Meet the Moment is sponsored by Vanguard. Welcome back. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has been capturing the past for nearly 50 years and chronicling some of the most significant events in American history, from the Civil War to the origins of baseball. He's been hailed as one of the most influential documentary filmmakers of all time, picking up multiple Emmys, Grammys, and Oscar nominations.
As America approaches its 250th birthday, Burns turned his attention toward the American Revolution in his latest series, telling the stories of the men and women who built America through sacrifice and struggle. America is predicated on an idea that tells us who we are, where we came from, and what our forebears were willing to die for. Collins said, no taxation without representation. The fear was, if we give into this press, what will they do in the future?
I sat down with Burns for a Meet the Moment conversation about what history can teach us about overcoming our differences today. Ken Burns, welcome back to Meet the Press. Thank you. Great to be here.
It is so wonderful to have you here. We want to talk about your latest documentary, the American Revolution. You are an iconic documentarian filmmaker. You have made some of the most impactful documentaries in US History, from the Civil War to the Roosevelts, Benjamin Franklin to baseball.
Why was now the right moment to retell the story of the American Revolution? It's such a wonderful and fortuitous accident. The now started 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago, when we were finishing up our series on the Vietnam War and I was looking at a map of the Central Highlands and I thought, maybe this could be the British moving west on Long island towards Brooklyn. Maybe we can do.
Despite the absence of photographs and newsreels, maybe we can do the revolution. So I spoke up and I said, we're doing the revolution next. No idea that it would come falling close to 250, come at a place where Americans are so anxious about the future. Will there be another 250 or another 10 years?
You know, and I think that that kind of existential, fraught moment gives us an opportunity to allow the story of the American Revolution, the complicated story of the American Revolution, to help us understand them. History is our best teacher and it can be a helpful guide for everybody, no matter your disposition, political orientation, age, whatever it is. History can be an incredibly important way to digest the present and then figure out what your response is and to imagine a future together. Well, when you think about the reaction from the public, this has been one of the most successful documentaries ever on pbs.
Why do you think people are so drawn to the topic of the American Revolution right now. And to this piece of work, I, you know, I had this once before in my life, and that was with the Civil War series that came out in 1990. And I think it's because both these events are Rosetta stones of our identity. The Civil War is the most important event that happened once we've been created as a country.
Its themes reverberate to this moment, but the origin story is even more interesting. We've accepted the violence of the Civil War and indeed the violence of our 20, the 20th century wars we're involved in. But we've romanticized the American Revolution. We made it just guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, and they are there and they're hugely important and they're some of the best thoughts ever.
But this is a bloody revolution and a bloody Civil war and a bloody world war that's engaging the major powers of Europe as well as Native American nations. And so when you add the complexity to it, it's even more of an impressive miracle that we're standing here and celebrating the 250th anniversary of us. Not just the capital of the US but us and all of the intimacy of that. And I think that's where we can draw some inspiration.
At Lexington Green on April 19, 1775, the chances were zero of success. We were up against the greatest military power on earth. But we don't think too often is that we're also up against our neighbors. This was a civil war in a way.
Our Civil War was a sectional war, one part of the country against the other. But here there's lots of civilian deaths and there's lots of who quite understandably want to remain loyal to the Crown. Because at that moment, the British constitutional monarchy is the best form of government on earth. Their prosperity, their land, their health, their literacy.
Why would I change it for something that's completely untried? And so we tried in our film to not make the Loyalists wrong. We try to understand what might be their motivations and therefore be even more impressed by those patriots who are willing to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. One of the aspects of the American Revolution that you capture so powerfully that you're referencing in this documentary is the fact that a lot of people think of the American Revolution in glossy terms.
The Founding Fathers in Philadelphia crafting the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution. But this documentary makes the point that this was a bloody, years long battle that claimed so many lives and that frankly impacted every single person on this territory. It's so pervasive and I think we have sanitized the war and I think it's out of an understandable fear that if somehow we reveal how dark and bloody it is, that it will somehow diminish those big ideas in Philadelphia in 76 and then 11 years later in 70, I mean 87, when they do the Constitution, it doesn't. Those ideas are made even more impressive because of the improbability of the sort of the odds against success, the time it took to do it, all of the problems, the winters of Valley Forge and wars down in which people are dying of disease.
This coincides with a continent wide pandemic or pandemics. And one of the big arguments of the time is whether you inoculate the troops, there's a failed invasion of Canada, our desire to make it the 14th state. I mean, the rhymes to this moment are so particularly helpful because I think we can, as we Chicken Little say the sky is falling, you know, everything is bad. We're so divided, we're really divided, but we're way more divided then way more divided during the Civil War, way more divided during the Vietnam period.
