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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with an urgent warning about TikTok’s looming deal with Trump-aligned insiders—a move David calls the “biggest giveaway since the days of the railway grants.” He argues that the American media landscape has been quietly transformed, and political power has shifted from legacy outlets to algorithmic platforms loyal to the president.
Then David speaks with the filmmaker Ken Burns about his new documentary series on the American Revolution. Together, they explore the Revolution’s competing legacies—liberty and exclusion, heroism and hypocrisy—and how its unresolved contradictions still shape the nation’s identity. Burns reflects on the moral complexity of figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the forgotten role of Loyalists and Indigenous nations, and the Revolution’s echoes in contemporary America.
Finally, David discusses Benjamin Nathans’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, an exploration of the Soviet dissident movement and the story of Alexander Esenin-Volpin, who defied tyranny by insisting that Soviet laws be obeyed exactly as written.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Ken Burns, the great American documentarian, producer most recently of a remarkable series on the American Revolution. We are so pleased and honored to welcome Ken Burns to The David Frum Show.
My book this week will be a very relevant history of the Soviet dissident movement by Benjamin Nathans called To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. This may seem like a chapter from the history of a bygone regime, but the lessons that I want to single out for discussion this week are very applicable to the United States in the 2020s.
Before getting to either of those topics, I wanna open with some preliminary thoughts about some recent events in the news. I hope you are all following these proceedings with the plans to sell TikTok to a group of American advisers. This is supposed to happen, according to law, by December 16. There have been a number of deadlines, each of them postponed again and again by executive order.
In 2024, Congress passed a law requiring TikTok to be divested from its Chinese ownership to an American group. The law was signed by President [Joe] Biden, and it was approved by the Supreme Court as being a legal exercise of congressional authority. When Donald Trump won the election, he showed some displeasure about the law. TikTok had been very favorable to Donald Trump’s cause in the 2024 election. He owed them a big debt of gratitude. He didn’t wanna transform them, and he wasn’t much interested in complying with a Biden-era law. But it is the law, and there were some opportunities here. And so Trump began to push back the deadlines repeatedly, later and later and later; the latest pushback is to December 16. But it looks like a deal is going to happen, and a group of hand-selected insiders are about to purchase 80 percent of the U.S. operations of TikTok from the Chinese company. A lot of this is very murky, but reports in The Wall Street Journal and other financial papers that quote unnamed senior administration officials suggest that the price is going to be about $14 billion.
Now, I’m gonna start with the financial aspect of this. TikTok U.S. throws off about $10 billion a year, and most conventional estimates would suggest that that would mean that the company should be worth $50 or $80 billion, or possibly even more. There will be no public auction—these insiders have been chosen, apparently, for their loyalty to President Trump. It looks like it’s going to be the biggest giveaway since the days of the railway grants. But in those days, at least you got a railway for your money. In this case, the company already exists; all that’s happening is a select group of insiders are going to receive a massive windfall.
Now, Donald Trump will presumably want something back—and I’ve written about this story in more detail in the print Atlantic, and if you want all the details, you should go there. But one can expect that the TikTok algorithm, owned by a group of people who owe tens of billions of dollars of thank-you to Donald Trump, will continue to favor Donald Trump’s views, maybe even more outrageously than they do now. And this brings us to a challenge to our understanding that is going to be difficult for those of us of a certain age.
Now, if your mind goes back to America as it used to be—and in MAGA world, you hear this a lot—you have this idea of “the media”; there’s this thing called “the media.” And they are supposedly very liberal. And when you press people, What do you mean by “the media”? They usually answer something like The New York Times, CNN, maybe the broadcast evening news—CBS, NBC, ABC—because those were the companies that used to be the most powerful companies in America when they were young.
It used to be that the people who had the ability to decide what is news and what is not news, to make a discussion stick, to force politicians to answer, it was a sort of short list, thinking about the year 1975—again, the networks; major national papers: New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal; local news affiliates in major markets like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston; and major local papers like The Atlanta Constitution, the Chicago Tribune, and others; maybe Time magazine. These were all institutions that both produced and distributed their own content, they were primarily either text-based or television-based, and they had a kind of a shared outlook. They’re not as liberal as all that, but they were broadly supportive of the foreign policy of the United States and the government of the United States, and they lean liberal, especially on issues of civil rights and civil liberties. That’s the media landscape that many people grew up with and that many people imagine is still there.
But when you think about What does media mean in the year 2025?, I don’t think there’s any way to get around the fact that, by far, the single most powerful media company in the country today is TikTok. Even though TikTok doesn’t produce its content—its algorithm decides what you see—it might as well be producing it. It picks and chooses among thousands of entrants, and it directs streams of revenue to the people who are chosen. TikTok is the—apparently among those under 30—it is the single most-relied-upon source of information.
What else would be powerful? Well, other kinds of new media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, owned by Meta; YouTube, owned by Alphabet. Again, they don’t produce the content, but they decide what is seen. Now, there’s some people who do produce content who are important: Fox News, watched by the president of the United States; and some consortiums of local TV stations, local TV affiliates, like those owned by Sinclair.
But we live in a new media environment, in which the media, as they exist in popular rhetoric and popular remembrance of older folks, are just not that important anymore. And the people who are important are companies that a lot of Americans are not in the habit of thinking of as the media, especially not TikTok. But these new media powerhouses, they are very different from the old. They are much more beholden on government for special favors. You may remember that story from the very beginning of the Trump administration when Amazon paid for the life rights for a Melania Trump documentary the reported sum of something like $40 million. It looks like this was just a straight gift for the family of the president to leave Amazon alone. Other media companies have paid their ransoms: CBS and ABC News and others have paid $16, $15 million ransoms to be let out of litigation that in the case of ABC was likely to lose, in the case of CBS was certain to lose. And CNN is under similar kinds of pressure. The New York Times has been put under similar kinds of pressure.
