How Ken Burns Turned The American Revolution Into Woke Propaganda

 From Amuse on X:

Ken Burns’ new six part, twelve hour PBS series The American Revolution arrives with the familiar promises. It will be definitive. It will scrape away myth. It will finally tell “everyone’s” story. At the level of production values, it delivers exactly what viewers expect. The maps are elegant, the voice over is confident, the selection of anecdotes is often moving. Roughly 80% of the factual scaffolding is solid. Yet precisely because the scaffolding is solid, the remaining 20% matters. Burns uses the trust he earns with competent narrative history to smuggle in a present day ideological project, one that quietly teaches viewers to be embarrassed by the American founding and to transfer moral credit for its achievements away from the people who actually built it.

The core problem is not that Burns includes Native Americans, enslaved Africans, women, and dissenters in his story. Any honest account should. The problem is how he includes them, and how he frames everyone else. Again and again, the series moves from careful description into unargued assertion, from history into catechism. The pattern is simple. First, offer a conventional fact. Second, attach to it a tendentious gloss. Third, omit the evidence that would let a viewer test that gloss. A well produced documentary becomes a vehicle for a subtle but thorough rewriting of the American Revolution along contemporary ideological lines.

Consider the very first move the series makes. Before the colonies are even on screen, we are told that the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy had a thriving democracy and that later the Founders would create a similar union. The unmistakable implication is that we owe our constitutional order, in significant part, to the Haudenosaunee. This is presented in the magisterial tone that Burns has perfected over decades, as if it were a settled finding of the historical profession rather than a contested, fringe thesis. No primary source is quoted on screen, no debate acknowledged, no footnote even hinted at. The viewer simply absorbs that American self government is derivative of indigenous models.

This suggestion collides with the documentary record. If the Iroquois design played a real role in the creation of American federalism, one would expect it to surface in the immense paper trail of the founding. Yet the Journals of the Continental Congress, the records of the Constitutional Convention, the ratification debates, and the public essays of the period are silent on any Iroquois template. The authors of the Federalist Papers explain their influences in great detail. They cite Montesquieu, Polybius, the Dutch Republic, the Swiss cantons, and of course the English constitution. They do not cite the Great Law of Peace. Individual colonists knew the Iroquois well and sometimes admired their discipline, but admiration is not intellectual dependency.

Burns’ one concrete hook is a line from a 1751 letter, in which Benjamin Franklin notes the practical fact that six nations of what he calls “ignorant savages” had managed to form a union, and remarks that it would be strange if the colonies could not do the same. The letter is an admonition, not a citation. Franklin’s point is that if even people he regards as backward can coordinate, then Englishmen with parliaments and printing presses have no excuse for their disunity. To treat this as proof of direct borrowing from Iroquois constitutional theory is to misread a scolding remark as a philosophical footnote. Burns never explains this, because explanation would reveal how thin the evidence really is.

Equally misleading is the description of the Iroquois system as a “thriving democracy.” The confederacy had no written constitution, relied on hereditary clan structures, and vested decision making in a small council of sachems selected by clan mothers. Ordinary Iroquois did not cast votes in anything like our sense. It was an impressive indigenous polity, but calling it democratic in the modern sense stretches the term past usefulness. Here again, the series chooses the vocabulary of contemporary legitimacy rather than the vocabulary that best fits the 18th century reality.

Why does this matter? Because the opening move sets a tone. If the American founders merely borrowed their institutional imagination from the Iroquois, then the uniqueness of the American experiment is diminished, and so is the moral credit we extend to the founding generation. The point is not to honor the Iroquois as such, who deserve study on their own terms, but to recenter the story away from the people who actually wrote the Declaration, fought the war, and built the Constitution. It is a redistribution of prestige, and it is accomplished by selective quotation and silence rather than by argument.

The treatment of slavery reveals the same habits in a more serious register. When Burns turns to the Atlantic slave trade, he speaks in the passive voice. Tens of thousands of Africans, we are told, were captured and put in chains. The obvious question, captured by whom, is left unanswered. The effect is not accidental. A viewer who has not studied the trade will naturally imagine European raiding parties sweeping through African villages. Burns knows this. He also knows that in the overwhelming majority of cases, the first act of enslavement was carried out by Africans themselves. (Read more.)

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