← Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain English with Derek Thompson
How the American Revolution Changed the World, With Ken Burns
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- [00:00]
A
What's up? It's Todd McShay, host of the McShay show at the Ringer and Spotify. We're building this thing up and I couldn't be more excited to be back talking college football and everything. NFL Draft with the most informed audience out there. That's you, my co host Steve mentioned. I will be with you three times a week throughout the football season with all the latest news, analysis and scouting intel from around the league. For even more insight, subscribe to my newsletter, the McShay Report to access my mock drafts, big boards, tape breakdowns and other exclusive scouting content you can't get anywhere else. It's going to be a great season and I hope you'll be with us at the McShay show every step of the way. This episode is presented by AT&T. America's First Network is also its fastest and most reliable based on root metrics. United states root score report 1H2025 tested with best commercially available smartphones on three national mobile networks across all available network types. Your experiences may vary. Rootmetrics ratings are not an endorsement of ATT. When you compare, there's no comparison. AT&T this episode is brought to you by Canva. If you find yourself flipping between endless tabs and programs trying to realize your vision, you should try Canva, the all in one design platform that makes ideas flow into beautiful work. Whether you're a content creator, small business owner, or influencer, it's got all the tools you need in one place. Like Canva Video. With thousands of templates or Canva docs for beautiful visual documents, Canva lets you bring your big ideas to life as fast as you can think of them. Put imagination to work@canva.com today. The American Revolution with Ken Burns I'm guessing you've seen the painting Washington Crossing the Delaware by Immanuel Leutze. It's the morning after Christmas, 1776. Lit by sunrise, men and women are rowing their little boat through blocks of ice. At the helm, we see George Washington standing tall, chest out, blue coat, American flag clutched behind him, face lit by a patriotic morning glow. It's one of the most famous images of patriotism in American history. It's also a fantasy, like so much about the Revolutionary War. The flag in the painting, for example, the Stars and Stripes, didn't exist yet. The crossing didn't happen in daylight, but rather in the middle of night in a freezing storm. The actual boat that George Washington rode on was much larger than the one pictured in the painting. It probably had horses and artillery on it, the actual scene would have been dark, chaotic, miserable men dressed in rags, many without coats. An army that had been shamefully pushed out of New York City. Having lost a series of critical battles, it would have made for a terrible painting. The Revolution, barely six months after independence was declared, seemed to be dying just days before that crossing. On December 19, 1776, Thomas Paine published a pamphlet that famously began with these these are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country. When we think about the American Revolution, we tend to think of it like Washington crossing the Delaware. Gauzy, sunlit, noble, triumphant, clean. The real revolution was so different. Long, dirty, improvisational, brutal, tens of thousands dead. So many loyalists in the thirteen colonies didn't agree with the patriots who wanted to break off from the British that it was almost as much of a civil war in America as it was a revolutionary war against the British. Even the cause of freedom was tangled in its own moral contradictions. George Washington, that symbol of honor and liberty shining in the sunlight of Christmas Day in that portrait, owed more than 100 slaves when he made that crossing. The same revolution that declared all men are created equal was, of course, built on an economy that denied equality to thousands. There's a tendency today to turn American history into a blunt political instrument to prove that America's character is inherently racist on the one hand or inherently good on the other. But the Revolutionary War was a microcosm for what American history has always been. Messy, inspiring, brutal, easily mythologized, frequently misunderstood. Today's guest is a genius at telling history on its own terms. Ken Burns is an award winning filmmaker whose documentary films and television series on American history include the Civil War, baseball, jazz and country music. This year, he's telling the story of the American Revolution and he stopped by our show to talk about American history and the art of storytelling. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Ken Burns, welcome to the show.
- [05:32]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [05:34]
A
As I was putting together the research for this episode, I had the feeling that the American Revolution is almost sanitized by our familiarity with it.
- [05:43]
B
No question.
- [05:43]
A
Broad strokes are so familiar that we lose purchase on just how radical it was, how weird it was. I mean, it is a radical act to die for a country that clearly exists. It is a much more radical and strange act to die for a country that does not clearly exist. And so for most of this interview, I want to ask you to explain the American Revolution to Me. But for this first question answer, I'd almost like you to unexplain the American Revolution to me, to jostle our familiar notions with what this thing is so big picture. What makes the American Revolution so strange and so radical, so unlike the clean and sanitized story of it that we like to tell ourselves?
- [06:21]
B
Well, I'm glad you point out that that's the sort of the way we want to tell it. It's encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia. We think it's a bloodless, gallant myth. It's just us against the British, that it's, you know, great men in Philadelphia thinking great ideas, which is a huge part of it. But it's also a very, very bloody revolution. It is an unpleasant way to die anywhere in any war. But in the late it 18th century, it is particularly bad with cannon and bayonet and musket fire. This is also a civil war overlaid on top of it. A lot of Americans, at times most are not with the program. It's also a world war, probably the fourth world War for the prize of North America. And so what you have is instead of this kind of thin, top level of kind of stuff happening in Philadelphia, you find this deep, deep, almost grand canyon of layers of people involved in it. They could not have been more disunited. The thirteen colonies. They are as different from one another as someone said when a scholar says in our film, as countries are, they are within their mixed are assimilated and coexisting Native Americans. The colonies have been superimposed over their lands or what was once their lands. At the western borders are many native nations, each of them distinct players on a world scene for centuries, that are trading partners, that are political partners, that are diplomatic partners, that are as distinct from one another as, say, France is from Prussia. You have 500,000 out of the 2.5 to 3 million people in the 13 colonies at the time of the beginning of the revolution who are enslaved or free black people. We represent the poorest of the colonies. The 13 colonies that we are familiar with are only half of the 26 colonies that Britain has. The other 13 are by far the most profitable. Only Virginia and South Carolina sort of turn a profit, if you will, for the empire. And of course, that profit is totally determined by slave labor. And so you have just an amazing set of characters. Not just the usual founding fathers, but half the population are, of course, women. And you've got all of these competing interests. And you end up with what I think is one of most important events in all of world history. I've sort of, I guess, provocatively said that I think it's the most important event since the birth of Christ and only to get people's minds kind of disenthralled from that mythological version of the revolution that you set at the top.
