|Mr. Burns's remarks start at 29 minutes, 20 seconds.
Good morning. We find ourselves today at a momentous intersection of both time and space, a crossroads where so many important narratives converge, a place where the imperfect lens of history meets the unflinching fact of this moment.
What a day. First and foremost let me welcome our new citizens of the United States. Besides being in a maternity ward, there is nothing more beautiful, moving, and hopeful than witnessing a naturalization ceremony. You come, as Paul Simon sang in “American Tune,” “in the age’s most uncertain hours,” but you now possess one of the greatest honors mankind can bestow - citizenship in a republic which - though often hugely dysfunctional — possesses and incubates an abiding faith in the human spirit and particularly the unique role we have played and can still play in the positive progress of human events. Welcome.
To Jane Kamensky, President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and steward of Monticello; and to the members of its board of trustees; to the distinguished guests gathered here; and to my fellow Americans, thank you for inviting me to say a few words today. I am honored that you might find what I have to say worthy of your attention on so important a day.
But I have now buried the lede. Forgive me. Happy 249th birthday to the United States of America! The Fourth is by far my favorite holiday. I am usually home in New Hampshire. For more than 30 years, I have read the Declaration of Independence on the big back porch overlooking the lake to my now four daughters and friends, the 1,337 words that created our country and ended with the phrase, “we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”
This is also the anniversary of the death, exactly 50 years after that founding, of both John Adams and the master of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson. So much to unpack today. The last time [I think] I was asked to speak here was in 1996, just as I was trying to finish a 2-part, 4-hour biography of Thomas Jefferson, trying to get to the heart of who this man really was.
He was a farmer, a violinist, a writer; a surveyor, a scientist, a lover of fine wines-- and a restless architect who could never quite bring himself to finish his own house. He was a statesman who was twice elected president of the United States -- but did not think his presidency worth listing among the achievements on his gravestone. He was a life-long champion of small government who took it upon himself to more than double the size of his country.
He distilled a century of Enlightenment thinking into one remarkable sentence, the purest expression of freedom and liberty the world knows. Yet he owned more than 600 human beings and only freed ten of them. Thomas Jefferson was a “shadow man,” said John Adams, who was first his friend, then his enemy, and then his friend again. His character, Adams continued, “was like the great rivers, whose bottoms we cannot see and make no noise.” He remained a puzzle even to those who thought they knew him best, embodied contradictions common to the country whose independence it fell to him to proclaim, in words whose precise meaning Americans have debated ever since.
Thomas Jefferson comes at us in a blizzard of facts: he was, for a time, the second largest slaveholder in Albemarle County; his distant cousin was John Marshall, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and they battled (as Jefferson and Adams would) constantly over whose vision of the Constitution would prevail. During his stay in France, Jefferson sent a set of encyclopedias home to his friend James Madison because he thought they would be useful in writing a constitution for the United States, and he personally brought back from Paris a device to make pasta. In the contested election of 1800, anti-Federalist governors threatened to march on Washington with their militias if the House denied Jefferson the Presidency. He saw the land he had purchased from France for 15 million dollars (in the greatest land deal in history) as "a treasure house of the unprecedented" and then sent his troubled young secretary west to see what he'd gotten for his money. And the Third President of the United States said that "the greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture." And he did.
More than anything, I think we are drawn to Thomas Jefferson’s words: brilliant, reasoned, frustrating, unexpectedly moving. Think about it. In 1776, kings still ruled in France and England, a czarina in St. Petersburg, a sultan in Constantinople, a divinely invested emperor in Beijing, and a shogun in Japan. But in Philadelphia, a group of men met there to see whether they might be able to govern themselves.
So listen to the familiar words anew: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Those words turned the world upside down.
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For the last nearly ten years, I have been working on a new film about the American Revolution. It will be released this November. It is co-directed by my longtime friend and colleague Sarah Botstein, who is here today, and by David Schmidt.
Jane served as an advisor for the 6-part, 12-hour series and even submitted to the indignities of sitting for a filmed interview, where she made (among many brilliant observations) the simple but profound comment to us that, “to believe in America, rooted in the American Revolution, is to believe in possibility. That, to me,” she went on, “is the extraordinary thing about the Patriot side of the fight. I think everybody, on every side, including people who were denied ownership of themselves,” she concluded, “had the sense of possibility worth fighting for.” Today, we celebrate and we serve that possibility.
We begin our film with these words: “The American Revolution was not just a clash between Englishmen over Indian land, taxes and representation, but a bloody struggle that would engage more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American —that also somehow came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.” The noblest aspirations of humankind. That is what this special day, then and now, and every moment in between, and where we will be next July – and onward, is all about.
All of the usual top down figures are in the film – George Washington and John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and Samuel Adams, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin, etc., etc.. And of course, Thomas Jefferson. But with these familiar - and at the same time unapproachable - founding fathers, we have tried to pierce the veil of sentimentality and nostalgia and to try to make them real: flawed, as well as extraordinary human beings. As Jane herself says on camera, “Do not look for gilded statues of marble men. They were not that. And neither are we.”
