Posted on 08/22/2006 6:26:18 AM PDT by AdAstraPerArdua
US President Thomas Jefferson's reputation has taken a battering in recent years, but his towering intellect and secular rationalism wouldn't go amiss today.
Restoration work on Jefferson's sculpture at Mount Rushmore According to a recent poll, more Americans have heard of Harry Potter than can name the British prime minister. This may seem an affront to our national pride, but it shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
Through films and books, Harry Potter must have made a far greater impact on American life and culture than anything Tony Blair has done or said. And once they become yesterday's men, our prime ministers often fade into almost complete obscurity: who today has much to say about Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman or Andrew Bonar Law or Sir Alec Douglas-Home?
Yet a select group of American superstar presidents are if anything even more famous in death than ever they were in life. Their homes are historic sites: Mount Vernon for Washington, Lincoln's birthplace, and Hyde Park on the Hudson for Franklin Roosevelt.
There are gigantic memorials in the federal capital: an obelisk for Washington, a temple for Lincoln, a performing arts centre for John F Kennedy. And their papers are published in multi-volume editions: five so far for James Madison, and 69 for Woodrow Wilson.
BBC NEWS: AUDIO Hear A Point of View in the BBC Radio Player Among British prime ministers, only Winston Churchill can compete with such sustained and determined commemorative endeavour. During the 20th century, a new form of presidential memorial became institutionalised in America, and that was the presidential library. The first of them was established for Franklin Roosevelt, and there are today 11 such monuments, encompassing his successors, and also Herbert Hoover, the incumbent he'd defeated in November 1932.
For any president, concerned with how history will eventually judge him, the presidential library is the most important legacy he can leave behind. In architectural terms, these libraries have ranged from the unpretentious to the grandiose. Someone once told me that the John F Kennedy Library in Boston was just this side of idolatry, whereas the Lyndon Johnson Library at Austin in Texas was emphatically the other side; and having seen both of them myself, I'm rather inclined to agree.
Presidential libraries serve several different purposes, and they're not easily reconciled.
They're a shrine to a former first citizen of the republic, and many presidents, among them Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, are buried in the grounds of their libraries. In their guides, their displays and their commentaries, they seek to give a positive appraisal of the man they memorialise. But this is not always easy for administrations which ended badly, as with Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, and Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky, or which ended abruptly after one term or less, as with Herbert Hoover or Gerald R Ford.
The Bill Clinton library in Little Rock Yet they're also meant to be major research centres for disinterested scholarly inquiry, gathering together not only the president's papers but also those of his cabinet colleagues, advisors and assistants. So it's scarcely surprising that there have been some difficulties in establishing a Richard Nixon Presidential Library, and this won't be finally accomplished until the infamous Watergate tapes are transferred from Washington to Nixon's birthplace at Yorba Linda in California.
There were no such presidential libraries for the founding fathers of the American republic, but Thomas Jefferson, the nation's third president, has been commemorated in every other possible way.
His house, Monticello, in Virginia, which he designed himself, is both a national shrine and a World Heritage site. At the University of Virginia, which he founded in 1817, he's still referred to in hushed tones as "Mr Jefferson". His memorial in Washington is a classical rotunda, replete with a statue and quotations from his most inspiring and uplifting writings.
In the company of presidents Washington, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, Jefferson's face was carved on a gigantic scale on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota during the 1930s. His biography, by Dumas Malone, runs to six volumes, and took more than 30 years to complete, and the project of publishing his papers, based at Princeton University, seems set to last for about as long as Jefferson himself was alive.
Jefferson: Governor, secretary of state, vice president, president This is an extraordinary level of memorialising, but then, Thomas Jefferson was an extraordinary man. His record of public service is unsurpassed by any American president: he was governor of Virginia, he was secretary of state under George Washington, he was vice president under John Adams, and he was eventually his own president for two full terms.
