paris, they've been to Madrid. They know what's going on in the world and they are active players in it. And I think we just tend to say them and just this. And so I would say that a tribe like the Shawnee are as important as the colony of Massachusetts, later the state or Virginia, or for that matter England or France. And that we've tried to in this series understand them as real and important and separate and distinct. You can, you know, it's the same kind of superficial way we refer to Africa as if it's one place. Right. It's like Europeans would be appalled if they were just considered one thing when, of course, they have distinct centuries, millennia old identities. Right. So we were trying to do the same thing. These are people who have six or seven hundred generations of experience in North America and the Europeans have what, seven or eight.
- [13:38]
Anita Arnand
One of the things, I suppose that adds to the complexity of this and I just wonder as a filmmaker, how you deal with it is that to some of the Native population, Washington was no hero at all. I mean, they called him town destroyer, didn't they? Now, in an American school, would American kids know that, for example?
- [13:58]
Ken Burns
No, no. In fact, they understand that many Native tribes fought with the British. So they're already opposed, not to Washington, but to this effort. They think, I think falsely, that if they ally with the British, they can foresaw who they call the hated Bostonians or the Yankees or whatever from taking their property. If the British had won, they'd be all about taking their property as well and settling it just under the name of their British colony. The Washington thing that you refer to has to do with the mostly upstate New York 6 Tribes of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida and Mohawk people who have formed their own kind of union, well, for more than 150 years. And what happens is as the revolution is going on and settlers are moving into Indian territory, they fight back. And the governors of New York and Pennsylvania are adamant that Washington do something. And he sent a general from New Hampshire, where I live, named Sullivan, to that area, telling them to just destroy everything, everything. And that's where it comes from. And it becomes, in a way, a scouting expedition for future white settlement after destroying 40 or 50 separate Indian towns. And let me say that these villages are. I mean, everybody has this romanticized idea of teepees that's across the Mississippi and the plains. These people, you. There are some villages that you would go into that you. Until you saw somebody, you wouldn't know who occupied it, whether they were European settlers or. There were panes of glass, there's clapboard houses, there are chimneys. I mean, we have to extend, and we never do to Native Americans dimensions and not just as described in the negative by what they feel about George Washington. The important thing is their own being and their own existence.
- [15:49]
Anita Arnand
Well, I mean, you've sort of said they're not part of the story. They're the heart of the story, I
- [15:52]
Ken Burns
think, as are the free and enslaved black people who daily remind us, I mean, when those people start arguing that what the British have done has enslaved them by their tyranny, they are also signaling, you know, not only a great hypocrisy, which we always like to focus on, but they're also signaling to those people that are serving them at that moment, the fact that the issue is about slavery. You know, as Jane Kaminsky, a former Harvard professor, now the head of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, says, the liberty talk is leaky. Everybody hears it, and everybody wants it. Because, of course, everybody does want liberty. Nobody wants to be a subject. Nobody wants to be enslaved.
- [16:38]
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- [17:07]
Ken Burns
Hey, I just Venmo'd you for rent.
- [17:09]
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- [17:16]
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- [17:23]
Ken Burns
So order more pizza.
- [17:25]
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- [17:26]
Ken Burns
Get the Venmo debit card.
- [17:28]
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- [17:36]
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- [17:38]
Ken Burns
It's the Priceline negotiator.
- [17:41]
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- [18:11]
Anita Arnand
I'm thinking, you know, back to your. Your civil war and that aired in 1990, and I think, yes, it's like, so 40 million Americans watched that, which is, you know, just an astonishing way.
- [18:24]
Ken Burns
More now for the revolution. It's fabulous broadcast streaming didn't exist then. So we've picked up, you know, millions and millions of viewers from streaming.
- [18:35]
Anita Arnand
Well, I mean, it's, it's a massive accolade. 35 years later, here we are. And, you know, there are arguments on both sides of the pond about, you know, what is seemly to discuss, arguments on your side of the pond about, you know, Confederate monuments, 16, 19 project, what gets taught in schools, immigrants, all of that. And, you know, we have a similar mirror image here about whether it's right and proper to talk about, you know, the depredation, say, of the British Empire or the Raj on your side of the pond. Do you think Americans understand their Civil War better than they did when you brought out the film in 1990, or is it actually worse?
