Firing Line

- Building something to last from the past.

This week on "Firing Line."

(somber music) - I think we've made the most patriotic film we've ever made because we were willing to say, we're not gonna just have a sanitized Madison Avenue version of this - [Margaret] In their latest film series on PBS, Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein take on the American Revolution in all its complexity - For Americans, land and liberty are completely intertwined.

Preserving, promoting that liberty for white Americans to them means taking Native land.

There is no other answer.

- You can get seduced by, oh, the founders and how lucky we are, and what a great assemblage of talent.

But they're basically young.

They basically make a lot of mistakes.

- At the heart of every film that we make is that heroes are flawed just like the rest of us.

- [Margaret] Ken Burns has always kept politics out of his films.

- I have tried in my work, and I have succeeded in my work to never putting a political thumb on the scale.

- [Margaret] But that does not mean there aren't lessons in our history to guide us in the present.

- [Narrator] Alexander Hamilton was concerned that an unprincipled man would mount the hobby horse of popularity and throw things into confusion.

"In a government like ours," he would write, "No one is above the law."

- [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, The Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, and by the following.

(bright music) - Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, welcome back to "Firing Line."

It's great to see you both again.

- It's great to be with you, Margaret.

- Your new series is "The American Revolution," We have, as Americans, been hearing some version of this story our whole lives.

How do you as filmmakers reconsider this story?

- I don't think you're looking for a new story.

You just wanna find one that honors the complexity of what takes place.

And I think what our job over the last 10 years has been was to just dive deep into it, to not impose any of our own ideas because we don't have any ideas.

We wanna ask of if what happened?

What took place?

Who was involved?

And we know from our history books and whatever sort of is in the ether that there's these boldfaced names, but we know that it's a much more dynamic situation that makes for a much better story for everyone.

And so if you don't impose an interpretation on it, then you've actually are telling people what happened.

And then you're speaking to everybody.

And that's been our job for every film that we've ever made.

- [Narrator] The British concluded that Native Americans and colonists needed to be separated, at least for a time.

And so in 1763, a royal proclamation declared all the territory beyond the Appalachians off limits to settlement or speculation.

- And that is a huge slap in the face and a blow to those elite colonial Americans who've been indulging in this investment.

Who are these people?

Household names.

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Washington.

- What struck me is how you don't hesitate to portray the founders in their heroism or their hypocrisy, that you hold both.

What is the one thing, Ken, you learned about George Washington that you didn't know when you started the series 10 years ago?

- I didn't think I fully appreciated how indispensable he was.

That's the title of a biography that I read 30 years ago, "The Indispensable Man."

But I didn't realize that that was true.

I thought that may have been part of the hagiography.

He's deeply flawed.

He owns other human beings.

He knows that that's wrong.

He ends up freeing his slaves by the time he dies.

He makes rash decisions.

He also makes really, really bad tactical decisions, at Long Island, at Brandywine, at a few other places, that are the deciding factor of why the Patriots lose.

But he's able to inspire people in the dead of night.

He picks great subordinate talent, unafraid of that they may be better generals, and most are, than he is.

He's able to talk to Congress.

He's got this regal bearing, but he defers to Congress.

He convinces somebody from South Carolina and somebody from Massachusetts that you're not in from different countries, which they felt, they're not enemies.

We're one thing, an American.

And more than anything, he kept his army intact and alive and he gave up power twice.

Everybody was perfectly willing for him to become the military general of this new country.

And he said no.

And then after he served two terms as president, he said, I'm out of here.

The highest office is citizen.

We don't have any, we don't have a country without George Washington.

And he doesn't know he's George Washington, right?

He doesn't know that there's gonna be a capital named after him and a dollar bill and a quarter in a state on the other side of the continent.

I mean, you can get seduced by, oh, the founders and how lucky we are and what a great assemblage of talent.

But they're basically young and they basically make a lotta mistakes.

They're basically deeply flawed, but somehow they were able to take this clash between Englishmen and turn it into, in the course of a bloody, bloody civil war, into something that represents, as we say in the opening of the film, the highest aspirations of humankind.

That is a great, great story that is never going to get old.

- I think at the heart of every film that we make, and certainly at the heart of the question about George Washington and heroism is that heroes are flawed just like the rest of us.

And if you are a parent, as we both are, if you want to inspire young people to care about this country, to be involved, then showing that our heroes are flawed just like us make them inspirational.

- The opening minutes of "The American Revolution," one of the very first voices one hears is a spokesperson for the Iroquois Confederacy.

- Canasatego.

- [Canasatego] We know our lands are now become more valuable.

