← The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim
The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim
'We are not out of the woods': Why democracy in the United States is being tested
00:36:26
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- [00:03]
A
Sky News, the full story first. Hi, this is Yalda and this is a extra special episode of the World podcast. Today I'm speaking to an iconic documentary filmmaker and one of my favorites, Ken Burns, who is of course one of the most influential documentary filmmakers on the planet, certainly in the United States. For decades, he has focused on American history. He's focused on national identity and democracy. We had a lengthy conversation about his latest documentary film, a six part series about the American Revolution. He says that it is a series that frankly, Americans need to see in this moment. Now, I enjoyed the conversation very much and I hope you do too. Ken Burns, thank you so much for joining us here on the podcast. You know, you've spent your entire career, the bulk of your adult life, telling America's story. I just want you to take a moment and pause and think about this particular moment and tell me how you're feeling right now about where America is.
- [01:36]
B
Well, I think we're at an incredibly fraught moment. I do think that history provides you with an extraordinary degree of optimism, not in some naive or pejorative sense of that word, but in a real one. We were far more divided during our American Revolution, far more divided during our Civil War, the subject of, of another film that I made. We're far more divided during the First World War and the Depression and the Second World War, the Vietnam period, all subjects that we've treated in our films. And so I think that that kind of triangulation and perspective that comes from a historical thing gives you a chance to sort of not be as we all are, kind of narcissistic about our moment, that this is, you know, the sky is falling, it's the worst time ever, all things are going to hell, It's a lot more interest. And so there's clearly an ongoing dynamic. Clearly there are aspects of the circumstances, particularly in the United States, but I also think in the world that are without precedent at the kind of concentration and the levels of power that are out. But I think that the thing that Western democracies have figured out is that as complicated, as messy as they are, the alternative is just so completely wrong and that it never really, really works out for those tyrants. And so I think that as much as we can see ourselves in this middle and kind of go, I'm in the middle of the worst traffic jam ever, you take a step to the right and all of a sudden you're clear of it. And I think that's, I'm not saying that that will happen. I'm not trying to be a prognosticator, I'm just trying to put in perspective the kind of urgency that we constantly assign to the present moment.
- [03:27]
A
So why do you think then it's so critical for people, young people, to understand their history and how we got here?
- [03:35]
B
See, that's the central question, because if you don't know where you've been, you can't possibly know where you are or where you're going. So you've got an essential power to history. And then it has a kind of practical thing. I'll give an example. During the 08 recession, I met someone, a friend of mine in the financial services who said we're in a depression. And I said, in the depression in the United States, in many cities, the animals in the zoo were shot and the meat distributed to the poor. When that happens, I'll say we're in a depression. But why don't we then moderate our panic and say that this is a very, very difficult recession that will be causing pain and will continue to cause pain even to this day, but that, let's not take that way. And so all of a sudden you realize there's a certain power to history. Harry Truman, the US President, said the only thing that's really new is the history you don't know. And so I would make a huge argument. And of course I'm swimming upstream against a tide that wants to put it all into science, technology, engineering and mathematics. STEM is the acronym in the United States that feels that the humanities that history that ethics that, comparative religion, all of these things don't matter, when in fact they're central to our well being and our happiness, not in the best sense of that word, both individually and collectively. And so at the heart of that is having this understanding of the complexity of what went before. Our arrogance in this moment assumes that because they're dead, we must know more. But I would give anything. Having spent nearly a decade with my colleague Sarah Botstein working on a film about the American Revolution, I'd give anything to have gone back and witnessed not just a conversation between the bold face names that are part of our series, but the scores of other people, ordinary teenagers that are involved in the battles. Young girls, 10 years old, loyalists who stay faithful to their sovereign, to the soldiers on all sides, whether they're Germans or Welsh or Irish or English or Scottish, or the American soldiers for different motivations, all of these forces, I would give anything to be able to listen to the complexity. If you back up and think about the American Revolution, this is a completely new and untested idea. The idea most Americans have is that we just fought the enemy. The British, they were across the sea. They sent an army. But it was a civil war between Loyalists and patriots, as well as a global war once France and Spain and the Netherlands came in. And there's lots of foreign powers, native powers to the west, and there are free and enslaved black people. So the dynamics are incredibly complicated. And you want to be able to represent those, and you can't do that in a simple binary structure that this is good and this is bad. You have to sort of inhale and exhale the complexities of any subject to do something that then allows people to shed the superficial mythology that they have about any subject I could be talking about now, but to also be able to therefore digest what actually took place in a profound way and maybe begin to see the chances of the success of the patriots. Nothing had ever been tried like this before, so it's a completely new and novel idea. And probably the best form of government on earth was the British constitutional monarchy. Why would you ever want to change this? So the chances of success in the beginning were zero, and at the end, improbably, they were 100%. How you get there is just such an interesting thing that I have pulled at this thread for years and years and years.