- [19:14]
Ken Burns
I hope so. I think that there had been a lot of dissembling that had taken place over the decades. Churchill famously said, among I'm sure, thousands of other people, that the victors write the history, but in fact the Confederates, the losers, wrote the history of the Civil War. And they postulate that the post Civil War period, which we know as Reconstruction, a subject that I'm working on right now, a locally grown terrorist organization like ISIS or Al Qaeda called the Ku Klux Klans are the heroes of this period. And that Reconstruction was bad, its collapse was good, when in fact the opposite is true. And so you have a view of the Civil War as not being about slavery, and yet it's states rights or nullification or this sort of thing or that sort of thing. And yet if you go to the South Carolina Articles of Secession that came out just before Christmas in 1860, after Abraham Lincoln was elected the month before, it does not mention states rights, it does not mention nullification, but it mentions slavery over and over again. And I think our series, if it did anything, was to center the fact that let's not kid ourselves anymore, it's about slavery and then proceed to tell the dark interiors, as Walt Whitman called of the story, as we do here in the Revolution in it's about battles as well as great documents and thoughts signed in Philadelphia.
- [20:36]
Anita Arnand
I think you've said somewhere along the line that the Civil War is the central trauma of American life and everything else flows from it. If that's true, then why does America keep refighting the Civil War?
- [20:51]
Ken Burns
In many ways, you've answered your own question. What is a central trauma but a thing that continually is, if it's an individual, say my mother died when I was 11 years old. I spent the seven or eight years before that, watching her die, it was incredibly traumatic and incredibly formative. Look what I do for a living. My late father in law, an eminent psychologist, said, I wake the dead. I make Abraham Lincoln come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? He told me at one point. In the middle of a crisis, trauma occurs and recurs. This is the great beauty of literature and art. Your own William Shakespeare has told this over and over again. And Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who may have written the great American novel, remember, it goes from Tierra del Fuego to the North Pole. Those who call themselves Americans in 100 Years of Solitude. The inescapability of these things. Of course, here we are, a country founded four score and five years before on the idea that all men are created equal. And yet at that moment, in 1861, before the guns opened up on Fort Sumter, 4 million Americans were owned by. Owned by other Americans. There are a group of people who have the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land. What do you think that's going to do? Just. You're not.
- [22:04]
Anita Arnand
No, I get it. I do get that. But I mean, I get it. And I love the parallel, but, you know, with traumas. And I am sorry, you know, to lose a parent at such a young age is an awful thing. But people then, you know, from trauma you can get closure. And I wonder if you look at.
- [22:22]
Ken Burns
You don't get closure. The half life of grief is endless. But you do something productive with it, as I've tried to do with my life. But it doesn't mean that's ever present. Or in the case of a country in which you have so many millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of manifestations, that these old tropes aren't continually doing it. And this is not an American phenomenon. This is a human phenomenon.
- [22:43]
Anita Arnand
Let's talk about some of your other enormous successes. Your Vietnam film, I would say, is probably the most politically courageous thing that you've made. And you gave voice to the North Vietnamese in it Was Vietnam, do you think the moment that America's imperial project became visible to itself and what did that do to Americans?
- [23:05]
Ken Burns
Yeah, it's a good question. I would suggest with the revolution that the America's imperial project begins with the subjugation of 300 Native American nations that make up what is the continental United States. But yeah, I think there was an interest in lie at the heart of all of that many, many years of struggle over Vietnam and that it was important to speak to it. And I think when you're dealing with war. It's important to know the universality of the experience of war. So often we would pair a Marine or an army guy with a North Vietnamese soldier or a Viet Cong soldier saying almost exactly the same thing about either that exact moment or more importantly, about the general experience of war. The introduction to that long and complex introduction to that series, which is 10 episodes and 18 hours, comes from a North Vietnamese soldier, Bao Dien, who said, you know, people. The only people who want to know who won and who lost are the people who don't fight.
- [24:09]
Anita Arnand
You know, I often think LBJ gets a rough deal from this. You know, he's a fascinating, tragic figure.
- [24:15]
Ken Burns
It is. It's Shakespearean tragedy. And we're now working on a film called LBJ and the Great Great Society. Because after Vietnam, it was so clear that we had not dismissed, but we had covered his domestic agenda, his most impressive domestic agenda in one sentence, in one shot. A beautiful picture of him in the White House admiring a portrait of lbj. I mean, he was called Lyndon Johnson because FDR had become fdr. He wanted to be lbj. And so there's a picture of him looking at fdr, I should say. And it's wonderful. And at that point, I said, I want to do something on lbj, too.
- [24:48]
Anita Arnand
Well, I'm delighted to hear that. I mean, just while we're chatting, because I can't wait for your film to come out. I'm anxious to see it. It's going to be amazing. But how should we look at LBJ today, do you think?
