Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein spent nearly a decade making a twelve-hour documentary on the American Revolution. This is what they learned from the thousands of stories and events that resulted in the United States of America. It's a story of world-changing ideas, contradictory figures, myths that do us no good and what it means to be in pursuit of a more perfect union.
You can watch Ken Burns The American Revolution on PBS, PBS.org and the free PBS app.
Transcript
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:02] You ever think it's a little odd that we have spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours talking about what [00:00:10] we are, who we are, how we work, why we exist, what all of this is based on. And yet, Nick. Yet we [00:00:20] have never really talked about the beginning. The war that changed everything. And [00:00:30] I mean everything.
Ken Burns: [00:00:32] You think you know something about the revolution and then what you learn over the next nine and a half years is that you knew nothing about the revolution.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:39] I'm Hannah [00:00:40] McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:40] I'm Nick Capodice. This is Civics 101. And today we are speaking with two people who radically opened my eyes to the thing that I, and I dare say, many of [00:00:50] us, thought we knew a lot about.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:54] We were wrong.
Ken Burns: [00:00:56] I'm Ken Burns, I am a co-director and co-producer of the [00:01:00] series The American Revolution with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt.
Sarah Botstein: [00:01:04] My Name is Sarah Botstein, and I co-produced and co-directed the series along with [00:01:10] Ken and David Schmidt.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:12] If you've missed it on PBS or you're not television inclined, the whole series is available to stream on PBS.org. Hannah [00:01:20] and I have watched it, all of it, and I'll just speak for myself. I feel like I just met America.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:31] In [00:01:30] this episode is a little bit different from your typical Civics 101, wherein we pick a topic and explain that one thing as best we can, because today [00:01:40] we're not going to explain the Revolutionary War to you. If you want that, I warmly recommend you dig into the documentary. Instead, we are going to talk about what it was like [00:01:50] for Ken and Sarah to make this project, what they learned, and how they think about the seven plus year conflict that resulted in an entirely new nation, [00:02:00] and how they approach the story of America and the study of history itself.
Ken Burns: [00:02:06] Do you think you know something about George Washington? You knew nothing about George Washington. [00:02:10] You hadn't heard of most of the people that we introduced you in the film, let alone, you know, got to know them in intimate ways.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:18] It's remarkable to me the [00:02:20] degree to which the elements and players of the American Revolution lived in my mind as these abstract, two dimensional things. Now, this is despite nine years [00:02:30] working at civics 101. We throw around names of people and places like they mean something, which they do, just maybe not what you [00:02:40] thought.
Ken Burns: [00:02:40] So it's very much a steep learning curve for us. And then what that translates into is less an arrogance of me telling you, Sarah, and I telling you what [00:02:50] you've got to know is sharing with you our process of discovery. And the whole thing is a process of discovery. And it's not so much additive as it is subtractive. We [00:03:00] collect as much stuff as we can and then try to keep in as much nuance. We've got a neon sign in the editing room that says it's complicated. Because [00:03:10] we always are looking for the destabilizing, not for the sake of it, but just because when you've got a scene that's [00:03:20] working and then you learn an important nuance.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:23] This reminded me so much, Hannah, of the many times that one of us has discovered a great anecdote from history that [00:03:30] seems to explain everything in this nice, neat, tidy little package. And then we do a little more research. And wouldn't you know, it's complicated.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:39] Yeah, that is [00:03:40] why I appreciate the term destabilizing so much here. Nice, neat and tidy is rarely the whole truth, but it sure is easier to swallow. And [00:03:50] when you're making a documentary about the Revolutionary War, you're butting up against so many assumptions and myths and tidy Heidi boxes that make the story [00:04:00] seem less complicated. Our story.