And so I see that division as sort of a mile wide, but an inch thick. And it takes good story to remind people of the thing that we share in common. And you do capture in this documentary, Ken, that revolution is not a foregone conclusion and that democracy is an unintended concept. I think a lot of people think that on this moment that was the plan all along, but it wasn't.
Well, first, the great arrogance of the present is that because we know how it turned out, we presume somehow that they knew how it was going to turn out. As the historian David McCullough said, There's no people in the past for the people in the past, there's no foreseeable future. George Washington doesn't know he's going to be who we think George Washington is with Dolly Bell and quarter and big pointy thing in Washington that's named after him and a state on the other side of the continent, he doesn't know that. And so even after the French have come in, which is going to just shower us with support, there's moments where he's absolutely certain it's not going to work.
And as a filmmaker, I'm going, oh, I know how it turns out, but I'm not sure it's going to work either. And I think that's what we have to do is extend to them the fact that the contingency of the moment and how long the odds were and that no one knew what was going to happen. And it makes it so improbable that this disagreement between Englishmen will be broken out into big natural rights that people who are deeply flawed in with regard to those rights will be able to articulate things that women and African Americans and Native Americans, the poor and others can drive through. And so the idea was to create a kind of aristocracy of these white male property owners.
But in order to win this revolution, other people are going to fight. The kind of alarm at the end is filled with teenagers, ne' er do wells, felons hoping for a pardon, recent immigrants, people who don't have property, second and third sons. And they fight the revolution and they're going to need something at the end. So what they get is democracy.
What we get is democracy. And so that becomes the unintended consequence of the revolution. And in watching this documentary, I kept thinking to myself that one of the takeaways, one of the points that you make is the power of this country's democracy and its fragility at the same time. It's really true.
And I found that in film after film after film. You know, we made a film a few years ago called the US and the Holocaust. And you, you realize that if you wanted to be in the most cosmopolitan place on earth where everything in architecture and cinema and painting and music and thinking was going on, Berlin in 1932 would be the best place. And the next January, not so much.
And so you see how quickly the veneer of civilization can be pierced and that it and the founders understood that they were really trying to reverse engineer all sorts of things. You know, they put as Article one, not the Executive, that's Article two. The Executive is the manager who carries out the wishes of the Congress. So I think if the founders came here, they would not be surprised at all.
If somebody was seeking more authoritarian power, they would be abjectly disappointed that Article 1, the legislative branch had abdicated so much of power because that's what they thought would be the bulwark against the inevitable thing. Remember on July 4, 1776, most people had been through time, subjects, and we were creating a new thing called citizen. And it had a lot of responsibilities entailed with it. Jefferson said in that document, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable.
Meaning all of human history we've put up with the authoritarian rule. It doesn't work, it doesn't provide for human happiness. And here's our idea of how to put this forward. And because it's the Enlightenment, because things had not changed for people for a thousand years.
You work the same plot of land for somebody else in England or Wales or Scotland or Ireland, and then all of a sudden you have this possibility, this sort of possibility of freedom in common sense. Thomas Paine says, not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to remake the world. So there is a biblical sense of our destiny, of creating a place where human beings can reset and say we hold these truths to be self evident. They're not self evident, they've never been tried.
But this is what we're going to try. In fact, you have said that the American Revolution is quote, the most important event since the birth of Christ. Tell me why you believe that moment in history was so extraordinary. We say in the film the most consequential revolution in history.
And we feel that's at the opening of the film and we feel 12 hours later we've proved it. And it's set in motion More than 200 years of revolution when Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnamese independencies, quoting Thomas Jefferson. So this has legs, these ideas have legs. They're the most important ideas.
And so then you go back and go, what's comparable to this since the birth of Christ in terms of a world altering phenomenon? And you know, I remember speaking to a scholar, French scholar, and she said, what about the French Revolution? I said, well, how'd that work out? And it was inspired by the American Revolution.
Benjamin Franklin made sure the Declaration was published all throughout France and it was a much more oppressive monarchy. And they said, we're done, we've had it up to here. But it's all across the globe that this happens. But more importantly, leading up to it, maybe you could say the Renaissance.
But out of the Renaissance comes the Enlightenment. And out of the Enlightenment, the tangible manifestation of the Enlightenment is the United States of America. That's a big, big deal. And our film, that's, that's essentially the takeaway from our film along with this idea.
