SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, when 13 American colonies dared to reject British rule over their affairs. Filmmaker Ken Burns spent a decade making a documentary series about the revolution that turned that declaration into reality. Recently, Burns spoke about the series, "The American Revolution," with Ramtin Arablouei. He's the host of NPR's history podcast Throughline.
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RAMTIN ARABLOUEI: I think the question you're getting a lot is sort of - what was the American Revolution really about, right?
KEN BURNS: It is a global war. Preceding it by 20 years is what we are - call the French and Indian War, which we see in our own way as our own story, our own battle with our then British allies against the French and some of their Native American allies. And we had our own Native American allies, and we won for the prize of North America. So the important thing is to rewind and say the prize of North America that then introduces an even more important thing. If you're saying North America is a prize, you're saying that the land is a prize, and that land has been occupied for millennia by other people.
And in 1776, 13 British colonies occupy the Eastern Seaboard, which they've already superimposed over existing Native lands, varieties of tribes, varieties of customs, not a single entity of them, but distinct states that have been on the world scene trading and diplomatically and militarily and have known the other empires, Britain and Spain and France, particularly Netherlands, for centuries. And some of the people superimposed by those 13 colonies have assimilated. Some are coexisting. Some have moved west and are in those western territories that the colonists want to spread into and the British can't afford to protect them. And so you have great tensions.
And so I think if you're in the eighth grade and you're having a test about the Revolution, you pass, if you say taxes and representation. But I think, as we try to do, like the global dynamics, like the importance of the Caribbean, like the violence and bloodshed that attends this revolution, all of that is revelatory and new, I think, for most people. For most of us, we think it's a bunch of guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, particularly in '76 and then in 1787. And it's true. These are the newest and the greatest thoughts you could possibly imagine.
But it's also a revolution. It's also a civil war, and as we've been discussing, it's also a global war. So it's got wonderful, complicated dynamics, and we haven't even brought up the fact that of the 3-, 2 1/2 to 3 million inhabitants of those 13 colonies, at the beginning of the Revolution, 500,000 are free and enslaved Africans who are part of the dynamic. Women who play essential role in keeping the resistance alive, who are writing as philosophers and historians and satirists and poets, movingly about it - they are participating in the Revolution when it happens. On the battlefield in supportive armies are women attending these armies. They're washing the dead. They are buying the dead. They're washing the bloody clothings they're around. They're also back home, running farms and businesses, thank you very much. And so there's a whole cast of people who have not really had their stories acknowledged in large measure because we're pre-photographic. There's not - you know, 99% of people don't have their portraits painted, but it doesn't mean those 99 don't exist. So we've spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out how to make them exist.
ARABLOUEI: You also profile people, or leaders in particular, who have understood this subtext and this need for possibility, whether it's Grant or it's Lincoln or Rosa. There's so many - just a list of these leaders that understood on some level for this to feel real, these ideas, it has to feel real in people's lives where people feel like there's a - and right now, what I'm worried about is - I'm not pointing to any particular leader, but I think we've had a series of leaders and just generally our leadership in Congress, who don't seem to understand that these ideas don't mean anything if they don't feel like they're real in people's lives, if they don't feel like they can (inaudible).
BURNS: That's exactly right. And so we tell stories about these people. So let's take - go back to the Revolution and take the most important person in the history of the United States, which is George Washington. Without him, we do not have a country. We just don't. He's indispensable. He's also deeply flawed. He owns hundreds of human beings. He's rash. He rides out on the battlefield, risking his life and therefore the cause. He makes some bad military decisions, but he's able to inspire men in the darkest of night to fight for a cause that nobody had ever fought for before in all of human history.
He is willing to sacrifice, as the last line of the Declaration says - we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes. He may be one of the richest men in America. And he spends most of his time living in other houses and tents for most of the war, never gets back to Mount Vernon. I think he spends four days during the war at Mount Vernon once he's named commander in chief. He's willing to do that and his sacred honor. He knows how to pick subordinate talent, unafraid or jealous of the fact they may be better generals than him. Some are. He knows how to talk and defer to Congress, which is the important example of a democracy, of a republic. He's able to convince people from Georgia and New Hampshire that they're not from individual countries as they think they are, but one thing - Americans.
And more than anything else, he gives up power twice, first his military commission and that. And he didn't know he was George Washington. He didn't know there was going to be a dollar bill or a quarter or a big spiky monument in the national capital that's named for him, or there'd be, on the other side of the continent, a state named for him, or then every other state has either a county or a town named for him. He didn't know that. He didn't know how it was going to turn out. Even when the French came in on our side, he was worried when the British took Charleston. He really thought, OK, this is over. I'm not going to be able to pull it off. And if you have the arrogance of the present, thinking, well, we know how it turned out - what could there be? Good history is staying tuned because you think it might not turn out the way you know it did.
I mean, we lament today. You know, we sort of don't have heroes, but a hero is not a perfect thing. A hero is - and the Greeks brought it to us. It's their idea that heroism is a negotiation between the person's strength and their weaknesses. And sometimes that negotiation - it's all internal - is a war, a kind of psychological war. Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths and powers. And so if you're - if you just want some sanitized, Madison Avenue, top-down version of the past, it's bankrupt. If you just say it's only bottom-up and you throw out the Washingtons and the Jeffersons and - in that unforgiving revisionism, it's bankrupt.
And yet, if you tell a complicated narrative that goes, yep, this is who they were, and sometimes - as Wynton Marsalis said to us in our jazz series, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. We do understand that in our friendships and our loves and our relationships and stuff, but we don't apply it to our politics 'cause everything's binary. Everything's one thing, my way or the highway, or it's red state or blue state, or it's on or off. It's like the same in our computer world. It's either a one or a zero. And it doesn't work like that.
DETROW: That was Ken Burns talking about his documentary series "The American Revolution" in conversation with Throughline's Ramtin Arablouei. You can hear the whole episode on NPR's Throughline podcast.
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