Interview Only w/ Ken Burns - Lessons From History On America’s 250th Birthday

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Joining me now is one of those you know, I'm I am A. I hate this cliche, but sometimes some people actually live the cliche. This person needs no introduction. It's ken Burns, and he is as I was joking with him before in my own team. I may season pass subscriber to ken Burns, and yet there are still ken Burns documentaries. I have not fully consumed. My biggest regrets so far, as Jazz, I have not fully consumed Jazz,

I will make that confession. But you know, it's one of those cases where every time you think there isn't a new story to tell, there's a new story to tell, and Ken burnsfuys that story to tell. Ken, It's good to see you.

more divided during the Vietnam year. I mean, we tend to think, as kind of narcissist Dick Chicken littles that our time is the worst. It's got to be bad, and there's history is there to say, you know what. I had a friend in the financial services you'll appreciate this who came to me in the after the eight meltdown and he said, this is a depression, and I just I said, you know, in the depression, in many American cities, the animals in the zoo were shot and

the meat distributed to the poor. And that happens.

what I would call the partisan critiques. I know you felt. I'm sure you saw them, and I'm.

you don't have to remember anything. So I said the same thing in the year of promotion of this thing last year to Joe Rogan and Theo vanas I said to the New York Times editorial board as I said to inner city school kids in Charleston and Detroit, and suburban kids in Chicago and the forty cities we went to in the eighty different screenings and the six million podcasts, I felt like I did, and all the other interviews, and because I was trying to reach everybody, this is

a story for everybody. And problem is that right now we've gotten to a place where we want to limit everything. It's you have to pass a litmus test, you have to sign a loyalty oath and nda to your real feelings. And I want to speak to everyone. And so I assumed if I could just get to October before the mid November broadcast would be okay. Well, October came and went, and then November broadcast came, and in the middle of it there were a couple half hearted this is woke,

sort of superficial dismissals. It was really clear that the people,

the authors of two or three of these things had watched maybe twenty minutes of the thing.

the creation of our country. And somehow because there were women in it, and somehow because they were oh my god, black people in it, and somehow because they were Native Americans and there were other people from other countries who were engaged in this World war in addition to our revolution and a bloody civil war, that somehow this is woke. And then you realize where is the wokeness? Actually is it in the litmust of one side of what it should be? And that's what it is. Wokeness is just

a miss test that is fearful of the truth. And it occurs in both ends of the spectrum. And and in fact, I don't think there ends.

of Bernie's supporters stayed home, a third voted for Hillary, and a third voted for Trump. So you've got a circle here in which the far left and the far right are often much closer than we would think.

I don't want to say I agree.

so many people to vote against their economic self interest because they've been able to interpose enemies. The great bugaboo of political distraction and ledger domain in sight of hand is to say it's oh, it's them, and to create them. And I can tell you right now, I mean, my bottom line is I've been making films about the US, but I've been also making films about us, right the lower case two lighter thing. And there's only us, there's no them. And whenever anyone tells you there's them, you're

having the woe pulled over your eyes. You're having a distraction take place in order for you to think it's actually an economic interest that is of central value to me is not as important as the thing that those people might be doing to me.

subject I know about. Each day of baseball was a humiliation of what I didn't know. And so revolution you just automatically, so you're not looking. You've got a chronological structure. It's already there, that is to say, and then and then and then, so then how you begin to put it together. You're absolutely right that there's no political thing. You just want to say what happened, and you want

to call balls and strikes. And I would suggest that in our media culture, as diverse and as multitudinous as it is a kind of tsunami of information, it's relatively the same. And so we become a kind of highlight reel. Babybruth only hits home runs. Well, Baybruth struck out way more times than he hit home run. And more importantly,

bab Ruth only comes up once every nine times at bad So sometime as the last World Series showed you a second basement, a middle infielder, not the star, becomes central to the outcome of a very dramatic thing. And so what we've tried to do is always keep that in mind. Do you scrimp on your biography of Babe Ruth, No, you tell a complete one. In this case, the Babe Ruth is George Washington. We don't have a country without him.

