00:00Ken Burns, thank you for joining us.
00:01It's my pleasure, great to be with you.
00:03So, you know, everyone thinks they know a pretty cut-and-dry story about the American Revolution,
00:07but as you said earlier, it's complicated.
00:10It is complicated, and I think that's the problem.
00:12We know a cut-and-dried version.
00:13We know sort of whatever we got in third grade, or was it fifth grade, or eighth, or maybe eleventh,
00:19and was this true, was that true, was that made up in the 19th century?
00:23And so this is a dramatic story of our origin, where we came into being, the greatest country on earth,
00:30all of the extraordinary aspirations, and the nitty-gritty of the fighting.
00:34This is a bloody, bloody civil war.
00:37It isn't just an argument between Englishmen.
00:40There are Americans here who are fighting against the patriot movement, the loyalists.
00:46There are British soldiers.
00:47They have hired, because the British Army is decimated by all the wars they've fought,
00:51German soldiers.
00:53They're native peoples that are allying with the British or with us.
00:57They're enslaved or free black Americans who are allied with us or the British.
01:02There are women involved at every level.
01:04It is a dramatically long war.
01:07It begins in Lexington, Massachusetts on April 19th, 1775,
01:12and it doesn't end until October of 1781 in Yorktown, Virginia,
01:17and it touches every single state from Georgia to New Hampshire.
01:20And it's about as, I won't work on a more important film.
01:25You said before when we were talking that, you know, the American Revolution is perhaps the most important,
01:31perhaps next to the birth of Christ event in human history.
01:33Yeah, I don't, I came to that just out of a sense of how important setting this experiment has been in world history.
01:43And the idea that everybody before this had been a subject, and now there were citizens,
01:50and that the highest office of the land was in fact kind of citizens.
01:54And Washington understood it.
01:56It's why he resigned his military commission, and more importantly, why he resigned the presidency.
02:00So something happens, you know, the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes, says there's nothing new under the sun,
02:05which means that human nature doesn't change, and it doesn't.
02:08But something happened that was really new under the sun.
02:12Thomas Paine says not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to sort of reset and get it right.
02:20So you have this sense that there's big stuff happening in these 13 British colonies that are rebelling about native land
02:27and taxes and representation that suddenly breaks out into huge natural rights that says all men are created equal.
02:35And while Jefferson meant all white men of property free of debt, it's not what we meant it.
02:42The conservative scholar Yuval Levin says once you say the word all, it's all over.
02:47You know, it's just because that all means all.
02:50And then people are going to constantly expand it.
02:52And the story of the American project has been the expansion of that.
02:57What for Jefferson was fairly narrow understanding of that phrase and what for half the population,
03:03more than half the population, women, means a lot more.
03:07And so something else that hasn't changed that we like to think is unique to today is that we're at each other's throats
03:12and we can't agree on anything, but this has always been a part of our story.
03:15It's always been a part of our story.
03:17I mean, history has a way of knowing history, which people find boring and I don't understand why.
03:23It's mostly made up of the word story plus high, and that's a great way to begin a story.
03:28It's what we all are addicted to, what we all digest story after story.
03:32The story, the history of the United States is so fascinating, and I think it can help us give a perspective.
03:40You know, we are divided, but we've always been divided.
03:43It's the civil war that was our revolution.
03:46Americans killing other Americans, the loyalists killing the patriots, and the patriots killing the loyalists,
03:51and the disaffected people who wanted to have nothing to do with the fight, keep their head down, are also probably doubly afflicted.
03:58There's lots of stuff, dramas going on.
04:01It reminds me, in some ways, like Yellowstone.
04:04There's so many layers of the story that it isn't just about George Washington, Kevin Costner, and the Dutton family at their ranch,
04:11but there are all these different levels, and when you get to know them,
04:15it's as dramatic and as compelling a story as you could possibly become.
04:19And, of course, what the story ends up doing is setting in motion and creating the United States of America,
04:25which is one hell of a great experiment.
04:28And it really doesn't happen without Washington.
04:31You know, the funny thing, we're in an age where the right and the left are happy to dispose of somebody.
04:37Somebody is canceled for some indiscretion of some sort of another,
04:41and everybody claims, oh, it's the other side that does it, but everybody does it.
04:47You can't cancel George Washington.
04:50He's central to it.
04:51Without him, we don't have a country.
04:52Is he flawed?
04:53Yes, but we've gotten in our media culture today to expect that heroes are perfect.
04:59Heroes have never been perfect.
05:00We borrowed it from the Greeks, who understood that heroism was a negotiation between the strengths and weaknesses of a person,
05:07sometimes a war between those strengths.
05:09Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strength.
05:13And so you just call balls and strikes if you're telling history,
05:16and what emerges from calling balls and strikes is that, you know, to continue the baseball metaphor,
05:22this is the George Washington is the Babe Ruth of this story.
05:27We don't have a country without him.
05:29He is central to how we are there.
05:32And this is this unknowable, courtly, tall, doesn't give you much, doesn't let anybody into his inner space man who's able to inspire people in the dead of night to fight,
05:44who's able to stop a retreat by his mere presence, risking his own life several times in battle.
05:50He's somebody who picks extraordinary subordinate talent and trusts them to do a good job.
05:57He's able to negotiate with Congress.
