Grab your feather hats and your 13 colony flags! Brilliant, award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns and his equally talented co-director Sarah Botstein are here with Jen to discuss their stunning & surprising new documentary, The American Revolution.
The American Revolution is an explosive docu-series that (in part) pierces the mythology of the origin story we’ve all been told. Burns and Botstein explore the human complexity of freedom fighters, while also creating a complicated, nuanced portrait of the likes of George Washington. Jen and The Contrarian recommend both this interview & the docu-series as a must-watch.
Ken Burns is an Emmy award winning, and Oscar nominated, documentary and television filmmaker. His contributions are numerous, but he is most widely known for his films The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, and the Vietnam War.
Sarah Botstein is a BAFTA-nominated documentary film producer known for her work on The U.S. and the Holocaust, Hemingway, College Behind Bars, The Vietnam War, Prohibition, The War, and Jazz.
Transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. We are delighted to have with us two esteemed filmmakers, Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein. They are responsible for the magnificent new PBS series, The American Revolution. Over 6 nights, 2 hours each, it tells the magnificent story of the American Revolution. You will learn a lot, you will be inspired, you will be intrigued, and we are delighted to have them both with us to talk about that film. I felt as if, the program and the information was really an exercise in myth-breaking, that we have had certain misconceptions about the revolution, and that the reality is more powerful and perhaps more useful to us. Did you intend to go after some common misperceptions of the revolution, or did that emerge organically from the work?
Ken Burns: I think it emerges organically from the work. That’s always been the story. You want to tell a complex story. You’re aware that mythologies build up, particularly in the Revolution. It’s encrusted with a lot of nostalgia and sentimentality. It’s sort of devoid of violence. There’s basically big ideas being thought up by men in Philadelphia in ‘76 and ‘87, but, you know, don’t bother me with the other stuff. we just wanted to do that, that we as my co-director, Sarah Botstein, and our other co-director, David Schmidt, and Jeff Ward, a writer I’ve worked with for 45 years, and an extraordinarily talented group of cinematographers and editors and people co-producers digging for the maps, digging for the paintings, filming the reenactors. So what you’re doing is you’re collecting a body of work, maybe 50 times that 12 hours, and then boiling it down, gently boiling it down to figure out what can stay. You don’t want to be an encyclopedia, and you don’t want to go after a particular myth that dates you, and you also don’t want to point your fingers at all the ways it rhymes in the present moment, right? Because human nature doesn’t change, and so, of course, every film we’ve ever made is going to have that. So, like Odysseus, we lash ourselves to the mast and permit ourselves to hear those rhymes, but to not sort of comment or act on them, because that immediately dates it and makes it a kind of binary political animal. rather than, we hope, a reconciling work of art that will speak to everybody. And I think this is a film, and I don’t think… I think Sarah would agree with me, that we won’t work on a more important film that is able to talk to everybody, wherever they come from, wherever they live, whatever their political persuasions. There is purchase in this story of our revolution, and particularly purchase in a complicated story, because… That’s the only kind of dramas there are that are successful, and the only thing that, regardless of your politics, you’re drawn to. The simplistic stuff, the Soviet, you know, editing of photographs, doesn’t work.
Jen Rubin: The conception of this, which obviously has been years in the making, I don’t know whether Donald Trump was in his first term, or you were.
Ken Burns: In between.
Jen Rubin: Bravo.
Ken Burns: Obama when we started.
Jen Rubin: So, obviously, you didn’t have that framework in mind when you began, but I must say, by the end of the program. The end really brought me to tears, because you talked about the effort to rid ourselves of a tyrant, and all of the pain, the effort, the struggle, and yet we find ourselves, in some sense, still in that battle. How did the context, of the present-day influence you, and did you have that in mind?
Ken Burns: No.
Jen Rubin: Did you say that last time?
