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The Best People with Nicolle Wallace
Ken Burns Knows We’ve Been Here Before
00:55:10
Ken Burns on the venality and virtue of America at 250.
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Ken Burns
We had unbelievable venality as well as virtue back during our founding, and we have unbelievable virtue as well as venality now. So let's just figure out, which do we wish to serve? The anxiety never is a good thing. Obviously. I assume the reason most of you are here is that we don't want to serve the forces of authoritarianism. And so how is it that we will put our democracy back on a surer and straighter and truer track?
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Podcast Host
Hello and welcome to the Best People. This week is really special. I recently sat down with the legendary documentary filmmaker and historian Ken Burns in front of a live audience at the 92nd Street Y. Ken's films tell our
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Interviewer/Co-host
story, the good, the bad, and the unflinching truth of us, which is why they touch our hearts and become fixtures
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Podcast Host
in our culture and our understanding of, of who we are as Americans. He picks his topics carefully because once
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Interviewer/Co-host
Ken digs in, he goes deep.
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Podcast Host
From baseball to jazz to the Vietnam
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Interviewer/Co-host
War and his most recent project, the American Revolution. The focus of this conversation, of our conversation, is the 250th anniversary of our country.
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Podcast Host
From her humble beginnings, through all of
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Interviewer/Co-host
her bumps and bruises along the way to now, one of her greatest tests of all.
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Podcast Host
Ken and I wrestle with where we are and why. The choices every individual makes today, tomorrow, and in the days ahead will determine what happens next. What a joy to spend this time
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Interviewer/Co-host
and share Ken's wisdom about the America we all love. So this is the best people, and
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Podcast Host
this is Ken Burns.
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Interviewer/Co-host
Thank you.
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Podcast Host
Well, I'll start by asking you in
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Interviewer/Co-host
front of everyone what I asked you in the back, but I'll clean it up because Peter and Lenny are here. Are we going to make it?
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Ken Burns
Yes.
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Podcast Host
I'm going to need your evidence based response.
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Ken Burns
Yeah. So we were. First of all, we have three great crises after the creation of the United States. The Civil War, the Depression and the Second World War. In those instances, free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power and the independence of the judiciary were never in question. There are a lot of things that are unique to this moment with this character that are terrifying. But we were more divided during our revolution, which was not just a revolution, the most consequential in the history of the world, but a incredibly bloody civil war, particularly on this island, particularly in New Jersey, particularly in South Carolina. Way more divided during our Civil War where we murdered, we now think well over 700,000 of our own people. And way more divided, I would say, during the period after the Civil War called Reconstruction and its collapse, its Terrible collapse that created the Jim Crow system that we seem to be teasing or testing to go back into today. And way more divided during the Vietnam period. I think if you think about it, from 69, for those of us who are around 69 to 75, there were hundreds and hundreds of bombings that took place. And I would just ask anyone in our media saturated world, what was the last bomb in America that went off? Was it caught and diffused? Did it go off? Where was it? How many people died? Right? I mean, so one thing you do when you study history is you end up at these different mountaintops in this perpetual range, and you're looking back at things and it can provide you some stuff. I told you earlier too, a friend of mine during the 08 meltdown, he's in the financial services and came up to me, Chicken Little, like the sky is falling. And this, we're in a depression. And I said, in our depression, in many cities, the animals in the zoo were shot and the meat distributed to the poor. If that happens, I'll agree. And then what happens is that there is a tempering of the anxieties that takes place when you study these things. I'll give you something that's not in the revolution. At the very end of the film, as we're struggling over the Bill of Rights and particularly the Constitution itself, and they're trying to reverse engineer against a dictator, and Hamilton is anxious. He says, what if somebody should mount the hobby horse of popularity and create chaos? No man is above the law. He wrote that just in these musings and considerations of what it would be like to build a system tight enough, Jefferson was in Paris, stuck in Paris, writing to his protege Madison, saying, and I took this out of the film and I think it's worth having a really healthy debate about. After Trump was reelected, he said to Madison, what if someone should lose an election but pretend false votes and reap the whirlwind? And you know, it was in there, it had its shock value before. And then I realized I need to reach as many people as possible. And this would just be a kind of. I mean, if they'd gotten that far in the film, I couldn't afford to lose them. But there was a spirit of whale to Sometimes you didn't need to put your thumb on the historical scale and say, isn't this so much like him? In fact, our job is to be Odysseus tied to the lash, to hear Circe's siren song and to be able to go, yep, it's Rhyming but I don't need to point it out. So there are lots of things that will rhyme and lots of things that don't rhyme. And more importantly to the underlying question is a lot of things that rhyme in one year don't rhyme again. And that means that there is this constant change and there's, there's. I've been writing this down for friends and my girls. I have four daughters who are the most important co productions but I wrote out on post its for them in moments of crisis, this won't last. Get help from others and be kind to yourself. Now those are essentially psychological in their origin, but they do apply. You can realize that the only thing that's constant is going to be the change. The things that, that are gonna not continue the way they are. And we are in this together. And part of what this divided world does is social media isn't right. There's nothing social about being on your phone and everyone else in the room is on their phone doing something else. And so what we need to do is find as you have created here for decades and decades and decades, a community of, of conversation, of thought, of civic action. And of course that's one of the virtues that will save us too is a kind of energetic and muscular civics that will permit us to sort of live out the true meaning of our creed.
