Ken Burns: National Treasure

At the Roosevelt Memorial

Ken Burns is a national treasure.

It ought to be possible for Congress to designate him just that.

"That's Ken Burns," the Guide might say.  "He saw things we only looked at."

For instance, everyone in America past the age of ignorance knows that Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Eleanor Roosevelt were part of the same family, but for most of us, that was a bit like saying that Rockefeller Center and John D. Rockefeller and  Standard Oil are all members of the same family.  Ken Burns really saw what we had been looking at.  He told us about Teddy and FDR and Eleanor, and we saw America.  We saw ourselves.

I have told, before, that my earliest memory was of standing on a tree stump, looking at the little never-painted brown wooden house where the Great Depression had deposited us, as glaciers leave evidence of things ground down, thinking of the almost hopeless radio from which sometimes a voice could be heard.  I must have been four or five.  It must have been about 1935.  I recall, while living in subsequent houses almost as primitive, listening to other voices in other radios; listening to President Roosevelt.

I still wonder, each time I hear those recordings, that he spoke of our poverty in a patrician tone, but he never spoke down.  It was like knowing that someone, himself somehow crippled, a product of a family, and an education none of us had ever known, knew that we, on a dirt road in Washington State, were having a hard time, and that we had to live on rations, and would likely have to go to war, and that we would make it somehow.

He knew.  He knew!  And most of us made it, somehow.

Ken Burns saw something that we are looking at today.  He saw that one of the things the Roosevelts represented was one side of what is still true of America, and of our own divided minds.  There are two minds about what a nation should be.  Some of us think that the proper role of a government is to provide a place and the conditions for a grand contest to be played; something like a football game.  The stronger, faster, smarter team ought to win.  The rules are stated, and referees are chosen--something like a government--to let the game be played.  Government is there to maintain crowd control, to let the game go on.  There will be winners and losers.  There are always winners and losers.  The smarter teams pump the oil, cut down the timber, amass and control the money flow, and the losers are losers, and will remain losers until they find a way to become winners.   Then someone else will lose.

The Roosevelts represented the other way of thinking about what a government should be.  FDR and Eleanor, especially, believed that the well-being of all of us was at stake, that Roosevelt or tenant farmer or coal miner, we were all in this together, and that until we understood that, we were not a defensibly decent nation.  Government existed to do what had to be done to afford everyone a new deal:  food, shelter, a job, a vote, a voice.  Fairness.  Security.  A chance.  A fair chance.

It is our land.  It is our coal, our oil, our soil.  Some people will, indeed, become very wealthy, but the coal miner and the shipyard worker and the day laborer helped create that wealth.  Some people are very smart, and some get polio, and some have brown skin.  It matters to all of us, or it ought to matter to all of us, how all of us are doing.  Some people will, inevitably, do very poorly, and in a decent nation, we need to do what we can about that.

That was the magic of those scratchy old radios.  We could hear that FDR was not thinking just of his own family, his own handicap, his own well-being.  We could hear it.  That is why he proposed all of those depression-era measures to create jobs and build a place for us all.  That is why he coaxed the nation to go to war against the Nazis.  He talked about, and tried everything he could think of to make us think about each other, but especially about those who hurt most.

In his own way, Ken Burns does that, too.  He makes us think about the things we know, to see what we look at.