Ken Burns is America’s documentarian: From the Civil War to Vietnam, baseball to the Brooklyn Bridge, his films are gospel for generations of Americans curious about the world and our history. This November, in a new six part, 12-hour documentary series Burns turns his attention to the American Revolution — and the counterintuitive revelation that democracy was *not* on the table when the fighting first broke out. Burns says what this film showed him is that the tension we feel today in 2025 arcs back to and mirrors the tension that gave birth to our nation. And Burns believes the American story boils down to a simple choice — a question posed in the timeless Frank Capra classic “It’s a Wonderful Life”: Do you want to live in Pottersville or Bedford Falls? (HINT: Ken Burns only wants to live in Bedford Falls)
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Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Ken Burns: I think the whole American question is, where do you want to live, in Bedford Falls or Pottersville? In Frank Capra’s wonderful movie with Jimmy Stewart, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” And for me, the choice has been simple my entire life since I saw that film, I want to live in Bedford Falls. I don’t want to live in Pottersville.
Nicolle Wallace: Hi there, everyone. Welcome to “The Best People” podcast. “The Best People” podcast is about people like this week’s guest, where being a best person doesn’t begin to capture what he really is to the country, to me, to our daily broadcast, and to our understanding of who we are as Americans and as humans. I think that I will muck this up if I go on much further. So without any further ado, this is “The Best People” and this is Ken Burns. Thank you so much for being here.
Ken Burns: Thank you, the feeling is mutual, best person.
Nicolle Wallace: I don’t ever feel like I’ve climbed a mountain worth pounding my chest about. But when I first had access to your email address, I did feel like I had arrived.
Ken Burns: No.
Nicolle Wallace: Well, I mean, I think that what you create is anthropological, is historical, but is above everything else, just the electricity of the human experience. And I wonder if you see it that way, if you set out to do that, and why you think that matters now more than ever.
Ken Burns: Well, I’m happy that you said anthropological. I’m the son of an anthropologist, and I thought I was diverting pretty far away from what I thought would be my chosen field. My father put no pressure on me. I’ve understood pretty early that history was a powerful teacher. And the problem with saying teacher is that it sounds then pedagogic and didactic, and there’s a test on Tuesday. But history is mostly made up of the word story, and so I’m happy to say that I decided to become a storyteller in film.
But at one point, I remember typing a letter, and that I wrote that I was interested in an emotional archaeology. Not just excavating dry dates and facts and events, they’re super important, but they needed to be accompanied by something, by meaning. And I think that in a way, that will be how we get out.
If we say that all people are created equal, then we really have to mean it. And then there’s a lot of responsibility and work that has to happen. And I think what happens now is that we’ve sort of said, can’t we just go back to the way it always was? Well, the way it always was before there was something new under the sun, which was the United States of America, was that everybody was a subject. And we created the idea of citizens, and now we feel that fragility, there’s that anxiety, there’s the sense of where do I act, how do I act, what I’m going to do. I think everybody’s struggling with how to figure out what to do, how to know what you can’t do, how to have, like The Serenity Prayer, how to have the wisdom to know the difference.
Nicolle Wallace: What do you feel in your gut when you see history and museums and facts that are indisputable thrown into the mosh pit of this moment?
Ken Burns: It’s terrifying in a way, it’s so frustrating. I feel for these people that I know. I mean, I’ve made all these films going to those places. I know who runs them. I know who’s in the back room with the white gloves with the archives. And you just sort of feel, and history tells us the fragility of all of these systems, you feel that they’re under assault. And that’s an incredibly disconcerting position to be in, particularly because we’d felt, I’m just finishing this film, it’s on the American Revolution.
I began it when Barack Obama had 15 months in his administration. And so the kind of water under the bridge that’s taken place, the rhymes that have changed. We follow lots of characters, all the top down important people, but lots of bottom ups, dozens of bottoms up, people that we’ve never heard of, people that don’t have portraits of them. One of them is the wife of a German, a Hessian general who’s fighting the patriots with John Burgoyne up in Saratoga. She’s arriving with her kids, transatlantic Jewish. She’s there to watch the triumph of the British Army against this upstart rebels, doesn’t happen. But she’s come loaded with ideas about what Americans are like. And one of them is she’s heard that we eat cats.
Nicolle Wallace: My God.
