← On with Kara Swisher
On with Kara Swisher
Ken Burns & Sarah Botstein on Finding Hope in America’s Brutal Beginnings
01:00:37
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- [00:00]
Ken Burns
Democratic socialists don't kill Jews. National Socialists kill Jews. I'm not worried about democratic socialists. I'm worried about dictators. It's on.
- [00:21]
Kara Swisher
Hi everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast network, this is on with Kara Swisher. And I'm Kara Swisher. My My guests today are filmmakers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein. The first episode of their six part documentary series, the American Revolution premiered last night on PBS and continues running through Friday. It's a deep, nuanced look at the American Revolutionary War in the years before and after. Over the course of 12 hours, Burns and Botstein challenge many of the neat stories we tell ourselves about the country's founding and what motivated the men who fought for America's independence from British rule. It's the kind of nuanced and challenging look at history the Trump administration is actively fighting against. But Burns and Botstein also make it clear there's still plenty of reasons to celebrate our country's origin story, even if it is way more messy and brutal than we'd like to acknowledge. I am a huge fan of him. He's just a really interesting and complex person himself and quite, I would say, patriotic. One of the more patriotic people I've ever met. I studied history in college and I really enjoyed this series. I think the most surprising thing to me was the depiction of Washington. For as much as I do understand his complexity, he was even more complex than I thought. And I think it's one of the best depictions of one of America's most important citizens. All right, let's get to my conversation with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein. Our expert question comes from historian, journalist and author Garrett Graf. This is a good one, so stick around. Support for this show comes from smartsheet. If you want to optimize your workflow, it's important to have all of your documents in one place. But it doesn't just stop at documents. You should have everything you need in one place. That's where Smartsheet comes in. Smartsheet is the intelligent work management platform that embeds AI powered execution to drive the velocity of work. With AI first capabilities, you can make work management your superpower. Getting personalized insights, automatically, creating tailored solutions and streamlining workflows to elevate your work. Plus, this intelligence layer unites people, processes and data, helping you tackle any work management challenge. Visit smartsheet.com Vox Support for this show comes from Upwork. If you're overextended and understaffed, Upwork Business plus helps you bring in top quality freelancers fast. You can get instant access to the top 1% of talent on Upwork in marketing, design, AI and more. Ready to jump in and take work off your plate. Upwork Business plus sources, vets and shortlists, proven experts so you can stop doing it all and delegate with confidence. Right now, when you spend $1,000 on Upwork Business plus, you get $500 in credit. Go to Upwork.comSavannow and claim the offer before December 31, 2025. Again, that's Upwork.com save scale smarter with top talent and $500 in credit. Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from Nordstrom.
- [03:36]
Ken Burns
Oh, what fun.
- [03:37]
Kara Swisher
Nordstrom has gifts for all your favorite.
- [03:40]
Ken Burns
People all in one place.
- [03:41]
Kara Swisher
Like beauty sets, sweaters, jewelry and toys with tons under a hundred dollars.
- [03:47]
Ken Burns
Need ideas?
- [03:48]
Kara Swisher
Check out gifts from Ugg, skims, Diptyque, Free people, Stanley and more. Plus explore their amazing gift shop in stores and online. Free styling, free shipping and order pickup. Make it all easy. Add Nordstrom. It is all Ken and Sarah, thanks for coming on on.
- [04:09]
Ken Burns
Thank you.
- [04:10]
Sarah Botstein
Thank you.
- [04:12]
Kara Swisher
So I'm gonna start with you, Ken. We've talked many times before on a lot of a range of topics. But in recent interviews, you've said the American Revolution was the most important event in all of world history since the birth of Christ. And the revolution certainly was a huge event. But explain why it's more important than the fall of the Roman Empire, the ARR. The Europeans in America. You know, tell me, what makes it stand apart from your perspective?
- [04:34]
Ken Burns
I was out on the road talking endlessly about this and I and I wasn't trying to be provocative. I was trying to enjoin a conversation which has happened. You know, Ecclesiastes said there's nothing new under the sun. And all of a sudden on July 4, 1776, there's something new under the sun. People are no longer subjects under authoritarian rule. They have the possibility of being citizens. And this is a big deal. And these are the noblest aspirations of humankind that are expressed in the second sentence of the dec declaration and certainly in other parts of this struggle, which is not only a revolution, but a civil war and a global war over the prize of North America. It's been interesting because it has enjoyed a lot of conversations. I was with a scholar at Brown University. She said, what about the French Revolution? And I said, how did that work out? And then somebody else stack rank them. Somebody else said the Renaissance. And I said, really good point. Right? So I'm not trying to impose this. There's no test on Tuesday whether if you check this as the most important event after the birth of Christ, you lose or win or whatever it is. I just wanted to have people think about the importance of it, because our revolution is so drowned in kind of Madison Avenue sanitized fife and drum treacle, the barnacles of sentimentality have encrusted themselves over every aspect in large measure, because there's no photograph or newsreel to give a human dimension. We think they can't be like us. They're exactly like us. And I think what Sarah and I have tried for the last 10 years to do is to sort of remove the opacity a little bit and treat it as the fact that we're born in violence, but that these ideas are beyond phenomenal and that maybe in times of division, going back to your origin story maybe helps understand.
- [06:19]
Kara Swisher
Yes, well, perfect timing, by the way.
- [06:22]
Ken Burns
Ten years ago, Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. So Nobody was talking 250. Nobody was talking semi quincentennial. And so we've just stumbled upon our good luck here.
- [06:34]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, absolutely. Timing is everything. So, Sarah, one of the through lines is, of course, what Ken was talking about was this was different, right? This was so different. And it's throughout the entire thing. And I think you stress it quite a bit. I'd love your perspective. What was the through line, and did it change over the process of you doing it? Did it start as something else?
- [06:56]
Sarah Botstein
I mean, I think like any huge revolution, the seeds did change over time. They were figuring it out as they went. I think, for me, anyway, some of the debates that the founders had themselves about what should happen next. Were they going to declare independence? Did they need a foreign ally first? What were the rights of the states versus the larger body? These are questions that our founders were debating as the war was brewing, as the war was happening, and when the war was ending. So for me, working on the series actually had the effect of making me feel really deeply patriotic and proud of a lot of our history and begin to understand for myself how young a country we are in some ways, and how unlikely it was that we were going to win this war. And so I think the film is a very surprising underdog story that the founders were figuring out as they went, too. And some of the great, most important, exciting ideals bubbled to the surface. And Those inspire us 250 years later in some very important ways.