- [07:33]
A
You know, just listening to you talk with such passion about that moment during the revolution, during the Civil War, the conversations between people referring to, you know, some of these people that we think about as teenagers, young people, the conversations they would have had, sort of like the kind of conversations that young people have today. And yet we keep hearing that America is more divided than ever. America is more polarized than ever. Would you say that when there is an understanding of your history, your past, you understand that actually America has always been divided. America has always been polarized.
- [08:11]
B
Everybody has always been divided. Everybody has always been polarized. Certainly true of my country. And I think that's what it is. You sort of need to sort of calm oneself about that. We always want to say this is the worst period ever. And I think that it's so interesting and complicated. There was a Supreme Court ruling just a few days ago that for the first time seemed to check what we assumed would just be this march towards dictatorship and anarchy. So there's always something that will happen, and people tend to. My ancestor is Robert Burns. He said the best laid plans of mice and men gang F to glai, which I assume is an old Scottish way of saying f up. And so I think that there Is this presumption in this moment now? And I think a lot of it has to do with we live in a media culture, we're saturated with media, and it needs that very superficial conflict, that binary that doesn't exist in our personal lives. And we know and we transcend it. We understand how complicated things are. And yet obviously we've taken a cue from the world of computers. Everything is somehow a one or a zero and it's not.
- [09:28]
A
And when you then think about that concept of one or a zero or a 30 second TikTok reel is taking eight to 10 years to make a film and tell a story, America's story, to the American people, teach them about themselves, teach the world about America. Is that an act of defiance?
- [09:49]
B
No, I don't think so. I think there's always been the distractions. I think if we went back to the late 18th century, to the revolutionary period in America or even London, we find people distracted by little things that we would say, oh, isn't that sort of little like TikTok or Instagram or whatever it might be? And people always have those diversions. But we all know that all meaning accrues in duration. I know that's true for you, that the work that you're proudest of, that the relationships you care the most about, have benefited from your sustained attention. And look at what we do in the midst of this tsunami, tsunami of possibilities we curate. We binge, we take our time and we spend. My children will sometimes spend more on a weekend than any 12 hour film on the documentary, watching and following one particular thing. And that's because we need to be able to exercise our attention and our concentration. And that's where meaning will develop. It's imperceptible, like the layers of a pearl. And that begins, of course, as an irritation, what a pearl becomes, which is a wonderful metaphor for a good deal of these things. A lot of the stuff that is negative in the moment is actually seeds and fertilizer for growth. My mother died when I was 11 years old. There wasn't a moment in my consciousness where she wasn't sick. It's the defining thing of my life. What do I do for a living? I wake the dead. I make Abraham Lincoln and George Washington come alive. I'm looking for, you know, to deal with still to this day, something that happened, you know, more than 60 years ago to this human being. And so I think that all of us have this complexity and all of this. We have within us the understanding of that. It's true that Our attention spans are being eroded. But it doesn't mean that at any given moment you can't stop that and then attend to something. And it might be the person who rebuilds an engine or makes a boat or raises a child or tends a garden or makes a documentary film or whatever it might be that we do. So I think in the midst of our dire anxieties about what's going to happen are just the same old human beings. I mean, the Bible, Old Testament, Ecclesiastes says, what has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun which suggests that human nature doesn't change, which it doesn't. It takes an awful lot to make human nature change. And so you see, for example, in the revolutionary period in the United States and here in Britain, the same degrees of venality and virtue of greed and generosity that you find today in people. And so what happens is that if you make your heroes kind of marble statues, there's no way to identify with them. They're just kind of perfect figures if you humanize them. Understand George Washington, for example, who is almost cartoonish to Americans, they don't understand the depths of his complexity and his greatness. Greatness. And some of the things that are less great, if you can tell a more complete picture, Americans dismiss George III as just this madman. There was no instances of madness until much, much later in his life. And he's much more complex. He's one of the more interesting of all of your monarchs. And he just decided he wasn't going to let go of the colonies. He had a kind of domino theory, as Americans did during the Vietnam War, because if I lose these guys, I'm going to lose Ireland, I'm going lose the more profitable colonies in the Caribbean, I might lose Gibraltar. What about the subcontinent? And so he's dealing in a kind of global what ifs. And you can see the anxieties of that. At the same time, he's a dedicated constitutional monarchist, and that's a really important thing, so we don't make him an enemy. And of course, if you have Damian Lewis reading off camera, making King George come Alive the third, you've got. You're a long way toward making him real and less a stick figure.