But then you also introduce people to scores of other characters that are bottom up, probably for the most part, but they also are central to what happened. They're the calling of balls and strikes, and I think there's something exhilarating in that complexity. And this notion that, certainly among authoritarians, that you want to reduce it to some simplistic slogans is ridiculous. Ridiculous.

assassinated presidents. You know what the modern myth making around Kennedy was, actually that could have been Garfield, and Garfield absolutely, you know, Garfield could assigned.

six election. There's all sorts of scholarship on it. And what I've noticed is that the author's politics matter a lot when you read, when you consume these books, and it's become to the point where I am get frustrated sometimes by his history books when you realize, no, the author has their own point of view and they start with it. And then and then it's sort of I don't want to say it poisons it, because if you know it in advance, you know it.

do that.

You know, never tell a lie, chop down on Jerry Dreeley, throw a coin across the doll. You can you can unsubscribe from both of these tyrannies and come to a much more complex thing. And that's where you bother people. Because they want things to fit in. They just want it to be white, or they wanted to be male, or they wanted to be simple, or they wanted to

be still entrusted with the barnacles. But we don't even have to look at the big ideas that we're supposed to be protecting, because if you look at those big ideas, you begin to understand even further the complexity and the beauty. You have to go into fiction. You have to go into William Shakespeare to see all that.

actually was incredibly important. And I often find that sort of what I would call the amateur historian, and I would put myself in that where I could misinterpret reading something because I'm reading it through the prism of today's American English language, and I just think about those issues. So, you know, when did you realize as you went through this over decades that you've done this. I assume over time you've now you're now almost an expert at seeing this.

But when you first ran into this challenge. You know what were the what are the different ways to deal with it?

around saying four score and seven years ago. He was just trying to ask you to think about eighty seven years in a different way, that's all. And it was a great rhetorical device for score in seven. So you have to do the math yourself. He's got you. As you're doing the math intention you're paying attention, and you've

been sucked in, and you begin to understand. And so what you find in all of these parsing the last sentence of the first inaugural taking, the Declaration of Independence, A few phrases past the pursuit of happiness, we can get to that which is really loaded and wonderful, particularly for today. He says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable. Maybe

you've read it at the picnic before on the fourth of July, and just let it go over. Think about what he's saying. He says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable. Not hard to parse means Heretofore everybody, he has been under an authoritarian's boot and have been willing to suffer for that for a thousand years working someone else's land, you know, for a thousand years being a slave without

even earning a farthing. Right. But this is going to be a new era. This is going to be a place where we're going to replace your subject hood with something much more responsible, coled citizenship. So let's go back to pursuit of happiness. So we've always assumed this is the American license for freedom. He didn't follow John Locke

and said life, liberty, and property. He said pursuit of happiness. And so happiness was not the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. If you did that, you would become more virtuous. That was the free electron word throughout every episode of the revolution. As we began to gather stuff. John Adams

is worrying about virtue. Abigail's worrying about that. George Washington, everybody, even the folks at the so called bottom, are thinking about it. And so virtue becomes a thing reaching back across the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, back to antiquity, the virtue that was going to make you able to assume the mantle of this, and Adams, at one point

great worrier says, you know, there's too much avarice and ambition, too much lust for profit, not enough virtue that I wonder whether we have the ability to create a republic. So what happens is by isolating these words, by getting great actors, I have the best cast I think for anyone ever made, bringing them to life in a way that you say, oh, I now know what that means. I get it, and you begin to see that those

differences which have held these people. They're wearing hoes and breeches and they've got you know, powdered wigs.

