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- [00:00]
NPR Sponsor Announcer
This message comes from Sony Pictures Classics with the Coral, directed by Nicholas Hittner, written by Alan Bennett, starring Ralph Fiennes as a choir master in 1916. Yorkshire making music as war rages on, now playing only in theaters.
- [00:23]
Christopher Brown
No one expects that a bunch of country farmers with muskets are going to hold off a trained army who have orders from an actual general. In Bost, there's a real disbelief that a bunch of ragtag colonists are going to manage to hold their own against trained soldiers. Stacy Schiff, the American Revolution.
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Rund Abdelfattah
The American Revolution was a bloody civil war that lasted for eight years. It was a time of great division and turmoil in the country that would eventually lead to the establishment of our democracy. In other words, we came out the other side. But that was then.
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Ken Burns
It's become one party defeating the other.
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Rund Abdelfattah
The current presidential administration seems hell bent.
- [01:20]
Ken Burns
On dividing not only socially but even economically. People that don't like Trump will say he's very divisive, but those are the same people that say that Biden was great. Americans are anti institutional now and if you look at data and trust in institutions, we don't trust anything today as much as we trusted it 40 years ago. Whether it be banks or unions or the media or religion, whenever I speak.
- [01:41]
Ramtin Arablouei
My values, I fear that something bad may happen.
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Ken Burns
Instances of political violence also include attacks on local politicians, members of Congress and their spouses, and political disagreements that turn deadly. This tension sits on top of pressures more and more people are already feeling.
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Rund Abdelfattah
The increasing cost of living, housing shortages.
- [02:01]
Ken Burns
And the erosion of shared spaces where people used to meet across political lines.
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Rund Abdelfattah
I don't think I'm alone in feeling that the country is going through some kind of reckoning or rupture, one where our democracy is at stake.
- [02:21]
Ramtin Arablouei
As the US prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, it's worth looking back at where we started. The real story, the real people who forged the United States into existence and the chaos, conflict and compromise they live through. And who better to take that deep dive than this guy?
- [02:40]
Ken Burns
My name is Ken Burns. I'm a documentary filmmaker. I've spent the last 10 years working with my colleagues, co directors Sarah Botstein and David schmidt on a six part 12 hour series called the American Revolution.
- [02:54]
Ramtin Arablouei
Ken Burns is one of my favorite filmmakers and I still remember when I was first introduced to his work back in middle school when I watched his documentary on the Civil War. After that I was hooked. We even got a chance to interview him on the show a few years back for another great documentary about country music and now after watching this new film, I was eager to bring him back and talk to him about his latest documentary. In our conversation, we talk about that intense and deeply divided period in U.S. history and how so many different groups of people and factions still managed to come together around a common cause. It was a messy, uncertain time with no guarantees about the future.
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Rund Abdelfattah
First though, let's talk about where we are now. That's coming up.
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Listener Callers
Hi, my name is Helen Hyun. I'm calling from Malvern, Pennsylvania. I hope this is the right phone number. I just listened to my first through line episode about the whiteness myth and it was really fascinating. So thank you very much. And here's the line you asked us to say. You are listening to third line from npr. Bye bye.
- [04:22]
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From NPR sponsor 1Password Anyone else feel like 99% of your emails and texts are password reset codes trusted by millions of users and over 175,000 businesses. 1Password lets you skip the resets and sign in securely with strong unique passwords that autofill across all your devices. You can safely share logins, store cards and files. And finally, stop using your pet's name as a password. Try it free for two weeks@1Password.com NPR support for NPR and the following message come from Warby Parker, the One Stop Shop for all your vision needs. They offer expertly crafted prescription eyewear plus contacts, eye exams and more for everything you need to see. Visit your nearest Warby Parker store or head to warbyparker.com Part 1 the American present.
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Christopher Brown
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Revolutionary War is that you had such different places come together as one nation. And so it really is actually kind of remarkable the way that that nation ends up coherent. Not around culture, not around religion, not around ancient history. It was coming together around a set of purposes and ideals for one common cause. Christopher Brown, the American Revolution.
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Ramtin Arablouei
All of your films, all together, you could take them together and really call them like America, a life. You know, it's almost like America becomes a complete life and Obviously, it's not over. We're living in a mo. Through a moment of that life. But what I have noticed in it is that the origin. So in this, in this series, you talk about what I took away was really hopeful is that America was obviously built out of ideals, right? Like, I immigrated from Iran. I have family members who immigrated to other parts of the West. And what they always tell me, even to this day, as we're adults, is you were really lucky your parents pushed to go to the US because at least, at least not like where they live in those countries like Germany or France. The nationality is tied to ethnicity in this country. It's tied to ideas. Now, the dark side of that is in a moment like this, where sometimes it feels, at least to me, as it's just an observer, that maybe we don't share ideals anymore. Like, can you have a country like the United States if there isn't at the core of it some set of shared ideals? Because to me, it feels like that's what the country was birthed in.