Ken Burns: That’s where we remain lashed to the mast and make sure we don’t comment on the ways in which it resonates. You know, we’re… our common phrase is that we’re so divided now. Well, I think what the film proves is that we’re way, way more divided during the American Revolution, where it’s a civil war in addition to a revolution. It’s a global war, the fourth global war over the prize of North America, which means when you say prize, you mean the land, and everybody wants it. The Spanish want it, the Dutch want it, the Brits want it, the French want it. We want it, and there are already people who live there. And so you’ve got a dynamic that you have to consider. There are 5… out of the 3 million people, there are 500,000 enslaved and… and free Black Americans, and a majority are women, who are rarely considered as part of the dynamic of the revolution, who are essential to it. So you’ve got a story that you’re just a priori going to be diving into, and I think maybe your emotion has to do with the sense of it’s different, you know, that we’re in this struggle again. This is the age-old human struggle. Jefferson says a few sentences after, Pursuit of Happiness, that all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. It just means that heretofore, everybody just basically puts up. With being under an authoritarian’s rule, and we’re… what we’re creating is going to require extra energy to escape the specific gravity of authoritarianism. And I think, as Yuval Levin told us the other day, he… I think the founders, if they showed up here, they would not be surprised that someone was trying to increase their power. They’d just be devastated that Article 1, the legislative branch, had yielded so much of that willingly. But that’s neither here nor there to the narrative. and the outro of the film, just as it’s neither here nor there to the intro. Sarah, maybe you, you know, have something that you would… You know, say, as we struggled with this, you know, both of us lashed to the mast.
Sarah Botstein: Yeah, I mean, I think because we worked on the film over such a long period of time, we really… the mantra for us, I think, and for me certainly, is just we kept… we actually tried to keep what was happening in the current moment away from the editing room and from the film, because The things that seem to be parallels, or echoes, or relevant, or hugely important. changed every week. They’re still changing every morning. I feel like there’s something that’s happening either here or in the world that touches back to that history, and so what… what I think really an animating principle was with the historians on camera, behind the camera with Jeff, was to just… Get the story so clear and right that it would stand and withstand the test of the moment.
Jen Rubin: Sarah Butstein, obviously one of the co-creators and geniuses behind this film. One of the things that struck me is that we have this myth that we started off as a unified, homogeneous people. And this does everything to show that from the beginning, we were a mixture of, of Native Americans, different languages, different people, and that we were not even unified on the Revolution itself. It strikes me that that is so much more interesting and relevant and has such… so much more to speak to us than this notion that We were, you know, all a singular people from the start.
Ken Burns: The Immaculate Conception of the Revolution is really just a fool’s errand. It’s really so complicated, and it is a civil war, and you understand where the Loyalists are coming from. The British constitutional monarchy’s a pretty good form of government, and it’s responsible for everybody on the eastern seaboard that’s at least white, you know. For their health, their property, their literacy, their, you know, the developing, prosperity that they have, the ownership of land, which is new to them. So there’s lots of reasons to sort of stay there, and then, as you say. It’s an incredible wide variety of people that are inhabiting. There are Native Americans, that are… assimilated and coexisting within the boundaries of the Thirteen Colonies. There are, of course, nations to the West that are as significant a world player, or have relationships for centuries on the world stage, diplomatically and economically, as, say, France and Prussia and Spain and Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as Great Britain, so you have dynamics that we never bring to bear when we consider the revolution. I mean, Sarah, it’s just so… so… fascinating, and for us, it was just trying to wrestle for months, for years, with trying to manage a story to keep all the balls in the air, and, you know, follow this teenager from Massachusetts, and this teenager, or… tween from Virginia, and to follow this French diplomat, and the wife of this German general, and this foot soldier from Ireland, and this king in England, and this founding father who’s got complications as well as just extraordinary greatness. I’m speaking of George Washington, without whom we do not have a country. And I think the film proves it, but is a person that has dimension. He has flaws as well as strengths, and that’s the nature of heroism that the Greeks have been telling us for thousands of years.
Sarah Botstein: Yeah, I mean, I think the answer is inherent in your question. This is a country that has had Even at its founding, just a wide variety of people with different backgrounds and experiences and sense of, place and ownership and deep connections, either as newly arrived immigrants or people who’ve been here for a long time.