- [13:56]
A
And is that part of your quest then, to humanize, to help us understand the complexities of these figures, these characters, that it isn't, as you say, binary black and white, these controversial figures as well, in a way, in this moment, through our own complexities Many people try and rewrite that history or try and better understand these characters.
- [14:20]
B
The best thing to understand about me is that I'm a filmmaker, I'm a storyteller, and so I'm interested in that. I happen to have chosen history, particularly American history, as the way I express these stories. And so that's pretty good, because history is mostly made up of the word story plus high, which is a good way to begin any story. What you begin to see is that people use history as a cudgel. They use it to sort of promote a particular theory that they superimpose over the past. It's called historiography, fashion of the academic academy or of other people. Oh, this is what happened, or this is what it is. Or that we become kind of almost belligerent moralists in which we throw people out for doing things that are now bad. There's a kind of post haste cancellation of people because that person once owned human beings, slaves that they are, I can't even consider them. But things are much more complex than that. And we have to extend to the past a complexity which we've tried to do in all of our films, and not make, for example, the Loyalists or even the British the enemies, to understand the way in which even George Washington is a failure. Owned hundreds of human beings. And as the writer Rick Atkinson said, you can't square that circle. You can't. He also makes terrible battlefield decisions that cost two, at least two huge victories for the British, including the biggest engagement of the Revolution, the Battle of Long Island. It loses New York, and it is a British stronghold From September of 1776 until November of 1883, two years after the war has ended. But the treaties haven't been signed. That's his on him. But he's also able to inspire people in the dead of night to fight. He's able to pick subordinate talent that's better than him. And he's not. He's very. He has a lot of humility. He defers to Congress. He gives up his power twice. George III said when he learned that he'd not only resigned his military commission, but many years later when he resigned the presidency, he said, or left after two terms. Then he is the greatest character of the age. And he was able, more important for my country, he's able to convince people in Georgia and people in New Hampshire, where I live, that they weren't from separate countries as they felt they were, but from the same new thing that they were Americans. And part of this brand new idea of the United States the idea out of the Enlightenment that human beings could govern themselves. Up to this moment, everybody had been a subject, more or less, and now there were people that had greater responsibility thrown on them. They were citizens. And that is part of the glories which makes the American Revolution as, as your historian Stephen Conway says in our film, just a hugely important event in world history. Not just a point of pride for us or a point of defeat for the United Kingdom, but that's what we're trying to get at. Something larger and less sort of judgmental in the moment, but filled with the complexity that human life at any moment, then or now, always has.
- [17:33]
A
Well, you know, by politicizing history. And politicians do it all the time, all the time. You know, they shape ideology. They win elections by simplifying the sorts of things that you're talking about. And history is contested. It's something that's incredibly, as you say, complicated. There aren't any right or wrong answers, but there are facts. How do you work around that?