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Ken Burns
Oh, you're absolutely right. And it's a really eloquent and elegant way of, of putting. And I think we feel ourselves in divided times now. We can look back at the revolution and perhaps take some solace from the fact that it was much more divided then. There are always going to be people who are going to shortcut the messiness and the promise of those ideals to say no. It's actually really about one religion, even though the First Amendment of the Constitution is establish no religion, that it isn't really free speech for everybody, that it's not this and that we're seeing limited. But there's been times all the way through. In fact, the founders were very religious. And this was not a revolution to create a democracy. Democracy was a consequence, not an intention of the revolution. It's an accident because of who had to fight it, who actually ended up fighting it. You needed to throw them some things. And what they threw them was the same kind of representation in a legislative and executive and a judicial system that they assumed that only the elite founders, the aristocracy of talent, would have. And that's made all the difference. And we're constantly battling with those forces, regressive forces that want to say, no, no, no. You know, it's like Orwell's Animal Farm. You know, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. And it's just not the case. And so I think your kind thing about saying that maybe this could be the life of a country if you collected all the patches of the quilt that I've done. Not, you know, without any rhyme or reason. We're not picking them because a marketing group. You should do this thing next. You do what the gut suggests. But when an individual like you or me, you talked about getting some support. When an individual is in crisis, you seek a professional or a pastor or whatever it might be. And they're going to ask you some basic questions. Where were you born? Who are your parents? What was your upbringing like? That's called your origin story. And it helps reconnect and re establish your own narrative. And that's, you know, a narrative that's sort of challenged by whatever pain, whatever unresolved traumas are existing. So if we collectively as a country are suffering from some sense of dislocation and sort of feeling like we're disunited, learning the origin story could remind us a lot of those things. And to sort of say that you could go back to people talk about heritage and blood. Well, if you're really going to apply that accurately to the United States at the time of the founding, then that's Native American. But other than that, we are an incredibly. There's a huge variety of people. There's Americans and there's people that speak Dutch and there are people that are speaking German. There are French people. There are Native Americans living within us. There are imported kidnapped Africans, enslaved and free, who speak and have inherited various religions, but also languages from mostly west and Central Africa. There are those native nations with their tongues and varieties of religious and spiritual practices and linguistic differences that make it all a kind of complex Tower of Babel. And it's only our desire to simplify things to get back to that gated community where everything runs smoothly, that we want to limit it to just one type of person. You can't do that with the founding of the United States. And I think if our film is an attempt to sort of remind people how. Don't take the, the description adverb. It's deliciously complicated.
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Ramtin Arablouei
It is deliciously complicated. I think you absolutely right. Well, you know, it's. I always come back to this because I, I grew up in the shadow of 911 and a lot of people around me that I grew up with have evolved this very cynical view towards American history. And I, and I know where that comes from. And they're always surprised when I'm, you know, I'm the father, I have a 10 year old and I always make my son put his hat over his heart during the national anthem and friends of mine are like, why? And I say because there's an idea at the root and the origin of this country that if we don't fight for that, if we don't to some extent understand and revere the ideas, and I'm not talking about flawed human beings, we should always be wary of putting anyone on a pedestal a human being. But the ideas are ones with which if we don't understand and revere, then one day we may not have them. And there's a great line from P.T. anderson's new movie where Leonardo DiCaprio's character says to someone else, you know, freedom's a funny thing. You don't appreciate it until it's gone. And I feel that way about the ideas.
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NPR Sponsor Announcer
Right.
- [12:30]
Ramtin Arablouei
And so I think once. Do you think you hope that your films kind of renew at least an appreciation or understanding for those ideas?
- [12:39]
Ken Burns
I hope so. I think cynicism is a luxury for jaded journalists and jet setters. I'm neither. And it's shame on a jaded journalist. Journalists have an obligation to free themselves not only from cynicism, as they are means testing everything. And that cynicism grows from understanding the flaws of human beings. But if you translate that into cynicism, it's just as bad as the sneering snobby people of the ultra rich. So I remember reading an article recently in which there was attached to me the idea that I was an optimist. And what was interesting and infuriating about it is that clearly in the context of this reporting that optimism was a naive and pejorative condition, to which I.
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Ramtin Arablouei
Say F you, I say optimism is the new punk rock.
