Word: jeffersonism
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...ingrained in the American character, was that art should have a social purpose; realism, it followed, was better than fantasy. The great republic, he said, had solved through a struggle between the ideas of Good Guy liberals, dissenters, democrats and humanitarians, like Roger Williams, Ben Franklin, and naturally, Thomas Jefferson, and Bad Guy conservatives like Jonathan Edwards, Increase Mather and Alexander Hamilton...
...Democrats formally adopted their present title in 1840 after being known as the Democratic-Republican Party. The organization actually goes back to the Virginia-New York axis formed before 1800 by Jefferson, Burr, Madison and Monroe...
...Great White Hope, by Howard Sackler, is a sprawling, episodic semi-documentary that traces the rise and fall of Jack Johnson, the first Negro heavyweight champion of the world. In the play he is called Jack Jefferson, and James Earl Jones roars through the role with the jungle magnetism and pride of a lion. In a concentrated off-Broadway apprenticeship, Jones often played a kind of jolly brown giant; here he plays an avenging black one. Jones is not the kind of actor who buries himself in a part. Instead, he devours the part and then radiates its presence...
From the time that Jefferson becomes champion, he appears to threaten and diminish the white world, in and out of boxing. Corrupt promoters begin scurrying around for a "great white hope" to restore racial supremacy. Full of arrogant self-regard and a casual contempt for blacks as well as whites, Jefferson all too easily stokes the hostility of his foes...
...subtlest and most infuriating affront is sexual. He loves a white girl, who lives and travels with him as his common-law wife. Jane Alexander invests this role with the tenderness, passion and loyalty of a star-crossed Desdemona. When Jefferson is convicted of a Mann Act charge, he jumps bail and flees to Europe. A hounded exile, he drifts from country to country, reaching a kind of symbolic degradation when he shuffles through the role of Uncle Tom in a Budapest cafe and is booed. Still, he rejects a standing offer to throw the championship fight in return...