Had it been released five years ago, Ken Burns’s recent documentary Benjamin Franklin would have seemed like just another iteration of the Burns formula: a stentorian yet intimate narrator, ponderous panning shots over still images, period music transporting us to a bygone time, experts bubbling over with enthusiasm, and a compelling human story to tie the package together. But in the fog of our current history wars — 1619 vs. 1776, contested monuments, and the hyped-up furor over something called critical race theory — the documentary has acquired a cultural weight I’m sure Burns never intended or expected. Benjamin Franklin illustrates everything that is wrong with how most white Americans think about their nation’s founding.
Ken Burns is America’s historian. Since his start with The Brooklyn Bridge, in 1981, for which he earned his first Academy Award nomination, Burns’s documentaries have regularly attracted NFL-size audiences. When The Civil War first aired, in 1990, it drew the largest audience of any PBS show, ever. Since then, Burns has directed dozens of films under a long-term PBS contract. Even professional historians have recognized him as the closest thing America has to a historian laureate: The American Historical Review, the flagship journal in the field, invited him to write an essay on the “changing nature of historical truth” for its centennial issue, in 1995. (Burns declined the invitation but agreed to an interview with the journal.)
Burns’s chosen topics often appear likely to split audiences along culture-war cleavages: the Civil War, Jack Johnson, Vietnam, the Central Park Five, Muhammad Ali. Yet he has shown an uncanny ability to package even divisive topics in ways that ultimately reinforce a sense of patriotism and belonging.
This superpower has paid off in corporate support. General Motors sponsored Burns’s productions for 22 years, until the company nearly went bankrupt in the crash of 2008. When Burns’s World War II series debuted, Anheuser-Busch printed promotions on its beer cans and Bank of America flashed reminders on its ATMs to watch the show. The famously conservative billionaire David Koch underwrote Burns’s series on Vietnam.
Burns’s popularity is rooted in his folksy nationalism, a muted celebration of America’s rise that is tempered with nods to the regrettable. His films center on heroes because, as he explained in the 1995 interview with the American Historical Review, “I believe that history ought to be sung, that Homer, the Homeric mode is an important one, that you need to sing the epic verses, and the way we do that is around this ‘electronic campfire.’” This epic mode is marked by an emphasis on storytelling and a quiet refusal to take any particular point of view. Ahead of the release of The Vietnam War, Burns and his co-director, Lynn Novick, wrote, “There is no simple or single truth to be extracted from the Vietnam War.” The documentary was later criticized for precisely this attitude — a “strange ambivalence about American imperial overreach,” as Alex Shephard wrote in The New Republic. And when the Congressional Hispanic Caucus criticized his World War II series for not representing the sacrifices of Latino soldiers, Burns responded by saying The War was “a sort of epic poem and not a textbook.”
To frame Franklin as “evolving” is to see the United States as a nation stained by slavery but equipped with the radical principle of liberty that made its rehabilitation inevitable.
In endeavoring to sing Benjamin Franklin, Burns can’t avoid taking sides in a longstanding scholarly debate in which everyone begins by agreeing that Franklin is the prime exemplar and shaper of the thing we call the United States of America. Franklin’s life does indeed trace the full arc of the 18th century, and no founder had a better vantage point from which to make sense of it all. Franklin soaked up political debates as a printer, surveyed the full sweep and variety of the colonies as deputy postmaster to the Crown, attended the coronation of George III, represented the rebel Continental Congress in London, took part in a last-ditch negotiation on Staten Island to end hostilities with the British, charmed Louis XVI’s court at Versailles to win the diplomatic war, drove a hard bargain with England to secure the peace, and played a pivotal role in the Constitutional Convention. He was the essential founder. The trailer for Benjamin Franklin intones, “The American identity begins when Benjamin Franklin knit the American colonies together.” He has become a metonym for America.
So, when assessing the meaning of Franklin’s life, the details matter. We can see him either as a flawed but evolving genius whose life mirrors and prefigures America’s halting progress toward equality, or as a man imbued with the typical biases of his time, whose overriding concern was the promotion of the well-being of people like himself, a people Franklin called “lovely white.” Franklin, like America, can’t be both.
Burns is an unwavering believer in the idea that Franklin overcame his racial prejudices and atoned for his earlier, unthinking racism by the end of his long life. On the Today show the filmmaker made things simple: “He enslaved human beings but at the end of his life was an abolitionist … The thing about Franklin is that he is always improving, always trying to make himself better — like the union.”