Ken Burns: I was thinking if the film came out last fall, people would go, man, you put that in, that was so unbelievable. But this fall, people have probably forgotten about cats. The Americans did think that the Germans ate people and were particularly interested in children. There’s a continent-wide pandemic, there’s a failed invasion of Canada, there’s a total eclipse. But in this idea that basically human nature stays the same and all of these things happen and that maybe in the study of where we’ve been can be a clearer understanding of how to understand what’s going on now, and then how to react, how to create our future, how to repair, how to figure out how to reinstitute those things that seem so threatened.
And it doesn’t happen at once, it can be sometimes with humor. We’ve seen the way in which humor is so disarming in every sense of the word. And so I think being able to proudly say this is how we were born, it’s really complicated. Democracy wasn’t on the table in the beginning. Democracy is a consequence. Our founders celebrated as they should be, had intended this to be a kind of republic of an aristocracy of white, propertied males. And in order to win that war, there was, of course, zero chance on April 19th, 1775 at Lexington Green of their success. And in order for that to become 100% at Yorktown, they had to open that up.
And so it isn’t just our ideas of the sturdy militia who did do that, but it’s teenagers. We follow a 14-year-old and a 15-year-old into this war. Americans are fighting Americans. This is a civil war. It’s going to take second and third sons without a chance of inheritance, Irish and German immigrants who’ve never owned a piece of land. And so we’re not setting out to create a democracy. Democracy comes as a consequence of the revolution. And that begins to tell you that sometimes these unintended consequences, these unanticipated byproducts are what the stuff of history is. And so we were able to get Maya Hawke, whose daddy is in the film as a voice, too, to read it, to complement Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep and others to bring the story, Samuel L. Jackson, to bring the story to life because it’s many voices.
I came across a quote in my own film that I hadn’t thought about in 30 years, the Civil War series. And Lincoln said, “You know, as a nation, we began by declaring that all men are created equal. We now practically read it, ‘All men are created except Negroes.’ Soon it will read, ‘All men are created equal except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty.”
Nicolle Wallace: Wow.
Ken Burns: To Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. This is Lincoln in the late ’50s.
Nicolle Wallace: Wow.
Ken Burns: And I mean, and he’s using Russia as an example. And you kind of go, okay, folks, where do you want to go? Which, the choice is super simple. I think the whole American question is, “Where do you want to live, in Bedford Falls or Pottersville?” You know, in Frank Capra’s wonderful movie with Jimmy Stewart, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” He has a chance to see what the world would be without him. And it’s presented with the fact that the greedy, moneyed banker in town turns the town into Pottersville, this loose, amoral thing. And that what he has been participating in, Bedford Falls, is a community in which we are all bound to one another, immigrants as well as long arrivals in which there’s a kind of sense of common purpose. And for me, the choice has been simple my entire life since I saw that film. I want to live in Bedford Falls. I don’t want to live in Pottersville.
Nicolle Wallace: One of the things, I think because this film has been sort of on your palate for so long, probably for as long as I’ve been talking to you on my show, is this idea that this was a civil war.
Ken Burns: Yeah.
Nicolle Wallace: American intelligence in this time was telling on your neighbors.
Ken Burns: That’s right.
Nicolle Wallace: This was a brutal war fought here, informed by intelligence gathered neighbor to neighbor. Just talk about that.
Ken Burns: Well, a lot of it is pretty difficult for us to sort of get our heads around. Benjamin Franklin’s own son, William, was the royal governor of New Jersey. He was deposed and sent to prison in Connecticut, finally released, assumed he would go back to his beloved England. Instead, he started a terrorist organization of loyalists killing patriots. There were lots of patriot organizations that were killing loyalists there. More German and Hessian soldiers fell in New Jersey, which has big battles like Trenton and Princeton and Monmouth Courthouse, by guerrilla actions, by ambushes than in those big set battles. Before the war, the committees of correspondence and these home guard patriots were opening letters of their neighbors to find out their sympathies. If you had still royal sympathies, your names were printed, you were ostracized, you might be tarred and feathered. We follow lots of loyalists, and particularly one named John Peters, who lives in what is now Vermont, in a town that doesn’t exist anymore. But his fellow citizens say, “You’re the upright guy. We’re sending you to the First Continental Congress.” He gets there and he goes, “I’m not about this.” And he gets arrested four times on the way home, in Hartford, in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, and in his own hometown of Moorefield, Vermont, as it was then called. He’s shunned. He finally is driven out of town, leaving his wife and small kids. They are eventually driven out of town. She finds, by luck, through the winter, going all the way to Lake Champlain, a British thing. They reunite in Quebec. He starts a loyalist unit up there. His son, 15-year-old son, signs up first. And they come back down and join Burgoyne’s army, and at a sub-battle before Saratoga. This is really important. I am telling you, sorry to go off on a storytelling thing.