they're thinking about you and me. And so the strawdinary story of our founding is the fact that, as the Old Testament says, there's nothing new under the sun, guess what on July fourth, seventeen seventy six, there was something new under the sun. Now does that mean that there's not the same quantities of virtue and venality and generosity and greed. Nope, that's the same thing. And you can find him in our story then, and it will echo or,

as Mark Twain said, rhyme with the present moment. But you have to be disciplined as a storyteller not to date your film by pointing arrows at isn't this so

much like today? I began this film when Barack Obama had thirteen months to go in his presidency, right, lots of water under the brid No one was talking to fifty no one was celebrating. Now people are saying, oh, you're so smart, you figured this out. You came out exactly the right time. I went the total total luck of the draw.

going on in the Fall of twenty four. Well, we follow, among dozens of characters, one hundred and fifty different characters in the film, the wife of a German general who's heading to join Burgoyne's army and her husband for their triumphant victory at Saratoga. Doesn't happen. The French come in blah blah blah. I'll give away the punchline. However, she's doing the perilous Atlantic crossing a little bit nervous because

she hears that Americans eat cats. Now, nobody said anything this fall, but if it had come out, they'd go burns. You know what he's trying to do, You know, I mean there was a letter that didn't make it into the film. But Jefferson's trapped during the Constitutional Convention in Paris,

and he writes a Madison who's writing the code. The Constitution is not pros except for the preamble written by Goriuvenor Morris in New York, but says what if someone should lose an election and pretend false votes and reap the whirlwind?

these five hundred and thirty five individuals who didn't bother to read Article one. That's exactly what I was just going to say.

If they look they'd be happy that we'd survive, surprised and so many of the changes, and not surprised that there could be you know, power grabs.

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or go to Americanfinancing dot net. Slash the Chuck Podcast use that code. This episode of The Chuck Podcast is brought to you by Zbiotics. Let's face it. After a night with drinks, it's hard to bounce back the next day. You have to make a choice either have a great night or a great next day. Well, that's where pre alcohol comes in. Zbiotics pre alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD

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use the code Chuck Podcast. I would argue we basically one hundred years of congress eroding away its own and

they did it to themselves. They did it to themselves.

to the revolution, It helps you come back. Well, what Ben Franklin represented was an opportunity to practice on the absence of photographs and newsreels, and we could because it was only two episodes, do it without doing any recreations with except for the print shot stuff. But here, as soon as I said it, I knew we were fully invested. So rather than get people to have them reenact a specific thing I'm not crazy about, why not make a

feature film. We just spent seven years collecting a critical mass of people doing reenactments in an impressionistic way, sometimes way up above from a drone, sometimes intimately where the musket the hammer hits the flint and the gunpowder explodes, or the cannon goes off, or you see women tending to a burned hand or slashing blood off a tile floor.

And then what you have is yet another resource. You've got paintings, you've got drawings, you have lithographs, you have print you have maps, maps, maps, you have live cinematography devoided people of the real star of our film, the magnificent country that we have, the prize that had animated this fifth Global war over it the land, And so then it could work in and you'd find a volley sort of out of focus and muzzy of redcoats firing, and all of a sudden you're panning across a painting

in which on the left side of the painting are a bunch of red coats firing, and then all of a sudden, you treat the paintings like they're live, and you treat the live like their paintings, and you've got a wonderful dynamic. We didn't have that in Ben Franklin because you could always return to a portrait of him. And it's over two. So this is six with as I said, one hundred and fifty different characters.

now understand prohibition better after COVID than I did before COVID, And right, you just sort of I get it, You're like, And frankly, I look at the current anti VAXX movement and I sort of see it as sort of familiar to how we ended up with prohibition and then how within a decade we realized, well, this is crazy. Well it is.

there a long time, but it had never really gotten huge traction until we had this perceived moral decay, you know,

and the whole what happened with the pandemic. And that's where you sort of like, okay, we can sort of you see, how we can go down sort of rabbit holes almost as a collective society when you go through a shared trauma like a pandemic is right in a fairly organized society, I guess I ask, I'm curious, do you think you would have Do you think you end up spending more time in the pandemic in nineteen seventeen and eighteen if you're doing prohibition today post, well.