It is true that Franklin accepted election as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and published a biting satire of the novel pro-slavery arguments its petitions provoked in Congress. But it is also true that Franklin, in his 80s and suffering from a growing list of maladies, wished to burnish his legacy and could see which side was the wrong side of history to be on. Early in Episode 1, the narrator observes that Franklin continuously and “carefully crafted [his] public image.” Somehow, Franklin’s gift for politics and self-fashioning in Episode 1 becomes, in Episode 2, his unimpeachable sincerity.
To frame Franklin as “evolving” is to see the United States as a nation stained by slavery but equipped with the radical principle of liberty that made its rehabilitation inevitable. This interpretation was pioneered by the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn in 1956 amid a bare-knuckled ivory-tower fight with an older generation of “progressive” historians, who had painted the Constitution as a greedy power grab by enslavers, land speculators, and bankers.
Burns includes an interview with Bailyn in which the historian argues that the fledgling United States shouldn’t be judged primarily for its reliance on slavery. It should be judged by its single greatest declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …” A ringing principle that, Bailyn argued, had changed the course of history.
Burns has never shied away from displaying the ugliness and contradictions of the past. His are not the historical documentaries of the 1950s and 1960s, which presented an American past whitewashed of any mention of slavery or settler colonialism. Benjamin Franklin notes that Franklin profited from printing advertisements for the sale of enslaved people in his newspaper, and that he bought and sold enslaved people himself. Quotes are read from Franklin’s cringe-inducing Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751), in which he bemoaned the importation of enslaved Africans that had “blacken’d half America” and asked, “Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?” As the historian Christopher Brown insightfully explains, Franklin’s racism and his opposition to the slave trade were hardly contradictory: Both attitudes meshed neatly with his conviction that the American colonies had, in Brown’s words, “too many Black people.” The narration also notes at several points that Franklin’s policies and actions dispossessed Native peoples of their lands.
By deftly assembling such vignettes, Burns creates for viewers the experience of an unvarnished story or, as Burns likes to say, history “warts and all.” But such warts as Burns chooses to expose are carefully curated and quickly and thoroughly drained of their subversive potential by earnest scholars explaining why what we just heard or saw is not as important as it seems or, worse, could not have been otherwise.
Late in the second episode, for example, the narrator describes how, at the Constitutional Convention, Franklin maneuvered a series of compromises on congressional apportionment that included the “three-fifths clause,” which effectively cemented the power of pro-slavery interests in the new government. This episode might lead viewers to wonder whether racism was not, in fact, baked into the republic. But these thoughts are immediately quashed as a platoon of historians marches onscreen, the first proclaiming that “the union is only possible if it includes the South” and therefore “if you did the moral thing … the Constitution would have never passed.” Another famous scholar bemoans the “tragic compromise,” while a third looks gravely into the distance and proclaims it America’s “original sin.”
Burns then cuts to the historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar, who tells viewers how they should understand this jarring contradiction in their nation’s ideals: “For Franklin, unity and compromise was the only thing that could make this new nation move forward. Without it, it would be a failed journey. American democracy would not develop without it.” Who doesn’t want the nation to move forward? Who wants a failed journey? No one asks, Whose journey is it?
The practice of sprinkling a fair number of disquieting facts into an argument in order to make it more persuasive was named by psychologists studying the dynamics of propaganda during the early Cold War. They called it “attitudinal inoculation.” The Yale University psychologist and War Department researcher Arthur A. Lumsdaine observed that “two-sided” propaganda, which exposed the listener to contrary information but ultimately arrived at its intended conclusion, was far more effective than propaganda that did not acknowledge counterarguments at all. This was because the listener had been “given an advance basis for ignoring or discounting the opposing communication and, thus ‘inoculated,’ he will tend to retain the positive communication.”
But “two-sided” propaganda is still propaganda. Benjamin Franklin overlooks a number of facts that compromise its portrait of Franklin as “evolving” and the young nation as wrestling with its “original sin” of slavery. There is no mention of the fact that fears of Black rebellion animated patriot resistance at the critical juncture of 1775. No mention of the fact that some of the first patriot militias in the South were raised in response to suspected slave uprisings in support of Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore. No mention of Lord Dunmore’s offering freedom to enslaved persons in exchange for their service to the Crown.
Burns distorts the history of Washington’s army by saying only that it included “Native Americans, free African Americans, and enslaved men, hoping to be freed when the war ended.” In fact, Washington, who owned enslaved people from age 11 until his death, banned all Black men from his army for its first year. He grudgingly accepted Black soldiers only after the British began recruiting them, and opposed forming all-Black regiments. (The British did not: Members of one British Black regiment, formed early in the war, famously wore sashes emblazoned with the words “Liberty to Slaves.”) No mention is made of the fact that many of the enslaved men who fought for American independence did so not because they had been promised their freedom but because they were substituting for their enslavers, or serving them.
