- This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St.

Petersburg, Sarasota.

[music] - Coming up, a conversation with Ken Burns, whose distinctive approach to storytelling has helped shape our understanding of the American experience.

The importance of history and what it asks of us today.

[music] Hello, I'm Eric Deggans.

For nearly 50 years, Ken Burns has helped America see itself through its victories and its tragedies, its myths and its hard truths.

From the Civil War to baseball, jazz, the Vietnam War, country music, and the American Revolution, his films have shaped how millions understand history, culture and one another.

Ken, thank you so much for joining us.

And I'm going to start out by asking a question that applies a term to you.

You'll probably resist, but a lot of writers have called you America's historian, but we seem to be at a time when people are at least resisting the lessons that come from history, if not resisting the knowledge of history.

And I wonder, as someone who's spent so much of his career educating us about history, how do you deal with that?

How do you find new ways of communicating to people when they're resisting the lessons of history?

- You know, the novelist Richard Powers said that the best arguments in the world, which is all we do and part of the function of trying to manipulate history for one particular point of view or another.

The best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view.

The only thing they can do that is a good story.

So the answer is actually in what's already taking place.

You think particularly in times like now, that you want to sort of invent something new as a kind of counterbalance to it, but I think continuing to tell good stories and inviting as many people in, calling balls and strikes.

So you're not accused of playing to one side, or one ism, or one historical interpretation or another.

There really are just facts.

And that's, I think, really important.

I am a storyteller.

That's what my training is.

I work in history the way a painter might choose oil as opposed to watercolors, or do still life as opposed to landscape.

And it's pretty interesting because the word history is mostly made up of the word story plus high, which is a good way to begin a story.

So I think that there's something intimate in the act of storytelling that can connect to someone else.

- Well, it's interesting, you know, you think about a project like the American Revolution, you spent ten years working on this project, and I got to think the context of that storytelling might change over that time.

And you would think things that might seem illuminative when you started working on the project, might be the kind of things that might distract people in a different context.

Where someone different is president, where we're in a different political reality.

Did you face that when you were working on American Revolution?

- No, because we are decidedly opposed to that sort of idea that whoever is president might change.

The way you would tell the story of the American Revolution.

Doesn't make any sense if you say it that way.

So we began it when Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency in December of 2015.

We finished it or broadcast it in November.

So 9 years and 11 months of '25.

Um, no, you don't want to do that.

Human nature is the same.

The facts of the revolution stay the same.

I do think that as each generation, each administration, each year changes, you do have a different relationship.

I have in my editing room a neon sign that says it's complicated.

It's been there for years and years and years, and it's on the first blush, it's about making sure that even if the scene is working, we're willing to go into it and, and dismantle it and destabilize it because we've learned new information, facts have to win over art.

But it's also to remind you about human nature that it's complicated.

Everybody's got undertow.

There's nobody that's perfect.

And so if you insist on projecting a very narrow, superficial, perfect vision of the American Revolution, you're going to be at odds at anything that's real about it.

But you can't do anything about the contemporary moment other than to just plow through.

This story is for all of us.

This is our origin story, and it's really complicated.

It isn't just guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts.

It's a huge part of it.

But it's a big, huge revolution.

Bloody.

It's a bloody Civil War and it's a bloody world war.

And all of those things have to be understood.

And all of the people, the idea that America was one thing at that time, and now we're lamenting the fact that it's not one thing, it's many.

It was many things then, as it's many things now.

- Yeah.

I mean, that's one of the great revelations, at least for me, watching the American Revolution, this idea that there were settlers on either side of this, you know, question fighting each other.

That's right.

And killing each other.

And I wonder, you know, eventually we did come together.

Are there any lessons for us now and how to come together after something so divisive, so bloody?

- What we've learned from our history is it's really hard to get together.

It's really hard to stay together.

And then once you've once the fissures happen, it's really hard to put it all back together again.

But we've done that again and again, and that may be one of the optimistic things about history.

Like we say, oh, we're so divided now.

Yeah.

But we're way more divided then because as you're saying, some people are loyalists, some people are, um, are patriots.

