American Sphinx (50 page)

EPILOGUE

THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION

The true Jefferson legacy is to be hostile to legacies.

—JOYCE APPLEBY (1993)

Jefferson’s ideas had also this felicity, and also perhaps a little too much of it. They come to birth a little too easily, and rest a little precariously on the aspirations and ideals of good men, and not sufficiently on the brute concrete facts of the world as it is.

—CARL BECKER (1944)

W
HAT, THEN,
is the historically correct Jeffersonian legacy? What, if any, are the values that the real person who was Thomas Jefferson embodied in his life that remain vital and viable over two centuries after he declared American independence? More than half a century after the historian Carl Becker posed the question in its most familiar form, it seems appropriate and even timely to ask ourselves again, “What is still living in the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson?”
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The question, it must be noted, would strike Jefferson himself and the majority of professional historians as bizarre. Jefferson certainly wanted to be remembered, but he had little patience with historical heritages, which he tended to regard as burdens imposed on the present by the past. Joyce Appleby, one of Jefferson’s most astute modern-day admirers, has put it nicely: “The true Jeffersonian legacy is to be hostile to legacies.” If he could make a miraculous appearance among us, it would be perfectly plausible for him to denounce the entire Jeffersonian enterprise as a massive waste of time. The present generation of Americans, he might well say, needs to liberate itself from the dead hand of ancestors and predecessors and seek its own fate and future. Indeed only by doing so will we remain faithful to the core Jeffersonian convictions.
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Most historians would chime in with a different version of the same message. As they see it, the past is a foreign country with its own distinctive mores and language. All efforts to wrench Jefferson out of his own time and place, therefore, are futile and misguided ventures that invariably compromise the integrity of the historical context that made him what he was. Lifting Jefferson out of that context and bringing him into the present is like trying to plant cut flowers. Granted, this means protecting the purity of the past at the expense of abandoning its relevance to the present. But most historians would rather run the risk of antiquarianism than commit the sin of presentism.

For better and for worse, however, Jefferson has long since broken through the barricades that historians set up between the present and the past. Different versions of him as both hero and villain are loose among us, and different claims on the Jeffersonian legacy have become a permanent feature of contemporary American culture. To be sure, Bill Clinton’s calculated pilgrimage to Monticello and Ronald Reagan’s uplifting recommendation that we “pluck a flower from Thomas Jefferson’s life and wear it on our soul forever” represent the same transparent impulse to appropriate an icon for their own political purposes. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, now icons themselves, perfected this technique long ago. (In fact a good case can be made that Roosevelt championed the construction of the Jefferson Memorial primarily to provide the Democratic party with a symbolic counter to the Lincoln Memorial, which the Republican party claimed as its own.) Such public invocations and appropriations of the mythical Jefferson have only the faintest connection with the historical Jefferson, who is presumably resting comfortably in archival enclaves tended by vigilant but invisible scholars.
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While prominent public figures quote from Jefferson without fear and without embarrassment at their ignorance, there is also an ongoing conversation of equivalent superficiality occurring at all hours of the day and night on the Internet. When John Adams spoke his last and most prophetic words—“Thomas Jefferson survives”—he had no way of knowing about cyberspace. But there is now more “talk” about Jeffersonian topics (i.e., Tom and Sally, Jefferson and Newt [Gingrich], Monticello recipes, Jefferson and GOD) on America Online than any other historical figure. In February 1996 the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation injected at least a semblance of informed opinion into these otherwise gossipy exchanges. “Monticello is pleased to announce its presence on the World-Wide Web,” the foundation declared, offering access to “a typical day in Jefferson’s life in the early 1800s” among other topics.
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In several senses cyberspace is the perfect Jeffersonian environment, an ethereal place where shifting images and impressions float freely and without any pretense of coherence. Likewise, the personal computer is the perfect Jeffersonian instrument; it allows ordinary individuals to communicate from the privacy of their solitary studies with laptop machines that a reincarnated Jefferson would surely regard as the modern analogue to his laptop desk. All this only reinforces the realization that maintaining scholarly control over Jefferson’s memory and legacy is a long-lost cause.

To revisit Carl Becker’s old question, then—“What is still living . . . ?”—is really to join an ongoing conversation that most scholars have simply chosen to avoid. Becker’s formulation of the question also implicitly suggests that any answer with pretensions of historical accuracy must begin with the recognition that substantial portions of Jefferson’s legacy are no longer alive; they have died a natural death somewhere between 1826 and now. Perhaps the best way to visualize that process is to imagine a series of sand castles on a beach, located different distances from the shoreline but all vulnerable to the tide of time.

The first major wave to strike was the Civil War, which destroyed slavery, the political primacy of the South and the doctrine that the states were sovereign agents in the federal compact. After 1865, Jefferson’s “Virginia-writ-large” version of the United States was gone with the proverbial wind, and his convictions about the proper distribution of power between state and federal governments, if not completely washed away, were permanently put on the defensive.

