Ken Burns on why the American Revolution is ‘the most important event in history after the birth of Christ’

Documentary maker Ken Burns doesn’t think today’s polarized politics are anything new, especially for a country that, as he sees it, already had two civil wars — the American Revolution of 1776 and the 1861 war between the Union and Confederacy.

“Every era thinks they’re Chicken Little, the sky is falling,” Burns said in an interview while stopping by The Post office to meet with the team and discuss his new six-part, 12-hour-long documentary, “The American Revolution,” premiering on PBS Nov. 16.

“Ecclesiastes says there’s nothing new under the sun. I’m proposing that for a brief, shining moment there’s something new under the sun, which is the creation of the United States of America. But that doesn’t mean human nature isn’t going to impose itself,” the 72-year-old iconic filmmaker said with his unsullied, infectious enthusiasm.

Burns has reinstated a political neutrality vow while on a coast-to-coast media blitz promoting the series, where he’s revisited historic battle sites, spoken to schoolkids in Detroit, and headlined many Q&As.

He hasn’t always been so tight-lipped on current events. In 2016, he called then-candidate Donald Trump “Hitler-esque,” and a Brandeis University commencement address last year turned into a stump speech when he called then presidential nominee “the opioid of all opioids,” saying a Trump presidency will “re-enslave” Americans.

“What’s [my] intention in making this?” Burns says of the series. “Just to tell the story, then get out of the way. But if I wanted something now that it’s done, I’d want to put the ‘us’ back in the US,” he said.

Apprehensive viewers worried about lectures on slavery or colonialism from the notoriously left-leaning Burns have little to fear — the series is light on wokeness. Rarely (though not entirely absent) is the phrase  “white male” uttered with a sneer by historians or academics.

This isn’t the 1619 Project, which tried to reframe the Revolutionary War as a fight to preserve slavery. Burns says that revisionism isn’t true. 

And the cast is extensive: Burns began the project nearly ten years ago and over 60 voice actors appear, including Hollywood celebrities Morgan Freeman, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Jeff Daniels, Paul Giamatti, Laura Linney, and Claire Danes.

The series utilizes over 18,000 maps and historical documents and cost $30 million to make.

In the documentary, Burns is not shy when it comes to detailing the gruesomeness of America’s fight for independence.

“This is a civil war and it’s really, really bad,” he said. “You’ll see some battles in which there’s only one Brit killed. Everyone else who’s killed or wounded is an American killing or wounding another American.”

The big, familiar names operate in the background of Burns’ series—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and The Post’s founder Alexander Hamilton (who makes his debut in the final episode).

One reason, Burns says, is overexposure of the Founding Fathers (like HBO’s 2008 “John Adams” miniseries and the “Hamilton” musical). Plus, Burns already did a Benjamin Franklin doc in 2022.

But George Washington remains the exception.

“He’s still, without a doubt, the person who knew how to defer to Congress, knew how to inspire ordinary people in the dead of night, knew how to pick subordinate talent, just had a kind of presence to him that, without him, we don’t have a country,” Burns said.

Even for those who don’t subscribe to the “great man” view — that history is shaped by a few exceptional individuals — it’s difficult to argue the US would exist without Washington.

Focusing on Washington’s complexity — his great blunders alongside his victories — allowed Burns to maintain the suspense in a story where everyone knows the ending.

The largest battle of the Revolution, the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776, fought only a month after the Declaration of Independence was signed, was also Washington’s most costly mistake. The British would come to occupy New York for the next seven years, and were warmly welcomed by the city’s strongly loyalist inhabitants.

“George Washington doesn’t get his city back, the one he has lost through his own terrible mistake of leaving the Jamaica Pass and the Gowanus Heights open and unguarded, which allows 10,000 [of the] British Army to sneak around and completely hem in the Americans,” Burns said.

When asked why colonial New Yorkers favored the Crown, Burns rubbed his fingers together, the sign for money. “Commerce,” he said.

But he’s not here to turn the word “loyalist” into a pejorative. He calls them the “conservatives” of their day.

“To be a loyalist is to be a conservative. You know that your prosperity, your health, your literacy, the land you own, comes from your emigration from what is arguably the world’s greatest form of government, the constitutional monarchy of Britain,” Burns said.

“Democracy up to that point has a kind of sense of anarchic mob rule.”

Episode One reminds viewers that the word “demagogue” comes from “democracy.”

“Before Lexington and Concord,” the first major battle of the Revolution, “there’s two ministers in Boston who are looking at each other and one says: who do you want? One tyrant 3,000 miles away or 3,000 tyrants not a mile away?” Burns said, an 250-year-old argument made, perhaps, freshly relevant as last week’s elections saw a card-carrying Marxist elected mayor of New York.

Then there’s the chilling line from Vermonter and loyalist militia leader John Peter after shooting his rebel classmate Jeremiah Post: “I was obliged to destroy him.”

Burns also challenges the perception of American Indians as passive, benevolent victims, telling a more three-dimensional tale of warring tribes as different from one another as the countries of Europe and forging alliances with both Patriots and the British Crown.

Like the surprising story of Rebecca Tanner, a Mohegan woman who lost five sons fighting for the Patriot cause.

“Mrs. Sullivan during World War II loses four sons on a battleship and we get ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ ” Burns said, referring to the 1998 Tom Hanks film. “[Tanner] loses five sons. That’s extraordinary, and all we have is just a line,” he said, referring to historical lists of casualties.

“We don’t have a picture of Rebecca, we don’t know much about her at all, but we can try to tell the story, because it’s really important.”

Those everyday, unsung minor characters — teenage boys running from home to fight, ne’er-do-well militiamen, women organizing boycotts, military contractors stuffing their pockets — anchors the series and is a device Burns hopes will bring intimacy to the American Revolution beyond classroom tales of wooden teeth and cherry trees.

Burns continued: “I think all of the saccharine, fife and drum treacle that tends to cling to our Revolution—it doesn’t need to be that. It can be super complicated and that is to not diminish these great ideas, the best ideas. I think the Revolution is the most important event in world history after the birth of Christ, full stop.”

“By telling a more complex story, those ideas are made bigger and more complicated. Democracy is not the intention of the Revolution. It’s a consequence of it.”

Highfalutin disputes over taxation and representation were very real in Revolutionary America, but the true power of the story is how that led to a discussion of natural rights — life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness — and how everyday people soon bought into the rhetoric.

“This argument between Englishmen breaks out into natural rights. And all of a sudden, even though these are not self-evident — nobody’s ever introduced them into the world before — we hold certain truths to be now self-evident.

“That has a very powerful effect, not just for the guys who are writing it and expect to inherit the mantels of leadership if they’re successful, if, but among the people that are the so-called ordinary people,” Burns said.

“And that, to me, is a great story.”