The white people think we do not know their value, but we are sensible that the land is everlasting.

- How do you assess how we previously told the story of Native Americans in this country?

And how did you depart from that?

- We didn't need to depart from it.

We needed to really just go into the record and find out that the whole idea for the, an idea of the union of these disparate different colonies comes from Benjamin Franklin looking at the Haudenosaunee, which is the Iroquois Confederacy, it's five and then six tribes, the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida and Mohawk, how for more than centuries, they had a kind of union of their own that allowed them to have the independence of their nations, states rights, and have a robust sort of economic and foreign policy diplomatically.

And these are not people living in teepees and woo-woo.

They are on a world economic and diplomatic scene and have been for a super long time.

They know people in England.

They know people in France.

They know people in Spain.

They are separate and distinct.

So we've tended in our histories to say them.

And what we wanted to do is to say, you know, the Shawnee or the Delaware may be as distinct an entity as France or Prussia or Virginia or Massachusetts.

And can you do that?

And here's the deal.

The American Revolution is not just a revolution.

It's not just a bloody civil war, which it is, and it's really, really bad.

It's a world war.

And it's the fourth world war over the prize of North America.

And when you say prize, what do you mean?

- You mean the land.

- You mean the land.

They didn't call it the Eastern Seaboard Congress Army.

They called it the Continental Army.

They knew where they were going, and we have conveniently forgotten what was in the way and who was in the way, distinct 300 nations in the continental United States.

- One of the things you depict, and Sarah, I think you're, I don't wanna say you're wholly responsible for this or largely responsible for this, but the maps and the imagery for the maps and how you capture the land in this.

I mean, this has always been a trademark of your films, but they come to life in a new way probably because of CGI and because of the drones and because of the way that you capture the land.

- You can't tell the history of the United States without appreciating this land and the landscape.

You can't tell the history of the United States without telling the story of what happened to Native peoples here.

- But these maps tell a new story of the American Revolution because the maps are so high tech.

And suddenly it's not just arrows going through.

It's not just the blue arrow and the red arrow.

You have the topography and you have the texture, and you have the darkness, and you have the heat.

- Just look at Boston on our maps.

- It's amazing.

- You know what, Boston now, there's a place called the Back Bay- - Yeah.

I love that.

- Which was a back bay as the Charles River was flowing into the Atlantic Ocean.

And, you know, Boston looks like a little head on top of a thing.

And to get that right is super, super important.

And the idea is to give people a sense of land and movement of human beings that don't have automobiles, don't have airplanes.

They are walking, or as Sarah likes to say, on four-legged animals, or in a boat.

- Look, you make very clear in the film that independence is not something that colonists necessarily sought or aspired to at the beginning.

That George Washington, even when he took leadership of the army, thought of this as a protest rather than a revolution.

- Right.

- Take a look first here, and then I want your reaction to it, of what William F. Buckley Jr said in 1976 when he was discussing the motivations and the contradictions of the nation's founding.

- I don't think it was so much a question of our telling the world how, that George III wasn't gonna tell us how to live.

It was about telling the world that George III wasn't gonna tell us how to govern ourselves.

And there is, of course, an important difference between the two concepts.

After all, we launched our experiment 200 years ago with a considerable number of human beings who were slaves.

So we began right off with a rather incandescent qualification on the whole notion of human freedom.

- The incandescent qualification is the best line I've heard in a long time.

So Buckley is taking it about 3/4 a way along the line, which is, you're not gonna tell me how to run my government here.

And oh, by the way, pay no attention to, out of 3 million people, those 500,000 people that are captured kidnapped Africans.

And oh, by the way, there's this thing called the Enlightenment going on.

And then all of a sudden, you're writing sentences like, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

There's nothing self-evident about these truths.

"That all men are created equal."

He means all white men of property free of debt.

But as Yuval Levin, the conservative scholar, says, "The word all just is like the trumpet breaking down the walls of Jericho."

And this is a great thing.

So those enslaved African Americans are four score and nine years ahead are gonna be free.

Women, impossibly, are gonna have to wait 144 years.

But all of that is going to happen because you've introduced this totally new idea about universal rights that, and it goes against what the hell is happening in a constitutional monarchy.

- The film gets into what a civil war this was.

- Yeah.

- Yes.

- I mean, you characterize this as a civil war.

- It is.

More of a civil war than our Civil War.

- Definitely.

- And you write about 15,000 Black Americans who actually enlist with George III.

- Yeah.

- Yes.

- As opposed to the 5,000 who ultimately joined the Patriots.

