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ReThinking: The George Washington story you haven’t heard with Ken Burns (Part 1)
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- [00:00]
Adam Grant
This episode of Work Life is brought to you by performyard. Companies spend a lot of time talking about performance management, but most are still using clunky old systems instead of focusing on what really matters, coaching and development. PerformYard is a performance management platform that helps give managers their time back, using AI to automate the mundane so you can focus on the real conversations and face to face check ins that actually help people improve. Performyard makes employee reviews easy to manage end to end and keeps all your performance data in one place so you can streamline the exact process you're already used to. Right now, new performyard customers get unlimited access to their full suite of HR management tools including performance management, employee engagement with pulse surveys, one on one meetings and people analytics. Head over to performyard.com to learn more and schedule your free demo today. Make sure to mention the Work Life podcast during your demo to get your first month free, stop dreading annual reviews and start driving real performance. Visit performyard.com to upgrade your process. This message is brought to you by Apple Card Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases wherever they shop. This means you could be earning daily cash on just about anything, like a slice of pizza from your local pizza place or a latte from the corner coffee shop. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more at applecard.com what's up Adam Grant from Work Life, A TED podcast here. If managing supply runs is still on your to do list, here's your sign to upgrade Walmart Business has the tech tools and services that make it ridiculously easy to stock up for your office or teamthink, schedule deliveries, multi user accounts and even IT setup. Bonus with a Walmart business plus membership, you you get free shipping, spend, analytics and 2% rewards on orders of $250 or more. Join the Smart Way to shop@business Walmart.com terms apply.
- [01:57]
Ken Burns
All biography is failure. Because even as you know in your own life, the people who are closest to us are in part inscrutable. Even to us. And how could we presume to reach back 250 years and say, aha, I now have George Washington. But he's a hell of a lot more more complicated and therefore to me more interesting than the superficial, sanitized Madison Avenue versions not only of him, but of our revolution that we've been spoon fed over the years.
- [02:31]
Adam Grant
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. Ken Burns is the king of historical documentaries. He's done films about Mark Twain, Jackie Robinson, the American Buffalo, the Civil War, and now in his latest work, the American Revolution, the series excavates the stories that define our country and define our identities as Americans.
- [03:05]
Ken Burns
If we go back to our origin story, it has a therapeutic advantage to it. To know where you've been is to help you know where you are and where you may be going. More precisely, the origin story is really important to reconstructing a collective narrative about ourselves.
- [03:25]
Adam Grant
Because this is Ken Burns, who's known for breaking his films into multiple parts, we had to make this conversation a two parter. So this is the first of two episodes where I sit down with Ken to talk about what we've gotten wrong about the American Revolution and how even our greatest heroes carry their own personal contradictions.
- [03:45]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Ken Burns, welcome to Rethinking.
- [03:47]
Ken Burns
Thank you for having me.
- [03:49]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
I imagine it's a lot of pressure for someone to do a tech check with you.
- [03:53]
Ken Burns
You know, it shouldn't be. I'm pretty much of a Luddite. I am a director, though, so if there's any lull in anything when people come to film me or whatever, I fill the gap instantly.
- [04:05]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Are you saying I should leave a bunch of gaps and just let you fill in?
- [04:08]
Ken Burns
No.
- [04:09]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Well, I have no doubt that some of the filling you'll do of the gaps is going to be more insightful and interesting than the questions I would have thought to ask you.
- [04:17]
Ken Burns
No bad questions. Never any bad questions, Ken.
- [04:20]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
I'm excited to talk about the new film. Before we dive into that, I was struck by your statement that in most stories, one plus one equals two. But you're looking for stories where one plus one equals three. And I'm hoping you can help make sense of what does that look like.
- [04:36]
Ken Burns
You can't build a bridge, an airplane, a house, you know, a microphone, a computer. If 1 and 1 doesn't equal 2, but stories are themselves this possibility where the whole could be greater than the sum of the parts. So if the sum of the parts are here, one and one equals two, and there's this other mysterious thing, that's what we look for in love, in relationship, in faith, in art, and of course, that's the equation that makes it happen. The novelist Richard Powers said the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. Suggesting that the power of a good story is in its ability to reconcile it and neutralize the inevitable binaries that we, in our superficial existences, mine included, create.
