What Ken Burns’ “The American Revolution” warns us about today

KEN BURNS: People, audiences come up to me and go, “I don’t know whether I’d be a loyalist or a patriot. I don’t know if I could risk my life for a cause. Would I be able to fight for a cause? Would I kill somebody for a cause? Would I die for a cause? Would I give up my fortune?” George Washington may have been the richest man in America, and he lived in a tent. Who among us, who in the sound of my voice, including myself, can honestly say, “I know exactly what I’d do for this country?”

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Ken Burns, the legendary documentarian. Ken was a guest on Rapid Response in 2024 to talk about Leonardo da Vinci. Now he’s got a new series coming out about the American Revolution, and the timing couldn’t be more prophetic. Ken shares key lessons he’s learned from his deep dive into the founding of the United States of America. He also talks about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, and how the TV series Yellowstone echoes the drama of the revolutionary era. Ken’s curiosity, passion, and love of country is inspiring, so let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. 

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Ken Burns, the esteemed documentarian. Ken, welcome back to the show.

BURNS: It’s great to be back, Bob. Thanks for having me.

Copy LinkThe inspiration behind Ken Burn’s The American Revolution

SAFIAN: Last time you were on Rapid Response, we talked about Leonardo da Vinci. Now you have a new, six-part series about the American Revolution, premiering on November 16th. Why were you drawn to this, and why now?

BURNS: I’ve been working on this for almost 10 years. I started this, and I said yes to this project in December of 2015. Barack Obama still had 13 months to go in his presidency. What drew me to the Civil War was organic and interior to my choices. I was looking at a map, a kind of 3D map, where I suddenly saw an arrow of British moving west through Long Island towards Brooklyn. This little, tiny town of Brooklyn, which is the largest battle in the entire revolution.

While there are no photographs in newsreels, I felt being a lover of maps and a willingness, I think, to reexamine my usual disdain for reenactments, they’re not going to reenact that battle. They’re just being there to make you feel the weather, make you feel the heat, make you feel the cold, make you feel the location, the interiors of all of these actions, and at that point, I realized maybe we can do this. Of course, I went about three years into this project and said, “Wow. If we hit our marks, we’ll be in 2025, which is the 250th anniversary of Lexington and Concord.” Then, all of a sudden people would arrive and say, “Oh. You planned this so well.”

SAFIAN: Yes, yes.

BURNS: We didn’t. I’m glad that a very deep dive into the revolution is going to happen way in advance of the 4th of July of next year, which is, for many people, the 250th. Of course, it’s been going on for some time, and will go on if you want to follow it through to the end, until 2039, which is 250 years after our government officially got started and George Washington became the first President of the United States of America. There’s lots of things going on, but a lot of it will be focused next July, and there is that risk that it could become super-ficialized. The war itself is already encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia. It is not bloodless or gallant.

You do not want to die when a cannon takes off your head, a bayonet guts you, or a musket ball rips through you. There’s just a remarkable set of characters and remarkable interiors to the war, the details of the battles, a really long, six and a half year war from Lexington to Yorktown. We need to know about our origin story, particularly in a time when people are sort of ringing their hands. We’re so divided. Well, you just look back there, and we’re really divided back then, and that maybe reinvesting with our origin story helps us find out what’s real and what’s artificial in all of the stuff that’s going on right now.

SAFIAN: You’re talking about this journey for you. It sounds like your curiosity sort of started with the craft, the way you would tell the story, and then as you sort of got deeper and deeper into it, the history itself. I mean, obviously, you were familiar with it, but that animated it also.

BURNS: Yeah. I think that’s a really good observation. First of all, it’s not like, can you overcome the deficits? It is really: what’s the history? We’re talking to scholars and following re-enactors in French, Hessian, British, American militia, continental, Native Americans, Black soldiers, and women who were always there at the battlefield, which I don’t think people know. How could you figure out a way, a dynamic, a recalibration of stuff that we’ve always done, in a way that would make this story compelling? So, that was an ongoing, almost 10-year question.

