TERRY GROSS, HOST:
I'm Terry Gross. Divisions in our country are often traced back to the Civil War. But the divisions go all the way back to the Revolutionary War. It wasn't just a war against the British. It was a bloody civil war in the colonies between the revolutionaries, who call themselves the patriots, and the loyalists who wanted to remain under British rule. The Revolutionary War is the subject of a new documentary series made by America's best-known documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, along with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt.
Burns describes the Revolutionary War as the most consequential revolution in history. The series tells the story not only from the perspectives of the Founding Fathers, the generals and the fighters. It includes the stories of people left out of the declaration's statement all men are created equal. That's women, Native Americans, enslaved people and free Black people. Making this film, Burns says, led him to new perspectives on the fundamental questions about the founding. This 12-part series premieres on most public TV stations Sunday, November 16, with two hour-long episodes on six consecutive nights. The subjects of Burns' other documentaries shown on public TV include the Civil War, the war in Vietnam, baseball, jazz, country music and our national parks. We recorded our interview onstage at the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Camden, New Jersey, next to the river depicted in the famous painting Washington Crossing the Delaware.
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GROSS: I have to tell you, Ken, that this series was like a revelation for me. I never studied the Revolutionary War in depth. I knew bits and pieces. And it was really a revelation. So my first question to you is, what really surprised you? Like, tell us one thing that really surprised you in doing the research because you uncovered so much and had so much source material.
KEN BURNS: Well, I have to acknowledge my codirectors, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. We've worked for nearly 10 years with our writer, Geoff Ward, and an extraordinarily good team of people figuring out maps and figuring out archives and figuring out how to shoot reenactments without it feeling like reenactments. I don't think there was a day, Terry, when we weren't stunned by something we'd learned new - that this was not just a revolution that takes place of ideas in Philadelphia, but a real revolution, a bloody one. A late 18th century war in which people die by muskets and bayonets. And that it's a civil war, Americans are killing other Americans, and then that it's a world war.
And that was the stunning thing, that Britain had not just 13 colonies, but 26. The other 13 were in the Caribbean. And they're by far the most profitable, a great engine of wealth for this far-flung British empire because it's based almost entirely on slave labor. And that the prize of North America has been contested by the Dutch, by the Spanish, by the French, by the English for centuries. And that our revolution, which is our little fight with the mother country, is in fact the fourth global war over the prize of North America.
GROSS: One of the things that really surprised me - we always talk, especially now, about how divided our nation is.
BURNS: Yeah (laughter).
GROSS: In my mind, that goes back to the Civil War. But now I think, oh, that goes back to the founding. That goes back to the Revolution.
BURNS: We've always been divided. I don't know if you can take comfort from it, given the current state of affairs. But I do believe that the historian's perspective is one that permits you to understand, as Ecclesiastes says, there's nothing new under the sun. The colonists, they are human beings and like us. And I think because there are no photographs to prove that, just paintings - and they have buckles on their feet and stockings and waistcoats and powdered wigs - that we think somehow they're just utterly different from us. And they're not.
So I think we can understand - historian Maya Jasanoff says that we're born in violence. The United States comes out of violence. She says, and that's an important thing that we have to understand. There's certainly big ideas over there. And those big ideas, I have to say, are not diminished by telling the truth about how complicated and how violent this struggle is and how diverse the group of people participating in it are.
GROSS: Yeah. So let's talk about the divisive nature of the Revolutionary War and the colonies. Tell us briefly some of the arguments for being a loyalist, being loyal to Britain, and for being a revolutionary and fighting for independence from Britain and the king.
BURNS: Well, loyalists, they think that their prosperity - the fact that they own land, their health, their literacy - all of it has come from the British constitutional monarchy. Why rock the boat for some strange, crazy cockamamie ideas. The patriots are kind of an amalgam of concerns. The central one, we're not taught this in school. It's taxes and representation, which is super important, but it's Indian land. It's Indian land in an intimate, personal way for an ordinary person who wants to get 150 acres of land and wants to spillover the Appalachians, where the British won't let us go because they can't afford, having won the previous war, the previous world war - the Seven Years' War, which we call the French and Indian War. They can't afford to defend us. And so please don't go over. And it's enraging people like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, who are speculators in tens of thousands of acres of land in the Ohio Valley, where people want to go.
