Monday, Dec 3, 2012 12:30 PM CST
Who is the real Thomas Jefferson?
A heated Op-Ed war among historians is picking up where two controversial new biographies left off this fall
By Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg
The firestorm over author Henry Wiencek’s unsparing portrait of Thomas Jefferson, “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” has taken to the pages of the New York Times and other media outlets with a vengeance. Amid tepid praise for Jon Meacham’s folksy best-seller, ”Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power,” which skirts the complex world of slavery, it is Wiencek’s hubristic treatment that has returned Jefferson to center stage in historians’ long-standing war over whom to blame first and foremost for our racist underpinnings as a nation.
Wiencek seizes upon stray notes in Jefferson’s hand in which the Virginia planter performs cold calculations on the monetary value of slaves. A Scrooge-like Jefferson becomes cruel and uncivilized as he obsesses over the slave economy – which he comes to see as a “convenient engine” of American growth. You don’t remove the human face from slavery and come out ahead. But that is what Henry Wiencek has done to Thomas Jefferson.
Swayed as many of us were by Wiencek’s deft examination of George Washington and slavery, Jefferson scholars expected a hard-hitting sequel. But in its design to shock, “Master of the Mountain” rashly removes the conversation from the long-active scholarly community, by self-consciously claiming that Wiencek, as historical detective, has smoked out a criminal.
Here’s the irony: Nothing is new in the current debate. Jefferson and his fellow founders have been sensationalized in the press and in popular literature and academic monographs without cease for over 200 years. For the uninitiated reader who has not followed the long parade of books on Jefferson, every spin on the third president appears at first to have merit. Jefferson has been a political symbol since he first sought the presidency, and a piñata in America’s culture wars for nearly as long as that.
Matthew Livingston Davis, Aaron Burr’s first biographer, actually knew Jefferson. When Thomas Jefferson Randolph published four volumes of his grandfather’s papers in 1829, Davis went through the letters and was shocked to discover that the Virginian’s real talent lay in deception. His favorite term of derision for Jefferson was “Jesuitical.” But the award for the most entertaining portrait of a villainous, hypocritical Jefferson goes to the late Gore Vidal. In his fictional “Burr,” we get a president who violated the Constitution while seducing his foes at the dinner parties he threw (those gatherings Jon Meacham offers up as his model of bipartisanship). Vidal’s Jefferson is surrounded by mixed-race offspring; his concubine Sally Hemings is pretty, but unfalteringly stupid.
Meacham’s Jefferson is “attractive and virile,” a smooth operator, serenely philosophical about the criticism he regularly receives, and a man who swings gleefully from realism to idealism, blending republican politics with haute cuisine. Oh, and also a master compromiser (which he was decidedly not). These characterizations of the sensitive politico serve to reframe the Jefferson biography as a Bob Woodward-style, inside-the-White-House intimate drama. Making Jefferson recognizable to us as a practitioner of political hardball allows the biographer to go on Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” and delight the host with comparisons to whatever is happening in Washington this week.
A studious historian strives to contextualize evidence. The 4 percent annual profit on the births of slave children that Wiencek seizes on is not pretty; no one gives Jefferson high marks, because there is no such thing as a good master. Yet the evidence Wiencek plucks from the page belongs to a conversation, foreign to our time, that took place in general terms relating to the collective self-interest of Southern elites who had inherited feelings of racial superiority. The evidence should be viewed as well in the context of those pages Jefferson produced when he doodled daily with numbers and lines, sketching out his parquet floors. In designing Monticello, he saw his world as a mathematical puzzle and calculated to fractions of an inch when builders of his day couldn’t come anywhere close. He said he lulled himself to sleep by conjuring “diagrams and crotchets” (wooden building supports).
Jefferson marveled, with melancholic persuasion, at the sublime scenes that nature, day and night, produced on his mountaintop. And this same man, born into a world of slavery, saw human ownership in terms that he could convert into practical experiments – slaves were pawns in his experiments with fruit trees and rice cultivation, too. Yet he was not a monster. We must always try to assess the true boundaries of the moral universe that existed, as we seek greater insight into the social limitations he and they contended with. It’s hard to do this without making premature judgments, which is why historians continue to find employment.
Still, there is something seductive in Wiencek’s argument. We want to get inside the heads of people who came before, who left a paper trail, whom we can imagine still speaking to us. Salon’s book review editor, Laura Miller, does not pretend to be an archivist of early American sources, and in reviewing Wiencek’s book she positively responded to its stark provocations. It is perfectly reasonable that she would not have identified senior scholars who were missing from the endnotes. And that is what moved experts on Jefferson and slavery to go public in their denunciations of the book. Selective evidence, presented effectively, is how prosecutors stage an argument, and Wiencek is clearly prosecuting his case against Jefferson. His detractors are not “Jefferson defenders,” but scholars whose more nuanced perspectives are absent from his argument.
Over the last two weeks, Op-Eds have rolled and roiled. Legal historian Paul Finkelman, writing in the Times, said that Wiencek is wrong only in his timing, and that Jefferson was not suddenly roused to racism when he discovered his 4 percent solution–no, he was always “deeply committed” to slavery. Finkelman terms Jefferson “creepy,” fixing understandably on Jefferson’s words in calling free blacks “pests in society” and emotionally primitive. Finkelman targets Jefferson, but at the same time excuses Washington, whose slave-owning experience differed from Jefferson’s only in that Washington was not perpetually in debt as Jefferson was, and could therefore have lived quite well if he had freed his slaves while he was in his prime and set a standard for others to follow. (We should add that even the urbanite Benjamin Franklin was a slave owner, and only freed his slave in his will.)
Everyone seems to have an ax to grind. Professor Finkelman is correct to charge Wiencek with exaggeration. To reduce Jefferson’s views on slavery simply to profit misses all the other ways that he engaged with the institution. This is the problem when a writer takes a very complex man and makes him familiar; this is what scholars call reductionist, wherein one solitary trait stands in for an entire personality.
But to call Jefferson “creepy” reflects Finkelman’s long-held bias. His Jefferson is incorrigible, a morally deformed figure lurking in the bowels of historic memory. When we isolate Jefferson and see his actions apart from those of his fellow Southerners (and a clear majority of Northerners), we miss the larger picture. Of course, he wrote in “Notes on Virginia” that Africans were a “blot” on the American landscape, and it sounds horrifying to our ears; it should. But his language drew on the respected 17th-century travel writer George Best and the ethnographic science of the mid-18th century’s ingenious (if misguided) Comte de Buffon.
We cannot do without historical context. Jefferson’s obsession with blood lines and breeding reflected his reading on animal husbandry and population theories. That is how he came to argue that interbreeding between Africans and Europeans improved the black race. So Wiencek is wrong to limit Jefferson’s view on slavery to the cash nexus alone; and Finkelman, while a deep constitutional thinker, also tends to be single-minded when it comes to Jefferson. For the historical Jefferson, race and procreation were conditioned by forces of culture beyond the obvious–his evolved theory on the “fortuitous concourse of breeders” asserted that uncontrollable human passions made it impossible to breed superior offspring. So he wrote tauntingly to John Adams in 1813. Reading Jefferson’s “Notes,” Adams offered unconditional praise, not only overlooking its reprehensible racial arguments but calling Jefferson’s remarks on race “gems” of political expression. Is Adams creepy for not condemning Jefferson? When we make Jefferson the measure of all things, we simplify what came before and distort the contested nature of past ideas and practices.
Annette Gordon-Reed, the Harvard professor whose books have done more than any other modern scholar to reframe the conversation about Jefferson and slavery, wrote in Slate that Wiencek’s treatment was “bizarre” and obsessive and full of misreadings. Jan Ellen Lewis of Rutgers-Newark took apart the author’s claims in the Daily Beast, charging that Wiencek was “blinded by his loathing.” Wiencek responded by calling Professor Lewis’ arguments “petty twistifications” — a word Jefferson himself used in attacking Chief Justice John Marshall for interpreting the law so that it reflected his personal biases.
The scholar who should be most offended by Wiencek is Lucia (Cinder) Stanton. Her long career as a researcher at Monticello has been singularly devoted to comprehending the personal lives and limitations imposed on the slave families of Monticello. Stanton receives praise in Wiencek’s acknowledgments; then the author proceeds to obscure, if not undermine, all she has brought to light. We strongly recommend to readers her book “Those Who Labor for My Happiness.” Stanton has no ax to grind; her purpose is to humanize the past and bring it to life responsibly.
It’s fascinating that people still get angry about dueling portrayals of Jefferson. He wasn’t the only one who lacked political courage. The founders were clannish lawyers and land speculators who identified with the interests of their states and never entirely surrendered their will to an idealized Union. They had to deal with state jealousies, jurisdictional controversies over land and expansion. In the 1780s, Jefferson wanted slavery prohibited in the federal territories of the Northwest. And that’s how Congress voted. So, do we laud Jefferson for his progressive instincts? Tentatively. Does it rescue him from the collective judgment of scholars? Hardly.
For he was a timid abolitionist at best. His primary constituency was the Southern planter class, landed men of social privilege. Like him, they borrowed heavily. They owed bankers in England and elsewhere. They were constantly perched on a fiscal cliff. And they, like the majority of their Northern peers, bought into the convenient consensus that those millions of individuals brought in chains from Africa and the Caribbean were an inferior race of people. Political men constantly privileged their own collective self-interest. No surprise there. Even in manumitting certain individual slaves (most commonly upon the death of the master), they allowed slavery to fester. There were a few heroes who spoke out for racial justice, a relative few who turned their backs on slavery. But in the first 50 years of the republic, the vast majority of elected U.S. representatives invested their hearts in issues we’ve long since forgotten. No inheritance continues to affect the U.S. and point to its deficiencies so much as the brutal memory of ugly mistreatment of a people whose skin pigmentation offended some lily-white European-Americans.
Why Jefferson? He is a bellwether, a moral indicator. Though the superior democrat, he is still compared unfavorably to the intrepid Washington, who finally freed his slaves in his will. But Washington never attempted to legislate in the interest of the enslaved in any one of his 68 years. In fact, his will kept his human property enslaved until after his widow Martha’s death, which occurred a few years later. One of those he owned was Martha’s half-sister – we learned that fact in Henry Wiencek’s earlier, well-received book, “An Imperfect God.”
Jefferson cared deeply about how he would be remembered. In the final decades of his life, he made repeated attempts to find a political historian friendly to his perspective on post-Revolutionary partisanship, with whom he could share his trunkfuls of documents. But he did not exhibit any concern over his published views on black inferiority, because he did not anticipate the 21st century and its evaluation of him on the basis of his life as a sexually active slave owner. He though his credentials in that regard would shield him from attack where and when it mattered. Like the posthumous Washington image. Seeing black as inferior was, and would remain for quite some time, mainstream thinking.
Like us, that generation argued without reaching an epiphany. In Madison and Jefferson, we show that Madison’s racism did not descend to the level of Jefferson’s. In “Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello,” Andrew Burstein focuses on early American cultural understandings of the body and right living, to explain how the widower and man of privilege that Jefferson was could justify sex with any “healthy, fruitful female” as an acceptable, indeed prescribed, method for a man of letters to maintain his health. There remains much to learn about the conflicted culture that birthed this nation.
Slavery as an institution was defended by the Constitution — a document Jefferson did not have any hand in drafting. Slavery was protected by state and federal laws. History is the art of engagement with that distant country we call the past; it is about more than personalities. It is not enough to be repelled by Jefferson; you have to probe the political and social environment if you wish to explore the reasons why he did those things that we find so reprehensible.