What is also a 10-year question is, at a time when we feel like the tapestry’s frayed a little bit, let’s go back and look at that tapestry, find out how it happened, and be inspired by George Washington, but also by dozens of people I promise you have never heard of before, because I’ve never heard of them before, and I’m so happy to introduce to you, albeit on the soundtrack, first-person voices read by the greatest actors in the world today. I mean, we have a cast list that is longer and better than any film or any television series that’s ever come. I mean, full stop, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks and Samuel L. Jackson and Morgan Freeman and Sir Kenneth Branagh and Liev Schreiber and Jeff Daniels and Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney and Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy.

SAFIAN: That is a list.

BURNS: Right? And you’ve cut me off at about one eighth of the people who are reading and making it come alive.

Copy LinkThe humanity behind the American Revolution

SAFIAN: You referenced how sanitized our retelling of the revolution often can be. Did you feel pressure about that? I mean, certainly, this year we’ve seen the White House lean into the depictions of our country’s history in places like the Smithsonian. Did you feel pressure about that, one way or the other?

BURNS: No, no, no. I mean, we always love to tell good stories. Look, what’s been a popular series, particularly apparently I’m told among the right, the series Yellowstone, right? Which I love, and what does it have? It has a very, very complex head of a family, who is also a murderer and is very honorable in lots of other ways, has a very strong daughter, a central, dominant female character, and two brothers, one of whom is married to a Native American and very conflicted, and the other who is, let’s just put it this way, Benedict Arnold. The strong daughter is married to the number one general of our George Washington, the Kevin Kausner character, Dutton. Then, you meet all of the people down below. They’re gay, they’re women, they’re Black, they’re white, they travel. Surrounding this story is a huge Native American dynamic and unbelievable greed for land and for power. Everybody loves this story.

Well, there is nothing I have just described that isn’t the story of the American Revolution. The problem is, because there are no photographs and no newsreel, we sort of see them in paintings and they’ve got buckles on their shoes, Bob, and they wear bridges and stockings, and they wear waistcoats and they have powdered wigs, so they can’t possibly be like us. They are exactly like us. The qualities of virtue, venality of greed, and generosity obtain with them as they do with us. So, this is a human dynamic, and our job is not to worry about other people’s interpretations of it, but the ability to tell a good story and to take the onus off the fact that there’s no photographs and no newsreels, but if you add maps, if you have drawings, if you have the documents themselves, where a 15-year-old, Joseph Plum Martin from Connecticut signs up a few days after the declaration and fights to the end of the war, he’s a grunt, he’s 15.

There’s a 14-year-old that we follow all the way through who joins the Patriot Cause from Boston, named John Greenwood. There’s a 10-year-old girl, named Betsy Ambler from Yorktown. There are so many interesting figures in addition to the people that we’ve heard of. There’s the geopolitical dynamics. You can’t sort of kid yourself into corralling the American Revolution into a nice, little thing where great men are thinking great thoughts in Philadelphia. That’s the main story. That’s the fastball down the center of the pie, but to get from Lexington Green where the chance of success is zero, to Yorktown and the surrender of Cornwallis, which means 100%, even then everybody thought the country would fail under the Articles of Confederation, that’s one hell of a long drama, and what happens in between and who the players are at all the levels is so, so interesting.

Copy LinkHow Ken Burns feels about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton

SAFIAN: The current cultural story about the American Revolution that maybe is most prominent or most well known is Hamilton, is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s retelling in that. Did that impact the way you told the story at all?

BURNS: Look, let me give my props to Lin Manuel. Hamilton is the greatest cultural event of this new millennium, this new century. It is a phenomenal thing. I mean, I’ve got a teenage daughter who’s 15, a 20-year-old daughter, and an almost 15-year-old granddaughter, and they can recite, sing the whole thing, two-and-a-half hours. And so, they know tensions between big and small states. They understand between a strong federal Hamiltonian system and a state’s rights Jefferson model. They know who Hercules Mulligan is. They know all this sort of stuff about the revolution, and they have a kind of great glee about it that must mean that history teachers of this period are just lying down and thanking God for Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Hamilton makes several appearances within our film. Many people that we know, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, did not fire a gun in anger, did not risk their lives on a battlefield the way George Washington did all the time, the way Alexander Hamilton did. Hamilton is with Lafayette and this kid, 15 years old, at the beginning, Joseph Plum Martin, that’s rushing Redoubt Number 10, which is the last big, British stronghold on the outer ring of defenses of Yorktown. If you can get to that moment, if you’ve got the sound effects where you can hear maybe 150 tracks of this siege of Yorktown, you’ll feel like you’re there, and you’ll go, “Whoa.”