- [08:13]
Kara Swisher
Sure. But also, the situation in the United States has changed while you're doing it. What kind of effect did that have?
- [08:20]
Sarah Botstein
So I love the fact that these films take a long time to make. The film that I worked on with Ken before this was on the US and the Holocaust. And that film also took a lot of years to make. And the world changed enormously while we were making that film. And the world changed enormously, particularly here at home, while we were making the film. So what kept me up at night was not what was happening around us, but to actually shut that noise out and get the history right and tell the story so that the film would transcend the moment and tell good history. That doesn't mean there aren't lessons and parallels and echoes.
- [09:00]
Kara Swisher
Well, there's a lot.
- [09:01]
Sarah Botstein
A lot, right. But that. That made the history for me feel more important to get right so that we weren't blowing with the winds of what was happening.
- [09:11]
Kara Swisher
Ken, you've talked about your past opposition to working with war reenactors to make a series. Talk about how your team have to adapt the filming, sort of capture the details of the war and make it compelling. People's tastes have changed. You and I have talked about this a lot of how they watch things. And you know, from the Civil War, that was groundbreaking the way you did it. But not the same in this watching environment with the impact of the Internet, et cetera.
- [09:36]
Ken Burns
Right. You know, those are a couple different questions. And let me just talk about reenactments I haven't really done. We had made a film in the late 90s on Lewis and Clark. It's two. Two hours. There's maybe four minutes of watch watching people in keelboats or portaging canoes or sewing leather buckskin by a campfire. Close ups, no faces or far away, no faces. And it worked. It helped us understand what the expedition looked at, an objective view so that we could then subjectively see what they saw in terms of the natural scenery. But here I realized with no photographs, we've got no chance, in particularly over 12 hours of understanding it. Unless I got over myself and, you know, said, we're going to do reenactments, but we're going to do it in a different way. We're not going to have reenactors reenact an event for us. We're going to film them for five or six years in every time of day and night, in every season, in every weather. And to do it impressionistically and to do it so we're not looking at faces, collecting a whole critical mass of hours and hours and hours of this stuff so that we can then use it as we would photographs or paintings in our work to complement the paintings that we do have, the. The documents we do have, the drawings that we do have, and that it works, it actually does something. I was so surprised and anxious about it, I decided to do this when I was looking at a map that we'd made for the Vietnam War of the Yadrang Valley in the Central highlands. I thought, maps will be really important. Maybe you can cover a lot of territory with maps. And this could be the British moving west in Long island towards Brooklyn. And so, yes, we got all of that stuff. Lots of maps, more maps than in all of our other films combined. Some of them are beautiful artistic ones we haven't touched, some we've just added an arrow. Some we've done cgi. You know, sometimes you've got witnesses in Vietnam and you have no first person voices here. You have no witnesses. We had no scholars in Vietnam, unless you happen to have been there. And here we've just got scholars, but 400 voices read by the finest actors in the world that bring to life not just the top down, bold face names, which it's important to know who they were and to remove that opacity, but also scores of other people that I had never heard of, and I presume you had never heard of, that make up in totality the complex, incredible variety of human beings that occupied what we call the 13 British colonies in North America. And that's the exciting thing to have.
- [12:05]
Kara Swisher
Just bringing to four people you don't know. History is littered with those people, of course, who are critical. So, Sarah, one of the things your film makes clear, though, is that the Revolutionary War was a civil war. It was probably our first civil war. The historian Alan Taylor says in your series, quote, the greatest misconception about the American Revolution is that it was something that unified Americans. The war pitted neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, father against sun. Obviously Ben Franklin is the most famous example of that. And also Native American tribes and both free and enslaved African Americans. So talk about the dividing lines at the time in terms of who supported the separatists versus who sided with the loyalists to the crown. Because it wasn't so easy, especially the common people. They were sort of happy to be British citizens in many ways.
- [12:50]
Sarah Botstein
I mean, one of the really surprising things when you dive into the history is to begin to have empathy and understanding for why you would have been a loyalists. I think Ken talks about this a lot. Loyalists kind of come down to us in history books as cartoonish and silly and traitors. When in fact, you know, probably close to a third of the population, potentially at some point felt like they would be Loyalists. The historians in the film sort of say, what does politics have to do with me? This is a violent, scary time. The British are not so terrible to us. It doesn't affect me so personally. Please, I don't want the war in my backyard. I'm afraid. I'm afraid for my family. I'm afraid for my community. And so just regular, ordinary people. I think it's very understandable why you would have been loyal to the Crown. And in fact, when the Germans came here, they looked around and went, why are these people rebelling? It's pretty good here. They have it pretty good.
- [13:49]
Kara Swisher
Also, the richer class was more into this and had to convince the lower class.
- [13:53]
Ken Burns
It's complicated. There are people that are making money, that feel that their wealth and their property has come from the British constitutional monarchy. And of course, the people who want to stay out of it for their families, they don't want a revolution. There is important. But they're also Loyalists that are saying, wait a second. And they're forming Loyalist regiments that are fighting Patriots. They're going to Canada, forming regiments and coming down. We have one Loyalist who kills his best friend at the Battle of Bennington, who's stabbing his best friend, is stabbing him, saying, you damn Tory. And he said, I'm obliged to destroy him. It's that kind of intimacy that goes on. And I think the question is really like. Like, what would I have been? Would I have been a Loyalist or would I have been a patriot? Would I have been willing to pick up a gun for a cause?
- [14:39]
Kara Swisher
Are each of you, Sarah, what would you have?