There's like no reason in hell why you would vote for the patriot.

Never been invented before.

Why would you do this sort of thing?

So there's lots of wonderful things that I think speak to our present moment without us having to say, oh, isn't that kind of like the stuff that we're going through now?

Because then that dates it, and it also angers the people who want to be told what actually happened, not what it means.

- Right?

Well, and so what's interesting to me.

I saw you said somewhere that after you did the Civil War, it was so tough to sort through all of that carnage that you didn't want to do another documentary on wars.

Yeah.

But then you did World War II and then you did Vietnam War, and now you're here with the American Revolution.

- You never say never, right?

- Is is there a lesson in this idea that this is an integral part of who we are, this violence?

- It's it's, you know, there was a historian couple, Will and Ariel Durant, who I now passed away, but they had figured out that there was something like, I'll make the number up like 38 years in all of recorded human history where people hadn't been at war with one another.

Clearly they missed something because we've always been at war.

At some point on the globe that's been going on, that's in our nature as Tennyson said, red.

Red in tooth and claw.

So I mean that sort of thing is what human beings do.

And so my aversion in the Civil War was emotional and intimate.

We just dealt with some really bloody horrible stuff.

And there were just still photographs.

But I actually kept away from our audience some of the worst stuff.

We weren't going to get into the pornography of war, which is what people sometimes do.

They're drawn to that.

And so we were disciplined, but it had really taken an emotional toll.

So I said, no more wars.

But at the end of the 90s, I heard that, um, 1000 veterans, American veterans of the Second World War were dying each day.

And that number is way down.

Um, and that many graduating high school seniors thought we fought with the Germans against the Russians.

I said the F word out loud and said, we're doing World War II and we have to do it from a different way.

We told the story of the greatest cataclysm on earth, through the eyes and experiences of people from four geographically distributed American towns.

And then before the ink was dry on that in 2006, I just said, we're doing Vietnam.

And everybody gulped, understandably.

Ten and a half years later, Vietnam came out.

And then before the ink was dry on Vietnam, I just said, we're doing the revolution.

And it wasn't that somebody said the other day that you did them out of chronological order.

I don't do stuff in chronological order.

I do stuff and are drawn to what it was, but it was making a nearly decade long commitment to try to get to the heart in a in a subject that had no photographs or or newsreels, of course.

And how then did you make the violence resonate?

How then do you tell an accurate story?

It's called the American Revolution.

It's a sequence of battles.

That's its essential narrative structure onto which you adorn the big ideas.

The story of all different peoples, the sociological changes, the religious differences between people, the geopolitical political stuff that's going on when not just Britain is trying to keep its former colonies, but France and Spain and the Netherlands come in on the side of the United States.

What are the exigencies?

What if you were a free or enslaved Black American, what would you choose?

Well, we know that 20,000 fought and 15,000 chose to fight with the British sometimes because the British had cynically having their whole empire based on slave.

The profits of slave labor offered freedom to some enslaved people of patriots, not to loyalists.

If you're loyalist you had your slaves.

So there's lots of dynamics of that, but people would make you think it would all be ideological, but they're making local decisions about what's best for me and my family.

And if you see daylight, if you're a running back and you see daylight in that direction even though the play called for that direction?

You go that way.

And so I think people were choosing that.

And 5000 fought for the United States.

Same with native peoples.

Often sided with the British because they thought they would forestall if their victory would forestall the colonists pouring over.

If the British had won, they'd take over the whole continent, too.

And then many Native Americans thought the people I know, the people I've lived with, intermarried with, joined the faith of coexist with whatever will help us regain our sovereignty.

Not true either.

Not true.

So it's it's so complicated.

But each question about we have to ask ourselves would be a loyalist or a patriot.

Each one.

And it changes.

I won't work on a more important film.

Other films I've said that about once was the Holocaust a few years ago, the U.S.

and the Holocaust.

This is the most patriotic film in a way, in that it gathers the threads of what our origin story is and tries to have an unfiltered and pretty accurate.

Um, complicated dimensional story of what that is.

And I think that's the essence of patriotism.