The second wave, really a series of waves, struck between 1890 and 1920. In 1890 the census of the United States revealed that the frontier phase of American history was over. (Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” three years later announced that “the frontier is gone and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”) Then the Census of 1920 reported that for the first time the majority of American citizens lived in urban as opposed to rural areas. And between these two dates the United States accepted a huge influx of European and Asian immigrants that permanently altered the previously Anglo-Saxon character of the American population. Taken together, these demographic changes transformed Jefferson’s agrarian vision into a nostalgic memory, his belief in the resuscitative powers of the West into a democratic myth and his presumption of Anglo-Saxon hegemony into a racial relic.
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The third wave arrived in the 1930s with the New Deal. In hindsight, one could actually see it coming from the early years of the twentieth century, when the effects of urbanization, industrialization, the increased density of the population and the exponential growth of corporate power over the economy combined to generate a need for a more centralized government to regulate the inequities of the marketplace and discipline the boisterous energies of an industrial economy. Herbert Croly’s
The Promise of American Life
(1909) had prophesied and championed these political changes, but it took Roosevelt’s New Deal to implement and institutionalize them. Roosevelt’s appropriation of Jefferson as a New Deal Democrat was one of the most inspired acts of political thievery in American history, since the growth of federal power during the New Deal represented the triumph, in Jeffersonian terms, of “consolidation” over “diffusion.” The New Deal was in fact the death knell for Jefferson’s idea of a minimalist government.
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The fourth and final wave came crashing down between 1950 and 1965. The onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s employed an essentially Jeffersonian moralism to mobilize public opinion against the Soviet Union. But with National Security Memorandum 68 in 1950, the United States committed itself to a massive military establishment to fight the Cold War that embodied precisely the kind of standing army (and navy and air force) that Jefferson abhorred. Meanwhile the Supreme Court decision in
Brown
v.
Board of Education,
then the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s, institutionalized the ideal of a biracial American society, making Jefferson’s belief in the physical and legal separation of blacks and whites an anachronism. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, with its entrenched military establishment, its dedication to the welfare state, its extension of full citizenship to blacks and women, represented the epitome of political corruption in the Jeffersonian scheme, as well as the repudiation of racial and gender differences that Jefferson regarded as rooted in fixed principles of nature.
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The mention of “fixed principles of nature” suggests an entirely different series of waves generated by the winds of change in the scientific as opposed to the political world. Chief among these are the discoveries associated with Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, which, taken together, completely shattered Jefferson’s premodern assumptions about the physical principles that governed the natural world as well as the relationship between what he called “the heart and the head.” The entire mental universe in which Jefferson did his thinking has changed so dramatically, modern science has so unmoored all the “fixed principles” that he took for granted, that any direct connection between then and now must be regarded as a highly questionable enterprise.
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It should now be abundantly clear that the ingrained reticence of historians to translate Jefferson across the ages is rooted in more than mere timidity; it is grounded in a fuller appreciation of the sea change that separates his world from our own. To extend the image of sand castles on the beach, it is not just that successive waves of change have swamped Jefferson’s core convictions; it is also that the shape of the entire shoreline has been completely reconfigured. The decisive demographic and attitudinal changes that made the United States “post-Jeffersonian” occurred between 1890 and 1920. Ironically, one of the most discernible strands of Jeffersonian thought that remains very much alive is the steadfast reluctance, in some instances downright refusal, to accept the political implications of these changes.

The chief voice for this potent version of Jeffersonian nostalgia in the late twentieth century is the conservative wing of the Republican party. Starting with Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, then reaching a crescendo of national success with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and continuing with Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America in the 1990s, the conservative movement has campaigned against the encroaching character of the federal government, much as Jefferson campaigned against the consolidating tendencies of the English Parliament in the 1770s, the Hamiltonian financial program of the 1790s and federal efforts to block the expansion of slavery in the 1820s. It is not just that the Republican desire to shift power from the federal to the state governments echoes Jefferson’s constitutional preference; more significantly the deeper echo is his profound hostility to government power per se. Indeed, since the end of the Cold War in 1989, the American government has replaced the Soviet Union as our domestic version of the Evil Empire.
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This is pure Jefferson, both in its congenital aversion to centralized authority located far from local communities and in its tendency to overlook the legitimate reasons why these political institutions at the federal level came into existence in the first place. Like Jefferson upon his ascendancy to the presidency in 1800, modern conservatives conceive their task as a dismantling operation designed to remove the accumulated political debris that has built up since the golden age. For Jefferson the clock needed to be turned back to 1776. For modern conservatives the target date is more elusive: 1963 (pre–Great Society); 1932 (pre–New Deal); even 1890 (pre-Progressivism). The underlying logic of conservative thought clearly regards the entire federal edifice that has developed in post-Jeffersonian America—that is, over the past century—as both dangerous and dispensable. One could argue that this is primarily a rhetorical posture, that no one seriously contemplates the elimination of Social Security or the Federal Reserve Board, that in fact the quadrennial assaults on the powers of the federal government have had little, if any, impact on the growth of federal spending or the size of the Washington bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the rhetorical prowess of Jefferson’s antigovernment ethos should not be underestimated as an influence on the special character of political discourse. Unlike any other nation-state in the modern world, the very idea of government power is stigmatized in the United States. And it is the residual power of Jeffersonian rhetoric that keeps government on the defensive. This potent strand of Jeffersonian thought remains alive and well in the conservative wing of the Republican party.
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The persistent and even reinvigorated vitality of the antigovernment ethos cuts two ways, however, because its rhetorical relevance as a distinctly Jeffersonian way to frame questions about public policy means that on the most disturbing and controversial problems in contemporary American society—abortion, drugs, poverty, crime—the Jeffersonian legacy has little to say. The debate about such social problems is a debate about government’s proper role, and from a Jeffersonian perspective, government should have no role at all. As Carl Becker put it, Jefferson believed that “the only thing to do with political power, since it is inherently dangerous, is to abate it.”

Within that antigovernment context, Jefferson’s most enduring legacy is the principle of religious freedom, defined as the complete separation of church and state, though he would be distressed to know that the chief defender of this negative principle in the last half of the twentieth century has been the Supreme Court, the branch of government he hated most. Nevertheless, the principle that the government has no business interfering with a person’s religious beliefs or practices is the one specific Jeffersonian idea that has negotiated the passage from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century without any significant change in character or coloration.
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