Nicolle Wallace: No, no, I love it. I love it.
Ken Burns: At Bennington, near Bennington, it’s actually in New York State, he’s on a redoubt. He’s about to lose a battle. But he hears somebody say, “Peters, you damn Tory,” as this person sticks him in the breast with a bayonet, which is the violent, ugly way that most of the stuff is happening, battlefield-wise. And it’s deflected by the bone.
And he realizes it’s the voice of Jeremiah Post, his best friend growing up.
Nicolle Wallace: Oh my God.
Ken Burns: And then he says, “I am obliged to destroy him.”
Nicolle Wallace: Jeez.
Ken Burns: So even though it is a patriot victory, he kills his best friend. And the stuff in New Jersey, the stuff in South Carolina, where a fifth of all the battlefield deaths take place, and they’re not big, gigantic battles. They’re at little tiny places called 96 South Carolina, where it’s just the only person in the battle are Americans killing other Americans. So the suffering in the revolution is proportional to the suffering in our civil war. And yet our civil war is not a civil war in the real sense. It’s a sectional war, right? It’s North against South, South against North. There’s not a lot of civilian deaths. One or two people died during Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America. But in the revolution, civilians and Americans die all the time in this bloody struggle to create this country.
And so you want to know about Betsy Hambler. You want to know about John Greenwood, who’s 14 years old. You want to know about Joseph Brandt, who is a Mohawk Native American siding with the British. You want to know about James Fortin, who’s a free Black kid, nine years old, who hears the Declaration read when it’s read for the very first time in Philadelphia, two days after the Declaration is signed. And he doesn’t for a second think that these self-evident truths don’t apply to him. They do apply to him. There are threads in this that connect all the way to this moment, to you and to me and to everyone listening to our voice. And it’s really important that we embrace the complexity of it, the undertow of it, the fact that I can tell you right now who the most important person is, George Washington. We don’t have a country without him. But he’s also a flawed, rash and makes a lot of really bad, avoidable tactical mistakes on the battlefield.
The largest battle of the revolution is the Battle of Long Island, and he leaves his left flank exposed. He does the same thing at another gigantic battle, the Battle of Brandywine. But then it doesn’t mean by telling the complexity of that, that you in any way undermine it. I think that’s what it is. Because it’s paintings, it’s not photographs. We don’t want to get into the violence of it. We think that if we diminish the big ideas, somehow we’re, you know, it’s lesser. But those big ideas are even more exhilarating, even more impressive when you see what we had to go through to get them. And if you tell an engaged story, you bring everybody along. And stories that have complexity then avoid the binary stuff we’re engaged in now.
Nicolle Wallace: As you’re talking, I’m thinking that it doesn’t exist without you. And I think it doesn’t exist for all of us without you putting it on PBS. And even the storyteller and the place where the story is told is under threat. Does that wallop you?
Ken Burns: Yeah, no, it’s, you know, we’re going to have to, look, I’ll tell you the story, the main story about the American Revolution is that Washington comes to some realizations pretty early on that he’s the head of an insurrectionary force. He doesn’t have to win. He just can’t surrender. The British have to win. He doesn’t have to win. The scholar Joseph–
Nicolle Wallace: He just has to resist.
Ken Burns: He just has to resist. And he gets beat all the time. And even in the Southern campaigns, his general, Nathaniel Green, says, “We fight, we get beat, we fight again.” It’s just about resisting. It’s just about waking up. Yes, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been involved in, I think, every single one, but one of my 40 or so films that PBS has done. I couldn’t produce any of the films except on PBS. We’re going to just have to figure out how to wake up and beat them again. That’s just the way you have to do it. If you want it, make God laugh. Tell her your plans. We’re going to have to improvise. That’s our genius, right?
Our Constitution is four pieces of parchment. Four. That’s the shortest Constitution on Earth. If it’s applied, it adjudicates any complicated problem that we have.