That's, that's very interesting to say for someone who has been as interested in bottom up history telling has popped down. He said, we don't have a country without George Washington, full stop, period. And most of the academy kind of resists the simple easy break man theory, but it's in this case happens to be true that we have somebody deeply flawed, rash, makes some bad decisions, but is able to inspire men in the dead of night who picks subordinate talent that's as good, if not better than him. Who defers to Congress, convinces people from Georgia and New Hampshire that they are Americans first and more importantly, gives up his power willingly twice.
We would have been happy to have him as our military dictator and as president for life. And he says, no, the highest office is actually citizenship. And sets in motion for 250 years this peaceful transfer of power, which is the envy of the world. And yet you have said even George Washington didn't know that he was going to be George Washington.
He's got a. He's so interesting, you know, he's got a humility and yet an arrogance. And he's taller than everybody else. He knows when he walks in a room that he commands it.
And yet he doesn't squander that. He's reserved. He gives up, he defers. He listens to other people.
And yet, you know, when soldiers are going home because they're listening up and he needs them for one more battle. Can you stay on a little bit? He speaks to them with a kind of tenderness. There's a moment in Valley Forge as the winter, the snow is melting and things are coming together.
There's a German language newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that calls him Daslander Vat Vater, the country's Des Landeswater, the country's father. And it's the first time, and it is really true. In our film we have two noted historians, you know, Annette Gordon Reed and Christopher Brown, who say, without him, we don't survive. And you begin to understand why leadership and virtue, the things that they hope this new thing that they've created will produce, are essential to its survival.
There's a kind of trust in virtue. And now we've got to a place where virtue isn't even talked about, and character, which used to be the defining sense of advancement, is no longer the thing. And so I think we can go back to the revolution and maybe rekindle a little bit of what their original mojo was, which had to do with a kind of self discipline, had to do with virtue, had to do with character, had to do with humility, and had to do with giving up power, not using as every single government up to this point had, the instrumentality of government as your own sort of special way to keep the power going. And how remarkable that you did start this project in 2015 as the World and this country itself for going through such monumental changes.
Ken, what was that experience? Well, you know what? There's a discipline that filmmakers that we have. Mark Twain is, you know, no event has happened twice, so history doesn't repeat itself.
Mark Twain is supposed to say, history doesn't repeat itself when it rhymes. And I have spent my entire professional life being aware of the rhymes in the present moment and having to instill in myself and my colleagues of discipline that says, we're not pointing science and saying, oh, isn't this so much like today? People are really smart. People use stories to advance themselves.
The novelist Richard Powers says, the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do is argue, won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. So if you tell a good story, you're not telling people how to think. You're not arguing that their point of view is wrong and mine's right.
You're saying, watch to the totality of this and drink it in. A kind of benign Trojan horse which you allow to come in, that doesn't end the city, go out and burn down the city and murder its inhabitants, but actually begins to transform. And so we rigidly say, we're not going to point out these errors. So when I began this In December of 2015, Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency.
So there's been a lot of water under the American bridge during this time. And we have remained steadfastly sort of into telling this story, knowing that some rhymes will come and some rhymes will go. I'll give you one hilarious example. If our family come out a year before, in the fall of 24, there's the wife of a German general who's making the crossings with her small daughters, and she's terrified about what she's going to find in America because she's heard that Americans eat cats now, right?
If this had come out in 24, when we're talking about spring loi, the whole insanity of that, maybe we say, oh, you put that in there for this political reason that it just went by. Nobody mentioned it because that rhyme had ended. But other rhymes have come to the fore, and they will also recede. So if you tell a good story and you permit all of these things to occur and you don't waste your time by making it, you know, it just disappears if you point to those things and say, isn't it so much like the day?
Well, and as a part of that storytelling, you included the stories of women during the American Revolution population. And we wouldn't have a revolution without their sustaining the resistance in the five years leading up to the revolution. So. And the first historian is a woman, and I'd argue one of the great writers is Abigail Adams.
And then there's also teenagers. Women are at every battle, children are at every battle. And you include Native Americans, African Americans who are slaves for the most part at the time. Why was it so important for you to include their stories and their voices?
So if you took a picture, say of Philadelphia, a photograph which didn't exist at the time, and looked at it, a downtown Philadelphia, there wouldn't be just white militia guys, there would be white people and black people, young and old, pets, women. Native Americans that lived coexisted with us, had been assimilated and other tribes that were trading. And I think that we tend to think of American Native Americans as sort of one thing. There are many, many tribes and they are as distinct from one another.