And there are, of course, founding mothers too; women played an extraordinary role in the resistance leading up to the Revolution and then as the bitter struggle went on and on. It’s not just Abigail Adams, either, though she might be the best writer of them all – male or female. There’s Mercy Otis Warren, a philosopher and historian of the period. And myriad other so-called ordinary women – and men – who populate our series. Rebecca Tanner, a Mohegan woman, lost five sons fighting for the Patriot cause. Betsy Ambler was 10 when the war began and later wrote a beautiful memoir for her sister, born during the struggle, too young to remember what had happened.
John Greenwood was 14 and Joseph Plumb Martin was 15 when they signed up to fight for the cause of liberty. James Forten was born free in Philadelphia, and at age 9, was in the crowd at the Pennsylvania State House that heard the Declaration of Independence read to the public for the very first time. Forten took the promise of the Declaration to heart and never questioned whether it’s “self-evident truths” applied to him.
The loyalist perspective is represented too in agonizing detail in the stories of men, women and children who decided to remain true to their sovereign and fight for the British. Vermonter Jon Peters is “obliged,” as he said, “to destroy” a childhood friend attacking him during the Battle of Bennington. There are many other battles, particularly in the south, where Americans are fighting – and killing – only other Americans – native, black and white. Our Revolution – we must be honest - was a devastatingly violent struggle with proportional suffering to our Civil War.
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Many years ago, while working on another documentary series on the Civil War, I came across a curious little book by Robert Penn Warren called The Legacy of the Civil War. And on those pages I stumbled across an extraordinary passage that led me back to our Revolution and to Thomas Jefferson:
A civil war is, we must say, [Warren wrote] the prototype of all war, for in the persons of fellow citizens who happen to be the enemy we meet again with the old ambivalence of love and hate and with all the old guilts, the blood brothers of our childhood…[A]ll the self-divisions of conflicts within individuals become a series of mirrors in which the plight of the country is reflected, and the self-divisions of the country a great mirror in which the individual may see imaged his own deep conflicts, not only the conflicts of political loyalties, but those more profoundly personal.”
Thinking about Warren’s stunning quote, I am drawn inexorably to Jefferson and his central role in our country's often conflicted psychology. He is a kind of Rosetta Stone of the American experience, a massive, tectonic intelligence that has formed and rattled the fault lines of our history, our present moment, and, if we are lucky, our future. As the scholar Joseph Ellis commented in an interview for our film, "He is the greatest enigma among major figures in American history and I think we're attracted to him in part because of his mysterious character. If he were a monument, he would be the Sphinx. If he were a painting, he would be the Mona Lisa. If he were a character in a play, he would be Hamlet.
Everywhere we turn, he and his incandescent ideas are there looking over our shoulder. When we talk about the separation of church and state, prayer in the classroom, school vouchers and federal funding for parochial education, Thomas Jefferson is there looking over our shoulders. When we debate states rights versus big government and think about the tension between home-grown militias on the one hand and a monolithic federal government on the other, Thomas Jefferson is there looking over our shoulders. When we think about the intractable problems in our country born of race--that is to say the differences between people based solely on the color of their skin and not, as Dr. Martin Luther King said, on the content of their character, Thomas Jefferson and his agonizing internal contradictions are there looking over our shoulder making us who we are for better and for worse.
So how do we mediate the self-divisions, as Robert Penn Warren would say, in Thomas Jefferson? And ourselves. We want so to decide. To nail him down. Is he good? Is he bad? Is he a Democratic? Is he a Republican? Is he mine? Is he yours? He is both, and we are both, and he and we are in this together. The greatest service we can do Jefferson – and our country – is to accept his self-divisions as a great mirror of our own possibilities -- and failings -- and to go forward. As he himself said: "Every human being must be viewed according to what it is good for; for none of us, no, not one is perfect; and were we to love none who had imperfections, this world would be a desert for our love."
And then there is this letter he wrote to his new old friend John Adams, towards the end of both their long lives, in the greatest correspondence between public figures in American history, when they discussed so movingly their invention, the United States of America: "...And so we have gone on, and so we shall go on,” Jefferson wrote, “puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man. And I do believe we shall continue to grow, to multiply and prosper until we exhibit an association, powerful, wise and happy, beyond what has yet been seen [by men]....I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. So good night. I will dream on, always fancying that Mrs. Adams and yourself are by my side marking our progress." “Puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man.” Isn’t that it?
Once, in those final years, John Adams wrote to Jefferson: “We ought not to die,” he said, “before we have explained ourselves to each other.” We ought not to die before we have explained Thomas Jefferson, and our equally complicated founding story, to each other. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. Thank you, Mr. Adams. Happy birthday to us. And welcome new citizens to these United States. Help us “exhibit an association, powerful, wise, and happy, beyond what has yet been seen (by men).”