The Gettysburg Address is America’s most important speech, says acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. The words by Abraham Lincoln are the subject of Burns’ latest work. The award-winning documentarian is also working on the story of one of the most influential political families: the Roosevelts.
Antonio Mora: “The Civil War” was your big breakthrough. Why have you decided to go back and deal with a very important part of that era?
Ken Burns: People ask me how I choose my projects, and I say they choose me. This one, more than any one, chose me. I live in a tiny town in rural New Hampshire. Across the Connecticut River, across the border in Putney, Vt., is another little town, and there's a school there — the Greenwood School. They asked me to be a judge at this Gettysburg memorization recitation thing. I went and wept. I fully admit I just cried at the inspirational nature of it, and I said, “Somebody should make a film on this.” But it's not my style. This would be cinéma vérité. I would go back whenever my schedule permitted me to be a judge again, or just to go back and help the kids with context over the years. Finally as the 150[th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address was] approaching, I said, “We've got to do this. I got to put my money where my mouth is.” We wanted to make a film about the heroic struggle of these boys. But then it became really clear that we had a larger programmatic aspect to it, which is challenging the rest of the country … to do something together. To have everybody memorize it. If these boys can do it, then we can do it too. If you go to learntheaddress.org, you'll see the thousands of citizens who have uploaded their renditions.
Ken Burns
Why do you think it's so important for people to go back and to memorize the address?
We've lost our educational mojo, and there's lots of reasons and lots of hand-wringing. One of them, I think, is that we stopped asking people to memorize stuff. It was rote, and that was bad. It wasn't good, and there was no relevance. But in point of fact, the effort at memorization does crystallize something in you. There's a sense of accomplishment. For the boys at the Greenwood School, it's like a talisman, something they carry with them the rest of their lives. So we reached out, and no one said no. History's a table around which we can still have a civil discourse. We've got Bill O'Reilly and Rachel Maddow. We have Marco Rubio, but also Nancy Pelosi. We have all the five living presidents contributing to this.
Now, do they see eye to eye on day-to-day events right now? No, of course not. But if you love Abraham Lincoln, as just about everyone I know does, then that's a place to begin to re-instill this civil discourse that is possible, to appeal to the better angels of our nature, Abraham Lincoln himself would say. It's a way to begin to try to repair what we've lost in our educational system. The things that we share in common — that's what the Gettysburg Address is.
It's impossible not to agree with everything that Lincoln said that day, and the beauty of his words and the power still resonate.
This is the Declaration of Independence 2.0. This is doubling down on the flawed hypocrisy, in some ways, of Thomas Jefferson's original Declaration, which said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal," yet he owned more than 100 human beings. Abraham Lincoln said at the site of the greatest battle ever fought on American soil, "We have a new birth of freedom." The first sentence, he talks about the past. The second sentence, he talks about the present, and then the rest he's pulling us. He's willing us.
He's begging us to enter a future. It's the operating system, the 2.0 that we operate under now.
While the address was a departure from what you've mostly done over the years, you're now going back to doing what we've loved so much for so long with “The Roosevelts.” That's your next project. It's coming up in the fall, and it goes from the birth of Teddy Roosevelt in the mid-19th century, all the way to the death of Eleanor Roosevelt — looking at Eleanor, who was a niece, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was a fifth cousin.
Here they are, the family that, as we say in the film, has had more effect on more Americans than any other family, and I will defend that to the end. There's been lots on Teddy, and lots on Franklin, and lots on Franklin and Eleanor, and nobody's put them all together. This is a very complicated family drama. This is an American “Downton Abbey” with two virtues for us Americans, which is that it's all true — not fiction, not made up — and it's also made in America. It's about these three extraordinary people whose themes are timeless. What are we debating today? We're debating, what is the role of government? What can a citizen expect of the government? What's the nature of leadership? How does character form leadership? How does adversity in childhood or in life form character? And how, in turn, does that character relate to leadership skills? Well, these are all the central questions of “The Roosevelts,” and the interplay of these high-voltage personalities, as one doctor put it after Franklin was stricken with polio, is one of the great American stories. I think we often focus too much on the outer stuff. It's all there in our film. We've got the two World Wars, we've got the Depression, we've got all the stuff that's going on, but we see it from an intimate point of view. We hear the diaries read by Paul Giamatti and Ed Herman and a little-known actor named Meryl Streep to bring to life Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as their newsreels and their actual recorded speeches.
Having spent so much time now with Franklin Delano Roosevelt — I know you've said that Lincoln is our greatest president — how do you feel about FDR?
