Opposable Brain

Ken Burns for Posterity

I noticed that Yale has taken down the archive of Ken Burns' 2004 speech, which was one of my favorites, so I'm replicating it here for everyone's perusal.

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Yale Class Day Speech
Ken Burns
May 23, 2004

President Levin, Dean Brodhead, other Deans and Masters, members of the Corporation, distinguished faculty, proud parents, graduating students, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I am deeply honored that you have asked me here to say a few words; that you might find what I have to say worthy of your attention on so important a day.

I know there was an expectation that someone else might be giving this speech, another proud parent of a graduating senior, but that turns out to be not the case -- and you're stuck with me today. This has happened to me once before at another speech at commencement time. There, I was told I was the third choice after Woody Allen and Roger Clemens. I assured my undoubtedly despairing audience that they had nothing to worry about, that I, in fact, possessed the blinding fastball of Woody Allen and the existential angst of Roger Clemens.

It is, of course, the prerequisite of every parent that at some point in their life they must become a source of nearly excruciating embarrassment to their children. It is the supreme injustice here today that my first-born child, my beloved daughter Sarah, a member of the graduating class of 2004, should have to suffer this in the presence of all her schoolmates, friends and loved ones. I apologize to her in advance for this indignity, but plead guilty to the parental affection and deep, indescribable love that has, more than your generous request to speak here today, propelled me to this podium.

As I stand here now, I am reminded of the time in the early Twentieth Century when Mark Twain was given an honorary degree at Oxford University. It was an amazing moment, this son of a slave-holder from the backwoods, the frontier of a relatively young and fragile country, who had raised himself up and almost single-handedly invented American literature by writing the way we sounded and by grappling with our country's original sin and great shame the question of slavery and race--suddenly found himself sharing center stage with the sculptor Auguste Rodin, the composer Camille Saint-Saens, and the writer Rudyard Kipling at one of the world's great and ancient universities. The significance of the moment was not lost on the press, who rushed up and surrounded the bemused Twain, now wearing a handsome cap and gown, clutching his diploma, and asked him how it felt to have come so far and be thus celebrated. Twain allowed that he was aware of the distance he had traveled in his life and was honored by the distinction accorded him that day, but he was really, as he put it, just "crazy about the clothes." (Later, at his daughter's wedding, he would steal all the attention from the infuriated bride and groom by wearing his commencement gown to the festivities. Ah, parenthood.)

As I mentioned, I have now had some experience with this speech-making business, but many years ago when I was first asked to address graduating students, I was in a real panic. I spoke to a number of friends who had some practice with this sort of thing to try ease my anxiety about what to say. Their advice and collective wisdom was very helpful. Then and now. One said to avoid cliches like the plague. Another gave the best advice for me and for you: "Be yourself." But then, one especially blunt friend said, "By all means, don't tell them their future lies ahead of them. That's the worst."

I thought about this for a long time and I am now absolutely convinced that he was right and that your future lies behind you. In your past, personal and collective. If you don't know where you have been, how can you possibly know where you are and where you are going? In the last thirty years of filmmaking, I have learned many things, but that the past is our greatest teacher is perhaps the most important lesson. And I do not believe in the Doppler Effect of history, that the farther away we get from a moment in time, the less relevant or compelling it is to us now.

History, the avocation I have chosen to practice my craft of filmmaking, is a malleable thing; each generation rediscovers and re-examines that part of its past that gives its present new meaning and, most important, new possibilities. The question becomes for us: what will we choose as our pole star? Which distant events will provide us with the greatest help, the most comforting solace, the perfect example of wisdom and leadership?

I am interested in that mysterious power of history, and I am interested in its many varied voices. Not just the voices of the old top-down version of our past, which would try to convince us that American history is only the story of Great Men. And not just those pessimistic voices that have recently entered our studies, voices which seem to suggest that our history is merely a catalogue of white crime. I am interested in listening to the voices of a true, honest, complicated past that is unafraid of controversy and tragedy, but equally drawn to those voices, those stories and moments, that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit and particularly the unique role this remarkable and sometimes dysfunctional Republic seems to have in the positive progress of mankind.

