Ken Burns says America’s founders would be ‘abjectly disappointed’ by Congress today

[0:00] You are an iconic documentarian, filmmaker. [0:03] You have made some of the most impactful documentaries in U.S. history, [0:09] from the Civil War to the Roosevelt's, Benjamin Franklin to baseball. [0:13] Why was now the right moment to retell the story of the American Revolution? [0:19] It's such a wonderful and fortuitous accident. [0:22] The now started 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago, [0:25] when we were finishing up our series on the Vietnam War. [0:29] And I was looking at a map of the Central Highlands, [0:32] and I thought, maybe this could be the British moving west on Long Island towards Brooklyn. [0:37] Maybe we can do, despite the absence of photographs and newsreels, [0:42] maybe we can do the revolution. [0:43] So I spoke up and I said, we're doing the revolution next. [0:46] No idea that it would come falling close to 250, [0:50] come at a place where Americans are so anxious about the future. [0:55] Will there be another 250 or another 10 years? [0:59] And I think that that kind of existential, fraught moment gives us an opportunity [1:04] to allow the story of the American Revolution, [1:07] the complicated story of the American Revolution, to help us understand. [1:11] History is our best teacher, and it can be a helpful guide for everybody, [1:15] no matter your disposition, political orientation, age, whatever it is. [1:20] History can be an incredibly important way to digest the present [1:25] and then figure out what your response is and to imagine a future together. [1:30] One of the aspects of the American Revolution that you capture so powerfully [1:36] that you're referencing in this documentary is the fact that a lot of people think of [1:41] the American Revolution in glossy terms, the founding fathers in Philadelphia crafting [1:47] the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution. [1:51] But this documentary makes the point that this was a bloody, years-long battle [1:58] that claimed so many lives and that, frankly, impacted every single person on this territory. [2:05] It's so pervasive, and I think we have sanitized the war, [2:10] and I think it's out of an understandable fear that if somehow we reveal how dark and bloody it is, [2:17] that it will somehow diminish those big ideas in Philadelphia in 76, [2:22] and then 11 years later in 87 when they do the Constitution. [2:27] It doesn't. [2:28] Those ideas are made even more impressive because of the improbability of the struggle, [2:33] the odds against success, the time it took to do it, all of the problems, [2:39] the winters at Valley Forge and Morristown in which people are dying of disease. [2:44] This coincides with a continent-wide pandemic or pandemics, [2:48] and one of the big arguments of the time is whether you inoculate the troops. [2:54] There's a failed invasion of Canada, our desire to make it the 14th state. [2:58] I mean, the rhymes to this moment are so particularly helpful [3:03] because I think we can, as we chicken little, say the sky is falling, you know, everything is bad. [3:10] We're so divided. [3:11] We are really divided, but we're way more divided then, [3:14] way more divided during the Civil War, way more divided during the Vietnam period. [3:18] And so I see that division as sort of a mile wide but an inch thick, [3:23] and it takes good story to remind people of the thing that we share in common. [3:29] And in watching this documentary, I kept thinking to myself that one of the takeaways, [3:35] one of the points that you make is the power of this country's democracy and its fragility at the same time. [3:44] It's really true, and I found that in film after film after film. [3:47] You know, we made a film a few years ago called The U.S. and the Holocaust, [3:50] and you realized that if you wanted to be in the most cosmopolitan place on Earth [3:56] where everything in architecture and cinema and painting and music and thinking was going on, [4:02] Berlin in 1932 would be the best place. [4:05] And the next January, not so much. [4:08] And so you see how quickly the veneer of civilization can be pierced. [4:15] And the founders understood that they were really trying to reverse engineer all sorts of things. [4:21] You know, they put as Article I, not the executive, that's Article II. [4:26] The executive's the manager who carries out the wishes of the Congress. [4:30] So I think if the founders came here, they would not be surprised at all [4:33] that somebody was seeking more authoritarian power. [4:36] They would be abjectly disappointed that Article I, the legislative branch, [4:43] had abdicated so much of the power, [4:44] because that's what they thought would be the bulwark against the inevitable thing. [4:50] Remember, on July 4, 1776, most people had been through time's subjects, [4:55] and we were creating a new thing called Citizen, [4:58] and it had a lot of responsibilities entailed with it. [5:01] Jefferson said in that document, [5:03] all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. [5:09] I mean, all of human history we've put up with the authoritarian rule. [5:14] It doesn't work. [5:15] It doesn't provide for human happiness. [5:18] And here's our idea of how to put this forward. [5:21] And because it's the Enlightenment, [5:23] because things had not changed for people for a thousand years, [5:26] you worked the same plot of land for somebody else in England or Wales or Scotland, [5:31] or Ireland, and then all of a sudden you had this possibility, [5:34] this sort of possibility of freedom. [5:37] In common sense, Thomas Paine says, [5:39] not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to remake the world. [5:44] So there is a biblical sense of our destiny of creating a place where human beings can reset [5:52] and say, we hold these truths to be self-evident. [5:55] They're not self-evident. [5:57] They've never been tried. [5:58] But this is what we're going to try. [6:00] What do you think the founding fathers, [6:03] the people who lived and fought during the American Revolution, [6:07] would think if they could see this country today, [6:10] this country, this democracy that they fought and gave their lives for? [6:14] They'd