- [09:10]
A
Well, I don't want to be a sensationalist, but it is impossible to not take that bait. How is the American Revolution the most important event in the last 2,000 years?
- [09:20]
B
Well, I don't know what. Some people came up to me just the other night at Brown University, a scholar came up to me and said she was French. What about the French Revolution? And I said, yeah, we sponsored it. So I didn't really feel. And it kind of went off kilter in ways that ours didn't go off kilter. And then I've had people along the road, and I've only been saying about this for maybe a couple of months that have brought up the Black Peleg or the Renaissance or things like that. I think they're all legitimate. I would throw in, what about Gutenberg? What about Shakespeare or something like that. But I think when you come to it, everybody before, Most everybody before July 4, 1776, was a subject under authoritarian rule. A few moments after pursuit of happiness in the Declaration, Jefferson said, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. We've just put up with this forever and that it's going to require an extra bit of effort to sort of overcome the specific gravity of that condition and to be a citizen, this new thing. And that's going to require all the virtue. That's what pursuit of happiness is. It's not objects. It's lifelong learning, and it's not a thing to be had. It's something to pursue. And out of that pursuit of lifelong learning would come some kind of virtue that. That would then earn you the right of citizenship, or at least that would be the ideal that the founders have. And of course nothing ever comes that way, but I think that's pretty great. The Old Testament, which is well before the birth of Christ, of course, says that what has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. That's Ecclesiastes. I think that's right. Human nature doesn't change. And we can find today the same degrees of venality and virtue in our population as we can find back in the revolutionary set and indeed back in the biblical set. But I think for a little bit there's something new under the sun. And I think that's what gives the American Revolution its sense, as the scholar says, Jane Kaminsky says in our film, this sense of possibility, even for people who didn't have ownership of themselves, that we were letting in some pretty big ideas. And that combined with just the mind boggling length and scope and brutality of it is what makes it to me just endlessly fascinating. And you use the word purchase and I think that's really, really an important word. Like where do we find connection to this origin story? Where do we find a real, genuine, authentic connection to something that we have so sanitized? And that I think is the rub. And for us it was just a big, big gigantic learning curve and 10 years of just trying to get it right, understanding all of this new scholarship, understanding finding where the paintings and the drawings, maps were, and to try to put it all together into coherent narrative that has not just a top down story of founders with a single third person narrator, but a chorus of more than 400 individual voices read by, fortunately some of the finer actors in the world today, bringing to life not just those founders, but the scores of other characters who are by no means subsidiary and in some instances central to understanding what actually took place in the Revolution.
- [12:47]
A
You mentioned that the American Revolution was not just an American Revolution, it was in some ways a global revolution. And I wonder if I was your co attorney litigating the case that this was the most important event in the last 2,000 years. I'd probably try to argue that the independence movements that flowed out of the American Revolution, or at least that followed it, not just the French Revolution that we're most familiar with, but revolutions throughout the world, from Central America to India, in the generations and centuries that followed the American Revolution, all in some way owe at least some of their inspiration or some of their tactics to the seed American Revolution. Just talk a bit about that and how this mushrooms around the world.
- [13:26]
B
We say that it's very funny. It used to be in the introduction and I was in the last throws. Sarah Botstein and I, my co director and I were in the last throws of editing. We'd even lock the introduction. But we unlocked it and we moved some stuff around and I took out a few didactic things, one of which is that it had been inspiration for more than 200 years of revolution. Let me just say that what you said and the itemization of not just French, but Central and South American and other places in Europe and Asia and Africa, but Let me just tell you what happened on September 2, 1945. That is the date that the Japanese are declaring unconditional surrender, signing the documents on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. At that same moment in Badin Square in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh, a man who has been saved by OSS members back in the late winter of 45 from some disease that he had, the OSS was looking for partners in the war against the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia, declares independence not only from the Japanese, who clearly have lost, but from the French, who have been their colonial masters for a long time. And he is standing there in Baden Square, quoting Thomas Jefferson with OSS men flanking him in much the same way park service people flanked Martin Luther King, park service rangers at his I have a dream speech on August 28, 1963, in front of the Lincoln Memorial. So a few weeks later, the State Department saying, no, he's a commie, get the hell out. We're not on his side anymore. But it's pretty unbelievable thinking about a history I've also spent ten and a half years delving into on the Vietnam War, just how incredibly powerful these ideas are. And you know what? When in the first draft and I detail this not in the revolution, but in a film that we did a few years ago on Benjamin Franklin, who is the sort of chairman, if you will, of the writing committee, it's given to Jefferson. Jefferson writes, and more accurately, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. That would be a perfect Enlightenment response to the moment, right? Like we're this, this is what we believe in, right? It's really new stuff. There's something new under the sun. Franklin says, no, we hold these truths to be self evident. Like Derek, there is nothing self evident about what he's about to say. Like that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I mean, it's so fantastic. And in that earlier Franklin piece, Summoned, the scholar says, it's the old lawyer's dodge. Just tell them it's true and then it sort of has to be true. So I add that to you, my co counsel, as we argue the American Revolution down through history and out into the world.