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Interviewer/Co-host
How much of saying yes to the question will we make? It is rooted in the lessons of
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Podcast Host
history and how much of it is
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Interviewer/Co-host
things you're seeing that are different from anything that's ever happened before?
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Ken Burns
Oh, that's a really good question. I think both. I think obviously I've given a way long 9 part answer to the first part, but I love a good fill of us. Yes, don't lend the filibuster, please. I think the other thing is that you begin to. There's something lawful about everything. I mean the first and most difficult for everyone here is none of us are getting out of here alive. There's no magic thing that an exception is going to be made in our case and we're going to live forever. So you could migrate that a little bit and Viktor Orban's going to be in Hungary forever and everything that he does will go really well. And so you have the mounting sort of momentum of the fact that as I've said a few times, that the dog has caught the school bus. School bus, always going to win. It's taken a long time and we're pretty anxious about the school bus. Why hasn't it prevailed here? But I think that there is a sense that pushbacks in lower courts, pushbacks even in the Supreme Court. Finally, some people being able to say things. The beginning of a new generation of leadership that is rising up, saying, you're not doing this well. You're not responding to this well. We're just talking about Texas, Maine, you know, places where really young and really complicated people are coming up and saying, we're going to try something else. All of that suggests that this, you know, this is unprecedented. You know, one thing I think is to say that helps. It's like you're in the middle of a big party. Your parents are going to come home tomorrow. The place is a mess. Right. Do you spend the rest of the party worrying about that? Or you say, okay, my next job when this great party is over is to clean up the mess? Why are we not talking about what restoration and repair looks like?
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Podcast Host
Because I think a lot of people
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Interviewer/Co-host
wonder if mom and dad are coming home.
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Ken Burns
Yeah.
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Interviewer/Co-host
And I think that when you look
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Podcast Host
at what I think that you have
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Interviewer/Co-host
such an intimate, tactical, emotional and intellectual understanding of our history. I think some people think checks and balances. The Congress was supposed to check him, and they are absent.
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Ken Burns
Yes.
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Podcast Host
The courts are supposed to check him,
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Interviewer/Co-host
and they just gutted the Voting Rights Act. I think people feel like the system hasn't worked.
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Ken Burns
It hasn't worked and it's not working. And I think these are the things that cause me great anxiety. I also know that that tactile part, the intimate part, is also an awareness of who we actually are across the country. Like, we're talking to a relatively insular audience. I'm really happy to say that the Revolution, the American Revolution series that was broadcast last November has just broken free.
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Interviewer/Co-host
Tell us. Tell us the numbers.
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Ken Burns
It's just. It's flabbergasting. There's an interesting curiosity out there in the midst of the crisis, in the midst of wanting to be on the floor in the fetal position, sucking your thumb, chicken littleing.
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Interviewer/Co-host
I love that you're looking at me.
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Ken Burns
That we also know that we have within our power the tools to figure out what that repair and what that restoration does look like. And I think it's beginning to move. It's showing in these little tiny state and Senate and House races. In other stuff. Not everywhere we saw what the fear of retribution did in Indiana, but it's out there. And there's a sense of things I think you have to understand. You can see it when the big MAGA people break for whatever reason, and their Motives are always suspicious to me. Like Tucker Carlson. I just think he's setting himself up to run for something.
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Interviewer/Co-host
I think he's the nominee in 2018.
