‘The American Revolution’ and the Story of Democracy
Ken Burns on his latest film—and how he hopes it ‘reinvigorates a spirit of what makes us unique in the history of the world’
Over the past half century, Ken Burns has become America’s storyteller. His documentaries provide a history of the nation through biographies, sports, music, and other subjects. His most recent film, “The American Revolution,” which was supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, premiered in November on PBS. He spoke about it with Pew recently in his barn office in New Hampshire.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Your most recent film is “The American Revolution.” Is the Revolution the beginning of democracy in the U.S.?
It is—in a kind of backdoor way. We presume that the Revolution was intended to create a democracy. Democracy is an unintended consequence of the Revolution. The fight was an attempt to redress grievances about taxes and representation that the colonists in North America had against Britain as we were taught in grade school. But to win the war, the patriot side had to ask not just wealthy men of property, farmers, and shopkeepers at the heart of the rebellion, but just regular folks—men, women, native American, free, and enslaved—to join the cause. The clash came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.
As the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary, the Revolution feels like our oldest story. Is it over or is it ongoing?
We end our film with the words of Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician and founding father, who said the American War was over but the American Revolution is ongoing. If you look at our most sacred documents, we say “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. We say “a more perfect union.” We are a nation in the process of becoming.
What’s great is that gave Americans a sense of process from the beginning that, as the old saying goes, it’s not about the end, it’s about the journey. We have built into our DNA a sense of the process of getting better, of trying to perfect ourselves, to be in the pursuit of happiness, which is not the acquisition of stuff but of lifelong learning and self-improvement.
This new thing that we were creating was not just a nation, but the idea of a citizen. Everybody before the Revolution had been a subject to a monarchy. Now they—we—were citizens and that means huge responsibilities.
You keep a sign in your editing room that says, “It’s complicated.” What were the complications in telling the story of the Revolution?
You don’t want to sanitize the war and you don’t want to overdramatize the violence of it. You just need to say, this is what happened. And we’re always finding stuff that makes for a truer story as we research our films.
Wynton Marsalis said to us in our jazz series that sometimes a thing and the opposite of that thing are true at the same time. We understand that in our own lives and relationships, but we don’t extend that to our politics or our media, where everything’s a one or a zero, everything’s binary. And we know that nothing in life is binary. So, if you tell a complicated story, you’re actually inviting people to come in and say, “I recognize it.”
I hope this film is an opportunity to put the “us” back in the U.S., to say it doesn’t always have to be binary. I’m right, you’re wrong. It’s possible for us to have something we share in common. I’ve made films for the last 50 years about the U.S. but I’ve also made films about that lowercase, two letter plural pronoun—us. All of the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty and complexity and contradiction of us. It’s a privilege and a magnificent space to negotiate and be able to work in.
The Revolution was complicated to be sure, but it was also about some big, broad ideas.
They are the most important thing. I think the American Revolution is the most important event since the birth of Christ. It’s certainly the most consequential revolution in history, the thing that inspires more than two centuries of other revolutions.
Everybody up to that point had been a subject of a kingdom. And now there were people clinging to former colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America, who were citizens. And universal human rights are still compelling. The most important words in our history are, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
In order to be free, to be a citizen, you have to know facts and not opinions, and to know truths and not suppositions. And that’s complicated and hard to do. Everybody succumbs to that, including myself. So that’s our job and I think telling stories is a good way to say, “Look, we’re all in this together.”
There is a lot of division in the nation today, but according to Pew Research Center, Americans seem to agree on one thing: about three-fourths of us say this country used to be a good example of democracy but isn’t anymore. Where are we in our history?
Actually, there’s not a period in this country when we’ve not been divided in some way. I think this sense of the possibilities of us ebbs and wanes and, right now, it’s low. And I hope this film reinvigorates a spirit of what makes us unique in the history of the world, and to not make those choices that make us become like most every other country in the world.
What would you say to young people about the nation’s path forward and their role in it?
Each generation has to take the messages and the stories and the examples of the American Revolution and internalize them to understand them, to come to terms with them, and then to try to manifest them, and most importantly, hand it down to their posterity.
That’s the American obligation, that we have this huge burden of citizenship, which means we constantly have to be learning more, not just about our history, but about what it means to be a citizen and then learn how to pass that down. We cannot just simply devolve into our tribal camps, into our arguments, instead of our understandings, and into our conspiracies instead of our facts. We have to actually manifest facts and understand them and then pass them on.
Listen to a conversation with Ken Burns on Pew’s podcast at pew.org/afterthefact