- [16:19]
A
One last question about its influence, which we'll return to at the end after we go through a bit of a chronology. It seems to me that the American Revolution is not just successful in that we successfully break off from the British Empire and then successfully create the richest country in the World. It's also mimetic. It becomes a kind of meme. Like, this is what you're picking up on when you're quoting Ho Chi Minh. This is what we're picking up on when we find that there's little fragments of Franklin and Jefferson and Washington's words that echo in the mouths of people in Central and South America and Southern Asia. Can you speak a little bit to. You know, you're a man of words yourself. The way in which this was, in a strange way, like one of the most memetic wars in history. I mean, we quote its papers all the time. It's laser statements.
- [17:10]
B
You've come to the right crazy person because every Fourth of July for the last 35, 40 years, I've stood on the picnic table at our lake cabin and made my four daughters listen to me read the Declaration of independence every July 4th before we dig in. Yeah, no, it's really huge. I was just in Philadelphia a few weeks ago in the Museum of the American Revolution, which had been fantastic help as we made. This is just about to open, or has just opened, an exhibition about the sort of the carrying power of the Declaration in all the places in which you can see it, including on the Mall in Washington. When Martin Luther King delivers that speech, he quotes Thomas Jefferson. We hold these truths. And so that's the promissory note that's being sort of asked to be delivered on. So this is so unbelievable. Even the immediate response in Philadelphia, it's red and people are going crazy. We're talking about the Middle east and people firing off guns in celebrations for this thing or that thing. We were doing it. And that's where we get our Fourth of July. Adam says this day should forever be celebrated with bonfires and illuminations and fireworks. And we've said, okay, we'll do that. And we have done that. His wife is in Boston and watches as every vestige of the King is taken down everywhere and burned in King Street. And that we can say, as she says, amen. And then up in Ticonderoga, the survivors of the failed Canadian invasion of earlier that year are. Are just saying, now we are a people with a name among the states of the world. And there's a black, free black fighter from Massachusetts named Lemuel Haynes who writes something about liberty further extended. And so already, even though it's clear that it means all white men of property free of debt, no one else believes that that's true. As yuval11 said the other day in Philadelphia to us that once you Say the word all, it's all over. You know, I mean, it's. It's the tr. The word that is the truck that drives through the doors and, and smashes down. The limited version of that. And I think it's the vagueness combined with the all, which means that, you know, the second they say it, slavery's done. Now it's going to take four score and nine years. Women are going to get the right to vote. It's going to take 144 years. But all of those things, it's the. The doors have been burst down. And that's why it's just. To me, no, even if other countries, and other countries do do it faster than us in terms of abolition of or extending suffrage to women, or all the other things that we consider the expanding rights that echo, that ripple out like the stone in the pond from our declaration, it's really been a very powerful world. And I think it's quite a lot of the metaphors, the world turned upside down or all of that sort of stuff are apt when it comes to that.
- [20:13]
A
I'm gonna tell the story a bit. Situate us in the 1760s, 1770s. The historian Christopher Brown said of America just before the American Revolution that, quote, I'm not sure there is a state anywhere in the world in the late 18th century that has as wide variety of people who inhabit it, end quote. There's many ways in which this is a very strange clump of people to be waging a revolution against the British Empire. And I sometimes think of this idea that, you know, they came from seeing themselves as a plurality to seeing themselves as a unity. But, but how did they get that sense? Like Sometimes in the 2000 and twenties, we say, oh, America has no sense of shared reality anymore. There's too many newsletters, there's too many podcasts that you, Ken Burns, are talking on. But I mean, think about shared reality in the 13 colonies in the 1760s, 1770s. It must have been completely shattered and diffuse. I mean, how did Americans collectively get the sense of. That we were about to, or had to embark on this insane, audacious project of taking on the Brits?