So it's about Indian land. And then it's about a funny thing that takes over, this kind of gravitation from an argument between British people over English law and property and things like that, into natural laws. And so these ideas of freedom and liberty and independence come. And it begins to grow steadily so that by the time the declaration is signed in the summer of 1776, and it's disseminated, there's a palpable sense that people have agency. There's a new thing going on. Suddenly, new identity had come. A lot of that has to do with the 3,000 miles that separate them. And so, all of a sudden, new events like the Boston Massacre, or the Tea Party, are invested with new understandings if you can have the patience to see out all the complexity and hold in contradiction lots of stuff that the simple, easy story of our revolution never wants to tell.
GROSS: Yeah. And I was amazed that America was so divided during the Revolutionary War that Ben Franklin's son was a loyalist. He was siding with the British. And Abigail Adams, John Adams' wife, the first vice president's wife, she initially thought like, you are really underestimating the amount of anarchy and violence this is going to lead to. This is not going to be an easy thing. And she was so right. But by the time the revolution was over, she was fully behind independence and revolution.
BURNS: The is the story. And it's not even that one person is a loyalist and another person's a patriot, and their positions are held. There are people who change. Benjamin Franklin's son, William, was the royal governor of New Jersey. He was deposed, spent time in a prison in Connecticut. It was presumed when he was released, he would go back to his beloved England. And he stays and forms a terrorist organization that are hunting down patriots. And there are lots of patriot organizations hunting down loyalists. That's one family of a Founding Father.
GROSS: So in terms of the brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, we're talking about, like, freelance fighting. And, I mean, we're talking about militias, too. But in addition to the militias, in addition to the actual armies, you also have just individuals attacking each other, burning each other's houses, seeking revenge. I didn't know that.
BURNS: Nor did we. I don't think we understood. When the British are dominant, the loyalists are taking revenge on their patriot neighbors. And when the reverse happens, the patriots are doing the same. And this is a very down and dirty war, and also a war at that huge macro level of geopolitics that is taking place in the courts of Europe.
GROSS: One of the things I love about your series is it talks about the Revolution not just from, like, the Founding Fathers. You get to the women. You get to the enslaved and the free Black people. You get to the Native Americans. So let's start with the enslaved and the free Black people. They were fighting in the army on both sides.
BURNS: Right.
GROSS: So what were they promised on each side?
BURNS: So the war is big and global, as I said. But it's also intimate, down to a family or an individual's decision. About 20% of the population of 2.5 to 3 million people included in the colonies, excluding Native peoples, are enslaved and free Black people. And they've got decisions to make. Many, we think 20,000, fought. Fifteen thousand for the British, who had cynically promised freedom for those slaves of rebelling people, not of slaves of loyalists. They had to remain slaves. The man who issued this proclamation, Dunmore, himself owned other human beings and didn't think that that was inconsistent. And many Black Americans flooded there and had a taste of freedom for the first time and fought alongside British regiments. The remaining 5,000 were patriots who fought.
GROSS: So the British promised that enslaved people, if they fought with the Brits, would be freed.
BURNS: Yeah.
GROSS: Did the Americans make the same promise?
BURNS: No, except in Rhode Island and a few other northern states, particularly Rhode Island, in which those Black regiments that were made up of both free and enslaved were promised their freedom. But it was also indicated that Rhode Island would compensate the owners for the loss of their property.
GROSS: And Washington, when he saw Black people in the militia, he didn't want them there.
BURNS: He arrives a Virginian and a very wealthy man and an owner, like Jefferson, of hundreds of human beings over the course of his lifetime. And he arrives in Boston and discovers that the army that he is assembling, this new continental army that's created in the spring of 1776, has Black soldiers who have fought in Lexington and Concord and have served bravely at Bunkers Hill. And he doesn't want to recruit any more. And he sort of insists on that. And then finally, and this distinguishes George Washington from many other people of his time, he suddenly realizes this has been a mistake.