be totally impressed in lots of ways. [6:17] They'd be stunned, maybe, and shocked at how much rights have been extended to people [6:22] and glad about it. [6:24] I mean, George Washington knew slavery was wrong. [6:26] Thomas Jefferson knew slavery was wrong. [6:29] And the scholar Annette Gordon-Reed said, how could you continue with something if you knew it was wrong? [6:33] And she said, instead of throwing Jefferson out, she's an African-American scholar, [6:37] she says, well, that's the human question for the rest of us. [6:40] Like, do we act on flaws of our own? [6:44] Yes, we do. [6:45] And so it's a generous idea. [6:47] 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 [6:55] and be disappointed in us that we hadn't figured out what the larger thing was. [7:01] There are people, we're not in a happy state right now. [7:04] So we have a lot of people who are keeping us alive to our grievances. [7:08] It is in the interests of authoritarians to keep people uneducated, distracted by conspiracy and superstition. [7:15] And our founding, that pursuit of happiness, was not pursuit of material goods in a marketplace of things, [7:22] but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. [7:25] If you did that, you were constantly in a Socratic sense asking yourself, how do I get better? [7:30] How do I have virtue? [7:32] And that a virtuous populace, an educated virtuous populace, saves itself all the time. [7:39] Part of that complicated tapestry is the violence on which this country was founded. [7:45] You capture that in the American Revolution. [7:47] You capture that during the Civil War. [7:50] We have seen political violence increase in recent years. [7:57] What do you think the role of violence has been in not just creating this country, but in where we are right now? [8:04] There is spasms of violence that people have, and we are not immune to it. [8:10] We didn't have a country unless it was, as you correctly point out, extraordinarily violent. [8:16] And yet, this is a human manifestation. [8:19] This is what human beings do. [8:20] 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, [8:30] to figure out what the peaceful solutions of George Washington is anguished at the Shays' Rebellion. [8:38] He's worried that we'll drown our rising empire, he said, our rising empire in blood. [8:43] And so violence is part of it. [8:45] The question is always falling on ourself, and this is what the founders felt. [8:50] This idea of virtue begins with me, begins with George Washington. [8:54] 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, [9:03] 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. [9:09] 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, [9:17] we will be talking about wars and political violence. [9:20] 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. [9:32] The question is, for Americans right now, as we approach this glorious moment, 250 years, the oldest democracy on earth, [9:41] do you want to continue to cook with that recipe? [9:43] Or do you, can you be, as authoritarians always do, convincing you it's better if everything's ordered, [9:50] or that our story is only one people and not other people? [9:54] The whole story is this unbelievably wide variety of people who improbably come together. [10:02] That's the headline. [10:03] You still seem so hopeful, despite the fact that this continues to be the great experiment, democracy. [10:16] What gives you that hope, Ken? [10:17] Because I think that recipe is there. [10:19] It's sitting in front of us, and we have been distracted by the shiny objects of superstition and conspiracy and us versus them. [10:28] I mean, I said something a couple of years ago, just out on the road, talking about one film, [10:34] and I said, you know, I've had the great privilege of making films about the U.S., [10:38] but I also make films about us. [10:41] That is to say, all of the intimacy of us and we and our. [10:48] And, you know, obviously things get frayed at times, but there are, we have built in in our system [10:55] the mechanisms for repair and the restoration that I think are central to the response to this moment. [11:03] Yes, we can be chicken littles and lie in a fetal position. [11:06] It's all over. [11:06] This is the worst existential thing. [11:08] That's the arrogance of this thing. [11:10] Way more divided during the revolution. [11:12] Way more divided during civil war. [11:14] Way more divided in the Vietnam era. [11:16] So we have a chance to sort of reconcile this. [11:21] And why not take the path of reconciliation rather than the drama, the needless drama, [11:27] of further disunion and dissipation and violence, perhaps. [11:33] And you just, we don't need to choose it. [11:36] Well, you have been making documentaries for more than 50 years. [11:40] Ken, you've dedicated your life to this craft. [11:44] When the documentary of Ken Burns is made, how do you hope people will remember your impact here on this earth? [11:52] One of the good things about Homer or Shakespeare is that we don't know that much about them. [11:58] It's the story that matters. [12:00] 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. [12:09] And one guy says to the other two, apparently my over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing. [12:15] And so there is. [12:16] And my little town also reinforces the stuff. [12:18] And I think learning a lot about George Washington for all the flaws and all the mistakes on the battlefield, [12:24] but all the great presence that helped deliver this country, that humility is the best thing. [12:29] I don't know what it will be. [12:31] I'm happy that my daughters are doing this with me. [12:34] I'm happy that people respond to them. [12:37] I love to talk about the United States as a kind of being an entity. [12:44] And I don't know anybody who loves their country more. [12:47] And I'm interested in figuring out ways through stories, not through lectures or lessons or tests or scolding, [12:55] to share the glories of the story of us. [12:59] And the reward is only that we will find ways to restore and rehabilitate whatever divisions are at the moment. [13:07] And there will always be divisions. [13:09] Ken Burns, thank you so much. [13:11] Thank you.