It is we today who have outsize expectations from Thomas Jefferson, because his most uplifting words attest to American ideals. We want someone from the receding past to be transcendent, to warrant the superlatives collectively conferred on a “greatest” generation. Yet no generation ever lives up to its ideals. We are all rationalizers. We are all prioritizers. But here’s a great line, which Jefferson wrote to a fellow Virginian in 1816: “I wish to avoid all collisions of opinion with all mankind.” Good luck with that, Mr. Jefferson.
Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg are professors of History at LSU and coauthors of "Madison and Jefferson" (Random House),
Monday, December 3, 2012
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Jefferson: American Fascist
by Corey Robin
Thomas Jefferson: American Fascist?1
It’s Old Home Week in the American media. First there was the welcome back of Abraham Lincoln (and the brouhaha over the Spielberg film). Now Thomas Jefferson is in the news. But where it was Lincoln the emancipator we were hailing earlier in the week, it’s Jefferson the slaveholder who’s now getting all the press.
Yesterday in the New York Times, legal historian Paul Finkelman wrote a bruising attack on Jefferson titled “The Monster of Monticello.” This was a followup to some of the controversy surrounding the publication of Henry Wiencek’s new book on Jefferson, which makes Jefferson’s slaveholding central to his legacy.
Finkelman’s essay has already prompted some pushback. David Post at The Volokh Conspiracy (h/t Samir Chopra) wrote:
Jefferson, Finkelman tells us, was not a “particularly kind” slave-master; he sometimes “punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time.” And he believed that ”blacks’ ability to reason was ‘much inferior’ to whites’ and that they were “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” So what? Really – so what? If you want to think that he was a bad guy — or even a really bad guy, with truly grievous personal faults — you’re free to do so. But to claim that that has something to do with Jefferson’s historical legacy is truly preposterous.
Jefferson’s real legacy, says Post, is not what he did or didn’t do to his slaves—that’s a strictly personal failing, I guess—but the glorious words he wrote in The Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths…you know the drill. (Various folks on Twitter have made similar claims to me.) Post also links to a short paper he wrote on Jefferson’s contributions to the cause of antislavery.
In that paper, Post liberally quotes from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, “an extraordinary book” according to Post, in which Jefferson does voice some of his ambivalence over slavery. Curiously, Post never cites the lengthy and disturbing passages from Query XIV, where Jefferson offers his most considered views on the nature and status of black people and their fate in America. And it’s clear why. It makes for chilling reading. I’ll just cite some brief excerpts here:
The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious experimentalist has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more of it. They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation.
…
The Indians, with no advantages of this kind [as that enjoyed by black slaves in America], will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. — Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem. Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer to merit in composition…But his imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky. His subjects should often have led him to a process of sober reasoning: yet we find him always substituting sentiment for demonstration. Upon the whole, though we admit him to the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgment, yet when we compare him with the writers of the race among whom he lived, and particularly with the epistolary class, in which he has taken his own stand, we are compelled to enroll him at the bottom of the column.
…
With the Romans, the regular method of taking the evidence of their slaves was under torture. Here it has been thought better never to resort to their evidence. When a master was murdered, all his slaves, in the same house, or within hearing, were condemned to death. Here punishment falls on the guilty only, and as precise proof is required against him as against a freeman. Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master’s children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction.
…
To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature, are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question `What further is to be done with them?’ join themselves in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.
I bring up these passages less because I’m interested in Post’s omissions and his arguments than because of the general way the debate about Jefferson has been framed thus far. The basic idea seems to be that Jefferson had some fine ideas—and terrible practices. And whatever of his legacy that’s terrible, the argument goes, is entirely caught up with, and consumed by, the institution of slavery. So once we abolish slavery, thanks in part to the words of the Declaration that Jefferson wrote, we’re in the land of the good Jefferson.
But as this passage in Notes on the State of Virginia suggests, Jefferson’s real and lasting contribution to the American experiment is not exhausted either by the Declaration or by the institution of slavery. It is as a theorist of race domination—of white supremacy, of the perdurability of race (and specifically the black race), of the ineradicable shallowness of blackness as against the textured profundity of whiteness—that he stands out. And that is a legacy that persists to this day.
Jefferson was not a liberal hypocrite, a symptom of his time. He was the avant garde of a group of American theorists who were struggling to reconcile the ideals of the Declaration with the reality of chattel slavery. His resolution of that struggle took the form of one of the most vicious doctrines of racial supremacy the world had yet seen. That is his legacy, or at least part of his legacy. He was by no means the only one to take this route, but he was one of the earliest and easily the most famous. He is the tributary of what would become an American tradition.
And as I argue in what follows, which is an excerpt from a paper on Louis Hartz that I never published (though a passage or two of it may appear in The Reactionary Mind), Jefferson’s race theory—along with that of such men as Thomas Dew, James Henry Hammond, and William Harper, who feature prominently in my discussion—points not only to the eighteenth century (he was much more than a man of his times) and not only to the categories of liberalism and republicanism, which are so familiar to US intellectual historians. It also points, albeit only in a suggestive way, to the future, to the twentieth century and European doctrines of racialized fascism.
Jefferson, I would submit, should be remembered not only as the writer of the Declaration of Independence and owner of slaves, but also as a contributor, along with his successors, to a doctrine of race war and what Hannah Arendt would later call, in another context, “race imperialism”—which would find its ultimate fulfillment a century later, and a continent away.
In the interest of legibility and flow, I’ve eliminated all the footnotes
● ● ● ● ●
Racism was tailor made to the counterrevolutionary task of combating abolition, of reconciling the Declaration of Independence with the reality of chattel slavery. It combined ideas of equality and inequality, and fused the radical’s vision of political plasticity with the conservative’s notion of the stubbornness of history. It proved an ideology of extraordinary and protean—extraordinary because protean—resilience, precisely because it had something for everyone, save of course for the slaves themselves.
According to Josiah Nott, races are “marked by peculiarities of structure, which have always been constant and undeviating. Human races—as opposed to other species of animal or plant—are particularly immutable.” From these deep and enduring differences of physical structure, moral differences, equally enduring, followed. “Is it not a law of nature, that every permanent animal form…carries with its physical type a moral of its own, which cannot be obliterated, changed, or transferred to another, so long as the physique stands?”
More than classifying men and women into distinctive types, slavery’s racial theorists made the quite radical argument that humanity’s every attempt to rise above its physical nature was a misbegotten enterprise. We are, they claimed, beings of the utmost and comprehensive constraint. Our character, personality, individuality—none of these is self-fashioned or amenable to artifice. Each is an irrevocable and irreversible given.
If the intransigence of biology was the back-story of race, it followed that there was only one race, properly understood, in America: the black race. According to Nott, white people reason, imagine, and create—activities of transcendence that do not jibe with the liabilities of race. The white man “takes up the march of civilization and presses onward.” He frees himself of his inheritance, his circumstance, history itself. For that reason, “the Caucasian races have been the only truly progressive races of history,” which means nothing so much as that whites were not a race at all.
Among blacks, however, “one generation does not take up civilization where the last left it and carry it on as does the Caucasian—there it stands immovable; they go as far as instinct extends and no farther.” In the words of Thomas Cobb, the black man’s “mind is never inventive or suggestive. Improvement never enters into his imagination. A trodden path, he will travel for years, without the idea ever suggesting itself to his brain, that a nearer and better way is present before him.” Blacks can no more rise above their station than they can sink below it. They are what they are, have been and will be. As William Harper wrote, “A slave has no hope that by a course of integrity, he can materially elevate his condition in society, nor can his offence materially depress it…he has no character to establish or lose.” Even contempt or scorn, claimed Harper, would not spur the black race to do better.
Writing long before these theories of racial difference were fully formulated, Thomas Jefferson offered a glimpse of what it means to think of blacks as a race, as the race, and whites as individuals. Blacks are brave, he says, but this is due to “want of forethought.” The black man is “ardent,” but this is lust, not love. “In general,” he says, “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” In “imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” One can see their brute incapacity for historical transcendence and moral or political freedom in the color of their skin. While whites sport “fine mixtures of red and white,” reflecting the diverse range of passions and sensibilities at their disposal, blacks suffer from the “eternal monotony” of blackness, that “immovable veil” that makes any subtlety or nuance, any gradation of feeling, any distinctiveness or idiosyncrasy of character and personality, impossible.
No mere contradiction or sleight of hand, this dual portrait of whites as individuals and blacks as a race was the perfect counterrevolutionary argument. It ascribed to whites all the virtues of a ruling class—capable of action, freedom, politics itself—and to blacks all the deficits of a class to be ruled. “This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people,” wrote Jefferson of black slaves. Even among free blacks in the North, Thomas Dew argued, “the animal part of the man gains the victory over the moral.” After the Civil War, Nott would write that “all the powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau, or ‘gates of hell cannot prevail against them’ [the inequalities between whites and blacks].”
But while race thinking prescribed the most vicious forms of domination, it also absorbed a mutant strain of the egalitarianism then roiling America and turned it into a justification for slavery. “Jack Cade, the English reformer, wished all mankind to be brought to one common level,” wrote Dew. “We believe slavery, in the United States, has accomplished this.” By freeing whites from “menial and low offices,” slavery had eliminated “the greatest cause of distinction and separation of the ranks of society.” Anticipating the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Edmund Morgan, and David Roediger, the slaveholders openly acknowledged that slavery made white men feel equal. Equal and, more important, superior: under slavery, freedom became a scarce privilege, a prized distinction that just happened to be possessed by all white men. It thus discharged the egalitarian debts of America—not by paying them (Alexander Stephens would claim that the claim of equality in the Declaration of Independence was “fundamentally wrong”) but by democratizing feudalism.
However vigorous were these nods to a feudal—if democratized—past, the defenders of slavery remained firmly fixed upon the future. Refusing the identity of the staid traditionalist, they preferred the title of the heretic and the scientist, that fugitive intelligence who marched to his own drummer and thereby advanced the cause of progress and civilization. John C. Calhoun compared the criticisms he received for his positions to the “denunciation” that had fallen “upon Galileo and Bacon when they first unfolded the great discoveries which have immortalized their names.” Like all the great modern—William Harvey, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and James Mill were also among their other models—the slaveholders were guided, or claimed to be guided, by the light of truth and reason. Just as Galileo was initially persecuted and now revered, so would the South one day be hailed for its innovations. “May we not,” asked Stephens, “look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests?” In 1837, Calhoun declared that the “experiment” of racialized slavery “was in progress, but had not been completed.” The “judgment” of society, he warned, “should be postponed for another ten years,” when the experiment would presumably be concluded.
But there was another side to this embrace of the fugitive intellect: the acute sense of wounded victimhood, which sounded like nothing so much as the grievances of a revolutionary class in the making. The master class performed that strange alchemy, so peculiar to privileged groups, by which the enjoyment of power—not just on the plantation or in the South but in national political institutions as well—is turned into the anxiety of persecution. Calhoun was the master of this transposition, borrowing directly from the abolitionist canon to make the case that it was the slaveholder that was the true slave. He compared the tariff to the exploitation and extraction of slavery and the federal government’s use of coercive power against the states to the “bond between master and slave—a union of exaction on one side and of unqualified obedience on the other.” Burke made a similar move in his account of the fate of Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution: his treatment of the hounded queen resembles those stories of feminine victimhood—think of Richardson’s Pamela—that Lynn Hunt has recently argued helped give rise to the popular discourse of human rights during the eighteenth century.