- [13:35]
Ken Burns
It is the only thing that you can have in the face of these inevitabilities. None of us get out of here alive. And the fact that you say if you do not exercise these ideas, if you do not believe in them, if you're so jaded, well, they didn't mean me, they didn't mean my people, my color, skin, my sex, my sexual preference, my age, my location, whatever the thing is. And of course it didn't, but it did say all men are created equal. And that all it just is just is like blaring down the walls of Jericho. I mean, you know, it's going to take four score and nine years before slavery ends, but it's going to end. It takes an inexcusable 144 years before women get the vote, but that's end. And so, you know, you got to participate in the fact that we're A process country. You know, we're in pursuit of happiness. Happiness is, you know, we can argue about it. They meant lifelong Lear. People think it's about acquiring wealth, but we can have that discussion. But the key is pursuit, right? Or in the Constitution, 11 years later, a more perfect union. We are a nation in the process of becoming. And either you're a participant in that becoming, making it more expansive, or you're trying to make it less expansive, or worse, you're cynically sitting it out saying, that's for me. So take your hat off while the national anthem is on. Put it over your heart. I read to My children, my four daughters that range in age from 43 to 15, every 4th of July, I read the Declaration of Independence to them and have for 30 plus years done that. This is what we do. And read the Constitution. It's short. And it's Article one is not the executive, it's the legislative, the people's representatives. And so our founders will come back and they'd not be surprised if somebody wanted to take more, more authoritarian control. They're not surprised. This is what they knew happened. That's human nature. They'd be surprised that the legislative had abdicated so much power to the executive. They just go, what? The people's representatives are giving up their right. And this. And this is coming not from me, but from Yuval Levin, a conservative scholar of the thing who I had the great fortune of spending some time with. And so I think that this, you know, we're all, you know, this division we're so divided is a mile wide and an inch thick. And if you can puncture a little bit of that by going back and saying, oh yeah, we do share this thing in common. We do. We are based on ideas, not on the color of skin. We're not based on the religion. Thomas Jefferson himself said, if my Neighbor believes in 20 gods or no God at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. That's why we have a First Amendment. We say, oh, First Amendment, Freedom of speech, it says, freedom of the press, right and abridging and address our grievances. But the first thing is no establishment of religion. All of human history, you can see so much of the conflict based on a state adopted sponsored religion. And you will find people saying, oh, yes, but we can do it here. Because we are actually of this kind nation. We are an Islamic nation, or we are a Jewish nation, or we are a Buddhist nation, or we are this. And in fact, if we are the first country on earth that was Established without a religion. Established.
- [17:14]
Ramtin Arablouei
And that's very intentional.
- [17:16]
Ken Burns
Intentional. And it has given us unbelievable strength despite all of the people come along, go, yes, but.
- [17:23]
Ramtin Arablouei
And, and what's. Yes, and what I. It zoom into another moment in, in the, in the series where Jane Kamensky, the historian, says. And because. Because I think it's related, where she says, I think to believe in America is rooted in American, in the idea of possibility. That that's what everyone was fighting for. And that is no one wrote possibility right In. In the Constitution or anywhere else. It's, it's, it's subtext that still lasts to this day.
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Ken Burns
And she said even people who did not have ownership of themselves are invested in that. And earlier in the film, she says the liberty talk, her words is leaky. Meaning, you may be reading the newspaper about this thing around the table, and the people who are serving you, they're interested in liberty, perhaps even more than you are. And the women at the table, they're interested in equality, perhaps even more than you are. And this is the American promise, is that we're going to, you know, steadily expand this narrow thing. When Jefferson wrote all men are created equal, he meant all white men of property free of debt. We do not mean that now.
- [18:31]
Ramtin Arablouei
And yes, and, and what is really haunting me about that, even though it's a beautiful moment and a beautiful sentiment, what haunts me about that is like, look, you and I are sitting here. We're employed, right? We live in some level of comfort, okay? How can there. How. And this is what worries me about the future of the country. When economically, for many people in this country, they don't feel like there's a possibility, right, that that subtext is withered away or it feels like a distant.
- [19:00]
Ken Burns
Kind of whispers tell each other's stories. The novelist Richard Powers said, the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do, won't change anybody's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. So let's tell stories that reach to every Middlesex village and farm, that penetrate down to people who are. Don't feel they've got a stake in any. That penetrate up to those people who think that they are born to a kind of privilege that should not exist in the United States, that goes out wide and says, yeah, we disagree, we voted for somebody different, but don't we do share these things in common, right? Nobody. When you go into the ballpark where you're about to sing the national anthem, anybody ask you who you voted for, what political party you're registered at. So I live in a tiny town in New Hampshire. Everybody's from every possible political thing and we get along right. We have to figure out how to get along, you know?