- [21:21]
B
It's such a complicated answer, and it's of course, the one. Well, I think maybe the most important one is what would I have been? Would I have been a loyalist or a patriot? Could I die for a cause? Could I fight for a cause? Could I kill another in a cause, as you pointed out, as abstract, at least for the moment as that may be? What am I willing to mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. As the Declaration ends. I mean, George Washington's the richest, maybe the richest man in America and he's in a tent for six and a half years, right? I mean, he's being shot at. He's firing his gun, his anger. No, Franklin didn't, John Adams didn't, Thomas Jefferson didn't, but Alexander Hamilton didn't. A lot of other people. You know, if you ever go to SoHo in New York, it's just a lineup of revolutionary generals, Lafayette and Mercer and Greene and Worcester and Thompson and Sullivan and McDougal. And then you hit Hudson and then you hit Washington. That was underwater. Glub, glub. But that's, I mean, it's like a little cemetery of the revolution there in New York City. So lots of things. Let's just start with inspiration. As we try to start our film, Benjamin Franklin becomes aware of the Haudenosaunee, which is the Iroquois Confederacy. This first five and then six tribes that have had a working democracy for centuries. And it allows the independence of each of the individual nations, but also provides for their common trade and defense. And he says, why can't we do this? Basically, if savages can do this, why can't we do this? And he proposes a plan of Union. He gets seven of the 13 colonies. They go to Albany. They agree to his plan of union. He's advertised it with a segmented snake that everybody's saying above the dire warning, join or die. They all sign on unanimously to the plan of union and go home to try to sell it. Nobody wants to. It's like dies a painful death. 20 years later. It will be the rallying cry, as we say in the most consequential revolution in history. But in the meantime, there's a French and Indian war which the rest of the world calls the Seven Years War, which is going to give Britain basically dominance in North America. And it's going to be, be careful what you wish for. It depletes their treasury. They've now got more territories. They now have a lot of French speaking Catholics on their doorstep. And they're a Protestant nation, as are most of the colon. They're filled with others. Catholics and Jews and Muslims come over on slave ships and other religions that the Native Americans and other enslaved Americans practice. And it's very, a wide variety, as Chris Brown says. And then they decide they can't protect anymore. So one of the big impetuses to come to the United States, since we're not the profitable place in Terms of the big global economy based on slavery, that the British Empire is, is to have land which most people from Britain and anywhere, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England don't have. They've worked for 1,000 years. They're dependent labor. So suddenly they own land and they want more land. They want to cross over. New immigrants want to. And the Brits say, we can't afford to pay for your protection. No, you can't go over that. They extend some rights to the folks in Quebec. And that drives them crazy because now all of a sudden, the Brits, it seems allied with the papacy, which is wrong. And then they begin to tax or suggest tax a stamp act that never goes into effect because we just say no. And what develops over the years is a kind of resistance. And there are various things that happen. Moments of violence. The Gas Bay is burned off. Rhode island, there is a firing. The British send troops, a standing army to not protect Boston, but to police it. 2,000 soldiers out of 16,000 population. A huge influx of troops. We're talking about this right now. It drives people crazy all up and down the colonies. And there's a massacre of five Americans in Boston in March of 1770 and 1773. There's a tea party. They dump tea because the tax remains on that. And so there's just this developing stuff. And Edmund Burke has this wonderful quote about how they say we're tyrannical and we become more tyrannical as they say this. We say they're more rebellious, they become more rebel. Know somebody has to give and it never gives. And it leads inevitably, as human beings, there's nothing new under the sun do it leads to Lexington and Concord, and then it leads to this impossibly long. You know, the chances of success at Lexington are zero. And by six and a half years later, long years after, mostly defeats, it ends in success at Yorktown. And still it's two more years before the Treaty of Paris. Two years and a month. Month before the British, their headquarters for seven years and two months evacuate New York. And then the Articles of Confederation don't really work. So you've got to have a Constitutional convention. I mean, there are so many things that lead us to this revolution. And at any given time, say, for example, if Washington was caught at Long island, be over. If he was killed at Kips Bay, over. If he was killed at Princeton, over. If he was killed at Monmouth, over. You know, it is a story about contingency. And this is the problem, not having photographs or having newsreels. We can't really Picture it. So we're relying on flawed paintings and drawings and whatever, and our interest in history is not that great. So we want to. We're still young and we burn our past behind us like rocket fuel, so who cares? But it really does matter who these people were. And George Washington didn't know he was George Washington. He didn't know he was going to be on a dollar bill or a quarter or have a big monument in the District of Columb named after him, that there'd be a state, and in just about every other state there would be a county or a town called Washington. He didn't know he was George Washington. Nobody knew how it would come out. Even when the French, after Saratoga, the great victory in large part due to the superb American generalship of Benedict Arnold, even when the French come in and offer us, as Stacy Schiff says in our film, upwards of 30 billion, equivalent of 30 billion in aid, the first few things go wrong. And Brits take Charleston and Savannah, and George Washington doesn't know at the end of our fifth episode, and neither do we if it's going to turn out the way we know it did. And so this contingency and this sense of trying to place people in the moment, that was our job, was just trying to say, you know, at every juncture, you just go, how does this work? Even when we win? You go, how does this work?
- [28:19]
A
You've already said one thing about George Washington that I don't think I'll forget, which is that he was quite possibly the richest man in America at the time. And it is very, very difficult for me to imagine Elon Musk or Larry Ellison leading the United States into battle, into actual war, riding a horse against some geopolitical nemesis. It's an incredible act of bravery which he did not necessarily need to take.
- [28:44]
B
We mutually pledge to each other our lives. That's a big deal. Our fortunes, that may be even a bigger deal for some people, and our sacred honor, whatever that is. And maybe the film's sort of final, sort of unarticulated thing is what sacred honor might be, or maybe the other word, virtue, that issues out of a lifetime of learning and questioning and critical thinking.
- [29:09]
A
I want you to tell me more about George Washington, because in interviews I've gathered that you regard him as both overrated in a narrow sense and underrated in the broader sense. That is to say, overrated potentially as a. A war tactician and general, but severely underrated as a singular figure in American history. I mean, you just said that we might not Be independent. If he dies in Kips Bay, if he dies in Long island, that holds up this figure as one of unbelievable significance for the outcome.