- [25:00]
Ken Burns
As the complex figure that he is, as the tragic figure. How do you look at Hamlet today? I mean, he alone passed the Civil Rights Act. His predecessor, who proposed it, coming to the subject of civil rights very late, would not have had the political muscle, I don't think, to be able to pass it. He, as a Southerner could, as well as the Voting Rights act, and he understood what the political calculus would be. He's incredibly powerful, an amazing person, Difficult, obviously. He went to Kennedy's foreign policy apparatus, McNamara and Rusk and others, and said, I need you more than he needed you, and the buck stops there. He's responsible for that. He's the guy who put boots on the ground. Although this is euphemistic. Kennedy inherited 700 military advisors from Eisenhower. When he was assassinated, there were 17,000 advisors. And it was fully a year and a half later, in March of 65, that Johnson felt from his mandate that he would put boots on the ground. Marines and army men Although they were already there. But this was sort of making it legitimate. There's a great tragedy to the, the foreign policy blunder that it was, and therefore. But you need to sort of see him in the hole and understand the complexity of it. What's so great is that he, like Nixon, had a taping system in the Oval Office. And what's even more spectacular is that his wife, Lady Bird, every night took out a small reel to reel tape recorder and recorded a journal, which we also have. So we like to think that when he lost the New Hampshire primary in 1968, he didn't lose it. He won 60% of the vote. But McCarthy got an unexpected 40% of the vote. That's Eugene McCarthy, not Joseph McCarthy. And he then said, I'm not running for reelection. But she had predicted back in 65 when he put boots on the ground, lyndon's not gonna run again. So now all of a sudden we have in these tapes that have been sitting there for scholars to listen to perhaps the biggest evidence of, of her extraordinary power, despite the fact we like to talk about how his extramarital affairs was an incredible blow to her.
- [27:12]
Anita Arnand
I suppose when I think about the tragedy of the man is that he is often the boogeyman for disastrous foreign policy and foreign adventurism and others. Teddy Roosevelt, I mean, I remember your American buffalo film. It had that absolutely devastating Roosevelt quote in it. You know, the buffaloes extinction would, and I think this is the right quote, go a long way to solving our Indian problem. Now he gets away really lightly in the pantheon.
- [27:44]
Ken Burns
Why not in our Roosevelt series though?
- [27:47]
UPS Store Announcer
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- [27:47]
Anita Arnand
No, I know. I rewatched that last night, by the way. You know, I think four episodes in one sitting.
- [27:52]
Ken Burns
Oh my goodness.
- [27:53]
Anita Arnand
But why does he get away so lightly?
- [27:56]
Ken Burns
I think his personality is so attractive to so many people who tend to be the ones that sort of define what's good, history and bad. His fifth cousin, Franklin is the much more important president. We're super lucky that there wasn't a war on TR's watch. He's a wonderful president. He's an amazing person. But it is. He reflects the eugenics of the period. He reflects the racism of the period. You know, he famously, everybody wants to, to point out, invited Booker T. Washington to the White House. He got so much grief about it, he never invited another black person to the White House. So while, if you can edit this thing, then it becomes a symbol of his extraordinary courage. If you expand the lens out, then you realize that he also caved to the political pressure of what that meant and could have meant for the lives of black people in America.
- [28:52]
Anita Arnand
Yeah. It's funny because at this point, sometimes, you know, TV chewing gum that I enjoy putting in my head is blue blood. So you've got Tom Selleck who just reveres, you know, Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, and wants to emulate him. And there are pictures of him as if he's the quintessential president. But he may not have been president, you know, at a time of war, but, you know, 1898, you've got his fingerprints on lots and lots of things. You know, the Philippines, Cuba.
- [29:18]
Ken Burns
I mean, you know, the Spanish American War is certainly not something that he started, but he certainly was delighted, as he would say, to help finish it.
- [29:27]
Anita Arnand
Yeah. And, you know, people like Mark Twain, you've made films about him as well. Even at the time, they were famously opposed to the Philippines war.
- [29:36]
Ken Burns
Well, Twain has a statement. I mean, Twain rarely wrote a bad sentence, but he said he didn't want the eagles talon, meaning the American eagles, talent in any other nation. He's, of course, forgetting what had taken place in our or spreading the continent. With regard to native nations, he had conveniently overlooked that despite being the person who invented American literature with Huckleberry Finn and his willingness to take on the twin themes of America, which are space, not outer, but the physical size of the place and race.
- [30:16]
Anita Arnand
It's obvious. I've watched so much of your work.
- [30:19]
Ken Burns
Thank you so much.
- [30:20]
Anita Arnand
No, not at all.
- [30:23]
Ken Burns
I'm honored by your attention.
- [30:25]
Anita Arnand
Well, thank you for making it. Is it true you do not write a script before you start filming?