Copy LinkThe importance of facts and agreed-upon truths

SAFIAN: I mean, truth and fact are increasingly contested today, and we mentioned Hamilton. I mean, Lin-Manuel, the big picture is certainly there, but there’s a lot of artistic license in what he pulled together. When you look at this as a storyteller, and for our listeners who are business leaders and other leaders, the responsibility to promote strict accuracy, or like as long as we get the big picture right, it’s okay the details don’t matter as much.

BURNS: The people that are listening to this have to do the former, right? Strict accuracy, and so do I. There’s not a filmmaker in a world when a scene is working, you don’t want to touch it, but we’re always finding new and destabilizing information that are true and you need to incorporate them. Lin-Manuel can actually take the poetic license necessary to do a big, Broadway musical, and God bless him. 

I mean, there’s a guy that we know in our past who would take the histories and conflate characters, change countries, move these characters around. His name is William Shakespeare, and we don’t believe that there are any truths higher in fiction, which are sometimes more true than what’s real, but I can’t do that. I will sacrifice the art for the correct story. That makes it super complicated, but what’s interesting is when you do that, when you try to fit the round peg of the truth into the square hole of art, if you will, and you successfully negotiate it, it’s as good as anything. You’re right, we’re in an age where we’re supposed to be post-truth. No, we’re not. Are you post-truth? I’m not. I’m not.

SAFIAN: Right.

BURNS: Nor are the business leaders of the country. You’re going to fudge your figures? I don’t think so. We do know that large sections of where we supposedly get information are, themselves, unaccountable. They do not care, one way or the other. Whatever political persuasion, whatever it is, people are manipulating the truth all the time. Always has been. The problem is just the sheer size of the internet and its ability for a lie to get started before the truth can come back, but one and one is always going to be two. You can’t build an airplane, you can’t run a business, you can’t work the budget of a documentary film without one and one equaling two.

You can’t just make it up, right? You cannot make it up. George Washington rides out on the battlefield at least three times, that I know of, risking his life at Kipp’s Bay in Manhattan, at Princeton, and at the Battle of Monmouth, and these are significant things. If he’s killed, it’s all over, because he is the only person that held us together as a historian, Annette Gordon Reed says, that there’s one person who was able to figure it out. I’m interested in him. He’s deeply flawed. He’s rash. Those movements potentially sacrifice the whole thing, and he makes terrible battlefield mistakes. He leaves his left flank exposed in the Battle of Long Island, the largest battle of the American Revolution, and loses it and New York for seven years.

It’s the British headquarters and the loyalist stronghold for the rest of the war. He does the same mistake at Brandywine in Pennsylvania, another huge, huge battle, where this time he leaves his right flank, but there’s nobody who knew how to inspire men in the dark of night, in the dead of cold, who could pick subordinate talent, that he wasn’t afraid of their skills or talent, who could defer to Congress and understand how they work, who could speak to a Georgian and a New Hampshireite and say, “You’re not that. You’re an American, this new thing.” Nobody. Nobody could do that. Does he have undertow? Yes. Does that make him any less heroic? No. Heroism is not perfection. Heroism is a negotiation within yourself between your strengths and your weaknesses.

SAFIAN: Has truth always been sort of fungible and selective in U.S. history, a kind of a matter of debate and perspective, or is this time we’re in now different?

BURNS: Human beings have always lied. People have been lying as long as there have been human beings.

SAFIAN: Ken’s quest for truth, while acknowledging that lies are part of human nature, is more than admirable. It’s an article of faith and also a tool, as he sees it, for divining the future direction of the United States. When we come back, why Ken believes the pursuit of virtue is as central to American democracy as the pursuit of happiness. Stay with us. 