- [05:30]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
That's one of the things that I love about your work so much. In psychology, we often talk about the problem of binary bias, where people collapse the complexity of the world and of beliefs and values into just two extremes. Good, bad, right, wrong, black, white. And you do such a beautiful job showing us the shades of gray and the nuance and the 3D view of people and history. I'd love to understand how.
- [05:54]
Ken Burns
Well, I think it's just tolerating that I've got in my editing room and I've had for years, in lowercase cursive, a needle neon sign that says, it's complicated. When a scene works, you just don't want to touch it. But in fact, if you're working in the area that I work in, you may find out new and destabilizing information, contradictory information. And you've got to be able to figure out how to include that, even if it makes that seem less good, whatever that means. In my work, the art has to be subservient to the facts. And so I'm not to say that we abandon art, but we just have to find a way in which it coexists as a wholly owned subsidiary of what the facts were. And so you just do that. I mean, we live in an era that we lament that we have no heroes. So let's just examine heroes. Well, heroes is something that we believe the Greeks have sort of brought down to us. And these are examples of a very pointed negotiation or even a war within someone between their strengths and their weaknesses. And it is that negotiation or that war that defines heroism. Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths. So this idea of perfection is ridiculous. This is what makes a good story. So for us, telling stories, just accepting that we do not have a country without George Washington, period, full stop. He's a deeply flawed human being. He owned hundreds of human beings. He knew that slavery was wrong. And at his deathbed, but way too late, he freed them. He is also rash. He rides out onto the battlefield in several instances at Kips Bay, at Princeton, and at Monmouth, risking his life and therefore the cause, all the time, with a bravery that is unbelievable. He also makes some bad tactical mistakes. But he knows how to pick people with subordinate Talent without a fear of jealousy, that they might be better generals than him. And in many cases, they are. Like Benedict Arnold or Nathaniel Greene. He is able to defer to Congress, knowing full well that the military, military has got to be subservient to the civilian control. He's able to inspire men in the dead of night to fight. He's able to convince those people who are anxious to go home in the dead of winter, their enlistments are up to stay a little bit longer. More importantly, he convinces Georgians and New Hampshireites who are from different countries that they're actually the same thing. And more important than that, he gives up his power twice, and he is the glue. Annette Gordon Reed, the historian, says, that held this country together. And another historian, Christopher Brown, says, I know how we survive without his leadership. So right then and there, you've got a pretty good story, don't you think? You know, is anybody upset with the fact that he's got undertow and complications? I don't think so. Does Hamlet. Yes. Does Othello? Yes. Does Lear? Yes. You know. Does Romeo? Yes. Does Juliet? Yes. You know, these are all Shakespearean characters who understand this is how we are. So you go looking for that, and you actually begin, after I've been doing this for almost 50 years, you begin to suddenly look for and welcome those destabilizing things, because all it does is it just makes it that much more interesting and complicated.
- [09:17]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Wow. Okay. You've given the roadmap for the rest of the conversation. I think I have to respond to and follow up on at least 17 things you just said. So first of all, let's talk about George Washington. I'm curious about a lot of things, but maybe the place for me to start on this is, why did you.
- [09:34]
Adam Grant
Want to revisit somebody whose story we.
- [09:35]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Think we already know?