Ken Burns: [00:04:03] You know what I tell groups of people, not just kids like. And the kids always know the answer to this. The [00:04:10] first part of it is, how were the colonists, both rich and poor, all men who dumped the tea into Boston Harbor, dressed. And the kids all go. And some of the adults [00:04:20] go dressed as Native Americans. And then you say, why? And there's a big silence. And you get a few people very understandably, saying to deflect the blame, to [00:04:30] put the blame right. Which is, what if we're honest with ourselves? That's probably what we thought, if we'd even gotten that far in thinking. But as the scholar Phil Deloria [00:04:40] tells us in our film, no, it's a way of making you yourself distinct, however ironic the undertow of that is making you distinct. We're no longer, he says, [00:04:50] of the motherland. We're Aboriginal. So all of a sudden, how their dress becomes a gigantic statement, given the fact that the last 150 years [00:05:00] has been about the displacement of native peoples from their lands, and the next 150 years will be the completion of the job all the way to the Pacific. But there how do [00:05:10] they distinguish themselves in this moment of great, not just symbolic, but real protest is to say we are no longer connected with the mother country. Now, that's something [00:05:20] that, for me, was as big a thing as anything I've ever come across.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:29] So I have to admit here, [00:05:30] Hannah, this directly contradicts what I learned reporting on my own episode on protest. The idea that the colonists were trying to pass the blame on to a group, that they were actively [00:05:40] displacing, a group they saw as the other. Like that makes sense. That's a dichotomy. That's, as you put it, easy to swallow.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:50] And [00:05:50] the true story reveals this complex rationale and perspective. The colonists appropriation Procreation is this strange paradox. I think it says a lot about [00:06:00] Boston colonial hypocrisy, romanticism mindsets before the war began, what at that moment, these protesters thought would best project [00:06:10] independent Americanism. Regardless of the irony that's clear to us today, the true story forces us to consider these coexisting, contradictory elements [00:06:20] of a story we thought we knew pretty well.
Ken Burns: [00:06:22] Having a little fact and every little place. If you if you spend the time we've spent working on this working and engaging in the [00:06:30] scholars, everything has a little bit of undertow, has a little bit of quicksand, has a little bit of the opposite, as well as the other opposite being true [00:06:40] at the same time. And that's exhilarating if if you're open to it.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:44] I love comparing these complications to Undertow in Quicksand. Hannah, you know, you're swimming along. [00:06:50] You're walking along. La la la. This is the path I know. And then all of a sudden, whoosh, you go under. And [00:07:00] you can either avoid the ocean, avoid the fire swamp, or you can say, wow, now I can draw the real map. Now I know what's really [00:07:10] going on here.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:11] Yeah. And we're going to come back to this piece soon, because Ken has a lot more to say about holding both the good story and the unsavory story in your mind at [00:07:20] the same time. And there's a good reason to do that. But to get all those little pieces calm, surface and undertow, Sara and Ken had to find [00:07:30] those pieces. They had to ask many, many people what they knew about the story.
Sarah Botstein: [00:07:36] Take Maggie Blackhawk. She's a very well renowned legal [00:07:40] scholar. Take Vince Brown. He's a specialist in the Caribbean experience of the war. When we started, if someone said to me, oh, are you going to have a Caribbean scholar, I would have gone, [00:07:50] ah, I have no idea. But the more we read and learned, the more we realized realize how important the Caribbean is to the history of the American Revolution. And [00:08:00] then there are more generalists like Alan Taylor and Jane Kaminsky. And then there's, you know, the British side of the struggle, the British perspective. And that's Christopher Brown, [00:08:10] who's a wonderful scholar, teaches the American Revolution, but is really interested in the British piece of it, along with Stephen Conway. And then, [00:08:20] you know, the writers Rick Atkinson, Nathaniel Philbrick, Stacy Schiff, Bill Hoagland, add something that the academics don't.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:28] It actually reminds me of the [00:08:30] parable of the five blind men and the elephant. Except this elephant is many years long and thousands of miles large, and you need the person who sees [00:08:40] the wall of it, the person who sees the snake, the one who sees the tree, etc. and you've got to put all that together to see the elephant.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:48] And the documentary [00:08:50] examines these many pieces over and over again. Some of the strange truths of the revolution are difficult to internalize. For example, the [00:09:00] fact that this was a war fought amongst ourselves. We think Redcoats versus revolutionaries, British versus American. But that distinction was new [00:09:10] and often murky at the time.
Sarah Botstein: [00:09:12] It's a world war. It's a civil war. It involves all kinds of people from all different backgrounds, who make all kinds [00:09:20] of really interesting choices that have a lot to learn from why they made those choices. So, you know, you're asking the viewer to think a, [00:09:30] what does this have to do with me? Can I find myself in this history? How does it inform my idea of being an American citizen in 2025? What is the responsibility [00:09:40] that I have?