- [20:02]
Rund Abdelfattah
Coming up, what the American Revolution was really about.
- [20:13]
Listener Callers
Foreign. Hi, this is Lea Marjolet calling from Paris, France, and you're listening to Throughline. I just want to say I think your show is fantastic. I love everything from the content to the music. You guys are doing an amazing job. Thank you so much and keep up the good work.
- [20:49]
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- [21:17]
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- [21:51]
Ken Burns
Part 2 Finding Unity.
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Christopher Brown
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. STEPHEN conway, the American Revolution.
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Ramtin Arablouei
You know, I think the question you're getting a lot is sort of what was the American Revolution really about? Right.
- [22:31]
Ken Burns
It is a global war. Preceding it by 20 years is what we are called the French and Indian War, which we see in our own way as our own story, our own battle with our then British allies against the French and some of their Native American allies. And we had our own Native American allies and we won for the prize of North America. So the important thing is to rewind and say the prize of North America. That then introduces an even more important thing. If you're saying North America is a prize, you're saying that the land is a prize and that land has been occupied for millennia by other people and 1776, 13 British colonies occupy the eastern seaboard, which they've already superimposed over existing native lands. Varieties of tribes, varieties of customs, not a single entity of them, but distinct states that have been on the world scene, trading and diplomatically and militari, and have known the other empires, Britain and Spain and France, particularly Netherlands, for centuries. And some of the people superimposed by those 13 colonies have assimilated. Some are coexisting, some have moved west and are in those western territories that the colonists want to spread into, and the British can't afford to protect them. And so you have great tensions. And so I think if you're in the eighth grade and you're having a test about the revolution, you pass if you say taxes and representation. But I think as we try to do, like the global dynamics, like the importance of the Caribbean, like the violence and bloodshed that attends this revolution, all of that is revelatory and new. I think for most people, for most of us, we think it's a bunch of guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, particularly in 76 and then in 1787. And it's true. These are the newest and the greatest thoughts you can possibly imagine. But it's also a revolution. It's also a civil war. And as we've been discussing, it's also a global war. So it's got wonderful complicated dynamics. And we haven't even brought up the fact that of the 3, 2 and a half to 3 million inhabitants of those 13 colonies at the beginning of the revolution, 500,000 are free and enslaved Africans who are part of the dynamic women who play essential role in keeping the resistance alive, who are writing as philosophers and historians and satirists and poets movingly about it. They are participating in the revolution when it happens on the battlefield in support of armies or women attending these armies. They're washing the dead, they are burying the dead, they're washing the bloody clothings. They're around. They're also back home running farms and businesses, thank you very much. And so there's a whole cast of people who have not really had their stories acknowledged in large measure because we're pre photographic. There's not, you know, 99% of people don't have their portraits painted, but it doesn't mean those 99 don't exist. So we've spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out how to make them exist. I mean, sometimes, ironically, it's the gravestone that proves that they were alive. Sometimes it's an enlistment role. Sometimes it's a letter, sometimes it's a memoir, sometimes it's just going to the places where you knew they were and invoking them. So in addition to having a third person narrator reading Jeff Ward's extraordinary script that is distilling 10 years of our working with scholars of every stripe about every aspect of the revolution and read by Peter Coyote, we also have 400 first person voices read by the finest actors in the world. Probably the best cast that's ever been assembled off camera of any television or movie, bringing to live scores of people that you don't know to make those bold faced names less opaque. The Washingtons, the Adamses, the Jeffersons, the Sam Adamses, all of those folks. Abigail. But more importantly, to introduce our audience and us initially to a cast of characters I'd never heard of, who I think give dimension and then I think more meaning. I think maybe we tell a superficial version of the revolution because we're afraid that if we show how violent it was, for example, that it diminishes somehow those big ideas in Philadelphia. It doesn't. It makes them all the more impressive.
- [27:11]
Ramtin Arablouei
One thing that comes out in your films though, that I really try to emulate is that you also profile people or leaders in particular who have understood this subtext and this need for possibility. Whether it's Grant or it's Lincoln or Roosevelt. There's so many, just a list of these leaders that understood on some level for this to feel real, these ideas, it has to feel real in people's lives where people feel like there's a. And right now what I'm worried about is I'm not pointing to any particular leader, but I think we've had a series of leaders and just generally our leadership in Congress who don't seem to understand that these ideas don't mean anything if they don't feel like they're real in people's lives, if they don't feel like they can.