Say the Cherokee from the Haudenosaude. The group of upstate New York, six nations that had first tried out an idea of a confederacy, as France is from Germany, you know, so you, you have to treat everybody. So we have a line in the opening of the film that this was became a global struggle that engaged more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American. They're hugely a part of this.
Remember, this is the fourth or fifth global war over the prize of North America. When you say prize, you mean the land. And when you say the land, there are 300 nations in the way between the Atlantic and the Pacific. And we didn't call it the Eastern Seaboard Congress.
And the Eastern Seaboard Congress didn't put George Washington in charge of the Eastern Seaboard Army. They called it the Continental Congress and the Continental Army. We knew where we were going because that's where Britain wanted to go, that's where France wanted to go, that's where Spain wanted to go, that's where the Dutch wanted to go. This is a prize and we ended up with it.
And so the characters in this drama are as complex as any story I told. But that complexity leads to revelation and understanding. And if you edit things out, you have a myopic view of what actually happened. It doesn't diminish the big ideas.
In fact, it makes them more interesting. Rebecca Tanner, a Mohegan woman from probably Connecticut or south central Massachusetts, lost five sons fighting for the patriot cause. Why am I going to leave that out? They're dying on Breeds Hill, Bunkers Hill.
They're at Lexington and Concord. The soaring African Americans free and enslaved. And so this is a dynamic story, but that's what we like, all of us like. Well, one of the incredibly powerful moments of this documentary is when a Letter from Abigail Adams is read in which she says, don't forget about the ladies, because if you do, we will rise up at some point.
How prophetic. It's so amazing, you know, what's happened. It's come down to us. It's a very familiar phrase.
Remember the ladies, and yet we don't. Look at the second thing. She said, all men would be tyrants if they want, if they were able. And then you realize that they see a position in this.
In which this new democracy, this new thing, whatever it is that we're doing, we need to have a role in it. But, you know, and they play an extraordinary role and are rewarded with nothing. It's 144 years before women will get the vote. It will be four score and nine years before the 13th Amendment will outlaw slavery.
Native Americans, most Native Americans, will not have citizenship until 1924 and will struggle to this day about their own sovereignty and identity within the American culture. But we still are a nation in the process of becoming. We say pursuit of happiness. We say in Constitution, a more perfect nation.
And so people knew. And the scholar Maggie Black Hawk says in our film that the Declaration, even though you knew it was white men of property free of debt, it was deeply significant, she said, to people at the margins, and women and enslaved blacks and native people, because it was the dream of us. All right? Freedom is the logical extent of human beings.
You know, people say, I think we need a dictator because the dictators get things done. And your immediate response has to be, and how did that work out in the past? It doesn't work out. The only thing that works out is the messiness of democracy, which is diverse and complicated and interesting and attempts to try to expand that original idea of our founder, Thomas Jefferson, who owned other human beings.
But we don't need to have the unforgiving revisionism to throw him or George Washington or Benjamin Franklin out because of the ownership. Because they made those words so not vague, so poetically open that it just invited the world in to interpret what that means. Do you think they understood that that was a possibility at the time they wrote those words? One of the most moving things for me throughout the production was that lots of people talk about you and me.
They talk about the unborn millions, the people yet unborn. John Adams said, they're thinking of themselves. They've got the most impossible uphill task that's ever been, you know, fought. And yet they also know that there is a posterity out there awaiting the blessings of their sacrifice and their discipline.
And we owe it to them, not just the founders who articulated it, but for the teenage boys that we introduced you to. John Greenwood, 14 years old when he joins the Massachusetts militia. Joseph Plum Martin, 15 when he signs up after the Declaration of Independence. Ten year old Betsy Handler in Yorktown, who's a refugee on the move all the time.
Joseph Plumarten serves from the biggest battle of disaster, Long Island. He is climbing over the redoubt at Redoubt Number 10 at Yorktown, which is the last military thing before the surrender. People are being shot next to him. Lafayette's in charge of his division.
Alexander Hamilton's an officer, but he's up and over this. He's still a teenager, just turned 20. It is so improbably impressive that we actually have an obligation to this founding moment to go in and find out what they actually meant, what they actually believe, who was actually involved, how long it took, all the battles, it isn't just Lexington conquered and Washington crosses the Delaware, Trenton and then Yorktown. This is just six and a half years of meek grinding of war.
Even then it's two years and a month before the British leave New York. The setback of New York, devastating. So devastating. And it's a mistake that Washington make.
He makes several tactical mistakes, no worse than at New York and later at Brandywine, doing the same thing, leaving a flank unprotected. And yet he knows eventually that as the head of an insurrectionary army, he just can't be captured. If he's captured, it's all over. If he's killed, it's all over.