- [14:40]
Sarah Botstein
Right? I mean, I think at different times in the war, I think I maybe would have chosen different positions, which is not a wishy washy thing to say. It's more sort of when the war felt inspiring and worth fighting and when the war felt very scary and maybe not worth it. But I think also to your question, in terms of Native American communities, and the black, free and enslaved communities were making very, very complicated decisions for, I think, very understandable reasons. And again, putting into context why Native American tribes amongst themselves were split to fight for the Patriots or to stay loyal to the Crown, because they had been dealing with the British for a long, long time. And then both our side and the Brits were manipulating particularly enslaved African Americans. And whoever was gonna promise what they thought was the best chance of freedom, which is. Is where you're going to go. And I think That's a very important part of the story.
- [15:35]
Kara Swisher
Yeah. So I want to talk more about Native Americans and African Americans in a bit. But the American Revolution was also a world war, which people probably don't realize. And the British hired Hessian, that's the best known because we've all read that Hessian book as kids from Germany to fight alongside them. Johnny Tremaine in the Hessian book, the Hessian, I think it's called, and it's the same author. The French, the Dutch and the Spanish all get involved on the side of the. The Americans, despite having their own colonial empires that looked a lot like the British Empire. And it took place, as you noted, all across the world. What drove these other nations into the American Revolution? Just they often get drawn into other things.
- [16:10]
Ken Burns
So the American Revolution is the fourth global war over the prize of North America. So the previous one, the third one, which we call the French and Indian War, Britain is triumphant. The rest of the world calls it the Seven Years War. Britain's triumphant, but their treasury is depleted. They don't have the resources to protect the colonists who now want to pour over the Appalachians and take Native American lands. They can't protect them. They think about taxation and whatever. And meanwhile, France particularly, but also Spain, they're smarting from the loss of territory to the British. British have Florida. Spain is worried about their holdings around Louisiana and Mississippi so that you have all these players interested in it. And it's an amazing con game that Benjamin Franklin and the other Americans play. They do a declaration of independence saying we really do mean to come together. And then they win a big battle, Saratoga. And then all of a sudden the French are in all in $30 billion. Stacy Schiff imagines in aid. And it's very interesting that a Protestant uprising against monarchy is going to be joined by a Catholic monarchy. And you know, that doesn't work out too well for the French. After this all happens, they're one of the losers. Not big time losers, but losers in the American revolutionary battle. But let's go back to the word prize. That means the land. That land has been occupied for 22,000 years by native peoples. The 13 colonies are superimposed on land that is originally native peoples that for the previous 150 years has been acquired and fought for and ceded and bought in some cases. And there are Native Americans that are completely assimilated. There are Native Americans coexisting with the colonists. It's a very diverse group of people that are living there. You do have Africans, both free and Enslaved that are part of the dynamic of the economies of all the states. States, it's legal from New Hampshire to Georgia. And then on the western borders, you have native nations that are anxious about their land, understandably anxious. And they think, as Sarah's suggesting, that the Brits might hold the key to it. They're all, it's all a disaster. Everybody wants to take the prize, whether it's Spain, whether it's Britain, whether it's the French. They want the land. So that land is going, no matter what happens. But in the short term, it looks like the people who beat the French and are saying, we don't want these rebellious colonists into your land might be the people to go with. So on the eastern side of things, the Oneidas, for example, are connected to Americans more. They fight for the Americans. And on the western side, the Seneca and the Cayuga and Onondaga and Tuscarora are more sort of trying to protect pristine lands. So you've got great, huge forces. And what we say in the introduction is that it's a clash over Englishman becomes a global war that involves more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American. And you can hear we are trying to center. We treat Native Americans as them. These tribes, the Shawnee and the Delaware, are as different from one another as the French are from the Prussians. Why didn't we just say them? They've been on the world scene, both economically and diplomatically, for centuries. They know people in France, they know people in Spain, they know people in Great Britain. They've traded with them. And so what we've tried to do is say this has got a gigantic, gigantic international dynamic into which you insert this squabble between Englishmen. You won't let us take the land you promised us we'd be able to have. You want to now tax us. And we don't have any representation for those taxes, and we're the least taxed people anywhere, and you're the most taxed, and we're not going to do it. And so all of a sudden, this argument coincides with the Enlightenment, and it gets broken out into universal rights. And so this idea of liberty is now out there for Native Americans and women and enslaved and free blacks to hear and want as well. So you have a kind of rush for that door of the phrase all men are created equal. We know what Jefferson meant. But when you say all, as the conservative scholar Yuval Levin told us, all is it, all is all.
- [20:34]
Kara Swisher
It's over, except it's not now. What Ken's referring to in reality, the elite colonial settlers like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington wanted this land from Native Americans, and they made to make a fortune off of it. 1763, King George III had banned new settlements and speculation. Most of the Appalachians, and they didn't like that. Sarah, in the grand scheme of causes, where did the land rank from your perspective? Was it the primaries? Because we always think it was taxes, of course, because again, we have this mythology around Boston Tea Party, et cetera. Was that more important than taxation?
- [21:09]
Sarah Botstein
I mean, as Ken was just saying, I think a big revelation to all of us when we really cracked the first book and started to talk to the first scholars about, okay, what is the story that we're telling? What do we have to make sure viewers walk away with? The land is at the center of that. So I think maybe an answer to your question is that sometimes land is more important, and then eventually taxes begin to be very important. And they're taking turns in terms of which. Cause in different times, the 20 years leading up to a shot being fired at Lexington and Concord, there's a lot going on to the lead up of those first shots. So it is about 1763. That's a huge, amazing, important moment in the American Revolution that they put that line there. And that means, wait a minute. Everybody realizes this is a big piece of land.
- [21:57]
Ken Burns
It's not just Washington and Franklin, the higher classes that are dealing in tens of thousands of acres and are very pissed off that they're not going to be able to exploit that. It's just regular folks, too, want to cross over and claim 100 acres. Their family's been dependent labor for a thousand years in England. They're going to own their own land for the first time. And you're saying no. And then you mentioned Tea Party as the other part of the taxation thing. How do the people who dumped the tea in Boston harbor dress? Everybody, school kid knows this. They dressed as Native Americans. But then he asked the second question. Why? Well, it's to offset the blame, to make them think that Native Americans, nobody was fooled. They knew exactly who had done it. They did it by proclaiming as a scholar. Phil Delorious says in our film, we're Aboriginal now. We're not of you. We have separated in our essential sense. And it's so ironic, of course, that you're dressing like the people that you've spent the last 150 years dispossessing of the present land, and you're going to spend the next 150 years taking the rest of the land all the way to San Francisco. But you're making a huge statement. And so it's still about the prize of North America. And I'll do one other thing and let you go on, which is they do not call it the Eastern Seaboard Congress. And the Eastern Seaboard Congress does not name George Washington the head of the Eastern Seaboard Army. They call it the Continental Congress. And the Continental army, they know where they're going. And whether you've got a tax on tea or stamps or panes of glass or painter's lead or whatever it is, or land, they're going to take this land. Land.