- [27:52]
Ken Burns
That's exactly right. And so we tell stories about these people. So let's take, go back to the revolution and take the most important person in the history of the United States, which is, is George Washington. Without him we do not have a country. We just don't. He's indispensable. He's also deeply flawed. He owns hundreds of human beings. He's rash. He rides out on the battlefield risking his life and therefore the cause. He makes some bad military decisions, but he's able to inspire men in the darkest of night to fight for a cause that nobody had ever fought for before in all of human history, he is willing to sacrifice, as the last line of the Declaration says, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes. He may be one of the richest men in America. And he spends most of his time living in other houses and tents for most of the war. Never gets back to Mount Vernon. I think he spends four days during the war at Mount Vernon when he's named commander in chief. He's willing to do that. And his sacred honor. He knows how to pick subordinate talent. Unafraid or jealous of the fact they may be better generals than him. Some are. He knows how to talk and defer to Congress, which is the important example of a democracy, of a republic. He's able to convince people from Georgia and New Hampshire that they're not from individual countries as they think they are. But a one thing Americans. And more than anything else, he gives up power twice. First his military commission and that. And he didn't know he was George Washington. He didn't know there was going to be a dollar bill or a quarter or a big spiky monument in the national capital that's named for him, or that be on the other side of the continent a state named for him, or then every other state has either a county or a town named for him. He didn't know that. He didn't know how it was going to turn out. Even when the first French came in on our side, he was worried. When the British took Charleston, he really thought, okay, this is over. I'm not going to be able to pull it off. And if you have the arrogance of the present thinking, ah, well, we know how it turned out. What could there be? Then you miss the interiors of the contingency. Good history is staying tuned because you think it might not turn out the way you know it did. And that's great. I have lots of people who write me letters or stop me on the street and say, you know, I watched the Civil War again and I went into that last episode thinking, maybe this time at first the gun will jam. And I just give them a hug and I said, hallelujah. Me too. Me too. I want that gun to jam. And it never does. He always gets killed. He always gets killed. But that is the understanding of the contingency. David McCullough said. And Rick Atkinson, who is this great historian, a writer in our film, likes to quote it. He says, in history, there's no foreseeable future, right? There's no foreseeable future. Nobody knows that. Washington, as he rides out, just like a couple miles from here at Kips Bay in Long Island, I mean, in Manhattan, he rides out and one of his aides is grabbing the horse. He's going to be shot. If he is shot, we're speaking English, English or French or Spanish. We're not who we are. And to then understand and weigh, I mean, we lament today. And you were lamenting today. You know, we sort of don't have heroes, but a hero is not a perfect thing. A hero is. And the Greeks brought it to us. It's their idea that heroism is a negotiation between the person's strength and their weaknesses. And sometimes that negotiation, it's all internal, is a war, a kind of psychological war. Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths and powers. And so if you just want some sanitized Madison Avenue, top down version of the past, it's bankrupt. If you just say it's only bottom up and you throw out the Washingtons and the Jeffersons in that unforgiving revisionism, it's bankrupt. And yet if you tell a complicated narrative that goes, yep, this is who they were. And sometimes, as Wynton Marsalis said to us in our jazz series, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. We don't understand that in our friendships and our loves and our relationships, but we don't apply it to our politics because everything's binary. Everything's one thing, my way or the highway, or it's red state or blue state or it's on or off. It's like the same in our computer world. It's either a one or a zero. And it doesn't work like that.
- [32:20]
Rund Abdelfattah
Coming up 250 years later, where a divided America goes from here.
- [32:53]
Listener Callers
Hi, this is Johnny Car from Oakland, California, and you're listening to Throughline from npr. I love Throughline because y' all share stories that otherwise I wouldn't know. And I think they often have to do with topics and subjects that knowing about them really will, I believe, make me a better person. So thanks so much.
- [33:26]
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- [33:44]
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- [34:17]
Ken Burns
Part 3America's Unforeseeable Future. We are in the very midst of a revolution. The most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations. Objects of the most stupendous magnitude and measures in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested are now before us. John Adams.
- [34:52]
Ramtin Arablouei
Early in the film in the series, there's a clip from John Adams describing how the, the early resistance to the British was fueled by resentment, that there was a resentment towards the occupation. And what that made me think about is like, that's like a. In the DNA of the American psyche. In a lot of ways it's a.
