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Burns urges Americans to celebrate common threads
The acclaimed historian and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns urged audience members at William Jewell’s 62nd annual Celebration of Achievement to listen to the voices of the past in order to fully appreciate the bonds that unite us as Americans.
Addressing an audience of 700 students, faculty, alumni and friends of the college March 2 at the Hyatt Regency Crown Center in Kansas City, Burns shared thoughts and impressions gained while assembling his three groundbreaking documentary films on baseball, jazz and the Civil War.
“What each of the three subjects daily reminded us,” Burns said, “was that the genius, the real achievement of America is improvisation, our unique experiment a profound intersection of freedom and creativity, in nearly every gesture and breath.
“I am interested in the power of history, and I am interested in its many varied voices. 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.”
Reflecting on our national pastime
In the great American pastime, Burns looked beyond the childhood game to uncover a complicated mosaic of “labor and management, those whose great skills make the game so interesting, and those who own the ball and the ballpark. This is a story of immigration and assimilation...of popular culture and advertising; of how myths are made. This is the story of heroes, and of course this is of necessity the story of villains and fools. And this, of course, is the story of race, central to our larger American narrative, and crucial to baseball.”
The filmmaker saluted the achievements of players like Jackie Robinson, whose appearance on a major league ball field in 1947 he hailed as a glorious moment that embodied “the first real progress in civil rights since the Civil War.” And he noted the struggles of those who came before Robinson, including the pioneering Negro Leagues player Buck O’Neil, who was present at the Achievement Day ceremonies in his role as the event’s honorary chair. The 94-year-old O’Neil was making his first public appearance since learning three days earlier that he had been left out of the 2006 inductees into baseball’s Hall of Fame.
“It is written that God made man in his image,” Burns said. “If that is so, then we have here tonight, in the person of Buck O’Neil, that man, who teaches us with each breath about the mechanics of the universe, namely that love multiplies. He knows and accepts better than any of us the trials and disappointments, the setbacks and insults that attend each life, but he has met them with the powerful, liberating force of transcendence and forbearance. These virtues will eventually inherit this earth. In the meantime, we have Buck to show us the way and we can only say that he is in our Hall of Fame forever.”
Finding hope from despair
In the uniquely American art form of jazz, Burns found embedded in the music “a message of hope and transcendence for all people, of affirmation in the face of adversity, unequaled in that unfolding drama we call American history. It is the story of two world wars and a devastating Depression—the soundtrack that helped Americans get through the worst of times. Jazz is about sex, the way men and women talk to each other with music, with art, and negotiate the complicated rituals of courtship; it is a sophisticated and elegant mating call that has all but disappeared from popular music in recent times.”
Burns told the crowd that history provides an enduring source of social unification that transcends the vagaries of time and place: “Nothing in our daily life offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time’s constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does an active and heartfelt engagement with our shared past, and the unity it suggests.”
Rejoicing in the ties that bind
Burns turned to Abraham Lincoln, and to his first inaugural address delivered just before the outbreak of the Civil War, for a message of hope from a time of despair. He quoted the poetic words of a president clinging to the hope that hostilities could be averted, even as the drums of war echoed in the distance: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.”
“And those chords,” Burns concluded, were not c-o-r-d-s, cords of some rope that would bind us by force together, but c-h-o-r-d-s, signifying some celestial harmony that would unite us through all time in common purpose—in a common anthem, if you will. Let us sing this anthem together.”
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