He drafted a bill passed by the Virginia state legislature enshrining religious freedom, he was the author of the Declaration of Independence and as president, he acquired Louisiana from France in 1803. But public life was only Jefferson's day job. In his spare time, he was a scientist, an agriculturalist, a linguist, an architect: indeed there was scarcely any intellectual pursuit to which he could not turn. It was a remarkably distinguished and versatile life, and Jefferson rounded it off to perfection, by dying on the fourth of July 1826 -- the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the same day as his predecessor, John Adams.
Jefferson's posthumous reputation was at its peak from the 1920s to the 1960s. Those years saw the preservation and restoration of Monticello, the construction of his memorial in Washington at the behest of Franklin Roosevelt, the completion of the great biography by Dumas Malone, and the launching of the project to publish all his papers, however long it took.
Jefferson was a particular favourite of John F Kennedy, who especially admired his combination of cool rationality and high-style rhetoric. On one occasion, JFK invited a group of Nobel Prize winners to dinner at the White House, and during the course of his speech of welcome, he observed that this was the greatest assemblage of talent and brain-power gathered together for a meal in the presidential mansion since Jefferson had last eaten there alone.
Kenneth Clark gave much credit for US's success to Jefferson I first encountered Thomas Jefferson as an historical personality when watching Kenneth Clark's series, Civilisation, which aired on British television during the spring of 1969. The 10th of Clark's 13 programmes was called The Smile of Reason, and it was concerned with that period of European history known as the Enlightenment.
Clark looked at intellectual and artistic developments in England and Scotland and France, he described the triumph of religious toleration and the virtues of secular reason, and he spoke of the Enlightenment's indebtedness to Renaissance humanism. By the standards of the time, Clark had a large budget for making his series, and he ended this particular episode, not in Europe, but in America, in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia.
According to Clark, the United States was a nation created on the Enlightenment principles of secular rationality and religious freedom, and it was Jefferson who had made this possible.
The years since then have not dealt so kindly with Jefferson's reputation. These days, the Enlightenment, of which he was a transatlantic product and ornament, is now denounced by many non-western scholars as something wholly bad, for they regard it as the means by which Europeans created and manipulated knowledge to achieve and legitimate their power over the whole of the globe.
DIY design: Jefferson's home, Monticello In the United States, the religious right is in full cry, and almost half of all Americans believe the Bible story about the creation of the world in seven days. In such a climate of opinion, Jefferson's brand of detached, sceptical rationalism seems to many at best outmoded, at worst wicked. His ideas of freedom and equality have also been criticised for their prejudice.
In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson may have urged that all men were created equal, but this noble vision was confined to white males, and it didn't encompass white women or blacks. To make matters worse, Jefferson had owned slaves on his Monticello estate, and in 1998 great controversy was aroused when it was alleged that he might have fathered an illegitimate child by one of them.
Yet there's one place where Jefferson remains a presiding deity, and that's the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.
Almost 200 years on, it's no longer exactly the academy he founded. It began as a finishing school for Virginia gentlemen, who lived in close contact with their professors, and who brought their slaves to look after them while they studied.
Nowadays, UVA is one of the great intellectual power houses of the United States, and the student body is highly diverse, in terms of its social background, the gender balance and the ethnic mix. But Jefferson's influence remains. A plan to put up some new buildings in a modern style was recently rejected in favour of a scheme that was consistent with Jefferson's original classical architecture. And the university has always honoured its founder's vision that the library was a more important place than any chapel or church.
Thomas Jefferson may no longer be quite the unblemished hero he once was. But as we contemplate our own world riven by sectarian conflict and religious hatred, we could certainly use some of his cool, sceptical rationalism just now.
a favorite quote of mine.
President John F. Kennedy welcomed forty-nine Nobel Prize winners of the Western Hemisphere to the White House in 1962, saying, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
The ideals of the Enlightenment were somewhat good. Some people today are so blind in not recognizing that if they actually supported the Enlightenment, then they would accept criticism of Macroevolution as much as they would of Creationism, and would not try to stifle useful debate.