- [35:10]
Ken Burns
Human thing, you know, that you've got this cause and it's really improbable that you have so called ordinary people that don't have any property, that are fighting for an idea of liberty, of freedom, of equality. What the hell does that mean? And then of course, they're having to deal with at various times, an occupying army, which always does bad things. It loots, it forages, it steals crops, it rapes women, it destroys houses, it breaks your china. All of those things which create resentment. And Adams, John Adams is realizing that the kind of, you know, supercharged combination of both cause and fury is what is going to animate. The reaction is true, particularly in New Jersey and South Carolina where the fighting is so bloody and it is citizen to citizen. Loyalists killing patriots, patriots killing loyalists. And not just set pieces of battles with what you find is this great animus that comes from people not only dedicated to an idea, a lot of people are dedicated to the ideas and disappear when the first shots are fired, or disappear when their crops need to be planted or harvested. But this revolution begun by propertied men to protect their property and their rights, suddenly get blown into natural rights, talking about things that all human beings have, which means enslaved people and Native Americans and women and people in the margin. As the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk says in our film, they're deeply influenced by the Declaration. So all these people are moving and changing sides. And in one season, more British and Asian soldiers were killed in kind of ambushes and guerrilla actions. That reminded me having the previous film on war being Vietnam just made me feel like we were in South Vietnam. They're talking about pacifying provinces and all of a sudden there's having to admit that province isn't pacified. I know a lot.
- [37:03]
Ramtin Arablouei
Exactly. And that made me think about how this is at the root of our existence as a country is a violent resistance to the excesses of an occupation. Then why do we struggle to understand, whether it's Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan or Palestine, why do we struggle as Americans to then understand or have empathy for other anti occupation movements?
- [37:24]
Ken Burns
Well, the Bible, the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes gets it. What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. Human nature doesn't change. And that human nature superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events. And we hear the echoes, we see the motifs. Mark Twain is supposed to have said, history doesn't repeat itself. But of course, of course it doesn't. No event has happened twice, but it rhymes. And that's exactly right. I've never made a film where it wasn't rhyming in the present. And our responsibility, our discipline as filmmakers is not to point signs saying, oh, isn't this rhyming like today? Because that not only dates the film, it makes you fall out of the complexity, but that this thing needs to have a complex and nuanced story of what actually happened and not some sanitized Madison Avenue version of the revolution that we've normally been taught. In large measure because there are no photographs and there are no newsreels and the paintings, they seem different from us. They have buckles on their shoes, they wear hose and they got breeches and that. And you think, they can't be like us. They're exactly like us. The same degrees of virtue and venality, of generosity and greed obtained then as they do now. And so you don't need to spend your time wasting your time as filmmakers going, oh, isn't this so much like today? You can just let it go. There's a failed invasion of Canada. We wanted to make it the 14 state. There's a continent wide pandemic in which huge arguments about inaugurations and Washington makes, as the historian, the distinguished historian Joe Ellis says, the greatest military decision was to inoculate his troops. There's a total eclipse. There's lots of stuff that rhymes, but you don't have to say, hey, doesn't that seem so much like today? Because you want to do something that lasts and you want to have something that you know. Our Civil War series, today is a school day in America, as you and I are talking. And my Civil War series, which is is more than 35 years old, is being shown in hundreds of classrooms. Not the whole thing, but a 20 minute or a 40 minute gulp about the battle of Gettysburg or about black troops, or about Lincoln and the White House and issuing demands. Whatever it might be, it's in use. And it wouldn't be in use if everybody's going, oh, isn't this so much like today?
- [39:50]
Ramtin Arablouei
And I appreciate you saying that because I think one of the pressures in the podcasting world in which we work, because it was born out of individual narrative, which is obviously nothing wrong with that. You profile many individual people, but it's done within the context, within a world. Like you build a world and then the people live in that world. And I think often if you tell the story without someone living in a world out of the context, then in a way you're missing the whole point of the story. And I appreciate that you take that approach, which makes me think about this idea that, that you're just pointing to about, like, not knowing the possible futures. We may know possible futures from reading about history, but you're never going to know exactly what's going to happen. And so looking forward, this always brings me to my, like, future prediction question. But listen, as we both acknowledge, we are in a moment of division and difficulty in our country, how it compares to things in the past that we'll only be able to know as things proceed.
- [40:51]
Christopher Brown
Right.
- [40:51]
Ramtin Arablouei
Like you can't predict a future, but given coming out of making this film over the course of 10 years. And also, let's just note a 10 years in which the country changed drastically.