But he keeps that army going, he keeps it alive, and he's able to inspire people to stay through the winter and fight the next run. Well, this year will mark 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. What do you think the founding fathers of people who lived and fought during the American Revolution would think if they could see this country today, this country, this democracy that they fought and gave their lives for? They'd be totally impressed in lots of ways.
They'd be stunned maybe and shocked at how much rights have been extended to people and glad about it. I mean, George Washington knew slavery was wrong. Thomas Jefferson knew slavery is wrong. And the scholar in echo and reads it, how could you continue with something if you knew it was wrong?
And she said instead of throwing Jefferson out, she's an African American scholar, she says, well that's the human question for the rest of the U.S. like, do we act on flaws of our own? Yes, we do. And so it's a generous idea.
And I think they'd be incredibly impressed at what we've been able to achieve and see the levels of division that would seem familiar to them and be disappointed in us that we hadn't figured out what the larger thing was. There are people. We're not in a happy state right now, and there are people for whom these divisions are, in a transactional sense, good business. Right.
To stoke the fires of that. I mean, it's what Sam Adams did. He said, my job is to keep my fellow countrymen alive to their grievances. So we have a lot of people who are keeping us alive to our grievances.
It is in the interest of authoritarians to keep people uneducated, distracted by conspiracy and superstition. And our founding, that pursuit of happiness was not pursuit of material goods in a marketplace of things, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. If you did that, you were constantly, in a Socratic sense, asking yourself, how do I get better? How do I have virtue?
And that a virtuous populace, an educated, virtuous populace, saves itself all the time. Well, in a conversation that I had with another historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, she said that the country's media ecosystem is in some ways as divided as it was during the Civil War, and that that's driving so much of the divisions, so many of the divisions that we see on display today. What does the American Revolution teach us about moving beyond divisions? It teaches us that you can move beyond divisions, that you can have people from Georgia and New Hampshire that are different states, different countries in their own mind, and that they can come together, that they're no longer.
This is George Washington saying, you're no longer from Georgia, you're no longer from New Hampshire. You're an American. And that idea has to be reinforced. But as I said, that the ecosystem does tend to a simple binary thing, and nothing's binary in our ordinary lives.
If you raise children, if you're married, you know how complicated that can be. And yet we somehow permit. Computer world is a one or a zero, and our media world is a good or bad, a red state, my way or thy way. And I think what the system.
And I think that's where their disappointment would come. Say they wouldn't be surprised if we were divided. This is human nature, and that's what human nature teaches you. The Bible, the Old Testament, says, what has been will be again.
What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. This is what human beings do. But we had represented a kind of island of possibility and hope.
And I think that revisiting the revolution gives us an opportunity to rekindle that and to perhaps say, yes, I disagree, But I now realize that this idea that you're completely wrong. It used to be that foreign policy stuff. You know, you didn't argue about foreign policy. It ended at the.
At the shoreline. And that you could argue about domestic things and you more or less understood things. And we've lost that. Vietnam has sort of set in motion divisions that I don't think we've ever quite abandoned, But I think we have that ability to.
And our job right now is to apply a kind of self discipline to ourselves and understand that our work ahead of us is repair and restoration. Well, there's a robust debate right now about how to tell history, about what should be included. And you and I love this. You have a sign in your editing room that says, it's complicated.
How do you approach this very complicated task and decide what to include? You just have to accept that you don't. You include what works in storytelling. But part of that sign up, it's complicated means that you may have a scene that works, but the facts are requiring you to destabilize it.
Scene. Most filmmakers, if it's working, you don't want to touch it, me included. But we've spent our entire professional life destabilizing scenes. Because in the tension between art and fact, fact has to win, just like in your business.
But we are in a place where people manipulate things. And so I think the sort of saying, it's not so complicated or let's not talk about that. Pay no attention to the. It's almost like the emperor having no clothes.
Like, wait a second, the emperor has no clothes? Let's talk about that. And so we have a very rich and complex history that's not diminished in any way by that complexity. In fact, I think it makes it all the more amazing.
So this idea that you can simplify, you can pull out somebody's story or not tell this story or don't go into that, that it's what. It's a corrosive ideology. This is crazy. This is what happened.
And you can't, you know, we're. If you're good at it, your umpire is calling balls and strikes. And if you live in a superficial media world where everything's a highlight reel. Babe Ruth only hits a home run.
