I guess I come down somewhere in between Ed Kigore and this Hot Air lunatic. I agree with Ed that it doesn’t really matter what we call a stupid fundraising dinner. But I agree with the lunatic that publicly disowning Jefferson sends a much broader message. Now, Ed is clear that he doesn’t endorse disowning Jefferson or any other historic figures. But I don’t see how you can look at what the Connecticut Democratic Party did as anything but that.
After all, they only did it because of the outrage people feel about the shooting in Charleston and the urging of the state NAACP. The clear implication is that there’s something dreadfully wrong with Thomas Jefferson which puts him in the same rough category as the Confederate Flag.
Now, the Hot Air guy misses this point entirely, mainly because he’s almost comically stupid. In his world, none of us care about slavery or being mindful of the sensitivities of people in our party who find Jefferson’s legacy profoundly objectionable. We want to disown Jefferson (and Jackson) because “they represent the foundations of conservatism.”
What we have here is a guy who is only too happy to take ownership of Jefferson for Team Red.
Ed’s happy to give him ownership for a variety of reasons, all of which make a ton of sense.
But, I’m not.
To be clear, I don’t care if the Democratic Party stops naming their fundraisers after Jefferson and Jackson. What I care about is this idea that Jefferson is a pariah.
I’d like, first, to strongly distinguish him from Jackson, who I do think deserves to be shunned. And, secondly, as I wrote, I’d like us to acknowledge and celebrate Jefferson’s greatness and our debt to him rather than focusing so much on his shortcomings that we lose sight of his magnificence.
And, finally, one of my key points was that people listen to each other and be willing to compromise. I don’t have some hard line on this. I just think it’s a safe bet that there are a lot of people who agree with me that Jefferson doesn’t deserve this treatment and are unhappy about it. And their viewpoint deserves some respect, too.
My sense is it may be necessary, at least for a time, to distance the party symbolically from Jefferson because of the feelings of an important part of our coalition. African-Americans have suffered so much, and continue to suffer so much, it’s the least the rest of the party (by which I mean the intellectuals who hang out here and in similar forums) can do (even though we’ve not been the cause of more than a small portion of that suffering).
What’s requested is nothing more than symbolic. And in time Jefferson’s contributions and limitations will come into focus. Really it’s all there now for anyone who can take a step back. The problem with lionizing people is that no matter how brilliant, how insightful, how noble of intention, all people have limitations and failings. That’s just a part of the human condition and the sooner we can learn to be mature about it, the sooner we can create a compassionate society in which all of us can be celebrated for our strengths and forgiven our weaknesses.
Or maybe we can all be adults. The modern Democratic Party formally begin the process of disavowing Jefferson’s personal acceptance of slavery and racism in 1948 and has continued that process (with a few notable and not fully appreciated backslides by a few Democrats) through today. Almost all African-Americans know that as well as appreciating that Lincoln has nothing to do with the modern GOP regardless of how often the GOP invokes Lincoln’s name to claim credit for his greatness.
How does it harm us to recognize the needs of African-Americans who are offended by Jefferson? One side or the other has to be magnanimous (on this entirely symbolic issue) so it might as well be us.
The notion that Jefferson did harm is ridiculous. He was a product of his time. Every single person he knew was either a poor loser or a slave-owner. The slave-owning culture was the dominant culture of his Virginia area. Yes, slavery was bad. But that was the time. You can’t blame him for his time, his culture, and his social position. Of course, some do, but those who do are simple idiots, honestly.
Jefferson ensured that we would have a two-party system — something many other founders hated (esp. Washington). He was also a deceptive hypocrite, lulling Washington into thinking he was a true and loyal servant while scheming to whip up anti-Washington ferver.
A great source on this is American Aurora, which is a fascinating collection of newspaper stories from the partisan press of the US in the late 18th/early19th century.
We have been given a myth about Jefferson — and I love that myth. But I also know it is a myth, and that Jefferson was, like most anyone, a mixture of good and bad.
There were people, even in Jefferson’s time, who knew that slavery was wrong. Maybe we could chose one of them to honor.
Even Jefferson felt it was wrong.
As long as we’re talking about a man and his times, Jefferson’s racial views were progressive in many ways for his time and yet unapologetically racist at the same time.
For example, he wanted to repatriate blacks to Africa, not because he disliked blacks, but because he felt that they should not be enslaved but we’re inferior and would wind up in a race war with whites that one or the other side would win totally.
In context, this a repudiation of slavery as immoral, but it was also an assertion of white supremacy. But it was also born of humanitarian concern.