That because a quote, according to Vincent Brown, "For many of those enslaved people, the British represented freedom.

The Patriots did not.

That's a hard story to tell Americans."

- Yeah.

- Why is it hard, Sarah?

- Well, what you see in "The American Revolution" is that both sides of the fight are manipulating and trying to promise freedom to the enslaved people.

And they're gonna take whichever version of that notion of freedom they think is more possible than the other.

And that is really understandable.

And we need to put that into some historical context.

Yes, it's a bitter pill to swallow, but it actually shouldn't be, if you've thought about American history and how long it takes for us to fight the Civil War.

- Nobody wants to be enslaved.

No one wants to be enslaved.

So where do I have freedom?

And I did not know the full dimensions of the hypocrisy of one of the most cherished of the stories we tell about Lord Dunmore, who's a deposed British royal governor who's out in the Chesapeake, who owns human beings.

And he says, "If you are the slave of a rebel, we'll give you your freedom.

If you're the slave of a loyalist, you're going to be a slave for the rest of your life."

So you've already got massive contradictions, and so many slaves flood to Dunmore.

And it angers a lot of people, and it turns them towards supporting this developing revolution.

- The narrative includes scores of characters that we've never heard of before.

- Right.

- And there is really an incredible illustration of the role that women played in war.

The fact that Martha Washington was at camp on the war front, the way women were traveling with the army.

I know particularly for you, Sarah, taking history and then turning it into a dramatic narrative is one of the successes of your films.

How do you do that?

- Women are central to any story of war.

And that is absolutely true in "The American Revolution."

You know, when Britain sends the standing army into Boston in 1768, it really ratches up what's happening.

And there are boycotts and protests, and women are at the heart of that.

And one of the wonderful female scholars in the film says, if women hadn't done that, the revolution wouldn't have happened, wouldn't have turned out the way it did.

And women are at the heart of the history of this time.

- How difficult was it to uncover the scholarship about women's contributions to the revolution?

- So finding the scholars who helped us make this film is one of the total joys of what we do.

They tend to be very siloed, the academics, and we just throw them into Florentine Films camp and they love it, and we love them.

- As Sarah said, because they work in fairly narrow territories, to be thrown in together was exhilarating for them as much as it was exhilarating for us to just be exposed to the dynamism of that scholarship.

- Yeah.

And I think, you know, we are their students and they're incredibly generous to us, and ,I think, to the American people.

- You started this project at the end of the Obama presidency.

We are now in the beginning of the second Trump presidency.

President Trump just signed an executive order entitled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.

He declared that there was, quote, "A widespread effort to rewrite our nation's history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth."

He targeted institutions like the Smithsonian and directed to remove exhibitions that, quote, "Degrade shared American values, divide Americans by race, or promote ideologies inconsistent with Federal law."

What do you make of that?

- You know, the great genius of the American experiment is that before, people were subjects subject to authoritarian rule.

And what the revolution did is it created citizens.

And it is in the interests of the authoritarian to have people have a simplistic view of things, or to make a them out of somebody or to be ignorant.

You know, subscribing to superstitions, subscribing to conspiracies, subscribing to things that aren't true.

So if you are going to take something as important, not just to the United States, but to the world, you are obligated as citizens of a democracy to show the complexity of it.

And at the same time, that patriotism at the heart of everyone's pursuit is enlarged.

I think we've made the most patriotic film we've ever made because we were willing to say, we're not gonna just have a sanitized Madison Avenue version of this, where there are no women in a battle, there are no Black people, there are no slaves, there are no Native people who own the land.

And so that doesn't diminish or take away from this, it actually enhances it.

So we're all, and have always been, for robust, complicated, deep dives.

I mean, we've done this in public broadcasting 'cause it's the only place that would give us 10 years to do a deep dive because the marketplace actually insists on something quick and dirty.

And we can't do that because it's not honest to what actually transpired in the revolution.

- So does that mean you agree or disagree with this executive order?

- Oh, I disagree with an executive order that would, in any way, limit the possibilities of understanding the complex dynamics of American history.

Because the more you appreciate that, the more you realize what an extraordinary thing we have.

- President Trump's executive order says, quote, "Casting historical milestones in a negative light can foster national shame."

Does it?

- The question is, what kind of use do you put to the word shame?

Do you use the word shame as a cudgel?

Do you use it as a weapon?

Or do you say this happened?

- It is a tool for learning.

- Use it as a tool for learning.

And that if you do anything besides call balls and strikes, right, then you've limited that.

And by limiting that, I will label as shameful.