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Ken Burns
But I think for a lot of people, you can see in Joe Rogan, hey, I do like habeas corpus. Hey, the immigrants do, do things. Hey, this is inconsistent. Hey, you promised us not to do this. Hey, you invaded this. You know, those sorts of things have a kind of slow and steady drum beat. But it's still not enough for us to sit here and be complacent, that it's all going to be taken care of by the mass of other people who are getting sick of him. It's going to require everybody to do everything. And I'm going to give you one other thing that was interesting. Mark Twain once said so many good things. He said, if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. And so I have been out on the road for over a year and a half and, and I have been saying the same things to everybody and to the New York Times editorial board and Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughan and inner city kids in Charleston and Detroit. And there's something exhilarating about bringing the same message without having to say, oh, these people are from this. So let me throw them this kind of thing. I hoped to just get to last October, a month before our broadcast, Mid October, before there was some controversy where the, you know what hit the fan and there would be criticisms up the wazoo and I'd have to spend the rest of my life on the road answering those questions. First, nothing. The thing went off middle of the broadcast. There were three rather desultory sort of negative things from expected places. Two of them they clearly had not watched more than 15 minutes of a show. This is a show, by the way, that thinks the American Revolution is the most consequential event in world history. That, oh, by the way, there's only one person responsible for its success and that's George Washington. And we can prove it. And it's very exhilarating for a bottom up guy like me to go, whoa, it really is him. And it's complicated him too. He's not all good and he's not all bad. There's the nature of heroism. None of these things stuck. It just didn't happen. And I just think people want a good story and this is a really complex story. And if you have for anything, any imagination, have this idea of the American Revolution. From New Hamp Hampshire and the main district of Massachusetts down to Georgia as being this sort of simple binary, you've really lost it. Because it is not that, as nothing is. And it is so interesting and complicated that it makes our founding narrative even more impressive and inspirational. And I think if you're in a crisis, you tend to go back and you find a pastor or a priest and you say, help. And the first thing they want to know is, where'd you come from? And I think going back to that moment, the origin story, the mythologies, the lies, the good things, all bring you to this possibility of what it is. This is a really unique experience. There's no other country in the world that has this. This is often. Our exceptionalism is so tiresome, and particularly to the rest of the world. But Lincoln, in his 1862 message to Congress, what we call the State of the Union address, he doesn't address. It was delivered the Constitution required. It would be read by the clerk. He said, you know, that we are the last best hope of earth. And he also did two really crazy, wonderful things. Can I go into a little Lincoln reverie? Oh, please. So he's the best at seeing who we have been, who we are now, and where we could possibly be. I interviewed Stuart Udall about the national parks, and he talked about Teddy Roosevelt. And he said Roosevelt had distance in his eyes, meaning he could see beyond the horizon, not just of the globe, but of time. And Lincoln had that more than anybody else. And Lincoln in this address says, fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. Two sentences later, he says, the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present, as our case is new. We must think anew, we must act anew, we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we will save our country. That country being the last best hope of earth. So how are they both true? Yes. You know, we are bound to the historical traditions, and we are also, in a moment so fraught and ripe with possibility that to disenthrall ourselves is an interesting thing. For the man who is just issued the Emancipation Proclamation that's going to go into effect on January 1st in a couple of weeks. That means to stop being a slave, to disenthrall yourself, make yourself a thrall to somebody else. And he's asking the whole country to have this thing. And all throughout his writings, he understands the sense of it, even as a young man. He said, we're going to live through all time or die by suicide right because we got these two big oceans. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio river or make a track in the Blue Ridge and the trial of a thousand years. He is absolutely right. He said, if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live through all time or die by suicide. So this is when he's 28 years old. He's just talking to the Young Men's Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, and he already knows this about us. He knows that this two oceans and these two relatively benign neighbors have incubated such extraordinary things. Innovation, hard work, purpose, sort of unity, getting together, as well as love of money, love of guns, certain that we're right, making the other wrong, that tiresome exceptionalism, all those things are baked into the same thing. And it just becomes that. It's not like this is worse time. We had unbelievable venality as well as virtue back during our founding, and we have unbelievable virtue as well as venality now. So it's a kind of get over yourself and let's just figure out which do we wish to serve. The anxiety never is a good thing. Obviously, I assume by the reason most of you are here is that we don't want to serve the forces of authoritarianism. And so how is it that we will put our demise, democracy back on a surer and straighter and truer track?
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Interviewer/Co-host
Do you want to answer that?