Ken Burns: Yeah, and you know, the people in Georgia are a whole different country than people in Massachusetts or New Hampshire. There’s different Protestant sects, there’s some Catholics, there’s some Jews, there are Muslims that have come over, on slave ships, but nobody’s singing the same tune, and they’re not singing the same tune at the end of the Revolution either. So there’s this constant battle of how you create a union. A union, by the way, inspired by the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy’s centuries-old way of holding together several 5- and then six distinct native nations into one cohesive diplomatic whole that Franklin goes, wow, if they can do it, why can’t we? And we can’t, because nobody can agree. And for 20 years, we sort of sputter around and then realize, you know, maybe this is the way to go, you know? The union, as our last episode is titled, The Most Sacred Thing. for Thomas Paine, every episode is named after a quote from Thomas Paine, that the most sacred thing is the union, the ability to figure out How to overcome those differences through compromise, through listening, through civic engagement, through civil discourse, and try to forge something out of all its disparate parts.
Jen Rubin: Sarah, one of the fascinating parts I found, was that from the very beginning, Americans were a violent people, not only, with, respect to the Native Americans, but with each other. And we were also a bunch of busybodies, and very tough on our neighbors. We think of that as sort of relegated to, like, sort of the Salem Witch Trials, but that seems to have been a thread throughout America. Did that surprise you? And where do you think that kind of comes from?
Sarah Botstein: Hmm, that’s a good question of where it comes from. It definitely surprised me a little bit. I hadn’t understood, that aspect of the revolution, and how… as Alan Taylor says in the film, you know, Ken was just speaking about the disparate nature of the different colonies. Massachusetts is very different from Virginia, that’s very different from South Carolina, it’s very different from… New Jersey, New Jersey’s centrality to the war, I think, will be surprising to people, and that in those different colonies, the culture is different, and trying to get everybody on board is going to require, some wrangling, and that wrangling isn’t always peaceful and kind, but a little bit, you know, propagandistic and bullying and tricky, so, there’s one map in the first show where we show the committees of correspondence getting information throughout the colonies, and I… I think it was really surprising and amazing to see how that map moved and how information was spreading, and people like Sam Adams. you know, they were, agitators, and, and noisy and, sometimes bullish, but they ended up inspiring a lot of people to come, to a cause that ultimately, I think people were really excited to be a part of. So it’s… again, a little bit of both things, and we want to bring that out. Maya Jasanov does say in the film, and I think this made us all sit up in the interview, and then really sit up while we were making the film, which is. partially because of the myths Ken was just talking about, and the way the revolution is so far away, and kind of pretty in our imagination, that you can’t tell the story of the American Revolution without really understanding that we were born in violence, that violence is… terribly bloody. It divided families, communities, neighbors. whole nations, as Ken was just saying, when it came to the Native Americans, and so you really have to square the revolution of ideas with that violence, if you want to understand…
Ken Burns: I would just add that I know exactly where it comes from. It’s human nature. We’re killers.
Sarah Botstein: Right.
Ken Burns: We are killers.
Sarah Botstein: The history of the work.
Ken Burns: It’s not American. We had a… we interviewed a Marine in Vietnam, and we kept pushing him for the details of what he did to get the fruits out of medals, and he said, look, it’s the history of the world.
Sarah Botstein: World.
Ken Burns: And this is what it’s about. We have to acknowledge that this is not an American failing...
Sarah Botstein: You’re absolutely right.