- [29:39]
B
I just don't accept. I don't accept the structure of the question as being a binary one. I will tell you this. Like all human beings I've ever met, he's deeply flawed. He's rash. I think riding out in those circumstances, particularly at Kips Bay, where, you know, it's too early in the war, you know. Aide reaches and pulls the reins back at Princeton, and Aide covers his face not to watch his commander killed. And at Monmouth, he dead stops a retreat, which is super impressive. Without saying a word, the Continentals are collapsing. And in face of a superior and well trained British force, and they just stop and turn on a dime. He's flawed. He owns other human beings, hundreds of them. He's rash and he makes at least two glaring tactical mistakes. At Long island, where he leaves his left flank exposed and the British are able, through Loyalist assistance, go through the unguarded Jamaica Pass and the Gowanus Highlands and come up behind the little town of Bedford and cut off the American lines. And they retreat to Brooklyn Heights. And only because of a providential rain and then fog is Washington able to escape but knows he has to eventually evacuate New York. He does the same thing at Brandywine, another gigantic battle where he leaves his right flank exposed and doesn't think the British, led by Loyalists, can go up and around the Brandywine river and find a ford to do it and nearly loses the army there. And yet, and yet, and yet, he is able to inspire people in the dead of night. He is able to get people who are desperate to go home and whose enlistments are up to stay a few more weeks. He is able to pick subordinate talent unafraid of their. Their greatness. He knows how to defer to Congress. He knows how to talk to people from New Hampshire and from Georgia and remind them, not remind them, suggest to them that they may not be Georgians and New Hampshireites, but they may in fact be this new thing, Americans. He gives up his power, his military power first, just weeks after, a few weeks after, he triumphantly returns to New York after losing it seven years and two months before. And then he reluctantly comes out of retirement to be the president of the Constitutional Convention. He's influential in some of the compromises which we can look at as both brilliant and tragic. And he is unanimously elected the first President of the United States and leaves it after two terms. It's just. It's hard to figure out. Annette Gordon Reed, the historian, says he was the person to keep the 13 states together. And Christopher Brown, the self, the historian you cited a second ago who said, you know, I'm not a big fan. The only time anyone breaks the fourth wall in our film sort of shakes in him, you know, in kind of frustration. Said I'm not, I'm not a great man, theory or interpretation of history person. But let's just put it this way, without Washington's leadership, I don't know how our country survives.
- [32:50]
A
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- [33:29]
B
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- [33:31]
A
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- [33:40]
B
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A
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- [33:50]
B
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- [33:53]
A
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- [33:55]
B
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- [34:30]
A
What do you think was Washington's genius at persuasion? At inspiration? I mean, what did he have that you think was so special?
- [34:39]
B
I think all of those things. I think that inspiration, being able to lead people, the bravery, the kind of rectitude. He's so much taller than anyone else when he walks into a room. You know it. I mean, I met Gregory Peck once. It's the only movie star I've ever met that was like, even bigger in life than he was, it seemed in the Movies. And he just kind of went, whoa, that's Gregory Peck. I'm stopping. I think that he had the effect of walking into the room, and everybody kind of quiets. And it's George Washington. And he never took advantage of it. I mean, at that. You know, the very famous and much cliched winter at Valley Floor forge. He lost 500 officers who left. Because the news from home is we're making money off this war one way or the other. We're making money. We're selling provisions to whomever is going to buy it, and they leave. And he doesn't leave. And he's the richest or one of the richest men in America. There's, you know, an amazing. God, it's a funny word, rectitude. There's a kind of severity at him. There's an opacity to him. Nobody can get in. Jo Ellis says, maybe Martha gets in, maybe Lafayette, maybe Hamilton. But, you know, he's not. He's. He's guarded, and maybe the guardedness provides something. But he's there with the troops. He understands. He arrives in Cambridge. He goes, what, you have black troops no more? Right. And Jane Kaminsky, he brings the hard no of a Virginia planter. And then he's malleable. He goes, all right. People petition him. He said, look, they died at Lexington. Conquer, they died. And breeds Hill. Dunkers Hill, you know, what are you talking about? And they're our comrades, right? And so are these Native Americans. He was more willing to accept that. Rebecca Tanner, by the way, a mohegan woman, lost five sons in the war. That's more than Mrs. Sullivan in World War II. Probably from Connecticut, fighting for the Patriot cause. Yeah, he's just. There's something about his presence that Parson Weems destroyed it for the rest of us. By the hagiography that attends Washington after his death is so phenomenal. The cherry tree, the telling a lie, the coin across the Potomac, all of it sort of stuff that even. Even now, because our resistance to that is now a kind of open rebellion, that he must not be that person. And he, of course, isn't entirely that person. And, you know, we make a joke of where Washington slept. I mean, I'm here to tell you it is super important where Washington slept, particularly in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. Really? Really. Maybe upstate New York, meaning Westchester and a little bit above. I mean, he's something else. And it is enigmatic, and it will defy your. And my ability to sort of really pin him down. But, you know, I think Macaulay said History is biography, but it's all failure, right? Because the person closest to you and the person closest to me remain inscrutable in some ways in their lives. And so how would we ever have the presumption for me to answer your question about who this guy really, really, really was? But it's something and it's attractive and it's also complicated. And you cannot shy away from permitting both. I mean, unforgiving revisionism is as bad as the tyranny of the old top down version of stuff, right? Both of them have deep, deep, glaring flaws. So what if you were umpires calling balls and strikes? And that's what we've tried to be.
