President Trump’s threats to democracy have prompted a number of experts to warn that the United States is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. As the country grapples with how to move forward, David Leonhardt looks back to America’s founding, with the filmmaker Ken Burns. Burns’s upcoming documentary focuses on the Revolutionary War, and in this conversation he discusses the ideals of the country’s flawed founders, how he thinks about patriotism and what he says is the “greatest existential threat to the existence of the United States right now.”
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David Leonhardt: Before we talk about America’s next story, I want to look back to the country’s origin story. The American Revolution was many things, as you explained in the new film; it was a battle to control valuable land. It was a civil war. But it really was an ideological struggle, too. I wonder what was the story that the revolutionaries told themselves and told the world about why they were risking their lives to break with England?
Ken Burns: What a wonderful question, David. It’s so complicated because it is informed by so many, many other — not ulterior — but just other common motives. Many people, rich and poor, wanted Indian land on the western border and big land speculators like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and Patrick Henry, all of them saw this as a westward thing. And then of course, a bankrupt treasury needs more taxes and the Americans were the least taxed.
So they’re telling different stories about it, but it’s one story of essentially not having a voice, not being heard, not having direct representation. That’s what the grade school stuff talks about as taxes and representation. But what happens in an interesting way is that what becomes an argument between English citizens suddenly breaks out into a discussion about natural rights. This is, after all, the enlightenment and it’s a really heady moment; it’s got a lot of stuff to it and undertow to it.
The folks who were arguing in Philadelphia were all fairly well-to-do — certainly property owners, certainly assumed a kind of republican elite aristocracy that would run this new version of things. Up to this point, the British constitutional monarchy is the best thing on earth. And so if you’re a loyalist, you think: I already live under the best form of government on earth, why are we going to try this radical thing? In order for that radical thing to actually succeed militarily as well as politically, you’re going to have to offer other stuff.
So it means that democracy is not an intention of the Revolution — it’s a byproduct, it’s a consequence. Perhaps even an unintended consequence of it, because in order to win those battles, you’re going to have non-property owners and second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance. You’re going to have felons, you’re going to have recent immigrants — none of whom fit the bill of the original configuration, but are the people who don’t disappear when things get tough. It’s a pretty fluid and dynamic remarkable thing.
Ecclesiastes says, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there’s nothing new under the sun.” That means human nature doesn’t change. Mark Twain is supposed to say history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. I’ve spent my entire professional career realizing the extent to which that human nature superposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events. And we perceive patterns, themes, echoes, rhymes, but there is something new under the sun.
Leonhardt: Tell me if you think this is fair: that in many ways, it starts as a low-concept fight between rich Brits in England and rich Brits who are colonists. But in order to inspire people to fight the battle here in America in the colonies, one of the things that the American side does is summon these larger ideas of the enlightenment.
Burns: That’s correct. I don’t think there’s any conscious intention. I’m looking for this wonderful quote that I want to read to you, if you can permit me. This is from Edmund Burke, and he said: “The Americans have made a discovery or think they have made one, that we mean to oppress them. We have made a discovery or think we have made one, that they intend to rise in rebellion. Our severity has increased their ill behavior. We know not how to advance. They know not how to retreat. Some party must give way.”
So rather than even attributing any kind of intentionality to it, you begin to see that escalating rhetoric. You’re a radical, you be, act more radical; you’re a despot, you act more despotically. These sorts of things are the kind of natural destabilization and crashes. And that’s what happens in the American Revolution.
And while you can say that there is a phenomenal appeal to this word liberty — and that becomes a huge force — it’s also exchanged in letters, in newspapers, read at dinner tables. People at the margins, as the scholar Maggie Blackhawk says in our film, are completely inspired by this. Jane Kamensky, now the head of Monticello, says that liberty talk is heard by everybody, and then all of a sudden you’ve opened the door. The second you mention gay marriage, it’s going to happen. The second you mention abolition, it’s going to happen. It may take an enormous cost of blood and treasure and time, but it’s going to happen. And so the American Revolution, essentially — accidentally on purpose — opens the door.
Leonhardt: So it becomes this inspiring cause, but of course the Revolution never lives up to the concept of liberty that it uses. And I think that’s very hard for many people to think about because on the one hand, these ideals are so inspiring. And on the other hand, of course, the revolutionaries treat the native population — including natives who fight with the revolutionaries — just horrendously. The sentence in the Declaration of Independence — “all men are created equal” — well, of course that isn’t how the colonists treated the enslaved people in the Americas. I think many people today can struggle to keep both these ideas in mind at once. One of the things that I like about your work is you really do try to synthesize them. So how can you at once view the Revolution as inspiring and also take account of its deep hypocrisies?
Burns: You call balls and strikes — that’s it. That’s it. And it allows contradiction and undertow to obtain because that’s the part of human experience. If you try to superimpose an expository theory on it, it’s always going to fail.
