This interview is from SDPB's daily public-affairs show, In the Moment.
Ken Burns has been making documentaries for some 45 years now. He's a Peabody and Emmy award-winning filmmaker from humble beginnings who illuminates iconic American figures and creates ambitious projects that have shaped how we view our own history.
His latest film premiers Monday night on SDPB-TV. "Benjamin Franklin: a film by Ken Burns" explores the life of one of America's most consequential public figures.
The following transcript has been auto-generated.
Lori Walsh:
Ken Burns has been making documentaries for some 45 years now. He is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, from humble beginnings, who illuminates iconic American figures and creates ambitious projects that have shaped how we view our own history.
Lori Walsh:
But as sweeping as his films are, Burns is known for creating work that is deeply intimate, human, uncomfortable at times, authentic. He says, "These are the stories of us. Not us and them, just us."
Lori Walsh:
His latest film premieres Monday night on SDPB TV and on Passport. Benjamin Franklin: a film by Ken Burns, explores the life of one of America's most consequential public figures. And we are delighted, of course, to welcome Ken Burns to South Dakota Public Broadcasting. Ken, welcome to the program.
Ken Burns:
Thank you.
Lori Walsh:
We are living in pandemic times. Historically, those times have also been rife with conspiracy theories, antisocial outbursts, and random acts of violence. And this is the time that we live in. This is our own history, as it unfolds day by day.
Lori Walsh:
I'm curious to know what you see your role as a public historian in pandemic times. Is it different than years past?
Ken Burns:
Well, I think it's important to just kind of do my job and not be too self-conscious. Not conscious — that's something else — but self-conscious about having some role to play or specific obligations.
Ken Burns:
The novelist, Richard Powers, said that "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." And so I'm in the business of trying to tell good stories.
Ken Burns:
They happen to all have been, so far, in American history. And I think that if you do history well, you're talking about the human condition, which means that it's not just past, it's present.
Ken Burns:
I don't know a film that we've worked on — and all of them, I swear, have been done just by focusing entirely on trying to tell the story in that time — that when they are done, we don't look up and suddenly see, no longer to our surprise, how much they resonate in the present and speak to the present moment.
Ken Burns:
If there is a potential healing component to powerful stories of how complicated — and it's very important to underscore the word "complicated." I've got in my editing room in neon, a cursive lower-case sign that says, "It's complicated" — how complicated is the human condition. And if we try to present our history as a Madison Avenue-sanitized version, we're lost.
Ken Burns:
If we're into a strict shaming that takes place where we throw the baby out with the bath water, that people are negated because of complications, we'll end up with no one. We'll end up alone, and we ourselves can't even be held to that standard.
Ken Burns:
So we're looking to tell about complicated stories. Celebrate, but also be mindful that part of that intimacy that you described in your kind introduction is also about age-old human foibles.
Lori Walsh:
You mentioned how this story of Benjamin Franklin ends up revealing much about the times we live in today. The nature of democracy, science versus religion, and even inoculation, all unfold in his story.
Lori Walsh:
I would love to talk about all those things with you. But first, tell us a little bit about what he (Benjamin Franklin) understood about his own presence, that maybe other people didn't understand, about the time that he was living. I mean, he was a man with an eye to the future, yes?
Ken Burns:
Oh, very much so. I interviewed Stewart Udall in our film about the national parks. And he said that Teddy Roosevelt had distance in his eyes. It's almost as if he could see beyond not only the curve of the earth, but beyond time. And Franklin had that. He had the wisdom of posterity, the wisdom of a life devoted to self-improvement, self-knowledge. In addition to all of the ways in which this remarkable human being engaged with life.
Ken Burns:
He's arguably the best American writer of the 18th century. He is the original American humorist. He is a successful businessman, a printer, a publisher, a newspaper man. He is the greatest scientist of the 18th century, with kind of Isaac Newton–level chops with his study into the principles of electricity.
Ken Burns:
He's a great inventor, all of which he shared with the world without patents. He could have retired a wealthy man in his 40s to pursue these things, to pursue science and invention and public good. He could have been a hundred times more wealthy had he done that.
Ken Burns:
And I haven't yet described the most important role he played.
Lori Walsh:
Right.
Ken Burns:
He's 69 years old, with only 15 years to go in his life, when he becomes a revolutionary. He's abandoned the hope of repairing the growing rift between the colonies and Great Britain. He's leaving London now, convinced to side with those who are declaring revolution and eventually independence — a declaration of which he would be on the committee to write.