Nicolle Wallace: How much of your faith, you sound more optimistic to me right now and more rooted in faith about the ideas behind our country and the people than you did when we last talked. I think we last talked on television after a speech you gave with a warning for the country about the two paths. And Trump has done more than what you and a lot of other people warned about. Much, much more and much, much more quickly. From where do you gather your faith?
Ken Burns: I think I don’t have the luxury of not having it. I have to believe in this experiment. People like to say that history repeats itself. It never has. And Ecclesiastes says, “We’ve talked about this. There’s nothing new under the sun.” But I think the most important event since the birth of Christ was the American Revolution. And I’ll defend that. I mean, I’m happy to have a conversation.
Nicolle Wallace: Explain, explain. I just think something new under the sun happened. Everybody was a subject. Jefferson says in the Declaration a few lines after Pursuit of Happiness, he says, “All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.” Meaning, we just kind of put up with this, you know what. And we’re creating this new thing, a citizen, and that’s going to require extraordinary responsibilities. And to me, my interpretation of that is to begin to have a little faith. Faith in the process of these ideas. You know, we like to credit the destruction of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Soviet Union, with our efforts. Only in our ideas, right? Collapsed of their own just flaws. It wasn’t a good idea to do this.
And the American people are a lot smarter than that. Maybe it takes a while to wake up. Maybe it’s, you know, we’ve bought into this idea of deep state, and now we have met the deep state, and he is us. You know, I mean, it’s like, what? How did that happen? Maybe it’s the fact that you believe in free trade. Trade is not a zero-sum game. It’s not I win, you lose. Trade is mutual things. And if you base trade entirely on some victory over somebody else, you’ve upset the apple cart of free trade.
So I think you can go sort of situation by situation and just say, all right, I have to breathe. I have to do what I know how to do, which is to try to tell complicated stories about us, not just the US, but us, and then hope that that story is able to be, I told Maureen Dowd this, a kind of benevolent Trojan horse. Right? It’s not this gift you take in, and then it gets out at night and kills you and burns down the city. No, you go, oh, yeah, that’s who we are. We’re complicated. We’re, you know, I’ve got a neon sign in my editing room and in cursive, and it says, “It’s complicated’” because you always want to just go for the simple story, the one that’s working. And we sort of define heroism as perfection. And of course, it’s not that.
Heroine is an internal negotiation, sometimes a war between your strengths and your weaknesses. And that’s why we study heroism, not for perfection, which we’re constantly disappointed if you live in a binary world, but because Achilles has his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths. So what are you going to do? Just show when Babe Ruth hits the home run, or do you show when he strikes out? Or do you show when the shortstop is up? Or do you show when somebody hits into a game-ending double play and we don’t win that game? You have to be able to say, “I’m big enough.”
In order to be the best team, you have to be incredibly self-critical. If you’re the biggest, most important country, exceptional country on earth, you’ve got to be harder on yourself. You think Tom Brady went, oh, I just won a Super Bowl. I don’t have to do anything. It’s cruise control from now on. You’re deeply mistaken. This is a constant readjustment and a self-evaluation, which is what we need to do as citizens on our own interpersonal level, in our relationship with friends, and most important, in relationship to the people that disagree with us, and then as a country.
Nicolle Wallace: We’re going to take a quick break right here. When we come back, we’ll have much, much more with legendary documentary filmmaker, national treasure, Ken Burns. We’ll be back in a moment.
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Nicolle Wallace: I read your speech at an immigration proceeding.
Ken Burns: It was so beautiful, Nicole.
Nicolle Wallace: It was so beautiful.
Ken Burns: I told them, it’s like, except being in a maternity ward at a hospital, there’s nothing with more potentiality than seeing these new citizens. And it was at Monticello. The oath that they take is much longer than the oath of president. And it was written by Thomas Jefferson in a law that was passed in 1802. And we’re still reading it when people raise their right hand and say, “Yes.”
Nicolle Wallace: But I felt so bittersweet reading it because it’s always been about what you’re talking about, this mutual, they want to be here and we want them here. And that covenant seems so violated. And so, I mean, even the most basic and beautiful thing, and I agree with you, outside of a maternity ward, it’s one of the most beautiful things, because it’s like a marriage. Everyone has to opt into it. I feel like even that is on the line right now.