Babe Ruth comes up once every nine times. He strikes out an awful lot. The highlights of everything show him hitting home runs. If you see all the dynamics here, not just of the George Washingtons and the John Adams and the Thomas Jeffersons and Benjamin Franklins, but bottom-up people — who themselves wrestle with these contradictions — they are contradictory. This is Whitman-esque. Do I contradict myself? Yes. So you just permit that. You don’t need to superimpose a fashion of historiography to interpret this. You actually just have to call balls and strikes.
Were there people who — I mean when Jefferson says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” there’s nothing self-evident about these truths. Nothing. As someone said in a film we made about Benjamin Franklin a few years ago, it’s an old lawyer’s dodge: just say it’s self-evident. But there’s nothing self-evident about the idea that all men are created equal. And once you’ve said it, you’ve opened the door. It’s too late.
You can sit there and keep score: “Well, you didn’t treat this right.” That’s true. But in fact, Washington, by the end of his life, is freeing his slaves. Jefferson, saddled with debt, tries to dance around it. He says it’s like holding a wolf by the ears: you don’t like it, but you dare not let it go. So there’s lots of temporizing. And you just have to say it’s a complicated narrative that finds comfort in contradiction. George Washington is an extremely flawed person. He’s rash. He makes horrible tactical mistakes at the biggest battle of the Revolution. And yet we do not have a country without him. Full stop.
We live in a computer world of ones and zeros, in a media culture where politics is on/off, binary. But there’s nothing binary in human existence. There’s nothing binary in nature. And so — a good story. Richard Powers said: “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.” Because good stories permit us connection and familiarity with all of these things. We want to decide: good or bad, white hat or dark hat. And sometimes you just have to say, this is the way it happened.
Leonhardt: As I often say to my kids, people are complicated. It’s really —
Burns: Yeah. Well, you know what, I have in my editing room — the main editing room that I’ve been working in for 34 years — a neon sign. In lowercase cursive it says, “it’s complicated.” And we are offering — we being Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, my co-directors — this 12 hours, six parts, as a way to say: It’s complicated. But by revealing that complication, those ideas are not diminished. They’re made more spectacular, more miraculous.
Leonhardt: Let’s bring some of these strands up to today. One of the other ideas the film talks about is possibility. Possibility defines the American story in so many ways: moving west, great scientific inventions, great social movements that force the country to live up to its stated values.
And then you come to modern times, and I have to say, it often feels like we’ve lost some of our belief in possibility. Today we’re so angry, so cynical. So I want to ask you: if you can imagine a future Ken Burns in the 21st or 22nd century, looking back on the last several decades, how would he explain how American society ended up as it has?
Burns: I go first to the words “pursuit” and “more perfect.” One in the Declaration, one in the preamble of the Constitution. We are in the process of becoming. All of those big ideas are never fully realized. They’re always partly unrealized and yet you see progress. I think right now what we perceive is a huge backward movement. But I don’t think the essential promise, the objective, has been lost. My feeling is you have to presume that human nature will be as it’s always been. We’ve seen institutions disintegrating before our eyes, a social contract fraying at the edges, undermined by social media and other forces we think are unique.
In one film we have, I remember somebody talking about the telegraph as the death of letters. In 1868, Pete O’Brien said, “They don’t play baseball the way they used to when I was a child.” I’ve heard that every single generation, and so we are a nation of Chicken Littles as well as a nation of forthright patriot optimists. And history makes you kind of optimistic only because you can watch and see what happens.
So our job now is to land the plane: repair, restoration, reconciliation. And let me add one other “R,” which is like respiration — you just have to breathe. These things happen. And I’m not minimizing the existential threat to our way of life after 249 years. The Civil War, the Depression, the Second World War — these were big deals. But in the North, at least, free and fair elections still took place. There was an independent judiciary. Other institutions remained intact. All of that now seems in danger of slipping away. And it becomes our job not to fall back.
Jefferson says a few phrases after pursuit of happiness. He says, “All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.” It’s not that hard to parse. He means that everybody heretofore has been subject to an authoritarian rule, and we’ve basically accepted it. It’s been the want of every authoritarian to make sure that people are uneducated, they’re suspicious, they’re a peasantry, they are subjects. And we’ve created a new thing called citizens. And that requires all that virtue, all that lifelong learning, all that responsibility, all of that energy to overcome that. I do not think that that is gone.
Leonhardt: You have this moment in the final episode in which you explain how the founders came together to write the Constitution.
“The architects of the Constitution divided the federal government into three branches, the legislative, executive and judicial. In a delicate balance by which each was meant to check the others to ensure against overreach that could result in tyranny. They feared that a demagogue might incite citizens into betraying the American experiment. Alexander Hamilton was concerned that an unprincipled man would mount the hobby horse of popularity and throw things into confusion. In a government like ours, he would write, no one is above the law.”
