Documentary filmmaker Burns speaks at Heinz

To know who you are as an American, you have to know the history of America, according to… To know who you are as an American, you have to know the history of America, according to documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.

Burns, who directed and produced some of the most watched documentaries on the Public Broadcasting System, including Jazz, Baseball the Civil War and a series on historical Americans, spoke as part of Robert Morris University’s Pittsburgh Speakers Series Wednesday night at Heinz Hall.

“I am interested in the power of our history,” he said.

Through his documentaries, Burns said he not only sought out to capture the voices of “Great Men” in American history, but he has tried to hear the “true, honest, complicated voices” of all Americans, he said.

“I have to admit in many ways I have made the same film,” he said.

According to him, in his documentaries, he has tried to find out “who we Americans are as a people.” And by studying jazz, which was born in New Orleans and transformed throughout the country, America’s pastime of baseball and the Civil War, a time period which changed the history of the United States, he has tried to find his answer.

His series about historical Americans included films on Thomas Jefferson, the Lewis and Clark expedition, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Mark Twain and Frank Lloyd Wright.

“I keep being drawn back to the lives of individuals,” he said.

According to Burns, Jefferson, who he described as the “man of the last millennium,” was an interesting individual because of his “agonizing contradictions.”

Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” in the Constitution, but he owned more than 200 slaves. To understand Jefferson means to understand these conflicts, Burns said.

The Constitution guarantees people the right to the “pursuit” of happiness, not necessarily happiness, according to Burns.

“It was the journey, not the getting there. We weren’t meant to find happiness, we’re meant to enjoy the pursuit,” he said. “We are forever a nation becoming.”

Jefferson’s impact on American culture is still visible today in many issues including school prayer, school vouchers and states’ rights, he said.

According to Burns, the American Revolution took more than 144 years to be won; it was not until Stanton, Anthony and their supporters won the fight for women to be allowed to vote that it ended.

“These two women are responsible for the largest transformation in American history,” he said.

Prior to their revolution and the passing of the 19th Amendment, women could not be on juries, testify or sign a contract, Burns said. “In fact, women were property of their husbands.”

According to Burns, when making the film on Lewis and Clark, he and his crew traveled the same path that the two had taken years before.

“Much to our disappointment we could no longer see much of what Lewis and Clark could see,” he said.

Hydroelectric plants, power lines and even military bases replaced many of the areas Lewis and Clark had described. Where wild buffalo ran, Burns said his group saw a few grazing tagged cows. But his crew continued the journey, he said.

“Soon it became clear to us that the true story was not Lewis and Clark,” he said. “It was the land itself.”

According to Burns, the story of Samuel Clemens and his pen name, Mark Twain, was split between Twain’s “exquisite use of language” and Clemens’ fear of failure.

Clemens dealt with “gut wrenching loses” during his life, losing his mother, father, several of his children and siblings and his wife, Burns said.

Yet when he wrote as Twain, he was a success, receiving a diploma from Oxford University and becoming the one who “almost single-handedly created American literature,” Burns said.