- [38:13]
A
Well, I want to pick up on that note, but it occurred to me as you were describing what we know of Washington, and again, this is just the best of what we know of him, that, you know, he's opaque, he's stern, he's hard to read, he's inspiring, he's incredibly tall. It's almost as if this man was a statue before he was a statue. Like there's just something imposing and, and inspiring about him even before he's turned into marble. This is obviously an interesting moment to be an American historian who attempts to tell stories for the entire country, because while I think American history has always been somewhat political, it is unusually political now. I think in the last few years, we've had on the one hand something like one version of history telling that might be epitomized by the New York Times 1916 project, which is associated with an approach that says the American project is forged in the original sin of slavery and racism. And in so many ways I think that is true. And then you have this conservative counter revolution, especially typified on the maga, right, that calls for forcing many public education systems to tell a story of America that's purely uplifting. And I think there's many aspects of America's story that are incredibly uplifting. But I guess two questions to come out of this interestingly polarized moment. Are those voices in your head when you're making a documentary? Are you in dialogue with these sort of politicized versions of history, or are you trying to ignore and transcend them and tell a story that's purely your own and not in dialogue with the historical questions of the moment?
- [39:49]
B
More. More of the latter, for sure. First of all, I began. I mean, often the lazy reporter will say, so Ken, why the American Revolution and why not now? And I go, there's no now. I started this in December of 2015. Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. The next month was the Iowa caucuses, out of which no one predicted a certain New York real estate guy would come out of it. I mean, there's no now. I mean, Mark Twain is supposed to have said, as you know, a gazillion history doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes. If he did say it, he's absolutely right. It fits with ecclesiastics. Human nature superimposes itself, and so nothing is ever repeated twice. So you get this sense of all of the complexity of stuff. The problem is that when you try to fit a political lens and politics is just a simple binary thing, it's a yes and no. I'm right, you're wrong. That's all it is. And it's like computer world that we live in, too, which is a one or a zero, but nothing else is like. Like that. There's no binaries in nature. There's no binaries in human nature. Let's put it this way. It's just a raft of complexity. So we're umpires, calling balls and strikes. One set of people will tell you, Babe Ruth strikes out all the time, and they're right all the time. Like, he strikes out a lot. Want to know more about Babe Ruth? There's another side of people who say they're the highlight film, right? Boom, home run. Boom, home run. Boom, home run. Never taking a pitch, never walking, never striking out, never realizing that he comes up once every nine times at bat. So what if you told a history where you understand what's going on? We know it's rhyming. I'll give you a good example. We follow, among the scores of people, we follow the wife of a German mercenary general who is fighting with Burgoyne at Saratoga. His wife delays her, accompanying him because she is bearing her third daughter. And then she makes the perilous ocean crossing to see what she thinks will be the great triumph of Burgoyne's army. It doesn't work out that way. Burgoyne loses and the French come in, blah, blah, blah. She's worried as she's making the crossing that she's heard that Americans eat cat. Okay, so if the film had come out last fall, say, we'd accelerated a production, that might have been. Oh, Ken, my God, you're just trying to mock the current thing. I mean, this has been in for a couple of years, right? Three years or something. Or other things that are set at a different time. You just have to, you know, you can't can't blot it out because you're a citizen and you're working and you believe whatever you believe in and you want to be an active citizen. But as a filmmaker, it doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter because this is what happened. And I suppose in degrees of emphasis or whatever, you have to be careful. But it's not in a way that's consciously reading the political leaves of the particular moment. Because if you think about where we were in December of 2015 and where we are now, and by the way, in the beginning of your question, we are more divided in the revolution than we are right now. So division is not a strange bedfellow. And I can point to my Civil War series to World War II. 1/4 of all transactions in the middle of people and their scrap drives and their victory gardens and their sacrifice and gas rations. One quarter of all transactions were in the black market, right? So I mean, just like, let it go. I have in my editing room, the main editing room down the hill in this little town, a neo unsigned lowercase cursive. And it says, it's complicated and you know, there's not a filmmaker in the world. When a scene works, you don't touch it. But I've spent my entire professional life undoing destabilizing scenes that are working because I found out new and contradictory information in my line of work where we hope the end product is artful art always has to lose to fact if they're in conflict at any given moment, because that destabilization gives communicates a verisimilitude that no amount of art can possibly duplicate.
- [44:12]
A
I want to end by asking some questions about craft. And I apologize if this is a little bit of an awkward question, but you're very good at making documentaries. What are you best at? What is the skill you're best at?
- [44:26]
B
Yeah, I do a lot of stuff. You know, I raise all the money. I'm a producer, I'm a director, I cinematography. I have lots of my shots are in the film I help write. I mean, I rewrite in the editing room all the time. The script is not delivered and then it's like a tablet down from Mount Sinai. In this case written by my longest collaborator, Jeffrey Ward. It's just brilliant. But it's aided by scholars who add and subtract. The best thing is to being your representative in the editing room. I can see, see the film new every single time I look at it. And I go, wait a second. Why do, why do we say this? How do we know this. What assumption did we just make? And I don't mean it in that kind of didactic or formalistic way, but I just know what to do to make the story for somebody who is ignorant, which is no crime, unless it's willful, ignorant, but curious. And if that's who you are, I have made this film and this. Then I'm also good at selling it. That is to say, doing what we're doing. I don't like leaving. People say, how could you work on something for 10 years? You must be so bored. And it's the other way around. The grief that attends locking and finishing it is mitigated only by conversations. And I have said the same thing to you as I have said to the editorial board of the New York Times, as I've said to inner city kids in Detroit and Chicago and Charleston, as I said to Joe Rogan, as I've said to. To everywhere that we've been in the country, and we've been like 40 places, which means probably 80 screenings and hundreds of interviews and conversations about this. And that's really important to me to just remain the enthusiastic guilty umpire. So I think the biggest thing is to be your representative in the editing room and saying, how do I know this? Didn't you just jump two spaces?