Ken Burns: [00:09:41] I had an experience sitting right where I am of sharing the introduction to this film with a dear friend, and at the end of it she said, I wonder what side I'd [00:09:50] be on. I wonder whether there would be a cause that I would fight for. Would I be willing to kill someone [00:10:00] for that cause? Now, you'd think somebody had been working on this film for seven years, would go, yeah, [00:10:10] I think about that every day. And I went, I don't think I'd thought about it that way. I thought about like, you know, could I have been a loyalist? I just every [00:10:20] American would like to assume they'd be a patriot. Could I have been a loyalist? Yeah. I do have an ancestor that was a loyalist and signed an oath of allegiance and ended up in New Brunswick.
Nick Capodice: [00:10:30] Have [00:10:30] you ever thought about this, Hannah? Whether you could have been a loyalist?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:34] Only ever since I read that loyalists existed in the colonies in the Felicity American Girl doll books. But [00:10:40] I cannot emphasize enough, Nick, how much growing up near Boston influences your understanding of the American Revolution and which side you should be on. And we [00:10:50] romanticized it. In my mind, the words American Revolution were surrounded by glittering stars and flags, and there was inspirational music playing in this feeling [00:11:00] of this rightful victory. But really, we're talking about a long and bloody war against friends and neighbors. And Ken and Sarah are not here [00:11:10] to keep that romantic vision up.
Sarah Botstein: [00:11:12] It was a really terrible war, and a lot of mothers lost their sons and sisters lost their brothers, and people died and families were divided. [00:11:20] And it took almost a decade for that to happen.
Ken Burns: [00:11:26] They fought each other. They killed each other. The lesson is the collective lesson [00:11:30] that we can take, that violence doesn't work. When do human beings decide that their an impasse and skip the fighting in the killing part and jump to the negotiation part? That's a huge thing, because [00:11:40] I think what we think is we have these great thoughts. And then there was Lexington and Concord, and then the British surrendered at Yorktown. That's six and a half years later. And the Treaty of Paris is not until eight years later. [00:11:50] And the British don't leave until eight and a half and two months later from New York City, their big stronghold for most of the war, from September 15th, 1776 [00:12:00] to November 25th. This is an occupied nation. So there were pacifists and many of them were loyalists, right? There was a pacifist, Nathanael Greene, who turns [00:12:10] out to be our second best general in the course of things, and he decides that pacifism is a little kind of not quite to the point right now, given what's going on. Meaning he [00:12:20] wants to be in on the fighting.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:25] So we've been talking, Hannah, about holding both the good and the unsavory, [00:12:30] the glittering and the tarnished in your mind at the same time when it comes to the American Revolution. That's how you actually get to a real understanding. Right. And [00:12:40] hand in hand with this bloody war are these glorious ideals of liberty and equality. And what's remarkable to me is the fact that despite [00:12:50] these being goals written by white land owning men. For white land owning men, it was not just white land owning men fighting this war, and it was not [00:13:00] just white land owning men who believed in these ideals, who wanted them, expected them.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:05] And this is something that you and I talk about a lot, right? Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration [00:13:10] of Independence, famously writes, all men are created equal. Now, he may have meant all white, land owning men like me, but [00:13:20] he wrote.
Sarah Botstein: [00:13:22] All the American Revolution isn't just, you know, fancy guys in Philadelphia duking out great thoughts and [00:13:30] leaving a lot of people out from their original thinking. But maybe they weren't really leaving people out. They just it was going to take us a while to actually get there.
Ken Burns: [00:13:38] We had an experience last week [00:13:40] with the conservative scholar Yuval Levin. He just said, you know, among many, many startling and wonderful, wonderful things. And we were so pleased that he had loved [00:13:50] the entire film and had watched it. But but more important, he said, when you say all men are created equal, once you say the word all.
Sarah Botstein: [00:13:59] It's there you go.
Ken Burns: [00:14:00] It's [00:14:00] all it's.
Sarah Botstein: [00:14:02] Might take us a while.
Ken Burns: [00:14:03] Now. He may mean only white men of property free of debt, but all is all. And that means that [00:14:10] the second that all comes out, slavery is over. It's going to take fourscore in nine years. But it's over in the United States.
Sarah Botstein: [00:14:18] A little while for Hannah and me to get the right to vote. [00:14:20]
Ken Burns: [00:14:20] Hannah and Sarah get the right to vote 144 years later.
Sarah Botstein: [00:14:23] 44 years later.