take away the bottle. You know, you've got these these other ulterior, sort of darker motives. And it's a conservative movement. And then you the progressive movement, which you can say is liberal or not. It doesn't really fit quite great, but they're going along saying that government, as I said, could be an instrumentality of social change. So if you

reverse engineer it. We have an amendment of the Constitution, the only one that's been repealed, the only one that limited human freedom, that was prohibition, and you had people on both sides of the aisle buying into it for different reasons. I'd say a much more determinate part. And again it's based chuck on fear. So your pandemic of the influenced Spanish influenza thing is not is the First

World War. So Germans were brewers, and it became very easy to say they had been equating all the nineteenth

century that it's grain, beer equals bread, it's the milk of human kindness. And suddenly they're the enemy, and so it becomes possible to begin to rev up your population in that sort of the thing that happens when people react by fear. And I would think it's more the anti German sentiment. Most of the brewers, if not all the brewers were Germans. And then this sense of social change combining with the anti immigrant, anti black, anti Catholic

sort of sentiments, and the idea too but very legitimate idea that, as our first episode of three was called, we were a nation of drunkards. Alcohol was a big, huge problem. What we learned is that we couldn't address it by you know, as Twain said, again, never wrote a bad sent in his life. The prohibition of anything makes it worthwhile, you know, or as he also said, nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. You know, that's what prohibition is, reforming other people's habits.

On other ways, you've hit a lot of the big stories. But there are different slices you could always go at. That's different. You have religion, you always historically note, but you've you've never I say never you did. I'm not going to say never you did the early on the Shakers. But you know, I think so I go in political science curriculum, you're never And I think it's a huge

mistake by universities. If you're trying to study the politics of any society and you don't understand the following three things. It's religious history, it's sort of economic engine, and its demography demographic history, then you're not going to understand. These are, by the way, three classes that no political science community makes requirements. It's one of these I find the whole You know, political theory is fine to know, but you

need to know other things. I agree, and you know, I believe and I always I. I uh, when I got to college, I didn't know who ponnscious Pilot was really, and I just didn't. I grew up. I was basically I say, basically, I'm Jewish, but I didn't really I had no knowledge of the New Testament. And you know, I think of myself as incredibly well read. My parents were well read, and yet I remember, and I got

shamed about it. It happened. I was a music composition major for a brief period and I was having to write write in the style of Bach and my teacher got my professor got mad. He said this is too upbeat for ponscious Pilot. And I went like, okay, who's ponscious Pilot? And he goes, well, I'm not telling you. And that's so I literally went and read read the New Testament. I just sort of like realized, Okay, I

lacking education. And then I got upset. I'm like, you know, we don't teach the history of religion because we're so afraid. I know why we don't write. I know in the public school system we can have huge fights over it, right, and so our fear of it. Sometimes we just leave it out too much because those that are devoted don't like when people deal with it as scholarship, and those that aren't devoted don't, you know, in some ways are

like you're giving it too much attention. Yeah, and no thing that.

out there and you stick the mic, and they say it's freedom of speech, right, And then maybe you get somebody who says freedom to redress your grievances, you know, protest whatever it might be. And then those are the second and third parts of a three part thing, the first of which is that the Congress will make no

establishment of any religion. And so one of my favorite sections in all of the Revolution film is one on deism, which becomes this sort of aggregate not default, but kind of aggregate conscious choice of many of the mostly Protestant Founders, you know, capital ab Founders, and the whole idea. And our scene begins with Thomas Jefferson saying, if my neighbor believes in twenty gods or no god at all, it

neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. So we've all religion has heretofore, the Founders understood, always been the cultural every country's had in this state bablished faith, and that has been the source of a great deal of the problems. But in fact, as we begun.