- [09:37]
Ken Burns
Well, because we don't know it. And what happens is right after the Revolution, he's just deified. Parson Weems is the guy who gives us the cherry tree and the coin across the Potomac and all of this sort of stuff. We make a joke about where Washington slept. It's really effing important. Where George Washington slept to the fact that you and I are able to talk to one another today. This is a guy. The last line of the Declaration is, we mutually pledge to ourselves. Ourselves, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Just stop for a second. I mean, I hope people watching this series would suddenly go somewhere along the line, I wonder what I would be. Would I be a loyalist? Completely understandable. All of your good fortune, your education, your prosperity, your land has come from the British constitutional monarchy. Why do you want to mess with this? With some completely untested idea, completely reasonable to be a Loyalist? Would I be a patriot? Could I die for a cause? An idea? This thing called liberty. You can hear it in the teenagers that we quote, who are just this idea that takes hold within them. And they're not the aristocracy of talent that are meeting in Philadelphia. They're regular people who are going to win the war. These grunts, these 15 year old kids who sign up in 1776. Joseph Plummorton sounds like every grunt I've ever met. And he's unbelievable about it and how he's staying the course. So could I fight for a cause? Could I die for a cause? Would I be willing to give up everything that I have? Washington was the arguably the richest person in America at that time. And he definitely was willing to risk his life, his fortune and his sacred honor. Imagine, say, think of a very, very rich. The top 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 people. Can you imagine them riding out on horseback into the middle of the fray and risking their lives and their fortunes? This is an amazing gift. I don't think we understand that. I think we think that the war, Lexington and Concord and then he crosses the Delaware and surprises the Hessians who were all drunk. Not true. We found some whiskey and Washington had it destroyed before his own men got drunk. And then it's Yorktown and it's all over. It's six and a half bloody years. It is a revolution, the first revolution in the history of humankind that was basically promoting individual rights. It's also a bloody, bloody civil war. We have a loyalist that we follow throughout the film that kills his best friend growing up in the battle of Bennington, as that best friend is charging up the hill and takes his bayonet into his rib cage, deflected off the bone. And as John Peters said, I was obliged to destroy him. Two brothers, one on the British, one on the American side, in the middle of the lull in the Battle of Saratoga, the defining definitive battle that'll bring the French in on our side. Suddenly somebody on the British side gets up and runs down to this river and jumps in it and swims out halfway and an American does it. Two brothers that had not seen each other in years and had not known that they were not only opposite sides in a war, but we're in opposite sides of a battle. So within the parentheses of those incredible things, we've got one of these Bloody civil wars. And then on top of it, it lasts six and a half years, eight and a half, if you want to count, till the Treaty of Paris and the British finally go home. And it's a world war. It's a global war. It's the fourth or fifth global war for the prize of North America. So when you say prize, what do you mean? You mean Native American land? That's what it means. People who have been there forever. So there's a dynamic that is rarely brought into this. And Washington, he's up to his neck in this question. From the very beginning, he may have been the person who started the last global war, what we call the French and Indian War, which everyone else calls the Seven Years War, by firing into, at night, sleeping Frenchmen out in the Ohio Valley, starting, we believe, that war. So you're. You've got that. He owns human beings. Out of the 3 million people in 1775, approximately 500,000 of them are enslaved or freed blacks who are part of the dynamic of the community. Lots of different religions, lots of different points of view, you know, lots of different cultures and music and styles of things. And he's the glue that's going to figure out how to bind these things together. Not perfectly, but in the imperfectness is why we've got so much more to learn about him. And on top of that, Adam, I have to say, he is opaque. He is difficult to understand. It is a calculating move. He's taller than everyone else. He knows when he walks in the room. He's got a regal bearing. He can make men fight in the dead of night. But very few people, as the scholar Joe Ellis says in our film, can get in. Maybe Martha, maybe Hamilton, maybe Lafayette. And whoa, he says to that person who thinks they're in there and are not. So all of a sudden, I mean, we're done with this thing. It's 12 hours long. We're really happy with it. It's really clear. He's the central figure of all of it, despite these bad, bad battlefield mistakes he makes at Long island, the biggest battle of the war. And again at Brandywine, the same mistake. Forgetting to protect one of his flanks. And the British take full advantage of it. But we don't have a country without him. And that kind of sense of now saying goodbye to him and moving on to new topics is. Is sad.
- [14:58]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
You know, as you talk about him, a bunch of questions come to mind for me. The first one is, you know, you've referenced him giving a power not once but twice. I think about even earlier, him being a reluctant revolutionary who wasn't sure he wanted to even take on the cause to begin with. I remember reading his farewell address where, you know, he talks again about giving up this station. He wants to go back to the private life from which he's been, quote, reluctantly drawn. Why was he so hesitant? And what impact did that have on his leadership?