Ken Burns: The Ecclesiastes, which is the Old Testament, says there’s nothing new under the sun. What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There’s nothing new under the sun, which means that human nature doesn’t say. And so. It’s actually the ideas themselves that work wonders. The ideas of liberty, those are the things that change people’s minds. The coercion, the opening of the mail, the ostracization only solidifies people into their positions. So it’s not the work of the propagandist that does it, it’s the beauty of the language of liberty. As Jane Kaminski says in our film. The liberty talk is leaky, and the people who don’t have it, most, are the ones who are drawn to it. And the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk says that the Declaration, for all its limitations, meaning all men are created equal, white men are property, free of debt. it was deeply significant, she said, to people at the margins. Native Americans, women enslaved, and free African Americans in the thing, and so you have this incandescent set of ideas, like the, you know, the second sentence of the Declaration. We owe these truths to be self-evident, is the second best sentence in the English language (after I love you). It’s big a deal. It’s a big deal. But in order for human beings to do this, they have to open each other’s mail, they have to tell them they’re wrong, they have to tar and feather them, which we think is a comical thing, but as Maya again points out, it’s like torture, makes Abu Ghraib look like, okay, you know, you’re putting boiling pitch, she says. Spitting out the word pitch on people, and the humiliation and the deaths, as well as the lifelong injuries that come from it, are not a pretty thing. And then, of course, war itself, an 18th century war, is as horrible as war is ever, and that’s what this is about. A revolution, a civil war, and a global war. And so, this is what human beings do. And it’s also an amazing moment in history, because we’re also suggesting that we could go in another direction, which we actually did go in, in fits and starts, and in half measures, and taking back steps, but here we are, 249 years later, and we still have, for all its messiness and failures, you know. an extraordinary track record. I can list, and my films have done, without, fear or favor, what we’ve done wrong, but I can also list all of the things, beginning with that declaration, up until the Affordable Care Act, You know, stuff that this government has done that has been… extraordinary Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and civil rights and voting rights, and you can say, oh, well, whether it’s being eroded. Yep, and all the time, the sort of tidal forces of history and of human behavior are always going to erode that. But in history, you get to take a lot little bit wider lens, and if you’re not involved in political argument, you then have the possibility to say. that what Richard Powers, the novelist, said, that arguments don’t change people’s minds, good stories do. And you don’t have to point attention. This is how I’d like you to change your beliefs. I’d like you to hear this story. And in the complication of the revolution, I think, is purchased for everyone, as I said before, but also a reinvestment with those great ideas. tethered completely to the violence of what took place, which I don’t think diminishes those big ideas. I think it makes them more inspirational.
Jen Rubin: Absolutely. One of the things, that I personally enjoyed so much, was Rick Atkinson, the magnificent military scholar. And one of the things you come away with is this sense that, gosh, on the battlefield, Washington wasn’t a very good general. He kept making the same mistake again and again, and yet no one else could have presented this larger-than-life, this leadership. You come away with a much more nuanced sense of who Washington was.
Ken Burns: And thank goodness, right? I mean…we’re so sick of that one-dimensional thing, and to know that he makes a couple of bad tactical decisions, but he picks people who are probably better generals than him, and he’s still able to keep the country together.
Sarah Botstein: No, it’s just… it was actually… I was just thinking in your question, because we have come to just absolutely love and adore and admire Rick Atkinson. I think he plays such a central role in the film for all kinds of reasons, but You know, one of the fun things about working with this batch of historians, this little band of brothers themselves, actually, over so many years is The one thing we actually asked every single one of them was about George Washington, and every single one of them Talked in different ways about the fact that Ken and I were talking about this at Mount Vernon last week. Know him, know us. without him, you don’t have the United States, and each of them, in their own historical, you know, their historian’s point of view, have a reason for that that are often the same and often slightly different, and so I think at the end of the 12 hours. Every viewer, hopefully, will have an appreciation for him, not only for all the things he did well, but a sympathy and maybe a connection to the things he did wrong, and to understand the things, you know, he owned hundreds of human beings, he freed them on his deathbed, not before. He was rash, as Ken always says, he was, I find fascinating. He didn’t have children of his own, he was kind of unknowable. But as we were at Brown a few weeks ago, and Karen Wolf said, yeah, but he knew he was something. So, you know, he walked in a room in his beautiful uniform, he was taller than everybody, he had enormous command, and then he understood that at the heart of leadership is… stepping away sometimes, and he did that, as Ken just said twice.
Jen Rubin: Absolutely. And that brings us, of course, to this central contradiction, which is so poignantly displayed when the Americans allow the slave owners to come and reclaim the slaves, many of whom had run away or had joined up with the British. And that was such a heartbreaking moment. There is no way to reconcile, in our modern eyes, these two phenomena. And yet it’s a theme that runs throughout the film. How do you best explain or come to understand this conflict between slavery and the ideals of the revolution?
