America’s Woke Revolution
The American Revolution
Directed and produced by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt ◆ Produced by Florentine Films ◆ Distributed by PBS
“From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen, not to be extinguished.” So opens Ken Burns’s 6-part, 12-hour documentary series The American Revolution, which premiered on PBS in November. The quote, from Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, is an inspiring assessment as the Republic enters its 250th year. Amid predictions that “our democracy” is doomed, it is also an optimistic one.
Is Burns’s new and arguably most ambitious documentary, which continues a 44-year career of sweeping, colorfully narrated, and lavishly illustrated treatments of vital swaths of American history and culture, something that can unite Americans? Many felt that way about his magnum opus, The Civil War (1990), which, long before the South and its heroes were condemned to racialized damnatio memoriae, humanized both Yankees and Confederates. It was a painstakingly rendered history that offered a moving and informed account of our country’s most challenging episode in a format that commanded near-universal appeal and won nearly unanimous praise.
Alas, in the intervening years, Burns, much like the formerly government-funded broadcaster that has reliably featured his work ever since, has succumbed to what Elon Musk has called “the woke mind virus.” Evidence of Burns’s politicization appeared as early as his lengthy 1994 series Baseball, which might have convinced some viewers that our erstwhile national sport was merely an open-air canvas for racial conflict and labor activism.
Some of Burns’s subsequent efforts leaned less on ideology—it is hard to ruin Jazz (2001) and National Parks (2009)—but the Age of Trump has clearly had a bad effect on the celebrated filmmaker. His jarring The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022), which recounts Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s failure to confront Nazi mass murder during World War II, invidiously ends with a film montage including President Trump calling for border security and, inexplicably, footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, demonstration at the Capitol.
In a CNN interview around the time of that film’s release, moreover, Burns deplored Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s chartered flight of a few dozen illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard—a self-proclaimed “sanctuary island.” He called it a worrisome exercise taken straight from what he called the “authoritarian playbook” and raised concerns about the end of democracy. In a curiously mixed metaphor for such an accomplished maker of historical nonfiction films, he later described other DeSantis policies as part of “a Soviet system or the way that Nazis would build a Potemkin village.”
Having expressed such overwrought views, it is unsurprising that The American Revolution is at times sanctimonious, pandering, and even approaching self-parody. One might have expected, in line with the radical left’s true authoritarian playbook, that the national founding would be portrayed with precious little said about the Revolution’s philosophical underpinnings. We hear all about slavery and, as Geoffrey C. Ward’s narrated text calls them, “enslaved people,” but next to nothing about the great thinkers of classical antiquity and the British and French Enlightenment, whose ideas inspired the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson’s deep reading of Locke and Montesquieu is absent, yet we are certainly told that his slaves who had taken refuge with the British were returned to him, as were George Washington’s and those of many other slaveowners, and lectured that he failed to live up to his own ideals of human equality.
In the film’s most glaring interpretive error, Burns would have us believe that the fundamentals of democracy and political union did not come from the British constitutional tradition, but rather from the Iroquois, whose Haudenosaunee Confederacy allegedly inspired Benjamin Franklin with its ideals. This is, of course, utter hogwash. The Haudenosaunee, which loosely united six Indian (as the film conspicuously calls them despite the long-used politically correct term “Native American”) tribes living mainly in what is today New York state, were not a federal democracy, but rather a collection of hereditary chiefdoms with leaders chosen by a bloodline matriarchy. This local variant of the hereditary principle more closely resembles the political order the American Revolution rejected than the one it created. The Haudenosaunee’s decisions, moreover, were not democratic in any modern political understanding of the word but rather based on a discursive consensus reached in tribal councils. Try imagining that in Congress today or at any other time in the last 250 years.
Although this error appears only at the very beginning of the series, it sets a poor tone for what follows. It was astonishing to see it pass amid the contributions of Burns’s large roster of expert commentators, almost all of whom are elite university professors specializing in the revolutionary period. Some of the older generation, including Joseph Ellis and Gordon Wood, respectively 82 and 92, offer insights worth listening to, as does the popular military historian Rick Atkinson, a comparative youth at 73.
But for the younger contributors, who seemed to have been selected with an eye toward racial diversity, international variety, and gender balance, such credentials say much less than they used to. Partly for those DEI reasons, Americans now overwhelmingly distrust institutional academia. History as a discipline has all but collapsed as a field of endeavor for students, with majors in steep decline and a scandalously low 18 percent of college students now enrolling in even one semester of American history of any era.
Earlier this year, Harvard University, the institution from which Burns appears to have recruited the largest number of experts for the film, was sanctioned by the federal government for massive civil rights violations. It had billions in federal funds frozen and entered negotiations to make significant structural reforms and pay a fine that could amount to as much as $500 million. This followed a humiliating scandal just two years ago in which its former president, who was also widely accused of career-long plagiarism, resigned in ignominy after telling a televised congressional hearing that calling for the deaths of Jews on her campus could be acceptable depending “on the context.”
That once-proud institution may no longer be where many of us would care to have our children learn our nation’s history—or anything else—at a price exceeding $80,000 per year, and Burns seems sensitive to this. When the experts appear on screen in short video clips, the film usually bills them simply as “historian,” perhaps intentionally leaving out institutional affiliations and faculty status that many viewers may now find suspect.
Fortunately for the viewer, the material is difficult for even the most committed leftist ideologue to distort. The film goes out of its way to insert blacks, Indians, women, youth, and other nonwhite adult males at any possible opportunity. Some viewers may be interested to know that Wolof and other African languages were spoken when Washington camped at Valley Forge in the tough winter of 1777. Others may take an interest in the life and writings of Phillis Wheatley, a freed slave who is regarded as the first black American to publish a book. But the general narrative always comes back to what solid empirical history is and should be—a coherent tale of great men driving world-changing events.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Episode 5, in which black Ivy League professors Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard) and Christopher Brown (Columbia) reluctantly—and rather entertainingly—break down and admit that George Washington, that infamous slaveowner and ruthless land speculator, was a great man and that the war could not have been won without him.
At a time when military history is practically proscribed from the academy, Burns dwells in impressive, precise, and accurate detail on every major battle from the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord to the colonists’ knockout final victory at Yorktown. These are tales of glory, daring, tribulation, and challenge that we should never forget as a people. Despite his foibles, we may have to thank Ken Burns for teaching via his ambitious but flawed television series events that most of our teachers and professors would tell us are either unimportant or much less important than supposed impersonal forces and Marxist dichotomies of oppressor vs. oppressed.
The series also laudably places the revolution in an international context, reminding us that it had ramifications for global politics and provoked imperial struggles and open warfare in Canada, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean world, India, and elsewhere. It also admirably reflects recent research on the oft-forgotten fate of Loyalists, Americans who remained faithful to the British Crown and suffered appalling violence, dispossession, and exile.
The final half hour or so muses rather aimlessly on the Revolution’s evolving meanings and ambiguities, which had worldwide repercussions and have, at least in some quarters, instilled a nagging sense of doubt in our national spirit. “The American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution,” goes the film’s final line, a quote from the physician Benjamin Rush, a minor Founding Father. Who knows where Ken Burns would like to see it go?
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/reviews/americas-woke-revolution