The new media, the platforms of today, are much more dependent on government and owned by people who are political allies of President Trump. We have moved imperceptibly from a world of sort of institutionalist, establishment-minded liberal media to post-institutional, very beholden to government, very pro-Trump media, and we don’t see it because we are not in the habit of recognizing these media companies as media companies. But as you try to understand the information diet of your fellow Americans, if you are someone who is watching The David Frum Show and reading The Atlantic, you are consuming a media of a very different quality and kind and form than that which is consumed by most of your fellow citizens. And while, congratulations, you’ve got a much healthier media diet than they do, there are a lot of them, and they matter, and they vote. So to understand what is coming, you need to understand how this media is being shaped.
And you also need to understand that the people who are governing this country—Donald Trump and his circle—have a very clear view of the new media that matters. You should be aware of it, as well as the president and the people who are benefiting from his largesse. You should be aware of it, and you should act and think accordingly.
And now my discussion with Ken Burns.
[Music]
Frum: For millions of people in the United States and around the world, Ken Burns is the preeminent guide and teacher of the American nation’s history. Since his first feature documentary in 1981 on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, Burns has told the story of baseball, the Vietnam War, jazz, and the Civil War.
To tell his stories, Burns invented a new cinematic technique that transforms still photographs and seemingly static interviews into moving pictures. Now Burns has brought his method and his insight to the American Revolution in time for the 250th anniversary of 1776. I’m honored to welcome Ken Burns to The David Frum Show. Ken, thank you so much for joining me today.
Ken Burns: Oh, David, it’s my honor. Thank you for having me.
Frum: Now, I have to warn you at the beginning: I’m gonna have a somewhat different perspective on this from some of the people you’ve talked to. I spend much of the year in a part of Ontario settled by refugees from the American Revolution.
Burns: And it’s probably one of my ancestors—Eldad Tupper might be there amongst the gravestones in your cemetery, so I’m a little bit more comfortable.
Frum: All right. I literally live on a road called Loyalist Parkway.
Burns: (Laughs.) Perfect.
Frum: So I wanna ask the first question, and forgive me if this is a little long ’cause I wanna set the table for you about where I’d like to go. There are, prevailing in American society today, two main versions of the Revolution story, and let’s call them the triumphalist and the tragic.
The triumphalist says American patriots rose up to defend their liberties against the tyrannical British Crown. They fought, at first, against enormous odds but with [growing] confidence and capacity and strength. They won a series of battles. They converted a ragtag group of militias into an army. They defeated the British on the battlefield using European techniques—they beat the British at their own game—and established a new nation of rights and liberties. That’s the triumphalist story.
And then there’s the tragic story, which is this revolution originated in mass surveillance and citizen-upon-citizen terror, that it was everywhere—it was a civil war that divided the nation, with people driven into exile. And it was a revolution that created terrible victims in Indigenous populations and enslaved people, and that ultimately resulted not in a new nation of liberty, but in a slave republic that continued slavery 30 years after the people against whom they revolted abolished slavery.
Now, as I watched all the episodes of your series, you give voice to both the triumphalist and the tragic version in a kind of balance. And here’s the question: My perception—and tell me if this is wrong—is, as a viewer, is that while your head is with the tragic version, your heart is with the triumphalist version.
Burns: Oh, what an interesting interpretation. I would say that it’s both; the head and the heart are invested in both things. In order to do good history, and that is to say, not take what I would say would be the lazy, academic—in academics, you would call it the historiography filter: the triumphal or sort of tragic filter that you would add to it—and be umpires calling balls and strikes.
It requires a passionate love of the game, but not with a thumb on any scale. And that is a discipline we have all tried to adhere to, and the we is not royal. It’s my co-directors, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt; very notably Geoffrey Ward, who I’ve been collaborating with for 45 years, who wrote the script; a number of really talented editors and people who’ve been digging with us to find the maps, to find the documents, to find the drawings, the paintings, to do the live cinematography—all of that is going on.
So to me, continuing the baseball metaphor, if you’re just gonna reduce Babe Ruth to hitting home runs, that’s one way to do it. You can also just say he struck out a lot, and that’s also true. But you can also just show the balls and strikes, and also that Babe Ruth only comes up once every nine times at bat. And so you have suddenly, as [Abraham] Lincoln would say in 1862, you’ve disenthralled yourself from the old sort of narrative that had to decide. And you don’t have to do that.
You have to say, “Without George Washington, we don’t have a country.” But this is a deeply flawed, rash riding out on the battlefields, risking his life and the cause in several instances—Kip’s Bay and Princeton and Monmouth, notably. And he also makes two gigantic—at least two gigantic tactical mistakes on the battlefield: in the largest battle, Long Island, where he leaves his left flank exposed; and in another huge battle, Brandywine, where he leaves his right flank exposed. And he should have known better; he’s a surveyor, as Rick Atkinson says in the film.
But it’s also true—and I think this is the problem, that we live in a place in which we are so wedded, addicted, devoted to binaries, right? It’s either one thing or another. And the novelist Richard Powers said the best arguments—which are, of course, binaries—the best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view. “The only thing that can do that,” he said, “is a good story.”
So a good story suggests that it’s able to contain contradictions within it, that there can be undertow. On our editing-room wall, we’ve had for years—that I put up—a neon sign in lowercase cursive that says It’s complicated. There’s not a filmmaker in the world that doesn’t wanna leave a thing that’s working alone, but we’ve spent our entire professional lives destabilizing stuff that already works in favor [of] the great tension between the facts and art, that somehow we still had to ring art out of being adherent to the facts of this thing.
So all of those things that you mentioned are true. The only thing I would say is that it’s even more of a kind of a Grand Canyon of sedimentary layers. It’s a revolution—and first of all, it’s an argument between British people over rights. It’s then a revolution. It’s then also a bloody civil war, which we don’t really want to admit to ourselves. The Loyalists aren’t bad people—they’d be called today conservatives—those people who think, quite correctly, that the best form of government on Earth is the British constitutional monarchy and Who are these crazy people who have been opening my mail for a few years and are gonna do that? Two ministers, as you noted and as I’m sure you saw in Episode 1, are looking and said, You wanna be ruled by one tyrant 3,000 miles away or 3,000 tyrants not a mile away?And then it’s also, in addition to a civil war—and much more of a civil war than our actual Civil War was: lots of civilian deaths in the Revolution, not so much in the American Civil War—it’s a world war. So that we do it with European techniques, but George Washington hasn’t got any idea how to operate a siege. He’s turning to his French—they’ve not only sent money and matériel and ships, but they’ve sent a general and thousands of troops. And it’s [Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de] Rochambeau who knows how to conduct a siege, and Washington is completely at his mercy of how to do it.