Ken Burns: Well, it’s just baked into the American experience, and I would say baked into the human experience, but let’s stick with us. We’re founded, we know exactly where it happened, Philadelphia, we know when. July 4th, we know what it is, the second sentence, right? And it says, we hold these truths to be self-evident, there’s nothing self-evident about these truths in human history, but okay. that’s the way you make an argument, that all men are created equal, right? The guy who wrote that owned hundreds of human beings. He’s distilling a century of Enlightenment thinking into one of the greatest sentences ever written. And it is going to symbolically and literally be the thing that we’re going to be wrestling with throughout the Revolution and throughout our history to this moment. And that it is always part of the American dynamic. I’m working on a film right now with another set of filmmakers, Sarah Burns, my daughter, and her husband, David McMahon. We’ve made films on Muhammad Ali and Leonardo da Vinci and the Central Park Five. Jackie Robinson, and we’re doing a history of reconstruction called Emancipation to Excess. We’re back into this whole thing again. You know, we meet a kid who hears the Declaration read in Philadelphia the first time it’s read out loud, James Fortin. He’s 9 years old, I think, and he’s a freed black kid. And he doesn’t, for a second, believe that this doesn’t apply to him. He knows he’s got these things. And he goes and he fights for these ideas, right? As you noted, other enslaved and mostly enslaved black Americans are moving towards the British, who are cynically offering them some freedom, not the slave peoples of Loyalists, but that, even though the entire British economy is based on the slave labor and the profits, they are sucking out with a giant straw from the Caribbean. But he signs up, he serves with distinction, he’s captured, he’s put in a horrible prison ship in the East River called the Jersey, barely survives, comes back, makes a fortune. funds the abolitionist movement. His granddaughter, during the Civil War, still in Philadelphia, comes down to the Sea Islands of Georgia to help with the newly freed, can’t say emancipated, but freed black Americans that, because of the U.S, the Union Army owning a bit of the Sea Islands, they’re gonna now try to practice what it might like to be free individuals. So, this is the ongoing American story, and I’ve got to assume they’re descendants of the Fortins that are still alive today, and I, you know. Let’s talk to them and find out how they’re still dealing with this dynamic.
Jen Rubin: Yes.
Ken Burns: The contradiction of human beings is not news. It’s not news. We are all… I mean, Whitman, our 19th century interpreter, along with Emerson, of who we are, says, do I contradict myself? I contradict myself. And he’s celebrating it within himself. sexually, intellectually, emotionally, patriotically, who we are. So I think if we want to make it into a dialectic, into a binary, we do a disservice to the possibilities of understanding Annette Gordon Reed, this extraordinary historian in our film, as we point out that the great freedoms that he… that Jefferson is enumerating, he couldn’t live out in his own lifetime. And she says, slavery’s foundational to him. It bounds the beginning and the end of his life, and he knew it was wrong. How could you know… how could you do something if you knew it was wrong? And she says… Well, that’s the human question for all of us. She’s not letting Jefferson off the hook, she’s putting the rest of us on the hook. So, Jennifer, I think Sarah and I have tried to spend the last 10 years, if not the entire 50 years of my professional life, trying to figure out how to, as Wynton Marcellus said to us in Jazz, how can a thing in the opposite of a thing happen at the same time, and so our editing room for years has had a neon sign in lowercase cursive that says. It’s complicated. And that’s… what you finally, at the end of the day, say. You can use Walt Whitman, you can look at George Washington, you know, who’s able to inspire men in the dead of night to fight… teenagers, he can say, please stay, your enlistments are up, but I need you for another month, and they stay. He can defer to Congress, and he can give up, as Sarah said, so magnificently power twice to set in motion an American example, and it doesn’t excuse or belie or contradict the fact that he owns other human beings, he’s rash on the battlefield, risking the experiment, and makes, as you say, two really glaring tactical errors at the biggest battle, we think, the Battle of Long Island, and then later repeats it at another huge battle, Brandywine in Pennsylvania. That happened. It is. This is just the facts of human behavior, just as Annette is asking us to go into our own lives and understand, look ourselves in the mirror before we are about to cancel somebody, or to make somebody all bad or all good. And I… I love that moment in her. I had a chance a couple nights ago to tell her just how significant, deeply significant it was for me to hear one of the great scholars, but also a black woman. Not let Jefferson off the hook, but to put us on the hook, because we’re still on it, as human beings, not just Americans, it’s not American problems. Nobody else has solved the question of the differences between people based on the content of their character or the color of their skin, as Dr. King said. Nobody’s figured this out yet. You know, you make advances, and then all of a sudden you just look around and you go, what happened? Why have we retreated? you know, it’s sometimes simpler to save them. And the thing I’ve learned. is I’ve made films about the U.S, but also us, and there’s… what I learned is there’s only us. There’s no them. Know them. Period. Know them.