divine providence. You hear those words, right, And they believe that that God has takes no interest in the daily affairs of mankind and makes obviously therefore no distinctions between religions. So it then becomes, in pursuit of happiness that our obligation to make ourselves better and then closer to whatever that being is, because if you're worse, you're cruder, and you're devolving, and you're closer to the animals. And many might say Satan, but there is such an I've spent

a lot of time looking at Deism and I find it such an interesting thing, and nobody wants to do. I mean, I'm traveling around the country and people say, well, this is a Protestant a Christian nation, and you go, well, you know, they're Jews and they're Catholics, and there's you know, all the animals religions that are brought over in the slave ships, including Muslim relationship, and then Native Americans have their own stuff. This is really polyglot, and people are

in different parts of the country susceptible. One of the things that they resented in the back country of the Carolina is and Georgia was that if it was the Anglican Church or the Presbyterian Church, or not Presbyterian, but some other church that was the favorite of the governor,

then you had to pay for the minister's salaries. And you didn't like that if your own Methodist or a Baptist or a Presbyterian, and so you have this sense of being suspicious of somebody trying to tell you their way is the only way, and that the government should

in any way favor any one flavor faith, whatever you want to talk. And if you go to Deism and understand, it's just you'r and my responsibility to move closer to God. However we see that to divine providence to the miracle of this snowfall out my window or the sunset that will come in a little bit.

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you've got a growing family. I mean, it's honestly, it's quite surprising that the founders were this enlightened, considering how important you know that the place, in some ways, the reason many of their their found their parents came here was for freedom to worship.

I said it's consequential revolution in the history, but I said it's the most consequence it's the most important event since the birth of Christ in world history, because it's set in motion revolutions for two centuries, but in set in motion, which for two hundred and fifty years is produced, you know, one of the greatest countries.

And if you listed all the good things, I don't know any other country on Earth that could put up, you know, starting with the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and then you just go on, whether it's land grant colleges or National Park or Homestead Act, or you know, child labor laws or anti trust or you know the GI Bill, or Social Security, labor's right to organize, Interstate Highway, Man on the Moon, affordable care medicaid,

medicare you know voting? I mean, this is like an

amazing stuff and it has tangible things. William Luckdeberg the latest Story and died recently at A one hundred and two, was an advisor for almost all the films that we worked on. But he was in our Roosevelt thing. He said, you land at LaGuardia FDR New Deal, you go across the bridge FDR New Deal, you go through the Lincoln Tunnel FDR, you go down the Skyline Drive and the

you know, Blue Ridge Parkway. The thing if you do the Lincoln Highway, if you do this ten thousand landing strips, you begin to understand all of the ways in which just that one presidential administration transformed the country.

of interviewing Barack Obama for eight two hour interviews. I've got a couple more to go, but there's no rush because what's happened in the recent political administrations is that it's constipated the scholarship. So by this time there'd normally be twenty five books of scholarship on Barack Obama's presidency.

But it hasn't happened, and so there's no urge to go and do it till you can get to that point of triangulation, that is to say, the perspective that comes from new scholarship and new things in which you're not solely dependent on.

on it when you look at it through the prism of starting at say twenty fifteen. Now I look back now from a perch of twenty twenty six, and you now see that Obama and Trump are are more intertwined, and they're going to be more intertwined in American history fifty years from now than I think either gentleman wants to what a wants to admit would be. That's sort of you know, your successor whoever that person is in

fifty years. You can't explain Trump without Obama, and you're not gonna be able to explain Obama without Trump, like you agree, going to be intertwined. Yet you couldn't tell the Obama story in twenty seventeen completely. No, I don't know and maybe that you can't tell this story completely. And maybe it's twenty thirty eight, maybe it's twenty three. Don't so, I guess, Mike, when do you feel comfortable me? Okay,

I think I can tackle it. I can tackle an era now where new information isn't going to change.

of Saigon in nineteen eighty five, America was in a recession. There's a Pacific rim but we're not talking about us. We're talking about Japan is a scendant, and we would see Vietnam as this ball and chain, this sort of like perpetual rain cloud over a.