And then we have the actual example he set, which involved sleeping with his slaves and not freeing them. On this last point, I think there’s reason to believe he would have freed his slaves if he hadn’t been such a lousy businessman. At is turned out, they were about the only assets he could leave as an inheritance.
This is similar to why Washington only provided for his slaves’ freedom at such time as his wife passed away. He wanted them free, but not if it would discomfort his family in the short term.
But Washington’s family could afford to do it and Jefferson’s family could not.
Of course, there’s a lot more to talk about on this subject, but I hope it’s at least clear that these men were men of their time who were troubled by human bondage and didn’t believe in it.
I keep seeing the words “sleeping with his slaves” and “having sex outside of marriage” as though what he did was not rape. There is no meaningful definition of rape that does not include “sleeping with his slaves”. So lets call a spade a spade. Thomas Jefferson was a rapist. Maybe it’s true that many men were rapists, so what?
I don’t honor or admire him. When he was talking about the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, he didn’t actually mean it. He wasn’t talking about me or people like me. He wasn’t talking about the human beings he owned whether he require them to have sex with him or not.
The problem with Jefferson and slavery is that he kind of went backwards. He took some stands against slavery when he was younger, such as the complaint against the slave trade in the first draft of the Declaration, but after a certain point he no longer took any action against it.
It’s hard to say what would have happened if he had tried harder to contain slavery, if not to eliminate it, but he was by far the most influential man in the country during a critical period. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, for instance, it was an open question whether slavery would be permitted in the new territory. Jefferson never even tried to keep it out.
Interesting. Thanks for the history lesson. It’s unfortunately all-too-common for people to go backwards as they age. That’s part of the reason old folks are more likely to be backward looking in their politics. There are of course exceptions and I’m proud to say my parents have gone from being rather myopic to true-blue liberals.
sleeping with his slaves and not freeing them.
Other than Sally Hemings, we don’t know that he engaged in any sexual activity with his slaves.
We also don’t know the nature of his relationship with Hemings. It could have been master and slave rape. Although, Betty Hemings and her descendants were the legal property of Martha and not Thomas Jefferson.
Martha Jefferson apparently made Thomas promise her that he would not remarry. That may sound odd to us today, but to her it may have been an effort to provide for her daughters. She had, after all, experienced the dilution of her inheritance because her father had remarried.
By all accounts, Martha and Thomas were happily married and he was devastated by her death. Martha and Sally were half-siblings. And few women at that time had anything close to resembling rights that today we take for granted. Legally free women were “married off” and not a few would have experienced their marriage as a form of slavery and sexual relationships as rape (fully sanctioned by religion and culture as doing her duty).
Not going to romanticize the relationship between TJ and Hemings as a love match, but Hemings is entitled to some respect — she did well by her children. They all lived free as adults and were educated/trained well enough to earn a living.
You make a good point, Marie. There’s so much we don’t know about Jefferson’s personal relationships.
Jefferson, in a bit of the draft of the Declaration that the committee cut, because they didn’t want to offend the Southerners, blaming slavery on George III but denouncing it in such gorgeous Jeffersonian language, showing that he understood the evil of slavery better than anybody:
Note the sarcastic reference to his Majesty’s Christianity. It’s just tragic that he fell so very far short of his own understanding.
Yes, but lives and circumstances are complex.
Yep. Certainly you’re right that the Hemings relationship was complex and it’s wrong to deny her agency.
Don’t forget who was president when the US abolished the slave trade (at the earliest date allowed by the Constitution Article 1 section 9). TJ started agitating for it in 1806:
And clearly worked to get it done on his watch, before Madison took over.
And yet he never freed a single one of the slaves under his control. Unless we count the two children of Sally Hemings that he didn’t stop from walking away.
Good words are nice; the everyday practice of good deeds in one’s life are better.
If given the opportunity to be able to afford a high standard of living, how many people choose to live much more modestly and use the balance to provide for others?
You’re taking ass-holery to eleven, dataguy.
If you want to keep Thomas Jefferson, you are entirely welcome to him. The man was a hypocrite, an owner of human beings and a rapist. I refuse to define his sexual activities with women who had absolutely no right to say no, women who’s entire existence he controlled as anything other than the rape that it was.
He was in no way associated with Democratic Party which did not exist during his lifetime. So why can we not find two individuals who were not associated with slavery rape and genocide to name our dinners after. It really shouldn’t be that hard.
I agree with you about Jefferson. He is a towering figure, and I will not abandon him to the other side.
