Notes on the state of America
It’s practically a social imperative these days that whenever anyone discusses America’s founding fathers, someone, somewhere simply must say something disparaging about them. This impulse is possibly born, in part, of our memories of our disappointment when we first discovered that America’s founding fathers were human. Those of you belonging to my generation will recall being raised from childhood on the idea that those progenitors of the American experiment were all saints. So the poor guys had nowhere to go but down.
Thomas Jefferson was a fixture of fascination to me since I was a teenager. I devoured books on him, especially the six volume biography by Dumas Malone. There was also “Jefferson, an Intimate History,” by Fawn M Brodie, which I picked up in 1974, and wherein Ms Brodie became the first modern historian to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that Jefferson fathered several children by one of his African slaves, Sally Hemings. Her case was later proved beyond the shadow of a doubt by DNA.
So I got my education in Jefferson’s lack of saintliness fairly early on. By that time I didn’t want heroes anyway, and if I should later change my mind, there was always Abraham Lincoln or Harriet Tubman.
I come here today not to bury Thomas Jefferson but to praise him. What Jefferson was to me was the quintessential genius, one of those men or women who come along in history at precisely the time they’re needed, arriving fully formed and ready to fulfil a destiny literally no one else could.
Without Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence there could have never been so nearly perfect an articulation to ourselves and to the world the unique (at that time) principles of freedom and democracy necessary to inspire us to fight — and our allies to help us win. Without Jefferson I don’t believe there could have been an American Revolution at all, at least not a successful one. Without Jefferson there would have been no Louisiana Purchase, and half the country as we know it today would be missing.
If Washington was the brawn behind the American Revolution, Jefferson was its brains, and without him there would have been no Independence Day, at least, not as we know it. And it certainly would not be the same without an inspired document to remind us why we celebrate it on the Fourth of July.
But the truths we once held as self-evident have become today muddled in a quagmire of lies, a growing addiction to which far too many Americans are captive. The monsters that Jefferson warned us of are now among us, and they are every inch as dangerous as Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton envisioned.
Thomas Jefferson was not a man of faith. He was at his core a man of supreme — even ruthless — practicality. He believed that Reason (with a capital R) would always ultimately see us through. Indeed, he saw that the Age of Reason was inseparable from the Rights of Man, and that our human rights are best defended by our ability to think critically and rationally.
Today, as I write this, is the 249th anniversary of the publication of the Declaration of Independence. Notice I don’t say “signing,” because it wasn’t entirely signed on July 4th, 1776. Those famous signatures were scribbled haphazardly, over a period of days, by various delegates straggling in, unaware that each of their signatures would be gratefully scrutinised by hundreds of generations of Americans yet unborn.
To the delegates of that early Congress, the Declaration was a list of grievances justifying America’s separation from England. Today it’s viewed by the lacerating backward glance of history as the first and best proclamation of the natural liberties that all human beings deserve, not as a privilege, but as a right.
To be sure those rights applied to white men of property. But the evolution of human thought has enshrined the Declaration with its best and most profound truth. That we are equal, all of us, that we derive our equality not from the generosity of the state, but from the inevitable logic of Reason. It’s an ideal far from realised, but thankfully one that most of us still believe.
Jefferson also symbolised the imperfections, contradictions and even hypocrisies we share as a nation. He was a slave owner who believed in human rights. We must not allow our imperfections, contradictions and hypocrisies to keep us from achieving our best destiny, as a beacon of freedom to ourselves and the world.
It’s part of the genius of the American system, created by geniuses like Jefferson, that we have been able to stay the course so far. I believe, ultimately, that we will continue to do so. We will continue to do so imperfectly, of course, but we’ll succeed in the end, and beat back the monsters who have come to our door. Because we always have. So happy Fourth of July, brothers and sisters.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.