The slaveholders’ sense of being besieged was not imaginary: outside of Brazil and the Caribbean, they were a lonely outpost of domination; with the abolitionists beginning to gain traction in some northern circles, they were acutely aware—Calhoun earlier than most—of the writing on the wall. Even so, their perception of themselves as aggrieved subalterns subjugated by imperious elites reflects more than a prophetic realism. It testifies to the curious ways in which a revolutionary idiom can infiltrate the most exalted of classes. “We…are in a hopeless minority in our own confederated republic,” cried Harper. “We can have no hearing before the tribunal of the civilized world.”
With their orientation to the future and acute sense of victimhood, the southern writers adopted an ethos geared less to liberalism or conservatism—ideologies arising from previous centuries of European conflict—than to fascism, the one ism of the twentieth century that could and would make a legitimate claim to novelty. They beat the drums of race war. Like the Nazis ca. 1940, they offered deportation and extermination as final solutions to the Negro Question. If blacks were set free, Jefferson warned, it would “produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one race or the other.” The only alternative was an “effort…unknown to history. When freed, he [the slave] is to be removed beyond the mixture.” Anticipating the writings of Robert Brassilach, the French fascist who argued that compassion meant that Jewish children should be deported from France with their parents, Dew claimed, “If our slaves are ever to be sent away in any systematic manner, humanity demands that they should be carried in families.” If the slaves were freed, Harper concluded, “one race must be driven out by the other, or exterminated, or again enslaved.”
Like the Nazis, the defenders of slavery spoke of lebensraum. We often forget that Hitler, in Mein Kampf, spurned Europe’s pursuit of overseas colonies, arguing instead that his countrymen should “direct [their] eyes toward the land in the East” where Germany could escape the industrial present and build an agrarian future. In Poland and Russia, the Germans could “finally put an end to the prewar colonial and trade policy and change over to the land policy of the future” based on the slave labor of the Slavic peoples. The slaveholders spoke of expanding to the west, where they too would create an alternative modernity, an agricultural utopia that would validate their new political economy of land and forced labor. They dreamed of vast empires, like the Roman or the Egyptian, but on the Mississippi. (Why Memphis, after all, or Cairo, Illinois?) “In our own country, look at the lower valley of the Mississippi,” wrote Harper, “which is capable of being made a far greater Egypt.” In “the great valley of the Mississippi” James Hammond thought he saw “the acknowledged seat of the empire of the world,” perhaps even “an empire that shall rule the world.”
Lurking beneath the South’s notions of race war and land empires was a vision of life as permanent struggle, of history as a ledger of agonistic conflict. Not for the slaveholders the pastorals of old Europe, where time stood still or moved forward at glacial pace. “Mutation and progress is the condition of human affairs,” wrote Harper. Like Nietzsche and the Social Darwinists, the master class believed that social friction and political contest made for passion and greatness. The problem with the abolitionist creed, Harper argued, was that it would create a society where “if there is little suffering, there is little high enjoyment. The even flow of the life forbids the high excitement which is necessary for it.” Only in struggle and domination could “the moral and intellectual faculties…be cultivated to their highest perfection.” Better the inequality of slavery, which allows for the highest cultivation of the few, than the mediocrity of equality. Only the “inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks,” wrote Calhoun, gives “so strong an impulse to the former to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward into their files.” Only inequality, in other words, would guarantee “the march of progress.” Slavery, Dew concluded, would produce not only an efficient economy but also the most dynamic and expansive society the world had ever seen.
Thomas Jefferson: American Fascist?1
It’s Old Home Week in the American media. First there was the welcome back of Abraham Lincoln (and the brouhaha over the Spielberg film). Now Thomas Jefferson is in the news. But where it was Lincoln the emancipator we were hailing earlier in the week, it’s Jefferson the slaveholder who’s now getting all the press.
Yesterday in the New York Times, legal historian Paul Finkelman wrote a bruising attack on Jefferson titled “The Monster of Monticello.” This was a followup to some of the controversy surrounding the publication of Henry Wiencek’s new book on Jefferson, which makes Jefferson’s slaveholding central to his legacy.
Finkelman’s essay has already prompted some pushback. David Post at The Volokh Conspiracy (h/t Samir Chopra) wrote:
Jefferson, Finkelman tells us, was not a “particularly kind” slave-master; he sometimes “punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time.” And he believed that ”blacks’ ability to reason was ‘much inferior’ to whites’ and that they were “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” So what? Really – so what? If you want to think that he was a bad guy — or even a really bad guy, with truly grievous personal faults — you’re free to do so. But to claim that that has something to do with Jefferson’s historical legacy is truly preposterous.
Jefferson’s real legacy, says Post, is not what he did or didn’t do to his slaves—that’s a strictly personal failing, I guess—but the glorious words he wrote in The Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths…you know the drill. (Various folks on Twitter have made similar claims to me.) Post also links to a short paper he wrote on Jefferson’s contributions to the cause of antislavery.
In that paper, Post liberally quotes from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, “an extraordinary book” according to Post, in which Jefferson does voice some of his ambivalence over slavery. Curiously, Post never cites the lengthy and disturbing passages from Query XIV, where Jefferson offers his most considered views on the nature and status of black people and their fate in America. And it’s clear why. It makes for chilling reading. I’ll just cite some brief excerpts here:
The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious experimentalist has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more of it. They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation.
…
The Indians, with no advantages of this kind [as that enjoyed by black slaves in America], will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. — Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem. Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer to merit in composition…But his imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky. His subjects should often have led him to a process of sober reasoning: yet we find him always substituting sentiment for demonstration. Upon the whole, though we admit him to the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgment, yet when we compare him with the writers of the race among whom he lived, and particularly with the epistolary class, in which he has taken his own stand, we are compelled to enroll him at the bottom of the column.
…
With the Romans, the regular method of taking the evidence of their slaves was under torture. Here it has been thought better never to resort to their evidence. When a master was murdered, all his slaves, in the same house, or within hearing, were condemned to death. Here punishment falls on the guilty only, and as precise proof is required against him as against a freeman. Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master’s children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction.
…
To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature, are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question `What further is to be done with them?’ join themselves in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.
I bring up these passages less because I’m interested in Post’s omissions and his arguments than because of the general way the debate about Jefferson has been framed thus far. The basic idea seems to be that Jefferson had some fine ideas—and terrible practices. And whatever of his legacy that’s terrible, the argument goes, is entirely caught up with, and consumed by, the institution of slavery. So once we abolish slavery, thanks in part to the words of the Declaration that Jefferson wrote, we’re in the land of the good Jefferson.
But as this passage in Notes on the State of Virginia suggests, Jefferson’s real and lasting contribution to the American experiment is not exhausted either by the Declaration or by the institution of slavery. It is as a theorist of race domination—of white supremacy, of the perdurability of race (and specifically the black race), of the ineradicable shallowness of blackness as against the textured profundity of whiteness—that he stands out. And that is a legacy that persists to this day.
Jefferson was not a liberal hypocrite, a symptom of his time. He was the avant garde of a group of American theorists who were struggling to reconcile the ideals of the Declaration with the reality of chattel slavery. His resolution of that struggle took the form of one of the most vicious doctrines of racial supremacy the world had yet seen. That is his legacy, or at least part of his legacy. He was by no means the only one to take this route, but he was one of the earliest and easily the most famous. He is the tributary of what would become an American tradition.
And as I argue in what follows, which is an excerpt from a paper on Louis Hartz that I never published (though a passage or two of it may appear in The Reactionary Mind), Jefferson’s race theory—along with that of such men as Thomas Dew, James Henry Hammond, and William Harper, who feature prominently in my discussion—points not only to the eighteenth century (he was much more than a man of his times) and not only to the categories of liberalism and republicanism, which are so familiar to US intellectual historians. It also points, albeit only in a suggestive way, to the future, to the twentieth century and European doctrines of racialized fascism.
Jefferson, I would submit, should be remembered not only as the writer of the Declaration of Independence and owner of slaves, but also as a contributor, along with his successors, to a doctrine of race war and what Hannah Arendt would later call, in another context, “race imperialism”—which would find its ultimate fulfillment a century later, and a continent away.
In the interest of legibility and flow, I’ve eliminated all the footnotes
● ● ● ● ●
Racism was tailor made to the counterrevolutionary task of combating abolition, of reconciling the Declaration of Independence with the reality of chattel slavery. It combined ideas of equality and inequality, and fused the radical’s vision of political plasticity with the conservative’s notion of the stubbornness of history. It proved an ideology of extraordinary and protean—extraordinary because protean—resilience, precisely because it had something for everyone, save of course for the slaves themselves.
According to Josiah Nott, races are “marked by peculiarities of structure, which have always been constant and undeviating. Human races—as opposed to other species of animal or plant—are particularly immutable.” From these deep and enduring differences of physical structure, moral differences, equally enduring, followed. “Is it not a law of nature, that every permanent animal form…carries with its physical type a moral of its own, which cannot be obliterated, changed, or transferred to another, so long as the physique stands?”
More than classifying men and women into distinctive types, slavery’s racial theorists made the quite radical argument that humanity’s every attempt to rise above its physical nature was a misbegotten enterprise. We are, they claimed, beings of the utmost and comprehensive constraint. Our character, personality, individuality—none of these is self-fashioned or amenable to artifice. Each is an irrevocable and irreversible given.
If the intransigence of biology was the back-story of race, it followed that there was only one race, properly understood, in America: the black race. According to Nott, white people reason, imagine, and create—activities of transcendence that do not jibe with the liabilities of race. The white man “takes up the march of civilization and presses onward.” He frees himself of his inheritance, his circumstance, history itself. For that reason, “the Caucasian races have been the only truly progressive races of history,” which means nothing so much as that whites were not a race at all.
Among blacks, however, “one generation does not take up civilization where the last left it and carry it on as does the Caucasian—there it stands immovable; they go as far as instinct extends and no farther.” In the words of Thomas Cobb, the black man’s “mind is never inventive or suggestive. Improvement never enters into his imagination. A trodden path, he will travel for years, without the idea ever suggesting itself to his brain, that a nearer and better way is present before him.” Blacks can no more rise above their station than they can sink below it. They are what they are, have been and will be. As William Harper wrote, “A slave has no hope that by a course of integrity, he can materially elevate his condition in society, nor can his offence materially depress it…he has no character to establish or lose.” Even contempt or scorn, claimed Harper, would not spur the black race to do better.
Writing long before these theories of racial difference were fully formulated, Thomas Jefferson offered a glimpse of what it means to think of blacks as a race, as the race, and whites as individuals. Blacks are brave, he says, but this is due to “want of forethought.” The black man is “ardent,” but this is lust, not love. “In general,” he says, “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” In “imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” One can see their brute incapacity for historical transcendence and moral or political freedom in the color of their skin. While whites sport “fine mixtures of red and white,” reflecting the diverse range of passions and sensibilities at their disposal, blacks suffer from the “eternal monotony” of blackness, that “immovable veil” that makes any subtlety or nuance, any gradation of feeling, any distinctiveness or idiosyncrasy of character and personality, impossible.