Ken Burns: [00:14:24] But it's it's done. Suffragists happen.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:33] I [00:14:30] got excited here because this is actually an argument that I have made quite a few times in my personal life when [00:14:40] I'm asked what makes me feel patriotic, what I love about this country, what's so great about democracy after all? Et cetera. Et cetera. To me, a big part of it is that a rich, [00:14:50] white, powerful man made a strong choice of words, and everybody kind of called his bluff.
Ken Burns: [00:14:56] It wasn't until the slave owners [00:15:00] were complaining that the British were treating them like they were slaves, and that concurrent with that is the release of this document that all men are created equal, that is not just heard [00:15:10] by George Washington. And Thomas Jefferson said, oh, whoa, boy. That's good. Tom. Yeah. Thanks, George. You know, it was like heard by the people who were serving them food. Everybody [00:15:20] heard it as Maggie Blackhawk, the scholar says in our film. It's deeply significant to people at the margins who don't have that and won't have that for [00:15:30] a significant amount of time. And so Bernard Bailyn, he said, you know, after the revolution, there wasn't a moment when we weren't talking about slavery. And so the cat is out of [00:15:40] the bag. So what? There is this democratic spirit that is released, both intended and unintentional. And the unintentional is as important as the intentional, like democracy [00:15:50] itself was not an intention of the revolution. It's a byproduct. They imagine a kind of Republican aristocracy that would rule things of white men, of property free [00:16:00] of debt. And that's what he meant when he said, all men are created equal.
Ken Burns: [00:16:06] But the people who won the revolution for those people were [00:16:10] teenagers and ne'er do wells, and second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance and recent immigrants and, you know, a whole bunch of people that they hadn't expected, freed [00:16:20] and enslaved black people and native people who were allies. I mean, this was a whole big, you know, like a World War Two bomber movie, you know, group of characters. [00:16:30] And they're going to need something at the end for what they did for the sacrifice they made. So democracy becomes [00:16:40] a consequence, perhaps unintended, a consequence of the revolution and not an intention. So, Hannah, that's the $64,000 [00:16:50] question. That's the grand slam home run of it is what happens when you create these conditions in which this argument between Englishmen breaks [00:17:00] out into, because we're in the enlightenment big, huge, big idea, natural rights, meaning everybody. And all of a sudden when you say all men are created equal, as [00:17:10] Yuval says, that all you know, it's all it means all. What part of all don't you understand? [00:17:20]
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:27] And you know, you can look at these as these white, land owning, [00:17:30] powerful men slipping up and accidentally opening the floodgates for the teenagers and the ne'er do wells, and the third sons and the new immigrants and the women and the freed [00:17:40] and enslaved black people and the native people. You can look at it as greedy elites who barely saw the rest of the nation, who were often flawed and immoral. And [00:17:50] you can throw them out but keep their good ideas. But that can explained is not going to get us very far.
Ken Burns: [00:17:58] And you begin to realize, [00:18:00] as Jefferson is distilling this in the words that are both poetic and vague, that he's just he's left room for the rest of us to drive a truck [00:18:10] through it. So while we spend all of our time in a kind of false binary sort of, do we throw Jefferson out? Do we keep Jeff? You know, what do we do? [00:18:20] He's there. We just call balls and strikes. But, you know, as as Annette Gordon-Reed says, he knew slavery was wrong. And how do you do something if you know it's wrong? She says that's a question for [00:18:30] all of us. She's not letting Jefferson off the hook. She's keeping him on the hook, but she's putting the rest of us on the hook for not being as we are not true to what is right and true all [00:18:40] the time. And so you can take the experience of the American Revolution and turn it into a skull. Tisk, tisk and cancel somebody. You can elevate [00:18:50] other people who have the same flaws that Jefferson has, right? Or or different variations of of human frailty and flaws. Or you can accept them and understand [00:19:00] how we're going to take this recipe and continually improve on it, because it's a much richer recipe right now. The cake we got out [00:19:10] of it in 1776 was delicious, but it's a hundred times more delicious now.
Nick Capodice: [00:19:19] I feel Hannah, like [00:19:20] so much of our conversation with Ken and Sarah, was a reminder to hang on to both the bathwater and the baby.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:27] You learn a lot more about the supposedly glittering thing, [00:19:30] if you can see the mess that it came from.