- [15:30]
Ken Burns
Our interpretation of the pursuit of happiness misses the most important word, pursuit. But we thought happiness was whatever we thought made us happy, meaning riches or whatever. And that's been something Americans have run with for 250 years. But it actually means lifelong learning. People are no longer subjects, they're citizens. And everybody had been subjects up to this point point under authoritarian rule, and that we're creating something new, a citizen that's going to require energy, it's going to require lifelong learning to be more virtuous and to be. I think every one of the sort of aristocracy of those felt that Washington. You can feel that in his bones when people are criticizing him. He goes instantly, okay, look, just tell me to go, I will go. I didn't ask for this position. You gave this to me. But he sees this cause as not about him. And what is so spectacular and even moving, Adam, is that throughout the film, people are talking about us. They're talking about you and me. Like one of the first quotes of the film is John Adams said, talking about the millions yet unborn. They know there's a posterity, there's some reward in which it's not about them, it's about future generations. TR said that about the national parks. We're setting it aside for our children's children's children. This idea we're making this country not for a day, but for for generations. And that sense of distance in their eyes is so spectacularly incredible, particularly when we're all sort of navel gazing, Chicken Littles, certain that this is the end and whatever. And so you want to just say, if we go back to our origin story, it has a therapeutic advantage to it. And I think when a person is struggling, they see a professional who says, where were you born? Who are your parents? What was your childhood like? The origin story is really important to reconstructing a collective narrative about ourselves and one that honors the complexity of the situation and doesn't turn it into something that is bloodless and gallant, kind of encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality, but actually living and vivid and familiar to us. You know, this is pre photographic. There's no photographs, there's no newsreels. These guys wear buckles on their shoes, and they have hose and and pants and waistcoats and powdered wigs. They can't be like us. They're exactly like us. And it is possible for us to breach that seemingly impossible distance.
- [18:05]
Adam Grant
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- [20:08]
Ken Burns
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- [20:43]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Just to loop back to your comments about Washington being the ultimate servant leader. I'm interested in the connection between him not wanting the role and then the way that he did the role. I've been involved in some research led by one of our former students, Danielle Tussing, who has basically found that when leaders arrive at the mantle with a little bit of I'm not sure that I want to be in charge, they end up being more effective in part because they empower, as opposed to either claiming all the authority for themselves or just kind of giving up the reins and being too laissez faire. And it seems like Washington is a prime example of that very much that.
- [21:20]
Ken Burns
Humility, you know, later on, I think it's the early 20th century, there's a jurist named Learned Hand. Could there be a better name for a judge than Learned Hand? And he said, liberty is never being too sure. You're right. I gave a commencement last year at Brandeis, and I said that the opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. And what you see, I think in a sort of a long view of leadership that I've come across, you can think Lincoln. The one person that's the opposite of that, or at least doesn't show any of that, is fdr, who just seems so confident. And it may have been he understood that, as George Will said in our film about the Roosevelts, that his smile was the best New Deal. Program him like, that's what you needed to have. But I think you see in Washington a kind of modesty, a kind of reticence, a kind of humility. And I. And what I said earlier, he is able to pick subordinate talent, unafraid, that they may be better at it than him. In many cases, they are. Nathaniel Green, Benedict Arnold, until he's not. John Sullivan from my state of New Hampshire. There are some, you know, superb people that he has no problem deferring to. In fact, he's not up at where the Battle of Saratoga is taking place. That's the army up there that's run first by Philip Schuyler and then by Gates. And he sends up to Benedict Arnold, who becomes a hero of that battle, and Daniel Morgan, who's just a crusty, flinty Virginian who's been just Seems to be everywhere and is unbelievably brave. And I just find this ability to pick that down and then talk to soldiers. Like, after Trenton, he knows they're going to come after him and come in full force, and he now wants to meet them and not just retreat again, which is what he's been doing since he lost New York. And so. But the enlistments are up, and they're going to be up on January 1st, and it's a few days away, and he asks. And nobody comes forward. And then he asks again in the most. I was going to say fatherly way, but it's not. It's just solicitous, and it understands. It feels warm and it feels human, and it feels like he's. Like he knows what they've been through. And they all step forward, most of them, and just stay for another month. I mean, I don't know how that happens. There's a mutiny that happens after the war is over where the troops haven't been paid and they're going to mutiny and take over and ride to. They're in Newberg, New York, they're going to ride down to Philadelphia and take over. And he hears about it. He breaks it up. And at first nobody's. They don't care. And then he pulls out a letter that he wants to read from a congressman who's in support of them getting paid, and he can't read it. And he pulls out some spectacles, and everybody goes. The whole crowd goes. And he looks up and he goes, oh, you see, I've grown old, gray and nearly blind in the service of my country. And like, it's. It. The mutiny's over. It's. It's unbelievable. I don't know how that happens, but the leadership is sometimes yielding it. We're always in our film talking about a council of war in which people are, you know, suggesting this and suggesting that. He arrives in Cambridge and he wants to do something bold, and they're going, it's not going to work. The British, you know, we don't. We've got them surrounded, but they've got the navy and they've got more guns than us. And until we get some guns up here, big guns, artillery, it's not going to happen. He goes, okay, right. And so when he makes a decision, you feel like it's not so much consensus. Sometimes he goes against what everybody else is saying, but, you know, they feel heard. And I think that the ordinary soldiers who. When they see him, you know, they're retreating at Monmouth and he comes out, it's a hot day, it's maybe 100 degrees. Comes out on his horseback, doesn't even say anything, and the retreat stops, just stops. And then Americans hold their own. I mean, these are farmers against, like, trained British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries. It's just there's something in this leadership thing, and I think a lot of it has to do with modesty and humility.