And what's so incredible about Washington, I think, and why he's so endlessly interesting, despite these flaws, despite his military mistakes, is how he is singularly the one person responsible for the United States. And a lot of it is his fluidity and his ability to say, oh, OK. You make good soldiers, that's OK. So he changes his mind. And he grows in a way that is impressive. And I think by the end, he's freeing his slaves. And he understands...
GROSS: By the end of?
BURNS: Of his life, he understands, as Jefferson knows, too, that slavery is wrong. It's a complicated thing that defies the sort of binary.
GROSS: So I want to quote something that Washington says because I found this a fascinating quote. And he's talking about how upsetting it is to see one brother killing another. And he says, the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with blood or inhabited by slaves. Sad alternative but can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?
BURNS: Yeah.
GROSS: So he's not talking about enslaved people. He's talking about himself.
BURNS: That's right.
GROSS: That he is being treated like a slave by the British. Like, that's the choice that the colonists have, to be treated as a slave by the British or to fight. And I'm thinking, hey, you're an enslaver. You are not a slave.
BURNS: So this is the whole conundrum of the Revolution. Many people began to describe their situation within British America as being dependent or slaves to them. And the irony is not lost on everybody. It's not lost on the British. It's not lost on even some of the people. And so what happens is, is that the second that incredibly hypocritical comment comes from Washington and many, many others, slavery is kind of over. I mean, it's over by the time Thomas Jefferson writes the declaration. It's going to take a long time, four score and nine years. But when he says all men are created equal, and he means all white men of property, it's over. Women are going to get the vote. Takes 144 years, but it's going to happen.
All the other expansions of liberty are going to happen because of the vagueness of these new arguments that the Americans are using, born of the Enlightenment, about how you're going to be free. And the hypocrisy is evident. But that hypocrisy is the place in which we are, strangely enough, able to grow. The scholar, the late scholar, Bernard Bailyn said, nobody really talked about the evils of slavery before the American Revolution. There were some people who spoke to it, he said, and its evils. But nobody really talked about it. But the second the Revolution began, that's all people talked about. Basically, by the time the Revolution had started, our Civil War was going to happen.
GROSS: We're listening to the interview I recorded onstage with Ken Burns. His new documentary series, "The American Revolution," premieres on most PBS stations Sunday, November 16. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF SLOWBERN'S "WHEN WAR WAS KING")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the onstage interview I recorded with Ken Burns about his new documentary series, "The American Revolution." It premieres on most PBS stations November 16.
Was there anybody speaking up during the Revolution about ensuring rights for women or Native Americans, or enslaved people?
BURNS: Everywhere, all the time, it's going on. Abigail Adams...
GROSS: During the Revolution?
BURNS: During the Revolution, Abigail Adams is saying - you know, we have this phrase that comes down to us, and we leave it. Remember the ladies. It sounds dainty, and we leave it alone. But she says, all husbands would be tyrants if they want to and then goes onto say that if we don't get some sort of representation, we're likely to foment a rebellion. And so there are people who are already patently antislavery speaking about this at the time.
And by the time the Constitutional Convention is over and our government is starting, Benjamin Franklin himself, who had owned human beings in his own household, a handful of people, is submitting to Congress a bill that goes, of course, nowhere to end slavery in the United States. But there are people arguing for the rights of Native Americans. There are people arguing for women's rights. There are people arguing for the rights of enslaved people. It is an incredibly fluid and fascinating dynamic.
GROSS: Let's talk about Native Americans in the Revolution. So as you mentioned, the British had fought the French and Indian War. Native Americans were siding with the French at that time.
BURNS: Some of them. Some of them...
GROSS: Some of them.
BURNS: ...Were with the British, some were with the French.
GROSS: Oh, OK.
