“Democracy is an unintended consequence”: Ken Burns on the story of American history
Introduction
By Kate Selker
April 1, 2026
There’s a neon sign in Ken Burns’ editing room that captures his take on history: “It’s complicated.”
The documentarian embraced that complicated narrative last month in a conversation at Harvard Kennedy School’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. He spoke with Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy Director Nancy Gibbs about the American Revolution, the early media landscape, and his own approach to storytelling.
As part of the Shorenstein Center’s annual Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics, Burns painted a complex picture of the early days of the United States. He pointed to enormous division, a fear of democracy, and a string of military losses. We share lightly edited excerpts from Burns’ remarks below.
On the division at the root of the revolution
In a moment like this—which is so Chicken Little, “The sky is falling, it’s all over, we’ve never been more divided.”—yes, we have. We were way more divided during the Revolution. Way more divided during the Civil War. The Revolution was a civil war—a really bloody civil war.
“Democracy meant bad things”
What the whole story of the revolution is for us now—and it may be helpful in this supposedly existentially threatening moment—is that we need to just go back and rediscover what actually happened. It is not the story of great men thinking ideas in Philadelphia. That’s hugely important in 1776 and in and in 1787. But this extraordinary revolution of ideas and of movements and democracy is an unintended consequence of this thing.
Democracy meant bad things when the revolution started. There’s a wonderful quote of two Boston clerics who are looking at yet another crazy mob demonstration, and they say, “What would you rather be ruled by? One tyrant 3,000 miles away or 3,000 tyrants not a mile away?” And there was this sense that the actions of the people were what you were guarding against.
A string of losses that lead to victory
If you look at the history of the American Revolution, it is not a string of patriot victories. In fact, it is the opposite of that. It is a string of British victories punctuated here and there fortuitously by some unexpected patriot victories—which caused the spirit, because of Trenton, to be raised in a very dark time…or Saratoga, which the French go, “oh, I just wanted a little victory, you’ve got a big victory—we’re going to give you $30 billion (in today’s money) and make the difference in the revolution.” And then of course, Cornwallis does everything he’s not supposed to do and ends up in the worst possible place to defend called Yorktown—and you know, it’s great. The arc of that is amazing.
On media during the American Revolution
We like to think that this [media landscape] today is somehow completely different [from that of the Revolution] and it’s more the same than it is different. Obviously the characters have been changed, the technology is different, but you basically have this literate population. They write letters. They read newspapers all up and down the place. It’s their internet. People are listening to lots of different points of view. And when the resistance—kept alive, by the way, by women in New England—when the resistance ebbs, it’s Samuel Adams who’s saying, “No, no, no. You’re really pissed off at this. They're going to—you’ve just got to wait. They’re going to do this in a in a few seconds. Just hang on.” And you know, unfortunately, he’s right.
This is a war that’s also one of escalating rhetoric. The more we tell King George how tyrannical he is, the more tyrannical he acts, the more radical he accuses us of being in his government, the more radical we behave, and then all of a sudden shots are fired. So it’s an interesting situation that is very similar in many ways to today…it just rhymes in almost every moment with today.
“Trying to reverse engineer against a tyrant”
During the constitutional convention they are trying to reverse engineer against a tyrant—and Hamilton says,“what if some unscrupulous person mounts the hobby horse of popularity and creates chaos?” Jefferson, who’s stuck in Paris, writes to Madison who’s kind of writing the code and he says, “what if someone should lose an election, but pretend false votes and reap the whirlwind?”
We talked to Yuval Levin, the constitutional scholar, just after the [documentary] series came out and he just said you know, if they came here [to the United States today], they would not be surprised there was somebody trying to take monarchical power. They’d just be super disappointed that Article 1, the Legislative, had abdicated so much of that power to the Executive, and had not insisted that the declaration of war be done not on a whim but through the through the representatives of all the people. That tariffs would not be levied without the people who are supposed to levy tariffs doing that work.
On presenting history as a “complicated narrative”
A complicated narrative is really the best antidote to just about anything. Because—Wynton Marsalis said this in our jazz film: “Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing can exist at the same time.” The binary structures that are prevalent in our mostly-media discourse require an on-off switch, and everything is red state, blue state, young, old, gay, straight, male, female, rich or poor, north or south, east or west. We always do that.
And yet what we know from our own lives and the lives of the people closest to us, from the art that we are sustained by, by the faith that sustains some of us, is [that the narrative] always much more complicated and dynamic. The novelist Richard Powers said “the best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view and all we do is argue,” he said….“the only thing that can do that is a good story, because a good story actually engages all of these complicated dynamics.”
...If you’re in trouble as a human being, you go to a pastor or a professional and the first thing they want to know is “Where’d you come from? Who are your parents? What’s your origin story? How’d you grow up?” And you begin to reassemble your narrative. So if, in this time of existential threat to this, you can go back and have an origin story in which everyone can find purchase—not because you've been all things to all people, but because you’ve just been calling balls and strikes. Which is what we’ve always tried to do, and make sure that we honor the neon sign in in our editing room: it’s complicated.
Photography by Martha Stewart