So I love the complexity of this, the undertow of this. And it doesn’t, at the end of the day—to go back to my heart, David—it doesn’t diminish. In fact, it only enlarges the power of the ideas. The Ecclesiastes, which is the Old Testament, says, What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there’s nothing new under the sun. But the Revolution is something new under the sun.
Frum: Lemme pause you there with something, because—just in deference to my Loyalist neighbors in Ontario—I don’t think it’s right to say that they were conservatives. Because of my neighbors, I’ve been interested in the subject and I said, Who were they? And the best predictor of who became a Loyalist was whether you were afraid of your neighbors.
So in the North, where most—especially in New England—where most of your neighbors were Congregationalists and Baptists and Methodists, the Anglicans became Loyalists. In the South, where most of your neighbors were Anglicans, the Congregationalists, Methodists, and Baptists became Loyalists. Up the Hudson Valley, if you were a Dutch farmer who had learned English, you probably went with the Patriots; if you were a Dutch farmer who had not learned English, you probably stayed loyal to the Crown. In areas where they were Huguenots, French Protestants, if they had learned English, they were probably Patriots; if they had not learned English, they were probably loyal to the Crown. If you were in a society where the elites had a lot of consensus, like Virginia, then the elites became Patriots. If you were in a place like New York where the elites did not have a lot of consensus, then the elites tended to—and so on. And everywhere and always, Indians and Blacks were Loyalists.
Burns: Right, well, that’s—right. Exactly.
Frum: What this is more about is breaking a tie—a check on the power of local majorities at the cost of local minorities. And that is, regarded by everyone, that’s the cause. It’s not modern people versus conservative people; it’s people who feel they will be empowered if the Crown is taken away versus people who feel they will be made more vulnerable if the Crown is taken away.
Burns: Yes. Yeah, I agree, and I’m sorry because I’m guilty of the same reductionism. By doing that, I’ve been trying to understand why we had not set up the simple binaries of This person is good or This person is bad. We follow John Peters, who is a Loyalist from Vermont, who’s the leading man of his community, who’s sent by his community in a not-yet-existent Vermont, a politically existent Vermont, to the Continental Congress and goes, Wait a sec— the first one—I don’t subscribe to this. And he’s arrested four times on the way back home and starts, eventually—driven from his home and his family driven from his home—starts a regiment of Loyalists and comes back down to fight in [John] Burgoyne’s ill-fated Saratoga campaign.
Frum: Yeah. One of the things I was struck by—and again, this is one of your binaries—there’s been a long-running argument in American history whether 1776 or 1787 is the crucial year: the year of the Revolution or the year of the Constitution. And it used to be argued that the Constitution was actually a kind of counterrevolution.
Now, that argument’s gone out of fashion—I think it’s sort of true. And one of the things I was struck by is that you discuss the 1780s in the last 10 minutes of the final episode. But I often wonder if a lot of our assessment of the Revolution is because of the successful counterrevolution of the 1780s, and if that hadn’t happened, the Revolution might look a little different. I’m thinking of [what] a friend of the American Revolution, Edmund Burke, said of the French Revolution: “The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.”
The American Revolution achieved stabilization and success. It wasn’t obvious on the day of Yorktown or on the day of the treaty in 1783 that it would lead to a stable country; that only became clear after 1787.
Burns: That’s correct. It’s a wonderful point. We were talking before we got started about my Civil War series, and in ways, almost all of the Civil War and how we understand it is shaped by the period after the Civil War, which we call Reconstruction, which has been invented by one group to be this horrible tragedy and invented by another group to be the first experiment in civil rights and its collapse athe tragedy. And whatever it is, it [ushered] in a period of white supremacy.
So it’s very hard to abandon a narrative, and it was very important to us, who thought we weren’t gonna go racing for the exits once Yorktown happened and the surrender took place, but to understand the way in which the failures of the [Articles] of Confederation, replaced by the Constitution and then the government, was a way to understand the ongoing tensions of how we would configure ourselves for generations to come, as well as sort out the winners, if you will, and the losers. The Native Americans being the worst losers, Black Americans, women, the French, and then the British being the least losers, and of course, the white American males being the winners of the whole shebang.
So it’s a tough narrative choice to make, but I agree with you, absolutely. And what I like is we did a film a few years ago on Benjamin Franklin and spent much more time in the Constitutional Convention, much more time arguing over some of this stuff, and felt not so much that I didn’t have to do it, but in this case, having won at Yorktown, I’ve got about 40 minutes before I’m gonna run the credits. I mean, and we don’t think of it that way; we just look to see what can fit and what you can do, and we hinted at, like the vermouth in a very dry martini, the excellent point that you’ve made.
Frum: Yeah. Well, your point about Black Americans being the losers, one of the things you, in the, again, final episode, you talk about very—if I’d known this, I’d forgotten it, and maybe I never knew it—was the extraordinary sea lift evacuation that the British did at the end of the war. Tens of thousands of people in 18th century—this is something that you associate with the United States in the 20th century, but the British did a refugee evacuation on tens of thousands of people, some to the Caribbean, some to Nova Scotia. A few made it their own way to what is now Ontario. Some went back to Britain. But the Americans said, Okay, you have permission to evacuate your refugees, but we have a condition: No Black people—no Black people to whom someone has a claim of property. And that’s part of the peace deal, that the Black people who stayed loyal to you must be abandoned to us.