Ken Burns: So it is, it is, and we can’t soft pedal it, but we also can’t be our own version of Chicken Little, that the sky is falling, if it bleeds, it leads. This naturalization ceremony, you have to create a court. Then there are all these justices, and they come in and they create a court on the spot and we’re witnesses to it. And then the acting attorney general for the Western District of Virginia, I think I’ve got that right, a Trump appointee goes up and reads the names of all the people, which he clearly worked so hard to get them right, because there was one Irishman in it. There was one easy, not going to blow it, pronunciation in the whole bunch. And so, yeah, we say this, there are all these signals, we’re verifying this, we’re saying that. But here’s the ceremony in which lots of South Asians, a whole bunch of Latin Hispanic people, there are lots of Afghans, right? Still coming into our country, still being accepted as full fledged citizens of the United States. And then many of them had a chance to go up and give a speech and you just kind of went, okay, my tank is full. And that gives me a little strength to go out and try to do this.
So I’ve got four daughters and all through their lives, they reach these impasses and I give them what I call the three things. And I’ve done it with my friends and loved ones, which is this won’t last, get help from others and be kind to yourself. I have realized just in the last few months, this is advice for all of us, collectively as well as individually, just there has to be a kind of patience. Things are constantly in motion and changing and maybe we can’t wait for the midterms or you can wait for the midterms. Guess what? You have to wait for the midterms and we have to seek community.
And strangely enough, I’ve tried to stop arguing and start just telling stories to people who don’t necessarily agree with me. And if you can say, have somebody go, wow, I didn’t know that, which is what I think people will be doing throughout “The American Revolution” series, then you’ve got a place that isn’t like, you know, you’re wrong and let me tell you why you’re wrong, because nobody’s mind was ever changed that way. They’re always changed by complicated stories where, I mean, we see it now where I think it was a Missouri town was about to lose their beloved fellow citizen.
Nicolle Wallace: Carol, Carol, yeah.
Ken Burns: To the ICE mob, but you go, the town said, no, no, no, we need her back. And so I think the Bedford Falls of us at some point kicks in maybe in fits and starts, but we have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of things to rebuild. We have a lot of things to work on, but first we have to remember to sing as loud as we can the anthems of our beliefs. And they’re right there. We know exactly when we were born, and more importantly, we know why we were born. And it is a very simple sentence. And by the way, pursuit of happiness does not mean the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects. It’s lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. All the founders would say that. And the key phrase is still pursuit, right? It’s a process. So we’re a nation in the process of becoming, and do we take some steps back? Yeah. And it’s really scary. We’ve just got to keep going forward.
Nicolle Wallace: The recent wars were fought so far away that stories really take care of a lot of what people know about war. But war is all these things, right? It is the worst. It is hell. It is the ultimate sacrifice, but it’s also community. And I wonder how drawn to stories of war and where it intersects with extraordinary feats taken by humans, how that pulls you to the American Revolution.
Ken Burns: It’s a super good question. And right at the heart, after “The Civil War” series came out in 1990, 35 years ago next month, I just said, we’re not doing any more wars” It was really tough. I mean, just, and we’re looking at photographs, but it was tough. And we just sort of agreed, we’re not going to do a war. And then at the end of the ’90s, I heard that a thousand American veterans of the Second World War were dying each day. But that number is tiny now. I mean, it’s minuscule. And that a huge, large proportion of graduating high school seniors thought we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War. And I just said, F, we got to do it. And it’s the only time I’ve made a film in which it had literally hundreds of other brethren, other films about World War II. So we decided to do it from the bottom up and do it in that intimate way. Took four geographically distributed American towns and tried to show the greatest cataclysm on earth through their eyes. Before the ink was dry on that, before we’d locked it, in December of 2006, I said, we’re doing Vietnam. And before Vietnam, the ink was dry on that, I said, we’re doing the revolution. Much harder because there’s no photographs and there are no memories, particularly in World War II and in Vietnam, of people that were actually lived through it.
But I knew from the Civil War, you could make folks come alive if you’ve got enough talent and enough varieties of people reading it to do it. Every day of the last nearly 10 years has been an incredible, sometimes humiliating lesson in, wow, I had no idea just how bad it was in so many ways. And then all of these rhymes from eclipses to invasions of Canada, we wanted to make it the 14th state then. Didn’t work.