- [25:21]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Well, that's such a beautiful illustration of a point I often make in my classes at Wharton, which is narcissistic leaders are threatened by talent. They want to be the smartest person in the room. Humble leaders are drawn to talent. They try to surround themselves with people who make them smarter. But great leaders grow talent. They want to make everyone in the room smarter.
- [25:38]
Ken Burns
That's right. Well, then I will take off my little. Yes, but about fdr, because FDR was always appointing really smart people. And in fact, he went down through the ranks of seniority to pick George Marshall to be the Army Chief of Staff, which was, you know, paid dividends for decades and decades and decades. And there was like a big surprise.
- [25:58]
Adam Grant
What?
- [25:59]
Ken Burns
You can't do that, Mr. President. You know, blah, blah, you know. And Marshall was exactly the right person and he knew it and he figured it out.
- [26:10]
Adam Grant
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- [27:00]
Sponsor Announcer
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- [28:02]
Adam Grant
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- [29:01]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Can I give you another reason to remove your. Yes, but about fdr. Yeah, and it's with no shortage of trepidation that I bring up any history about America to Ken Burns. But here we go.
- [29:14]
Ken Burns
I love FDR so much too.
- [29:17]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you're gonna correct me on this, but I have such a vivid recollection of his try something speech, which I think was maybe the quintessential example of low certainty. You know, I don't know what's gonna work. We're gonna try something. If that doesn't work, we'll try something else. Isn't that actually the point you're making?
- [29:34]
Ken Burns
Yes, indeed. And another way of describing it is that you gotta do something and potentially fail rather than do what politics, particularly today, suggests is you to avoid saying yes because yes gets you in trouble. No doesn't. I mean, there's no greater politician of the 20th century than FDR. Churchill's not there. And you know, in the America, LLBJ and Richard Nixon are next as sort of phenomenally interesting political figures, but nobody's as accomplished and somebody who's a Lincoln man watched FDR just grow almost to parody, if not parody with. With Lincoln as the best president after.
- [30:15]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
George Washington bother you at all that he was lying to the public in plain sight?
- [30:21]
Ken Burns
Fdr, no, you lie to the public in plain sight all the time. What do you think about my dress? Lovely.
- [30:30]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
It's a difference in magnitude, isn't it?
- [30:33]
Ken Burns
What is he lying about? His physical condition.
- [30:36]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Yeah.
- [30:36]
Ken Burns
And how'd he do on that? He died in office, but nobody was gonna. Didn't wanna let him go. You know, he looks like a cadaver. You know how old he is when he dies? 64. He looks like he's 97. But he carried that. He did that. He understood it. He did that for you and for me. And so it's a different kind of lying. It's not a Richard Nixon lying, It's not a, you know, contemporary lying. And, you know, I'm not arguing for that simpler time because it just does not exist. It's probably the 1930s and the 40s are really much more complicated times. It's got the worst economic cataclysm in the history of the world, followed by the greatest man made cataclysm, the Second World War, in the history of the world. So I don't know how these are simpler times, but there are customs and things that anybody in power will take advantage of. And in this case, having the public not know the extent to his physical frailty was advantageous for him. Maybe it's not for us, but we've pierced that veil. People even in his own administration have volunteered the extents of that difficulty. But George Willigan said when the steel went on his legs, it went in his soul too. And so he can't lift himself up, but he lifts us out of the Depression and through the Second World War. It's magnificent.
- [32:01]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Well, this is a great rethinking moment for me because I've always been bothered by the deception there. And I think as I hear you talk about this, I'm realizing in some ways he was challenging an unnecessary expectation of a president in the first place. And saying, my physical disability doesn't have any bearing on my mental ability.