BURNS: And remember, there - colonies are superimposed over many tribal lands, and so there's coexistence and even assimilation of Native peoples among the colonists. And then you have all of these separate nations at the West who are fearing the encroachment of the settlers and early on, figure that maybe they should go with the British who beat the French and - 'cause the British seem to be trying to restrain their own people, their own upstarts. And a lot of Native tribes are waiting and seeing, and a lot are also fighting on the American side.
Rebecca Tanner, a Mohegan woman, therefore, I presume, to be from Connecticut, lost five sons fighting for the Patriots. It's just an extraordinary loss. I can't imagine being a mother losing five sons. And the Haudenosaunee, the group that we open our film with, the Iroquois Confederacy that Franklin decides could be the model for the United States, a union, 20 years before the revolution, that gets destroyed by our American Revolution because the eastern branches of the tribes, mostly the Oneida side with the Americans. And the Westerns, the Senecas and Mohawks, are siding with the British, and the entire beautiful democracy that had existed for centuries that Franklin was trying to model this idea for the colonies...
GROSS: The Europe prediction (ph).
BURNS: ...On the Haudenosaunee falls apart as a result of the American Revolution.
GROSS: And Washington owned tens of thousands of acres of Native American land. How did he get them?
BURNS: So you survey it, you speculate, and while many of the recent immigrants and colonists are hoping to flow over the Appalachians and take over Indian land, you know, 125 acres to own land for the first time maybe in your life because you've been in Wales or Scotland or Ireland, and your family has worked as dependents on somebody else's land for 1,000 years, you've got new lands, so there's tension at the sort of lower levels of society. And then at the higher levels, both in the North and the South, you have the planters and you have successful businessmen like Benjamin Franklin, who are speculating in tens of thousands of lands, which they've just identified that they want, and they're hoping to get the blessings of the king or the governor to grant them that land.
But these are Native lands, and they are presuming that Native people do not have the same relationship to property as they do, which is true, but that therefore, they then have some right, which we'll call in the next century manifest destiny, to - or spread (ph) the whole thing.
GROSS: So let's talk about women. And an image that you have in your film really sticks in my mind of, like, women in a stream washing blood out of clothes. And you talk in the movie about how women's jobs, part of it was washing the blood out of clothes so that the clothes of the dead soldiers could be given to fighters who were wearing tatters, you know, tattered clothes. Tell us more about the role that women played during the Revolutionary War.
BURNS: The role of women is essential. They are responsible for sustaining the resistance period in the 10 or so years leading up to the actual warfare, beginning in April of 1775. Our idea of battles as solely masculine affairs are completely wrong. There are women and children accompany every army. Washington, every general, resents the kind of dependence, but they are performing functions of cleaning and nursing and burying the dead and washing the blood and preparing a uniform of a dead soldier to be handed down to someone else. They are very active in all aspects of this.
Women, of course, disguise themselves very famously. At Fort Washington in Manhattan, across from Fort Lee in New Jersey, almost where the George Washington Bridge is now, there's a big fight, and Margaret Corbin's husband is killed. And she directs such a furious fire down on the Hessians who are coming up the hill that they direct all their fire at her, and she's wounded in the breast and in the jaw and ends up being the first woman offered a pension after the Revolutionary War, though, of course, at half the rate of the men.
GROSS: We're listening to the onstage interview I recorded with Ken Burns about his new PBS series, "The American Revolution." It premieres on most PBS stations November 16. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the onstage interview I recorded with Ken Burns about his new documentary series, "The American Revolution." It premieres on most PBS stations Sunday, November 16, and runs for six consecutive nights. The series includes the perspectives of women, enslaved and freed Black people and Indigenous people - the people left out of the declaration's statement, all men are created equal.
The Revolutionary War was also a bloody, violent civil war, with the revolutionaries and those who were loyal to British rule fighting each other on and off the battlefield. Before the war started, Abigail Adams, who was married to Founding Father John Adams, warned that people were underestimating the amount of anarchy and violence a revolutionary war would lead to.