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Ken Burns
Well, at the heart of this compact is that when Jefferson writes pursuit of happiness, he doesn't mean the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects. He means lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. So there's always this Socratic kind of improve and know yourself and be better. It works on both the political as well as spiritual. And we forget the spiritual dimension of our revolution that we are the first country on earth that did not establish a religion. People say First Amendment freedom of speech is being trampled or freedom of assembly or whatever. No, the first thing of that is we'll make no establishment of a religion which liberated our people to worship as we felt. And a lot of that was gravitating towards a kind of deist philosophy, regardless of your Catholic or overwhelmingly Protestant, even Jewish, even Muslim and other animist religions. If you want to denigrate Native Americans and Africans by sort of putting one title next to whatever particular faith they were adhering to, that this would liberate yourself, you would improve yourself and put you closer to God through that effort on A political sense which we speak about. It's being engaged. It's civics is gone from the schools. And I don't mean 100 senators and 435 representatives and three branches of government. I mean how you get things done. And a lot of the effort will be in re reminding us of the civic virtue Jefferson saw, and Washington saw it better. At the height of his military power, he convinced people to fight for an incompletely untried cause. In the dead of night, he inspired people from Georgia and New Hampshire that they were from the same country. They were this new thing Americans, not Georgians or New Hampshireites. And at the height of his military power, the height, he gave it up within like two weeks, at the height of his political power, walked away from it. And it was the example that set us going in lots of ways. There's a deep rectitude and humility to that. And I think what is so shocking right now is the number of times that rectitude, that humbleness, that servant to the people, has been just sort of so grossly violated for people. And then, as you suggested, Nicole, and absolutely true, the founders would less be surprised by someone taking authoritarian power than they would be by the abdication of what they correctly said was after their poetic preamble, Article one is the legislative and Article two is executive. That would be the manager carrying out what the executive, what the legislative wanted. And that is not happening. And we're seeing even the courts go into that realm. Washington had three pleas. He said, avoid partisanship, no foreign entanglements, and leave office, please. That's his message. And those things are a good starting point.
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Podcast Host
We'll take a quick break here. When we're back, much more of my conversation with documentary filmmaker and legendary storyteller Ken Burns. Stay with us.
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Interviewer/Co-host
Did they have a backup plan if the checks and balances didn't hold?
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Ken Burns
I don't know. The checks and balances didn't hold. We had a civil war that came four score and, you know, five years after the declaration, and certainly much shorter period after the Constitution, and even shorter, two years shorter from when the government actually started in 1789. They had assumed that some of the compromises that they put in place, which were in many cases quite brilliant to help the smaller states and the larger states sort of reconcile things, but it has the three fifths clause in it, and it seemed to hold. The south had and was very happy to have a kind of control of the government in not only the executive, but in the legislative for a Very long period of time. And then new western states were being added and the question of whether they were slave or free, the already moral obligation to speak out against slavery had taken, taken hold. George Washington knew slavery was evil. Thomas Jefferson knew slavery was evil. They're making so much money and so hard to stop. Washington did free his slaves at his death. Jefferson did not. Just kept buying wine and Italians, French wine and Italian statuary and temporized. He said holding slavery, slavery is like holding a wolf by the ears. You don't like it but you dare not let go. Which is bullshit. And his neighbor Cole I think his name was, urged him to free his slaves as he had done. His cousin Randolph had freed his slaves. So it was happening all around and the moral arguments were hitting a pitch. And it was no longer just no slavery, it's abolition, let's get rid of it. At that point the south turns in the economic. Their whole economic engine is now in question. There are 9 million people in the south in 1861 when the Civil War begins, 4 million of whom 45% are enslaved people. Zero interest in slavery. And people have spent the last 36 years since my Civil War series came up buttonholing me in various locations about how you say it's about slavery but it's really about states rights or it's about nullification or it's whatever it is. And you go, please just read the South Carolina Articles of Secession. They say nothing about states rights, they say nothing about nullification, interposition, anything. They say slavery over and over again. And they've already know that the guy that's been elected with 40% of the vote president is a moderate. He's a moderate, he's from the western wing. He's going to try to keep the Union together. And they're still going to go. The system was already and always has been charged. It should have been. Madison thought it was just a dead letter meant about the Constitution unless the life of the people was brought into it. And that's why the Constitution wouldn't have been ratified if the people who had been fighting for this improbable idea of liberty hadn't insisted that there be a bill of Rights, that it would enshrine many of the things they felt they were fighting for. And it's a beautiful period of incredible political, what's the right word kind of civic engagement, widespread civic engagement, probably the largest in the world up to that time where you had so called ordinary people now engaged with what will we make of this thing now that we've done it. But I think they always knew that it was flawed and going to be that way. I mean, you can look at that First Amendment as one of the most beautiful. You could go to the 14th right away. And that's what's being dismantled a little bit right now. And then I'm working on a history of Reconstruction, but I'm also making a film about LBJ and the Great Society, which is where you're getting the first progresses after the Civil War enshrined in the law in the Civil Rights act and the Voting Rights Act. And so we're in this fraught moment where maybe the lessons of those two films can help us understand just the darkness to which where some of these rulings are leading us will take us to. It is a dark, dark place and an indictment, a wholesale indictment of the United States. If we were to go back to what happened at the collapse of Reconstruction by the end of the 1870s and what Jim Crow and lynching and Plessy versus Ferguson and other things meant, it a dark, dark place to go where you have this unfettered ability to make sure that people of color do not have a chance to vote or make it so difficult that it impedes them from exercising this right.