- [46:20]
A
Because we know there's something you said that reminds me of something I think is an incredibly underrated skill across media, which is. Let me see if I can frame it. Well, you're very good in your documentaries at taking perspectives in this of generals and slaves and wives and traitors and loyalists and patriots. You're telling the story through the experience of other people. And so you were taking their perspective to push the story forward. And it seems like what I'm hearing you say is that one of the skills of being a great documentary maker and maybe just being a great storyteller, period, is being able to innocently take the part of the curious audience member. Like to transform yourself into someone who has never seen the work, who's never done all the work, to get to the point where you can see the work and to almost forget the entire experience of being Ken Burns, documentary maker and become the innocent, curious audience member who has no idea what they're looking at and is seeing it all for a fresh. And like, that's the perspective that you know how to take in the editing room. Is it something like that?
- [47:22]
B
Yeah, totally. It is exactly like that. Sarah Botstein, one of my co directors, along with David Schmidt and I, we locked. I think we locked the introduction, which is the thing that gets the most work on, because obviously that's the. The portal that people enter. That's the. The vestibule that they're going to take off their coats and either stay a while or go, I don't like this party, you know, click. And we just blew it up. We just rearranged it. It was so liberating and exciting and got rid of a couple lines of narration and this didactic shot and made this, put in some live cinema. This is with the help of our spectacular editor, Trisha Reedy, who I've been working with for 40 years. I can't, Derek, describe. It's a kind of exhilarating process, but part of it has to be they're representing somebody that doesn't know what I already know. And it's a funny sort of disconnect to sort of say, but I don't know this, even though I know this and I know how it turns out. So another way to think about it is that the process of making the film, and I would not say documentary as much as I'd say storytelling, because so much a lot of documentary is quite legitimate, essayistic or expository or whatever. It's not interested in narrative, in the large sort of gigantic sense of narrative, is just how I think. Well, I think it goes back to this contingency that we don't know how it's going to turn out, that we want to be your person, the representative in this. You're taken along and you say, yes, the worst thing you can do is fall out. And I'll tell you, the last three or four weeks, my comrades, who might be better at this, is basically given over to me changing things like a twelfth of a second, like two frames, opening it up between a word, between where a comma is between a breath or in a shot or four frames. That four frames is a sixth of a second. And it makes a huge difference. I mean, I can say, no, no, no, no, no, make it eight, it's not enough. Or, no, no, no, two, two. That was too much. And absurd questions like that are going on in the last weeks as we're locking it. And it comes down to just, everybody said their piece, now they're done. Yes, that quote is fine. No, we're going to lose that phrase. But the last stuff is just me having my way with the kind of pace and rhythm and music of it. It's really almost. We use sort of lame, very superficial musical sorts of stuff. Hold that a beat longer. Get to the End of the measure. We will. Since we record our music before or early in editing, the music is determining how long a sentence is or how long a shot lasts. And because music is not an afterthought, it's not icing on a cake, it's ought to be baked in.
- [50:21]
A
You're known for these stories. I won't say documentaries. I'll say stories that make incredible use of photography and video. And in this case, we are decades, centuries before photography and video is even close to being invented. Maybe the obvious question is, can you tell me how that limited you? But I'll try to ask you to comment on the unobvious question, which is, is there a way in which those limits were liberating, that you were allowed to do things now that you didn't do with other stories that you told completely.
- [50:53]
B
It's all about calibration and recalibration. So I was going to say. And I kind of lost my train of thought is that you would presume that making a film is additive. It's actually subtractive. You know, we gather 40 or 50 times the amount of material and the negative space of creation. What's not in is as important to me as what ends up in it. Because you have to be aware. Well, at any moment. That interview I had with you, that took three hours. And we have you in four places in episode one, which makes you a superstar of episode one is still a fraction. It totals a minute and 12 seconds, you know, a fraction of the time you did it. And so we're constantly at that stage of trying to do it. Now ask the second part of the subsequent question that you just asked.
- [51:37]
A
The substantive question was, in what ways were the technological limits of this story liberating?