Jen Rubin: Sarah, one of the things that’s different about this, production is you do use reenactors, and you had a problem, obviously, that you didn’t face in other films because of the dearth of photographs or, you know, a lot of visual evidence. Was that a hard decision for you to make? And how did you, balance the need to kind of recreate something, but not give it a kind of glossy image, or to make it, like, a beautiful, you know, Hollywood production?
Sarah Botstein: What a great question. We’ve talked, obviously, a lot about this in the last few weeks, you know. this is the first film that I’ve made that deals with the 18th century. Ken has made several films and has been, I think. you know, wisely, and I totally agree with him, sort of stayed away from a lot of the reenactments, but in this film, we kind of turned it all upside down on its head, and we did a few things. One is, we spent a lot of time with both the reenactors and the Living History Museums, Colonial Williamsburg being the most important to the series, and spending time with the people who do the trades in those places, because you want to bring to life as much as we can in the 21st century, the 18th century, and how do you do that? So, we got to know those people over time without our cameras, and then spent a lot of time with Ken and with Buddy and our editors, thinking about ways to make those reenactments more impressionistic. Less literal, more… impressionistic is really the right word, and we sometimes would film through old glass. We used different kinds of cameras, Buddy embedded with them, and in a few instances, Lexington and Concord, the Battle of Monmouth, you really get the scale of a big, large reenactment. But from a different point of view, and a different distance, and then we spent much more time impressionistically looking at a bayonet charge, soldiers walking through the woods, a hand to another soldier, high up over the Delaware, snow, rain, sleet. One of the things we had to do was make it feel grittier and dirtier, because… Places are beautiful and pristine, and their costumes are pristine, but the war was anything but beautiful and clean, and their houses and their taverns, so… To bring both the battles to life, we had to do that, but also to bring to life the world of 18th century, there’s no photographs of these people. 1% of the people have portraits painted, so you want to see where they ate, where they walked, where they slept. where they lived, how they might have moved from place to place. So, the live cinematography, I think, at the end is just… beautiful, exciting, devastating, and really was, artistically, I think, for all of us, just, energizing and exciting and really new.
Jen Rubin: Absolutely. And I thought the photography of just the physical landscape. beauty of America was a reminder of, kind of, the richness and one of the defining aspects of America, these great rivers, the great mountains, and that was very emotional. And I take it that that was a very deliberate choice as well.
Ken Burns: Yes, and I was happy when you said emotional earlier about the end of the film, but the real star, I mean, if this is the fourth global war over the prize of North America. That means the land. It’s the land. Obviously, there’s a Native American tragedy embedded in that story, and we do not shirk from telling it. But it is a beautiful place. It is the New Eden. It is the New World. And I live in… have lived for… you know, decades in New Hampshire, and I took my phone out every single morning, and I filmed sunrises and mists and lights pouring through tears, and snow, and all of that to add to the professional equipment that Buddy Squires… Sarah was referring to Buddy, that’s our longtime cinematographer, Buddy Squires, to just get Get a sense of… what this is about, and it is a prize. It is a place, as Thomas Paine said, this Eden. It’s not unoccupied. It’s not silent. It’s filled with culture and language and music and rhythm and drums and conflict, and all of that stuff predates Colombian, you know. Columbus’s time, but it’s got this beauty to it, and a sense, as Payne said, that not since the days of Noah.
Jen Rubin: Yes.