- [23:36]
Sarah Botstein
We're gonna pay our soldiers in land.
- [23:38]
Ken Burns
Scripts gonna pay those who sign up for the duration in land.
- [23:45]
Kara Swisher
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- [28:24]
Ken Burns
Dunmore.
- [28:25]
Sarah Botstein
Yeah.
- [28:25]
Ken Burns
So the British Empire is dependent entirely on slave Labor. There are 26 colonies that they have in North America. 13 in the Caribbean are hugely profitable, and they're all dependent on slave labor. We're the least profitable. Only Virginia and the Carolinas are. And in Virginia, the royal governor Dunmore has been deposed. He's floating impotently out in the Chesapeake, and he gets this idea, I can offer freedom to only those slaves of rebels, not to slaves of loyalists who will have to remain slaves forever. And oh, by the the way, I own slaves and I'm not gonna free them. But there are circumstances, as Sarah was suggesting, and it's all local. The decision, the run for daylight is dependent exactly where you are. And so a lot of enslaved people rush to Dunmore. It's a disaster. They're killed in these battles, foolish battles. They die at disease. They're not treated well. But there is a sense that the British are going to be the place. As Christopher Brown says, one side is unevenly attached to this instit Britain, although in a global sense, they are totally attached to the institution and that our side is 100% for it. And so you do have that. But at the same time, there are people who hear that liberty talk, Native Americans and women and blacks who hear that, and that's what they go. We follow James Forten, who's a kid who hears the declaration read the first time it's read in public in Philadelphia, and he knows that it applies to him. He knows also he's not an idiot. He knows that it means all white men of property free of debt. But for him, he wants it. He joins the patriot cause. He's captured. He refuses a kind of sweetheart deal to go to England. He ends up in the Jersey, which is a prison ship in the east river, which is, you know, a death trap. Very few people come out of it alive. He makes it home. He becomes wealthy in the merchant marines, and he starts funding the Abolitionist movement. And when offered a pension, he said, no, I'm a volunteer. And I mean, it is. So it's a layup to go for the hypocrisy of it. It's totally hypocritical. But it is those people at the margins, as Maggie Blackhawk say, who give it meaning. And the real hypocrisy is that as this resistance is building up, the rhetoric increases. And so what happens, the rhetoric of people are often that the British are enslaving us and, you know, and even Washington says, you know, hold arbitrary sway over us as we do over the Negroes, you know, in our backyard. And you go, okay, then. And they know slavery is wrong.
- [31:09]
Sarah Botstein
I was sort of confused by that. I was like, wait a minute. What slavery are we talking about? That rhetoric was in anyway. Yes.
- [31:16]
Kara Swisher
So, Sarah, the desire to uphold slavery also helped unify the colonies because it helped convince the southern states to support the war against the British. But it also made slavery an issue of national debate in the colonies in a way that it just wasn't before. Talk about how this issue of slavery both united and divided Americans around the time of war.
- [31:33]
Sarah Botstein
When we started, my husband said to me, you know, in so many ways, the American Revolution was our Civil War, and our Civil War was our revolution. I think, as Bernard Bailyn says beautifully at the end of the film, before the American Revolution, slavery was not a constant conversation. And after the Revolution, it was. And I think that's for a number of different reasons. Most important is what we were just talking about, which is the Declaration of Independence, which is this document that everybody reads, inspires everybody, and its ironies and its complexities and its hypocrisies are not lost on anyone. So the colonies are not a monolith around slavery. People are not a monolith around slavery. And we're gonna say all something. Everyone's going to think about that in new and different ways. And the founders, Deb Slavery themselves. And George Washington frees his slaves on his deathbed. Thomas Jefferson doesn't. Ben Franklin. They all have different records on slavery, different opinions on slavery. They are thinking about it all the time.
- [32:40]
Kara Swisher
Ken. George Washington, as Sarah just note, is a mythic figure, of course, in this story, as both the commander of the Continental army and the first U.S. president. But your documentary paints a more complicated picture of him. He wasn't a particularly great general at times. He made a series of major tactical mistakes that almost lost the war for the Americans, especially in the Battle of Long Island. And Brandy, there was talk of mutiny among the ranks in the army at one point. And yet a few of the historians in the series say the war couldn't have been won without him. Talk about his flaws as a general and why he was so integral to the victory.
- [33:12]
Ken Burns
We wouldn't have a country without him. It's really unbelievable. He's a deeply flawed human being. He owns other people. He knows slavery is wrong, and only till his deathbed does he do something about it. He is opposed. When he gets to New England that there are black troops and doesn't want any more hired, he changes his mind on that. He's persuaded, which makes him different, as Jane Kaminsky says, than any other Virginia planter of the time. So he's malleable in one respect. He's rash. He rides out on the battlefield risking the whole cause. Cause if he's killed or captured, that's it. We're done. The revolution's over. He makes, as you suggest, some tactical mistakes at Long island and at Brandywine and some would argue at Germantown. That costs a war. So that's. That's. If you're trying to decide which college to go to. Those are all the negatives. Right. We're not going to George Washington University because of this, but we are going to George Washington University because of this, which is he is able to inspire people, ordinary people not of his station. He may be the richest man in America at one time, to fight in the dead of night to when they're going to go home because they're cold and hungry. To stay long longer, he picks subordinate talent, generals that are better than him, including Benedict Arnold and Nathaniel Greene, and does not feel the jealousy. He defers to Congress even though he has the moral rectitude and the kind of presence that Benjamin Rush, the only physician who signed the Declaration, said would make every other ruler in Europe look like a valet de chambre next to him, and yet he defers to Congress. More importantly, he's able to convince people from Georgia and New Hampshire that they are not from these separate countries that they believe they've always been from, but are this new thing called Americans. And more important than anything, he gave up his power twice and set in motion. So for all of these reasons, he didn't know he was George Washington. He didn't know there's a dollar bill or a quarter or a big spiky monument in the national capital named after him, or a state on the other side of that.