No mere contradiction or sleight of hand, this dual portrait of whites as individuals and blacks as a race was the perfect counterrevolutionary argument. It ascribed to whites all the virtues of a ruling class—capable of action, freedom, politics itself—and to blacks all the deficits of a class to be ruled. “This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people,” wrote Jefferson of black slaves. Even among free blacks in the North, Thomas Dew argued, “the animal part of the man gains the victory over the moral.” After the Civil War, Nott would write that “all the powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau, or ‘gates of hell cannot prevail against them’ [the inequalities between whites and blacks].”
But while race thinking prescribed the most vicious forms of domination, it also absorbed a mutant strain of the egalitarianism then roiling America and turned it into a justification for slavery. “Jack Cade, the English reformer, wished all mankind to be brought to one common level,” wrote Dew. “We believe slavery, in the United States, has accomplished this.” By freeing whites from “menial and low offices,” slavery had eliminated “the greatest cause of distinction and separation of the ranks of society.” Anticipating the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Edmund Morgan, and David Roediger, the slaveholders openly acknowledged that slavery made white men feel equal. Equal and, more important, superior: under slavery, freedom became a scarce privilege, a prized distinction that just happened to be possessed by all white men. It thus discharged the egalitarian debts of America—not by paying them (Alexander Stephens would claim that the claim of equality in the Declaration of Independence was “fundamentally wrong”) but by democratizing feudalism.
However vigorous were these nods to a feudal—if democratized—past, the defenders of slavery remained firmly fixed upon the future. Refusing the identity of the staid traditionalist, they preferred the title of the heretic and the scientist, that fugitive intelligence who marched to his own drummer and thereby advanced the cause of progress and civilization. John C. Calhoun compared the criticisms he received for his positions to the “denunciation” that had fallen “upon Galileo and Bacon when they first unfolded the great discoveries which have immortalized their names.” Like all the great modern—William Harvey, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and James Mill were also among their other models—the slaveholders were guided, or claimed to be guided, by the light of truth and reason. Just as Galileo was initially persecuted and now revered, so would the South one day be hailed for its innovations. “May we not,” asked Stephens, “look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests?” In 1837, Calhoun declared that the “experiment” of racialized slavery “was in progress, but had not been completed.” The “judgment” of society, he warned, “should be postponed for another ten years,” when the experiment would presumably be concluded.
But there was another side to this embrace of the fugitive intellect: the acute sense of wounded victimhood, which sounded like nothing so much as the grievances of a revolutionary class in the making. The master class performed that strange alchemy, so peculiar to privileged groups, by which the enjoyment of power—not just on the plantation or in the South but in national political institutions as well—is turned into the anxiety of persecution. Calhoun was the master of this transposition, borrowing directly from the abolitionist canon to make the case that it was the slaveholder that was the true slave. He compared the tariff to the exploitation and extraction of slavery and the federal government’s use of coercive power against the states to the “bond between master and slave—a union of exaction on one side and of unqualified obedience on the other.” Burke made a similar move in his account of the fate of Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution: his treatment of the hounded queen resembles those stories of feminine victimhood—think of Richardson’s Pamela—that Lynn Hunt has recently argued helped give rise to the popular discourse of human rights during the eighteenth century.
The slaveholders’ sense of being besieged was not imaginary: outside of Brazil and the Caribbean, they were a lonely outpost of domination; with the abolitionists beginning to gain traction in some northern circles, they were acutely aware—Calhoun earlier than most—of the writing on the wall. Even so, their perception of themselves as aggrieved subalterns subjugated by imperious elites reflects more than a prophetic realism. It testifies to the curious ways in which a revolutionary idiom can infiltrate the most exalted of classes. “We…are in a hopeless minority in our own confederated republic,” cried Harper. “We can have no hearing before the tribunal of the civilized world.”
With their orientation to the future and acute sense of victimhood, the southern writers adopted an ethos geared less to liberalism or conservatism—ideologies arising from previous centuries of European conflict—than to fascism, the one ism of the twentieth century that could and would make a legitimate claim to novelty. They beat the drums of race war. Like the Nazis ca. 1940, they offered deportation and extermination as final solutions to the Negro Question. If blacks were set free, Jefferson warned, it would “produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one race or the other.” The only alternative was an “effort…unknown to history. When freed, he [the slave] is to be removed beyond the mixture.” Anticipating the writings of Robert Brassilach, the French fascist who argued that compassion meant that Jewish children should be deported from France with their parents, Dew claimed, “If our slaves are ever to be sent away in any systematic manner, humanity demands that they should be carried in families.” If the slaves were freed, Harper concluded, “one race must be driven out by the other, or exterminated, or again enslaved.”
Like the Nazis, the defenders of slavery spoke of lebensraum. We often forget that Hitler, in Mein Kampf, spurned Europe’s pursuit of overseas colonies, arguing instead that his countrymen should “direct [their] eyes toward the land in the East” where Germany could escape the industrial present and build an agrarian future. In Poland and Russia, the Germans could “finally put an end to the prewar colonial and trade policy and change over to the land policy of the future” based on the slave labor of the Slavic peoples. The slaveholders spoke of expanding to the west, where they too would create an alternative modernity, an agricultural utopia that would validate their new political economy of land and forced labor. They dreamed of vast empires, like the Roman or the Egyptian, but on the Mississippi. (Why Memphis, after all, or Cairo, Illinois?) “In our own country, look at the lower valley of the Mississippi,” wrote Harper, “which is capable of being made a far greater Egypt.” In “the great valley of the Mississippi” James Hammond thought he saw “the acknowledged seat of the empire of the world,” perhaps even “an empire that shall rule the world.”
Lurking beneath the South’s notions of race war and land empires was a vision of life as permanent struggle, of history as a ledger of agonistic conflict. Not for the slaveholders the pastorals of old Europe, where time stood still or moved forward at glacial pace. “Mutation and progress is the condition of human affairs,” wrote Harper. Like Nietzsche and the Social Darwinists, the master class believed that social friction and political contest made for passion and greatness. The problem with the abolitionist creed, Harper argued, was that it would create a society where “if there is little suffering, there is little high enjoyment. The even flow of the life forbids the high excitement which is necessary for it.” Only in struggle and domination could “the moral and intellectual faculties…be cultivated to their highest perfection.” Better the inequality of slavery, which allows for the highest cultivation of the few, than the mediocrity of equality. Only the “inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks,” wrote Calhoun, gives “so strong an impulse to the former to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward into their files.” Only inequality, in other words, would guarantee “the march of progress.” Slavery, Dew concluded, would produce not only an efficient economy but also the most dynamic and expansive society the world had ever seen.
Jefferson Defended
Why Don’t People Get It About Jefferson and Slavery?
David Post • December 1, 2012 10:54 am
We seem to have once again entered a period in which we will be subject to more Jefferson-the-Perpetuator-of-Slavery bashing – witness the rather appalling Op-Ed piece in today’s NYT by Paul Finkelman on “The Monster of Monticello.” The founding generation, Finkelman writes, helped perpetuate a “treason against the hopes of the world,” by “fail[ing] to place the nation on the road to liberty for all,” and “no one bore a greater responsibility for that failure than the master of Monticello.”
This is truly outrageous and pernicious and a-historical nonsense. The truth is that few people in human history did more, over the course of a lifetime, to “place the road on the road to liberty for all” — and indeed, to eliminate human slavery from the civilized world — than Jefferson. Don’t take my word for it - take Lincoln’s (who was himself, of course, one of those “few people”). ”I am sustained by Mr. Jefferson” he said, in 1858.
The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. Some dashingly call them “glittering generalities”; another bluntly calls them “self evident lies”; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to “superior races.” These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect—the supplanting the principles of free government . . . We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.
This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
That “abstract truth” being, of course, that all men were created equal, and that all had inalienable rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness. Taking his cue from the 25th chapter of the Book of Proverbs – “a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver” – Lincoln went on:
“The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word ‘fitly spoken’ which has proved an ‘apple of gold’ to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal or destroy the apple; but to adorn and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple – not the apple for the picture. So let us act, that neither picture, or apple, shall ever be blurred, or bruised, or broken.
It was Jefferson, Lincoln wrote, who realized that “there was a question of God’s eternal justice wrapped up in the enslaving of any race of men, or any man, and that those who did so braved the arm of Jehovah – that when a nation thus dared the Almighty every friend of that nation had cause to dread His wrath.”
Maybe Lincoln didn’t understand what was going on as well as Paul Finkelman now does, but I regard that as unlikely.
Why is this so hard for people to see? Even if Jefferson had done nothing more than pen those words and get them inserted into the foundational document for the new country — and he did plenty more, see my paper here — declaring that principle to be a self-evident truth and at the foundation of any legitimate government was an act of political courage, not cowardice or hypocrisy, at a time when slavery was at the heart of the way of life and an economy across vast swaths of colonial America. Maybe Prof. Finkelman would have come up with a way to more quickly eliminate the institution from the new republic than Jefferson did, one that would have eliminated the horrible bloodshed of the Civil War. But nobody had such a plan, at the time – not Jefferson, not Washington, not Clay, not anyone.
Jefferson, Finkelman tells us, was not a “particularly kind” slave-master; he sometimes “punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time.” And he believed that ”blacks’ ability to reason was ‘much inferior’ to whites’ and that they were “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” So what? Really – so what? If you want to think that he was a bad guy — or even a really bad guy, with truly grievous personal faults — you’re free to do so. But to claim that that has something to do with Jefferson’s historical legacy is truly preposterous.
David Post • December 1, 2012 10:54 am
We seem to have once again entered a period in which we will be subject to more Jefferson-the-Perpetuator-of-Slavery bashing – witness the rather appalling Op-Ed piece in today’s NYT by Paul Finkelman on “The Monster of Monticello.” The founding generation, Finkelman writes, helped perpetuate a “treason against the hopes of the world,” by “fail[ing] to place the nation on the road to liberty for all,” and “no one bore a greater responsibility for that failure than the master of Monticello.”
This is truly outrageous and pernicious and a-historical nonsense. The truth is that few people in human history did more, over the course of a lifetime, to “place the road on the road to liberty for all” — and indeed, to eliminate human slavery from the civilized world — than Jefferson. Don’t take my word for it - take Lincoln’s (who was himself, of course, one of those “few people”). ”I am sustained by Mr. Jefferson” he said, in 1858.
The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. Some dashingly call them “glittering generalities”; another bluntly calls them “self evident lies”; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to “superior races.” These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect—the supplanting the principles of free government . . . We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.
This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
That “abstract truth” being, of course, that all men were created equal, and that all had inalienable rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness. Taking his cue from the 25th chapter of the Book of Proverbs – “a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver” – Lincoln went on:
“The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word ‘fitly spoken’ which has proved an ‘apple of gold’ to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal or destroy the apple; but to adorn and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple – not the apple for the picture. So let us act, that neither picture, or apple, shall ever be blurred, or bruised, or broken.
It was Jefferson, Lincoln wrote, who realized that “there was a question of God’s eternal justice wrapped up in the enslaving of any race of men, or any man, and that those who did so braved the arm of Jehovah – that when a nation thus dared the Almighty every friend of that nation had cause to dread His wrath.”
Maybe Lincoln didn’t understand what was going on as well as Paul Finkelman now does, but I regard that as unlikely.