- So you're saying the real shame is in ignoring the difficult history?

- I think so, but even then, I don't- - But the purpose of the shame is not to make people feel shame today for previous actions.

It's to use shame as a tool for how to build a future.

- And it is the weapon, when the word shame is weaponized, then it's just in support of ignorance and superficiality, rather than the depth and complexity that every human being deserves.

If you want to superficialize everything, then we're just a highlight reel of only good things.

- Totally.

- And then Babe Ruth only hits a home run every time.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- I think history is, we talked a lot about this the last time we were sitting here with you, that history is useful as a warning, as a teacher, as an inspiration.

It's all of those things.

- You just mentioned PBS and how it is a place that uniquely provides with the time and the space that the marketplace couldn't afford to be able to create a 10-year product.

- Yes!

- As your cousin at PBS, I empathize deeply.

Is it a mistake to think that private donations and philanthropy will be able to fill the gap for federal funding?

- I remember talking to President Reagan at the White House the first time I was ever at the White House about the funding for "The Civil War."

And he asked me about it and I said, "Well, we got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities."

He said, "Very good, very good."

So the federal government primes the pump and then the private comes in.

General Motors was then the corporate underwriter, now it's Bank of America.

There was a couple of foundations involved.

They're still periodically involved.

- There has been a hybrid model at PBS for so long.

- And it's a hybrid model of how our government works, you know?

So my grant of $1,349,500 from the National Endowment of Humanities for "The Civil War" project was paid for back to the United States government by earnings off the top of "The Civil War" series.

- Ken, you publicly endorsed Kamala Harris for president last year saying that quote, "Our democracy hangs in the balance."

At a Brandeis University commencement a few months before, you said this, - Which brings me to a moment I've dreaded and forces me to suspend my longstanding attempt at neutrality.

There is no real choice this November.

There is only... - What were you dreading?

- I think I'm a private citizen.

I have my own political views.

I respect people who have different and opposing political views of mine.

That's the essence of a democracy, is the respect for the idea that someone could feel the opposite about it.

And so I've tried in my work, and I have succeeded in my work to never putting a political thumb on the scale to favor any one thing or any one person or candidate or whatever.

At the same time as a citizen, when you see things that you don't like, you have a right to speak up.

And so I was speaking up as our First Amendment, one of the extraordinary byproducts of this revolution gave us, as a private citizen.

But I wasn't saying it as a filmmaker.

And oh, by the way, I'm gonna take my anxiety about the future of our republic, which apparently a majority of Americans feel, to my work and I'm gonna put the thumb on the scale.

I will tell you this, that we have called balls and strikes in "The American Revolution."

And we hope because we have spoken to everybody and said the same thing to everybody across the country, that this helps put a kind of us back in the U.S.

because we have a shared story.

Everybody has a part to play in this story and they belong to this story.

Everybody.

Everybody.

There's no exceptions.

And that's the film we've made.

And that's what you want to protect is the ability for everyone to find in the complex story of our founding a place, a portal, a door where they can go, oh yeah, this is my story.

- The documentary series ends with your narrator saying, quote, "The architects of the federal Constitution feared that a demagogue might incite citizens into betraying the American experiment."

That sounds like a warning.

Is it?

- Well, it's a timeless warning if it is, because, you know, a lot of the stuff- - Totally timeless.

- Yeah, no, a lot of the stuff is stuff that was well before the most recent election.

- The founders were worried about precisely elements of our current moment.

- So Yuval Levin, the conservative scholar, says, if they showed up here, they would not be upset that somebody was trying to take more power, more authoritarian power.

That's what they were trying to reverse.

They would be very upset that Article I, which is not the executive, but the legislative, had yielded so much power to that.

So that may be a new way to think about it.

And it's helped us understand as we've traveled.

- The takeaway for me at the end of the show are three things.

And to your question, I think they were worried about the executive having too much power, and that they really focused on Congress.

Congress is the representation of the people.

Its job is to check the executive branch.

And over the last 250 years, we have done that better and worse.

And both parties are responsible for that.

That is not a one party problem.

So I think that's, I mean, to me, the takeaway of the show is, oh, Congress needs to represent me and needs to represent me regardless of the president, and to check the president's power, regardless of my political beliefs.

That's central to the American experiment, as is citizenship.

And that when you're 18, you have a privilege to live here.

You should cast your vote.

- Absolutely.

Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, thank you for returning to "Firing Line."

- Thank you.

- Thank you for having us.

(bright music) - [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, The Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, and by the following.

(bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music) (bright music) - [Announcer] You're watching PBS.