Ken Burns had to correct a “woke bomb” in his new documentary series about the Revolutionary War.
Critics of the six-part “The Revolution” accuse the legendary filmmaker of injecting left-wing-inspired inaccuracies into the series, among them a claim that Native Americans inspired the Founding Fathers to form the United States and that a woman injured in battle received only half the compensation awarded to a male soldier.
Those affiliated with the series have rejected some of the complaints, but they’ve made a significant correction.
The series, which has already aired on PBS and will be “used in classrooms around the country,” will remove a claim about the alleged sexist treatment of Revolutionary War hero Margaret Corbin, a production official told The Washington Times.
“Regarding Margaret Corbin, that is something that we caught too and it has been fixed in the master, which will be uploaded to streaming, etc.,” said Joe DePlasco, head of the public relations firm DKC, which worked closely with Mr. Burns’ company, Florentine Films.
The documentary misfires on its description of the heroic actions of Corbin, who was seriously wounded by the British in 1776 while bravely helping her fallen husband defend Fort Washington in northern Manhattan.
For her battle injuries, narrator Peter Coyote solemnly reported, “She would become the first woman to receive a lifetime disability pension, but at half the rate wounded men received.”
It turned out the show’s claim of gender-based pay discrimination is false. Corbin received the same lifetime compensation as disabled Revolutionary War soldiers, which, documents from the Continental Congress of 1880 recorded, was set at “one-half of his monthly pay, from and after the time that his pay as an officer or a soldier ceases.” Corbin also received a new set of clothes.
The blunder was first pointed out last month by conservatives, including Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh, a frequent critic of woke ideology in the media.
The segment about Corbin was one of several references in the series that sought to highlight how women, enslaved Americans and Native Americans played an integral role in the formation of the United States but were nonetheless treated as lesser citizens or far worse.
Mr. Walsh called Mr. Burns a propagandist who seeks to inject race- and gender-based politics into his films with “woke bombs,” among them the claim about Corbin.
“I can’t emphasize enough how insidious and evil this kind of behavior is. A historian — especially one who’s paid with our tax dollars — is not supposed to lie to us. When he presents extremely dubious claims, he shouldn’t do so with confidence. He shouldn’t pretend it’s obviously true. He should show his work,” Mr. Walsh wrote on The Daily Wire.
The series has been widely praised by historians and media critics for its depiction of Revolutionary War battles and other events that defined the era and led to the formation of the United States. Mr. Walsh said most of the series is “actually quite good.”
The show has faced additional criticisms about woke narratives, however.
Historians say the Burns documentary used debunked theories to imply that Benjamin Franklin in 1754 proposed the colonies form “a similar union” to the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.
The correlation is dropped in the opening monologue of the series, and to many, it suggested Mr. Burns’ film was crediting Native Americans for inspiring Franklin to call for the formation of the United States out of the 13 colonies.
Scholars said the Iroquois reference is based on the work of two historians in the 1970s and 1980s and has been discredited repeatedly in subsequent research.
“The Iroquois influence thesis, suggested here by Ken Burns in his new documentary on the American Revolution, has been thoroughly debunked by academics and historians,” said Arizona State University associate professor Jonathan Barth.
He posted several publications that discredited the theory, which scholars say was based on taking out of context a letter Franklin wrote that referenced the Iroquois nation during his early failed bid to centralize the colonial governments.
A 1988 paper written by Temple University historian Elisabeth Tooker, posted by Mr. Barth on social media, stated, “A review of the evidence in the historical and ethnographic documents … offers virtually no support for this contention.”
The Iroquois Confederacy,” Ms. Tooker wrote, “rested on distinctive Indian principles, as remarkable in conception as those in the U.S. Constitution.”
Mr. DePlasco said the series made no intentional inferences about the role the Iroquois played in inspiring the unification of the colonies.
“At no point does the film suggest that the founders based their ideas about representative government on the Iroquois Confederation. The film acknowledges those Six Nations in the first few minutes, as it does Benjamin Franklin’s failed 1754 Plan for Union, before devoting the entirety of the six episodes and 12 hours to the events, people, battles and ideas that made the union of the states possible,” he said.
Critics bashed the series for its inclusion of an unverified tale about a 6-year-old slave who said George Washington scoffed at his request to be paid for doing chores.
“Washington was no gentleman,” the boy is quoted as saying in the series.
The tale did not appear in print until 1870, long after both the boy and Washington died, and during its earliest telling, it was the boy’s father who had an exchange with Washington.
“For Burns to include this as a documented fact is actual malice,” S. David Sultzer wrote in The American Thinker.
Adam Rowe, an assistant professor of history at Florida’s New College, wrote in Compact Magazine that Mr. Burns’ series lacked a coherent message about the Revolution and what it stood for. But the show, he said, “honestly and passionately depicts the oppression and dispossession that the American slaves and Native Americans were fighting to resist, mostly without success.”