Nick Capodice: [00:19:32] So it can be less messy in the future.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:34] So we can be less messy in the future.
Ken Burns: [00:19:37] Mark Twain said nothing so needs reforming [00:19:40] as other people's habits, right? Meaning we're always willing to tell Hannah or Nick what they need to do, right? [00:19:50] It's what I am responsible to do. This is. This is the great anxiety of atoms. How will I change myself? How will I participate in these fraught times? To be a better citizen, [00:20:00] to contribute to the progress, the pursuit of happiness and a more perfect union? What? What will that entail?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:08] What that entails after [00:20:10] the break.
Nick Capodice: [00:20:11] But before that break, it is no 12 hour Revolutionary War documentary. But Hannah and I did write a book. A book in which we share the story of America, why we're [00:20:20] here and what we are doing. It also includes the brilliant illustrations from our friend and New Yorker cartoonist Tom Toro. Check it out. It's called A User's Guide to Democracy How [00:20:30] America Works.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:50] We're [00:20:50] back. Today we are sharing a conversation with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, who together with their team and a host of scholars and writers in nearly ten years of work, [00:21:00] created a documentary, The American Revolution.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:03] And just before the break, we got to one of my favorite subjects from our conversation with Ken and Sarah, using our [00:21:10] understanding of our history and the flaws and mistakes and the victories and the glory of the past to make us more perfect, which is, incidentally, the only [00:21:20] way this is going to work.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:21] Yeah, to that point, there's this moment in the documentary, you've got Paul Giamatti reading a letter written by John Adams, and Adam says, basically, this [00:21:30] thing isn't going to work unless people put society above themselves.
Ken Burns: [00:21:36] And that's why we teach civics, which is to arm our our [00:21:40] young citizens with the tools necessary to continue the lifelong learning, the pursuit of happiness that they said was necessary in order to [00:21:50] keep up with stuff.
Sarah Botstein: [00:21:51] And make a virtuous public.
Ken Burns: [00:21:53] Yeah.
Sarah Botstein: [00:21:53] Virtue.
Ken Burns: [00:21:54] There's too much ambition and avarice, too much greed, too much lust for profit. There's not enough virtue [00:22:00] to create what we're going to need. And this is the anxiety we've always had. And this is a human thing he's worried not about. Like in this particular case, he's talking [00:22:10] about human nature everywhere. He's talking about Kazakhstan and Peru. Right. And Iceland. That's what he's talking about [00:22:20] as well, because these are you know, the great thing about the declaration is, he says, we hold these truths to be self-evident. There is nothing self-evident about these truths. Actually, he wrote, [00:22:30] we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. That's actually more accurate to the thing. Meaning we're telling you something new, self-evident says [00:22:40] everybody's always believed this, but it's not true. But it's it's Franklin who adds the self-evident and scratches out in the first draft, which you can see [00:22:50] in in our film twice, you know, the sacred and undeniable. Just terrific, terrific editing on the part of Franklin of Jefferson's, you know, beautiful, beautiful [00:23:00] prose. And the most important word is not happiness, which they meant was like learning, learning, learning and virtue. Virtue, virtue, as Sarah would say. But [00:23:10] it's pursuit. Right. It's we're a process, and we're all the way through this. And then in the Constitution, which is, you know, many [00:23:20] years later. Right? Right. A dozen years later, we're, we're saying a more perfect union. So we're always putting [00:23:30] the goalposts ahead of us. The perfection is impossible, right? The happiness is unattainable. But we are [00:23:40] obligated as citizens, not subjects. Subjects can just remain ignorant in a kind of superstitious peasantry, right? But as a citizen, [00:23:50] you don't give up. You just keep learning and you just figure out a new way to sort of parse the complexity, even the impossibility of these [00:24:00] sentences, these phrases.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:04] The American Revolution can be, and often is told to us as a story of ideal [00:24:10] union of collective America, the United States. But that, as Ken says, [00:24:20] is the goalpost that we never actually reach. We weren't there then. We are not there now. We're moving toward it, and [00:24:30] looking back and seeing just how far we've come is integral to the project.
