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Andrew Burstein - Democracys Muse: How Thomas Jefferson Became an FDR Liberal, a Reagan Republican, and a Tea Party Fanatic, All the While Being Dead

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Democracys Muse: How Thomas Jefferson Became an FDR Liberal, a Reagan Republican, and a Tea Party Fanatic, All the While Being Dead
Author:
Andrew Burstein
Publisher:
University of Virginia Press
Genre:
Books / History
Year:
2015
City:
Charlottesville
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In political speech, Thomas Jefferson is the eternal flame. No other member of the founding generation has served the agendas of both Left and Right with greater vigor. When Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the iconic Jefferson Memorial on the founders two hundredth birthday, in 1943, he declared the triumph of liberal humanism. Harry Truman claimed Jefferson as his favorite president, too. And yet Ronald Reagan was as great a Jefferson admirer as any Democrat. He had a go-to file of Jeffersons sayings and enshrined him as a small-government conservative.

So, who owns Jefferson--the Left or the Right? The unknowable yet irresistible third president has had a tortuous afterlife, and he remains a fixture in todays culture wars. Pained by Jeffersons slaveholding, Democrats still regard him highly. Until recently he was widely considered by many African Americans to be an early abolitionist. Libertarians adore him for his inflexible individualism, and although he formulated the doctrine of separation of church and state, Christian activists have found intense religiosity between the lines in his pronouncements.

The renowned Jefferson scholar Andrew Burstein lays out the case for both Democrat and Republican Jefferson as he interrogates historys greatest shape-shifter, the founder who has inspired perhaps the strongest popular emotions. In this timely and powerful book, Burstein shares telling insights, as well as some inconvenient truths, about politicized Americans and their misappropriations of the past, including the concoction of a Jeffersonian stance on issues that Jefferson himself could never have imagined.

Here is one book that is more about us than it is about Jefferson. It explains how the founding generations most controversial partisan became essential to Americas quest for moral securityhow he became, in short, democracys muse.

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DEMOCRACYS MUSE

ANDREW BURSTEIN

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press

2015 by Andrew Burstein

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2015

ISBN 978-0-8139-3722-9 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8139-3723-6 (ebook)

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available from the Library of Congress.

OTHER BOOKS BY ANDREW BURSTEIN

Lincoln Dreamt He Died: The Midnight Visions of
Remarkable Americans from Colonial Times to Freud

Madison and Jefferson (with Nancy Isenberg)

The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving

Jeffersons Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello

The Passions of Andrew Jackson

Letters from the Head and Heart: Writings of
Thomas Jefferson

Americas Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation
Remembered Fifty Years of Independence

Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of
Americas Romantic Self-image

The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist

EDITOR

Mortal Remains: Death in Early America (with Nancy Isenberg)

To Matt and Lizzie

PREFACE

UP CLOSE, he presented an air of reserve, even of shyness. Yet he was well hated at a distance. Thomas Jefferson made and maintained political enemies, while retaining among his friends a reputation for sturdiness and commitment. When he died, and the heat that emanated from the vigorous positions he took in life had time to cool, he gradually became whatever an adoring posterity wanted him to be.

If we were to aggregate the memories of those whose lives span the seven decades since Thomas Jeffersons head was formed from Mount Rushmore, we would see that the essential founder has passively endured several noticeable facelifts. He has been, in that time, freedoms philosopher, racist-in-chief, the champion of liberal government, and the champion of small government; what remained of his ethereal image was most spectacularly compromised after the exposure of his sexual secret keeping. One thing hasnt changed, though: his is the first name Americans associate with representative democracy. He is the one founding father whose political sentiments reverberate loudest. Here and around the world, he is democracys muse.

Politicians gravitate to Jefferson for obvious reasons. His expressions of hope for the future of the republicand republics abroadremain integral to Americans collective sense of purpose. He provides an ennobling vocabulary that elected representatives draw upon when they seek support from the public. A few brief examples will give an adequate taste of what that language sounds like. Jefferson as the inspired peacemaker: Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart & one mind; let us restore to social intercourse that harmony & affection, without which Liberty, & even Life itself, are but dreary things (First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801). As a man of the Enlightenment: For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it (to English historian William Roscoe, December 27, 1820). Or, as a fair-minded freethinker: It behoves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others (to Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, April 21, 1803).

Jefferson goes far in clarifying the meaning of freedom. His message is one of faith in the human spirit: it can be used to project confidence in the potential of democracy to shape the ideal society or recover a lost virtue. And so, even when they are not seeking partisan advantage, presidents and members of Congress pepper speeches with quotes from Jeffersons personal letters and public documents. The accomplished architect, book collector, natural historian, and linguist generally strikes a modern audience as the most cosmopolitan in taste among the Revolutionary set, and certainly the easiest to universalize. He is ammunition held in reserve; he is moralizing fodder. He is the supremely articulate superego of the American nation.

Problems occur whenever he is abstracted. We know that professional politicians require a serviceable narrative when they run for office and are under pressure to draw lessons from the past. Jefferson is but one victim of their interpretive shortcuts. Professional historians strive to temper the excesses of professional politicians, and yet even they have been known to succumb to the temptation to oversimplify Jefferson. History is not a stable narrative; the compulsion to rewrite it is rarely more than half-conscious. That, in a nutshell, is what this book is about.

The World War II era furnishes a prime example of the unconstrained use of the mindful founder who speaks so volubly to his posterity. Our study begins here, when the United States was simultaneously fighting Nazi and Japanese militarism. On April 13, 1943, the bicentennial of Jeffersons birth, President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. The speech he delivered on that carefully chosen day matched Jefferson to his own political faith.

In that dark year, the third president was nothing less than the light at the end of the tunnel. He had bequeathed to a world at war his abiding faith that, as Roosevelt phrased it, the seeming eclipse of liberty can well be the dawn of more liberty. No one could have projected Americas resolve as well as Jefferson when he wrote in 1800: I have sworn before the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. Those are the words, as Roosevelt forcefully pointed out, that encircle the interior of the domed monument.

We dont officially celebrate Jeffersons birthday anymore. For that

I HAD BEEN thinking of taking up this subject for almost a decade, after having stood before a typed paper with handwritten insertions by John F. Kennedy (see page 46). On April 29, 1962, the thirty-fifth president hosted a dinner at the White House for forty-nine Nobel laureates. The New York Times reporter who covered the event described this group as the cream of scientific America. In the shock that followed the Soviets launch of Sputnik in 1957, superpower competition had escalated; increasingly, Americans saw scientific expertise and technical innovation as critical to their nations standing in the world.

As the distinguished guests assembled, First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy adorned the scene, wearing a gown of sea-foam green and wedding-style gloves that extended past her elbows. Colonel John H. Glenn Jr., an instant hero as the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the earth, signed autographs for the scientists and their wives, as he chatted easily with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The popular poet Robert Frost, then eighty-eight years old, was in attendance, toofifteen months earlier he had recited The Gift Outright at the presidents inaugural. Noted authors from John Dos Passos to James Baldwin received their invitations. The controversial physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, instrumental in developing the atom bomb, was on hand; so was the chemist Linus Pauling, a staunch critic of nuclear testing. There were 175 invited guests that evening, plus Ban the Bomb picketers hovering outside the gates of the White House.

On the mantle above the fireplace in the room where the guests gathered, a bust of Thomas Jefferson sat prominently. The third president would have relished the scene, read the caption in a

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