U.S. Filmmaker Ken Burns: "The Revolution Was Our Civil War"

The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis (1820) is an oil painting by John Trumbull. It depicts the successful siege of Yorktown, Virginia, by General George Washington in October 1781, ending major fighting in the American Revolution (1775-1783).

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The manner of "weaving together" the stories of people from all quarters is a hallmark of Ken Burns' 40 "director-cut" films, most of which chronicle the history and culture of the United States.

The American Revolution, a six-part, 12-hour series by Ken Burns and his colleagues, is scheduled to premiere on November 16, according to PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) Shows. Burns credits PBS for giving him the luxury of time for his work.

Next year will mark the 250th year of the United States' Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, severing the 13 colonies' political connection to Great Britain, according to the Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. By declaring themselves independent, the colonists were able to confirm an official alliance with France and obtain French assistance in their revolution against Britain.

"By weaving together accounts of American political thinkers and their British counterparts with the perspectives of the so-called ordinary people who waged and witnessed war, The American Revolution will be an expansive, evenhanded look at the virtues and the contradictions in the fight for independence and the birth of the United States.," according to the Ken Burns' website.

Burns, 72, compared the spinning out of a story to embodying all the spokes of a wheel in an interview on Influential With Katty Kay, BBC News (April 4), some of which is recounted below:

We have become so attached to facile and really non-existent binaries that everything is always argument.

When, in fact, the essence of a good story is the disarming of argument in favor of accepting the possibility, as Wynton Marsalis said in my jazz film (Jazz, 2001), that sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing could be true at the same time.

We understand that in our personal lives. We understand that in our intimate lives. We understand that in great stories. We just can't drag it into a very public sphere these days. It has to be an argument.

It has to be either lost or won; up or down; good or bad; gay or straight; male or female, all of these things that we do. And they're non-existent. What you forget is the best stories are like a wheel in which you are aware of all the spokes, and things can co-exist that are contradictory. That's the essence, that it isn't an agenda-based narrative.

It's just the whole, wild, unformed thing, which you have to figure out how to honor . . . So, you have to find a way that both respects the perfection of what takes place in all of human events and what goes on in the universe and, then, how we humans tell the story. . . . We edit human experience. When it's big stuff, like the kinds of themes we try to tackle, you've got an obligation. . . .

The American Revolution has become so protected and encased in a sort of amber because we accept the violence of the Civil War. We accept the violence of all the 20th-century wars that we've been in. But the revolution -- these are great ideas -- and they are -- great men thinking great ideas but, you forget, it's our civil war. Our civil war is a sectional war; the revolution is a civil war.

At least 20 percent, maybe 25 percent, in some areas much more, are Loyalists remaining faithful to the king. There's nothing wrong with the status quo. That's called a conservative. That's what you do. And the patriots were risking everything. And lots of people were just sort of paying attention to who's going to win and just wanting to stay out of harm's way. . . .

It's interesting what you say about the Revolutionary War. It makes me think about the Holocaust and America. You approached it from this unusual angle of America's relationship with the Holocaust (The U.S. and the Holocaust, 2022). Are you trying consciously to expose questions rather than, I suppose, provide answers that people don't want to broach, necessarily, or thought about broaching? Am I being too grandiose?

Yes, because it implies a sort of intentionality to it. When you see that something is a good story, you want to do it. That means that if you're going to dive deep, you're inevitably going to bring up contradictory and complex stories that go fundamentally to who we are, who we like to think we are, who we're not even though we think we are, and all of the possible combinations in between.

That's a complicated thing to do.

You want to make sure, in the course of that, that there's no scold. There's no particular political thumb that you're placing on the scale, that anybody, any American, any human being . . . would be drawn to . . .(the story).

Stories are one way of keeping things a little bit alive. The best stories also wake us up to the realities of what our future will be.

In my case, I take the past to tell us something about not where we are and where we're going to be -- those are byproducts of the films -- but where we've been and how very very much they were exactly like us. . . .

Ecclesiastes, in the Old Testament, said . . . "There's nothing new under the sun", which means human nature doesn't change.

So, every time we work for 10 years on a project of the national parks (The National Parks, 2009) or Vietnam (The Vietnam War, 2017) or the American Revolution (The American Revolution, 2025). . . you look up at the end and you go, "Oh, my God. It's so much like today: this venality, this virtue, this greed. It's repeating itself. We know these people, and we understand the people who are both. Sometimes we sort of say, "Oh you're bad, and you're good." What we understand from honesty about ourselves -- we've got both of those things in us.

We've done some bad things, and we've done some good things. How do we reconcile all of that?

So, we don't have to throw anybody out. We don't have to cancel anybody out. Nor do we have to present some treacly superficial version of American history. We can just say, "Call balls and strikes". (Baseball, 1994). And you know what? The perspective of the shortstop is really different than the perspective of the right-fielder or the catcher. And we want to have all those perspectives as well as the people sitting on the bench, and the manager and the people in the stands.

Whatever we do, it's going to be like today because human beings don't change.

It's all in the spokes.

It's all in the spokes. That human beings don't change can be cripplingly sad. And it also can be something to rejoice about. Within those parameters lies human experience: the fact that we don't learn and the fact that we do learn.

When you think about America, it seems that there's almost an America you're longing to describe or searching for or portraying, a kind of de Tocquevilllan America of shared experience and community. (Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the influential Democracy in America, 1835-1840). I was wondering if that's why you go to history so often, that you find it more in history than you might find it today.

No. I live in a small town (Walpole, New Hampshire, population 3,600). You see it every day, the willingness to help another, to wave at as I walk three miles every morning with my dog. I wave at every car whether they wave back or not. Most people wave back.

I think maybe at the beginning, growing up, I had a kind of idealized version of my country. I love my country. I don't know anyone who loves their country more than me. As I learned to tell the stories, I learned how complicated it was from the very very beginning, from the first stories that we're telling, that for every thing, the opposite might be true. So, it became incumbent to try to figure out how.

I've worked, principally, with Geoffrey Ward who has been a master as a writer in tolerating the contradictions between Americans and within Americans. Somebody like Thomas Jefferson, who is able to distill a century of Enlightenment thinking into one remarkable sentence --I think the most important sentence in the English language after "I love you" -- that begins "We hold these truths to be self-evident". He said "sacred and undeniable" and (Benjamin) Franklin said no, "self-evident".

The last thing in the world that was self-evident were the truths that (Jefferson) was about to articulate. They were not. Everybody was a subject up to that point, and he was suggesting something else. He said that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator -- meaning this is not bestowed by any monarch -- with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

He owned hundreds of human beings in his lifetime. He knew it was wrong, and he kept doing it. The historian Annette Gordon-Reed, in the film, said: "Why, if you knew it was wrong, and you could do it? That's the question for all of us," which was exactly the right answer.

The impulse is to go either to shame Jefferson or be upset with anybody who even brought up the fact that Jefferson did that. "Why are you muddying the waters?"

What we've saying is that American history is a mirror that holds up to us an incredibly complicated story of us. I've said this: I make films about the U.S., but I make films about us and all the intimacy of that lower-case two letter plural pronoun, all the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty, the complexity, the contradiction and, even, controversy of the United States.

If I were given 3,000 years to live, and I will not, I would not run out of topics in American history.