Ken Burns: A chance to start over again and create, as he put it, an asylum for mankind. This idea that the old world is just this oppressive place. Let us breathe this air, see its vistas. And he’s not that far removed from what Emerson and Whitman are gonna do about talking about this catechism that comes from not the cathedrals built by man, but by this… the God that you find in nature. And so, we went looking for that throughout the 10 years we’ve worked on it.
Jen Rubin: Well, it definitely makes me want to go back and rewatch the National Parks series that you did, because that physical beauty is really so emotional. Let me end with where America began, and that is the Native Americans. they, to a large extent, have been written out of our American Revolutionary story, bizarrely, even though, of course, the prevention of the westward movement was one of the main grievances against the Crown, and even though they were so intricately involved in the battles on both sides, difficult was it for you, Ken, to kind of reintegrate, that story? And, the American Revolution would not have been the American Revolution without them, and yet they’ve been divorced from this national story, our birth story.
Ken Burns: Yeah, it’s just whether you’re gonna tell a superficial one and follow the kind of tropes of that superficiality, or are you gonna do what we’ve always done from the very beginning, is include all the stories. And that’s been true of all the work that we’ve done, and no more so than the Native American stories. They are the original inhabitants, it’s their land that we’re on for the 13 colonies, and they’ve either coexisted, or are assimilated, or moved out, and are part of those Western nations desperate. The Brits have limited that only because they can’t afford to protect us, not because they want to protect the Native Americans. If they win the revolution. Right? And we lose, we’re still British citizens, and they’re still gonna move west. If the French come in and suddenly take over, the Spanish somehow do this, all these other, you know, sort of parlor tricks, you know. they’re gonna take over the thing, and I had yesterday two conversations with Native Media, and, you know, we were helped extraordinarily by a woman who’s with the Cherokee Nation. So that means, in our story, it’s like South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina. Right? The southeastern United States. She lives in Oklahoma. Right. That’s the whole thing. And, like, and they’re thanking us. for including them, and I said, are you kidding me?
Sarah Botstein: Right.
Ken Burns: I’m thanking you for giving us access and reminding us what’s the non-romanticized version of this? What’s the more accurate thing? What, you know, this woman saved us from a mistake at the end of the film. Where we had taken something and romanticized it. Instead, she reminded us that it was more complicated, and so we moved the quote into a place in which it had a kind of… undertow and bittersweet aspect to it, and saved our bacon in this way, and just as the scholars, hundreds of times throughout, and the writers like Rick Atkinson, who is, I agree with you, just, like, a blessing to this republic, you know? Just the finest journalist, but also the finest historian and the finest kind of human being who helped us understand it is no accident. or it is an accident. But no accident that he is the first and the very last talking head that you say. We didn’t have… we don’t look to people and say, can you be part of this introduction, can you go say something right here?
Jen Rubin: Yes.
Ken Burns: it evolves naturally, and it is so interesting that he says the first thing, and Sarah, isn’t it… isn’t it.
Sarah Botstein: It’s the first question we asked him and the last question we asked him. I mean, it’s never happened in all the years. I mean, it’s just so crazy. I just was gonna pick up on your question, what Ken was saying. I think one of our hopes for people who watch the film is that We do begin to actually go back and reverse this kind of omission of the major part. You can’t tell American history without Native American history, and somehow the combination of what happened to them as a people, and a peoples, and they are not a monolith, as Ken was just saying. They’re different communities, different nations, been here for a very long time, displaced, and the centrality of them, and the land, and their relationship to the land, which is another thing that this wonderful Cherokee woman helped us understand in making the film. And Ned Blackhawk said it to us in our first conversation with him a decade ago. You have to remember this piece of the story. So we were lucky, again, there’s, you know, so many different types of scholars helped us make the film. They’re different ages, they’re from different parts of the country, they have different expertise, and they all, you know, helped us knit this… You know, this kind of crocheted blanket together.