- [35:19]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, that might be going soon, but go ahead.
- [35:21]
Ken Burns
You know, the state on the other side of the country and every state has a Washington county or a Washington. He's central to this. Annette Gordon Reed, the historian, says, you know, he's the glue that held it together. And Christopher Brown, a younger historian, you know, breaks the fourth wall for the only time in our 12 hours and just sort of. I can't believe I'm saying this because I don't believe in the great man theory of history or interpretation of history that we don't have a country without his leadership.
- [35:51]
Kara Swisher
One thing you do note is the first he fired the first shot of the actual war which was in the French and Indian, right?
- [35:56]
Ken Burns
Well, we think he did. Native all suggest that this 22 year old militia commander from Virginia fired into a French encampment that began the seven years War. He has a very mixed results there, but he distinguishes himself and asks for a commission in the British army and doesn't get it and they turn him down. And that begins a kind of wait a second. You don't want me.
- [36:19]
Kara Swisher
I didn't know that.
- [36:20]
Ken Burns
You don't want me.
- [36:21]
Kara Swisher
I didn't know that. Yeah. So we have an idealized notion of all these men though, who fought in the war as these noble patriots fully committed to the cause of American freedom and liberty. But as the war drags on, the ranks of the Continental army eventually made up of the poorest of the poor, jobless laborers, second and third sons who weren't going to inherit anything. British deserters, felons hoping to win pardons, immigrants from Ireland and Germany. There's no nationwide draft to force meant to enlist and some states did implement drafts. But why did they stay along? Sarah, from a perspective, to win the war. No other choices.
- [36:52]
Sarah Botstein
I mean, I don't want to speak for them, but I think the. This is part of the history of our country and of wars and who fights them versus who leads them. I think they fought the war for all the reasons that are inherent in your question. It was their chance at something. It was for financial reasons, for family reasons. They didn't have any other choice for the hope of a better life. They were promised things that were better than the station that they started in. I think class is at the center of our history as much as race. We don't talk about it. And this happens in war and it happened during the American Revolution.
- [37:32]
Ken Burns
And it's so great because they're also. Everybody's drawn to these ideas, the animating spirit of it. And plus many of them are in the revenge business. They are after the fact that the British came through and occupied your New Jersey town and stole your crops and raped your daughter and, you know, stole all of your possessions. And so cause animated by fury is a great motivator. So what we can say is that democracy is not the intention of the American Revolution. By no stretch of the imagination, the ruling elites, we'd call them today, believed in forming some non monarchical, republican, small r form of government. But in order to win the war, you gotta begin to promise things to the people who are fighting the war for you. And it is fought not just by this dirty landowning militiamen. They're often unreliable, leaving to plant crops or to harvest crops or because they're scared. And it ends up being won by these teenagers and these new immigrants that don't own property. And it is, as Washington said, it's just nothing short of a standing miracle that they were able, against all this odds, over six and a half years to pull it off. It's just, it's incredible.
- [38:51]
Kara Swisher
So I'm going to jump for a second to present day and the ways we talk about history now. This is airing at a particularly fraught time to be telling these kinds of nuanced stories. It's become a political act whether you want it to be or not. The Trump administration is debated demanding a return to telling more patriotic version of the country's history. Trump wanted to purge the Smithsonian of what he called divisive race based ideology. He's ordered any material that disparages Americans to be stripped from the national parks. You got a lot of that in there. Like it's, I mean, you're telling the story right, which is the factual story. So how has that been in working on it over these 10 years? Because you started in a different time.
- [39:26]
Sarah Botstein
Look, I have two children. I see history as our great teachers, teacher, history as a warning, history as inspiration, history as essential to understanding where we are and where we might go. And I think to teach complicated good history is at the heart of this country. Our founders wanted us to be educated, curiosity, education. Ken talks a lot about this virtue are all about trying to understand the good and the bad. It's like making a hero perfect. No hero is perfect. No person is perfect. You need to make somebody truly heroic. You need to understand the things they're not good at, at least for me. Because then you can tell your son or your daughter, look at that incredible person who wasn't perfect and look what they achieved. Right? Whatever it is, like you want to give people complication and nuance and we have a really complicated. I Don't really love the word nuanced, but it's appropriate nuanced history where, you know, Ken says this a lot. As soon as you're sure you're really right, you better peel back and let somebody tell you why you might not be right. That is at the heart of, I think, what makes a human experience worth living through. So I think the film, in the end, for me, is a deeply patriotic film. I feel very proud to be an American at the end of this film. Not because we did everything right or we've done everything right in the last 250 years, but because this is such an unlikely and surprising story. Citizenship is the highest form of office. Citizenship, to me, is at the heart of any film we make, actually. And I want to inspire young people to care about their local school board and their local election. And you can only do that if you understand who your neighbor is and that their beliefs might be different than yours.
- [41:22]
Kara Swisher
So, Ken, do you think. You know, you talked about getting history right, and you've definitely gotten more nuanced over the years, right, in terms of who you pick and choose and the perspectives?
- [41:32]
Ken Burns
I don't think so. I was looking at the Civil War, and I thought it had, you know, it's pretty. It's pretty nuanced in. In terms of the voices that you hear from and all the various people who contribute to it.
- [41:43]
Kara Swisher
Do you feel pressure to include even more voices that you may not agree with?
- [41:47]
Ken Burns
No, not at all.
- [41:48]
Kara Swisher
In fact, tell me about that.
- [41:49]
Ken Burns
It's.
- [41:49]
Kara Swisher
It.
- [41:50]
Ken Burns
You know what's so nice? They take a long time, so people don't have the attention spans to, like, sort of oversee us. But let me just say something. This nuance is not the province of progressives. This nuance is the province of human beings and storytelling. So let's just take what is considered a kind of bellwether of the conservatives, supposedly, which is the series I love, called Yellowstone, Right. Its patriarch, it's. George Washington, is a very wise person who happens to murder people and dump their bodies in a ravine, right? His strong daughter, right, is.