- [41:00]
Ken Burns
Yeah, we started. Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency, you know, and so the things that were rhyming then don't rhyme now or some do and stuff comes and goes. We have the wife of a German general, Hessian general, who's traveling to the United States alone. She'd waited for the birth of her third daughter and was now making the perilous thing. She's anxious because she hears that Americans eat cats. If it had come out when we were in the middle of the camp, you know, the presidential campaign, and people were talking about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats. Completely made up. Completely. Not true. But that would have said, oh, can you put that in to do that? I think this year it'll go over and nobody will notice it. But it's a beautiful moment and you begin to realize rumor, conspiracy, you know, disinformation has always been when the first human being started having a conversation with one another, somebody Told a lie, you.
- [41:59]
Ramtin Arablouei
Know, and that lie, I mean, if you think about the lie, is that is at the root of storytelling that. So. So this brings me to what I kind of want to get to here, which is your. Your films have almost a mythical quality. Even though they're dealing, in fact, they're told in a way that I felt that, you know, in my own tradition, you know, my parents always taught me that it's important to remember your ancestors and the things that have happened. Because if you're not rooted in anything, you're out there sailing out in the ocean with nothing to hold you down. Have you viewed your career up till now in a lot of ways as creating that anchor, not creating it or pointing to it, maybe even in all of its complexity, that in some sense we have to kind of understand and appreciate our ancestors? Because without understanding that, what are we?
- [42:46]
Ken Burns
Where are we exactly? If you don't know where you've been, you can't possibly know where you are or where you're going. I agree with that. I'm a filmmaker. I'm not a historian. I'm not professionally trained in the scholarly sense. But I happen to choose history, the way to tell my stories, the way some painter might choose oil, as opposed to watercolor. And fortunately, the word history is mostly made up of the word story plus high, which is a good way to begin a story. So I don't want to overindulge it. We want to, but I don't want people to take a certain thing away from this. We've worked for 10 years so that you can take away whatever you want to take away. But I promise you that every person in this country, I did not make it for a certain subset. I made it for everybody. And I've traveled the country. I've said the same thing to Joe Rogan for three hours. As I said the New York Times editorial board, as I said to inner city kids in Charleston and Detroit and Chicago, to suburban kids, to general audiences, I said the same thing about the story that we've told. Because everybody within the sound of my ears is a product of that, can get involved in that story. And other than that, what they do with it is what they'll do with it. And I hope, if I had a wish, I would say that. I hope that the film might help put the US Back in the US.
- [44:09]
Ramtin Arablouei
I think one of the questions me and a lot of other fans of your films over the years have asked is, like, what happens when Ken Burns stops making these films one day for, like, Whatever reason. Right. How important to you is it to kind of pass on the baton of this work, of this kind of documentary storytelling as you're looking into the future? How important is that for you?
- [44:31]
Ken Burns
I don't think it's a. This kind of documentary telling because everybody is individual and unique and. And we've been working together, many of us, for 50 years, for 45 years. I've got two or three production teams. We have a really rigorous and disciplined way of working which I don't for a second think will not be carried on. Our fact checking is as good, I think, as the New Yorkers. We're interested in facts. Our scripts, as we're working on them, they're not coming down from Mount Sinai and then informing shooting and editing. We are shooting before there's a script, we're shooting after. There's drafts of scripts that sometimes will go to 20 different iterations. We're always researching. We're always changing up until the very last moment. And we have to be able to tolerate complexities. We have in our editing room and have had for years and years and years a neon sign in lowercase cursive. And it just says simply, it's complicated because you just want to respect the fact that if you think that scene is working and it's perfect and then you learn some contradictory information. No, nobody wants to change it, but we change it. We go. We're willing to sacrifice, destabilize a scene that's working because the facts have to win out over the art every single time.
- [45:52]
Ramtin Arablouei
Given all that and your wish, do you think right now, after making this film and after making all the other films you've made, that the moment we're living here in the US Right now is part of, just part of. Is it lean more towards just being part of a cycle or that it's a uniquely tenuous moment.
- [46:08]
Ken Burns
It's a uniquely tenuous moment. Unprecedented and an existential threat. But history makes you optimistic because I can point to many other films that I've made that have been about similar existential threats. You know, they're not as unprecedented in this case, but, you know, in human history there have been. And in smaller moments, I made a film about Huey Long, who was sort of this dictator politician in Louisiana that was going for run for president and was assassinated and. And you know, it's got echoes of today, but I don't need to say, oh, isn't this. I mean, just don't. I made it in 83. It seemed to exist by itself. It had Theatrical distribution and won a lot of awards. But, you know, if you. If you dust it out and show it today, you go, oh, I know what Ken's trying to say, you know, and you go, no, no, you don't. I'm just trying to tell a complicated story.