Why is this so hard for people to see? Even if Jefferson had done nothing more than pen those words and get them inserted into the foundational document for the new country — and he did plenty more, see my paper here — declaring that principle to be a self-evident truth and at the foundation of any legitimate government was an act of political courage, not cowardice or hypocrisy, at a time when slavery was at the heart of the way of life and an economy across vast swaths of colonial America. Maybe Prof. Finkelman would have come up with a way to more quickly eliminate the institution from the new republic than Jefferson did, one that would have eliminated the horrible bloodshed of the Civil War. But nobody had such a plan, at the time – not Jefferson, not Washington, not Clay, not anyone.
Jefferson, Finkelman tells us, was not a “particularly kind” slave-master; he sometimes “punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time.” And he believed that ”blacks’ ability to reason was ‘much inferior’ to whites’ and that they were “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” So what? Really – so what? If you want to think that he was a bad guy — or even a really bad guy, with truly grievous personal faults — you’re free to do so. But to claim that that has something to do with Jefferson’s historical legacy is truly preposterous.
The Jefferson Wars
The Jefferson Wars have reignited.
Some Scholars Reject Dark Portrait of JeffersonBy JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: November 26, 2012
Henry Wiencek suspected he would be in for a rough ride when “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” his scathing assessment of America’s third president, was published last month. But just how rough he may not have realized.
True, Mr. Wiencek, an independent scholar, has received the kind of attention most authors can only dream of: book excerpts on the covers of both Smithsonian and American History magazines, a C-Span interview at Monticello, almost universally glowing reviews from nonspecialists. (Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post called the book “brilliant,” while Laura Miller of Salon hailed it as one “every American should read.”)
But the Jefferson scholars who have weighed in have subjected “Master of the Mountain” (published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux) to a fierce barrage of criticism, blasting away at Mr. Wiencek’s evidence, interpretations and claims to originality. Reviewing the book in Slate, Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning study “The Hemingses of Monticello,” declared that it “fails as a work of scholarship,” recklessly misreading documents and dismissing other scholars in pursuit of a “journalistic obsession with ‘the scoop.’ ” Jan Ellen Lewis, a historian at Rutgers University, writing in The Daily Beast, was even blunter, denouncing the book as a “train wreck,” written by a man “so blinded by his loathing of Thomas Jefferson that he can’t see” contrary evidence “right in front of his eyes.”
The divergence of response would seem to highlight the difference between the ways professionals and lay readers approach history, not to mention the sometimes tense relations between academic historians and independent scholars working the same beat, especially one as charged and contentious as the relationship between the founding fathers and slavery.
Mr. Wiencek (pronounced WIN-seck), the author of a well-regarded earlier book about George Washington and slavery, certainly sees it that way.
“Inside the Jefferson bubble, they are trying to discredit this,” he said recently in a telephone conversation from his home in Charlottesville, Va., a few miles down the road from Monticello. “It presents an image they don’t like.”
Mr. Wiencek’s main contention is that sometime in the 1790s, Jefferson became so convinced of the economic value of slavery that he completely abandoned his youthful antislavery sentiments.
To bolster his argument, Mr. Wiencek points to a note in the margins of a 1792 report to George Washington that he believes shows Jefferson, then serving as secretary of state, calculating the birth of slave children as delivering a reliable return on capital of “4 percent per annum” — a note, he claims, that no writer on Jefferson has ever mentioned.
In their reviews, Ms. Lewis and Ms. Gordon-Reed dismiss this “4 percent theorem,” as Mr. Wiencek calls it, as a speculative back-of-the-envelope calculation about slavery in Virginia as a whole, not evidence of any turning point in Jefferson’s thinking about his own investments in human property at Monticello.
But Mr. Wiencek defends his interpretation of the document, doubling down on what he sees as a “core truth” behind Jefferson’s lifelong equivocations about the evils of slavery.
“It was all about the money,” he said. “By the 1790s, he saw them as capital assets and was literally counting the babies.”
When it comes to his critics, Mr. Wiencek is equally direct: “They have turned what could have been a reasoned debate into a mudslinging fest.”
But even some who are sympathetic to Mr. Wiencek’s dark view of Jefferson say that if there is mud flying, Mr. Wiencek set it off by writing a sensationalistic book that repackages the work of scholars who have spent decades fighting for a full acknowledgment of Jefferson’s entanglement with slavery, only to be painted now as apologists for the man.
“I think Thomas Jefferson is one of the most deeply creepy people in American history,” said Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School and the author of “Slavery and the Founders,” which outlines the evasions of earlier generations of Jefferson scholars. “But for Henry to come along and say, ‘I am the first one to discover this’? Come on.”
Mr. Wiencek acknowledges some truth in the charge that he is repackaging the work of others, but defends his book as a real contribution.
“Yes, I’m repeating some of information that others have brought out,” he said. “But others brought it out and buried it in footnotes. I brought it all together. I connected the dots.”
Historians, however, tend to read footnotes first, and some have raised eyebrows at what they see in Mr. Wiencek’s. In particular, they point to his treatment of the work of Ms. Gordon-Reed, whose 1997 book, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” was instrumental in breaking down the wall of resistance to the idea that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Hemings.
Ms. Gordon-Reed’s name appears nowhere in the body of the text but three times in Mr. Wiencek’s endnotes, twice to mention her “erroneous and misleading” transcriptions of key documents relating to Hemings.
David Waldstreicher, a historian at Temple University and the author of several books about slavery and the founders, called those footnotes (which do not identify the errors or acknowledge that Ms. Gordon-Reed corrected one of the transcriptions a decade ago in a reissue of her 1997 book) “fighting words” and “about as nasty as it gets.” A professional historian, he continued, “would publish this in a scholarly journal and make it very clear how it makes a difference, instead of using it to say, ‘I am the last word.’ ”
Mr. Wiencek said in the interview that the transcription errors were minor. But his third reference to Ms. Gordon-Reed cuts to the heart of a larger continuing debate in the writing of academic history: How does one balance, or, now, rebalance, the shift from focusing on men of power, like Jefferson, to exploring the ways women, slaves and other marginalized people shaped their own destiny?
At the close of his book, Mr. Wiencek quotes a sentence from “The Hemingses of Monticello” as an example of the way two decades of scholarship that emphasizes the “agency” of slaves implies, as he puts it, that they “had no master.”
Ms. Lewis, in an interview, called that passage a “profound misreading” of Ms. Gordon-Reed’s work. “There are historians who in their eagerness to discover the slave perspective have averted our attention from the ways in which slavery really was a horrible, unjust institution, but he doesn’t cite them,” she said. “Instead, he cites Annette Gordon-Reed? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Since his book was published, Mr. Wiencek has been more direct in his claims, asserting that his work “systematically demolishes” Ms. Gordon-Reed’s portrayal of Jefferson as “a kindly master to black slaves.”
But Ms. Gordon-Reed, for her part, scoffs at the idea, noting that her books discuss many of the same instances of cruelty at Monticello that Mr. Wiencek cites. “That was Jefferson’s image of himself, as a benevolent slaveholder,” she said. “My work shows that’s impossible.”
Even some of the scholars who helped Mr. Wiencek have turned against him. In his acknowledgments Mr. Wiencek, who received a research fellowship from the International Center for Jefferson Studies, thanks Lucia Stanton, the recently retired chief historian at Monticello, whose decades of research on slavery at the plantation he credits with breaking “the seals on many hidden histories.”
But in a letter last month to The Hook, a Charlottesville newspaper that ran an article about “Master of the Mountain,” Ms. Stanton blasted him for a “breathtaking disrespect for the historical record and for the historians who preceded him,” including Edwin M. Betts, whose 1953 edition of Jefferson’s plantation records Mr. Wiencek claims deliberately left out a passage indicating that Jefferson knew that very young enslaved boys in the Monticello nail factory were being whipped.
“How can he know that Betts ‘deliberately’ suppressed this sentence, in what was a compilation of excerpts, not full letters?” she asked, noting that Betts’s edition contains many far worse details about Jefferson’s treatment of slaves.
Mr. Waldstreicher said Mr. Wiencek had raised legitimate questions about the editing of Jefferson’s farm records that scholars would need to untangle. But for the moment, Mr. Wiencek is not going to get the public forum with Ms. Gordon-Reed he says he is eager for. The museum at Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s other plantation, in Lynchburg, Va., has invited both of them to appear on a panel. Ms. Gordon-Reed, however, has declined.
Some Scholars Reject Dark Portrait of JeffersonBy JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: November 26, 2012
Henry Wiencek suspected he would be in for a rough ride when “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” his scathing assessment of America’s third president, was published last month. But just how rough he may not have realized.
True, Mr. Wiencek, an independent scholar, has received the kind of attention most authors can only dream of: book excerpts on the covers of both Smithsonian and American History magazines, a C-Span interview at Monticello, almost universally glowing reviews from nonspecialists. (Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post called the book “brilliant,” while Laura Miller of Salon hailed it as one “every American should read.”)
But the Jefferson scholars who have weighed in have subjected “Master of the Mountain” (published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux) to a fierce barrage of criticism, blasting away at Mr. Wiencek’s evidence, interpretations and claims to originality. Reviewing the book in Slate, Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning study “The Hemingses of Monticello,” declared that it “fails as a work of scholarship,” recklessly misreading documents and dismissing other scholars in pursuit of a “journalistic obsession with ‘the scoop.’ ” Jan Ellen Lewis, a historian at Rutgers University, writing in The Daily Beast, was even blunter, denouncing the book as a “train wreck,” written by a man “so blinded by his loathing of Thomas Jefferson that he can’t see” contrary evidence “right in front of his eyes.”
The divergence of response would seem to highlight the difference between the ways professionals and lay readers approach history, not to mention the sometimes tense relations between academic historians and independent scholars working the same beat, especially one as charged and contentious as the relationship between the founding fathers and slavery.
Mr. Wiencek (pronounced WIN-seck), the author of a well-regarded earlier book about George Washington and slavery, certainly sees it that way.
“Inside the Jefferson bubble, they are trying to discredit this,” he said recently in a telephone conversation from his home in Charlottesville, Va., a few miles down the road from Monticello. “It presents an image they don’t like.”
Mr. Wiencek’s main contention is that sometime in the 1790s, Jefferson became so convinced of the economic value of slavery that he completely abandoned his youthful antislavery sentiments.
To bolster his argument, Mr. Wiencek points to a note in the margins of a 1792 report to George Washington that he believes shows Jefferson, then serving as secretary of state, calculating the birth of slave children as delivering a reliable return on capital of “4 percent per annum” — a note, he claims, that no writer on Jefferson has ever mentioned.
In their reviews, Ms. Lewis and Ms. Gordon-Reed dismiss this “4 percent theorem,” as Mr. Wiencek calls it, as a speculative back-of-the-envelope calculation about slavery in Virginia as a whole, not evidence of any turning point in Jefferson’s thinking about his own investments in human property at Monticello.
But Mr. Wiencek defends his interpretation of the document, doubling down on what he sees as a “core truth” behind Jefferson’s lifelong equivocations about the evils of slavery.
“It was all about the money,” he said. “By the 1790s, he saw them as capital assets and was literally counting the babies.”
When it comes to his critics, Mr. Wiencek is equally direct: “They have turned what could have been a reasoned debate into a mudslinging fest.”
But even some who are sympathetic to Mr. Wiencek’s dark view of Jefferson say that if there is mud flying, Mr. Wiencek set it off by writing a sensationalistic book that repackages the work of scholars who have spent decades fighting for a full acknowledgment of Jefferson’s entanglement with slavery, only to be painted now as apologists for the man.