Burns: Right. And [Henry] Clinton, who was then the military leader of all the King’s forces in North America, said, No, we made promises. And it actually works out—in a very ironic thing, I was just in Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan just the other day, and there’s a room in there where they got together, and they decided—they had two lists of Negroes, as they were called—and what happens is families are torn apart because the mother can prove that she’s been in the service of this officer or this Loyalist for this long, and so they’re the property and can go, but the child cannot. And so there are heartrending moments at dockside when families are literally being pulled apart.
Frum: Yeah, you have a heartrending painting of one of those scenes, with a child being pulled one way by a man in a tricorn hat and the mother in another way—a woman who went to, I think, Bermuda or Bahamas and had to leave behind her stolen daughter.
Burns: Yeah, Judith Jackson. And it’s just one—like William Blake [said, the idea that] you could find the world in a grain of sand in Judith Jackson’s story holds true. And there’s several other people that we are able to identify, if we don’t have a contemporary image or even a later image, by the signatures on a line, by the roll, by wherever they appear, by a gravestone, that proves their existence and adds to the complexity of the story.
Frum: Now, the Northern states use the occasion of the Revolution to write constitutions that prohibit slavery. Or, I should say, the New England state—New York doesn’t get around to abolishing slavery, I think, until the 1820s or ’30s, something like that. But New England and Pennsylvania abolish slavery—
Burns: That’s correct—first.
Frum: So the Revolution has a kind of—people take their words seriously. But in other parts of the country, the Revolution seems to fasten the slave system even more intensely.
Burns: Yes. Yeah, and so there’s a wonderful comment—when I was making my film about Benjamin Franklin, I had the good fortune of interviewing the late historian Bernard Bailyn, and sort of baiting and switching at the end, I said, We’ve also been working on this film about the Revolution. Would you let me talk [to you about it]? So he actually said something that we used in the Franklin film and then used again here, that he said that before the Revolution, people didn’t talk about slavery that much. There were some people who gave voice to its evils, but it wasn’t [central]. But the second the Revolution happened—because it’s often the planters themselves, the large slave owners, who are using the idea that the King is enslaving them—that the hypocrisy comes out, that then the question of slavery. And because you’ve broken out these British rights to now big natural rights, that all men are created equal—as Yuval Levin says, it’s not men are equal; it’s all—that you’ve opened the door and we’re gonna drive a truck through it, however long—four score and nine years or 144 years—before women get to vote, or whatever it’s going to be, it’s going to happen. And so then slavery is always in discussion. And the people who are hearing the liberty talk, as Jane Kamensky says, they’re as alive, if not more alive, to the possibilities of freedom than anyone else. So you have destabilized a lot of arguments.
But you’re absolutely right: Slavery’s making the British Empire tons of money. We say 13 colonies; there are 26 colonies. We are the least profitable. The 13 in the Caribbean, because they have sometimes 90 percent slave population—Jamaica, Barbados—they’re the most profitable of all the far-flung sort of revenue streams of the British Empire. And so there’s hypocrisy in Lord Dunmore offering—who owns his own human beings—freedom to just the enslaved people of rebels and not to Loyalists. It’s an incredibly complex dynamic that we wanted to kind of represent.
But yes, I think what happens is that when you have suddenly opened the door to these Enlightenment thoughts that transcend the argument here, it’s gonna be gone. It’s gonna take longer for the people who are making a lot of money to do that. And in fact, it gets re-entrenched because even, I mean, you could say that [Thomas] Jefferson and Washington are anti-slavery; they know it’s wrong. And Annette Gordon-Reed has this wonderful thing—well, how could Thomas Jefferson know something was wrong and still do it? And she goes, Well, that’s a question for all of us, not letting Jefferson off the hook, but putting the rest of us on the hook. But by the time you have an abolitionist movement in the early part of the 19th century, then the enslavers are digging in and saying, No, no, no, this is inferior—not that Jefferson didn’t write about that in the Notes on the State of Virginia—these are inferior people. They need to be taken care of. And so you’re scrambling around for arguments that are, of course, even more specious than before.
Frum: Well, this is one of the notes of complexity you strike. If I recall right, the last Founding Father we hear from in the whole series is Benjamin Rush.
Burns: That’s correct.
Frum: The doctor from Pennsylvania, who is, I think, the only member of the Revolutionary generation who is convinced of the full moral and intellectual equality of the races. There are many abolitionists, like [Alexander] Hamilton and Franklin, but they were not so certain about equality. Rush was.
But to make it complicated, Rush was also a medical crank, who killed—
Burns: That’s right.
Frum: —hundreds of people—
Burns: Experimenting, yeah.
Frum: Yeah, with purging and bleeding and was—I mean, I shouldn’t call him a crackpot, because these were fairly common ideas at his time—but people were beginning to have doubts, and he was with the medical reactionaries who said, No, when someone has yellow fever, you take a razor to their arm and release some blood, and that’ll fix ’em. Oh, that one died too. Oh, well.
Burns: Yeah, I know. It’s unbelievable—and I have another ancestor, Gerardus Clarkson, who, with Rush, helped found the first medical college, hopefully to learn better, in Pennsylvania, from that insanity.
Frum: Well, I wanna ask you something about—and this is the most unfair, most provoking kind of question—but about the things you didn’t talk about.
Burns: Yeah.
Frum: So one of the things that has been a fixture of American history for 200 years has been the comparison of the American Revolution to the French Revolution: Why did the American Revolution work, and why did the French Revolution seemingly, at least in the opinion of most Americans, not work? But a thing Americans are not interested in is, what I would’ve thought is the much more salient question, of why did the American Revolution work when the contemporary South American revolutions did not work? That people are ready to compare Washington to the heroes of French liberty; they’re not so willing to compare Washington to [Simón] Bolívar.
Burns: To Bolívar, right.
Frum: And I’ve got some thoughts on this, but I’d like to hear—how do you integrate the Latin, or I should say, because in Mexico, the revolution actually failed until the last minute, but in South America, the revolutionaries succeeded, but they left behind enduring instability, unjust societies. How do you understand the difference when it happened in North America and South America?