However, there is a lot to be said about Jackson, and much of it good. Like it or not, during the early part of the 1800s, we were in a fight to the death with the Indians, and they were doing very well. Without Jackson and those who beat the Indians, we would be confined to the states of OH and eastward. Again, the politically correct notion is that the “white man” oppressed the Indian. What bullshit. The Indians were doing very well indeed, killing thousands of whites. If you were a settler on your own, during the 1840s-1850s, the Indians were not your friends. They came to kill you, rape your wife, and enslave your children.
What happened after the Civil War is different. But the future of the country was decided 150 years ago. It was what it was. I do not apologize for the actions of Jackson or others. It was kill or be killed. The non-Indian side won.
As stewards of the lands, it would have been better if the Indians had beat back the white man that believed they had the god given right to steal their lands.
The Indians were not stewards of the land. They were incompetent property managers who were mired in a pre-Iron Age social system in which they had not come up with the key concept of property ownership. So, the white people kicked their butts. That’s because our technology was better, our property system superior, and there were more of us.
The Indians had as much right to the land as we did. So, we took it. Too bad for them. They lost. Just because you are a loser does not make you morally superior. They lost because the European civilization was better. Simple as that.
Had the Indians come up with the concept of the fortified encampment (called a castle in Europe), they would have had a very much better result than they did. The whole history of the Americas would have been different. But since they were 2000-3000 years behind the Europeans, they did not have that idea, so they lost.
Oh, jeez, am I tromping on treasured jewels of current self-victimhood? Sorry…
You’re speaking of an essentially tribal paradigm, one in which one is part of a community in which the rights of others are respected but not part of a larger community. Outside our circle, we get to do whatever we want to “the other.”
Some Native Americans viewed the world through a similarly myopic prism. It’s the way our minds are designed and it takes a high degree of reflection or a very evolved spiritual sense to take one beyond such a narrow perspective. We can define ourselves as part of a larger humanity in which all have rights.
Those larger ideals are ones we claimed for ourselves in our founding documents. From the beginning we failed to live up to them. Jefferson is a prime example of that phenomenon. But he’s no worse than us. All of us have such thoughts and impulses, whether we act on them or not. If we did not, we couldn’t get focused on our own success when so many around us were suffering.
There are a few humans who put aside their own needs to dedicate their lives to the well being of others. Such people are few and far between, and ultimately fallible too.
And then you wonder why when you trot out your xenophobic hatred of immigrants we invoke the term “racism”.
Because I understand the history of the US, and you do not, you consider me a racist? What an ignorant attitude?
Specifically what do you know about the history of the western expansion? Probably nothing.
And as to the canard that I am a xenophobe, I am not. I favor legal immigration. I oppose illegal criminals. I am a Barbara Jordan democrat. In 1995, the commission she chaired, the Jordan Commission on Immigration, issued a report. The short result, since you know nothing about it and have never read it due to ignorance, is that
A couple of definitions to help you follow my comment.
You need to STFU about land stewardship.
Wouldn’t things like this just be a hell of a lot easier to work through if, all along, we would have been teaching everyone the history of this country in a manner that is, ya’ know….FACTUAL! This is happening, in large part, because 90%, or more, of this country is totally ignorant of our real history and how to understand the context of events that occurred and people who lived hundreds of years ago. All we do is conveniently cut snippets from our American historical pallet and turn them into rah-rah points for our tribes and use them as clubs to denigrate everyone else who is outside our tribe. Everyone does this. It’s not just the wingers.
History is messy. Everyone, included those “sacred” Founding Fathers had some less than stellar personal characteristics and questionable actions in their complex and nuanced lives. Things like this situation just drive me crazy because, at its root, it stems from our collective stubbornness and conscious ignorance of our own history.
Yes, they all had less-than-stellar characteristics. They all had sex. They all pooped. Still, between the drinking bouts, the sex with women that he was not married with, and the pooping, Jefferson wrote the key documents of this country.
You say ” sex with women that he was not married with”, I say rape. Maybe it’s a case of tomato,tomatoh but I suspect you’d feel differently about his “extra-marital” sex if you were a descendent of people who had no right to refuse offers of “extra-marital” sex from the men who owned them.
Whahhahahahahhah
Political correctness gone insane. You know about Jefferson’s domestic arrangements of 200+ years ago? What a genius you must be….
Neither one of us knows about his “domestic arrangements” what we both know is that he had sex with his slave and that slaves had no right to refuse. What more do you need to know?”
That was 2 minutes of his time on Sat night. The rest of the time, he was doing important things. What right do you have to judge him? What have you done?