The narrative of Franklin’s evolution toward abolitionism also runs aground on the details of the peace treaty Franklin hammered out with the British. As Franklin and his fellow American negotiators met with their counterparts in Paris, they were all aware that the British were providing sanctuary to thousands of fugitives from slavery on Manhattan and Long Island. Franklin pushed for Article 7, which bound the Brits to withdraw “without … carrying away any negroes or other property of the American inhabitants.” In other words, Franklin was quite comfortable condemning thousands of free Blacks to be returned to the mercies of their former enslavers. In the end, the British general Guy Carleton brushed aside the patriots’ insistence that the thousands of fugitives under his protection be immediately returned, and sailed away with them when he evacuated to Canada.
None of this, not a hint of it, appears in Benjamin Franklin. It is equally absent from the best-selling biography of Franklin written by Walter Isaacson, the documentary’s “senior creative consultant” and the on-air talking head with the most face time.
There is a deeper problem at work in Burns’s portrait of Franklin, a problem that emanates from the same qualities that make his work so popular. Throughout, Franklin and America are viewed through what the sociologist Joe Feagin has called a “white racial frame.” In such a perspective the interests, problems, and fortunes of white Americans are prioritized, while those of nonwhite others are discounted, viewed as lesser and available for sacrifice. White framing silently assumes that the “us” and the “we” in thinking about America are white people.
That framing is evident throughout Benjamin Franklin. For example, when the documentary discusses the Junto, a club for fellow young artisans organized in Philadelphia by Franklin, Isaacson comments, “Franklin believed that the virtues and values of a working middle class were going to be the backbone of American society. The artisans, the shopkeepers, the people who put on leather aprons early in the morning to help serve the public.” Of course, in Franklin’s time, only white artisans, white shopkeepers, and leather-apron-clad white people were eligible for membership in mutual-aid clubs like the Junto. The white part doesn’t have to be said out loud: The volunteer fire departments, lending libraries, and free colleges that Franklin helped organize, except for the specifically named “Negro” school, were for whites only.
Like much of Burns’s oeuvre, ‘Benjamin Franklin’ hews to the old consensus narrative, swaddling conflicts in the comforting blanket of necessity.
White framing is also evident in Burns’s segregation of commentary. Most of the expert comments dealing with race, racism, or slavery come from the only two scholars of color among the dozen or so historians featured in Benjamin Franklin: Christopher Brown and Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Conversely, while Brown and Dunbar are deeply learned scholars with much to say about the world of the 18th century in general, they are rarely asked to discuss topics beyond slavery or racism. Indeed, the stories of people of color are generally sequestered as the possession of Black historians, a “special interest.”
Back in the 1970s, when Burns was just starting out, a new generation of historians was emphasizing not only that those left out of earlier narratives — women, Natives, people of color — had stories worth telling but that their stories drastically altered the longstanding “consensus” history of America, which highlighted the gradual perfection of the Enlightenment principles of liberty and equality. Edmund Morgan’s 1975 book American Slavery, American Freedom upended the consensus theory, arguing that the spread of democratic practices in the United States in fact depended on enslaving one-fifth of its population. Since then, researchers have focused on writing the stories of the dispossessed, despised, overlooked, and forgotten — not out of some sense of fairness or balancing the scales, but because their dissent shaped, and pushed forward, this bulky thing we call a nation. Most historians have since come to appreciate that it is precisely the succession of clashing aspirations, not some core agreement over shared ideals, that has made America.
Like much of Burns’s oeuvre, Benjamin Franklin hews to the old consensus narrative, swaddling conflicts in the comforting blanket of necessity. Pitching the project on the Today show in March 2020, Burns was asked about the Constitution’s strengthening of slavery. He said of Franklin, “He is one of the architects of those terrible compromises, but there’s no United States without those terrible compromises.” Just a few months later, Sen. Tom Cotton was swiftly condemned for describing slavery as a “necessary evil upon which the union was built.” Burns’s documentary makes the same argument without eliciting a peep of protest.
Back in his 1995 interview with the American Historical Review, Burns boasted that “there is more unum than pluribus in my work.” Burns may have believed that e pluribus unum referred to making one nation out of the many colonies. In fact, as the committee charged with designing a seal for the new United States reported to Congress in 1776, pluribus referred to the many “countries from which the States have been peopled.” The committee, on which Franklin served, planned to represent these countries figuratively in the form of a shield depicting a rose for England, a thistle for Scotland, a harp for Ireland, a “flower de luce” for France, an eagle for Germany, and a lion for Holland. The one-fifth of the population who hailed from Africa, and all those native to this land, were absent.