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Interviewer/Co-host
You have the maximum amount of perspective and information to draw from. I have the least right. I stare at my nose is pressed against the glass in the news cycle.
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Ken Burns
So we all here disagree.
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Interviewer/Co-host
It is true. Thank you.
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Podcast Host
But I just have to ask if
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Interviewer/Co-host
you are sort of directly addressing the decision last week from the Supreme Court to get the Voting Rights act and if you think that one decision or do you think it is the multiple rulings that effectively gut the Voting Rights Act?
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Ken Burns
Yeah, I think last week was just a gut punch for many of us. And I think that my feeling is to not put a label on it and say, okay, it's the biggest one of many certain things. It's like, I can tell you times when it is so much darker. Maybe that's the way to say it. So much darker than we could ever possibly imagine in our history. And I don't mean just way back then when they had breeches and powdered wigs and no photographs. I mean, you know, in our lives, in the lives of photography and filmmaking. On the morning of June 6, 1944, Americans woke up. As Dwight Eisenhower said in his announcement, liberty loving Americans woke up. And they'd heard that it happened. They knew nothing. There were no from the beach reports, there was nothing. No one knew what had happened to their brothers and Their sons and their husbands and. And that night, FDR gave one of the most beautiful prayers, the D Day prayer. And he said, you know, that we may not win at once. The enemy may hurl back our forces. There's a sense now that if we live in a computer age where everything is a one or a zero, or in a media culture where everything is a simple binary, that everything's either good or bad, but it's all a process.
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Interviewer/Co-host
I want to play a little bit of the Revolution.
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Narrator/Voice Actor
I think to believe in America rooted in the American Revolution is to believe in possibility. That, to me, is the extraordinary thing about the patriot side of the fight. I think everybody on every side, including people who were denied even the ownership of themselves, had the sense of possibility worth fighting for.
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Historian/Expert
The American Revolution changed the world. It's not just about the birth of the United States. It has ramifications across the globe. So studying the American Revolution, understanding it and putting it in a global context, I think is vitally important for us to understand why we are where we are now.
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Ken Burns
That's the opening of the sixth episode. So that was a good way to begin the last roundup. You know, the last thing.
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Podcast Host
I think it makes me cry, though, because this idea that it was a
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Interviewer/Co-host
global event, this is something you always think about, right? You think it's our story, but it was a massive event the world over.
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Ken Burns
So this is maybe the fifth World War over. The prize of North America. When you say prize, you mean Indian land. So that's another thing we have to be conscious of. It's also. It's interesting, there's nobody alive that doesn't know that when that document is issued from Philadelphia on July 4th that says, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. We know that they mean all white men of property free of debt, but it doesn't mean that every other person who's been hearing for the last 20 years, as Jane Kaminsky herself says, the Liberty talk is leaky. As you're reading the newspaper, reading the Walpole, New Hampshire, where the Town I Live Gazette, which is read all the way down in Georgia, and you're reading these ideas that are being passed around. And this liberty thing is so such amazing stuff. People say, this is hot. People have ears. They all knew. And Maggie Blackhawk, who's a legal scholar at Yale, said that the Declaration was deeply significant to people at the margins. Women, the poor, enslaved and free African Americans and native peoples who were both assimilated, trying to coexist. And of course, Hoping to forestall the inevitable because that those world wars are the prize and they want it. Look, they didn't put Washington in charge of the Eastern Seaboard Army. Let's just put it that way. The Continental Congress put him in charge of the Continental Army. They knew exactly where they were going. They knew what they wanted. They knew California was out there. And so there's a complexity to that. And yet this is the Enlightenment. So the disagreement between English and. We sort of made the revolution just, oh, it's them against us. We don't acknowledge the number of people, particularly in New York City, who are loyalists, who are. Why would I change? All my prosperity, all my education, my good health, the property I own, whatever it is, has come from the British constitutional monarchy, which arguably, in terms of European Western sensibilities, could be considered the best form of government, certainly not repressive the way the French are. So why would I change that for some completely new and untried idea. But that new and untried idea had been incubating, maybe not articulated as an idea, but incubating because of the distance of 3,000 miles. In the age of. A parliamentary person said that we treated the North American colonies with salutary neglect. That salutary neglect grew this passion for that, and that passion was for everyone there. And it's hard to say this because it took four score and nine years for the 13th amendment and took 144 years for women to get to vote. Native American sovereignty is still an issue, but it was done. It was done the moment those words were let loose. And he says, that's Jefferson. A couple phrases later, he says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, which is easy to parse. It just means that heretofore everybody's been under an authoritarian's boot. We put up with that. The trains are running on time, we're told, so things must be good here in Italy under Mussolini. Right. But we are creating something else which are citizens. And it's going to take extra effort in order not to just suffer evils while evils are separable. This is one of the greatest sentences ever written in the English language. But just that idea that it is in our nature to sort of. How many grandmothers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. I'll sit in the dark that there's that tendency to just suffer while evils are sufferable. And we do have this mechanism to
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Interviewer/Co-host
say, no, what is the. I don't want to mix metaphors here. But what is the switch then in your study of humans that makes us turn the lights on?