Well, hearing Abigail Adams' prediction about how horrible a revolutionary war would be and learning more through your film about how horrible it was and all the blood and anarchy and brother and brother fighting against each other. I'm so war averse, which isn't to say I'm a pacifist, but I grew up watching World War II movies 'cause it wasn't long after World War II. And then there was Vietnam and, you know, seeing just all of that horror made me very - you know, feeling lucky that I've never had to live through a war in my own country.
And so it made me wonder, watching your documentary, which side would I be on? I'm not sure that I would be a revolutionary because I wouldn't want to have war in my neighborhood. I wouldn't want to lose all the men in my life to war. If I was a mother, I wouldn't want to lose my son. I'm a sister. I wouldn't want to lose my brother. Have you thought about that, which side would you have been on?
BURNS: I think that's the fundamental question, and I really don't know what side I'd be on. I don't know whether I could take up arms for a cause, whether I would be willing to die for a cause, whether I would be willing to kill for a cause. I remember when we made the Civil War series, afterwards I said, we're not doing any more wars. And for a variety of reasons, we got sucked into doing a history of the Second World War, which we called the war. Before the ink was dry on that, I'd committed to Vietnam, and before the ink was dry on Vietnam, I said, we're doing the revolution.
I'm drawn into the fact that it obviously represents the worst, but often the best of us. And there's so much that happens in the levels of it, and yet the elemental question that you ask is one that I think all of us who've worked on it sound every day in some way. I'm not sure I have the answers. Of course, I might be a loyalist, but maybe I wouldn't be. But could I fight?
Jefferson didn't fire a gun in anger. Patrick Henry didn't fire a gun in anger. Benjamin Franklin didn't fire a gun in anger, but George Washington did, and Alexander Hamilton did, and James Monroe did. And, you know, many other people fought in this war and made decisions of that kind. And as this - the last line of the Declaration says, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. George Washington may have been the richest man in America, and he certainly risked his life. Certainly...
GROSS: Constantly.
BURNS: ...Risked to his...
GROSS: Like...
BURNS: ...Fortune. Constantly.
GROSS: Yeah.
BURNS: And let's remember that in addition - between his flaws and between the bad military decisions that he made often, he also rides out on the battlefield, risking everything at Kips Bay in mid-Manhattan.
GROSS: And living with his men in the freezing cold...
BURNS: Living with the men...
GROSS: ...In the winter.
BURNS: ...In the freezing cold and being able to inspire them. This is, like, the richest guy in America, or one of the richest guys in America. And at Valley Forge, he loses something like 500 major officers who've gotten letters from home saying, hey, we're making a lot of money off this war selling provisions and doing this. And they desert, and he stays.
GROSS: But that's the thing. A lot of the wealthy landowners who start off fighting for independence, they end up going home. And then it's the relatively poor people, the people who don't own land and teenagers and felons, you say, who become the army. And it's kind of remarkable...
BURNS: It's remarkable.
GROSS: ...That they succeeded.
BURNS: It is...
GROSS: They had no training.
BURNS: There's zero chance that they're going to succeed at Lexington Green on April 19, 1775. And this is a war that has been proposed and sort of undertaken by property owners, from militiamen who are farmers to businessmen and merchants and big planters and rich people. But in order to actually succeed, it has to be, as you say, those teenagers and those felons and those ne'er-do-wells and those second and third sons without a chance of inheritance and recent immigrants who have nothing. And so, by the end of the war, the war is being fought in large measure by people who have little or no property that it started out as a war to protect the rights of property owners.
And so the interesting thing is, our textbooks say, you know, the American Revolution was about bringing democracy. Democracy is not an object of the American Revolution. It's a consequence of it. Because those people, as Washington himself said so movingly, it is a standing miracle that that army stayed together and did it. And that's what impresses the French. And that's what impresses the world is that. And in Johannes Ewald, who we follow, and it says who would have thought a century ago that out of this multitude of rabble - he's dismissive of them - could come a people who could defy kings.