So, I would like to talk briefly this afternoon about history and memory and attachment. And despite my seeming professional reliance on images and pictures, I am, like you, in the business of words and stories. So permit me a few minutes to tell you, with some words, some stories that might have some meaning, that might have some relevance for you this day.

A little more than twenty years ago I was in New Orleans, finishing up work on a film about the turbulent southern demagogue Huey Long, the corrupt politician who had amassed more political power than any other man in America, but who had also delivered on many of his promises to lift up the poor. I was visiting a friend in the Garden District, a retired legislator and judge named Cecil Morgan, who had given that project one of its strongest and most dramatic interviews. Cecil had been a fierce opponent of Huey Long's in the Louisiana legislature in the thirties, and he had in our filmed conversation vividly brought to life the fear and paranoia and even terror of those dark days. This time, prompted by a remark that I was considering making a film on the Civil War but hadn't literally gotten up the courage to do so, Cecil brought out an old dusty book, written by his grandfather, James Morris Morgan. It was called "Recollections of a Rebel Reefer," a reference to Cecil's ancestor's service in the Confederate navy, not, as a few of you may suspect, about an experimenting undergraduate.

Just as I was politely returning the book to Cecil, a scrap of paper fell from its pages to the floor. It was a short, yellowed note from old James Morris Morgan to his great niece. It read: "Dear Louise, When the incidents recorded in this volume seem ancient to you, try to remember that I can remember your Grandfather's grandmother Morgan and her tales of how she danced with George Washington. The past to the aged does not seem as far away as does the dim future, and the only thing that abides with us always is the love of those who are dear to us."

James Morris Morgan's letter really needs no comment. His truth is plain and direct, to the heart--an important ingredient of good history and good story telling. All of us must, in our historical explorations and excavations, however informal or personal, be more like emotional archaeologists than clinical scientists, exposing to modern air not just the dry dates and facts of those past lives and moments, but the moving undercurrent of real human affections and failings. It will help us get on with our lives, I promise you.

[Ken Burns tips his cap to the Class of '04]

Listen. Listen. In January of 1838, shortly before his 29th birthday, a tall thin lawyer prone to bouts of debilitating depression, addressed the Young Men's Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. "At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?" he asked his audience. "...Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the Earth and crush us at a blow?" Then he answered his own question: "Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio [River] or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years...If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

That young man, Abraham Lincoln, would go on to preside over the closest this country has ever come to near national suicide, our Civil War, and yet embedded in his extraordinary, disturbing and prescient words is a fundamental optimism that implicitly acknowledges the geographical force-field two benign neighbors North and South and two mighty oceans have provided for us since the British burned the White House during the War of 1812.

In many respects, September 11th ended all of that, rupturing the sense of invincibility and safety we had gradually acquired as the cold war receded into the past. Still, as we struggle to redefine ourselves in the wake of that rupture, it is interesting that we come back again and again to the Civil War and Lincoln for the kind of sustaining vision of why we Americans still agree to cohere, why, unlike any other country on earth, we are still stitched together by words and, most important, their dangerous progeny: ideas. It is altogether fitting and proper that some of those powerful words and ideas of Lincoln's should have echoed at ground zero on the first anniversary of September 11th and amplified our own feeble, and yet terribly moving, attempts at memorial. We have counted on Lincoln for nearly a century and a half to get it right when the undertow in the tide of human events has threatened to overwhelm us. We return to him for a sense of unity, conscience, and national purpose. And still, he and The Civil War have much to teach us.