Well, Bay Ruth struck out more times than he get a home run. And guess what? He only comes up to bat once every Nine times. And it may fall to a second baseman, a middle infielder who's making a fraction of his salary that's batting, you know, 198, to be the hero of the last.
The seventh game of the last World Series was exactly that. So do you then want to say, it's only this guy who comes up once every nine time, or do you want to acknowledge that there are all the other people that are engaged? That doesn't take away from the power of Babe Ruth or the power of the American ideals to understand that it's complicated by these glorious things, and we celebrate that. You know, even Whitman, our poet of the 19th century, says, Do I contradict myself?
I contradict myself. We revel in the fact that democracy is messy. We revel in the fact that if you. That the hallmark of authoritarianism is to regulate everything, how you think, what the history is and whatever, and you can take people out of photographs, the Soviets to death, there'd be somebody, you know at the polite who'd fallen out of fashion, and they just edit the photograph out.
We can't do that in a democracy. Part of that complicated tapestry is the violence on which this country was founded. You captured that in the American Revolution. You capture that during the Civil War.
We have seen political violence increase in recent years. What do you think the role of violence has been in not just creating this country, but where we are right now? There is spasms of violence that people have, and we are not immune to it. We didn't have a country unless it was, as you correctly point out, extraordinarily violent.
Our Civil War is beyond comprehension. As we made our series 35 years ago, we thought that there were 600, 620,000 dead. We now believe that maybe 750,000. That's also disease and wounds later on, but just an impossibly large number, even for a country then of 31 million.
But the revolution, 3 million people, and the suffering is proportionately as bad as the Civil War. We'll never know the numbers. We're not keeping the kind of records that are possible. It's really.
It's really horrible. And yet this is a human manifestation. This is what human beings do. One of the things that the founders were hoping is to design a network that would permit within it the ability to negotiate these things, to figure out what the peaceful solution of.
George Washington is anguished at the Shays Rebellion. He's worried that we'll drown our rising empire. He said, our rising empire in blood. He's looking for ways to Take what is the normal course of human events.
There was a couple, Will and Errol Durand, a historian couple, who decided, I think it was like 38 years of all recorded human history had been without wars. They're wrong. There was a war somewhere there. They just missed it in their scholarship.
This is what we do. This is, as someone, one of our Marines in the Vietnam War said, this is the history of the world. People killing each other and fighting. So violence is part of it.
The question is always following ourselves. And this is what the founders felt. This idea of virtue begins with me, begins with George Washington. It says, I need to check this.
And can we design a system that will permit people to understand that the highest office in the land is citizen, that you can't complain, you have to vote, that you have to get involved with things, you have to listen to your neighbors. You have to understand that this will always, for all of human history. You know, if I'm making a film, you know, 200 years from now, which I won't, we will be talking about wars and political violence. But we have a system here in which we have at least the recipe to pull out the fuel rods of anger and distrust and hatred.
The question is, for Americans right now, as we approach this glorious moment, 250 years, the oldest democracy on earth, do you want to continue to cook with that recipe, or do you. Can you be, as authoritarians always do, convincing you it's better if everything's ordered, or that our story is only one people and not other people? The whole story is this unbelievably wide variety of people who improbably come together. That's the headline.
You still seem so hopeful despite the fact that this continues to be the great experiment, democracy. What gives you that hope? Because I think that recipe is there. It's sitting in front of us.
And we have been distracted by the shiny objects of superstition and conspiracy and us versus 10 life. I mean, I. I said something a couple years ago, just out on the road, talking about one film, and I said, you know, I've had the great privilege of making films about the US but I also make films about us. That is to say, all of the intimacy of us and we and our.
And all the majesty and complexity and contradiction and even controversy of the US and it is a privileged space. And if you can hold on to the fact that these things can coexist, that you can have controversy, you can have contradiction, you can have complexity, you can have majesty, and you can have the intimacy of each of Our struggles in our own lives, to make a living, to put food on the table, to raise our children well, to constantly educate ourselves. Pursuit of happiness. Then you can be optimistic and then you can have that.
There's always an Oscar. I live in a tiny town in New Hampshire, and people have various points of view, like widely varying points of view. And we listen to each other and we talk to each other and, you know, obviously things get frayed at times, but there are. We have built in.
In our system, the mechanisms for repair and the restoration that I think are central to the response to this moment. Yes, we can be chicken wittles and lie in a field position. It's all over. This is the worst existential thing.
That's the arrogance of this thing. Way more divided during the Revolution, way more divided during civil War, way more divided in the Vietnam era. So we had a chance to sort of reconcile this. And why not take the path of reconciliation rather than the drama, the needless drama of further disunion and dissipation and violence, perhaps?
