The name of the sitting U.S. president was never uttered during Thursday night’s New York premiere of Ken Burns‘s PBS docuseries The American Revolution (nor, for the record, was the name Jimmy Kimmel).
Even so, Donald Trump and his efforts to omit parts of American history via direct orders to the Smithsonian, National Park Service and others was an obvious reference point.
“There is this tendency to make it so Weekly Reader,” Burns said. “It’s superficial.” PBS, he added, “has urged us, but also permitted us to dive deep, unafraid of conflict. And by the way, PBS is not going anywhere” despite being stripped of a key part of its funding by Congress.
The comment drew huge applause from the Town Hall crowd during a panel moderated by Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg. The panel followed the Atlantic Festival screening of scenes from the series, which will premiere November 16.
Goldberg asked Burns, Tom Hanks and other panelists about the “threat to ‘full history’” in the current climate. Trump has directed museum curators and park officials to remove materials he decried as “woke” and “out-of-control” and said the Smithsonian focuses too much on “how bad slavery was.” The edits and revamping are being done during the runup to the 250th anniversary of the nation, which will be celebrated next year and has already been a point of emphasis by Trump.
Tom Hanks, who voices several historical characters in the 12-episode series, didn’t name names but shared his thoughts about the point of view taken by the series. Based on the 47 minutes of footage that screened, it didn’t appear to be as likely to provoke as much controversy as the New York Times‘ 1619 Project. These days, one never knows, and scenes covered the fact that the founding fathers owned slaves and touched on other non-traditional narratives associated with the revolution. The idea of forming the U.S. itself, the series posits based on historical documents, came from Native American tribes living on American soil and advising colonial leaders.
“It’s a very basic kind of thought process,” Hanks said, which establishes “the only narrative that is acceptable.” That agreed-upon story, he continued, is “made by the people in power who want to guarantee themselves to be in power. … We know better. And you do not get that unless you understand the conversation that we’ve had about slavery.”
The series, Hanks added, will be a valuable counterpoint to the conventional sense of the founding of the nation as being about fireworks on July 4 and a flag sewn by Betsy Ross. Burns heartily agreed. “Nothing is diminished by showing the violence. Those ideas, those big ideas are not diminished by telling the story,” Burns said. “How are you so threatened by knowing that part of the story?”
America’s growth and evolution, Hanks argued, is what makes the country great. “Look how often, and by often I mean 51% of the time – 49% you’re wrong, but 51% of the time we steered toward the right way of making a more perfect union,” he said. “And that describes how far we have come! I’m a proud American … that comes out without a doubt when you look at history with enough dispassion to understand, we did not know better then, but we do immediately.”
Goldberg noted that a “brittleness” has set in across society of late. The environment certainly feels different than it did a decade ago when production began on The American Revolution, during the end of Barack Obama’s second term. The filmmaking team, he said, “probably had a different view [then], that the American story was settled. We were on a course, and it was a steady course.”
Harvard history professor Annette Gordon-Reed, one of the talking heads in the series, said the approach is “not about criticizing America. … It’s about having a sense of progress.” Gordon-Reed, who is Black, added, “There have always been people who question whether or not people of color are actually part of all of this.”
The panel and screening were preceded by a reading by John Lithgow of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Sarah Botstein, one of the directors of the series, also took part in the panel.
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