I first have to say that like all arguments about pop music and about baseball and the presidency, it's all — besides George Washington, besides Babe Ruth, besides the Beatles — it's always for second place. Lincoln's always been the greatest president in my mind, but now Franklin has really come up and is really competing with him because of this extraordinary combination of empathy and leadership. Opacity, too. This is warts and all. This is not an uncritical hagiography about the Roosevelts.
You put together “Civil War.” You put it on PBS. Did you ever think that that many Americans were going to be interested in watching something that happened 130 years before?
The Civil War is the most important event in the United States. There's a publishing axiom that if you're having a bad season, you put out a Civil War book. There was a sense that there is a pent-up curiosity. Not pent-up, it's just ever-present curiosity about the Civil War. But I had just come back from the television critics’ meeting in Los Angeles, and they all said, "This is terrific, Ken, but nobody's going to watch it. I mean, it's 11 and a half hours long, and it's still photographs. Nobody's going to watch that, and anyway, Steven Bochco’s got this new show called ‘Cop Rocks’ on about singing, musical police procedural …"
It lasted about five minutes, right?
"... and by the way we're in an MTV generation, and nobody has that attention span." Well, it turns out we're all starved for meaning. We all know that the real meaning, significant meaning, accrues in duration, and the work you're proudest of, the relationships you care about the most, have benefited from sustained attention. Now I've been vindicated by Netflix and other things where people are bingeing.
True, but as you said, it was already 1990, it was already the MTV generation. Everybody was used to flashy video and graphics, and cable news was already in place. We were used to sound bites, short sound bites. Attention spans in this country seem to have been getting shorter and shorter.
I'm working on this big series on the Vietnam War. We're in the editing room, and we're using these news pieces. The reporter would say, "I'm here in such-and-such talking to somebody," and then that person speaks for a minute. Now you hear, "I'm here talking about somebody," and that person speaks for two seconds, and then they tell you what they said rather than listen. I worry that if Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address today there'd be some negative politician who said, "You know, Lincoln just came to Gettysburg to try to distract attention from his disastrous military campaign out west," meaning in Tennessee. Maybe even C-SPAN wouldn't have it covered. And so who would hear the greatest speech ever given in the English language?
And people might have been bored by it because it was only a couple of minutes long. There's also so much written about our lack of historical literacy and just how it's not being taught well, how people just don't know much about their history. There is a certain dichotomy here, that you've been successful in telling the stories of our past.
It just tells you that there's pent-up demand. There's hunger, there's curiosity, there is a dissatisfaction with that mode. I mean, we need that. We all can look at nice YouTube things of kittens and balls of string and stuff like that. But we also need to have longer-form stuff.
Talking about where you've been, is that where your love of history comes from? Because I know your mom died when you were 11. She was sick pretty much since you were a toddler. I know you've quoted your father-in-law as telling you that — and this was a very moving thing I read about you — that your whole work is an attempt to make people long gone come back to life.
Yes, he said, "You wake the dead." I had been disturbed that I could not remember the date of my mother's death. It always kept coming and then receding, and I was never present. He said, "I bet you blew out your candles when you were a kid wishing her to come back?"
I said, "Yeah, how'd you know?" He said, "You haven't completed it, but look what you do for a living. You wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson and Louis Armstrong come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake up?" Maybe that's dime-store psychology. I don't think so. He was an eminent psychologist.
Must have been a wonderful thing for you to hear.
It was liberating. It permitted me to go back and have that closure with my mom. I have now not in 25 years forgotten her birthday, her death day, and [I have] been able to memorialize her. I've had things change. I've matured in a way. But the passion for waking the dead, the passion for trying to not hold that old photograph at arm's length, but to get inside of it, to not only look at it and examine it but to hear it, has never gone away. Nor has this sense that the past, the exploration of the past, an honest and complicated exploration of the past, is an incredibly helpful guide to what we're doing right now.
You've been referred to as the most influential documentarian of our time. In fact, some have called you the most influential filmmaker of our time. How do you judge your own success?
I live in a tiny little village in New Hampshire where all of that plus 50 cents gets you a cup of coffee. You're measured more by whether you shoveled the walk of the lady next door who needed it, than by the number of Emmys and Oscar nominations and things that are around that.
It's very nice when people give you awards and people tell you that you're this or you're that. Or if Stephen Ambrose says, "More Americans get their history from me than any others." It doesn't matter in the end. If you tell a good story, a good story is a good story is a good story. That's what I care about.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
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