And what you have to do is reward those people. And the first rewarding happens in Pennsylvania, when the Pennsylvania state convention - Commonwealth of Pennsylvania - extends to all men, 21 years or age, the right to vote. They don't have to own property. They can be in debt.And that's where the door gets opened, and we can say we're taking the tentative steps of...
GROSS: So are...
BURNS: ...Democracy.
GROSS: Are you saying that, like, all men are created equal, that beautiful phrases like that are because of gratitude to the people who...
BURNS: No.
GROSS: ...Fought...
BURNS: No. They...
GROSS: ...Or, you know...
BURNS: It is...
GROSS: ...A promise that they made to get them to stay in the...
BURNS: This is early...
GROSS: ...Army?
BURNS: That's early in the war, and I don't think they've fully come to the idea. When he said all men are created equal, he meant all white men of property free of debt. And we don't mean that anymore. And a lot of that anymore happens over the course of the revolution as it changes. And what happens is, when you have a clash between British people that suddenly becomes about natural rights - this is the enlightenment. You're suddenly talking about big ideas that the people who are serving the meals hear and understand. The Native people at the borders understand. The women in the household understand. That if you are going to take your argument with Britain and turn it into this big, huge human affairs, really - as Thomas Payne says, not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to change things.
And by the way, that's the story of America. It's a process word. Democracy is not a thing. It's kind of an active verb. You're in pursuit of happiness. You're after a more perfect union. And a lot of it has to do with both the poetry and the vagueness of the words that permit everyone else to find meaning and hope in it. And so, as the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk says in our film, the Declaration of Independence is deeply significant to people at the margins not because they think for a second that they're immediately going to be granted those rights, but it says that those rights are theirs. And as James Forten said, where does it that God says that white people are better than Black people? And I can tell you, God never says that.
(APPLAUSE)
GROSS: We're listening to the interview I recorded onstage with Ken Burns. His new documentary series, "The American Revolution," premieres on most PBS stations Sunday, November 16. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BOSTON POPS AND JOHN WILLIAMS' PERFORMANCE OF AARON COPLAND'S "RODEO: HOE-DOWN")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the onstage interview I recorded with Ken Burns about his new documentary series, "The American Revolution." It premieres on most PBS stations November 16.
When I was preparing the interview, I found myself focusing a lot on, like, Washington's flaws, like his hypocrisy about slavery and what happened to the Native Americans and the enslaved and free Black people who fought in the war and the women and - because those stories haven't been told in the same way that the founding fathers and the poetic language of the founding documents, that's part of what really interested me in your series. So I don't mean to just, like, focus on the negatives, but these are, like, the untold or lesser-told parts of the story.
I was wondering, if you were showing this in a Smithsonian museum or instead of outside on a night in New Jersey, in Camden, if you were showing it in a national park, would you be canceled?
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: Because it's so DEI, if I may say.
BURNS: (Laughter).
(APPLAUSE)
GROSS: You know? 'Cause you're focusing on the people whose stories haven't sufficiently been told.
BURNS: I've always thought that another way of saying DEI is e pluribus unum.
GROSS: (Laughter).
(APPLAUSE)
BURNS: Part of the dilemma, the trap, the mistake of argument is that we become so dialectically preoccupied - one side or the other. We see things in simple binaries that don't exist. And so Richard Powers, the novelist, said the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. A good story is a good story is a good story. I think the story of the American Revolution...
GROSS: Yes, but wait...
BURNS: ...Is a really good story. Conservatives are supposed to love the series "Yellowstone," and that is a film about a rancher...
GROSS: Wait, I'm going to stop you.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: I want to stop you to say that you did a series on national parks. Look at what's happening in the national parks. History has literally been escorted out of the parks - taken down, erased. And that's the climate that we're living in now. So, in reality, you might have been canceled if it was at the Smithsonian if - or it was in a national park. Are there bits of history that you, for instance, treasure in the national parks that you became very familiar with when you were doing your series that are gone now?
BURNS: Well, I...