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Before the break, we heard documentarian, Ken Burns, explain what makes the American Revolution a central tool for understanding the USA of today. Now, Ken talks about how facing the complexity of America’s history makes him a better American. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkWhy understanding our history makes us better Americans

The series stresses the diversity throughout the 13 colonies.

BURNS: Miraculousness is that, how do these people ever come together? Like a Georgian, as I said before, is so different from a New Hampshireite, what they want. They’re a separate country. They are disunited, and within them, half of them are women whose rights are not going to be recognized. Out of two and a half to three million people at the time of the revolution, there may be 500,000 free and enslaved Black people. There are native people who are assimilated into the culture. I mean, and there are merchants, farmers, seamen, and big plantation owners, and everybody wants native land.

That’s the biggest cause of the revolution, is the Brits make a line in 1763 through the Appalachians and say, “You can’t go over,” which enrages every regular poor person who finally, after 1000 years of working for somebody else, is being dependent farmers in England and Wales and Scotland and Ireland, suddenly have the chance of real land, and you can’t get it, and it enrages the big speculators, people dealing in tens of thousands of acres, which they don’t own. They just said, “I want that. ” It’s not theirs. It’s the Shawnee, it’s the Delaware, it’s the Cherokee. They say, “I want that,” and those speculators are people, household names, as Calloway, the historian says, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. You can get an A in third, eighth grade, or whatever, when the cause is the answer is taxes and representation. That’s really true, but that’s two and three. Number one is native land.

SAFIAN: I mean, in doing all this research and working on this, did it change or impact what you think about when you say, “Oh. Here’s what it means to be an American?”

BURNS: No, no. It only enriches. I mean, every film that I’ve worked on, as you can tell, I get really excited about it, I think it makes you a better American to understand the complexity, just as the relationships that you value the most. Whether it’s in business or whether it’s within a family, benefit from your having an unbelievable awareness of the complexities of that individual.

SAFIAN: Yes.

BURNS: And a kind of toleration of them, because they also have to tolerate your complexities, and that’s the essence of love and friendship. And so, when you extend that to the past, and you don’t turn it into these sorts of sanitized, Madison Avenue figures, that’s the problem, is that we just want to say, “Well, they can’t be like us. Just thank God for them. They’re good ideas,” but let’s get to know them. Let’s understand who they are, what their passions are, what their flaws are, what it is. It doesn’t take anything away. It makes it more complex, and the more complex it is, the more knowledgeable you are and the better you are to make a good decision, and that would be true about information in the present or information in the past.

Copy LinkWhy Ken Burns leans into long-form storytelling

SAFIAN: The American Revolution Series runs 12 hours. Some of your other projects are longer. Elsewhere, the trend seems to be more short form content, and I’m curious about your perspective on viewing habits and supposed waning, or do you just not care?

BURNS: Oh. I was told in 1990, I went to the Century Plaza Hotel where the national press tour takes place twice a year, and they said, “Ken, the Civil War is really good, but nobody’s going to watch it, and the reason why is that Steven Bochco, the great success producer, has got a new series. It’s a singing police procedural called Cop Rops, and nobody’s going to watch this. Our attention spans are so eroded by MTV commercials.” Now, that film on the Civil War is still, 35 years plus later, the highest rated program in PBS.

They said the same thing about baseball. They said the same thing about jazz. They said the same thing about the World War II, but by 2014, nobody ever said that with the Roosevelts, or after that Vietnam, or the country music series. Nobody said that, and that’s because, in the midst of all of this stuff, including the people who love to watch those small TikToks and things like that, what they do is they binge, which is a form of self-curation and self-preservation. With the tsunami of all the options breaking over our head, what do people do? They curate their own viewing things, and they spend hours, longer than any film I’ve made. I’ll have a daughter spend a weekend watching three seasons of this particular series, right?

SAFIAN: Yes.