You know, patriotism, somebody said, was the last refuge of the scoundrel.

And people use patriotism always as a weapon or a culture or something to hide behind.

But real patriotism is a decision, at least in American patriotism, is to make a choice that, as the last phrase of the Declaration said, "I mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

Now that's a big thing to give up.

Well, George Washington almost lost his life many times.

He was maybe one of the richest, certainly one of the richest men in America.

He was willing to sacrifice all of that and sacred honor.

We can just leave to what everybody's imagination.

What sacred and honor do words that are rarely invoked today might mean?

But.

that's what it is.

I think that um.

Thomas Paine addressed it, you know, that, you know, "These are the times that, try men's souls," the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot, you know, that's you begin to realize that a lot of people wear these labels very lightly.

And other people are deeply, deeply committed, willing to sacrifice their lives.

I mean, you go to World War II, back to World War II, and wonder why some farm kid from Nebraska would land at Normandy Beach.

He's not getting paid much.

He's not there for empire or wealth.

What's he doing it for?

He's doing it for an idea which has to do with liberating other people from the thing that he enjoys.

That's patriotism.

- So you've been able to tell these incredibly detailed and incredibly lengthy stories on PBS, right?

Hard to imagine anywhere else?

- No, no place else.

I mean, we just end the argument right here.

I've made 40 films that PBS has shown, and they couldn't have been made anywhere else.

I mean, I could, I could've have...the Vietnam film costs $30 million.

A lot of money took it's ten and a half years.

I spent ten of those ten and a half years raising the money.

Really a pain in the you know where.

And I could have walked into a streaming service or a premium cable and made the pitch with my track record.

They would have given me the 30 million.

They would not have given me ten and a half years.

You know, our, our network has one foot in the marketplace tentatively and the other proudly out of it.

- Right.

But now we're in a situation where that federal funding has been removed and it's become tougher for everybody, including you.

- So patriotism might mean looking yourself in the mirror, not you, not me, but people who enjoy these things and saying, I need to step up and help my network.

Just as I step up and help my country, I need to dig deeper.

You know, the number of people who watch who actually are members of a particular station are in single digits compared to the people that actually watch it.

So if you just double that number, let's just say it's 7%.

If you double to 14, we begin to ameliorate over time.

The devastating effects of the rescission vote that eliminated the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the significant funding they make to local stations and to filmmakers like me.

And I'll be okay.

I'll have to redouble my efforts.

But there's a new filmmaker coming up who's not going to be okay, and that's where the rest of us have to sort of hitch up our trousers and figure out how to how to help, because we need that.

This is the public television.

The Declaration of Independence applied to communications.

It's lifelong learning.

It's what we're supposed to be about.

And we can't have any news desert anywhere in our in our country.

We can't have people who are just using the marketplace as the way the market is a wonderful thing.

It regulates so many stuff, but not everything.

It's not, it's not, um, let's just put it away.

The marketplace did not land at Normandy.

- There you go.

And you know, as somebody who works in public media myself, I like the idea that through tax dollars, every American had a little skin in the game with public media.

- Yeah, I agree with you completely.

Every American should have some skin in the game, even if they never watch it.

They should.

They should know.

Just like in every civilized nation has their own public broadcasting and they fund it to much greater support than we do.

We're more on our own than any other entity, and we do pretty damn well the stuff we make.

The, you know, finest children's, the finest science, the finest nature, the finest news and public affairs, the finest history.

I'm told that's not a bad thing.

- One of the things that always struck me is that you're such an engaging presence When you get out there and you talk about these films, and yet you never actually appear in these films.

- You hear me once.

- Why don't you narrate your own your own films?

- I like, I like the discipline of not doing that.

I mean, I remember that so many programs, as I was beginning to enter the PBS system with my first film called Brooklyn Bridge, you know, had somebody walking from, you know, would have had somebody walking around the pillar of the, of the Brooklyn Bridge and saying, hi, I'm Ken Burns, you know, and I, I just didn't want to do that.

Having said that, I do realize that there, there's three moments that I like best about filmmaking.

