To promote his new Benjamin Franklin documentary on Wednesday, Ken Burns journeyed over to MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle where he told the show’s namesake host that he was worried about the future of democracy and then Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and President Biden reversed those concerns. For her part, Ruhle dismissed the Founding Fathers as white male landowners.
Towards the end of a lengthy interview, Ruhle inquired, “as a person who has deeply studied almost all parts of American history and culture, what do you think about where we are and where we're headed?”
Burns relayed his feelings that, “I've been quite worried and quite disturbed about it and I see what's going on now. The combination of the racial reckoning from George Floyd's brutal murder and from the pandemic, and from the divisions of the politics as something that was insurmountable.”
Fortunately, all is not lost:
But then, something like Ukraine happens. A horrible, horrible event for the Ukrainians, a vicious attack by the Russians and these wobbly, unstable, fragile Western democracies that are about to go the way of the, you know, whatever anachronistic thing you think of, have suddenly, kind of, congealed under the leadership of Joe Biden who everybody is absolutely sure can't do anything, and has, magnificently, sort of, and all the sudden you realize, oh yeah sometimes it just flips like that. Sometimes it’s, it takes the unintended consequences from something else over there to change the dynamics of stuff.
Earlier in the segment after Burns had gone through some details of Franklin’s life, Ruhle declared, "we do hold our forefathers on this pedestal for what they created together, but are we forgetting that they were, for the mast part, similar aged, white male landowners. It is a lot easier for that small group to agree on a set of ideals, then the giant, massive diverse group of stakeholders that we have today. A group of white guys that are all 35 can all fit in one bar.”
Burns pushed back slightly, “Yeah. Yeah, they actually had a hard time. They had a hard time doing that,” before going into more facts about Franklin, including his role in the ratification of the Constitution.
Surely the Founders are rolling over in their graves at the thought of not being able to live up to the standards of MSNBC hosts.
This segment was sponsored by Priceline.
Here is a transcript for the March 30 show:
MSNBC The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle
3/30/2022
11:27 PM ET
STEPHANIE RUHLE: Okay, but do we hold our fore—we do hold our forefathers on this pedestal—
KEN BURNS: Oh, it’s ridiculous
RUHLE: -- for what they created together, but are we forgetting that they were, for the mast part, similar aged, white male landowners. It is a lot easier for that small group to agree on a set of ideals, then the giant, massive diverse group of stakeholders that we have today. A group of white guys that are all 35 can all fit in one bar.
BURNS: Yeah. Yeah, they actually had a hard time. They had a hard time doing that. I mean, Franklin was way older. His son was older than Jefferson and Adam and Madison.So, he's that much wiser, he's the most famous American on Earth because of his scientific discoveries, mainly with regard to electricity, and he's the greatest diplomat ‘cause he’s gotten the French to come in on our side and we only win because he's there, but he has a hard time corralling all of these white landowners because the southerners want something and the northerners want something else, and there’s beginning to be little whispers, including from Franklin, about abolition. So, it's—it’s—it’s a dicey thing, but he designed, he helped to design, a machine which is still going.
He—he-- started a club as a young tradesmen called the Junto club, it’s Latin for, sort of, making a joint and he would say, you know, you shave a little off here, Walter Isaacson says in our film, you shave a little off here and you make a joint that will last for centuries. Well, this—this—this-- joint has lasted for centuries, but it is frayed because of the diversity of all of these things and the question is, can this government comprehend the whole? And right now, he would come and say, “ah, you're having the problems that we thought we’d have.”
He says when he proposes the ratification of the Constitution, you know, our enemies expect us to be cutting our own throats like we’re from the Tower of Babel, but we're not. We all brought our own wisdom, but we all brought our own prejudices, and we've given up a little bit and one of the things that they compromised on is the uncompromisable, human life.
RUHLE: And It’s —it is-- a lot harder to compromise today, given how diverse we are. But, we were divided back then, right?BURNS: Oh sup--
RUHLE: He was estranged from his own son over politics.
BURNS: His son was a loy—
RUHLE: So, should we be that shocked that we're divided today?
BURNS No. No, I mean, I think we should be concerned and very worried, but all of these things, you know, the Bible says it, Ecclesiastes, that’s the Old Testament, it says “what has been will be again, what's been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun.” It's not that history repeats itself, it’s that human life -- all of the antecedents of everything that we're experiencing today have happened at some point. And let's remember, our civil war, which we got through and over, killed 750,000 of us and that was us at our own throats. So, you know, we’re not there yet --
RUHLE: I was going to say, don't tell me that's where we are.
BURNS: No, no, we're not there yet and so there’s --there can be cause, The problem is, the things that we have seen bubble up to the surface, that bubble of continually in American history,
like white supremacy, and on the ugliness of the Klan and lynching and thank god, for yesterday's law. They've been trying to do this for decades and decades and decades, and couldn't get it done. Why couldn't we get it done?In any case, we—we-- didn't have it from the highest occupant -- highest office in the land as we had for four years. Somebody spouting some of these things gave a larger and wider voice to these, you know, the ills of Pandora's box.
RUHLE: Then, as a person who has deeply studied almost all parts of American history and culture, what do you think about where we are and where we're headed?
BURNS: Well, you know, I've been quite worried and quite disturbed about it and I see what's going on now. The combination of the racial reckoning from George Floyd's brutal murder and from the pandemic, and from the divisions of the politics as something that was insurmountable.But then, something like Ukraine happens. A horrible, horrible event for the Ukrainians, a vicious attack by the Russians and these wobbly, unstable, fragile Western democracies that are about to go the way of the, you know, whatever anachronistic thing you think of, have suddenly, kind of, congealed under the leadership of Joe Biden who everybody is absolutely sure can't do anything, and has, magnificently, sort of, and all the sudden you realize, oh yeah sometimes it just flips like that. Sometimes it’s, it takes the unintended consequences from something else over there to change the dynamics of stuff.