Jefferson was a fine amateur architect, excellent rhetoritician and cabinet maker. He was the most overrated president we ever had and a fanatical opponent of the political economy which led to America's greatness. His opposition to Hamilton's program shows he was clueless wrt economics and finance or hypocritical beyond compare.
After over a century of inappropriate lionization it is about time his actions were examined as well as his words. No one SOUNDED better then there is practice.
The only thing I can say about TJ is: Thank god for Hamilton.
As a Brit, I hate it when commentators from the BBC exude the author's condescending and fatuous attitude. That the author knows little about Jefferson is clear from his tracing of Jefferson's Sally problem to 1998! The rumor was voiced by that scandalmongerer Callender soon after Jefferson won his first term as President. Moreover,
Fawn Brodie's controversial book that kicked off the latest round of speculation concerning Jefferson's exploitation of his slaves was published in 1974 not 1998.
FWIW, I agree that Jefferson is overrated. What is interesting is to see how his contemporaries viewed him: Hamilton certainly saw him as a vain, ambitious, conniving, backstabbing, manipulative and cowardly opportunist, who talked high principles but operated in a seedy and under-handed way. He was definitely smart like his namesake WJC. Alas their characters also are on a par.
I agree that Hamilton was a far more accomplished politician and economic policy maker - even though he also had fairly significant character blemishes.
One of Jefferson's biggest shortcomings was his failure to recognize the French Revolution for what it truly was. Long after that revolution had begun to eat its own, he defended it, and as Washington's Sec. of State, almost to the point of treason (i.e., the "Citizen Genet" affair). A very good book on this topic is Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Long Affair.
O'Brien's book is an interesting one. Be sure and read his book on Burke which I think is the capstone of his political conversion.
Point taken, though I would still say that the controversy had been bubbling along most recently since Brodie's 1974 book and had been written about constantly since then by almost all commentators on Jefferson. You are right however in that Jefferson's defenders vociferously objected to the charge until the DNA results when they became more muted - though my recollection is that the DNA tests by their design could only demonstrate an affinity not a match.
However, my basic point is that for an author and historian of some note, Mr Cannadine is somewhat loose with his facts and simplistic in his judgements.
Actually my beef with Jefferson has little to do with Sally Hemmings. Sally was the half sister of his deceased wife and I have no doubt that her relationship with Jefferson was one of love not exploitation. Jefferson's life was lonely and sad after Martha's death and he honored his promise to her not to re-marry.
Callender was a hired gun whom Jefferson assisted when he was attacking his enemies but who turned on J after feeling insufficiently rewarded for his hatchet work. After turning on J he was found drowned in a few feet of water.
Hamilton's relationship with Maria Reynolds probably prevented him from becoming President. Its revelation by his political enemies provoked a damaging response wherein H told the whole tale to the whole world. It almost led to a duel between him and James Monroe who had possession of the damaging information, pretended it would not be revealed and forwarded it to Jefferson.
Jefferson's minions released it while the Sage held up his hands to show him guiltless of any involvement. This was SOP for him preferring to avoid any direct conflict and work behind the scenes through unsavory characters such as Beckley.
Hamilton was much the greater statesman. By the end of George Washington's life he refused to allow the name of Jefferson be mentioned in his presence he despised him so strongly. Hamilton, on the other hand, maintained Washington's highest esteem to the end.
Jefferson fanaticism has been deliberately downplayed and excused for two centuries by a fawning academia while Hamilton has been the victim of slander and lies claiming him a monarchist and hater of the common man. In actual fact, his program strengthened the conditions necessary for the poor to succeed and he spent almost his entire adult life fighting for the USA's independence and s
Jefferson was an efete snob who represented the only aristocracy, the Southern planters, this nation ever had. Hamilton was a self-made man with no personal wealth to support him just his brain. He was illegitimate and early orphan through desertion and his mother's death born on a tiny Caribbean island.
I think we are in violent agreement on the flaws in Jefferson's character. Jefferson was, like WJC, an hypocrite.
It is sad to have to say that. As my knowledge of Jefferson increased my regard diminished.
Thank God for Burr. If he had just done it years earlier.
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