- [34:40]
Ken Burns
Yeah, this I do not know. I am trying to figure this out. We follow a loyalist all the way through. He forms a regiment and he's in a losing battle. Kills his best friend growing up in a losing battle. There's a kid, Joseph Plum Martin, who's from Connecticut, 15 years old, who signs up a couple days after the Declaration signs up and he's first blooded here in Long island which is the biggest and the worst battle of the revolution for patriots in many respects. Why did he do that? He actually's 15. He will be going over the rampart at Redoubt Number 10 at Yorktown in October of 81. So his boss, Joseph Plumarten's boss is Lafayette, who's nowhere near there and Alexander Hamilton who's not there. Their grunts doing this work. And how did they know? Because they didn't mean for these rights. They wanted a republic of an elite. But somewhere along the line it began to change. And democracy was not the intention but the unintended consequence of this fight. And what propels people? James Forten. Here's the Declaration read A free black kid, 9 years old on the 8th, I think of July in Philadelphia, first public reading of the Declaration. And he didn't for a second think that it didn't mean him. He just went out, joined the Patriot Navy, was caught. He spends the rest of the war in the Jersey, which is a prison ship that the British have in the East River. That is the worst of the worst of the worst. He's a young kid, so he survives. He walks home barefoot to Pennsylvania. Mother can't believe he's alive. He basically makes a fortune in the sail business in the merchant marine and he funds the Liberator William Lloyd Garrison's the first abolitionist newspaper. James Wharton did and his I'm going to cry. His granddaughter Charlotte came down to the Sea Islands of Georgia after the Union took control of the Sea Islands to try to figure out how to take not yet emancipated, not yet free, but not under enslavement black Americans and to figure out how they could have schools and how they could plant crops, how they could own their own properties, how they could build their own churches and communities together. So just the animating thing. There's a guy who surrenders at Yorktown named Johann Ewald, this German Hessian. He's openly contemptuous of this stuff. He calls us a rabble, he calls us worse. But he's in the surrendering army at Yorktown. And he says, who would have thought 100 years ago that out of this multitude of rabble could arise a people who could defy kings? Just gotta be hungry enough.
- [37:32]
Podcast Host
The conversation with Ken Burns continues right after the break. We'll be right back.
- [37:50]
Interviewer/Co-host
It's time for Jackie Robinson. Oh, yeah, we'll play the other clip.
- [37:57]
Narrator/Voice Actor
History was made here Tuesday afternoon in Brooklyn's flag bedecked Ebbets Field when smiling Jackie Robinson trotted out on the green swept diamond with the rest of his Dodger teammates. No less than 15 photographers surrounded Robinson before the game, and he clicked his picture from every position imaginable. Pittsburgh Courier.
- [38:30]
On April 15, 1947, at Ebbets Field in Flatbush in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, the Brooklyn Dodgers faced the Boston Braves. It was opening day, and for the first time in modern major league history, a black man, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, was starting the game at first base. There were 26,623 fans in the stands, more than half of them black. Come to see Jackie Robinson. Although Robinson went hitless in three trips to the plate, just the sight of him stirred the crowd.
- [39:48]
Interviewer/Co-host
You have to talk first.
- [39:51]
Podcast Host
I guess what I want to ask
- [39:52]
Interviewer/Co-host
you is how do we get back to being changed by the courage of one man and a moment that unites the country behind what is now so obviously the right thing?
