Variations on a Theme: American Originals, Symbols, and Institutions

Abstract

The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God was very much a family affair from start to finish. Having focused all of his attention for more than four years on completing his first large-scale historical documentary, Ken Burns was now uncertain where to next direct his professional energies during the spring of 1981. In his final status report on Brooklyn Bridge to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in May 1981, he wrote: “There are no immediate plans to follow this project up but its phenomenal success has created an interest in pursuing a series of films on American monumental architecture.”² Burns was apparently in a period of intense self-examination through the ensuing spring and summer months as evidenced by the tone and substance of his work journal entries at the time. In one example he reflected, “how do I nourish the witness? There is so little observation, so little seeing. There is a moment of awakening … [then] despair, sleep … The moment of possibility is so quick. The need to go deeper and not rest.”³

What brings me to these subjects is in the wonderful and peculiar tension between granite and steel in the Brooklyn Bridge, in the grace of a Shaker chair, and in the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty, even in the corrupt demagoguery of Huey Long. All of these subjects are animated by the question, “who are we?”—that is to say, who are we as a people? What does it mean to be an American? All of these questions are not necessarily answered by these investigations as the question is itself deepened, and that’s basically, almost in a nutshell, what I do.

—Ken Burns, 1993¹