- [42:30]
Sarah Botstein
She's a hot mess.
- [42:31]
Ken Burns
She's a hot mess and is incredibly wise and smart and also kills people and dumps their bodies in ravines. There are two sons, one of whom is married to a Native American and conflicted throughout the whole film. The other is Benedict Arnold. The daughter is in love with the foreman, who has a crew of young and old, white and black people. People, right? And surrounding them is a Native American sense that this is their land. And overlaid on that is the American story of taking over land and greed. So this is the, this is a complicated thing. I could be describing a Shakespeare play for all you know. This is what people want. They are hungry. And Sarah and I were on Washington Journal and C Span, you know, where they call in in the morning over the headlines and they got a Democratic line and a Republican line line and an independent line. And I'm used to being on it and you're dodging arrows and bullets and spears that are coming at you from every one of them. Each caller said, oh, we really love your stuff. So what it means is that we're hungry for good stories and good stories are always complicated, no matter what the state might want to impose. It doesn't work for anybody. It doesn't work for a conservative, it doesn't work for a progressive. I mean, look what the left has done in sort of editing out people off the politburo or this thing or whatever it is. It's all in the interests of authoritarians to make this a single note story because that keeps you a subject dedicated to conspiracies and mythology, not what's really cool.
- [44:11]
Kara Swisher
Let me push back us say nuance is not progressive, but let's not both sides that Trump and Mag are interested in nodding complicated, nuanced portrayal of America history. Correct?
- [44:20]
Ken Burns
No, totally. But what I'm saying is that they don't necessarily represent even conservatives in the United States fair. What we have is a good story is a good story. The novelist Richard Powers said, you know, 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, he said, is a good story. That's true, but so good stories remind us that it isn't a binary.
- [44:43]
Sarah Botstein
Right, Right.
- [44:44]
Kara Swisher
But Sarah, I'm just curious your thought. Can stories of history ever be neutral and is it wrong to present them as such if they're. They still hold a point of view. Right.
- [44:53]
Sarah Botstein
Look, I think the way I think about this is facts as close to a fact as you can get. And then how you interpret those facts is where I think the heart of your question is so what we tried to do both in Vietnam and this and I think we've talked a lot about the scholarship in both series. They may seem so different and they took place a long time apart from. But they're like upside down versions of each other. In Vietnam, we're looking at the war from four different perspectives and the scholars are behind the camera in this film, the scholars are on camera helping the American people understand the facts on the ground as we're putting them forward. And the historians have different expertise and different points of view and think different things are important. And we want to put them in conversation with each other to give our audiences the tools to think for themselves and have questions and get to the heart of some of what you're saying, which is what we've done well, what we haven't done well, and how to think about our origin story.
- [45:55]
Kara Swisher
So truthful, but not neutral necessarily.
- [45:57]
Ken Burns
Yeah, no, no. We say calling balls and strikes. That's the phrase we like to use.
- [46:03]
Kara Swisher
You do know that Chief Justice John Roberts also talks about calling.
- [46:06]
Ken Burns
Yeah. But that he's a different balls and strikes, that he's using it in a different way.
- [46:12]
Kara Swisher
Let me ask you the last sort of Trump question. In addition to this docuseries, you've made films on Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and Congress itself. Based on your decades of research about this era, what does Trump's rapid consolidation of power tell us about the gap between the founders, visions of checks and balances and the reality of what we're seeing today? And what would they make of Congress's abdication of its own constitutional powers as a check on the executive? Because it's sort of the opposite of what your story is telling.
- [46:38]
Ken Burns
Yes. So we were with Yuval Levin a few weeks ago in Philadelphia taping something that'll air after the broadcast of our film with Jeffrey Rosen at the National Constitution center and Melody Barnes, Sarah and me. It was a wonderful conversation. And Yuval was saying the founders aren't going to be. They wouldn't be surprised if somebody was seeking monarchical power. They'd be surprised that Article 1 is not the executive, Article 1 is the legislative, and that they had abdicated. That would be the huge, stunning shock to them that there had been any kind of abdication of powers. He said it in a wonderful way, having to do with tense. He said that the legislative was in the future tense. You'll do this. The executive was in the present tense. I am doing what you told me to do. And the Supreme Court is in the past tense, judging that. And so they saw this almost in that temporal way. The founders, I'm talking about, and this is through Yuval Levin, who knows a lot more about it than I do, even though we, I'm sure, find ourselves on opposite sides about any, any number of things. But it was an interesting way to understand that. And, and, and I went. It took me back you know, to what I carry around, which is the Constitution and the Declaration and the Bill of Rights and to read, you know, just how extensive Article 1 is and, and how much less extensive 2 and 3 are and the other sort of parts of it before we get to the Bill of Rights. It's, it's, it's unprecedented times. And yet, you know, I made a film on Huey Long which, you know, every sentence is rhyming with today. Every sentence of that song is rhyming with today.
- [48:21]
Kara Swisher
He had a different outcome.
- [48:22]
Ken Burns
Different outcome.