Sarah Botstein: [00:24:36] I was born in 1972. I have very little memories of [00:24:40] the Bicentennial, and in my imagination When we started the film, I was like, oh, the country was totally united then and we had parades and people [00:24:50] were flying the flag and daughters of the American Revolution. Okay, well, some of that happened, but the country was wildly divided. It was the fall of Saigon. People couldn't [00:25:00] agree about anything. There was huge social upheaval. So as Ken was just saying, we have always been divided. We need to listen to each other. We need [00:25:10] to think about where our divisions lie. We need to inspire people to be engaged in their local communities. I think that's where we [00:25:20] have a lot to learn from the revolution. They were not. First of all, they didn't know how it was going to turn out right. So Ken always says George Washington doesn't know he's going to be George Washington. [00:25:30] Thomas Jefferson is 34 years old, 33 years old, 33 or 34 when he writes the declaration, they're just like really smart revolutionaries duking it [00:25:40] out amongst themselves. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson couldn't agree. But they love each other at the end because they can't agree, right? And we've watched [00:25:50] in 250 years so much of their debate play out.
Ken Burns: [00:25:57] We've been doing this for a long time, making films about American [00:26:00] history for 50 years. And, um, you learn a lot of things. And what the revolution really reminds us is how divided we were back then. [00:26:10] Really divided. Way more divided than we are now. We kind of think of it. Oh, it's an argument, as we say in the introduction, it's not just a clash between Englishmen over Indian [00:26:20] land and taxes and representation, but a bloody struggle that would involve more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American, that somehow came to be about the [00:26:30] noblest aspirations of humankind. So all of that stuff exists. We were divided when we began this. We're obviously divided now as we finish it and share it with the world. [00:26:40]
Nick Capodice: [00:26:42] This conversation with Ken and Sarah was such an important reminder to me of what history is for Hannah and [00:26:50] how we can and should use what happened 250 years ago to get through the next 250.
Ken Burns: [00:26:56] And what we do know is that history, as you guys know, is [00:27:00] the greatest teacher. And so we just know that it helps to have that kind of perspective. It may make you less of a chicken little. The sky is falling. It may give you more confidence [00:27:10] to reengage with those noble aspirations of humankind in a way that you hadn't really thought of. It may make you understand George Washington a little [00:27:20] bit better. Or what a ten year old girl? What's happening to her in 1775, when the war begins, all of these things are possible. And that's where history just opens up. You know, [00:27:30] I've given a few commencement addresses, and I remember the first as approaching the first one with great anxiety. And someone said, well, whatever you do, don't tell them their future lies ahead of them. That's [00:27:40] such a cliche. So I said, okay, and I admitted that somebody had said that. And so I said, I want to talk to you today about how your future lies behind you in the history you don't know. [00:27:50] And that's I still firmly that was, you know, in the mid 80s. I still firmly believe that. And, and I think that we have this opportunity [00:28:00] to sort of Lincoln says it in a message to Congress. He first says, fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us [00:28:10] down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. Then he changes courses and he goes. The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. [00:28:20] As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves. That means don't be a slave to and then we can save our country. So he's not [00:28:30] contradictory. He's understanding that it is both true. We have to gather the threads of our past, but we also have to see this as a completely new situation.
Nick Capodice: [00:28:43] Disenthrall [00:28:40] ourselves really got to me, as Lincoln often does. I think it can be difficult to understand [00:28:50] what really happened before. Understand that we are a product of that. Keep that history in mind as we look to the future, but also know that the past is not [00:29:00] some transparent blueprint. You can just lay over the present.
Ken Burns: [00:29:04] Are there federal troops in US cities? Yes. Is this like the standing army that everybody got [00:29:10] so upset about? When General Gage sent the regiments from Halifax, Nova Scotia, into Boston not to protect them, but to police them? Yes, but it's really different set of circumstances. [00:29:20] So if you take the reaction of the colonists to this and apply it to now, you've missed the boat, you have to both disenthrall ourselves because our case is new. [00:29:30] And at the same time, you have to realize the inescapability of history. And if you can hold those two seemingly contradictory things just as he does, Lincoln does in the second inaugural [00:29:40] when he's very Old Testament, you know, if if it's going to take 500 years with every drop of blood drawn by the lash, it'll be drawn by the sword. Meaning, you know, you want to keep this up, we will keep this [00:29:50] up. And then he pivots and goes from Old Testament to New Testament with malice towards none, with charity for all. This [00:30:00] is what we have to do as citizens. We are required. This is what the declaration also says. Pursuit of happiness is lifelong learning, [00:30:10] not acquisition of stuff. It's lifelong learning is the ability to tolerate these contradictions and to learn and grow from them and work from them. And the reason [00:30:20] why history is for so many people boring is because it's always one dimensional when it has dimension to it, when it has story to it, when it [00:30:30] isn't just an argument, a one thing or another, then it blossoms. And like a garden, it just continually bears fruit.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:41] Over [00:30:40] the course of watching this documentary, I gasped, I sobbed, I laughed, I furiously texted my friends asking if they [00:30:50] knew the whole story of Benedict Arnold. They definitely didn't. And for me personally, gaining a new level of understanding, standing [00:31:00] in the multidimensional garden of complex stories and people from one of our most mythologized eras, it's like getting to be Ralph [00:31:10] Waldo Emerson's transparent eyeball.