“I think Thomas Jefferson is one of the most deeply creepy people in American history,” said Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School and the author of “Slavery and the Founders,” which outlines the evasions of earlier generations of Jefferson scholars. “But for Henry to come along and say, ‘I am the first one to discover this’? Come on.”
Mr. Wiencek acknowledges some truth in the charge that he is repackaging the work of others, but defends his book as a real contribution.
“Yes, I’m repeating some of information that others have brought out,” he said. “But others brought it out and buried it in footnotes. I brought it all together. I connected the dots.”
Historians, however, tend to read footnotes first, and some have raised eyebrows at what they see in Mr. Wiencek’s. In particular, they point to his treatment of the work of Ms. Gordon-Reed, whose 1997 book, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” was instrumental in breaking down the wall of resistance to the idea that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Hemings.
Ms. Gordon-Reed’s name appears nowhere in the body of the text but three times in Mr. Wiencek’s endnotes, twice to mention her “erroneous and misleading” transcriptions of key documents relating to Hemings.
David Waldstreicher, a historian at Temple University and the author of several books about slavery and the founders, called those footnotes (which do not identify the errors or acknowledge that Ms. Gordon-Reed corrected one of the transcriptions a decade ago in a reissue of her 1997 book) “fighting words” and “about as nasty as it gets.” A professional historian, he continued, “would publish this in a scholarly journal and make it very clear how it makes a difference, instead of using it to say, ‘I am the last word.’ ”
Mr. Wiencek said in the interview that the transcription errors were minor. But his third reference to Ms. Gordon-Reed cuts to the heart of a larger continuing debate in the writing of academic history: How does one balance, or, now, rebalance, the shift from focusing on men of power, like Jefferson, to exploring the ways women, slaves and other marginalized people shaped their own destiny?
At the close of his book, Mr. Wiencek quotes a sentence from “The Hemingses of Monticello” as an example of the way two decades of scholarship that emphasizes the “agency” of slaves implies, as he puts it, that they “had no master.”
Ms. Lewis, in an interview, called that passage a “profound misreading” of Ms. Gordon-Reed’s work. “There are historians who in their eagerness to discover the slave perspective have averted our attention from the ways in which slavery really was a horrible, unjust institution, but he doesn’t cite them,” she said. “Instead, he cites Annette Gordon-Reed? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Since his book was published, Mr. Wiencek has been more direct in his claims, asserting that his work “systematically demolishes” Ms. Gordon-Reed’s portrayal of Jefferson as “a kindly master to black slaves.”
But Ms. Gordon-Reed, for her part, scoffs at the idea, noting that her books discuss many of the same instances of cruelty at Monticello that Mr. Wiencek cites. “That was Jefferson’s image of himself, as a benevolent slaveholder,” she said. “My work shows that’s impossible.”
Even some of the scholars who helped Mr. Wiencek have turned against him. In his acknowledgments Mr. Wiencek, who received a research fellowship from the International Center for Jefferson Studies, thanks Lucia Stanton, the recently retired chief historian at Monticello, whose decades of research on slavery at the plantation he credits with breaking “the seals on many hidden histories.”
But in a letter last month to The Hook, a Charlottesville newspaper that ran an article about “Master of the Mountain,” Ms. Stanton blasted him for a “breathtaking disrespect for the historical record and for the historians who preceded him,” including Edwin M. Betts, whose 1953 edition of Jefferson’s plantation records Mr. Wiencek claims deliberately left out a passage indicating that Jefferson knew that very young enslaved boys in the Monticello nail factory were being whipped.
“How can he know that Betts ‘deliberately’ suppressed this sentence, in what was a compilation of excerpts, not full letters?” she asked, noting that Betts’s edition contains many far worse details about Jefferson’s treatment of slaves.
Mr. Waldstreicher said Mr. Wiencek had raised legitimate questions about the editing of Jefferson’s farm records that scholars would need to untangle. But for the moment, Mr. Wiencek is not going to get the public forum with Ms. Gordon-Reed he says he is eager for. The museum at Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s other plantation, in Lynchburg, Va., has invited both of them to appear on a panel. Ms. Gordon-Reed, however, has declined.
Good Novels with Bad Endings
November 27, 2012
On Bad Endings
Posted by Joan Acocella
Many of the world’s best novels have bad endings. I don’t mean that they end sadly, or on a back-to-work, all-is-forgiven note (e.g. “War and Peace,” “The Red and the Black,” “A Suitable Boy”), but that the ending is actually inartistic—a betrayal of what came before. This is true not just of good novels but also of books on which the reputation of Western fiction rests. The first half of “David Copperfield” leaves you gasping. You laugh, you cry, you think you’re going to faint. The scene where David, having been rescued by his Aunt Betsey and fed, given a bath, and put to bed, looks out the window at the moonlight on the Channel, imagining that he might see his dead mother there, with her baby in her arms (she died in childbirth): after I have forgotten most of the events of my life, I will remember that. But in the last chapters of the novel, the now-adult David marries a wise woman and succeeds in life, and from then on you die of boredom. Ditto “Wuthering Heights.” After the scalding passion of Catherine and Heathcliff, who cares about the amorous back-and-forths of their uninteresting children? Yet this occupies half of the book.
Willa Cather’s “Song of the Lark” is a similar case. The novel shows us how Thea, a girl from a dusty little town in Colorado, becomes a great a Wagnerian soprano at the Metropolitan Opera. Cather, like Dickens, felt that her young person’s apotheosis was a wonderful thing and needed describing. It didn’t. All the characters do in the final chapters is talk, talk, talk. Even when Thea accepts a proposal of marriage from a man who adores her, the transaction is clipped and dry. Cather eventually saw the problem, and when, more than twenty years after the book was published, she revised it, hacking off a lot of material, she included a preface explaining what she had done. “The chief fault of the book,” she writes, “is that it describes a descending curve; the life of a successful artist in the full tide of achievement is not so interesting as the life of a talented young girl ‘fighting her way,’ as we say. Success is never so interesting as struggle—not even to the successful.” She did not add that this was true of her life as well—that in the early period there was a great love and a great struggle, and in the later years, when she was famous, there was a correcting of galleys and punctual mealtimes. She repeatedly quoted the famous words of Jules Michelet: “Le but n’est rien. Le chemin, c’est tout.” (“Achieving a goal is nothing. The getting there is everything.”)
But the novel with the most shockingly bad ending is our country’s greatest novel, “Huckleberry Finn.” Here, after Huck and Jim’s revelatory journey up the river—a trip that seems to tell you everything important about America and is also a love story, in which a black man and a white boy become each other’s truest friends—Huck accidentally meets up with his old pal Tom Sawyer at Tom’s aunt’s house. While the whole point of going up the river was to release Jim from slavery, he now gets imprisoned as a runaway. Tom, the soul of amoral mischief, has good ideas about how he and Huck can tease and frighten Jim in the hut that is his holding pen. Huck agrees. One day, they go to the hut, and Tom asks Jim if he has any spiders in there:
“No, sah, thanks to goodness I hain’t, Mars Tom.”
“All right, we’ll get you some.”
“But bless you, honey, I doan’ want none. I’s afears un um. I jis’ ’s soon have rattle snakes aroun.’ ”
That’s a good idea, Tom says. He’ll bring Jim a rattlesnake. Jim can tame it.
“Tame it!”
“Yes—easy enough. Every animal is grateful for kindness and petting, and they wouldn’t think of hurting a person that pets them. Any book will tell you that…. Why, you can get him so in a little while that he’ll love you; and sleep with you; and won’t stay away from you for a minute; and will let you wrap him round your neck and put his head in your mouth.”
“Please, Mars Tom—doan’ talk so. I can’t stan’ it. He’d let me shove his head in my mouf—fer a favor, hain’t it? I lay he’d wait a pow’ful long time ’fo’ I ast him.”
Everybody comes out pretty much O.K. (Jim is freed from slavery), but it’s hard not to have a bad taste in your mouth as you close the book. How could Twain, so serious, morally, in the earlier part of the novel, have veered off into this cruel comedy? Bernard DeVoto, though he revered Twain, still wrote that in the history of English-language fiction there was “no more abrupt or more chilling descent.” Some critics, great ones, tried to defend the ending on formal grounds. T. S. Eliot wrote that Twain had to bring Huck back to where he started out: in a comic world, ruled by Tom. Lionel Trilling, with misgivings, said something similar. Leo Marx scolded both of them for this. As he saw it, we just have to admit that Twain had a “failure of nerve,” and backed off from what he had said, in the main body of the book, about race and morals. I believe that’s the best explanation. But what’s most interesting here is that readers can consider a book very, very great even when it has a fault as huge as this. We seem to be able to eat the good half of the apple and throw the mushy part away. The last time I read “Wuthering Heights” I was shocked by the lameness of the second half. I had forgotten it.
E. M. Forster, in “Aspects of the Novel,” said that nearly every novel’s ending is a letdown. “This is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is this necessary? Why is there not a convention which allows a novelist to stop as soon as he feels muddled or bored? Alas, he has to round things off, and usually the characters go dead while he is at work.” That’s still not much of an explanation, though. Why do novelists feel that they have to round things off? Is it some basic conservatism? Or classicism?
Another possibility is that the author just gets tired. I review a lot of books, many of them non-fiction. Again and again, the last chapters are hasty and dull. “I’ve worked hard enough,” the author seems to be saying. “My advance wasn’t much. I already have the idea for my next book. Get me out of here.”
But even that reasoning, so attractively commonsensical, is inadequate. I think the tiredness may not be personal, but something about the universe in general: biology, physics. Art, whether fiction or not, is a challenge to entropy, a bumping up of something that must be flattened down again. When you think about it, it’s surprising that art is allowed to exist. It’s always a deviation: overly selective, overly concrete, and unfaithful, not to our actual experience but to our generalizing afterthoughts, the thoughts that get us through life. In “War and Peace,” when the excitable young heroine grows up and has kids and gets fat, young readers may be disappointed, but I think that adults may be comforted. Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary—to end. The stone fell in the water. The ripples ran. Now they should stop. The surface should be smooth again.
On Bad Endings
Posted by Joan Acocella
Many of the world’s best novels have bad endings. I don’t mean that they end sadly, or on a back-to-work, all-is-forgiven note (e.g. “War and Peace,” “The Red and the Black,” “A Suitable Boy”), but that the ending is actually inartistic—a betrayal of what came before. This is true not just of good novels but also of books on which the reputation of Western fiction rests. The first half of “David Copperfield” leaves you gasping. You laugh, you cry, you think you’re going to faint. The scene where David, having been rescued by his Aunt Betsey and fed, given a bath, and put to bed, looks out the window at the moonlight on the Channel, imagining that he might see his dead mother there, with her baby in her arms (she died in childbirth): after I have forgotten most of the events of my life, I will remember that. But in the last chapters of the novel, the now-adult David marries a wise woman and succeeds in life, and from then on you die of boredom. Ditto “Wuthering Heights.” After the scalding passion of Catherine and Heathcliff, who cares about the amorous back-and-forths of their uninteresting children? Yet this occupies half of the book.