- [48:22]
Kara Swisher
Who knows? Who knows? We'll be back in a minute. Minute. Support for this show comes from Smartsheet. Look, everyone wants to go faster. Whether you're stuck in line standing at the DMV or you've got a huge to do list at work that doesn't seem to go away. But usually when things are rushed, mistakes tend to follow. That's where Smartsheet steps in. They can get you the speed you need and the productivity to go along the alongside it. Smartsheet is the intelligent work management platform that embeds AI powered execution to drive the velocity of work. With their AI first capabilities, you can make work management your superpower, getting personalized insights automatically, creating tailored solutions and streamlining workflows to elevate your work. This intelligence layer unites people, processes and data, helping you tackle any work management challenge. Plus, smartsheet AI turns intent into guided workflows and smart, smarter outcomes by generating tailored solutions and personalized insights through intelligent AI assistance. The result is an environment where humans plus AI work collectively to anticipate needs, remove barriers and enable greater impact so you can move faster, think bigger and drive greater business growth. Visit smartsheet.com Vox Support for the show comes from Rippling Finance teams can waste weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets and fixing errors across a slew of disciplines. Disconnected spend tools and that's what Rippling is here to fix, helping you keep your spend under control without the busy work of clunky finance software. Rippling is the unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance. They've helped millions replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system designed to give leaders clarity, speed and control. By uniting your employees, teams and departments in one system, Rippling removes the bottlenecks, busywork and silos your software cross created automated, perfectly in sync and seriously simple to use, Rippling gives your company one source of truth for your people, their data and everything they touch. With Rippling, you can run your entire hr, IT and finance operations as one or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps in your software stack. And right now you can get six months free when you go to rippling.com Kara learn more at r-I p p l-I n g.com that's rippling.com Kara for six months free. Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from upwork. So you started a business, but you didn't expect to become the head of everything. Now you're doing marketing, customer service and it with no support staff. At some point doing it all becomes the reason nothing gets done. Stop doing everything. Instead of spending weeks sorting through random resumes resumes, Upwork Business plus sends a curated shortlist of expert talent to your inbox in hours. These are trusted top rated freelancers vetted for skills and reliability. And with Upwork Business plus you can get instant access to the top 1% of talent on Upwork in marketing, design, AI and more, all ready to jump in and take work off your plate. Upwork Business plus can take the hassle out of hiring and the pressure off your team. That way you can stop doing everything and instead focus on scaling while the pros at Upwork can handle the rest. Right now, when you spend $1,000 on Upwork Business plus, you get $500 in credit. Go to Upwork.comsave now and claim the offer before December 31, 2025. Again, that's Upwork.comsave scale smarter with top talent and $500 in credit. Terms and conditions apply. All right, every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours.
- [52:13]
Sarah Botstein
Hi, I'm Garrett Graf, a journalist and historian. And my big question for Ken Burns is about his documentary Civil War. Ever since that documentary came out in 1990 and helped reinspire and reinterest America in that seminal conflict, we've also seen the Civil War become a flashpoint in our power politics again. We've seen the Confederate flag removed from the State House lawn in South Carolina after that infamous church shooting in Charleston. We've seen Confederate statues removed across the country in the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020. And now we're living in another moment where Confederate statues are going back up in Washington, D.C. i wonder, Ken, how your view of that war's legacy has changed since 1990 and what you have learned about how we remember that war as a nation.
- [53:12]
Ken Burns
Well, the Civil War, that's a really great question. The Civil War, once we started our country, is the most important event. And let's remember that Confederate flag was not the Confederate flag. The flag of the Confederacy is a different flag altogether. That was one battle flag of the army of Northern Virginia that was just adopted by the Ku Klux Klan. So that use of the flag is in itself even more specious than being the flag.
- [53:35]
Kara Swisher
So they're just stupid, but go ahead.
- [53:37]
Ken Burns
Yeah. And so it's constantly doing that. I've got photographs in many other films of Klansmen marching by the tens of Thousands in Washington D.C. unfurling Gigantic American flags on the steps of the Capitol. We've had periods in which we have romanticized this. And part of the attempt to simplify our history to go back to something that's more manageable. And whether it's moving women back into the position where they should be. Making it a lily white story is of course, to elevate the aspirations of the Confederacy, which itself was not only bankrupt, but varied in and of itself. There are 9 million people in the South, 4 million of whom are owned by the other people in the South. So you have 45% of the population that doesn't give a damn about. About slavery. They want it to end as fast as possible. And so we've got a really complex. The Civil War will always resonate. There's no different way that I treated our film after a prologue and an introduction begins with a quote that says, when thinking about America, I admire her bright blue stars. This is approximation of it. Her beautiful mountains are star crossed field, blah, blah, blah. But then my rapture is soon checked when I realize it is filled with slave holding and wrong. The tears of of my brethren flow to the sea that the soil drinks daily of the blood of my outraged sisters. I am filled with unutterable loathing. Frederick Douglass. That's how our series begins. I don't have after the prologue and introduction, I don't have any problem with that today. Yesterday, 35 years ago when it came out, or 35 years from now, which, God willing, we still got a republic. Thinking about the centrality of the Civil War and the excellent question that was just posed.
- [55:26]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're not going to be able to run the Smithsonian, Ken, but that's okay. Not this week. The Civil War is actually a good segue to finishing up and talking about the legacy of the Revolutionary War and what came after.
- [55:38]
Sarah Botstein
Sarah.
- [55:38]
Kara Swisher
Ken has said that democracy was not the intention of the American Revolution, but a consequence of it. You see the tension with the Founding Fathers themselves. As you both noted, 250 years later, we're still trying to live up to the Values they champion, even if they didn't live up to the them in personhood. So if the challenge for every generation is to try to live up to those ideals and create a more perfect union, as the preamble of the Constitution says, how do you think that legacy is going? And what are the unique challenges? Are they the same challenges from your perspective?
- [56:08]
Sarah Botstein
I don't think they're the same challenges, although there's probably some similarities just to the human experience. I do think citizenship and. And your responsibility in a democracy are just essential elements to try to inspire in our young people to actually be civically minded, civically engaged. I think there are a lot of deeply important principles at our founding. The freedom of speech, the freedom to practice your own religion, the separation of church and state, and a balance of power, free and fair elections. I think some of our founding principles are deeply inspirational and really, really important. And when we lose our way, we need to go back to those principles, kind of strip back and reassess and sort of, I hope, actually come together around this. Pretty surprising. It's a great underdog story. It's very unlikely that we were gonna win. We didn't win alone. So. So it's. I mean, at the heart of your question, I think, are some of the things the founders were debating themselves and fighting for and declared and then tried to figure out.
- [57:26]
Kara Swisher
Right.
- [57:26]
Sarah Botstein
There's 10 years between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It takes a while to form a government. George Washington steps away from power because he wants to show an example of a peaceful transfer of power. There's a lot to our beginnings that might help us right now.
- [57:42]
Kara Swisher
So, Ken, what do you hope, particularly young people will take away from the docu series? According to the recent PBS News Marist Poll, nearly a third of Americans right now say people may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back. So what do you hope people will take away?