That certainly feels meaningful in today’s America.
Burns: Mark Twain would say, there you go, rhyming again.
Leonhardt: Like you, I’m an optimist and I take optimism from history, but I also never expected our country to be in the condition that it is today. And so, I’m curious, how you think of just how significant the dangers are?
Burns: I think, as I said before, the increase in executive power is perhaps the greatest existential threat to the United States right now. The patriots, the rebels, were mainly selecting against a despot, against an authoritarian. They knew human nature. They knew someone would eventually come along like that, and they were trying to figure out how to guard against it.
Jefferson, writing from Paris to Madison, said: What if someone should lose an election but pretend false votes and reap the whirlwind? They weren’t idiots. They were really smart, and they were trying to guard against exactly that. And I think that in our democratic — small “d” democratic — DNA is everything we need to right the ship. I am optimistic, though I’ve never been as pessimistic as I am right now.
Leonhardt: We talked before about how the Revolution became something different from what it began as. It became something bigger and more inspiring and that’s a reminder of just how important national narratives are to shaping the future of countries. When you look at the United States today, what do you think are the kinds of stories that today we can tell ourselves about ourselves that might help us get out of this moment?
Burns: When I began this film and we were in the editing room on Vietnam, it wasn’t completely locked yet, and I said, “We’re doing the Revolution.” And people were like, oh no, because there are no pictures. There’s no newsreel, right? But when I said that in December of 2015, Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. Donald Trump was not supposed to emerge from the next month’s Iowa caucus. Not a single person predicted a victory. And yet the story that we’ve told and we’ve been so disciplined to not sort of try to do, to point to the rhymes, to say, oh, isn’t this so like today? Because they keep changing.
I’ll tell you — there’s a moment where we follow this beautiful story of the German wife of a German officer. She’s bringing her three little kids across the ocean to join her husband. But while she’s traveling across the Atlantic, she worries because she’s heard Americans eat cats. So if our film had, by sheer luck, come out last year, people might have said, “Oh, Ken, you’re trying to put your thumb on the scale!” And yet this fall, it may pass without a thought. Maybe what you read of Hamilton is more resonant. But that’s not my job.
Going back to balls and strikes — I just have to tell the story. I think I’m offering a good story. I’m not offering it as a Democrat or a Republican. I’m not offering it as anything other than an attempt to tell a complicated story, to make it come alive, and to suggest that maybe it’s possible to coalesce around the complexity of our origin story — to revel in it, rather than reduce it to something binary and simple.
Within that complexity, it may be possible to draw people to the ironies, the tragedies, the exultant ideas. Because this — the American Revolution — is the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ. Period. Full stop. And I’ll defend that. Including all the hypocrisy you’ve raised, all the failures, all the things left undone — it’s all there. Because for the first time, there was possibility, even for those who did not yet have ownership of themselves. And to me, that is the essence of the liberating story of the American Revolution.
Leonhardt: How do you think about the word patriot? And specifically for people who are worried about the turn that this country has taken, do you think it is important for them to claim or reclaim the word patriot?
Burns: As the scholar Alan Taylor tells us, it’s basically those lovers of constitutional rights — the Whigs in Britain. And then it becomes what we call ourselves, while the British call us rebels the whole time. They never acknowledge us otherwise. To them, we’re just upstarts — “a rabble” is often the phrase. But at the very end, a German Hessian soldier who’s been mocking us all along is there at the surrender at Yorktown on the wrong side and says: “Who would have thought a hundred years ago that a rabble could defy kings?”
And that’s the point. I believe it is possible to express one’s patriotism in many ways. By understanding the context in which the word patriot came into being during the Revolution — which I think our film communicates successfully — it becomes possible for everyone to find a place within that word, and within the narrative itself. It reminds us how close we might already be, despite everything else.
Leonhardt: I just want to underline something you just said, which is an original meaning of patriot is a lover of constitutional liberty, and I think that’s a really important thing to remember
Burns: Exactly.
Leonhardt: You give a very prominent place to some words from Benjamin Rush, the only doctor to sign the Declaration of Independence.
“The American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed … Your country demands your services; the Revolution is not over. ”
Leonhardt: As I’ve been thinking about what kind of story our country needs today to move on, to have a new beginning — I actually think the Revolution is not over, is about the best idea I’ve heard yet.
Burns: That’s why it occupies the pride of place that it does. Exactly right — it’s back to process, back to pursuit and more perfect. Everyone knew it wasn’t perfect. Washington says, “I wish it was this. I wish it was more. But it’s a start.” The war is over, and our film is called “The American Revolution,” which means it’s also about the war itself. The war ends and then somehow you have to figure out how you’re going to come together, if you’re going to come together. And we do come together, with some pretty difficult compromises — compromises that are hard to swallow in retrospect. But the idea endures. Nobody needs to say anything after Benjamin Rush — he got it.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing and original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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