Nick Capodice: [00:31:12] You're gonna have to give me a little bit more there.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:31:14] Okay. Emerson was actually talking about dissolving the ego and seeing everything becoming one with nature. [00:31:20] You're this transparent eyeball that sees it all. Right. But my point is, there are these boundaries and biases that, at least for me, [00:31:30] fall away when you open history up, when you see how flawed and complex people were and are messy. Blood and bone. But [00:31:40] with these astonishing, glittering ideals, those were humans back there, fighting and arguing and working toward a goal so spectacular [00:31:50] that it is still ahead of us. And the reason we're here today is because we are still fighting and arguing and working toward [00:32:00] that goal. And you can either call that madness or you can go out and be a part of the tussle.
Sarah Botstein: [00:32:07] The inspiration I hope people take [00:32:10] from the show is that you do have a voice that our founders wanted us to be involved, that our founders wanted us to debate our neighbors civilly [00:32:20] and with virtue, and to try to figure it out. So I don't want that to sound naive. I truly mean it. I mean, we were I was just thinking [00:32:30] we were making this film as we were finishing a film that came out three years ago on the US and the Holocaust. And one of the things that that film studies is how quickly [00:32:40] the world descended into a world war and how America changed, and also stayed exactly the same through [00:32:50] the depression. And what you know, what America was like in the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s. And in that film, there is an enormous amount to celebrate [00:33:00] about the American military achievement in the Second World War, and a lot to be very discouraged about when it comes to America's history [00:33:10] of antisemitism, nativism, isolationist tendencies. And both those things happen in that film. And here we are talking about the American [00:33:20] Revolution a few years later, and there are so many pieces that those two films can learn from each other in thinking about the past. But the thing that's the same at [00:33:30] the end of both of them, you should vote. You should care about your local library. You should care about your local school board. Politics starts locally, and John Adams [00:33:40] and Thomas Jefferson knew that in their own 18th century way.
Ken Burns: [00:33:43] Sarah's absolutely right. Let's just pull something out from the revolutionary period, which we can agree on. [00:33:50] So we win the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. We have a Treaty of Paris in 1783. The British leave at the end of November of 1783, [00:34:00] and things go to hell in a handbasket. The Articles of Confederation are toothless and ineffective, and we then in 1787, decide we need to have a constitutional [00:34:10] convention. George, will you please come out of retirement and chair this? Be the president of this? Okay. They make phenomenal compromises, some genius, some unbelievably tragic, [00:34:20] and they work out a system. But then, as Annette Gordon-Reed says, what follows is one of the greatest periods of public debate in the history of the world. [00:34:30] There's not a Shays Rebellion that's not old soldiers killing each other [00:34:40] over taxes in Massachusetts or this or that. It's people engaging. And what they all want is they want this new blueprint. But the blueprint is without poetry, [00:34:50] except for the preamble. It's code. And they said, we need to append to this code what we actually just spent all this time fighting for [00:35:00] which we call the Bill of rights.
Ken Burns: [00:35:02] It is an itemization of everything they think that they've earned. And all of this takes place with vigorous public conversation [00:35:10] and revision. We got to the tent almost simultaneously with the various new states of the United States ratifying this [00:35:20] unusual document. Never before in the history of humankind and then said, we enshrine these things, right. Just the first one alone is like [00:35:30] the whole stuff. No, the government will not establish a particular religion. They saw that religion was at the heart of most of the struggles that had taken place in [00:35:40] the world, or the excuse used to as a cudgel against your enemy will make no religion. It gives you the chance to have the free expression of whatever your religion [00:35:50] is. There's freedom of the press, the freedom of speech to articulate what they want, and the freedom to address one's grievances peacefully. Address one's grievances. I mean, you just just [00:36:00] in the First Amendment alone, you have the biggest package of happiness that human beings have ever tied and put a bow on to just amendment [00:36:10] number one.