Willa Cather’s “Song of the Lark” is a similar case. The novel shows us how Thea, a girl from a dusty little town in Colorado, becomes a great a Wagnerian soprano at the Metropolitan Opera. Cather, like Dickens, felt that her young person’s apotheosis was a wonderful thing and needed describing. It didn’t. All the characters do in the final chapters is talk, talk, talk. Even when Thea accepts a proposal of marriage from a man who adores her, the transaction is clipped and dry. Cather eventually saw the problem, and when, more than twenty years after the book was published, she revised it, hacking off a lot of material, she included a preface explaining what she had done. “The chief fault of the book,” she writes, “is that it describes a descending curve; the life of a successful artist in the full tide of achievement is not so interesting as the life of a talented young girl ‘fighting her way,’ as we say. Success is never so interesting as struggle—not even to the successful.” She did not add that this was true of her life as well—that in the early period there was a great love and a great struggle, and in the later years, when she was famous, there was a correcting of galleys and punctual mealtimes. She repeatedly quoted the famous words of Jules Michelet: “Le but n’est rien. Le chemin, c’est tout.” (“Achieving a goal is nothing. The getting there is everything.”)
But the novel with the most shockingly bad ending is our country’s greatest novel, “Huckleberry Finn.” Here, after Huck and Jim’s revelatory journey up the river—a trip that seems to tell you everything important about America and is also a love story, in which a black man and a white boy become each other’s truest friends—Huck accidentally meets up with his old pal Tom Sawyer at Tom’s aunt’s house. While the whole point of going up the river was to release Jim from slavery, he now gets imprisoned as a runaway. Tom, the soul of amoral mischief, has good ideas about how he and Huck can tease and frighten Jim in the hut that is his holding pen. Huck agrees. One day, they go to the hut, and Tom asks Jim if he has any spiders in there:
“No, sah, thanks to goodness I hain’t, Mars Tom.”
“All right, we’ll get you some.”
“But bless you, honey, I doan’ want none. I’s afears un um. I jis’ ’s soon have rattle snakes aroun.’ ”
That’s a good idea, Tom says. He’ll bring Jim a rattlesnake. Jim can tame it.
“Tame it!”
“Yes—easy enough. Every animal is grateful for kindness and petting, and they wouldn’t think of hurting a person that pets them. Any book will tell you that…. Why, you can get him so in a little while that he’ll love you; and sleep with you; and won’t stay away from you for a minute; and will let you wrap him round your neck and put his head in your mouth.”
“Please, Mars Tom—doan’ talk so. I can’t stan’ it. He’d let me shove his head in my mouf—fer a favor, hain’t it? I lay he’d wait a pow’ful long time ’fo’ I ast him.”
Everybody comes out pretty much O.K. (Jim is freed from slavery), but it’s hard not to have a bad taste in your mouth as you close the book. How could Twain, so serious, morally, in the earlier part of the novel, have veered off into this cruel comedy? Bernard DeVoto, though he revered Twain, still wrote that in the history of English-language fiction there was “no more abrupt or more chilling descent.” Some critics, great ones, tried to defend the ending on formal grounds. T. S. Eliot wrote that Twain had to bring Huck back to where he started out: in a comic world, ruled by Tom. Lionel Trilling, with misgivings, said something similar. Leo Marx scolded both of them for this. As he saw it, we just have to admit that Twain had a “failure of nerve,” and backed off from what he had said, in the main body of the book, about race and morals. I believe that’s the best explanation. But what’s most interesting here is that readers can consider a book very, very great even when it has a fault as huge as this. We seem to be able to eat the good half of the apple and throw the mushy part away. The last time I read “Wuthering Heights” I was shocked by the lameness of the second half. I had forgotten it.
E. M. Forster, in “Aspects of the Novel,” said that nearly every novel’s ending is a letdown. “This is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is this necessary? Why is there not a convention which allows a novelist to stop as soon as he feels muddled or bored? Alas, he has to round things off, and usually the characters go dead while he is at work.” That’s still not much of an explanation, though. Why do novelists feel that they have to round things off? Is it some basic conservatism? Or classicism?
Another possibility is that the author just gets tired. I review a lot of books, many of them non-fiction. Again and again, the last chapters are hasty and dull. “I’ve worked hard enough,” the author seems to be saying. “My advance wasn’t much. I already have the idea for my next book. Get me out of here.”
But even that reasoning, so attractively commonsensical, is inadequate. I think the tiredness may not be personal, but something about the universe in general: biology, physics. Art, whether fiction or not, is a challenge to entropy, a bumping up of something that must be flattened down again. When you think about it, it’s surprising that art is allowed to exist. It’s always a deviation: overly selective, overly concrete, and unfaithful, not to our actual experience but to our generalizing afterthoughts, the thoughts that get us through life. In “War and Peace,” when the excitable young heroine grows up and has kids and gets fat, young readers may be disappointed, but I think that adults may be comforted. Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary—to end. The stone fell in the water. The ripples ran. Now they should stop. The surface should be smooth again.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
On Secession Theology
The more things change, the more they stay the same. This.Secession Theology Runs Deep In American Religious & Political History
Religious Secession
By G. Jeffrey Macdonald Posted: 11/30/2012 9:26 am EST Updated: 11/30/2012 9:23 pm EST
Corruption has gone too far. The righteous must break away. Hope now rests with a holy remnant that will honor foundational texts.
The message sounds familiar. A church schism? No, mounting calls for secession from the United States.
Since President Obama won re-election, more than 750,000 Americans have petitioned the White House website to let their respective states secede, from Alaska to Iowa to Maryland and Vermont. Those leading the charge are framing it, observers say, in terms that suggest a deep-seated religious impulse for purity-through-separation is flaring up once again.
But this time, it's playing out on a political stage.
"Today's secessionist movements are just the latest example of a long parade of breakaway groups (in American history) seeking to restore some lost ideal," said Peter J. Thuesen, professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "The problem is that the ideal is invariably a mirage."
Seeking purity through separation has marked American religious history since the Puritans sailed from Holland to establish a holy beacon in the New World. It helps explain why Baptists, Presbyterians and others have splintered into countless subgroups over the years, and why the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina disaffiliated from the Episcopal Church this fall.
The pattern commonly involves one group breaking off to re-establish a holy community by living in fresh accord with sacred texts. Religious purists have the Bible to guide their quest; secessionists look to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Both insist these centers of authority have suffered neglect and must be restored.
"That's a persistent line of thought," said Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. "There are people who are disappointed with the direction the United States has taken. ... It's primarily political and economic, and then they just find a religious cover for it (as) they tap into pre-existent religious language."
Dismissing the United States as hopelessly corrupt, secessionists are picking up the breakaway-for-purity motif and running with it. Radio host Alex Jones, whose show airs in 60 markets, alleged on Nov. 15 that "foreign megabanks have hijacked the government" and have made secession necessary.
"We do not want to secede from the Union to destroy the republic, but to restore it," Jones said. "Go to the White House website. Do your own petitions to reinstall the Declaration of Independence. ... It's now time to launch the second American Revolution."
Secessionists, such as Russell Longcore of Marietta, Ga., take inspiration from history. He sees secession as pursuit of God-given liberty, such as when American colonies seceded from Britain in 1776, when Southern states left the Union in the 1860s and when the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 separate states two decades ago.
In his view, petitioning the federal government is "silly" because states don't need permission to secede, but he regards the petitioners' goal as nonetheless serious and moral in nature.
"The moral decay comes from the fact that Washington, D.C., has summarily ignored the Constitution," said Longcore, an insurance claims consultant who blogs at dumpdc.com. He offered the example of unsanctioned wars.
"Article One, Section Eight (of the Constitution) says Congress should have authority to declare war and to prosecute a war," Longcore said. "There hasn't been a declared war since World War II, but we've been in an awful lot of wars."
Other narratives help secessionists, as well as religious isolationists, understand their efforts as part of a noble tapestry. Evangelical groups have for years supported Christians in South Sudan, which broke off from Sudan last year after persistent clashes with Muslims in the north. Some now laud how Sudanese Christians separated and hope American Christians would do similarly by withdrawing at least culturally, if not legally.
Those inspired by such examples include Jim Rawles, an evangelical blogger and novelist who teaches survival skills for the coming day when America's economy collapses. He sees no point in seceding, since the federal government would "hammer" such efforts anyway.
Instead, he's getting more response these days, he says, to his call for Bible-believing Christians, Orthodox Jews and Messianic Jews to relocate to what he calls the American Redoubt: Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, eastern Washington and eastern Oregon.
One reason he gives on his website for separation: "Even if God has withdrawn his blessings from our nation as a whole, he will continue to provide for and to protect his remnant."
"It's time to distance ourselves from the vile corruptness that we see inside the Washington, D.C., Beltway," said Rawles, who blogs at survivalblog.com. "It is analogous to the Puritan exodus (from Europe). They couldn't fit in and said,'We're going to move to completely virgin territory and start afresh.' ... In effect, we're becoming pistol-packing Amish."
Some scholars still aren't buying it. As Wolfe sees it, calls for secession and cultural withdrawal are just sour grapes.
"It's not religious in inspiration at all," Wolfe says. "It's like in the Old South, where if you gave (secession) a religious cover, you made it sound better. But it's just people who basically have difficulty accepting that we have a two-party system. One party wins. One party loses."
But separatists insist the impulse to flee corruption and live rightly before God is genuine. And if that means clustering in ever more secluded enclaves, then so be it.
"The Bible teaches that the remnant will be small," Rawles said. "People who recognize that they are of the remnant, that they are God's elect, will in increasing numbers choose to vote with their feet."
Religious Secession
By G. Jeffrey Macdonald Posted: 11/30/2012 9:26 am EST Updated: 11/30/2012 9:23 pm EST
Corruption has gone too far. The righteous must break away. Hope now rests with a holy remnant that will honor foundational texts.
The message sounds familiar. A church schism? No, mounting calls for secession from the United States.
Since President Obama won re-election, more than 750,000 Americans have petitioned the White House website to let their respective states secede, from Alaska to Iowa to Maryland and Vermont. Those leading the charge are framing it, observers say, in terms that suggest a deep-seated religious impulse for purity-through-separation is flaring up once again.
But this time, it's playing out on a political stage.
"Today's secessionist movements are just the latest example of a long parade of breakaway groups (in American history) seeking to restore some lost ideal," said Peter J. Thuesen, professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "The problem is that the ideal is invariably a mirage."
Seeking purity through separation has marked American religious history since the Puritans sailed from Holland to establish a holy beacon in the New World. It helps explain why Baptists, Presbyterians and others have splintered into countless subgroups over the years, and why the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina disaffiliated from the Episcopal Church this fall.
The pattern commonly involves one group breaking off to re-establish a holy community by living in fresh accord with sacred texts. Religious purists have the Bible to guide their quest; secessionists look to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Both insist these centers of authority have suffered neglect and must be restored.
"That's a persistent line of thought," said Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. "There are people who are disappointed with the direction the United States has taken. ... It's primarily political and economic, and then they just find a religious cover for it (as) they tap into pre-existent religious language."
Dismissing the United States as hopelessly corrupt, secessionists are picking up the breakaway-for-purity motif and running with it. Radio host Alex Jones, whose show airs in 60 markets, alleged on Nov. 15 that "foreign megabanks have hijacked the government" and have made secession necessary.
"We do not want to secede from the Union to destroy the republic, but to restore it," Jones said. "Go to the White House website. Do your own petitions to reinstall the Declaration of Independence. ... It's now time to launch the second American Revolution."
Secessionists, such as Russell Longcore of Marietta, Ga., take inspiration from history. He sees secession as pursuit of God-given liberty, such as when American colonies seceded from Britain in 1776, when Southern states left the Union in the 1860s and when the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 separate states two decades ago.
In his view, petitioning the federal government is "silly" because states don't need permission to secede, but he regards the petitioners' goal as nonetheless serious and moral in nature.
