Word: jefferson
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...bicentennial is, of course, an appropriate time for a revisionist look at a nation's beginnings. Two recent books became bestsellers by taking just such a view, each portraying the revered Thomas Jefferson and George Washington in a new and unflattering light. Last week Virginius Dabney, a proud Virginian, historian and retired editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, came to the defense of the founding fathers in an outspoken Charter Day address at Virginia's venerable College of William and Mary. He sharply assailed Fawn Brodie, author of Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History, and Gore Vidal, who wrote...
Dabney's primary target was Brodie, who portrayed Jefferson in Freudian'terms as suffering from a guilt complex stemming from his paternity of mulatto children at Monticello. The trouble with that tidy theory, Dabney argued, is that it only works if Jefferson was indeed the father and he insisted that there is no reliable evidence to support that assertion-and much evidence to the contrary. Dabney enlisted statements from three Jefferson historians to refute the paternity claim. He said that Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson of the University of Virginia and Julian P. Boyd, editor of the papers...
Freedom in America, however, has been represented by the past. This is not difficult to see think of constant references to the liberties handed down by the Founding Fathers--the definition of freedom in terms of Jeffersonian democracy, which Jefferson himself believed was based on a nation of small, freeholding farmers. Virtually every group in American politics--including workers believes that the past contained a great measure of true freedom, and that the degree of liberty present now can be calculated by our distance from the idea of the Constitution...
...culture in the 1930's depression days tried to integrate this American remembrance with a future-oriented Marxism consider Grandpa Joad's line in The Grapes of Wrath "I' m stickin' with my farm until Idie"), and Woody Guthrie's "Roll On Columbia." In which he applauds "Tom Jefferson's vision" which "could not let him rest"--that vision being the endless expansion of American farmland westward...
...think Jefferson saw free speech as a means to many ends, rather than an end in itself. With him, I still feel that the primary role of the university is the public examination of the moral and spiritual quality of life. But alas, most universities, like churches, are citadels of caution...