- [47:02]
Ramtin Arablouei
So that actually leads me to kind of a. This is a little bit of a personal question, but I'm fascinated by it, which is. I've interviewed over the years now doing this show, so many historians or have been so interested and fascinated and like, you know, it's. It's the catnip for them, history. And I thought about one common thing. I see across a lot of those stories when I ask people personal questions about why they've been interested in it is usually people have experienced, like I did some major loss as a young person. And, you know, I read that you lost your mom when you were young. I think just 11.
- [47:37]
Ken Burns
When I was 11. And she'd been sick for all of my conscious life, so there was never a moment. And, yeah, no, I had a crisis later on in my life, and my father, my late father in law, who was an eminent psychologist, I said, I seem to be keeping my mother alive. I could never remember. I could see the date that she died coming up, April 28, but then it would be receding. And he looked at me and he said, I bet you blew your candles out on your cake, wishing she'd come back as a kid. And I said, how did you know? And he knew a lot about other stuff. And he said, look what you do for a living. You wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? And that intimacy was very helpful for me to go back and try to heal some of the things from that loss. But to realize that many of us are defined, and it sounds like you, by loss. And that it's interesting that we're always trying to design our lives kind of almost with a gated community and as if we can ensure that everything is running smoothly, when in fact, we're mostly defined by these difficult times. And how you negotiate these difficult times or don't becomes the measure of who you are as a person. I feel incredibly lucky. I was once asked by a sociologist what my mother's greatest gift to me was. And I said unblinkingly, dying. I didn't want her to die. I started to cry when I had answered it, but I. But what I meant is that I wouldn't be here talking to you. I wouldn't have made these films if I wasn't constantly dealing in, you know, it's made me a good dad and a good filmmaker. I think it's made me terrible in lots of other ways. But that loss has had a profound thing. I think that's true.
- [49:18]
Ramtin Arablouei
If you're supported and have a life in which that you're able to not just bounce back from that, but use that, as you're saying, as a. As future fuel for your own interests to expand, to make art, whatever it is, then it's a really positive.
- [49:32]
Ken Burns
Yeah, I don't think you ever bounced back. I thought that the half life of grief was endless, but that somehow you learn to transform some energy. I mean, my mom's been dead for 60 and a half years, which is, I have to say, way too long to be without a mother. But. But I also know that the reason why I'm talking to you, the reason why I just finished a film on the American Revolution and the films before that, some of them 20 hours long, some of them, like this one, 12 hours long, some of them one hour, I mean, has been because of this. And it's not that I'm running away from it, it's just that whatever is part of the negotiation with our inevitable mortality, no one within the sound of my voice is getting out of. Of here alive. And many of us don't deal with that. And that along the way we will be challenged by extraordinary and at times unbearable loss. And that this is what human beings are kind of burdened with by consciousness, by language, by memory, by feeling, feeling by art. All of those things that distinguish us from the prehensile thumbs from most other creatures also deliver this potentiality for enormous suffering. You know, out in the real world you have the example of a perfect nature and imperfect, perfect human being. So nature can be a great guide and you can tell stories which are always complicated, the ones that we like the most. And then out of those, you form a much more sophisticated and complex view of the world that helps you negotiate what's going on and, and it helps you remain optimistic that the system is, is terrific. But, you know, you have to, to get through some of these speed bumps. And maybe they're there just like our own private losses. Maybe they're there for a reason, for us to figure out how to overcome them.
- [51:53]
Ramtin Arablouei
That was filmmaker Ken Burns talking with me about his new documentary series, the American Revolution. You can watch it now on PBS.org.
- [52:05]
Rund Abdelfattah
And that's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfattah I'm Ramtin Arablouei and.
- [52:10]
Ramtin Arablouei
You'Ve been listening to Throughline from npr.
- [52:13]
Rund Abdelfattah
This episode was produced by me and.
- [52:16]
Ken Burns
Me and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya.
- [52:20]
NPR Sponsor Announcer
Steinberg, Casey Miner, Christina Kim, Devin Kadayama, Irene Noguchi.
- [52:25]
Rund Abdelfattah
Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel.
- [52:28]
Ramtin Arablouei
Also, thank you to Johannes Durgi, Beth Donovan and Tommy Evans.
- [52:33]
Rund Abdelfattah
This episode was mixed by Maggie Luthar. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which.
- [52:41]
Ken Burns
Includes Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.
- [52:46]
Ramtin Arablouei
And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us@throughlinepr.org and make sure you follow us on on Apple, Spotify or the NPR app. That way you'll never miss an episode.
- [53:01]
Rund Abdelfattah
Thanks for listening.
- [53:20]
NPR Sponsor Announcer
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