- [30:31]
Ken Burns
Yeah. What we like to do is have the left hand not know what the right hand is doing. We want to go out and interview people. We have never, as many colleagues I have in and working on other films have done, where you go to a scholar or somebody and you say, can you get me from paragraph 2 to paragraph 3 on page 6 of episode 5? Every time you see a talking head in our film, it's a happy accident of location. And so you want to do these interviews, you want to film things unconcerned with whether you're filming a script and you want to be able to write if you're the writer, unafraid of whether there's images to show. Sometimes you end up not having images and you find new ways, new equivalencies to do it. And other times, the fact the stuff that you have filmed suggests new things to write, and it makes it longer, more attenuated, I suppose, but it makes it fresher. And more corrigible to the end. Normally a production is X amount of time for research and writing. The script is produced. It's written in stone like it's come down from Mount Sinai. It informs the, the, you know, the editing and the shooting and the editing, boom, done. But we never stop researching and we never stop writing. And it makes us able to incorporate new information to the very, very end.
- [31:43]
Anita Arnand
Now, I mean, we are coming to the very, very end of this interview. Are you up for a quick fire round, Ken Burns?
- [31:49]
Ken Burns
Well, I'm not sure, given the fact that I usually have, you know, many episodes of responses in my films that I can ever be, you know, as definitive as you probably want me to be.
- [32:00]
Anita Arnand
You just do you, Ken. You do you. I'll just throw them at you.
- [32:04]
Wayfair Announcer
Okay.
- [32:04]
UPS Store Announcer
All right.
- [32:05]
Anita Arnand
Question number one. Best president America ever had besides George
- [32:09]
Ken Burns
Washington, because we don't have a country without him.
- [32:11]
Anita Arnand
Abraham Lincoln, best president America never had. Someone you wish had really made it to the White House.
- [32:17]
Ken Burns
It would have been nice. He's the old man of the lot. But Benjamin Franklin has got some extraordinary, extraordinary, extraordinary possibilities. And then in a more contemporary sense, I think she was a terrible, terrible campaigner and candidate, but I think would have been a very accomplished president.
- [32:33]
Anita Arnand
Hillary Clinton, the film you would most like to make and why I'm.
- [32:40]
Ken Burns
For decades I have said Martin Luther King. The family has difficulty controlled a good deal of access to his material. And understandably, a man, a husband, a father they couldn't control in life are attempting to in death. And we are working on a King project right now. We've interviewed 70 hours of people with the foot soldiers in the civil rights movement, all in anticipation of being able to do something on that. But look, if I were given a thousand years to live, and I will not be, I will not run out of projects in American history to do.
- [33:12]
Anita Arnand
Who would you rather have dinner with, Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln?
- [33:15]
Ken Burns
Oh, God, I don't know. That's a tough one. Mark Twain is great. He's got the best one liner of all time. He said, it's not that the world is filled with fools, it's just that lightning isn't distributed right. And yet Abraham Lincoln is the poet president of our country. He seemed to contain our entire history, our present moment and our entire future in any speech. He's got a wonderful speech to Congress in 1862 in which he says, as fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down or honor or dishonor to the latest generation. And then a couple sentences later, he says the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, we must think anew, we must act anew, we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we can save our country. Which is it, Abe? You can't escape history or the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. And of course it's both. And that's the great thing that proves the lie to the idea of ones and zeros and some simple equation of an off on switch in any of this.
- [34:22]
Anita Arnand
Well, I suspect this is not going to be a simple final question and an answer from you, but I understand that every 4th of July you read the Declaration of Independence to your daughters and you've done that for about three decades, which is just lovely.
- [34:35]
Ken Burns
And now grandchildren too, who are.
- [34:37]
Anita Arnand
And grandchildren. Okay, so after 50 years in this particular moment, do you still believe in America?
- [34:44]
Ken Burns
Oh, of course I do.
- [34:45]
Venmo Announcer
Yeah.
- [34:45]
Ken Burns
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. We were way more divided during the revolution, during the Civil War, during the post Civil War era, during the Vietnam era that we are now. It's not to say that this is not a significant and existential threat in which it means I could be wrong about the survival, that there'll be another 250 years or another 50 years, or another five years. But I certainly believe in the ideas as articulated in the most consequential revolution in history, that we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which is not the pursuit of objects in the marketplace of things, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. We are meant to to improve each other, to increase in virtue, to be worthy of the great gift of citizenship.
- [35:39]
Anita Arnand
Ken Burns, thank you very much for being with us.
- [35:41]
Ken Burns
Thank you.
- [35:50]
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Anita Arnand
style, every home Hear that?
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