BURNS: All in a row, right? Taking time to eat. Do you live? Can you get out of your bed? All of that stuff. I am not worried. We are going to always be drawn to the kitten with a ball of yarn, and we are always going to realize that all meaning accrues in duration. So, I’ve heard this conversation, and I go, “Yeah, okay. Yeah, a good story is a good story is a good story.” That’s all.

SAFIAN: The American Revolution project took you, as you said, almost 10 years. Many businesses find it difficult, particularly today, to keep up enthusiasm or motivation for anything, for even a year, let alone 10 years.

BURNS: Yeah, that’s a problem, isn’t it?

SAFIAN: So, how do you do it? I mean, you must hit lulls in this. Do you have any advice for leaders who struggle with this?

BURNS: Look, a lot of this is governed by the bottom line. It’s been for 50 years. Judge me quarter to quarter, right? People say, “God, how could you work on a film for almost 10 years and still love it?” I am sorry to leave it. If I didn’t have this evangelical period, this time where I’m out talking to friends like you, and saying, “God. I’ve got a story. You really got to pay attention to this,” I would be so grief-stricken at having to leave this project.

SAFIAN: But for you, it’s not transactional, right?

BURNS: No, no, no. Well, that’s the point. I think that what we are is too often transactional, that we may have sacrificed from that “judge me, quarter to quarter,” something larger and more transformational, and I think the great business leaders already understand that. I mean, if you think of some visionary, like Warren Buffett, is he doing it for the next three months? If you look at Ray Dalio, a friend of mine, he’s looking at huge, long-term, century-long patterns. I think what you find is anywhere the most successful businesses, the most successful, you name it, fill in the blanks. Have a much less, in-the-moment transactional thing.

Copy LinkHow does the defunding of PBS impact Ken Burns?

SAFIAN: One of your key business partners has been PBS. The government’s defunding of PBS. Does that impact those plans and your plans with them?

BURNS: I wouldn’t call it business partner. They have one foot in the marketplace tentatively and the other foot proudly out. They provide, funding wise, maybe between 12 and 15%. The corporation for public broadcasting, which was defunded, is a huge loss. It represents about 20% of my budget. Bank of America has also contributed 21, 22% of our budget, and there are large foundations that come in and out, and there’s huge individuals of wealth that contribute. Obviously, they’re going to have to, if we’re going to continue, pick up the slack. PBS is not going anywhere. The incredible shortsightedness of the rescission, that is to say they had already authorized and appropriated two years of funding, including four million for the project that I’m working on right now, that just disappeared overnight. PBS is the largest network in the country. There are 338 affiliates. This will impact the small, rural stations, more than anything else. That’s the shortsightedness.

SAFIAN: And when that $4 million sort of disappears for you, you have places to go to look for it? I mean, it obviously must be bracing.

BURNS: Yeah. It is, to say the least. Sphincter tightening. Before the ’08 meltdown, we had had a three-legged stool, so it was corporate. Then, we had the governmental stuff, PBS, which is not governmental. Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Downward for the Humanities. Then, the third leg was big, large institutional foundations, and I said, “You know what? This is not going to hold up in this crisis, so we need to add a fourth leg.” I started an organization which I’m no longer part of, because it got 501(c)(3) status, and it’s raising money, not just for me, but other places, called the Better Angel Society, in which individuals of wealth are contributing to a film across the political spectrum, from Democrats and Republicans and centrists. That fourth leg has really been the saving grace, and I hope that those folks will step up and help us be able to tell the stories.

Copy LinkWhat’s at stake right now for America?

SAFIAN: I mean, with all the changes that are going on, what do you feel like is at stake for filmmaking, for storytelling, for our relationship with truth right now?

BURNS: I think it’s how we go back and regather the threads of what our original intention was. If you’re confused and not sure, I mean, the truth is really obvious. Is it raining out? Yes, it is. I cannot tell you it’s a sunny day. It’s raining. If I told you I was 150 years old and not 72, you’d kind of go, “Okay, Ken.” We have to be strict adherents to the truth. There’s not a businessman that doesn’t understand that, or just a human being who understands that you just have to say the truth, but we are in an age where people actually enrich themselves by promoting false narratives and false things. That’s what authoritarianism is about.

