Earlier this month, 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. Ozarks at Large's Jack Travis was at the event, and he brings us this report.
Ken Burns is a name synonymous with American documentary filmmaking. For the past four decades, Burns has made films distributed by PBS with funding from sources including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He recently visited Arkansas, the first state to break ties with the public broadcasting network. He was there for Crystal Bridges' Building Bridges Lecture Series. Museum board chair Olivia Walton and the packed house at the Heartland Whole Health Institute welcomed him with this.
"I love that. So if folks are watching at home, that clapping was for PBS. We love PBS.”
“Thank you."
Burns' visit centered on his latest film, "The American Revolution," a six-part, 12-hour series detailing the conflict and the people involved. One of those people who might come to mind when you think of the American Revolution was Burns' first topic of conversation, George Washington.
He told Walton that Americans tend to create a 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 as a kind of 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.”
Even the men of the time didn't realize what a revolution takes. Burns says that all they knew was that they wanted democracy, a virtue learned through the Enlightenment period, but had an unrealistic idea of how that must take shape to be in congruence with their lofty ideals.
"They think that it's going to be — to make a republic is to have just the wealthy men of property who have had the ability to read and understand the world's knowledge, to be able to administer this. In order to prosecute this revolution, they need buy-in from ordinary people. And the first thing ordinary people are going to say is, what's in it for me? And it is important that we have this mythology of the sturdy militiamen, at Concord Green, and they're there, but they're going back to plant their crops or to sow their crops, or they're scared, or they need to mind their shops. And it turns out that the Continental Army will be filled at the end with teenagers and ne'er-do-wells and felons hoping for a pardon and disreputable sorts. That's how South Carolina advertised for new soldiers. Disreputable sorts. Second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance. Recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany. People who did not own property. And what happened was what had begun as a struggle over the rights of propertied Englishmen in America becomes this massive struggle for the liberation of a people, and eventually you're going to have to extend rights. So democracy is definitely — it has a bad — it's a bad word at the beginning of the revolution. It means the rule of the mob. In fact, there are two Anglican clergymen who are having a conversation after the tar and feathering of a British customs agent. Tar and feathering seems funny to us. It's torture — boiling pitch poured on somebody. Then it's an unbelievable humiliation. And he said, who would you rather be ruled by? One tyrant 3,000 miles away, or 3,000 tyrants not a mile away. But people evolve, and tracks like 'Common Sense' by Thomas Paine — an Englishman comes and sort of makes the ideals of the revolution. He puts it in the vernacular that ordinary, so-called ordinary, people can understand and puts them in biblical context so that people are really aroused. And I assume that everybody in this audience thinks for sure they'd be a patriot. And you have to understand that at least 20% of you are loyalists, and at least 20% of you are disaffected and are trying to just keep your head down and not be bothered by it. And many of you will change back and forth depending on the circumstances of who's controlling things. And that's a reality that we sort of find it hard to accept, along with the fact that we don't win without the aid of the French. And also, did you know the Dutch were involved? And also the Spanish, in this what became a world war — the fifth world war over the prize of North America. And prize, of course, means the land. And the land, of course, is already occupied by 300 individual nations. So you've got a very complicated dynamic going on. And so democracy is the unintended byproduct of this."
He says that one of the most difficult aspects of documentary filmmaking is selecting which stories to include and which to cut.
"So you would presume that what we do is additive. It's actually subtractive. We have 400 hours of film that comes down to 12. So the cutting room floor is filled with really good stuff, not bad stuff. And so it tells you what it needs. It tells you that you can do the Battle of Cowpens at 10 minutes, but you can't do the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in North Carolina — Cowpens is in South Carolina — in the same amount of time, because it's the same story. So it's now two sentences instead of 10 minutes. So over the course, people begin to emerge. At one point, one of our academic advisors who came in — and were surprised that we invited them back years and years and years to watch — they said, 'Well, you're admirable. You don't make loyalists bad people, but you follow lots of patriots throughout the episodes. But you don't have loyalists all the way through.' So we took the very best quote we had of a loyalist and then found out more about him and sprinkled his story throughout all the episodes. John Peters, who in episode four is leading a band of loyalists that he's formed in Quebec, come down and he's in Burgoyne's army. He's fighting a losing battle at Bennington, and he hears somebody say, 'Peters, you damn Tory!' Just as that person — his best friend growing up, Jeremiah Post — stabs him with his bayonet and is deflected, he says, by the bone. Whereupon John Peters says, 'I was obliged to destroy him.' So he killed his best friend there. And that's the American Revolution, too. There are these interior moments and scenes that are difficult to convey if you are dedicated to a kind of superficial, glancing, sentimental version of the revolution. But if you get down and want to find out what happened, then these people live and have dimensions, and you get to know them and understand their motives."