"The moral decay comes from the fact that Washington, D.C., has summarily ignored the Constitution," said Longcore, an insurance claims consultant who blogs at dumpdc.com. He offered the example of unsanctioned wars.
"Article One, Section Eight (of the Constitution) says Congress should have authority to declare war and to prosecute a war," Longcore said. "There hasn't been a declared war since World War II, but we've been in an awful lot of wars."
Other narratives help secessionists, as well as religious isolationists, understand their efforts as part of a noble tapestry. Evangelical groups have for years supported Christians in South Sudan, which broke off from Sudan last year after persistent clashes with Muslims in the north. Some now laud how Sudanese Christians separated and hope American Christians would do similarly by withdrawing at least culturally, if not legally.
Those inspired by such examples include Jim Rawles, an evangelical blogger and novelist who teaches survival skills for the coming day when America's economy collapses. He sees no point in seceding, since the federal government would "hammer" such efforts anyway.
Instead, he's getting more response these days, he says, to his call for Bible-believing Christians, Orthodox Jews and Messianic Jews to relocate to what he calls the American Redoubt: Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, eastern Washington and eastern Oregon.
One reason he gives on his website for separation: "Even if God has withdrawn his blessings from our nation as a whole, he will continue to provide for and to protect his remnant."
"It's time to distance ourselves from the vile corruptness that we see inside the Washington, D.C., Beltway," said Rawles, who blogs at survivalblog.com. "It is analogous to the Puritan exodus (from Europe). They couldn't fit in and said,'We're going to move to completely virgin territory and start afresh.' ... In effect, we're becoming pistol-packing Amish."
Some scholars still aren't buying it. As Wolfe sees it, calls for secession and cultural withdrawal are just sour grapes.
"It's not religious in inspiration at all," Wolfe says. "It's like in the Old South, where if you gave (secession) a religious cover, you made it sound better. But it's just people who basically have difficulty accepting that we have a two-party system. One party wins. One party loses."
But separatists insist the impulse to flee corruption and live rightly before God is genuine. And if that means clustering in ever more secluded enclaves, then so be it.
"The Bible teaches that the remnant will be small," Rawles said. "People who recognize that they are of the remnant, that they are God's elect, will in increasing numbers choose to vote with their feet."
Liberal Moments
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Search All NYTimes.comThe Opinion PagesWorldU.S.N.Y. / RegionBusinessTechnologyScienceHealthSportsOpinionArtsStyleTravelJobsReal EstateAutos.EditorialsColumnistsContributorsLettersThe Public EditorGlobal Opinion
Timothy Egan November 29, 2012, 9:00 pm337 Comments
A Liberal Moment
By TIMOTHY EGAN
.Still hard to believe, I told a friend the other day while trying to fathom the election results, that pot is legal in my state, gays are free to marry, and a black man who vowed to raise taxes on the rich won a majority of the popular vote for president, back to back — the first time any Democrat has done that since Franklin Roosevelt’s second election in 1936.
And yet only one in four voters identified themselves as “liberal” in national exit polls. Conservatives were 35 percent, and moderates the plurality, at 41 percent. The number of voters who agreed to the “l” tag was up by three percentage points, for what it’s worth, from 22 percent in 2008.
What’s going on here, demography and democracy seem to be saying at the same time, is the advance of progressive political ideas by a majority that spurns an obvious label. Liberals have long been a distinct minority; liberalism, in its better forms, has been triumphant at key times since the founding of the Republic.
Abraham Lincoln’s push for the 13th Amendment, erasing the original sin of slavery from the land, was a liberal moment, as dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s new film. Teddy Roosevelt’s embrace of the income tax, eventually written into the Constitution after he left office, was a liberal moment. “No single device has done so much to secure the future of capitalism as this tax,” said John Kenneth Galbraith.
Women’s suffrage in 1920, Social Security in 1935, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — all liberal moments. Ditto the creation of national parks, and laws against child labor and poisoning the environment, and for giving most Americans access to health care.
Democrats were the knuckle-draggers on race and populist economic reform in the 19th century, Republicans in the latter half of the 20th. The party identities change; the arc of enlightenment does not.
Which brings us to the fascinating self-portrait of the United States at the start of the second half of the Obama era. A tenuous center-left majority wants to restore some equality to the outsize imbalance between the very rich and the rest of us. If a tenuous president can lead that coalition, without overreaching, he might be remembered among the greats.
In its simplest form, this will involve raising taxes at the high end and reforming entitlements enough to ensure their continued success and sustainability. Much of that, an accountant could do. But it takes a gifted politician for the heavier lifting. That leader will have to make his still-fledgling health care act work and earn his premature Nobel Peace Prize on an issue like climate change. In the process, he could restore the good name to traditional liberalism.
For at least a generation’s time, liberals in this country have been afraid to call themselves liberal. Was it the excesses of their creed, from race-based preferential programs that went on far too long to crude speech censorship by the politically correct and humorless (one and the same) that soiled the brand? In blindly embracing, say, the teachers’ union in the face of overwhelming evidence that public education needs a jolt or in never questioning the efficacy of government programs, the left earned its years in exile.
Or was it the relentless campaign by the broadcasting and publishing empires of the far right, associating liberals with tyranny, spiritual vacuity and baby killing, that drove people from the label that could not speak its name? “Godless,” “Treason” and “Demonic” are actual Ann Coulter book titles, and a representative sample of the profitable cartooning of liberals.
Liberalism, in the broadest sense, is about expanding human rights and opportunity, while embracing science and reason. What do they call the secularists in Egypt today pushing for democracy over a theocracy? Liberals.
The Progressives of the early 20th had an amazing run — direct elections of senators, regulation of monopolistic trusts, modernization of public schools, cleaning up the food supply — with only one major blooper: Prohibition.
The New Deal’s lasting legacy, Social Security, and its counterpart of the 1960s, Medicare, allowed millions of American to live out their lives in dignity. Those programs, attacked as socialistic abominations by the Fox News shills of their day, are now considered near sacrosanct by Americans of all political stripes.
Conservatives of the last decade lost their way by rejecting science, immigration reform and personal freedom, particularly in regard to choices made by women and gays. If you believe in climate change, finding a path to citizenship for millions of hard-working Hispanics and the right to marry the person you love, there is no place in the Republican Party of 2012 for you.
Their neo-con wing started a pair of disastrous wars that all but bankrupted the country. And for leaders, at least on television, the party put forth crackpots like Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and the morally elastic Newt Gingrich. This chorus promoted an orthodoxy that forced this year’s standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, to sound even more out of touch than he already was.
All political moments are ephemeral. This one could vanish in the blink of a donkey’s eye. But here it is: a chance to shore up a battered middle class, make the promise of health care expansion work and do something about a planet in peril. Huge tasks, of course, and fraught with risk. For now, the majority of Americans have Obama’s back. But should he fail, the same majority could become something much worse — a confederacy of cynics.
Search All NYTimes.comThe Opinion PagesWorldU.S.N.Y. / RegionBusinessTechnologyScienceHealthSportsOpinionArtsStyleTravelJobsReal EstateAutos.EditorialsColumnistsContributorsLettersThe Public EditorGlobal Opinion
Timothy Egan November 29, 2012, 9:00 pm337 Comments
A Liberal Moment
By TIMOTHY EGAN
.Still hard to believe, I told a friend the other day while trying to fathom the election results, that pot is legal in my state, gays are free to marry, and a black man who vowed to raise taxes on the rich won a majority of the popular vote for president, back to back — the first time any Democrat has done that since Franklin Roosevelt’s second election in 1936.
And yet only one in four voters identified themselves as “liberal” in national exit polls. Conservatives were 35 percent, and moderates the plurality, at 41 percent. The number of voters who agreed to the “l” tag was up by three percentage points, for what it’s worth, from 22 percent in 2008.
What’s going on here, demography and democracy seem to be saying at the same time, is the advance of progressive political ideas by a majority that spurns an obvious label. Liberals have long been a distinct minority; liberalism, in its better forms, has been triumphant at key times since the founding of the Republic.
Abraham Lincoln’s push for the 13th Amendment, erasing the original sin of slavery from the land, was a liberal moment, as dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s new film. Teddy Roosevelt’s embrace of the income tax, eventually written into the Constitution after he left office, was a liberal moment. “No single device has done so much to secure the future of capitalism as this tax,” said John Kenneth Galbraith.
Women’s suffrage in 1920, Social Security in 1935, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — all liberal moments. Ditto the creation of national parks, and laws against child labor and poisoning the environment, and for giving most Americans access to health care.
Democrats were the knuckle-draggers on race and populist economic reform in the 19th century, Republicans in the latter half of the 20th. The party identities change; the arc of enlightenment does not.
Which brings us to the fascinating self-portrait of the United States at the start of the second half of the Obama era. A tenuous center-left majority wants to restore some equality to the outsize imbalance between the very rich and the rest of us. If a tenuous president can lead that coalition, without overreaching, he might be remembered among the greats.
In its simplest form, this will involve raising taxes at the high end and reforming entitlements enough to ensure their continued success and sustainability. Much of that, an accountant could do. But it takes a gifted politician for the heavier lifting. That leader will have to make his still-fledgling health care act work and earn his premature Nobel Peace Prize on an issue like climate change. In the process, he could restore the good name to traditional liberalism.
For at least a generation’s time, liberals in this country have been afraid to call themselves liberal. Was it the excesses of their creed, from race-based preferential programs that went on far too long to crude speech censorship by the politically correct and humorless (one and the same) that soiled the brand? In blindly embracing, say, the teachers’ union in the face of overwhelming evidence that public education needs a jolt or in never questioning the efficacy of government programs, the left earned its years in exile.
Or was it the relentless campaign by the broadcasting and publishing empires of the far right, associating liberals with tyranny, spiritual vacuity and baby killing, that drove people from the label that could not speak its name? “Godless,” “Treason” and “Demonic” are actual Ann Coulter book titles, and a representative sample of the profitable cartooning of liberals.
Liberalism, in the broadest sense, is about expanding human rights and opportunity, while embracing science and reason. What do they call the secularists in Egypt today pushing for democracy over a theocracy? Liberals.
The Progressives of the early 20th had an amazing run — direct elections of senators, regulation of monopolistic trusts, modernization of public schools, cleaning up the food supply — with only one major blooper: Prohibition.
The New Deal’s lasting legacy, Social Security, and its counterpart of the 1960s, Medicare, allowed millions of American to live out their lives in dignity. Those programs, attacked as socialistic abominations by the Fox News shills of their day, are now considered near sacrosanct by Americans of all political stripes.
Conservatives of the last decade lost their way by rejecting science, immigration reform and personal freedom, particularly in regard to choices made by women and gays. If you believe in climate change, finding a path to citizenship for millions of hard-working Hispanics and the right to marry the person you love, there is no place in the Republican Party of 2012 for you.
Their neo-con wing started a pair of disastrous wars that all but bankrupted the country. And for leaders, at least on television, the party put forth crackpots like Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and the morally elastic Newt Gingrich. This chorus promoted an orthodoxy that forced this year’s standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, to sound even more out of touch than he already was.
All political moments are ephemeral. This one could vanish in the blink of a donkey’s eye. But here it is: a chance to shore up a battered middle class, make the promise of health care expansion work and do something about a planet in peril. Huge tasks, of course, and fraught with risk. For now, the majority of Americans have Obama’s back. But should he fail, the same majority could become something much worse — a confederacy of cynics.
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