- [57:58]
Ken Burns
Yeah, no. The study of war is always fraught because you are essentially reexamining and representing violence. That is part of the human story. In fact, one of our episodes of the Vietnam War was called the history of the World, meaning that's what human beings do, is they kill each other. And, you know, regardless of what a poll says on Thursday or whatever, it doesn't matter. You don't want to in any way glorify war. It is really horrible. There's a woman, there's a line in a document we have. Rebecca Tanner lost five sons fighting for the patriot cause. Rebecca Tanner was a Mohegan Indian. From we presume, Connecticut. Ultimately, we have an ability to tell the story because it's so dramatic and so part of the human condition. But the idea that what emerges are these free electrons, the free electrons that Sarah's been talking about of citizenship and education, that pursuit of happiness doesn't mean stuff, it means knowledge. And that the word that is is most commonly used throughout our film is virtue, which is an old fashioned word. And this period has as much venality as it has virtue, maybe more venality, just as our period does. And to your earlier question to Sarah, you're gonna always take steps forwards and steps backwards. And I think the Chicken Little in us at any moment says our moment's the most important and of course, is the worst has ever been. And so you can either Chicken Little it, you know, sit in the room with your, you know, sucking your thumb in the fetal position and go, go, the sky is falling, or you go out and vote.
- [59:37]
Kara Swisher
I want you to address young people specifically.
- [59:39]
Ken Burns
So I think they're the ones that are most sophisticated about stories. They're the ones who are getting our stuff now in school and come up where nobody knew me from Adam, when the Civil War came out. Now all of them have seen it and they come up and they want to talk about it. We were yesterday at the Trinity Church in Manhattan doing stuff on the revolution with Lynch, Manuel Miranda. And there were all school kids, 400 school kids from all over New York. And there was this one kid who, like, he knew everything about me, every film I'd made, every, you know, stuff. And I just kind of went, holy Toledo. And then he gets up and he's one of the performers of a scene from Hamilton, this rap, which he does perfectly with Lin Manuel going, oh, my God. Because we've got. To me, it's the easy, easiest group to do. It's the people who have permitted their beliefs to become so encrusted and they're so certain learn at hand. There cannot be a better name for a judge than learn.
- [60:37]
Kara Swisher
So they're not more doubtful. You don't.
- [60:39]
Ken Burns
No, no, no, no. They're more open. They're persuadable. They went with the democratic socialist. You know, Democratic socialists don't kill Jews. National Socialists kill Jews. Many of our allies are, have been or are democratic socialists. I'm not worried about democratic socialists. I'm worried about dictators. That's what I'm worried about. And so are they, because they told us which way they wanted to go. So you've got. This is complicated. It's that learned hand said, liberty is never being too sure you're right. And that you have to understand there is a fluidity. And that this question that has animated my work, who are we? Is in fact a mirror that has to hold up to itself and say, who am I? And I think good stories do that. And so if people give us our attention, I don't care if you voted for Trump. I don't care if you voted for Kamala Harris. I literally want you to do it. And we've been out in the country. Sarah and I have been traveling all across the country and we've said the same thing to Joe Rogan as to kids everywhere in inner city kids in Charleston and Detroit and Chicago and sir, suburban kids in general audiences in every part of the country. Same story, same fastball down the center of the pike there. I could give you another baseball story.
- [61:55]
Kara Swisher
Thank you for that.
- [61:56]
Ken Burns
And what you find is a curiosity and a hunger and the best thing we ever hear, which is, I didn't know that.
- [62:05]
Kara Swisher
So this is my last question. Despite all of the hypocrisies inherent in the origin story in the country and its founding documents, it's hard not to come away from your series feeling patriotic, as Sarah noted. So even though the story of America's founding was brutal and messy and ugly right now, each of you, why don't you start, Sarah, what things are worth celebrating and taking pride and then can you finish up?
- [62:28]
Sarah Botstein
I mean, you know, I think the 4th of July is worth celebrating because we did turn the world upside down. We changed the way governments function. We changed the way people could participate and have a voice, even if that voice was for a very small segment. In 250 years, we've pressed the levers of power, right? It took 144 years for you and me to have the right to vote, but we did it and those women fought hard for us. So I want to stand on their shoulders and fight hard for the next generation. I think optimism gets lost and I want to be optimistic. I don't think I have a deeply sophisticated answer for that, other than going back to some of the debates that they had themselves. I find very helpful to understand where we are now and where I think it would be helpful to go.
- [63:22]
Ken Burns
I think we frame this always in binaries. No matter what question we're asking of ourselves, we have to say, despite the hypocrisy or despite that the actual human experience is much less defined. It's more shades of gray than the black and white that our computer systems of one and zeros and our media system of my way or the highway, red state or blue state would suggest. And I think that if we can, and this is where good stories come in, then we have the idea to go. And I could amplify, Sarah, that optimism is not a naive and pejorative condition. Cynicism is a luxury for jaded journalists and jetsetters, not for the rest of us. We all, all have to say, yep, there's a lot of bad stuff behind us and there's a lot of good stuff behind us. But in fact, none of that matters. It just matters what I do. So what I do is I vote. I go to my school board meeting, I go to my city council, I run for dog catcher. I clean up my dog's poop, I find out what my neighbor needs. I shovel their walk if they're infirmed. I do the things that the civic engagement that the revolution suggested, it was possible that for the first time in human history, and I'll repeat myself, human beings are no longer subjects, willfully dedicated to being ignorant, susceptible to superstitions, but educated and now citizens exercising as Washington felt when he resigned the presidency, the highest office in the land.
- [64:54]
Kara Swisher
Great. Perfect. Thank you so much. Sarah Botstein and Ken Burns. It's a wonderful documentary.
- [65:00]
Ken Burns
Thank you.
- [65:01]
Sarah Botstein
Thank you.
- [65:01]
Ken Burns
Great to be with you.
- [65:08]
Kara Swisher
Today's show was produced by Christian Castor Russell, Kateri Yocum, Michelle Aloy, Megan Burney and Kalyn Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Katherine Barner and Eamon Whalen. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're only following the show, you're a patriot, but not the Mel Gibson kind. If not, go read some history books. Go wherever you listen to podcasts. Search for on with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to on with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.