Burns: Well, I think this is a really important thing. The first thing to understand is that, unlike your world, which is the intellectual pursuit of these ideas and the history that undergirds it, is a kind of additive process; what I’m involved in is a subtractive one. I’m talking to you from New Hampshire. We make maple syrup. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. So we’re actually collecting the stuff and then pulling away: What can our story contain? And so we’d love to go off, press that Benjamin Rush button, which you can’t do at the very last moment, when you’re hearing somebody say the American war is over, but the American Revolution is still going on, and go into Benjamin Rush and all of the cuckooness that you described.
At the same time, as we acknowledge a few minutes before that, that the American Revolution is going to set in motion revolutions for the next 200-plus years around the world:, first in Europe, then in the Caribbean and South America, and in Asia and Africa. We’re talking about all of that, but we’re not at that stage; just like at the end of the Civil War series, we could hint at this progress, this thing that was going to be called Reconstruction, but we couldn’t delve into it. And so, to me—I’m now working, by the way, if this is in any satisfactory a sop to you, David—I’ve been working, thinking about for decades and now working on a film called Emancipation to Exodus, which is exactly that: self-emancipating slaves through the Civil War to the Reconstruction, its collapse, finally to the Great Migration. And so we’ll be going back and answering a fundamental question not dissimilar to the one you just asked me. And who knows, maybe we’ll be able to say this American project ought to extend beyond the borders of just one of the Americas.
Frum: Can I test a theory on you?
Burns: Yeah, sure.
Frum: I have a thought about why Washington succeeded and Bolívar failed, and I’d like to know what you, with your great study of the subject, what you think about it. And again, bracket Mexico—in Mexico, the Spaniards actually won. And the Mexican case, the way I compare it, is that imagine that the British completely beat the Americans and executed Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Franklin: firing squads, hanging, they were all—
Burns: Drawn and quartered, yeah.
Frum: —all dead. And the Spanish hero who defeated them all was General Benedict Arnold, and he becomes the leader of the country. And then he turns against the British and crowns himself Emperor Benedict I and declares the independence of America under his imperial rule. That’s the story of Mexican independence. (Laughs.)
Burns: Yeah, right.
Frum: But going farther south—[Agustín] de Iturbide is the name of the guy who did it—going farther south, here’s my theory and tell me what you think of this. In the United States, certainly in the North and even in the South, the white American population was big enough. They were able to lock the Indigenous people and the slaves out of politics. And they were military factors, but they were not really political factors, and they were completely locked out. And when the British tried to make use of them, that only consolidated Patriot feeling more against the British.
Burns: That’s a very good point, yes.
Frum: In South America, the populations were not, so you couldn’t lock the Indigenous and the slaves out of politics; you had to bring them in in some way. And Bolívar ends up bringing them in. And the result is he turns a political revolution into a social revolution—and a revolution that is not just against Spanish rule while preserving the structures of Spanish society, but it’s something that turns into a slave revolt at the same time that then the new powerholders try to suppress. And the story of South America has been: When you pull the Spanish out, you uncork the bottle. And then repressive forces try to put the cork in, and they’re never able to succeed, and the oppressed forces are never able to push the cork back out again fully either, and that’s why it remains so stable. And that’s the difference, is that the United States, it remained a quarrel within the Americans of European descent, and they were able to lock the others out and thus to prevent the political revolution from turning into—it was something of a social revolution but not a very big one, whereas in South America, it was a huge one.
Burns: Yeah. I’m not sure I’d buy into just the terminology of “lock the others out,” but I agree with you. I think that’s very, very smart. [Winston] Churchill, looking back at it, said we could only do two things. We could only handle union; we couldn’t handle slavery, right? So that the Revolution was making a simple choice. And I think what we did do, David, and it doesn’t answer your question directly, but I think it places the sort of foundation on which our narrative progresses not on the grade-school taxes and representation—which is obviously a big, huge part of it, and not to take anything away from those motivations—but about Indian land, all the way through. And so you have, very much pride of place, put Canassatego and his celebrations of the land that they have and the worry that the white people don’t understand their relationship to the land and his confidence in the power of his Confederacy, a union—remember he says, Never fall out one with the other; he’s sort of telling us, Don’t have a civil war. And by the end of the sixth episode, we’ve brought a civil war to the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, which destroys them, in the name of grabbing land in upstate New York and northern Pennsylvania.
So all the way through, even from our opening topic sentence of the introduction: It’s not just a clash between Englishmen over Indian land, taxes, and representation. There was something that I insisted on because I think that’s the way to understand it, because you have Native peoples living in separate and distinct nations, that are like the difference between France and Prussia, who have formed alliances, that have fallen out of those alliances, and we treat them as them. And we have both assimilated and co-existing Native Americans within the land we’ve already spent the last 150 years securing—we’re gonna spend the next 150 years taking the rest of it.
And by the way, we do not start that Congress and call it the Eastern Seaboard Congress or the Eastern Seaboard Army in which we are placing you, George Washington, in charge of; we’re calling it a Continental Army. We know where we’re going. So I think the heart of this is less—and I don’t know enough about Latin or South America to be able to argue in any real way—but to say the conquering has taken place. Here, we’re just all about uncorking potentiality. And that’s the whole thing, that we see this as an empire in the making. And George Washington, in the ’80s, as things are beginning to unravel because the Articles of Confederation are so toothless, he’s saying—and there’s Shays’s Rebellion—he says he’s worried about drowning “our rising empire in blood.” They know what they got. And they got, in the Treaty of Paris, everything to the Mississippi, and they want everything beyond that too.
Frum: Well, the financial stabilization of the Union depends on the Indian land. Once Congress is formed, how does the United States pay its bills from the world?
Burns: Exactly.
Frum: Land sales.
Burns: And you have a states-rights guy in Thomas Jefferson who makes the greatest land deal in the history of the world, which is aghast. I’m not even sure Alexander Hamilton would’ve had the guts to say, Yep. And he buys—you know, doubling the size of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase.