Nicolle Wallace: I think what’s amazing when you watch it too, is you realize that no one was spared. Right. And it makes you feel, it sort of underscores all the privilege of this era, right? Women and girls figure prominently, young, young, young, 14 isn’t a man or a young man, it’s a child. And so, just talk about the importance of reminding us how everyone was impacted. Everyone was impacted. And I think that’s why you’re drawn to war. Obviously, it’s the worst, but it also brings out the best in that community, in individual actions. And so, our idea of wars, particularly because what we know of them are from the romanticized paintings, are all male. They’re nearly all white. And they’re just not like that. Women are attached to these armies, they’re fighting there.
We have this wonderful shot. I have never really liked reenactments, and I didn’t want to do reenactments, but we filmed reenactors, which is a little bit differently. And we filmed them for years in French, in British, in militia, in continental uniforms, black soldiers, French soldier, whatever it might be. And it supplemented what we don’t have in photographs and newsreels. But there’s a wonderful moment when the Battle of Monmouth ends. It’s unbelievably hot. The British are just trying to get their supply train and their army back to New York. They’ve abandoned Philadelphia, which they’ve occupied for a while. We’re holding the field, the British retreat. So, it’s a draw, technically, but because we’re holding the field, it’s an American victory. Of course, that’s the way you spin it. And then the next thing you see are these barefoot women and children, just from the calves down, walking over the battlefield. Because the women came and cleaned it up.
Women were central to the resistance before the war started. They were the making the homespun cloth. They were doing without the English goods. They were running the family households. And if they weren’t with their husbands at the battle with their kids, they were back home running farms and businesses and doing pretty well, thank you very much. And I’d make an argument that of all the great writers, and Washington was a great, great writer, and obviously, John Adams was a great writer. You have to put Abigail Adams right up there, and thank God they were split up. War splits families up. So, all of a sudden, you have communication between people in a very fraught situation.
And in our opening minutes, in our introduction, in the overture of this 12 hours, six episodes, you hear from him saying, we’re in the middle of a revolution. Oh my goodness, the fate of millions unborn, meaning you and me, Nicole, are hanging in balance. And all of a sudden, you hear from, that’s read by Paul Giamatti, represents his great role. And then you hear from Claire Danes, who is reading off camera, Abigail, and she says, we realize that this overthrowing of empire stuff is really bloody, and it can’t be taken lightly.
And so, you’ve got within one family, in a communication between a husband and a wife, exactly the polarities of what it does. And so, let me give you a statistic. Most Native Americans, because they were watching the encroachment, west of settlers, Americans, they called them in the north, the hated Bostonians. They called everybody Bostonians, who were trying to take their land. And it’s not just them, it’s not one tribe, it’s 300 tribes, but there’s 20 or so that are Germane to the story. And they’re as important, the Shawnee or the Delaware are as important as say, Virginia or the Netherlands or France in this geopolitical story. But most of them are fighting for the British. But Rebecca Tanner, a Mohegan, Native American, that means probably Connecticut, lost five sons fighting for the Patriot cause. Think about it. The only thing we know about her existence is one line, Rebecca Tanner lost five sons.
So, Mrs. Sullivan in World War II, four sons go down in the ship. And so, we change the rules, it gives us separated families and “Saving Private Ryan.” Rebecca Tanner exists for me as the mother who lost the most. And she’s a Native American doing what a fraction of Native peoples were doing, which is fighting for the Patriot cause. Same with black Americans, the British very cynically offered their freedom to just slaves of rebels, not slaves of loyalists, they had to stay slaves, not to their own slaves, they would keep them enslaved. Their entire economy, the British economy is based on the 13 other colonies in the Caribbean. And all of the riches of the British army is based on the slave labor. Jamaica and Barbados, 90% enslaved people there.
So, it’s understandable why when somebody says, hey, we’ll give you your freedom, people flop. Jefferson lost, Washington lost, enslaved people to that thing. But of the 20,000 blacks that fought, 15 probably fought for the British, but 5,000 fought the Americans who said, I see this, like James Forten, this kid who hears the declaration, I see this possibility.
So, you’ve got just complicated dynamics at our founding and to make it tiny and minuscule and only one color and one sex and only one place and only a binary is to do a disservice to the just exultant complexity of our origin story.
Nicolle Wallace: There’s something about Paul Giamatti and Claire Danes that you start to feel it, right? You can read it, you can study it, you can prepare for an interview to talk about it, but there’s something about hearing it. And I wonder at what point you realize that and how you decide who is best suited for that. That’s a really important part of it.
