Thomas Jefferson, The Atlantic, and the mything of the past
By DAN KENNEDY
BOSTON --in the cover piece of the current Atlantic Monthly, Conor Cruise O'Brien puts forth a controversial -- hell, heretical -- argument: that Thomas Jefferson should be disqualified from civic sainthood because he was a radical libertarian who cheered the worst excesses of the French Revolution, and a racist even when compared with his fellow slaveholders. In "Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist," O'Brien writes that the only Americans who might properly keep alive the cult of Jefferson are lunatic-fringe militia groups attracted to his nihilistic notions of liberty and his unwavering belief in the supremacy of whites. And O'Brien's certainly not afraid to drive the point home: he identifies Timothy McVeigh as Jefferson's true ideological descendant.
Earlier this month in Faneuil Hall, perhaps about a mile from The Atlantic's offices, two eminent historians, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Alan Brinkley, and an economist who thinks like a historian, John Kenneth Galbraith, sat down together to attempt to answer a question: Does history matter?
With a painting of Daniel Webster sternly holding forth for "liberty and union now and forever" overhead, and with busts of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Frederick Douglass arrayed behind the speakers, the historic hall was clearly not a setting in which anyone was going to answer that question in the negative.
O'Brien's article, though, raised the stakes considerably for the panel, which was co-sponsored by the Ford Hall Forum and Harper's Magazine, and moderated by Harper's editor Lewis Lapham.
The mood was set by Brinkley, a professor at Columbia University whose "Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression" won the 1983 National Book Award. "History is, whether we like it or not, an instrument of power," he said.
And in what O'Brien calls the "American civil religion," few icons have been invested with as much power as Thomas Jefferson. So when a member of the audience asked about O'Brien's thesis, the historians were ready.
First came Brinkley, of whom it might be said that the term "mild-mannered" makes him sound more aggressive than he really is. It wasn't long before he was contradicting himself: "Much of what he (O'Brien) says about Jefferson is certainly true," Brinkley conceded, before quickly moving on to O'Brien's perceived sins. "He compares Jefferson to the standards of our own time instead of to his," Brinkley charged. He then immediately reversed course by acknowledging that O'Brien had compared Jefferson with his peers, but charging that his range was too narrow.
Brinkley, though, was strictly the warm-up act. Waiting in the wings was the gnomish yet aggressively engaged Schlesinger, a JFK intimate best known for his post-assassination biography "A Thousand Days."
There was nothing new in O'Brien's piece, Schlesinger sneered: "What offended me was the sense that he was the great iconoclast, revealing long-concealed facts." And though Schlesinger considers himself more a Hamiltonian than a Jeffersonian, he nevertheless said he was deeply offended at what he considered to be O'Brien's utter botching of the historical record. "I thought this was a third-rate piece by a man who doesn't know much about American history and is well-known for his egotism," Schlesinger said, drawing a few laughs and a few "ooohs" from the polite, tweedy crowd.
Galbraith stayed out of it, either not having an opinion of O'Brien or not willing to share it.
If history is, as Brinkley said, an instrument of power, that power is mainly symbolic, seen and felt in the myths by which a culture defines and unites itself. Brinkley and Schlesinger may well have a better handle on Jefferson than does O'Brien; yet O'Brien offers some pretty compelling evidence that the symbolism surrounding Jefferson has been tampered with. In particular, Jefferson's alleged ringing denunciation of slavery, carved in stone at the Jefferson Memorial, is revealed to have been cobbled together from two separate sources, taken out of context, and with explicitly racist content edited out. "The distortion by suppression has to be deliberate," O'Brien writes.
Or as Schlesinger put it Thursday evening: "The glorification of the past is something to which all peoples are given."
Schlesinger also spoke of how amused he is when he hears anyone talk of the "definitive" biography of someone, or the "definitive" history of a particular time and place. Historical exercises are never definitive, he said; historians are always revising the works of their predecessors, applying newly discovered facts and new interpretations.
That's what Conor Cruise O'Brien has done with Jefferson. Next month his book, "The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800," will be published by the University of Chicago Press. Some critics, no doubt, will join with Schlesinger and Brinkley in tearing it apart. Others will praise it. What's certain is that it will force us to rethink the life of a man whose place in the American mythology until now has been as secure as Washington's or Lincoln's.
Dan Kennedy is the media reporter for the Boston Phoenix.
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