Ken Burns:
And with deft editing changes. He changed Thomas Jefferson's opening of the second sentence from "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable," to "We hold these to be self-evident." We're in the Age of Enlightenment. This is the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. We're untethering ourselves from this.
Ken Burns:
He's the greatest diplomat in American history. He secures the French aid that is critical to Washington's victory. Without it, there is no victory and probably no United States. Then he comes home after negotiating a one-sided treaty with the British, all to our favor. He comes back and negotiates the very complicated and in many ways, tragic, compromises necessary to create the United States of America and set in motion all of the tensions that still beset us along with that.
Ken Burns:
And as a man who had in his wealth, enslaved human beings in his household, he starts a school for black children and is surprised ... surprised ... that they are as apt and have the same potential for learning as any white kid. By the end of his life, he's joined an early, early abolitionist society.
Ken Burns:
He sets precedent and has the privilege of introducing into the United States government, his creation, a resolution banning slavery, which of course is ignored by the Senate and voted down by the House. And will inevitably provoke civil war, fourscore years and five years from the signing of the Declaration. He's a very complicated person and he understands the fragility of what he's done.
Ken Burns:
The easiest way to think about him and how much resonance he has to today is, his face is on the largest denomination in general circulation, the hundred dollar bill. Everybody wants more "Benjamins." He's been exalted for every generation: from the last generation born while he was still alive, to the present for his "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, make it on your own self reliance."
Ken Burns:
Poor boy makes good. And it's all true, but it misses half of it. He is tethered in this case to civic improvement. He understands there's an exquisite tension that is today so out of balance between our notions of freedom. There's the freedom of the individual, what I want; which is often in tension with the freedom of the rest of us, of what we need. And he understood that.
Ken Burns:
He was born in Massachusetts Bay Colony, which would become the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And he died in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. These are words that are out of fashion, but he would come here today and be so disappointed with our inability to compromise, with our certainty about our own points of view, about the way our own points of view are shaped not by a multitude of sources, but usually by one or two sources that reinforce prejudices.
Ken Burns:
By our inability to listen, and therefore to understand something. The demonization of the other who does not hold precisely the same view as us. Even he was given the great privilege of proposing the resolution, the adoption of the Constitution, at the Constitutional Convention in September of 1787.
Ken Burns:
And he says, "When you assemble people of wisdom, you also assemble their prejudices. And I'm not sure that we could do a better job than what we've done, but we are confounding our enemies who expect us to be like the builders of battle, cutting each other's throats."
Ken Burns:
He's a generation older than most of the other revolutionaries; his son was older than Jefferson and Adams and Madison and Patrick Henry. He was able to forge these sorts of things. And we've lost that ability. We could use Franklin back in our lives to remind us of where we've gone wrong.
Ken Burns:
I was also asked by a reporter if he (Franklin) would probably disapprove of social media, and I laughed at him. I said, "He was social media." He was Google and he was Apple and he was Facebook and he was Twitter all at once. He was a printer and a publisher and newspaper man, and a maker of almanacs and a postmaster. He controls everything.
Ken Burns:
And he spoke in these little tweets: "Early to bed and early to rise," that sort of stuff, the humorous stuff. "Fish and visitors stink after three days." "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead."
Lori Walsh:
(That's one of my favorites.
Ken Burns:
These are hugely important things. And he helps mitigate in a way that we lack, mostly today, the ability to laugh at ourselves and not take ourselves too seriously.
Ken Burns:
You know, faith is an important part of human life. Not necessarily just religious faith — that's of course, central to many people's lives. But the opposite of faith, if you ask people, we often say, "It's doubt." It's not. It's certainty. You know?
Lori Walsh:
Yeah.
Ken Burns:
And that's the death of faith. Whether it's science or reason, doubt is a healthy component of scientific exploration, an experiment of one's own spiritual journey and everything else in between. Franklin understood that. And that's why he seems so powerfully relevant.
Ken Burns:
He opens in one direction a portal into our founding that seems very human and accessible, warts and all. He's not static. He's not a statue like a Washington or a Jefferson. He's moving and he's evolving.
Ken Burns:
But he is also offering us great gifts from that period that remind us that the only way we got to where we were was through working with one another and listening to people whose views you don't like. And what happens is, with the certainty comes not just the demonization, but the actual diminishing of your own rational ability to make decisions.
Ken Burns:
It's really refreshing to spend a few years with Benjamin Franklin and feel like you get to know him. It's always great to have an actor as wonderful and as generous as Mandy Patinkin voicing that. So we're very much looking forward to sharing it with the country-
Lori Walsh:
I want to ask you a follow-up question about humor. Does his humor stem from humility?