Nearly fourteen years ago, PBS first broadcast our film on the Civil War. For years, those of us who were engaged in producing the film struggled to understand the four horrible years in our national life where, paradoxically, in order to become one, we tore ourselves in two. We were all constantly moved by Lincoln's ability to reconcile the contradictions that have attended, and at times, bedeviled us since our inception. He never lost sight of what was worth fighting for and what the cost would be; he seemed to instinctively comprehend and then tried to bridge the innate tension between our psychological and civic lives. He gave our fragile experiment a conscious shock that enabled it to outgrow the monumental hypocrisy of slavery inherited at our founding and permitted us all, slave owner as well as slave, to have literally as he said, "a new birth of freedom." And I think, by some strange historical osmosis, he made us better filmmakers.

When the film first aired in September of 1990, our nation was in the serious grip of war fever -- it was a palpable excitement -- as we massed our forces in the Gulf to attack Iraq. After the broadcast, however, pollsters and commentators noted that our popular enthusiasm and appetite for battle -- a sadly human trait I'm afraid -- diminished by nearly a quarter as our film, they said -- in frame after frame of painful imagery of Americans killing other Americans -- revealed the real cost of a war fought more than a century earlier. We considered that perhaps minor hesitation our best review.

Recently, PBS dusted the series off and showed it again. Again, we are at war in Iraq, substituting what our leaders thought perhaps would be a more tangible foe for the shadowy forces that shattered our peace and tranquility on September 11th. And again the war -- and Lincoln -- have much to say to us. "No general yet found," Lincoln said with chilling and brutal honesty in 1863, "can face the arithmetic, but the end of the war will be at hand when he shall be discovered." The arithmetic, of course, was the number of dead soldiers that general would inevitably have to send home. Lincoln found that general -- U. S. Grant -- and the bodies piled up in numbers unimaginable just a few months before. And that war was won.

As I watched the film again and relived its dark internal scenes, I pray we are prepared for the cost, and I shudder when the full force of Lincoln's youthful warning comes back to my consciousness -- that the real threat always and still comes from within this favored land, that the greatest enemy is, as our religious teachings remind us, always ourselves. And it seems abundantly clear that when we Americans heed the advice that echoes back from our inexpressibly wise past, we insure that we will, indeed, as Lincoln predicted, "live through all time."

The great jurist Learned Hand (and could there be a better name for a judge than Learned Hand?) once said that, "Liberty is never being too sure you're right." Somehow, recently though, we have replaced our usual and healthy doubt with an arrogance and belligerence that resembles more the ancient and now fallen empires of our history books than a modern compassionate democracy; begun to start wars instead of finishing them; begun to depend on censorship and intimidation and to infringe on the most basic liberties that have heroically defined and described our trajectory as a nation of free people; begun to reduce the complexity of modern life into facile judgments of good and evil, and now find ourselves brought up short when we see that we have, too, sometimes, in moments, become what we despise.

It is easy, I am sure, during these times of international upheaval and titanic change everywhere, to, like an ostrich, retreat inward, to retire to our spiritually as well as physically gated communities, to smugly convince ourselves that we in this country have somehow triumphantly made it through, that our destiny as a people, a society, a nation is now assured. That, like some perpetual motion machine, we will go on forever.

Nothing could be more dangerous than this arrogant belief, brought on and amplified as it is by a complete lack of historical awareness among us, and further reinforced by a modern media, cloaked in democratic slogans, but dedicated to the most stultifying kind of consumer existence, convincing us to worship gods of commerce and money and selfish advancement above all else.

"There are grave doubts at the hugeness of the land," Henry Adams wrote, "and whether one government can comprehend the whole." It is a perfect quote, accurately conveying the anxiety of Americans in the middle of the 19th Century who feared that this collection of former colonies could ever expand to continental status, could ever deal as one nation with the sectional discord that threatened civil war, could, as Adams put it so well, "comprehend the whole."

Civil war did come, yet the phrase "the United States are," as we referred to ourselves plurally before the war, paradoxically morphed after the war into a singular "the United States is" that we still, ungrammatically, refer to today.

But, alas, today we find ourselves in the midst of a new, subtler, perhaps more dangerous, civil war. The first one proved, above all, that a minority view could not secede politically or geographically from this union.