Casting stones is a bad place to be at. We all have sins to atone for. His accomplishments far outweigh his sins.
Sally Hemings was not two minutes of his time.
The point is that we have no idea what his domestic arrangements were, and additionally, that a person is not defined by the sexual relationships that he/she is in. This was a part of his private life that we have no information about. And the notion that this was a compulsory relationship is only one of many possibilities.
Despite your claims to historical knowledge, you have none in this area and should do some reading before you deliberately offend people any more.
I think that’s a part of it. The other part, the part that’s not popular to talk about in progressive circles, is that we all have an innate desire for larger than life figures to look up to. Tribes select chiefs and civilizations select (however indirectly and imperfectly) kings. Democracy is a very recent phenomenon and, still, the stronger, the taller, the more youthful candidate generally seems to have an advantage. It’s deep in our DNA to want a strong man to lead us and historical mythical strong men to revere.
In my Sufi community, the explanation for this is that at some deep level we’re all thirsting for God. Without a sense of God we inevitably create false ones. Sometimes we’ll choose a historical figure. Sometimes a romantic partner. Ultimately none of them can hold our projections and so we’ll be disappointed.
Agree of disagree with the latter paragraph, I don’t think anyone can credibly dispute the former. Jefferson has been made larger than life, in part because he was this amazing genius. But that’s only a part of the story. There are many amazing geniuses no one remembers. He was also in the right place at the right time, and he had certain qualities that allows him to carry our projections well.
In a democracy, each man is as good as the next, and often better, as Mr. Dooley used to say.
In theory, sure. And we still look for strongmen.
I think that this is a generally balanced view. Yes, he was a man of accomplishments. Yes, he was a failed man who did many things that are considered incorrect by the standards of today.
Yet, despite his personal failings and errors, he still wrote the Declaration of Independence, managed our relationships with France during the Revolutionary War, was a highly successful president, was an opponent of the first attempt to impose a religious order on the US government, stripped the Bible of the myths and fables contained within it, purchased the land west of the Mississippi for a modest sum, and, most importantly, introduced macaroni-and-cheese to Americans.
It is a huge mistake to condemn the accomplishments of a person for their personal foibles. He was a man of his time, and did what he did. Without him, our revolution would have been different. Who knows for good or ill?
I stand with him.
Richard Wagner was a musical genius and there are those who can’t stop pointing out that he had a sharp tinge of antisemitism. So there, he gave us the music, Jefferson gave us the thinking. We can’t ask the woman he slept with him what they thought about the experience. It’s all projection and retro fine-tuning. But we can ask the Jews who perform Wagner’s music what they think of it. You can guess what they’ll say. As an institution slavery was and is an abomination to US, today, and to some yesterday. But what are you and I doing today which will look hideous in hindsight after two centuries? Any suggestions?
And yet Jackson also did a lot to reign in rule by elites in the era and had a strongly populist streak to go with his genocidal Indian policies. Everyone is a mixture, so I’m going to take good while deplorable the bad and remembering that these guys are men, not angels and refer to them as such. You can disavow the myth of Jefferson without abandoning him.
Like any group NAACP can go to excess. I think they did here.
LURKER COMES OUT OF THE SHADOWS
-Hi, I am Grady Seasons. I am 45, lifelong progressive Democrat (fed-up), and daily reader of Booman for at least 10 years, and Daily Kos for at least 12. MY TAKE:
http://www.newhistorian.com/more-evidence-of-human-neanderthal-interbreeding-in-europe/4140/
I’m still thinking that the philosophical Jefferson would loathe the idea of fundraising dinners in US politics period.
But the practical politician Jefferson would name them after someone and be delighted they were named after himself. And certainly would have something to say about Washington-Adams dinners.
TJ and Adams mended their rift and remained close in the years after their terms in office.
But Jefferson never mended his rift with Washington.
……Sigh.
Here’s one thing about Jefferson. We all know who wrote these words:
But what about these words?
The author hasn’t been forgotten, of course, but he’s not nearly as widely known as Jefferson. That’s partly because he was never president, but drafting the Constitution was far from his only contribution. Is it because the preamble is less memorable, less revolutionary, than the Declaration of Independence? Or is it because Gouverneur Morris was one of Jefferson’s political enemies?
He also, by the way, argued vigorously against allowing slavery at the constitutional convention.
She may not be a founding father, but I’d be perfectly happy with an annual Eleanor Roosevelt Dinner.
A most remarkable woman. Easily grasped the “right thing” to do. But not so headstrong to rush right in if Franklin asked her to slow walk or delay it.