One is when you're filming could be an interview and you suddenly realize, wow, they just gave gold.

Or it's finding an old archive and you put it up and you're filming it, or you come across it and you do it, or you're out shooting live cinematography and it's just you just go, oh God, I know this is going to be in the final film.

It's just exhilarating.

And then the more important of all three is in the editing room where you make a decision to lose something or to add something you hadn't been expected, or to move what was at the end of a scene to the beginning, or to chop that scene in half, and to somehow give up your little darlings, as they say in journalism and make a good thing.

But the third is, once it's done, people say, you work for ten years on something.

Aren't you sick of it?

It's really hard to let go of it.

And one of the ways to be able to let go of it is to participate in the evangelical dimension, the evangelical period where I'm out on the road talking about it, and I'm trying to transfer my love and energy to someone else.

And I love that.

And I see that has an effect on people, and that's good, but it's not my day job.

My day job is to try to figure out how to tell really complex stories and to tell them in a way that's engaging and that are durable.

You know, today, as we're talking, is a school day in the United States, and there are hundreds of schools that are showing the Civil War series.

Not all of it.

Not all 12 hours, but 40 minutes on the Battle of Antietam, or on black troops or on women, you know, whatever.

Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, whatever it might be.

And that film is 36 years old.

And that's I can say that of baseball and of jazz and of Lewis and Clark and the Roosevelts and the national parks and the Holocaust film.

More recently.

And now the revolution is working its way in there.

Vietnam.

That's really satisfying.

- One of the things that also strikes me is covering this broad sweep of history and all the work that you've done.

What do you think, people and I bet I might understand, I might predict what your answer might be complexity.

But beyond that, what do people most get wrong about how history works and what they should understand about history?

- Well, the biggest thing is they think it's the arrogance we in the presence have because we're here and they're not.

We must know more than them.

And we also must assume that they know how it turned out.

Or they knew how it was going to turn out.

Right.

And David McCullough, the historian that we've used in many films and late historian, was a narrator of a few of the first films that we did said in the past, there's no foreseeable future.

Nobody knows.

George Washington doesn't know he's going to be George Washington, of the kind.

We understand George Washington and that he's not sure, even with months from Yorktown, that it's going to work out okay.

And nobody knew.

And that's the thing you have to honor more than anything else.

You do have to lean into the complexity and be willing to show, as Wynton Marsalis said to us in our jazz series, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing can be true at the same time.

So you have to be able to tolerate the contradictions and the undertow that are sort of within every moment.

It's not revisionist.

It's not woke.

It's just what the way human beings act.

We've been dealing with this complexity.

Shakespeare is full of it all the great classical in antiquity, all of the great philosophers, whether it's Aristotle or Plato or whoever it might Confucius, whoever it might be, have understood this, this dynamic.

And so you have to just be faithful to recreating that.

But you also have to realize that nobody knew what was going to happen that next moment.

And so that becomes a kind of obligation of storytelling.

I'm always saying, how come we're saying this?

What you know?

And it's because we have that presumption inherited from living in the present that says we know the outcome.

- As a journalist, one of the things that I've noticed, of course, is that the public is constantly losing trust in journalism organizations, but it seems as if people still trust what you do.

They are invested in these films.

They know you work on them for years.

How do you maintain that trust with an audience, and can other areas like journalism learn from what you've achieved?

- Journalism is out there on a daily basis and is much more susceptible to what Shakespeare called the hamlet, said the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

It is in the interests of those people who wish to have a kind of monolithic sense of what happened, or one central, you know, party version to question and undermine journalism because it's in their interest, because journalism will report how complicated things are.

So being the day to day, they get most of the slings and arrows and we get a lot of those same ones.

But I think because we spend so long time crafting them, they're often about events in the past that resonate with things that are going on in the present, but we're not adjusting to that.

We know that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

As Mark Twain may have said, that there are always rhymes in any film I've ever made.

And you just put the put the you know, you just steal yourself and say, I'm not going to play to this rhyme.

I'm not going to play to this rhyme.

I'm just going to let it go.

And sometimes it resonates, sometimes it doesn't.