I think we have to recenter Native American land in this story, and that’s what makes it different from a France and makes it different from a Haiti and makes it different from South American examples that you bring up, which I wanna plead ignorant—
Frum: Okay, I’m sorry. I told you it was a dirty trick to ask you about something—
Burns: No, no, no. I’m fascinated. You’re now gonna send me down that rabbit hole. (Laughs.)
Frum: I wanted to take it back to the story of your head and your heart because you have the American flag over your left shoulder.
Burns: This is actually—may I just say something to you that will help you understand all of my dancing, whatever I do to dance on your next question? That is a Navajo blanket. Does that change the dynamics? That is not an American [flag]. It is a representation of the American flag—it is neither a flag nor even a quilt, which I collect and are all over, but it is a blanket by the Navajo people. And it, to me—
Frum: So now you’re intensifying the contradiction that I was about to ask you about, which is you say goodbye to the viewer and you make your peace with the story by saying—you’ve talked about the heroism and the valor of those who fought, you talked about how those who fought came from the bottom of society: at the beginning they had property, but by the end of the war, the professional Continental Army is an army of propertyless men; the Minutemen were not. But all through the many hours we’ve spent with you, you have entertained or invited us or introduced us to many qualms and doubts about what’s happening, but you end by saying, I’m going to give you a vision of the future of how this will all turn out that vindicates what happened. But as you are sorting this out, as an historian but also a storyteller—to the extent those are different—how do we make sense of we have our feelings about 1781 and 1783 decided by outcomes that no one in 1781 or 1783 could know or have any confidence in, even if they had visions of what the future might be?
Burns: I don’t know the answer to that. I know that I felt that, because we had been so assiduous in trying to maintain all the complexities that we’ve described in our conversation, that I still had a sense that this was the most consequential revolution in history. That, as I’ve been saying out on the road—much to the chagrin, I assume, of some of my colleagues, who are too polite to speak up—that I thought it was the most important event since the birth of Christ in all of world history, and I’m willing to sort of go there and defend it; I think it’s a way to wake people up to think about it. That there’s something deeply patriotic, in a good way—and reclaiming the word patriotism from the scoundrels—and Samuel Johnson said, “Lost souls escape their loss of control in patriotism.”
There’s a way in which I wanted to reclaim a sophisticated—and it meant that for all the yes-buts that the film is constantly throwing up in terms—those last moments, the 40 minutes after Yorktown, are filled with a lot of the contradictions and the losses. It felt important to at least say in a way, Didn’t we throw something forward? Couldn’t we have a place where we could agree that everyone—and I’ve been out on the road, David, for months and months and months, and I have said the same thing to Joe Rogan as I said to the New York Times Editorial Board, as I said to inner-city kids in Detroit, and kids from Chicagoland area, and audiences in the evenings everywhere around the country. Because I think that there’s a place to have purchase, particularly in this divided time, that if you wanna be clear-eyed about not [the] cure, but just getting better, you need to, as any professional would do when a person’s in crisis, you go back and find out: “Who are your parents? Where’d you grow up? What’d you do? So what’s your origin story?” And that you begin to reassemble your narrative in a much more positive, healthy way.
So having told a more complete [story], calling balls and strikes—and there’s some unbelievable balls and strikes, as well as some grand-slam home runs—that I wanted to give it back to the hopefulness of, like Jefferson said to [John] Adams, “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” “And so we shall go on, puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of men”—“puzzled and prospering.” It’s not in our film; I’ve used it in a couple of other films, couldn’t just do it again. But it’s really the sense that there is some embedded hopefulness in this story that I wish also to not be extinguished, that I don’t want to, in your original binary, sort of subscribe to the triumphal, nor do I wish to subscribe to the sad story.
Frum: There’s a spirit of history that says that, as [Leopold] von Ranke said, that history is just what happened. But in reality, what actually happens is history is a resource in which people search for what they need. So you’ve referenced Lincoln a couple of times. So in Lincoln’s youth, when the Constitution enshrined slavery, which he did not like, but the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence seemed to condemn slavery, Lincoln said, 1776, good; 1787, defective, and We have to revert from the Constitution to the Declaration. And he made a hero out of Jefferson in a way that actually didn’t make a lot of sense, but—
Burns: No, no, no. (Laughs.) Because he was running, probably, the greatest Federalist government of all time.
Frum: But it made emotional sense. So in that era, Lincoln said—and those of his ilk in the 1830s, 1840s—1776, good; 1787, bad. The historians of the 1950s, fresh from the McCarthy period, said, Wait a moment. You let loose the politics of every day—you’re going to let loose a lot of paranoia and conspiracy theory and a lot of—like, a lot of the people who fought in 1776, what they thought they were fighting for was to stop [King] George III from turning America Catholic. And that was crazy, but that’s what they went to war to do. They thought there was a Catholic conspiracy against the liberties of Americans. And so the historians of the 1950s often said, 1787, good; 1776, a little more troubling.
And so it goes in different historical periods. And I was thinking, when I was watching your conversation with my editor Jeff Goldberg, I’m old enough to remember the 1976 bicentennial and the mood of 1976 was the United States had been through Vietnam, Watergate, the worst recession since the Great Depression, at that time, and America said, We need cheering up. We need a feel-good version of 1776 to cheer us up in the tougher days of 1976. And I remember at the time thinking, What’s the mood going to be in 50 years? And I live to see it. And the mood is—I think we’re back in the mood of the 1950s, where a lot of people are saying, We are not so confident anymore about what happens when you say, Let’s, loose the spirit, so let’s dissolve the bonds of authority; let’s dissolve the bonds of knowledge. If you wanna go out into your pulpit in the backwoods and say, George III has a plot to make America Catholic, that it turns out all right. And we may be in a moment where it looks and feels more like 1958 than 1976.