Now we are poised to fight that war again, and perhaps again and again, this time culturally, where the threat is fundamentalism wherever it raises its intolerant head. The casualties this time will be our sense of common heritage, our sense of humor, our sense of balance and cohesion. The ultimate stakes, though, are just as great as those Abraham Lincoln faced--the Union and very survival of our country.

What we are seeing is a secession of ideas and identification from the mainstream. In the name of the truth, we have created an infinite number of different truths, all pulling in different directions, all oblivious to the old or even a new conception of the whole. The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. said that we suffer today from "too much pluribus and not enough unum."

Our first Civil War started, as the writer Shelby Foote says, because we failed to do what we Americans do best: compromise. "We like to think of ourselves as uncompromising people," he said, "but our genius is for compromise and when that broke down, we started killing each other." The lesson for us, today, is tolerance and the mitigating wisdom that sees beyond the dialectical preoccupation that has set each individual, each group, each region of the country, against the whole.

So, I ask those of you graduating tomorrow, male or female, black or white or brown or yellow, young or old, straight or gay, to become soldiers in a new Union Army, an army dedicated to the preservation of this country's great ideals, a vanguard against this new separatism and disunion, a vanguard against those who, in the name of our great democracy, have managed to diminish it.

This is a family problem. Our problem. Not a red state or a blue state problem. Our problem.

So what do we make of all this? Let me speak directly to the graduating class. (Watch out, here comes the advice.)

As you pursue your goals in life, that is to say your future, pursue your past. Let it be your guide. Insist on having a past and then you will have a future.

Do not descend too deeply into specialism in your work. Educate all your parts. You will be healthier. Replace cynicism with its old-fashioned antidote, skepticism.

Don't confuse success with excellence. The poet Robert Penn Warren, who taught here at Yale for many years, once told me that "careerism is death."

Travel. Do not get stuck in one place. Visit Yellowstone or Yosemite or Appomattox, where our country really came together. Whatever you do, walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. Listen to jazz music, the only art form Americans have ever invented, and a painless way, Wynton Marsalis reminds us, "of understanding ourselves."

Give up addictions. Try brushing your teeth tonight with the other hand. Try even remembering what I just asked you.

Insist on heroes. And be one.

Read. The book is still the greatest manmade machine of all -- not the car, not the TV, not the computer, I promise.

Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality. Remember, too, there is nothing more incredible than being a witness to history.

Serve your country. Insist that we fight the right wars. Convince your government that the real threat comes from within, as Lincoln said. Governments always forget that. Do not let your government outsource honesty, transparency, or candor. Do not let your government outsource democracy. Steel yourselves. Steel yourselves. Your generation will have to repair this damage. And it will not be easy.

Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the actual defense of our country -- they just make our country worth defending.

Do only, as Emerson suggests, whatever "inly rejoices." Do not lose your enthusiasm. In its Greek etymology, the word enthusiasm means, "God in us." Remember, most of all, that only love multiplies.

[Ken Burns with daughter Sarah]
In closing, let me cement the embarrassment, my dear Sarah. I speak to all here, but I direct this last thought, this last quote, especially to you. On January 18th, 1892, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to my mind one of the most important women in American history and a writer on a par with Lincoln, gave a speech in Washington called "The Solitude of Self." She considered it her best. Though she speaks to women in this quote, she means all of us. All of us. Listen:

" No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men prefer to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation...

"The talk of sheltering women from the fierce storms of life is sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer... Whatever the theories may be of woman's dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he cannot bear her burdens... [In] the tragedies and triumphs of human experience each mortal stands alone.

"The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself.

"In age, when the pleasures of youth are passed, children grown up, married and gone, the hurry and bustle of life in a measure over, when the hands are weary of active service, when the old armchair and the fireside are chosen resorts, then men and women alike must fall back on their own resources... There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried..., more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being which we call ourselves, no eye or touch of man or angel has ever pierced."

Thank you and good luck.
I love you, Sarah.

Ken Burns
Walpole, New Hampshire

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