Ken Burns:
You know, I made a film almost 25 years ago on Mark Twain.
Lori Walsh:
Yes.
Ken Burns:
And Mark Twain said one of the most stunning things ever about humor. He said, "The source of laughter is not joy, but sorrow. There is no laughter in heaven." This is from a man who was arguably the funniest man of the 19th century, and maybe of all time. Whose life was beset by tragedies that make the Kennedy family, for example, seem like they didn't have it as bad — just unbelievable loss and death and suffering.
Ken Burns:
And I think in some ways, humility is a component of that. But I also think it's understanding. I have [inaudible 00:13:50] the journalist when asked by an acolyte how he could possibly admire, in this case, Thomas Jefferson, who owned other human beings ... which Benjamin Franklin did as well. Turned to him and said, "Because history is not melodrama; it's tragedy."
Ken Burns:
In melodrama, all villains are perfectly villainous and all heroes are perfectly virtuous. But life is not like that. Like is tragedy. None of us get out of this alive. And I think humor is around for us to help mitigate the sting of that realization. Particularly if we are so adamantly involved in an omnivorous investigation of life — both inner and outer, as Franklin was.
Ken Burns:
He was aware of his foibles and his flaws and his opacity at times, but he was also extraordinarily generous and thoughtful and wise beyond measure. I don't think we have a country without him.
Lori Walsh:
I see.
Ken Burns:
I don't think there is a United States. Not just the diplomacy part of it — that's huge. At Yorktown, Washington's there with 9,000 Continental Army men, now clothed and armed by the French. Next to him are nearly 9,000 French soldiers. And out in the harbor, blocking Cornwallis' escape, is the French group.
Ken Burns:
That's why the revolution wins. That's the big victory that Washington has. And every aspect of that victory had been delivered by Benjamin Franklin.
But it's also the compromise.
Lori Walsh:
I want to ask you one more question, because you mentioned the tragedy of Mark Twain. And of course, Ben Franklin's life is far from tragedy free.
Lori Walsh:
I mentioned at the top of the conversation thoughts about inoculation. I think we should invite listeners into that story as well, because he's an early proponent of inoculation. But that does not prevent him from great loss. Will you tell us a little bit of that story?
Ken Burns:
Yeah. It's so unbearable. It's just a few seconds in our film, but we have at kenburns ... Unum, U-N-U-M, part of the Latin motto, E pluribus unum ... dot com, you can find an extended four- or five-minute little piece about it. He goes into great detail.
Ken Burns:
Yes. He was an avid proponent of inoculation. And because he was in charge of "social media," he would say this to any audience he could find.
Ken Burns:
There was a smallpox scare going around, and he had a young son, Frankie, the first of his issue from his common-law marriage to Deborah Reed. Frankie had a very bad cold. And in those days, we're not talking about vaccination; we're talking about inoculation.
Lori Walsh:
Right.
Ken Burns:
Inoculation is really giving you the disease in a small dose to train your immune system to fight it. In fact, Washington, through a lot of Franklin's urging, had the entire Continental Army inoculated. It was a requirement, a mandate, I guess I should say.
Ken Burns:
In any case, they decided that because Frankie had a cold, he and Deborah decided they would just wait until he was better before they gave the additional shock to his system of inoculation.
Ken Burns:
But by that time, Frankie had contracted smallpox and died horribly. It's a really horrific death and he never, never, never, ever forgot that tragedy. It's a great, great suffering and loss of his and Deborah's life.
Ken Burns:
Then as a public personage, he had to go and continue to advocate for inoculation, but also had to explain what the special circumstances of Frankie's death were. So it was opening the wound again and again and again as he went forward. It's just, as anybody who's a parent and contemplates the loss of a four year old, an unspeakable-
... unspeakable tragedy.
Lori Walsh:
Well, my guest today has been America's great documentarian, Ken Burns. The film Benjamin Franklin is premiering Monday night, April 4th. You can see it on SDPB TV. Of course, episode one starting at 7:00 Central, 6:00 Mountain, then again at 9:00 Central, 8:00 Mountain.
Lori Walsh:
Episode two airs the following night. That would be Tuesday, April 5th, also at 7:00 Central, 6:00 Mountain and 9:00 Central, 8:00 Mountain.
Lori Walsh:
You can also go online now and see lots of extra material. Then the show is free for a few weeks afterwards at pbs.org. It can also be found on Passport. So lots of ways to catch this Benjamin Franklin film by Ken Burns.
Lori Walsh:
Ken Burns, on behalf of all of us from South Dakota, we appreciate hearing your voice here at home. Thank you.
Ken Burns:
Thank you, Lori.