Ken Burns: It’s a huge important part. And the first thing is that making a film like this is not additive, right? It’s subtractive. It’s like we make maple syrup right out here and it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon. So, you’re taking it away. So, I’m the scratch narrator through 95%, but as soon as Peter Coyote comes in, you go, oh, there’s the music. And all of us in the editing room are reading these quotes and George Washington and this, and then all of a sudden you get Josh Brolin as George Washington.
And I tell him, I said, look, this guy, we don’t have a country without him and he’s opaque, he’s unknowable. So, you have to both convey all of that stuff and he’s great. You can’t get in. You can knock at the door of George Washington. You can’t get in. Only a couple people, somebody says in the film, gets in to him, Martha, his wife, maybe Lafayette, maybe Hamilton. We don’t really know who gets into that into his head, but it’s extraordinary. And then Paul Giamatti is just amazing. Laura Linney, who reads a lot of voices, including a lot of loyalist voices, make it come alive. Jeff Daniels takes Thomas Jefferson’s words. Matthew Rhys does Thomas Paine, an Englishman, who gives every one of our six episodes, it’s titled, from “In Order to Be Free” to “The Times that Try Men’s Souls” to “An Asylum for Mankind” about the declaration.
This is a reset in the human story and that deserves a kind of, excuse me, put a pin in it. Can we go back to that and get really involved and understand how does the odds of zero on Lexington Green go to 100% six and a half years later at Yorktown? It’s phenomenal. And then what do you do when you’ve won? Because the winning was then turns out in some ways not quite as hard as trying to forge a federal government out of these 13 states whose articles of confederation did nothing, were completely without any force.
And that’s another story. And before we end the film, we have to have George Washington do two things, right? He has to give up his power twice. If he’d said, look, I’m thinking of becoming emperor, everybody would have gone, okay, the general, the Napoleon. And he gave it up, resigned his military commission, and then is unanimously elected president of the United States and leaves after two terms.
And even George III said that he’s the greatest character of the age because he was. And this is our example, our example of not the pursuit of power, but the understanding that the highest office is really still citizen and that the trappings of power have no place in the people’s government.
Nicolle Wallace: Do you think we are the same?
Ken Burns: Same, exactly the same? No, stuff happens, DNA changes, but we are in these basic elemental things. You can see it in just the way MAGA has kind of stuttered a little bit in the face of not just Epstein, which is that everybody’s always like, this is the thing. There’s no this thing. It’s just the question of whether the fever dream is just, it passes. What’s happened to the party of Abraham Lincoln, particularly in the United States Senate?
The party of Abraham Lincoln who said, “I would prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” I mean, they’re talking to us, all of them, and nobody’s perfect. And that’s, I think, the mistake we made. I think it’s the world we live in, which is a computer world, which is binary, everything’s a one and a zero. And it is a political world in which it’s one thing or the other. And of course, everything we know about our personal lives, our own psychology, everything else is just complicated, which is why that signs up there every day to go, right, it’s complicated.
Nicolle Wallace: My conversation with Ken Burns continues right after a quick break. Stay with us.
(BREAK)
Nicolle Wallace: When I had a chance to talk to you, I think for the first time, about why you tell stories and about the space, the storytelling, and I think it’s a love affair with stories and history that you led us into. People are so moved by you and you constantly try to get out, right? You don’t talk about yourself for two seconds and then it’s back to the stories. I wonder if you ever sit with your role in our sense of who we are as Americans and your place in everything we know. I feel this preciousness of all of it. And I couldn’t wait to see it because we wait for this work and we need it so much. And I wonder how that feels on the receiving end, our need for you and what you create.
Ken Burns: So I have, it’s not right here, it’s out of sight, but I have in every place that I put my head, I’ve got a copy of an old “New Yorker” cartoon that shows three men standing in hell, the flames licking up around them. And one guy says to the other two, “Apparently my over 200 screen credits didn’t mean a damn thing.”
My storytelling is born in tragedy. My mother’s sickness, nearly 10 years, and death when I was nearly 12 years old, 11 years old. My late father-in-law said that I wake the dead, that’s what I do for a living. He said, who do you think you’re really trying to wake up? Abraham Lincoln, Jackie Robinson, you’re trying to wake your mom up. And then a lot of it is a conversation with her. Her name was Lyla, L-Y-L-A. My oldest daughter, who of course never met her grandmother, named her first child, my first grandchild, Lyla. And so a name that was draped in black crepe is now, you know, birds sing and flowers bloom when we say that.