- [40:06]
Ken Burns
Yeah, we'll never find it in the thing that we did before. You know, there were a handful of black players at what we would consider the major league level in the 1880s. Moses, Fleetwood Walker and Bud Fowler. But Cap Anson, a player for the Chicago White Stockings, said that he wouldn't play if there was an N word on the field. And so baseball made this horrific, what they called gentlemen's agreement. And so it wouldn't be until Jackie came up, grandson of a slave. And the way was perilous. I'm not sure we have this ability to direct events, but maybe move into them in a way. What John Thord said. I'm most proud when we've led too often recently. We feel like we haven't led. We feel like we've taken some steps back, and yet we are united by this possibility. I mean, if you've ever seen a picture of Jackie Robinson just before he died, he looks like he's 85 years old and he's 53. And you begin to understand what he carried because for the first three years, one in the minor leagues in Montreal Royals, which was then the Dodgers number one AAA Farm team. He'd had to turn the other cheek. He hadn't met much resistance except in the south and in spring training. And then it got really tough for the two years here. And this is a guy who had a temper. The white person you see mostly with his hands on him is a guy named Clyde Sukeforth from Maine down Easter that I interviewed when he was in his 90s about scouting for Mr. Rickey, Branch Rickey and finding him and treating him and making sure that he was taken care of. Brought along some of the black press. Wendell Smith from the Pittsburgh Courier, other black newspaper reporters who could help him insulate him. And Rachel, his widow, who is still alive, is turning 103 this summer. God bless her. You know, it's hard to say what the ingredients are that make this kind of transformation possible. We may find it in really unexpected places. And I do think we see it. Maybe our political world is not. I consider the baseball series the sequel to the Civil War, because the first real progress in civil rights happens then, right? Then that's the center of gravity of the entire nine inning, nine episode film is that moment right there when it just changes. And you know, and somebody said this to me, somebody said, what if you were a racist and a Brooklyn Dodger fan? What do you do? The first obvious thing is you change teams, right? But you know, he's not going to be the last. So maybe you change sports. Well, pro football, which was nowhere near what it is now, had already integrated other sports were going to do that. Or the third choice is you could change. And so I think in this age of argument, the idea that the powerful stories that we are still able to tell have a kind of medicinal force that realizes that we can transform and overwhelm. It may just be the exhilaration of I am Spartacus. I am Spartacus. I am Spartacus. I am Spartacus. Of standing up in the face of what's going on and saying something. That's a good story. There's no binary in that story, Right. I think we've become used to things are all one thing or the other. What lever do we flick? You said, and I'm not sure it's a lever. Something happens. We want pearls and pearls are irritants. And over time those irritants build up imperceptibly and never could you identify one layer or the other until through that irritation you have a pearl. That's where the wisdom of storytelling, which lets you know that Wynton said this to me. Wynton Marsalis in our jazz film, sometimes the thing and the opposite of a thing can happen at the same time. And you go, right, we all know this. We know it in our lives, the personal relationships with our children. But our politics have to be on or off, red or blue, whatever it might be. And there's interesting that almost all the satisfactory change is going to happen in these weird ways. When I made the update of baseball called the 10th inning, we were just talking about it backstage. I had interviewed Tom Boswell, who was the great sports writer for the Washington Post, now retired. And his beat used to have to cover the Senators and then the Baltimore Orioles and whatever. But I was trying to have somebody make sense of steroids and Barry Bonds and stuff like that. And he said that Keats had written a letter about what Shakespeare had that no one had. And he said that Shakespeare had negative capability, the ability to hold intention, a person's strengths and their weaknesses. The moralist in us, Tom said, wants to judge one way or the other, but to hold for as long as you can. And it may be the Iago, it may be Shylock, it may be Lear, it may be Hamlet, it may be Macbeth. But to hold in tension all of these characters for as long as you can before the inevitable tragedy. And so I think we need, as Lincoln understood, this ability to. And that Keats said that Shakespeare had. Have the negative capability to just open ourselves up to the fact that neither and both may be the answer. If you're really interested in an unforgiving revisionism, I can arm you, as I said before, with all the reasons to throw George Washington out or fill in the blank Thomas Jefferson. But I can also show you other reasons. And if they're just thrown out, they're not useful. If they're just perfect statues collecting pigeon shit in the park, they're not helpful either. But somewhere along the line, they have dimension and complexity, just as all of us do. And if we extend that to them, then we have people that are our superheroes that we actually identify. Because we say, oh, they're not actually superheroes. They're kind of regular people. George Washington was the richest man in the United States. He was, you know, could do whatever he wanted. And he goes to Cambridge. He says, what, you're hiring black soldiers? No, no, no, no, no, no. And people implore him. And after a few months, as Jane Kaminsky says, you know, he has the hard no of a Virginia planter. And then he changes. Sometimes we find these things happening in really strange, incremental moments that are impossible to Calibrate for the nightly news to say, oh, this happened. That was a good thing. But there may be so many unintended consequences that issue out of this particular presidency right now. I mean, people say it's going to be really hard to repair. You work for George W. Bush. His approval rating in, say, let's just limit it to Europe was pretty low. The next guy came along and within a year, kind of awkwardly gave him a Nobel Peace Prize. I didn't mean to be hard on W. Who we would take in a second. And who I know and who I think is a terrific person. But it's true. He was a pariah and then all of a sudden. And we were a pariah by extension, and then we weren't. And that has that possibility of that healing can be a long, long grief is a long, long, slow process, but it also can move in big gulps and increments.
