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What Ken Burns Wants His Grandchildren to Know About America
As the United States turns 250, the documentary filmmaker reflects on the love, complexity and stubborn hope he wants the next generation to carry forward
For Ken Burns, loving America means telling the whole story, including the parts that still demand more from us.
Peter Arkle
Editor’s note: Ken Burns has spent more than four decades telling America’s story through landmark documentaries including The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea and The Vietnam War. His latest PBS series, The American Revolution, revisits the country’s founding as America approaches its 250th birthday.
The lawn sign outside my house in New Hampshire reads “Love Multiplies.”
I’ve lived here 47 years, in a state with the first-in-the-nation primary, so campaign lawn signs are a regular part of the local landscape. Most of them are trying to win an argument before the next election. Mine is trying to share something more basic, and maybe more urgent, especially when I think about the country my grandchildren will inherit.
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“Love multiplies” means that love has to move outward. It begins with the people closest to you, with your children and grandchildren, but it can’t end there. It has to extend past your own house, past the people you already know how to care about, even past your own lifetime.
At our best, Americans have always been asked to widen the circle. That’s why cynicism is dangerous. It convinces you that the ideals were never real and the future is someone else’s problem.
In a state famous for political lawn signs, the one outside Burns’ home carries a different kind of campaign message.
Courtesy Ken Burns
I get the impulse. I went through that as a teenager in the midst of Vietnam. It’s an understandable response to watching the country you love fall short of its own promises. But there’s an important distinction between cynicism and criticism. When a young person looks at this country and says, “Wait a minute, this isn’t what we said we were going to be,” to me, that feels like engagement. That’s how the American argument keeps going, because it means you still believe the country can be asked to live up to itself.
I hear that from my daughters all the time. My oldest has worked with me on history films for 20 years. My third daughter is a senior at Georgetown, majoring in American studies. My 15-year-old, my youngest, is away at boarding school, and her favorite course is history. Whenever they see people being treated unfairly, it infuriates them, and that anger comes from believing the country’s founding words still matter enough to demand something from us.
We live in a world of ones and zeros. We live in a media culture of red states and blue states, and we’ve been trained to believe that everything resolves into one camp or the other. But there are no binaries in nature. What I want for my grandchildren is the ability to live with complexity and still keep their hearts open. I want them to understand that two things can be true at the same time, and that listening matters most when the person speaking is angry about a promise still unkept.
History helps with this, if you let it in. We tend to live in a kind of narcissism of the present, convinced that our moment is uniquely terrible, our divisions uniquely deep and our crisis uniquely irreversible. But we were actually more divided during the Revolution than we are now. We were in the middle of a revolution, but also a civil war in a global war.
That gives me no permission to be complacent. It gives me perspective, and right now a wider frame is something we badly need. My youngest daughter once sent me a text from study hall asking about the period between the World Wars, and I wrote back everything I could think of. When she came home, she said history was the only thing she wanted to talk about. That, to me, is the goal.
The way you get there is through story. The word history is mostly made up of the word story, which tells you something important. Stories are the editing of human experience, the part that matters pulled out of the noise. When you lower your voice while telling your kid a bedtime story, they lean in. That’s how human beings have always connected with one another, long before anyone stood at a blackboard and called it a lesson.
The Declaration’s words were written by imperfect men, but Burns says they opened a door that’s never been shut.
Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery
Every Fourth of July, I read the Declaration of Independence aloud to my family. I started in the early ’90s, when my older daughters were young, and I’ve done it every year since, for at least 32 years. Now my first set of daughters is grown, and the circle has widened to include grandchildren.
I read it because the words are meaningful. The second sentence of the Declaration, the one that begins “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” is the second greatest sentence in the English language. If you ask me what the first is, I’ll tell you it’s “I love you,” and that’s really what I’m thinking about when I read to my family.
The Declaration was written by imperfect people, many of whom enslaved other human beings even as they declared that all men were created equal. That terrible contradiction is part of the story. So is the power of the words themselves, which opened a door that’s never been shut. The promise was incomplete from the beginning, and the work since then has been to widen it.
As we were making The American Revolution, we started with 400 hours of material and brought it down to 12, and every cut was painful because every story opened onto another story. Betsy Ambler was a 10-year-old girl in Yorktown, Virginia, in 1775, a reminder that the Revolution was also being lived by children whose futures were being shaped around them. Joseph Plumb Martin was a 15-year-old soldier from Connecticut who fought from the Battle of Long Island all the way to Yorktown. Mercy Otis Warren wrote anti-tyrannical plays before the war, and then wrote the first history of it. Most people have never heard of them, and all of them are part of the Revolution.
When I need evidence that this country can still surprise itself, I go to Abraham Lincoln. He reached back to the Declaration, and the Gettysburg Address became its sequel, a doubling down on the proposition that all men are created equal.
What moves me most about Lincoln is that he never demanded a binary. He could hold contradictions without collapsing them, and when he said both that “the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present” and that “we cannot escape history,” he was telling the truth about how complicated things actually are. That’s the complexity I keep trying to communicate.
Burns believes America’s contradictions are no reason to turn away from its story, but rather a reason to tell it more honestly.
Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Many of the founders, in their writing, referred to the millions yet unborn. You’d think that, fighting the odds they were fighting, they’d be focused entirely on survival. But they were already thinking about us, already trying to make space for people who didn’t yet exist, and that obligates us to do the same for the people who come after us.
That’s what “love multiplies” means to me. It’s really about the work of carrying the story forward without flattening it, without giving in to despair and without pretending the distance still to go is closer than we think. What I want my grandchildren to carry forward is the willingness to hold the whole complicated story, the promise and the betrayal, the beauty and the shame, and to keep believing the distance is worth crossing.
AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.
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