If I've waited thirty years and it's twenty two thousand and five, we're bogged down in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and people are using Vietnam analogies to talk about that. And then you know, the film comes out essentially ten years after that, forty years, forty two years after that, and you begin to realize that your job is to use the passage of time as triangulation, to use the scholarship as triangulation, to figure out how to more firmly understand an event by what you've done and sort of

average out those things. Disaster not a disaster, disaster again,

And so Vietnam undergoes lots of things, and of course it's none of those things. It's never history doesn't repeat itself. No event has ever happened twice, never has, never will, And so the trope of that becomes a kind of prison for us to get in. And so what you have to do is be dispassionate. You have to sort of like a dissease, tie yourself to the mass so you can hear seriously sound, but you don't want to

like point arrows. Isn't this so much like today? Because as I said, you're dated instantly by that, and you've become you know, the historical profession has gone through many fashions of historiography. Right, so after World War Two, narratives bad, it's bankrupt. So we're going to replace it with a Freudian interpretation, a psychosexuality, and it's going to be Marxist

economic determinism. Somewhere along the line. It's symbolism, it's semiotics, it's deconstruction, it's queer studies, it's afrocentrism, it's whatever it is. None of those give you what all of those give you, which is a multitude of modes of inquiry, multitude of perspectives, like the spokes on a wheel that make the wheel engineered to great strength, to able to bear a great load.

He's a black man to go, no, no, no, he must want to talk about slavery, and does, but only in the context of economic So you get a wonderful dynamic without having to subscribe to anybody's theory of how American history. That's why, you know, and we're constantly being bombarded with

what is the correct way to see this? You know, it's seventeen seventy six, or it's sixteen nineteen, or it's no, it's from eighteen seventy it's from seventeen seventy five to seventeen eighty one or seventeen eighty three, depending on whether it's Yorktown or the British Slavy Board.

and about a year ago I said, I want to make it the CIA. So we're doing a big but we're just beginning to sort of unload and create the space. I like took all the books and stuff like that and put it in a corner of my house and I put a sign up over and said, Langley, you know, because that's where we're going to collect all the CIA notes and papers.

So all of a sudden, the abstractions of talking about Cold wars and stuff like that goes down to the minutia of somebody in Geneva doing this to somebody else.

we were like this, you know, whatever it is. I wish our politics were this way. I wish our media were this way, and I wish and I go back and I'm like, you're a child of the Cold War era, and you don't realize you live in an outlier. And then I'll go through, you know, and say, you know, we're actually we're reverting. Today's America is no different from nineteenth century America. There's a lot of differences and as far as people's freedoms and not but in some ways

our politics is not this similar. We're still fighting about who gets to be an American and who isn't. We're still fighting about you know, shares of the pie and things like that. And oh, by the way, the nineteenth century was superpartisan, our media was superpartisan. And where are we today, you know? And then it has made me look at the Cold War as an outlier as far as in political history, right, we had I love to

remind people are closest. We've had six of the last seven presidential elections been decided by five points or less in the entire twentieth century, when we had five, and

it's like, okay, why and yet the nineteenth century. My gosh, we had twenty I'm obsessed with the seven presidents between Jackson and Lincoln in twenty eight years. Like you want to talk about instability, there's instability.

sort of live to see it. You have to be able to look backwards in the world I grew up, you know, I always think now that that I grew up in the wrong I always think I grew up in the right of the way the media worked, And it's like, no, in some ways, I grew up in the wrong era because it was a false premise.

that when the Soviet Empire collapsed, the total destabilizing of American politics was assured. That is to say, destabilize from what you're calling the outlier of a kind of general consensus that had been built not since just forty five, but I would say back to the progressive era, where you had people in both parties wishing to use government as an instrumentality of progress, or at least, as tr would say, a countervailing force between labor and capital.

elections were followed by two of our biggest blowouts. So seventy two and sixty four were blowouts because each party went off the reservation, But sixty and seventy six were two of our closest presidential elections because both parties went back on the reservation and it was anyway. It's just one of those where I feel like you have to capture this.