- [51:47]
B
It's first daunting. And I think if you had said to me 20 years ago, why haven't you done the revolution? I'd say, well, I did a biography of Jefferson. I'm going to do this one on Franklin, but it's not going to. I don't know if I can sustain over six episodes in 12 hours. The kinds of things. If I don't have photographs and newsrooms, I'm just not sure of how to do that. But I had an epiphany while I was working on the Vietnam film near the end when I saw a map. And I thought, well, maybe maps will really help. And they do. And I love maps, and I have maps in all my films. But there are more maps in this than any other thing, and they'll help any Person who goes, well, I'm not really interested in battles. Right. That's who the maps are for. Right. Because they will just immediately rivet your attention to that. So we are very much in the business of doing that. And then I had to get over what has been a reluctance to do any kind of reenactments. Like reenactments. I don't want to even say that. We have followed reenactors around for years and years and years in every season and every day of night, in every uniform. French and British and militia and Continental and black soldiers and Native Americans, they're all there. And we follow them. They're very assiduous. But we're not asking them to reenact something. We're filming them very impressionistically from high above in a drone or up close as a musket goes off, off. So you don't see faces, you just see bodies. And you see it in an intimate way. One of the earliest images is of women in twilight washing bloody sheets in a river. And it's just trying to tell you women are involved. And by the way, this is not your sort of superficial version of that. And so in that way, this became an exhilarating and liberating kind of. Kind of thing. Yes. I don't have Lincoln standing in the tent with George McClellan, whom he's about to fire at Antietam after the draw that gives him the excuse to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. And the paintings of George Washington, the comparable figure of the time, change. And you're not really sure. There are some. You could say that wasn't as good and that was cartoonish, or, man, that's great, but you can't use that all the time. And actually, that's an older Washington, so we have to say that to the last episode, you know, all of that sort of. Of stuff. But then you see these people and they're trudging through snow, or there's just, you know, there's just a hand trying to stay warm and the accumulation of that. It's almost like we assembled over many, many years a critical mass of people reenacting so that we could just pull it off the shelf the way we would a photograph or a bit of newsreel. And because live cinematography is always important to us, it complements the live cinematography of the continent, which is. Is the real star of the film. This is the prize. This is what everybody wanted, was this continent. And from Maine to Georgia, Maine was a part of Massachusetts. This is the real star of the film. And it's got unpredictable weather. It's got huge distances, all of which confound not just the people who are fighting, but particularly the British, who are already 3,000 miles from the home office. And it just is an impossible task. And Washington finally comes to that realization that he doesn't have to win every battle the British have to win. He just. Just can't lose. Right. Surrender, be caught.
- [54:54]
A
You mentioned that you're often thinking about stories that you can tell, stories that you might tell, stories that you aren't ready to tell. Right. Yes to baseball, yes to Jefferson, maybe to American revolution. We'll see about Benjamin Franklin. Is there a documentary subject that people have desperately begged you to do that you've so far resisted for what I assume to be a very good reason?
- [55:19]
B
Well, you know, no, but there is one thing. I mean, revolution wasn't ever on a list. It wasn't sort of like thinking, but we're not yet ready. You know, it was just one of these epiphanies. Like when I saw this map of the Adrang Valley that we had kind of animated 3D map and we're going through it, I suddenly realized, man, this could be the British moving west in. In Long island towards Brooklyn, you know, through. Across the Guam. And I go, maybe we can do this right. Little did I know that that was the largest battle. Little did I know that this was going to be as important as it was that early, halfway through 1776, Washington was going to lose New York and not get back until 1783, almost winter. I mean, just really kind of that kind of epiphany. So it was a yes right away. The way I said yes to the Civil War in my heart, the way I said yes to country music. I took 30 years to do the Buffalo. And I'm so glad because new scholarship, particularly Native American scholarship, allowed it to happen. Have some undertow and an ability for us to center native American stuff in a way that I don't think we would have been able to had it had been made much earlier and some other stuff had been like that. So it's not like that. The thing I want to do is Martin Luther King and the family came to me at the early aughts and said, we think you're the perfect person. I said, I am the perfect person. And then I realized the control that they want. It was just not something that I didn't want to sit here and talk to you about, why this film wasn't the same. So I walked away, but I'm still working at it. One of my teams that includes my daughter Sarah Burns and her husband David McMahon, we just recently did a film on Leonardo da Vinci, but have done a big series on Muhammad Ali and a smaller two part series on Jackie Robinson and the Central Park Five. We've been filming foot soldiers in the civil rights people who knew Dr. King and know. I don't, I don't mean just Harry Belafonte. We got a late interview of his and John Lewis, what. We may have gotten the last interview. It doesn't matter. It's good. But we have the people who picked him up at Albany, Georgia and took him. So I'm still waiting to find the daylight to just get in there and be able to do it. The family controls the speech and makes it hard. All of his spoken words, it makes it hard and you just need to do justice. And unfortunately, the people know the most about King are kids, kindergartners, you know, because the books are still there and they're still used and they're great. But you want to, you want to have deeper dive. Jonathan I, who's a frequent collaborator with us, just wrote a just massive, beautiful biography of him. But we'd like to get, you know, the movie Selma didn't have a single word of Martin Luther King in it, though he's the star of the film. It was all made up, written by screenwriters because of those limitations. So I don't have any, you know, we're working on a history of LBJ and the Great Society. We're doing something called Emancipation to Exodus, which is essentially Reconstruction, which we thought of immediately as the Civil War. Series was ending 35 years ago. And so it's been incubating for 30 years. We've been working on it for about five. I want to do something on the CIA. I'm helping a colleague make a film on history of Crime and Punishment. Other colleagues on a small three part, three hour film on Henry David Thoreau. You know, if I were given a thousand years to live, which I won't, I won't run out of topics in America, American history.
- [58:44]
A
Ken Burns, thank you very, very much.
- [58:46]
B
Thank you.
- [58:48]
A
Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Paraldi. And we are back to our twice a week schedule. We'll talk to you soon.
- [59:08]
B
Sam.