I think I have nothing to advise the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal about how they conduct their work.

I think they're extraordinary.

And it's only the external forces that are trying to convince people not to trust this.

And so you have, you know, the mainstream media means something that's lying.

It's not actually it may be just inconveniently truthful to those people who would like it to lie or like it to ignore their own failings, you know?

So that's our job is, I think, to stay the course.

I think our job is to is to double down on our insistence we don't have to become sexier or more attractive to this, or do stuff for young people who are now in their phones.

Like we live in a world in which we are in a. highlights reel, right?

That's all we want.

Babe Ruth hits a home run every time you see Babe Ruth.

Well, Babe Ruth struck out way, way, way more times than he had home runs.

And he hit into a game ending double plays.

And he comes up only once every nine times at bat.

So sometimes, as their most recent World Series suggested, a middle infielder second baseman will be central to the story of this thing.

Are you do you have the courage to not just show Babe Ruth hitting home runs, but say it doesn't take anything away to say?

On Thursday, he struck out four times or at a crucial moment, he struck out or at a crucial moment he hit a home run.

You got to be willing to call balls and strikes, so let's just apply it to George Washington.

This is a deeply flawed human being.

He's rash.

He runs out on the battlefield, jeopardizing the cause, the whole cause.

If he's captured or killed, it's all over, right?

He makes a couple of strategic blunders, particularly at Long Island and at Brandywine, that lose the battle.

His mistake.

A couple of other places you could maybe blame on him or not.

Or it's just bad luck.

Whatever.

He owns other human beings, too.

He sees by the end of his life that's wrong and he frees them, which is nice.

Um, but he's also able to inspire people to fight for this unbelievable cause in the dead of night, get teenagers, get people from Georgia and New Hampshire to agree that they're not Georgians in New Hampshire rights, but Americans.

This new concept he defers to Congress, he picks subordinate talent that is better than him.

He's unafraid of people who might be better at something than him.

Um, he is more he defers to Congress in a kind of political way.

He understands that he should defer to them at a time when the country would have been happy to make him the military dictator.

He resigns his military commission at a time when they were willing to have him as president for life.

He resigns the presidency.

And when he did that, George III said, "Then he must be the most powerful character of the age."

And that is the American example.

So you got a very.

A lot of people you got to carry in that George Washington bag, I mean.

He's humble, he's modest, he's certain.

He's angry.

He's got does all this sort of stuff.

And I'm not afraid of finding out more about him, are you?

- You know, what's amazing to me about you is not only have you built this amazing body of work where you've delved into all of these thorny areas, and of course, we talked about all the wars that you covered and all the troubling things, and you've seen how we constantly seem to repeat it.

But you have this optimism about America, about our society.

Where does that come from?

After having to.

- Well, I think it's the study of history as an amateur provides that.

I'll give you an example.

I've been out on the road for most of the last year talking about it, and everybody's really upset about how divided we are.

And I can just say to them, we're more divided during the Revolution.

Way more divided during the Civil War.

Very divided.

During Vietnam, there were hundreds of bombings between the late 60s and mid 70s, hundreds, hundreds of bombings.

When was the last bombing you remember?

So, um, another thing is I, I remember in the 08 meltdown, a friend of mine that I knew that worked in financial services said, man, this is a depression.

I said, no, it's not.

I said, in the depression, in many American cities, the animals in the zoo were shot and the meat distributed to the poor.

- Wow.

- When that happens, I'll agree with you right now.

It's an incredibly painful, very serious recession.

You see what I mean?

You, by... by being armed with history, our best teacher, it also provides you with a kind of perspective on the present moment that allows you not to fall into this, you know, Chicken Little, the sky is falling kind of kind of thing.

Oh, it's all over.

We're in the middle of a Civil War.

No we're not.

I know it's a Civil War.

Look like.

And I remember recently there was some newspaper that wrote an article, and it was really clear by the word optimist or optimism that the writer had about me, that it was a, a, a naive or pejorative condition.

And I reject that completely.

I think cynicism is a luxury for jet setters and jaded journalists.

- There you go.

- Ken, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you.