Ken Burns: Maybe, maybe we can… the poll question of the Native American be summed up with a story that we tell, that I’m sure you remember, Jennifer, which is, every school kid knows that the white man, rich and poor, who dumped the tea in the harbor in December of 1773 in Boston. were dressed as Native Americans. And when you ask why, most of those kids and most of the adults say to deflect the attention. But as we point out, as the scholar Phil Deloria tells us, it’s saying no. It’s an attempt to say we’re Aboriginal. We are no longer part of the mother country, we’re separating. And then how ironic, and how… It is. That you would dress in the garb of the people that you had spent the last 150 years systematically dispossessing of the lands that you now occupy, and then will spend the next 150 years dispossessing the rest of the land. But embodied in that moment. Is… is the tenderness and the… The beauty and the sadness and the tragedy of the whole… whole enterprise, just in that one gesture. It’s not to say, oh, nobody, for a second. thought of a British official, a custom official, whatever, that these people were Native Americans causing mischief, and what? We’re just white people? We didn’t have anything to do with destroying this tea. Everybody knew. But by dressing this way, there was a kind of… Representing that’s taking place that has just… unspeakably sad undertones, but also something at the heart of this human com… yes, we are a violent species, we’re not, as one of our other Marines said in the Vietnam War, we’re not the dominant species on the planet, because we’re nice. We’re not. you know, weak. But we also have… These impulses that kind of transcend. the baser instincts, and one of those things is the experiment of the United States, and that’s a good thing to celebrate.
Jen Rubin: Absolutely. Sarah, after you made the Holocaust film, and this, I think, applies certainly to this film, we talked a bit that sometimes by being the happy, storytellers, the myth makers, that we do ourselves a disservice, because we forget how hard it was, how difficult it was. We’re not in… the first existential crisis that the country has ever experienced. The entire American experience has been an existential crisis in some sense. And the, complexity and the depth that you tell, in some sense, did that give you a reassurance that nothing has ever been determined, nothing has ever been settled? Did that give you, in this Confusing, horrifying, maddening time. Some sense that we really have come through hard times, and we can do it again.
Sarah Botstein: I mean, I love your question. I feel like, again, your thoughtful question is kind of the answer. I think the… we’ve talked a lot about this in both making the Holocaust film Vietnam, and this film, that… citizenship and patriotism are at the heart of the message that I personally take away from working on all those projects, that you have a privilege to live in this country, in this democracy, with all its flaws and all our bruises and all the things we haven’t done well. but that we do have some agency, and we do have a voice, and we have, much more importantly, a responsibility to our neighbor, to our community, to our county, to our state, and to our federal government. So I actually think… The last few films that we’ve made together. even though they’re very different time periods, very different subjects, dealing with all kinds of different existential questions in history and American history, the takeaway is, is citizenship.
Ken Burns: Yeah, I agree. And let me just say, she’s absolutely right, that embedded in your question, and it speaks to you, Jennifer, and the extraordinary gift that you are, is that we want to have an optimism. And we live in cynical times, and optimism is seen… I’ve reacted to a couple of stories that have been written about the film, and my apparent optimism. that comes, I’m not worried, but I also share this. It is not a naive or pejorative condition. It is, in fact, the thing, and the agency of that optimism is citizenship, as Sarah is suggesting. That’s the only way you exercise it in the dynamic, or the arena that we’ve spent most of the time talking about today. Now, if we move into psychological, or sexual or other kinds of realms, we have perhaps different language, but we are always negotiating the stuff, and it means the, you know, the muck, one of my favorite shots of the shoes just going through the mud to give you a sense of how tough it is to fight a revolution against the biggest, you know power on Earth. But it’s also… propels those feet up and down, and then that’s a beautiful thing, and I think your question, and what you do day in and day out.
Sarah Botstein: Agreed.
Ken Burns: From our wonderful conversation with you, you are a blessing to our Republic. We’re so grateful to spend a few minutes with you.
Sarah Botstein: 10.
Jen Rubin: Thank you. Well, thank you for a gorgeous film that is inspiring, educational. emotional, and thank you for spending all this time with us. We, we really appreciate it, and we wish, every American and every elected leader, could watch this film. Perhaps we can make it mandatory.
Ken Burns: Yeah, please…
Jen Rubin: We’ll do our best. So, thank you very much, Ken, and thank you, Sarah, and we will enjoy watching it all over again this upcoming week. So, thank you so much.
Ken Burns: Thank you for your attention. Thank you. Bye-bye.