- [48:31]
Interviewer/Co-host
George W. Bush was very unpopular here as well. I think we were at 27% down to 27%. I think so.
- [48:38]
Ken Burns
Okay, so there's some room to move.
- [48:42]
Interviewer/Co-host
This is an audience question. So, reflecting on all of U.S. history, what gives you the most confidence about the future of the American experiment?
- [48:53]
Ken Burns
I think the idea is there, enshrined. I almost said, what in the world would someone from Brooklyn or Iowa be doing landing in a LST on June 6, 1944? They are not getting paid for it. There's no territory, no empires being expanded. What would you do that? And everyone in this audience knows the answer to that. They have underlying this, the sense that what was lost there was so precious that we would be willing to launch. Launch the greatest seaboard invasion for one idea, and that is liberty. I mean, it sounds pretty corny, but this is brand new in our revolution, and it's still brand new. And I think we even feel part of this pain is that we don't like liberties taken away from them or me or you or whatever it might be. You know, I gotta read you this thing. Okay. I made a film about Thomas Jefferson, also a cancelable person, if you're interested in it. This is a guy who was close friends with John Adams and then they were mortal political enemies. And then they were friends again. And they started up a correspondence, which is the hallmark of this friendship from Braintree to Monticello. And he said, Thomas Jefferson said, writing to Adams. And so we have gone on, and so we shall go on, puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man. And I do believe we shall continue to grow to Multiply and prosper until we exhibit an association powerful, wise and happy beyond what has yet been seen by men. I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. So good night. I will dream on always fancying that Mrs. Adams and yourself are by my side marking our progress. You can, like, go to bed at night with this one because you go, right. Puzzled and prospering beyond example. And we're puzzled, right. And yet there's. They know it. Things aren't different then. It's not like they don't know what we know. They know at least what we know. And then more so.
- [51:19]
Podcast Host
So let me ask you one last
- [51:22]
Interviewer/Co-host
question, because I can tell people need a little bit more. Ken Burns, what is your practice for getting through these days?
- [51:35]
Ken Burns
Every morning I wake up and for the last 11 years I've read the very, very, very first thing I do often, 5, 36 o', clock, is read that page that's been mailed to me. The photograph of a page of a book from Leo Tolstoy's Cal of Wisdom. And it has all. It might be, you know, if the paragraph is unsigned, it's Tolstoy. If it's italicized, that's the main gist of the page. But there's usually seven or eight short paragraphs. And it might be from the Quran, it might be from the Old Testament or the Talmud, or it might be Persian wisdom, or it might be Thomas Jefferson. Every day now, I get up and I just respond to it with whatever, without all of the mental activity that has gotten the momentum. The day will give it a kind of momentum and a binary quality to it. I just sort of give it my best shot. And there's a kind of grounding sense. There's a Zen tale of two monks that are working their way back to the monastery where they live in silence. They come to a stream in the middle of the forest and there's a woman, very beautiful woman, who is unable to cross. And one of the monks just picks her up and puts her on the other side. And they continue walking on in total silence. And as they're approaching the monastery, the other monk says to the first monk, you know, in our teaching we are apart from the world. And it seemed like you committed to that. And the first monk looks at him and he said, I put her down on the other side of the stream. You're still carrying her. And there's a little bit of we have to be mindful of what we carry. Often it has a fraudulence, it has an outrage. It has a kind of pity that may not be germane to what we're actually thinking about. And I think I would go back to the first thing I quoted. You know, the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present, as our case is new. We must think anew, we must act anew, we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we can save our country.
- [53:55]
Podcast Host
Ken Burns thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the Best People. All episodes of the podcast are also available on YouTube. You visit msnow the best people to watch and remember. You can subscribe to MSNow Premium on Apple Podcasts to get this and other MSNow originals ad free. You'll also get early access and exclusive bonus content. The Best People is produced by Vicki Vergelina. Our intern is Colette Holcomb, with additional production support from Ayan Chatterjee and Allison Stewart. Our audio engineers are Bob Mallory and Hazik bin Ahmad Farad. Katie Lau is our Senior Manager of Audio Production Pat Burkey is the Senior Executive Producer of Deadline White House Brad Gold is the Executive Producer of Content Strategy Aisha Turner is the Executive Producer of Audio and Madeline Herringer is Senior VP in charge of audio, Digital and long form. Search for the Best People wherever you get your podcast and be sure to follow the series.