GROSS: Because everybody loves a good story, but we know we're living in a time when history is being erased...
BURNS: It's pretty complicated to just...
GROSS: ...And diversity is being punished.
BURNS: They did just scrub the word Enola Gay, which is the mother of the pilot who dropped the first atomic bomb, and that was the name of his plane, the Enola Gay, because it had the word gay in it. And I'm disappointed that we, at this present moment - and it's not everyone - feel compelled to take the simplified version of things and try to make it all morning again in America. We don't operate that way. I don't think a good story operates that way.
And my argument about "Yellowstone" is that it's telling about all the stories. They're Black and gay and female and white and poor and Native American. And greed is one of the main objects of it. And the main character is a murderer in addition to this big patriot. And it's just beloved. Good stories about human beings, whether it's William Shakespeare or Kevin Costner or, God forbid, a documentary about the Revolution, can have complexity and nuance and people get it. And I'll tell you that I couldn't have made any of the films we made outside of public broadcasting.
GROSS: Well, that's another thing. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been shut down.
(APPLAUSE)
GROSS: And I know all of public radio and public television has lost money. You've lost some of your funding.
BURNS: I've lost a great deal, millions of dollars, as a result of the rescission, which, as you know, clawed back two years of money that had been authorized...
GROSS: It was already promised.
BURNS: ...And appropriated and promised, and it's gone away. And it's an incredibly shortsighted thing. This is a network, in the case of PBS, that had William F. Buckley, a noted conservative's, show on for 32 years. And that show's still on, still moderated by a conservative. But because some people did not like certain aspects of it, the idea that it had to be defunded.
It will mostly hurt - WHYY will survive. I will, too. We'll figure out ways to overcome that. More people will join and become members in Philadelphia, and that will be a good thing. But the losers will be the rural stations, the poorer rural areas that will now be news deserts. No one will be covering the school board or the city council. There will no - not only be the good children's in prime time, but there won't be "Classroom Of The Air" (ph) and continuing education and emergency signals and homeland security things. This is - you know, this is a big deal. And places will lose what is - what I think is the - in PBS, that I know, and NPR by extension - the Declaration of Independence applied to communications.
(APPLAUSE)
GROSS: I'm proud to be an American has new meaning to me because I realized, like, during the Revolutionary War, when somebody said I'm proud to be an American, what they kind of meant was I no longer consider myself British.
BURNS: That's right.
GROSS: I'm a patriot. I'm not a loyalist. And I'm proud to be a patriot fighting for freedom and revolution. I'm proud to be an American. It just had totally different meaning to me. I wonder, like, if you felt that way.
BURNS: I have been, Terry, engaged with trying to tell the stories about this complex American project for 50 years, and whether it's about the Brooklyn Bridge or the national parks or the Shakers. But strangely, perhaps perversely, in the study of war, no more do I feel - even in things that are so drenched in contradiction and hypocrisy and blood - does that authentic patriotism that I think you're talking about come out and raise the kind of questions within themselves and between themselves that you've asked in that regard.
Very sincere, basic, sometimes gut-wrenching questions. What would I have been? Could I have done this? Could I have killed somebody else? Would I be willing to die for a cause, to give up all of my good fortune for a cause? And then you're beginning to approach, but not necessarily make, the decisions that were made in every family in every community and every colony, to become a state, to become a union, to become the United States of America.
(APPLAUSE)
GROSS: Ken Burns, it's time for us to end. I thank you so much for being here. Thank you for this series. Like I said, it was a revelation. And congratulations to you and your team and your codirectors and coproducers.
BURNS: Thank you, Terry. Thank you.
(CHEERING)
BURNS: Thank you.
GROSS: My interview with Ken Burns was recorded October 9 onstage at the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Camden, New Jersey. Thanks to WHYY's Nancy Stuski, Gianna Tripodi-Bhise, Yvette Murray, Ali L'Esperance, Julian Herzfeld and Adam Staniszewski.
After we take a short break, classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz will play recordings by a singer he recently discovered and really loves. This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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