- [17:57]
B
That's what you have to do. It's contested only in so far far as it is used as a weapon by people. It has a kind of superficial value in telling us what happened. The slogan of the Make America great again. And then you have to ask a basic question that has never been answered, which is, what period do you wish to go back to when there was a segregated society, when people were enslaved? What. What was so great about which period? And it's never been answered, but it's the idea that it's bad now because of all these things. And you can just hint and wink and put the little signals that suggest it may have to do with race, or it may have to do with the role of women. It may have to do with whatever it might be, religion and all of those things. You see the way in which the nefarious use of history sort of clogs the arteries of our proxies. And so history will always be contested in this way. But you are obligated to start with facts. You are obligated to find out what actually happened. You are obligated to call, as we do, using our baseball metaphor, balls and strikes. We live in a media culture in which everything is a sort of highlight reel. So our great baseball player Babe Ruth always hits home runs, but he struck out more times than he hit home runs, and he comes up only once every nine times at bat. And so all of a sudden, it falls to many other people, and then you're obligated. And I think this equivalency to history is really important. You're obligated to find out what did a 10 year old girl, Betsy Ambler from Yorktown, Virginia, what was her war like? What is the experience of Joseph Plumbartin who signs up when he's 15 years old to fight for the patriot cause and ends up in that battle of Long island the first time he's nearly killed there and ends up all the way at Yorktown, an experienced soldier who's now maybe 19 or 20. What happened to him? I can understand and communicate a little bit easier what the experience of Benjamin Franklin was. George Washington because they left voluminous writings. But how do you piece together? And it's incredibly fraught. And of course what we do is we end up making history so superficial that we leave out the important stories. It's just a top down version of great men, capital G, capital M. More than half the population are women. They're hugely important to the success of the revolution and certainly important to the perpetuation of the resistance. During the 10 years leading up. There are, as I said, 500,000 free and enslaved black people. There are native peoples coexisting and assimilated within the thirteen colonies on North America. And more importantly there are an array of native nations to the west that are as distinct as say France is from Prussia. And yet we just say them, we just reduce them to that. We assume they live in tepees. That doesn't happen until you're on the other side of the Mississippi. There's sometimes you could be traveling in upstate New York and you can, you could come across a village with clapboard houses and panes of windows and you wouldn't know until you saw the people whether they were European settlers or Native Americans. That's an important thing to communicate. And then someone once said to me early on, good history is showing up because you think it might not turn out the way you know it did. I've had people write to me that they, that looking at my Civil War series, they went into Ford's Theater where Lincoln was, was assassinated and hoping this time the gun wouldn't fire. They know the gun fired, but that's where you want to leave that, that you don't know how it's going to turn out. Even though you know how it's going to turn out.
- [21:47]
A
Yeah, that's, that's extraordinary. I wonder why now. Because of course, you know, you've been working on this particular series, the American Revolution for eight, 10 years. You started during the Obama years. Why was it this moment in your kind of five decade career that you thought I had.
- [22:26]
B
You know, first of all, can I just say that we were looking at our Vietnam film. We were beginning to lock it in December of 2015, and I looked at a map of the central islands in South Vietnam and I just said, oh, this could be the British moving west towards Brooklyn on Long Island. And I said, we're doing the American Revolution. Everybody was like, yikes. Because we knew what that meant. There are no photographs, there are no newsreels. We're going to have to really figure out how to make this come alive. I'm not a big fan of reenactments, so we followed reenactors for years and years and years and got not them to reenact this battle, but we, we filmed a critical mass of impressionistic views, sometimes way up in a drome, sometimes incredibly close on where the musket fires or where the cannon comes out, just to create a feeling of what it was like. The cold of winter, the hot of summer, all of these things that people. So you're not looking at faces and wondering what they really do for a living. You're just sort of blending in with the paintings and the drawings and the documents that we're doing. And, you know, you never know what's going to happen. We sort of realized it was going to take us 10 years, by the way. To be fair, I've released another film, sometimes two, almost every year since then. And so it's not that we're not working on other things, but the team for this. We were together over the nearly 10 years making this, and we had no idea what to expect or what was going on. And now people are complimenting us on our timing, but we, we never do that. I think what's been so interesting about my own professional life is that so often I've released a film at just the moment when the country wants to hear it. So people said, oh, the 250th is coming up. You planned this entirely. And we go. It's just kind of the luck of the draw. But I know we've been extraordinarily lucky that we've come out with many, many films. The Civil War, but this one in particular, where the country felt like it needed to hear this story and we've already had. It's just unheard of in public broadcasting. Four billion plus minutes of watching, of streaming. I mean, just, you know, it's just unheard of. The number of people who are attempting to digest our origin story in advance of a Celebration