Like what Thomas Jefferson says a few lines past pursuit of happiness in the declaration, “All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.” This is not hard to understand. It means here before, everybody’s been a subject, and willing to just accept the tyrannical rule of somebody else, and then relegated not to education, but to superstition, conspiracies, and falsehoods. We would say lies or disinformation, but of course, what they meant by pursuit of happiness was not the acquisition of things. It was lifelong learning, because if you did that, if you could hold yourself to this huge moral standard, the free electron of this series, the word that we didn’t put in, but everybody says and talks about is virtue. That is, if you’re educated, if you pursue happiness, and remember, it’s not just happiness; it’s the pursuit, another action word.

Then, you have the possibility of being virtuous, and if you’re virtuous, then you’ve earned this brand new, priceless gift of citizenship. If a series on the revolution could rekindle a sense of what that meant back then, it’s not like arguing, “Well, did Jefferson mean this, and did Hamilton mean this?” Yeah, they meant all those things, but they had robust conversations with each other. I mean, just look at the Federalist Papers, this sort of attendant conversation around the creating of the Constitution, which took four months to write, but it’s four pieces of paper, and it’s got some seriously bad compromises and some seriously great compromises, but it’s worked for an awfully long time, and it didn’t get ratified unless people knew what was coming were 10 amendments, the first of which is so unbelievable. First of all, no establishment of religion, free press and freedom of assembly.

This is the stuff that the King wouldn’t let them do. If you look at the declaration, the complaints, it’s mostly a list of complaints of what the King did. It’s got a beautiful, poetic beginning and a wonderful, make-your-heart-cry end, that we mutually pledge to ourselves, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Is there anything right now? I mean, audiences come up to me and go, “I don’t know whether I’d be a loyalist or a patriot. I don’t know if I could risk my life for a cause. Would I be able to fight for a cause? Would I kill somebody for a cause? Would I die for a cause? Would I give up my fortune?” George Washington may have been the richest man in America, and he lived in a tent for most of six-and-a-half years, in a tent and risked his life every single day.

Who among us, who in the sound of my voice, including myself, can honestly say, “I know exactly what I do for this country”? We have many people who’ve served in the armed forces and were willing to give those things up, and to them, I have now, having done the Civil War, having done World War II, having done the Vietnam War, and now this, the most profound respect for the people who are willing to do this for an idea. And what is that idea? Is that we hold these truths to be self-evident. There was nothing self-evident about those truths at that time, but if you say it, then maybe people believe it. I believe it, and I think Americans can come back to that and be re-reminded of why we agree to cohere as a country.

SAFIAN: And this is what virtue is.

BURNS: This is what virtue is, is lifelong learning. It’s understanding that I am a flawed project by nature and that I need to improve myself and make myself better. Mark Twain said, we use this at the opening of our prohibition film. He said, “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” We are always happy to say what you’re doing wrong, Bob, and what this group is doing wrong and how bad they are. I make films about the U.S., but I make films about “us” – that lowercase, two letter, plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our, and all of the majesty and complexity and contradiction and even controversy of the US, and I have the most privileged job in the country, because I get to occupy that space, understand its contradictions, or try to understand its contradictions, and certainly reflect back its inspirational glory.

SAFIAN: Well, Ken, as always, this was great. Thanks again for doing it.

BURNS: My pleasure. It’s great to be with you, Bob. Thank you.

SAFIAN: I love listening to Ken, his energy, his enthusiasm, his wisdom. Where I anchor most in connecting the American Revolution with the America of today is Ken’s highlighting of the word virtue. I didn’t realize that virtue was a defining element of U.S. citizenship in the very beginning, but it makes me happy to know it. There’s so much posturing in our modern world, and as Ken notes, there’s always been the human inclination for lies, but to stand up a democracy, we needed to unleash our better selves, and we need that just as much today. Truth and honesty are core to any marketplace, whether it’s a commercial marketplace, a marketplace of ideas, or a community of people. Here’s hoping Ken’s work inspires more truth and honesty and virtue from all of us. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.