Burns: The other evening, at the National Constitution Center, I was speaking with Yuval Levin onstage, and he was saying the founders—who were trying to reverse engineer an autocrat in their designs of the document, in the writing of the code in the summer of 1787—wouldn’t be surprised to come back and find that somebody wanted to take more power. That would not surprise them. What would surprise them was the acquiescence of what is Article One, which is the legislative branch. And that’s Article One; it’s not Article Two—that’s the executive branch. And so I think that we’re gonna be constantly moving. It’s a kind of centering process.
And for storytellers, it’s not so much we’re reading the moment—because we can’t, David. I began this when Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency, and we’ve gone through lots of what Mark Twain would call rhymes throughout. When the wife of the German general who’s with Burgoyne is coming over, she’s worried about Americans eating cats. If, for some thing, we’d come out last fall, this would be like a gigantic, Oh, Ken Burns, you did this because we’re talking about Springfield, Ohio, and J. D. Vance, and everybody’s talking about illegal immigrants eating cats. That would’ve been a big rhyme. I think it’ll pass by this fall with hardly a kerfuffle. But there’ll be other things that were in the film, you know, years ago that are going to just rhyme in spectacular fashions. I don’t know. But I have felt, my whole professional life, the movement.
I mean, even Gordon Wood, in the middle of our declaration sentence, said Lincoln knew this—he said, “All honor to Jefferson.” That’s the beginning of taking it away from the Constitution. And I could go back, and one of the things I’m working on with this Emancipation to Exodus project is: People do believe that the Constitution is a racist document. Actually, it’s people like Frederick Douglass and Lincoln who decide, You know what, it’s not actually, and here’s how we’re going to use it. And the leverage of that is, I wouldn’t say, equally as important in a big conversation of head and heart as Lincoln quoting Jefferson at the Gettysburg Address, which is the Declaration 2.0: We really do mean that all men are created equal. He’s replacing the original catechism with a slight adjustment to it. I do think it’s as much the underlying, undergirding constitutional things that even Frederick Douglass can find purchase within the original Constitution to make his arguments about human freedom and equality.
Frum: Yeah. When you say the Constitution’s a racist document, it’s a document in which slavery is sort of the embedding problem.
Burns: Yeah, I’m not saying I’m saying it—I’m saying that the interpretation, as you correctly said, in the early 19th century, was for many that the Constitution was flawed, and therefore, we should go back further and resurrect Jefferson and the Declaration.
Frum: And we’ve created, then, this imagined history where the Constitution as you have it now is the same document as it was in 1787.
Burns: Right. (Laughs.)
Frum: And it really isn’t. But they were solving a problem, which is how did they reassert the authority of the central government? How did they fund it? And when we talked about land sales, I mean, even before Louisiana, that one of the things that is a provocation of the Revolution, as you say at the beginning, is the Quebec Act of 1774, which basically assigns Ohio and greater Ohio to the province of Quebec with a view to stopping—Quebec has a royal governor, and so you can stop, or try to stop more effectively, migration westward across the Appalachians into the Ohio Valley. It’s probably doomed never to work because the British were never going to pay the cost of actually policing it. But it wasn’t an impediment; it was certainly—
Burns: And it was also an internal thing. It’s more local consumption. They’re trying to also pacify the Catholic population of this new state that they’ve absorbed because of the Seven Years’ War, what we call the French and Indian War. And it’s really the 1763 demarcation that you can’t go over it ’cause we can’t afford to protect you.
And so that’s why many Native tribes think—because the British have beat the French and because they’re supposedly keeping their own people from crossing the border—why more Native Americans went in with the British than went in with the Patriots and same for Black people, because they just saw perhaps more daylight in a British ambiguous position on slavery than on an unambiguous position on slavery that the Patriots had.
Frum: But unlike the lands west of the Mississippi, which will be homesteaded in the 1860s, where you can just basically—you show up; you start farming; it’s yours—the lands east of the Mississippi were sold. And they were sold for cash. And that was how the new government paid the Revolutionary debt, paid its bills, paid its army, at last. And that was the problem that consumed the people of 1787, which is, “How do you pay the debts?” Which [is] one thing that South American governments were never able to do, and that set them on many of their paths, and that the new Republic of Haiti was unable to do—
Burns: I think it’s because they didn’t have in front of them the kind of tabula rasa, the blank canvas, ahead of them that was going to be not just the Manifest Destiny, but it was the place where we were gonna be able to create the income necessary to keep things running.
Frum: Well, so then this is where I will end with your generous time, but to go back to your head-and-heart question: Are you with Lincoln as a man of 1776, or are you with the historians of the 1950s as a man of 1787?
Burns: All right, I am going to drive you crazy, David, because I’m gonna say neither and both. So in his message to Congress in 1862, he says, “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation,” right? And a few seconds later, he says, The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, we must think anew, we must act anew, we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we can save our country.
In the second inauguration, he says, If you are, I’m willing to go 500 years with this business, right? Every drop of blood drawn by the lash will be replaced by one drawn by the sword—as Old Testament as you can get. And then he pivots and goes, With malice towards none, with charity for all. So I am—in the fact that the American project seems to be hinging, I wouldn’t even say, between head and heart but between these polarities of a sort of vigorous prosecution and an understanding of how much the past informs where we are now and a sense that the point is right here, and there’s a kind of New Testament generosity that you have. So I buy into all of it, and I’m just trying to, in Whitmanesque ways, you know, do I contradict myself? Yes. And I contain multitudes, and so I’ve tried to represent—it’s not so much me that contains multitudes; I’ve tried to represent the multitudes that yell from either side of the brain or from the head and the heart in the American project.
Frum: As you say this, maybe you are resolving another binary that we have about you, which is one of the questions about Ken Burns, and maybe the one that students of your work will struggle with the most, is: Are you first and foremost an historian, or are you first and foremost an artist?
Burns: I am a storyteller, and so—
Frum: And historians hate contradictions, and artists love them.
Burns: Yeah. No, no, no, you need to have them. Wynton Marsalis, one of the great artists that I know—dear, dear friend, we’re like brothers—said, in jazz, “sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time.”