Multidimensional is perhaps an apt way to describe a clip from the series that Burns, Walton and the audience watch together. It detailed life at Valley Forge, the winter encampment of the Continental Army under the command of George Washington. The camp housed soldiers born in the colonies, Ireland and Germany — Catholics, Protestants, white people, enslaved and free Black people, and indigenous people, men and women. Burns says there was a reason they all came together.
"They had a common mission. It's really unbelievable. You feel it in the idealism of Lafayette. John Laurens now is looking — he's fighting alongside Black troops. The Continental Army is more integrated than at any time for the next 225 years. And it's interesting that the calls for liberty — slavery has existed forever, and in the new world it's been there for 150 years, and people have spoken about its evils, but it's kind of generally accepted. But when you begin a revolution on the idea of the oppression of the British, and even Washington says that they treat us with the same arbitrary sway as we hold over the Negroes who work for us — all of a sudden the hypocrisy is apparent. And so while people did speak about the evils beforehand, the historian Bernard Bailyn says it wasn't until the revolution that the issue came to the fore, because you can't say we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. It's really amazing. And let me speak about the Native Americans. One of the tribes is the Mohegans, from north-central Connecticut. And we found a list in which Rebecca Tanner, a Mohegan woman, lost five sons to the patriot cause. Five sons. Remember Mrs. Sullivan from World War II? Four sons — they all went down on a battleship. So we changed the rule that brothers had to be separated. And we got a little bit of relief for mothers, and ‘Saving Private Ryan’. And that's a good thing. But Rebecca Tanner lost five sons. And to find this extraordinary line in just a document — just one line — 'lost five sons.'"
Burns says he intends this documentary to be for every American, regardless of their politics. In fact, he says certain scenes were left out of the film to reduce polarization.
"People like to say in a kind of lazy fashion that history repeats itself. No event has ever happened twice. Mark Twain — remember him? I knew I could get him back in — is supposed to have said history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And that's a really good thing. As a filmmaker, I have worked on films where you are so aware, boy, this is what's happening now. And over the course of a decade, it's different things. And so like Odysseus, we kind of tied ourselves to the mast so we wouldn't date ourselves or render our film useless by pointing out all the ways that it rhymes. In fact, I took something out of the film after the last presidential election because I just thought no one on earth will believe that it was in there for–
“What was it?”
“We have a scene towards the end of the film about the Bill of Rights, and Jefferson was stuck in Paris and wrote to his protégé, James Madison, who's sort of writing the code of the Constitution and many of the federal papers with Hamilton, arguing and debating. And Jefferson says, 'What if someone should lose an election but pretend false votes and reap the whirlwind?' And I just said, this is coming out, because I want to speak to everybody and I don't want suddenly to have it turned off. Our story is our story — not us and them. There's no them. There's only us. I saw that in your elevator when we were going through — it was me, but the reflection of me is we. Carson McCullers, in 'The Member of the Wedding,' has a protagonist, a young girl named Frankie. She's jealous of her older sister who's getting married. And she said, 'They will now have a we of me,' and we need a we of me. And this is why we tell stories — to connect ourselves to each other. That's what we do. And the more we get distracted by social media, the more we lose that connection with each other and the more we lose the civic virtues and the civic civility that are essential to our progress. Whenever we've been together — more unum than pluribus — we've done extraordinary things. When it's more pluribus than unum, not so much."
Crystal Bridges' Building Bridges lecture series honors the American spirit of meeting in the middle with curiosity, courage and care. The next speaker in the series is 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. You can stay posted to Crystal Bridges' YouTube channel, where they will upload the full conversation from An Evening with Ken Burns soon. You can also watch all 12 hours of "The American Revolution" docu-series online with a PBS Passport subscription.
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.
