Ahead of the quarter-millennial anniversary of the American Revolution, Ken Burns spoke with Jeffrey H. Anderson of the American Main Street Initiative and John Fonte of the Hudson Institute about his upcoming documentary on the founding of the United States. Burns reflected on the moral and philosophical foundations of the Revolution and its place in history. The American Revolution, after nearly a decade in production, premieres November 16 on PBS. Here’s the trailer: Burns described the American founders as a philosophical “dream team,” calling the Revolution “the most important event since the birth of Christ.” Over 10 years producing this new film, Burns said one word kept reappearing: The free electron that turns up in the quotes we’ve assembled is the word virtue-and that’s sort of missing from our conversations today, with the crassness and the crudeness of politics as it is.” He points to a key line in the Declaration of Independence: “All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.” “That’s not hard to parse,” Burns explained. “It means that, heretofore, everyone has more or less been a subject under some form of authoritarian rule, and we are inventing something else-this new thing, citizens. That carries a huge amount of responsibility, but also the energy to swim upstream against what people will otherwise suffer. That is an extraordinary moment for me that speaks to the complexity and the glory of the story that we’re telling.” “They’re constantly reaching back into antiquity-both Greek and Roman-to find these virtues,” he added. “This word virtue, this notion of the essentials of the human being, to himself and to a larger polity, becomes critical. There’s an anguished quote that we include by John Adams, who said, ‘There’s so much venality, so much avarice and ambition, so much lust for profit; I wonder if there’s enough virtue for a republic.’ Montesquieu said virtue was synonymous with patriotism.” “So the rebels-as the British never stopped calling us-called themselves, early on in the resistance, ‘patriots,’ which drove the British crazy, because this was a British term allied with the Whigs-those who were defenders of the constitutional monarchy,” he explained. You sense the intensity of the civil-war aspect of this, in addition to a revolution of ideas and arms-and, of course, a global war, the fourth global war over the prize of North America. “For our film, the goalposts are from about 1754 to when Washington decides not to seek a third term as president,” Burns said. “We don’t have to point arrows or create neon signs and say this is so great. It’s just a hell of a good story. It’s so complex and, in many ways, unknown, largely because there are no photographs or newsreels.” “I think many want to encrust the Revolution with the barnacles of sentimentality because we’re afraid that if you get into the nitty-gritty, it diminishes it. If you get into the nitty-gritty, it actually makes it even more inspiring, in my mind.” “We don’t have a country without George Washington,” he continued. “When you’re wrestling with this hugely complex narrative, it is striking how much he rises to the top… But that doesn’t mean it’s the only story you want to tell.” “There are Native American peoples, some assimilated, some coexisting,” Burns noted, “Many nations on the western edge are as distinct from each other as Virginia is from Massachusetts, or France from Prussia, and they’ve been on the world scene for a couple of centuries as diplomatic and economic trading partners, with a kind of sophistication we don’t usually extend to them.” “And then, out of the 2.5 to 3 million people in the colonies, you have 500,000 black people, free and enslaved.” “And it’s a global war-so you’ve got to understand who the Germans are, from the top down and the bottom up, and the British soldiers and their king and ministers and generals, and the Irish and the Scots and the Welsh and the English-most of whose families had been working land for a thousand years that they didn’t own. They’re looking at these colonists who now own land. The dynamics are great,” Burns explained. “You have a sense that not only is this a geopolitical prize for empire, but it also represents, in the day-to-day, what it meant for an individual who could finally, maybe for the first time in a thousand years, own a plot of land.” “The genius of it is that we’re a process country,” he said. “We’re in pursuit of happiness. We want to debate what happiness is.” “A more perfect union, I think, means improvement. It doesn’t mean the creation of a utopia,” he added. “This goes back to Ecclesiastes: ‘What has been will be again; what has been done will be done again; there’s nothing new under the sun.’ Human nature doesn’t change.” “If you live in a disposable, all-consuming present, blissfully unaware of the historical tides that brought you to this moment, or where those tides may take you, then you’ve abdicated some of the very things that most concerned the founders as they were creating this. We’re living in times where the things they worked so hard to reverse engineer seem to be having more traction than usual,” he continued. “Going back to the origin story permits you to re-remember-perhaps reinvigorate-what animated this thing. What did it mean? What questions can you ask yourself? Would I have been a Loyalist or a Patriot? Would I have been willing to fight for a cause? To die for a cause? To give up my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor in pursuit of this completely untested idea?”
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