that could become so superficial and so treacle y and filled with just fife and drum and all the bromides that we like to say. Patriotism being the refuge of a scoundrel. We just hope that this could be an intelligent, complicated port that would remind people of what the Republic was actually founded for, what the ideas were, the animating ideas were behind it, and more importantly, what people were willing to die for. This is what Rick Atkinson, the writer, says in our film and the first talking head that appears. I mean, like, what were people willing to die for? Which is, as he says, the most profound question you could ask. What would it be? I'm very interested in the Loyalists and what they think. It seems sort of obvious you'd want to. My health, my prosperity, my literacy has come from this British Empire. Why would you want to change that? What was the thing we know the grievances, but what was it that was convinced that this new thing that had never been tried before in human history was actually going to. To work and that you would willing to, as they say in the last line of the Declaration, risk. We mutually pledged to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. I have relatives that fought on both sides. And one, Eldad Tupper, refused to sign a loyalty oath at the end of the Revolution and ended up in New Brunswick in Canada. This is what happens. And I think everybody, at least in the U.S. i think, should be thinking as they watch it, am I absolutely certain I'd be a patriot? Because everyone has that kind of narrow, superficial view that the bad guys are over there 3,000 miles away and they're sending troops and that everybody here was a patriot. It's not true. Most Native Americans sided with the British. Out of the 20,000 black Americans who fought, 15,000 fought for the British and 5,000 for the Americans because they saw in their own individual struggles for freedom that maybe the best way lay towards the British. And sometimes the British, cynically, though their entire wealth of the empire is dependent on slave labor. In the Caribbean, the colonies that we talk about are the least profitable. Only Virginia and South Carolina, because of their huge enslaved populations, are profitable. Cynically offer freedom sometimes to black Americans to come. And they do. And so you have an incredibly complicated dynamic, which is much more interesting than all of the bromides and all of the kind of fairy tales that we like to lull ourselves to sleep with.
- [27:27]
A
You said that people often compliment you on your timing, but you haven't sort of worked this through.
- [27:35]
B
Can't take credit for that. But.
- [27:36]
A
But and you also said that you feel that this is a moment, perhaps, where the nation needs to hear some of these things. Why do they need to hear this in this moment?
- [27:46]
B
Well, first of all, we're approaching our 250th, our semi quincentennial. It's a big deal. Not for you guys. You've been around for thousands of years, or at least a lot more than 250. So I think at that moment, it's a good time to take stock. It would have been under any President. President that we'd done. I think it's particularly important now because a lot of the reasons that the Constitution was founded. There are a lot of reasons that. I mean, the Constitution was written, the country was founded, was for things that are now being destabilized and that to understand what they're about are hugely important in understanding where you want to go forward. It is always within the interests of people to tell you, I've got the solution. Right? And the actual answer is, no, you don't. We may come to the best thing, but it's got to be a we. And that's why the opening of the Constitution, which is not poetic except for its prologue, it's an operating manual. It's kind of like the code. And it says, we the people. And that's an important thing. It's not like I the ruler, it's we the people. And that's central to what Americans are about. And Thomas Paine, an Englishman who wrote the most important pamphlet in American history, said, not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to start again. And the idea was that maybe there is something new under the sun. And on July 4, 1776, I believe for a little bit, there was something new under the sun, which was the moment of creation of the United States. We're very lucky. We know exactly where it happened, what date it happened on, and who was there at the moment of creation. And yet we've allowed the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia to encrust it. And so I think at this moment, particularly because we feel so fraught, as does the world, about us and about their own circumstances, it's important to go back to your origin story. I mean, if you were in a crisis, a personal crisis, you would go to a pastor or to a professional who would begin to ask you questions. And the first questions they'd ask you is, tell me where you came from? Who were your parents? What were the circumstances? What's your origin story? And then you would begin to Build, rebuild a narrative that you could perhaps put your heart and your mind at ease. And so history is a way of kind of going back and gathering the threads and asking these central questions not for the past, but for the present, because that's where it works. William Faulkner said, history is not was, but is. And I like that. I have to, like Ulysses, Odysseus, I have to tie myself to the mast and not point out all the ways in which. As you're working on something, it's rhyming with the presentation, present moment, because it would date the film if I took that sort of simple luxury. But, you know, this thing rhymes because human nature doesn't change. You can see things and go, isn't that so much like today? And we found that in every film we've made, and in every film we've made, we've been disciplined. Part of my neon sign in my editing room that says, it's complicated means we're willing to take a scene that's working and destabilize it and make it less a good scene in order to tell the truth, because we've found new facts. But it's also to understand we're also not going to take an easy route and say, oh, isn't this talking exactly about what's going on today? Because in 10 years it'll be different.