- [32:20]
Ken Burns
Right. And we sort of pay homage to it. We build ramps everywhere to it, but we don't accept that that's the case. It's so interesting that if he hadn't been stricken with infantile paralysis in 1924 or 1920, wherever it was, he probably would have been the standard bearer of the Democratic Party and been wholly defeated by Herbert Hoover or Calvin Coolidge, whoever it was that was going to beat him, and we would probably never heard of him again, but he was. And then we were. And Al Smith, to run in 28, let Franklin Roosevelt take over as governor. And he did all these experiments as the Depression was deepening in New York, as New York still is, a kind of laboratory of social experiments that he was then able to translate, you know, obviously with modifications to the rest of the country in the New Deal. It's, you know, endlessly fascinating story.
- [33:16]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Yes, it is. Okay, so let's then take on a bigger moral question. Going back to Washington, you mentioned that he knew it was wrong to have slaves, but he waited until his deathbed to free them. How do you explain the moral hypocrisy?
- [33:29]
Ken Burns
You can't. It's morally hypocritical, period. But then again, if you're expecting perfection, then what do you get? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. So, yeah, so is Jefferson. Jefferson's words, right? He says, you don't like slavery, but it's like holding a wolf by the ears. You don't like it, but you don't like. You can't let go. Right. They're making lots of money off it. They're making lots of money off it. It's really hard to stop this thing. I mean, they know it's wrong and they know it's morally wrong. And that's why I quote Annette Gordon Reed, who says, you know, how could you do something if you knew it was wrong? She said, that is the human question for all of us. And it's not letting Washington, in this case, Jefferson, off the hook. It's putting us on the hook for some sense that we could have the unmitigated gall to make ourselves umpires and referees of their behavior when we can't even control or see our own. So then what are you left with? Well, to begin with, you're left with a hell of a good story, because how can somebody so good also be so bad? That's a really great question. An animating force of human story. And what is story? It's the editing of human experience. Honey, how was your day? Does not begin with I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb, unless somebody T bones you, in which case that's exactly how you. How you tell it, right? But usually you just go, my boss is a son of a bitch, right? And so you. You edit human experience. So this moralizing, wherever it comes from, it doesn't pay off anything. Forgiveness, tolerance, understanding, reconciliation are the things that we tell Stories about in order to understand.
- [35:34]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
So, Ken, I'm very sympathetic to your argument that we should be more cautious and nuanced in our moral judgments of other people, especially when we're fallible ourselves. At the same time, there's a part of me that thinks this is a slippery slope into moral relativism, where we say, look, you know, all good people do bad things, and therefore, you know, let's not have moral standards anymore. And I think part of the way that society progresses is by looking at past standards and saying those are unacceptable by current expectations, and we need to keep raising the bar. How do you reconcile those two views?
- [36:06]
Ken Burns
Well, first of all, your description of it is a moral relativism. You just put into a binary. You said by saying this, it therefore means that which is the opposite of this, and it's all a shade of gray. So the pursuit of happiness then takes that phrase, all men are created equal, and it actually begins to expand it. It's not all white men of property free of debt, now, is it? It's more than that. So there is a human progress that takes place. And I do not believe in presentism that is helpful, nor do I believe that we let people off the hook for being men of their times. Right. I'm not saying that this is a failed institution. These are deeply flawed individuals who also spectacularly heroic, and they can coexist in the same person. I don't want my world filtered for those kinds of things. I need to establish a moral ground that's super important for my own behavior. But I can look back and understand. I mean, as early as April of 61, which is when the Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Lincoln was thinking very seriously about recolonizing black Americans back to Africa or to South America. Like, let's just get rid of them, right? Let's just make it an easier thing. And then, I mean, changes and he understands. And, you know, Frederick Douglass is really great when he just says, you know, many years later, he just says, you know, in. And looking at Lincoln, you realize he's tardy, he's late, he's not this. But taking him all in all, you know, nobody was ever more important to his age. So you just. Everybody, we can do this. We've done it with fdr, with Lincoln, with Jefferson, with George Washington.
- [38:00]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Okay, so this raises a question for me. Why are we so reluctant to recognize the flaws in our heroes? Because in some ways, that makes them all the more heroic. And I'm thinking of. I think it was Du Bois, who said he was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln. And the fact that he is human, that he is late and sometimes overly sympathetic to people who don't deserve it, and we can make a list of his other flaws, that makes it all the more impressive that he rose above those limitations, doesn't it?
