Friday night, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art continued its Building Bridges lecture series with An Evening with Ken Burns. The documentarian was the second guest in the series, following former President Barack Obama earlier this year.
Burns' visit was tied closely with his latest film, The American Revolution, a six-part, 12-hour series detailing the conflict and the people affected. Of those who might come to mind when you think of the American Revolution — a founding father, someone who has one of history's most recognizable faces — Burns' first topic of conversation Friday night was George Washington.
He told moderator Olivia Walton that we, as Americans, have a sort of mythological interpretation of the man. That characterization is reflected in Crystal Bridges' temporary exhibit America 250: Common Threads, in which the first room is covered floor to ceiling in memorabilia in the first president's likeness. Burns says we get some things wrong in our collective memory, and one painting is a glaring example.
“Nobody stands up in the middle of a boat in an ice-choked Delaware River in the middle of the night, even though it looks like it's day there. So I think what happened is almost immediately the mythology of the revolution began to swallow it.
“There's a man named Parson Weems in the 19th century who sort of turns and almost fetishizes Washington, to the extent that he's no longer accessible to us. And what becomes the obligation of anybody who's doing any serious history is to remove that — the sort of layers and layers of the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia.
“And I think that's what it is. Mostly, we've accepted the violence of our Civil War and the violence of the 20th century wars that we've been involved in, but we like to see the American Revolution in bloodless, gallant terms. And it's not. It is a horrific revolution. It is a bloody civil war. We're not just fighting the British over there. We are fighting our neighbors in many cases, our family members.
“Benjamin Franklin's own son, William, was the royal governor of New Jersey — deposed, imprisoned and then released, presuming that he would go back to England — and he starts a terrorist organization to kill patriots. And there are Patriot organizations that kill loyalists. This is a very bloody civil war. You do not want to be in New Jersey or South Carolina at all in this war. They are the worst places of violence.
“And I think the reason why is that the ideas that come out of Philadelphia — first in 1776 and then in 1787 with the Constitutional Convention — are so big and so important that we worry that somehow, if we tell it as it was, that these ideas would be diminished. We found after 10 years of work, they're not diminished. They're in fact made all the more impressive.”
Stay tuned to Ozarks at Large to hear more from Ken Burns' Building Bridges conversation that took place Friday night. You can also stay posted to Crystal Bridges' YouTube channel, where they will upload a full stream of the evening soon.
The American Revolution docuseries is available online with a PBS Passport subscription. And by the way, the next speaker in the Building Bridges series was announced this morning: Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. She will be in conversation with Crystal Bridges Board Chair Olivia Walton on Saturday, May 9, at 6 p.m.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