Like, if you are trying to superimpose the historiography of one particular view of the Revolution or of the Civil War, it doesn’t fit at all. And yet, you know, [John] Keats said of Shakespeare that Shakespeare had “negative capability,” which is a wonderful phrase. That was the ability to hold in tension a person’s strengths and their weaknesses, and to postpone the decision about it for as long as you can, because that was closer to the realities of our own world, in which the people closest to us remain inscrutable to us. And that, I think, is the role of art.
And so storytelling, with my It’s complicated sign, is the winner, but it also has to be subservient, if you can believe that, to the facts of the past. We cannot mess with what happened. It’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan—there’s an opinion to art somewhere, I suppose, and people are entitled to that, but not to their own set of facts. And so I’ve spent my entire professional life trying to figure out how to fit that square peg into that round hole and still come out with a narrative that doesn’t throw it out and isn’t also sort of treacly triumphant at the same time, in the case of the Revolution.
Frum: Ken Burns, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been such a pleasure and honor to talk to you, and what a remarkable legacy you have given to Americans in this coming 250th-anniversary year.
Burns: Thank you, David.
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Frum: Thanks so much to Ken Burns for joining me today on The David Frum Show. I wanna add a special thank-you to listeners and viewers of The David Frum Show. You’ll remember that, in August, I requested participation in a survey about what you like and what you don’t like, what changes, what suggestions you have for the program. Six thousand people responded to that survey, and we are—all of us at The Atlantic—overwhelmed, astonished, grateful to each and every one of you. Thank you so much. It has been so helpful, so informative. We benefit so much, and we are so appreciative of the enthusiasm that so many listeners and viewers feel for this program. Thank you.
As mentioned, the book I will discuss this week is Benjamin Nathans’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, Princeton 2024. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a history of the Soviet dissident movement in the 1960s and 1970s. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause won the Pulitzer Prize in 2025, and I am honored to have served on the jury that recommended the book for the prize. It is amply deserving of it. It’s a very substantial book, and it may be more about the Soviet dissident movement than everyone will wanna read all the way through. But there’s a part of the book that I think is very bearing on present American problems. The book introduces us almost at the very start to an individual named Alexander Vopin, who was—sorry, beg your pardon, Alexander [Esenin-]Volpin—who was the inspiration, the first breakthrough of the modern Soviet dissident movement.
Volpin was born in 1924 in the Soviet Union. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1949 in mathematics, and he immediately encountered trouble with the regime. He wanted to live like a free human being and wouldn’t accept that that was not allowed. He was sentenced to prisons. He was sentenced to mental institutions. He was eventually released after the death of Stalin in 1953. But he never relented in his struggle for his individual right. But he based all of his opposition, all of his struggle, on a startling insight that struck people as one of those things that’s so brilliant that it’s crazy, so crazy that it might be brilliant.
Volpin began by pointing out that the 1936 Stalin constitution of the Soviet Union granted large rights to Soviet citizens: rights of freedom of speech, rights of due process. Now, of course, everyone understood that these words were meaningless, empty, that the regime utterly ignored the laws it pretended to be bound by. Volpin insisted, But what if we acted as if the laws meant something? What if we treated the laws as if they were real? He explained to his friends, Soviet laws—and here are his words—“ought to be understood in exactly the way they are written and not as they are interpreted by the government, and the government ought to fulfill those laws to the letter.”
So he would be arrested for handing out a leaflet or criticizing the government in a poem, and he would argue his rights under the Soviet constitution. Soviet courts didn’t know what to make of it. No one had been so insane as to argue that the Soviet constitution gave anybody any rights—they all knew it was a dead letter—but he would be in court insisting otherwise. And the Stalin terror was over, and the regime was trying to become, if not more legal, then more predictable. And sometimes he’d win because, after all, it was the law, and the courts were not quite prepared to say the law didn’t count for anything.
Volpin explained to his allies and comrades, who looked at him at first as if he were crazy, he would insist, What would happen if we acted on the assumption that the laws are binding, if we acted on the assumption that our rights are real? And again, in Volpin’s words, If one person did it, he would become a martyr; if two people did it, they would be labeled an enemy organization; if thousands of people did it, they would be a hostile movement; but if everyone did it, the state would have to become less oppressive.
I think there’s a lesson here for Americans. Now, I don’t want to make any comparison between the Soviet Union, even after Stalin, to the United States of today. But the United States is moving in directions in which laws mean less and less, in which the authorities flat-out say they’re not bound by law; due process doesn’t mean anything. The laws are in trouble—they are shaking in the United States. And one of the great dangers to the freedom of citizens is that we will act worldly, we will act wise, and say, Well, we all know they ignore the law. Volpin reminds us: They only can get away with ignoring the law if people acquiesce in the ignoring of the law. But if everyone did it, the state would have to become less oppressive.
So it’s important, even as you know in your mind that the laws mean less and less in the United States, important to act in your heart as if the laws meant everything and to commit your personal political work to the premise that the laws are binding, that your rights are real, even as you confront an authority that seems determined to shrink the laws and take away rights.
Alexander [Esenin-]Volpin went in and out of prisons. In 1972, he was released to the United States. In those days, the United States did stand for freedom, and he lived a long life—he lived to age 91—and he died in the spring of 2016. Mercifully, he had a full life and died before he saw the United States begin to descend in its own path to unfreedom. He was spared that sight. I don’t know what he would’ve thought of it. Well, I do know what he would’ve thought about it—he would’ve said to us, as he told his Soviet fellow citizens, Laws ought to be understood in exactly the way [they are] written and not as they are interpreted by the government, and the government ought to fulfill those laws to the letter. If one person did it, he would become a martyr; if everyone did it, the state would have to become less oppressive. Let’s everyone do it.
Thank you so much [for= listening today—or watching, if you watch on YouTube—The David Frum Show. Thank you for joining me. As ever, the best way to support this program and the work of all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you’ll consider doing that. You might also want to consider subscribing to a David Frum alert on The Atlantic site; that will let you know whenever I post a new article on the site. And I will, of course, return next week with another episode of The David Frum Show. Thanks for joining. Bye-bye.
[Music]
Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.
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