- [31:32]
A
And yet there are those who say America's institutions, everything that the Founding Fathers based this country on, are being tested. Democracy is being tested in this moment in America.
- [31:44]
B
Yes, it is. And I think that we were talking to a conservative scholar named Yuval Levin a few months ago, and he was really interesting. He said Founders would come, they'd be super happy that we refer to the Founders as if they're the apostles, right? The Founders, Capital T, capital F. The founders would come back and they would, he said, not be surprised that someone was trying to take more monarchical stuff. That's what they were trying to reverse engineer. They'd be surprised, he said, by the fact that the Article 1 of our Constitution about the legislative branch had abdicated so much power. And in fact, if you look at this recent Supreme Court decision by the third branch, Article 3, it says, no, this is a job for the legislative. You've taken too much power. And so I think what you're seeing, and they might be able to look and go, whew, finally somebody's beginning to do this. We are not out of the woods, nor is anyone out of the woods in the world, nor is everyone dependent on every sneeze. That comes from the United States. At the same time, we know, just traveling through Europe on many films, the extent to which our contribution is in the Second World War and in particularly the Marshall Plan has created the stability that has created modern Europe, which is now going, what's happening, guys? You don't like us anymore? What's that about? And most Americans I can report to you happily, are saying, yes, we love you just as much as we did in 1945.
- [33:33]
A
When you say we're not out of the woods. You know, as someone who documents history, Storyteller. And we've talked about whether this moment is more precarious than previous, and you've said it's important that we know and understand our history. Would you say then this is just a blip?
- [33:51]
B
Sure.
- [33:51]
A
Or how would you know someone like you tell 2026's story?
- [33:56]
B
Right. Well, that's what I'm getting to. I'm 72 years old. I sort of like to have. Have 20, 25 years out. I think because of just how quickly things move. Maybe we'll give a little bit more time, but this would be a wonderful thing to be able to look back on. And I really would love to be able to look back on and say, didn't we all? Meaning all of us, the entire world, we survived and we did all right. Something came out of it that was positive. It never works out for the. For the tyrants. It just never works out well. And your Churchill is supposed to have said that democracy is incredibly messy, but so much better than anything else. And that's really true. I think what we're doing is we're responding, as I said at the beginning of our conversation, narcissistically, to this sense that whatever's happening now must be the most important thing ever. And it may not be. And. And we may be able to look back on and go, remember how worried we were? I mean, you could just go back in your own mind to April of 2020. That's not even six years ago. And we weren't sure that we weren't all going to die of a pandemic, that now I look in any public space, jammed public space, and very infrequently see a mask. So would you accept that maybe in six years you and I could agree to come back and have a conversation and we could say, boy, you're right. We've gone to hell in a handbasket, and we're talking from an underground bunker on some underground radio station, some pirate radio station. Or we just went, yeah, that was really a bumpy time.
- [35:43]
A
Ken Burns, so great to talk to you. Thank you so much.
- [35:45]
B
It's been my pleasure. Thank you.
- [35:47]
A
You. That was Ken Burns, iconic filmmaker, and I hope you enjoyed that conversation. You can, of course, get our podcast on Spotify or Apple and you can follow us on YouTube as well.
- [36:12]
B
Sa.