And you just. We don't need to choose it. You have told so many of these stories on public television. You have been a fierce advocate of public television, of pbs, and yet it is facing steep headwinds.
Where do you think public television is about a year into seeing its funding cut? Yeah. So not all it's funding. We get support from, you know, people like you.
Thank you. And the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was sort of put out of business. A huge part of my budget, huge part of PBS's budget. But it's not the only thing we'll survive.
The problem is, what about the filmmakers that are coming out? What about those rural stations that depend on much greater funding from the Corporation for Public broadcasting than my 20%, which is a huge big hit that we have. But we'll respond. You know, I worry about them.
There might be news deserts who will be covering the school board, who will be at the city council meeting. Maybe that's the intention of it. I don't know. But I want that to.
We're stitched together by that. I think the good news side of it, the glass half full, is that I couldn't have made any of my films over the last 15 years anywhere about public broadcasting. There's just at the time, it is one foot in the marketplace and the other proudly out. And so it is.
The Declaration of Independence supplied communications because it is about lifelong learning. And so the market demands, as you are well aware of, are intense these days on this business of journalism or Just television and getting it straight. And what seems nice about the PBS stands for the public, obviously broadcasting, obviously. But it isn't system, it's service.
And I like that. And we have to remember we gotta do a lot of things. We have to put civics back into our teaching, we have to put history back into our teaching. We have to remind people how extraordinarily relevant if right now, in this moment, my film about Something that happened 250 years ago is the thing of the moment, to help us get it through.
That reminds you of the power of history, our greatest teacher. And that's, I think, where we will be led out of the wilderness through the discipline of education, self education, Questioning yourself. There's a great jurist from the early 20th century named learned Hand. Can there be a better name for a judge than Learned Hand?
And he said, liberty is never being too sure you're right. So right now we need to have a faith in our system. And the opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith.
The opposite of faith is certainty, which kills the mystery of what's going on. So when you take out this book from this library or you don't tell this story, you're saying that you're certain you know what things are, and we don't know what things are. And the embracing of that mystery is our salvation. And you are telling these moments of histories against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
What do you think the role of AI is and will be in documentary filmmaking? Well, I hope minimal. I hope it's a research tool that helps you find that document that you didn't know existed. Or that painting of Benedict Arnold, who doesn't have a good painting here for obvious reasons.
You know, maybe you can find that there. But the idea that it might write, that idea that it might generate things is really unacceptable to me. It's not going to happen for me. I'm more interested in what it will do, say in medicine, in our gene editing, the CRISPR thing.
And the idea that AI could go through the permutations and isolate those proteins that would save your life because they could design a non toxic natural immunity to whatever was attacking your body. And that could be solved individually on a person to person level. That's to me an application of AI. The idea that you can dump into some social media.
An application that strips people of their clothing, not so much. I want to talk to you a little bit about you personally, how you became Ken Burns. You talk about the fact that the passing of your mother was deeply devastating to you and that it was deeply impactful. Talk a little bit about your mom losing her and how that created who you are today.
My mom got cancer when she was. When I was three or four. And there was never a moment growing up where we didn't have this horrific impending tragedy about to happen. And I was even told when I was in second grade, seven years old, that she was going to die in six months.
But she lived. Almost to my 12th birthday just a few months ago, I got through the sixth grade, or just almost through the sixth grade and she died. And my father would have this strict curfew, but he would. He would let me stay at night and watch movies with him.
And I saw him cry for the first time in a movie. And he hadn't cried when my mom was sicker. When she died, I noticed it and friends had noticed it. And then here was this emotional safe haven.
So I know in 1965, I was now 12, I wanted to be a filmmaker. And that meant Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford or whatever. And I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which was brand new and experimenting. I came the second year and all the teachers were social documentaries, still photographers and filmmakers, reminding me that there is as much drama in what is and what was is anything that the human imagination dreams of.
And by the time I was working on my final project there in 74 and 75, I was doing a history film. And I've done it ever since. Later on, in a crisis, my late father in law, who was a psychologist, I told him I seemed to be keeping my mother alive. And he then said, I bet you blow out your birthday candles wishing she'd come back.
I could never be present on the day she died. It was always a date in the future and then receding. April 28th. Now I never forget it, or even during the day notice it on the clock or a countdown camera, whatever it might be.
And he said, I bet you blew out your candles wishing she'd come back. And I said, how did you know that? And he said, look what you do for a living. You wake the dead, you make your hand like and come alive.
Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? And so you realize that grief is this incredibly devastating force in our lives, but it also is a propellant. And sometimes most of us, as much as we want to order our lives and have the metaphorical gated community against everything and try to solve for any kind of free electron, we're really actually made often by the tragedies that we suffer. And that I am.
I wouldn't be talking to you if my mother hadn't died. And that's part of the tragedy and loss of it. And it's also part of what makes us, as human beings, able to overcome these things. And to say, not in a conscious way, but I have, in retrospect, been able to put the grief into the service of communicating to myself, my colleagues, and most importantly, to my fellow citizens, the glories of our story in all their complications.
It's powerful. You're basically saying you've carried her with you every step of the way. Lila. L Y L A.
And we never said that name. It was sort of draped in black crepe. My brother and I were in our 70s saying mommy still. Because when she left, she's Mom.
But my oldest daughter, who never met her grandmother, of course, named her first child Lila. And so now the bird sings and the flowers bloom, and we celebrate, you know, new life. And that's. That's what happens.
You begin to understand, you know, none of us are getting out of here alive. And so you could quite conceivably be in that fetal position, not doing anything. But we don't. We write symphonies, and we create skyscrapers and we raise children and 10 gardens.
This is all in a way of. And we tell stories, stories which are a way to keep, as Wynton Marsalis said, the wolf from the door. And the wolf from the door is our inevitable mortality. There's not going to be an excuse made, an exception made in anyone's case.
And they're gonna live forever, which many of us, deep down, think maybe that will happen when we accept that you've taken a big step forward and you've permitted the fact that story, the editing of human experience, is the way we share with each other the fragility of our mortality, and yet the immortality of the things we leave behind. What an amazing tribute to your mother. It's notable that there is a tribute to you called the Ken Burns Effect, which describes this unique way that you have found of zooming in and frankly, capturing and giving people an intimate look at an image. What does it mean to you, Ken, that you have impacted the film industry, the documentary industry, young filmmakers, in a way that there's now a Ken Burns Effect.
Well, Steve Jobs invented that, and I gained out about a good friendship with him because he brought me in to show me this rather crude zooming and panning across old photographs. And it's a bit more complicated being related to a lot of still photographers. My dad was an amateur still photographer. My first memory is of him building a dark room and developing stuff in our basement.
And there's a magic in it. I wanted to treat those old photographs as alive and try to figure out how to wake them up. And that means with an energetic and exploring camera eye. And Jobs brought it in.
He said, all Mac computers starting in January 2003 will have this, and we want to keep the working title. And I said, what? He goes, the Ken Burns Effect. I said, I don't do commercial endorsements.
And he went, what? So we went back to his office and we talked. And at the end, Apple very generously, Steve very generously gave more than a million dollars, which I gave away, of software and hardware to nonprofits. And that was the way I did it.
And so I'm hoping that that gets people interested in how you can put together the stories, our own intimate stories. I mean, I know that that thing has saved lots of weddings and vacations and bar mitzvahs and, you know, memorial services. But the important thing is that we learn to tell stories to each other and we learn to share our experiences in an honest and open way that's unafraid of the controversy and tragedy that attends not just the national story, but the inner story, but equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit. Well, you have been making documentaries for more than 50 years, and you've dedicated your life to this craft.
When the documentary of Ken Burns is made, how do you hope people will remember your impact here on this earth? One of the good things about Homer or Shakespeare is that we don't know that much about them. It's the story that matters. And I have in my home in New Hampshire, a faded New Yorker cartoon that shows three men standing in hell, the flames looking up around them.
And one guy says to the other two, apparently my over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing. And so there is. And my little town also reinforces the stuff. And I think learning a lot about George Washington for all the flaws and all the mistakes on the battlefield, but all the great presence that.
That help deliver this country, the humility is the best thing. I don't know what it will be. I'm happy that my daughters are doing this with me. I'm happy that people respond to them.
I love to talk about the United States as a kind of being an entity. And I don't know anybody who loves the country more. And I'm interested in figuring out ways through stories, not through lectures or lessons or tests or scolding to share the glories of the story of us. And the reward is only that we will find ways to restore and rehabilitate whatever divisions are at the moment.
And there will always be divisions. Ken Burns, thank you so much. Thank you. It was so wonderful to be able to talk to you.
Thank you. He was a young Marine. She didn't care about convention. They made a life together.
Then one night, the Marine died. And then the death investigation took a wild, unexpected, and utterly bizarre turn. I'm Josh Manitz, and this is Trace of Suspicion, an all new podcast from Dayline. Listen to all episodes of Trace of Suspicion.
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