05:59And more important, he's already envisioned the union.
06:03He's understood that he can talk to Georgians and people from New Hampshire and make them understand that,
06:08yes, you call your colonies now states your country, but actually you're Americans.
06:15You're all this new thing that we're creating here.
06:18And it's spectacular.
06:21And then he makes bad battlefield decisions at the biggest battle of the revolution at Long Island
06:27and later at Brandywine in Pennsylvania, exposing, you know, leaving exposed both first his left and then his right flank.
06:35And so that's like any one of us, you know, not perfect.
06:41But without him, we don't have a country, period, full stop.
06:45And you said before that it's a wonderful thing that John Adams and Abigail Adams are separate.
06:50Are apart.
06:51Because you find so many wonderful correspondents between them that really...
06:55It may be the greatest correspondence in American history.
06:58A lot of people like to say it's the correspondence between Jefferson and Adams that takes place.
07:02They were first friends and they were enemies and then they became friends again.
07:05And they both died exactly 50 years to the day, July 4th, 1826, 50 years to the day of the signing of the Declaration.
07:13And they could look back on that.
07:15And it is a really important correspondence.
07:18But there's something really wonderful and both immediate to ordinary life.
07:23You know, he describes how Philadelphia is laid out, you know, with this kind of enthusiasm.
07:28And it starts, it's between the Delaware River and the Schuylkill.
07:32And it's first and second and third and fourth.
07:34Some people don't like it.
07:35I do.
07:35And then they're named after fruit trees.
07:37And if you have Paul Giamatti reading it, who's been John Adams before, it's great.
07:42And Claire Danes in this case, not Laura Lenny, who reads other voices in our film, but Claire Danes, is Abigail.
07:47And she's saying, remember the ladies, you know, men, all men would be tyrants if they would.
07:51And if you don't recognize the ladies in these deliberations, you know, we're likely to foment a rebellion if we don't have representation.
07:59It's just wonderful correspondence between them, not just between Boston and Philadelphia, but later when he's posted to France.
08:07So, and in other travels in Europe, it's just wonderful.
08:11And to have these come alive, not just the top-down folks whose names we've heard of, but all these people, scores of people I had never heard of before that we introduced you in the film.
08:20Like a 14-year-old Pfeiffer from Boston named John Greenwood, 14 years old, joins the Patriot Cause.
08:27Down in Connecticut, Joseph Plum Martin, 15 years old, signs up a couple days after the Declaration of Independence and fights throughout the war.
08:34I mean, just, that's who wins the war for Washington are these teenagers and ne'er-do-wells and second and third sons without the chance of an inheritance and recent immigrants from England and Scotland and Wales and Germany and Ireland.
08:46It's just, it's a phenomenal story that all of the mythology that's grown up around it and obscured the real view, when you scrape it away, it doesn't diminish it.
08:55It makes it bigger and better and more inspirational.
08:58I mean, I've never been, I feel like this is a very patriotic film for all the complexity in it.
09:04It's a very, very patriotic film that we've done and necessarily so because the story is so extraordinary.
09:12Well, and when the war was won, the British didn't leave.
09:15No.
09:16They were here in New York for, in fact, we celebrated Evacuation Day.
09:19Yes.
09:19For a very long time here in New York.
09:21So, Evacuation Day happens November 25th, 1883.
09:26So, Yorktown is mid-October 1781.
09:33So, that's two years and a month plus that they're still in control of a gigantic city in the United States.
09:42Yeah.
09:42And they've been in control since September 15th, 1776, when Washington has to abandon it.
09:49He's lost the Battle of Long Island and he's left some troops there.
09:53He's racing up to Harlem and then to White Plains to try to avoid it and then orders the rest of his army to evacuate without firing a shot.
10:02The British walk into New York City, the lower tip of Manhattan, and from September 15th, 1776 until November 25th, 1783, it is British-owned.
10:14That's seven plus years of New York City being the center of British power in the United States during the revolution,
10:23which has begun only, you know, less than a year and a half earlier in Lexington, Massachusetts.
10:28It's hard for Americans to get your head around it, but when you do, then you understand what it's like,
10:33what it must have been like for Washington to come down to Bowling Green on Broadway and celebrate at Francis Tavern
10:38and say goodbye to his officers and go to Annapolis and resign his military commission, something nobody does,
10:45and then later on comes out of retirement to be the president of the Constitutional Convention
10:50and then is elected unanimously president and then leaves voluntarily from office, which nobody does,
10:56and sets an example for our democratic system.
11:01So 250 years on, next summer, how do you think we're doing?
11:05You know what? I think that we're doing okay. Fits and starts. We're in a big, big crisis right now.
11:12I think it's really important, and people feel that both sides of the aisle, but also I think people
11:20who are less engaged in politics sort of feel the fraying of the tapestry.
11:23But I always think that when someone and individuals in distress, either they go to their pastor or they go to a professional
11:32who says, you know, where'd you come from? Who are your parents? Tell me about your upbringing.
11:37And then somehow the rebuilding of the narrative helps.
11:41And so I think for us, collectively, to go back and understand our collective origin story is really, really important.
11:50And maybe this film contributes, as I think a lot of the celebration will do, to putting the us back in the U.S.
11:57Ken Burns, thank you so much for joining us.
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