by liberal japonicus
In a comment, GftNC posted Luttig’s article about Clarence Thomas’ speech shitting on Jeffersonian ideas and ideals in American history, discussing how this underlines much of the damage that Trump and MAGA are doing to the the country. I’m sure everyone has already read it in the comments, but I pull out a graf to make an observation.
As a matter of historical fact, every single progressive president since Theodore Roosevelt, with the arguable exception of Woodrow Wilson has unhesitatingly embraced the Declaration’s Preamble, the Declaration itself, and indeed, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence.
I don’t contest this, Jefferson has been a bit of a golden boy in US history, but recently, he has gotten some bad press for the mismatch between his professed ideals and his actual life. I remember Annette Gordon-Reed’s essay about Jefferson’s contradictions (it’s now behind a paywall, if anyone has a gift link, please send it on) was good and measured and discusses the contradictions in Jefferson. If you prefer to listen, her talk here is quite good. One thing that she observes that I like is that each generation asks different questions of Jefferson, and that the questions of the next generation will supplant the ones we are asking.
On the other hand, other pieces, like this one from the Smithsonian, go after Jefferson with the fervor of the Spanish Inquisition. The Smithsonian piece, entitled The Dark Side of Jefferson, concludes with the story of Joseph Fossett, a Monticello blacksmith, who was manumitted by Jefferson, a dispensation not afforded to his wife and six of his seven children.
His oldest child (born, ironically, in the White House itself) had already been given to Jefferson’s grandson. Fossett found sympathetic buyers for his wife, his son Peter and two other children, but he watched the auction of three young daughters to different buyers. One of them, 17-year-old Patsy, immediately escaped from her new master, a University of Virginia official.
Joseph Fossett spent ten years at his anvil and forge earning the money to buy back his wife and children. By the late 1830s he had cash in hand to reclaim Peter, then about 21, but the owner reneged on the deal. Compelled to leave Peter in slavery and having lost three daughters, Joseph and Edith Fossett departed Charlottesville for Ohio around 1840. Years later, speaking as a free man in Ohio in 1898, Peter, who was 83, would recount that he had never forgotten the moment when he was “put up on the auction block and sold like a horse.”
Powerful stuff. But at the risk of defending Jefferson, who passed away in 1826, you can see that all of this takes place after his death. Certainly, Jefferson was the catalyst but not sure how much censure we should put on him. Shakespeare has Mark Antony say, “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones” but reading Luttig, you get the impression that maybe Jefferson had a better run than most.
There’s a debate to be had about how we apportion blame and credit to the host of people who are no longer around, but if it pops up in the comments, I’ll pass and let other folks tackle that. But another passage from that Smithsonian article reminds me that the grinding mills may be coming for more than Jefferson.
During dinner Jefferson would open a panel in the side of the fireplace, insert an empty wine bottle and seconds later pull out a full bottle. We can imagine that he would delay explaining how this magic took place until an astonished guest put the question to him. The panel concealed a narrow dumbwaiter that descended to the basement. When Jefferson put an empty bottle in the compartment, a slave waiting in the basement pulled the dumbwaiter down, removed the empty, inserted a fresh bottle and sent it up to the master in a matter of seconds. Similarly, platters of hot food magically appeared on a revolving door fitted with shelves, and the used plates disappeared from sight on the same contrivance. Guests could not see or hear any of the activity, nor the links between the visible world and the invisible that magically produced Jefferson’s abundance.
Rhetorically, this passage is interesting, manufacturing a whole mise en scene of the champagne socialist Jefferson regaling his guests about this. I’m not sure that dumbwaiters were such rarity in this time, but setting that aside, it’s pretty easy taking potshots when you can make up tableaus out of a whole cloth to get your point across.
Now, I may be reaching too far here, but the vibe I got was Jefferson as the antecedent of Bong Joon-ho, specifically in his movie Snowpiercer, (warning, spoiler!) where we discover that “Eternal Engine” is not automated but constantly repaired by small children hidden in tiny spaces. As the article about the movie notes:
If this sounds like a terrifying metaphor for the real world, well, it is. This is a place where the poor are literally cogs in a machine designed to maintain decadent luxury for a tiny minority, where the hope among those abused poor that someday they will see a better life for themselves within that system is what prevents them from completely throwing over that system. (Think about how poor white people are encouraged to vote against their own interests and blame some nebulous Other — immigrants; racial minorities — for keeping them down, rather than placing blame where it belongs, on the oligarchs and those who directly serve them.)
I write this as I check my facebook (cause that’s how foreigners keep in touch with each other in Japan) on my iphone and hit Gemini to double check things. So, for me, I’m going to be a little cautious before I completely denounce Jefferson. The image of Jefferson enjoying all these amazing labor saving devices that are built on the backs of others seems a little to close to home.
It seems to me that, for a great many people not just Jefferson, they can create and embrace great ideas in principle, without necessarily grasping how those ideas apply to their own lives. Or, at least, not grasping it completely.
Of course, we can just become purity ponies, and trash anyone who fails of perfection. A lot of fans of that approach, on both the left and the right. But personally, I’d rather applaud people for what they got right. Not to ignore what they got wrong. Just not to let it overshadow the rest.
I think we can condemn the parts of a historical person that deserve condemnation and applaud the parts that deserve applause. After all, the historical person is dead and gone and the only effect he/she has on us is their legacy–so we benefit from remembering and promoting the good parts, while remembering the bad as a warning about human fallibility.
I think that it is more appropriate to be harsh with people currently alive. If Jefferson lived now and presented himself as an intellectual champion of liberty while being an obvious racist (and cheating on his wife) I’d say go ahead and condemn him loudly and let the condemnation outweigh anything good he said. There’s the possibility that negative feedback would get him to change and would provide context for anyone likely to hero worship him.