- [38:28]
Ken Burns
It does indeed. And that's why we pursue the stories that we pursue. I mean, it's so funny. The Civil War series that I made that came out in 1990 was sort of just universally loved. But then within a few years within the academy there was like, oh no, you can't make human beings out of Southerners. I go, why? Tom Boswell, the great, now retired sportswriter for the Washington Post, said that Keats said about Shakespeare that Shakespeare had negative capability. That means he could hold intentions, someone's strength and someone's weakness and he wouldn't decide in everything in words, other us, the moralist in us wants to decide good or bad and that he could hold in tension and that the art was in that tension. And so I think maybe the answer to your last series of questions is maybe this ineffable and maybe impossible to precisely articulate because it has those free electrons of art or 1 and 1 equaling 3, or of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts that we would just have to deal with the fact that it is just true. This is what happened, you know.
- [39:37]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
So, Ken, I have to ask you about some of the other characters.
- [39:40]
Ken Burns
Yeah, let's say revolutionary characters.
- [39:43]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
I wanted to ask you about Ben Franklin in particular. One, because he, you know, he actually embodies a lot of the qualities we're talking about right now and he's full of contradictions. But two, you've done a prior film on him and I was wondering what you see about him now looking at him with the other revolutionaries that you didn't know then.
- [39:59]
Ken Burns
You know, it was funny. We just sort of made a game time decision to not need to make Ben Franklin as big as he is in the revolution because we'd done a two part series on him. He's second only to Washington, but he's not there firing guns in anger. He's older than anybody else. He's the one who early on feels in this sort of enlightenment sense, which means reaching back across the dark ages to antiquity to bring these values of temperance and moderation and humility and virtue out. And he's trying to do that and live his life and understanding the way in which his own ego gets in the way of it. Someone pointed out that humility wasn't in his list of 12 virtues, and he understood how much humor was a disinfectant and a kind of wonderful sunshine. You know, Twain said, in the next century, it's not that the world is filled with fools, it's just that lightning isn't distributed right. You know, it's like no other joke from the 19th century, except his are funny. So Franklin, he's the guy who helps forge those compromises in the summer of 1787. And some of them are horrifically tragic compromises to get the Constitution passed, like the three fifths, to give the Southern states, you know, a kind of dominance not only in. In the legislative branch, but in the White House for decades to come. That's going to help forestall and at the same time ensure that there'll be a civil war and, you know, everybody. I can't believe we could find anybody that we couldn't go deep down into and find just stunning contradictions about if their secrets, their truths be told. Whitman tried to do this. Do I contradict myself? I contradict myself. And it was a celebration, not an admission. Not your honor, I'm guilty. He's saying, your honor, I'm guilty of being contradictory.
- [41:59]
Adam Grant
That's part one of my conversation with Ken Burns. Next week, we'll continue the dialogue about the American Revolution.
- [42:06]
Ken Burns
Yuval Levin said that the founders would not be surprised by finding somebody wanting monarchical powers. They'd be surprised that Article 1, the legislative branch had given up and ceded so much of their power.
- [42:18]
Adam Grant
But we'll get more personal, too.
- [42:20]
Ken Burns
I actually think I'm a better father than I am a filmmaker, and that's totally meaningful for me.
- [42:25]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Wow, I would not have expected that.
- [42:32]
Adam Grant
Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glaser. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar, Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winick, and our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hylash, Bambam Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Singer and Alison Layton Brown.
- [43:03]
Ken Burns
I'll give you an idea of a bellwether, supposedly of the last several years of the conservatives was a great, I love it. Narrative called Yellowstone, in which its patriarch, played by Kevin Costner, is the wise man of the family who also murders people who piss him off and he throws them bodies in a ravine.
- [43:22]
Interviewer/Host (possibly a co-host or guest host)
Ken Burns, it sounds like you watch.
- [43:25]
Adam Grant
TV like the rest of us.
- [43:26]
Ken Burns
Sure, of course. It's a great story. It's a great story. It's a great story and has no political affiliation attached to it and is more complicated than what we're told we're allowed to understand in American history. In a world where January is supposed to be boring, one staple of the holidays refuses to end the great deals at Verizon. The church joy just keeps on coming. Right now you can save on four new phones and four lines. Critics agree it's the deal that keeps on giving. Come into Verizon and save on four new phones and four lines on unlimited. Welcome. Additional terms apply@seeverizon.com for details.
- [44:11]
Adam Grant
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- [44:49]
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