Nick Capodice: [00:36:15] So remember, at the end of our conversation with Ken and Sarah Hannah, we asked them about community, [00:36:20] specifically what it takes to put down the individual personal things that we cling to, the things we hold up as shields or swords [00:36:30] against those who have different shields and swords. Because a question you and I are asking ourselves all the time is how do we talk to one another [00:36:40] and combine our efforts? How do we live as the all instead of the one as the Pluribus? Not just the Unum. [00:36:50] And how is the story of the American Revolution the true story? I mean, a piece of the answer.
Sarah Botstein: [00:36:57] Really at the heart of for me. I'll just [00:37:00] say for myself, any film I've worked on over the 30 years of working with Ken, I think that humility. I think [00:37:10] we almost want our viewer to subtly put that hat on. Please come on. This exploration of [00:37:20] this subject, that is the American experiment, that is American history. And this is it's our origin story. So there's more in this to [00:37:30] a be humble about B to think very seriously about see to be deeply patriotic about for very [00:37:40] complicated reasons, patriotism. To me personally, I feel like I've learned a lot about patriotism and thought a lot about patriotism in making this particular film. [00:37:50] And to your first question, talking to the scholars that have thought about it, watching our country go through the last two big election cycles that it's gone through, seeing what's [00:38:00] happening on the world stage, understanding over 250 years where I personally think America has done well and been a beacon of hope and example, and [00:38:10] where I think we haven't done well, and how both those things together give me energy and optimism to fight for a better future, the [00:38:20] more humble we become. No question about that. The more we listen, the more we experience, the better we become. The [00:38:30] healthier we are. Our families are. Our communities are, our Republic is. And that's I mean, speaking for myself, that's at the heart of the work that we do.
Ken Burns: [00:38:41] What [00:38:40] is worth fighting for, if it if it comes to that? What is worth killing for? Maybe you'd [00:38:50] hope that humanity would be at a place where it didn't do any of that. That it found a way to solve it. But I also think I mean, you think about D-Day. [00:39:00] And you've got farm kids from Iowa [00:39:10] or Nebraska who are landing at Omaha Beach, the worst of all of the landing spots. They're not getting paid anything [00:39:20] to speak of. There is no territory that the United States is gaining. There's no looting. [00:39:30] There's no profit. They are there because of an idea and it's so powerful [00:39:40] an idea born or at least articulated on July 4th, 1776. It is so powerful that nearly 200 years [00:39:50] later, people are willing to sacrifice. So maybe [00:40:00] not so much. What would I be willing to kill for? But what would I be willing to die for in the service of these ideas? And it is our collective [00:40:10] failure. I mean, the four of us, that we have a system around us that is often ignorant even of the [00:40:20] essential ability to ask these questions of themselves. A lot of it has to do with our failure to teach our history well, or to understand the centrality [00:40:30] of civics, which isn't just, you know, 100 senators and 435 representatives and three branches of government. But it's I live in a tiny town in New Hampshire. And, you [00:40:40] know, it's whether we buy this fire truck that costs $350,000 or $450,000 this year. And what do we do about this little problem [00:40:50] about parking over here? All of that? Things are part of this bigger, bigger thing that we've said by virtue of being an [00:41:00] American, that we're going to be part of. And so it's now how do we how do we shout to every Middlesex village and farm the alarm? You know, not that the British are coming. They didn't say [00:41:10] that. They said the regulars are coming out. The regulars are coming out. But if you don't use it, you lose it. That's our message.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:41:36] That [00:41:30] does it for this episode. Now go shout it to every Middlesex village and [00:41:40] farm and also all of the other counties outside of Middlesex County, Massachusetts. This was produced by me. Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. [00:41:50] Marina Henke is our producer. Music in this episode by Mr. You know you missed me Chris Zabriskie. A reminder again that Ken Burns's Revolutionary War is available to stream [00:42:00] on PBS.org, as well as several other streaming services. If you watch it and you have thoughts or questions and you want us to answer them in a civics 101 episode, well, that's [00:42:10] what we're here for. Email us at Civics 101 at nhpr.org. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.