But you know, you should see the way I.

watch what happens. And at least to their credit, most people have come back and apologized. Is that you're right. Race is central, it's the story. How can you say that we know exactly when we were founded, and we know what's our catechism, and it begins, we hold these schoos to be self evident, that all men are created equal, and the guy who wrote it owned other human beings. And so how are we not constantly both ennobled and also stricken by this, by that contradiction and that hypocrisy.

I'm John Ford, I'm Alfred Hitchcock. And then I went to Hampshire College where they were doing nothing but social documentary, still photography. So I realized, truthfully that there is as much drama, if not more, in what was and what is than anything that human imagination dreams up. But I think about it all the time. But I don't have to, you know, Shelby called me up in the middle where editing had this huge problem. I called him up and I just said, I can't figure out how to do

Vicksburg and Gettysburg. And he said, God's the greatest dramatist, I said, he said, I said, what goes? God's the greatest dramatist. So I hung up, and I realized, just tell it the way it happened. So everybody either puts Vicksburg after Gettysburg or Vicksburg before, but actually Vicksburg happens before and during and after a Yettysburg. And that's exactly the way. And then he called me up and he said it again. He said, maybe a couple of years later,

he goes, God's the greatest dramatis. Who would have thought that Lee would surrender the grant and a few days later Lincoln would have enough free time after eighteen hour days prosecuting the war to go to the theater. God is the greatest drama.

of the hedgerows. And then you go back to the middle of the Battle of Sidepark.

our sacred honor. And you know who, George Washington was probably the richest person in America, or one of the richest at the time of the revolution, certainly before he was, and he risked everything, his life and his fortune and his sacred honor. You know, you make we make a joke now of Washington slept here, But he spent between when he was named the head of the Continental Army, not the East Coast Army, but continental. We knew where we were going. By the Continental Congress, we knew where

we were going. In the early summer of seventy five, he gets back to my Mount Vernon for four nights. Right, he comes back to Mount Vernon in December of seventeen eighty three. So who would And this is an idea that's never been tested. Now we've tested it for two hundred and fifty years. And could you imagine somebody in the top one hundred risking their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for something as important as our founding.

And so that's what the celebration of two fifteen. Nobody can tell you what it isn't nobody can tell you what it is. It's always complex, that's the nature of human beings, and we should be reveling in that complexity. Let me give you one slight example. The bell cow of the conservative movement at this time is the television series Yellowstone Right. Right, This is finally they've made liberal.

Hollywood made a story for us, right, And what is at the heart of that story A a patriarch who is the George Washington of the series, who also kills people who piss him off. Just as his father and grandfather have done, dumping their bodies wherever they went. He's got a daughter cut from his same cloth, as ruthless

as he is. He's got two sons. One is tortured by the relationship to the land and the Native American story that has been superimposed without any questions over that, and he's married a Native American.

it's got undertow and all of the American experience. We made a film on the American Buffalo, and I remember looking at one scene where Kevin Costner plays the lead. John Dutton is explaining to somebody just about it, and in three seconds I just turned to my daughter and I said, that was our four hours on the Buffalo, you know, And he did it in like three sentences.

German Hessian soldier named Johann Evld. He's openly contemptuous of these rebels, and he arrives in episode three at Staten Island when we send the first big batch there, but he's there in three, four or five and six, but he's part of the surrounding army at Yorktown. And he says, after Yorktown, who would have thought one hundred years ago that out of this multitude of rabble could rise of

people who could defy kings. These German soldiers who didn't get killed, who escaped and blended into the German communities, those who stayed and then got shipped back home. A lot of them came back with their families because they had seen the promised land who would have thought one hundred years ago, out of this multitude of rabble could rise of people who could defy kings johanney Vov.