And so that’s what it’s about too. It’s about hope and it’s about rebirth. And all of these things are important. At the heart of it, it’s about story and making the storyteller important is a disservice. A few people can get away with it, but you don’t want to really hold a mirror up. You want to say, we share these stories in common. I mean, my great-great-grandfather fought for the Confederate Army, right? Abraham Burns. That’s an important punchline if you’re trying to remind people of the intimacy of this, the ideas of history. Because for most people, history is that test. History is the memorization of dates. History has nothing to do with where I am right now, and there’s nothing more important.
I find in studying this, we are aware of the fact that, as Twain is supposed to have said, that it rhymes. It doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. So we’re really aware of all the rhymes that are going on and maybe nationwide pandemics and eclipses and police actions in metropolitan areas and invasions of Canada and just the people, good, bad, and in between, greedy and generous and venal and virtuous. All of that stuff is populated really good histories.
But at the end of the day, it’s just like us, and we have to sort of go forward. I mean, everybody at the Constitutional Convention is trying to figure out how not to design for a dictator. Hamilton says, “What if somebody rides the hobby horse of popularity and reaps the whirlwind? No man should be above the law.”
This is like you go, okay, so this is our founding. This is our complicated story. Not everybody got along, not everybody agreed, not everybody thought that the Norman Rockwell painting was at the end of this long corridor. But it turns out that what came out of it is still the best thing going.
Nicolle Wallace: There’s no one in this story that you would ever accuse of apathy. I wonder how much of being in love with our history and our story and this story and the ideas behind our founding you think could be an antidote to what I think is, I don’t think political extremism is incredibly dangerous. I think the one thing more dangerous is apathy. But if you are indifferent or think it doesn’t matter to you about the pollution in the air or the water or the freedom, like apathy. Can you just talk about apathy?
Ken Burns: Yeah, well, it’s there in the revolution too. There’s people that are called disaffected. They’re neither loyalists nor patriots. They’re hoping that the things will just pass them by you. We understand that sort of people. Maybe they’re the people that don’t vote. Maybe they’re the people that already understand maybe well beyond us who’ve been sucked in in various forms into politics and the machinery of politics our whole lives and love that part of it. They’re often more suspect. And then there are people who disappear from the battle.
But I think the important thing is that if you value these things that we have, we can disagree as you say on that, but you cannot not want to have some sort of skin in this game. You cannot just play it coy and kind of be the person that’s going to profit one way or the other. That is what the biblical teachings, including Christ’s teachings, and that’s what the virtue that our founders reaching back over the dark ages to antiquity, to the Greek and Romans, they’re looking for these human values. And there’s an anguished quote by John Adams who says, do we have enough virtue to create a republic? There’s so much avarice and ambition. There’s so much greed for this, this lust for profit. Are we ever going to be able to create? That’s why they call lifelong learning the pursuit of happiness as key to it.
So if you kick out a block of lifelong learning, then we’ve got some issues and we have to engage everybody. And it doesn’t mean, I mean, I think I said this to you once before, Nicole, that the novelist Richard Powers says, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
And I think we’re obligated to figure out when you say, “I can talk to anybody,” what you mean is that I don’t have to say you’re wrong. Because when you tell somebody they’re wrong.
Nicolle Wallace: It’s over.
Ken Burns: It’s over. Just as when they tell us we’re wrong, it’s over. That’s why revisions are so, you know, I used to, every film used to be invited into Fox News. You know, and I go, I met Donald Trump once in my life coming out of Bill O’Reilly and he was going in, and he told me how much he liked the Civil War series.
Nicolle Wallace: I’m sure.
Ken Burns: There’s a place to begin, right? Let’s begin. What is it about it? Is it the complication that’s in it of black and white and it’s not states’ rights, it’s about slavery? Is it Lincoln and his powerful words and his asceticism and devotion to citizenship and to the constitution? What is it that draws us to this near-national suicide that he, as a young lawyer, predicted, you know, “We’ll live forever or die by suicide.”
Nicolle Wallace: Ken Burns, you know how I feel about getting to talk to you for a segment on the show or a special, but to have a whole hour and to talk about this project, it’s a privilege. Thank you so much.
Ken Burns: Thank you. The feeling is mutual.
Nicolle Wallace: Thank you.
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