Depending on who you ask, the Founding Fathers created a country, freed a small nation from monarchical tyranny and at least one of them had the arm strength to throw a silver dollar across the River Potomac. But in recent years, the collective American cultural conversation has become not as shy with confronting the less desirable aspects of that select crew.
Slavery is bad, and George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, et. al, owned people. It’s a safe bet that a lot of them harbored ill-conceived views about women and the poor. They probably weren’t capable of making delicious food on their own.
The flaws are there, and we consider them in tandem with memories of the Founders. Except, for some reason, Benjamin Franklin.
“One of the reasons I felt compelled to dive into [Franklin’s story] is that, despite our modern media culture — which you would presume would provide us with access to so much information about him — the popular conventional wisdom about him is so woefully superficial.” That’s the very straightforward objective of documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, whose new two-part documentary about the Boston-Philly Diplomacy Daddy premieres Monday, April 4 on PBS.
There’s a lot to get accurate about Ben Franklin, make no mistake. He’s closely associated with Philadelphia but lived in Boston through much of his adolescence. He was a keen inventor who respected the scientific process; the famed “kite experiment” was not the whim of a loon who wanted to see if he could get struck by lighting. (As the film points out, the real experiment was sophisticated in its simplicity and indirectly saved many buildings from what was assumed to be the wrath of God.)
He had a child, out of wedlock, while technically engaged to the mother. He didn’t abandon the kid, but he had his wife raise him. He loved London, and attended the coronation of King George III. He owned at least five slaves. But the broken snake and the “Join or Die” slogan? That’s him. The first anti-slavery legislation introduced to the United States Congress? That was him, too.
And there’s an irony to Franklin’s portrait being etched into the highest-value denomination of paper money that’s printed. He’s the original bootstrapper ideal man, but for all of his inventions, he never turned a profit. “I think that the libertarians who extol his money-making virtues have forgotten that he shared all of his magnificent, world-changing inventions without a patent,” Burns pointed out.
The documentarian’s influence transcends his films. He’s been in the documentary game since 1981, when his first film, a portrait of the Brooklyn Bridge, was released. Since then, his filmography has ballooned to include more than 30 other films under his direction — not counting “Franklin” or the number of executive producer credits he’s earned along the way. Like Franklin the inventor, Burns has influenced the way documentaries are made. To wit: iMovie editing software has a plugin called the Ken Burns effect.
The mythic Burns looms so large in contemporary discussion of American history, and anyone who is so prolific — like the mythic Franklin himself — will find it hard to escape scrutiny and criticism.
His hyper-productivity combined with a long-running, exclusive broadcasting partnership has landed him in the center of the “white guy–PBS real estate” conversation. In March 2021, ahead of the premiere of Burns’ “Hemingway,” a number of filmmakers signed an open letter criticizing PBS’ perceived “over-reliance” on the documentarian. PBS countered, as reported by NPR, saying that over the past five years, it had aired 58 hours of programming from Burns and 74 hours of projects by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In January, acknowledging that it could do better, PBS made a multi-million dollar commitment to supporting creators from diverse backgrounds.
It’s a controversy that has compelled Burns to reiterate how he operates. “I have, throughout my professional life, tried to tell the story of this country in an inclusive way,” he said. “But I don't accept the idea that the only people of a particular background can tell certain stories about the past. And then we've just balkanized us in the worst sort of way. Sometimes having perspective is a good thing, as to the thing about me taking up too much space.”
"We live in a melodramatic age. Every hero has to be perfectly virtuous and every villain has to be perfectly villainous. And that's not the way it is."Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker
It’s hard to ignore the position in which Burns has found himself with regard to PBS — he needs it, he argues, because in a media landscape that puts a premium on the now, PBS lets him take his time. Take 2017’s “The Vietnam War” — a project that he began in earnest in 2006 and didn’t lock until December 2015. “I can go out with my track record and get $30 million, which is what it costs to make ‘The Vietnam War,’” he said. “But no one will give me the 10-and-a-half years it took me to make it right. I can get it from the streaming service ... but they want it in two years, or two-and-a-half years, right? I can't do that.”
In the four-hour “Benjamin Franklin,” Burns offers an unvarnished look at a complicated and consequential man. “We live in a melodramatic age. Every hero has to be perfectly virtuous and every villain has to be perfectly villainous. And that’s not the way it is.” Burns doesn’t feel like he’s pushing an agenda or rewriting history; he wants me to understand that his goal is to put forward an accurate portrayal of the statesman and inventor and philosopher who’s been remembered as the quirky, wise-cracking grandpa of the Founding Fathers.
The upcoming premiere, though, does not mean that Burns is taking a break. “I just keep my head down, and I just make the films that are drawn to me.” He says his team just locked another film: a six-and-a-half-hour examination of [REDACTED].
For him, there’s always work to be done. Burns will be keeping his head down in his New Hampshire home, dedicating years of his life to the stories that capture his interest. Of all of Burns’ subjects, Franklin might be the one most emblematic of the documentarian’s work ethic: that nothing is ever actually finished, and that everything is a work in progress.
“Benjamin Franklin,” directed by Ken Burns, airs on GBH 2, April 4-5, 8-10 p.m.
