Thomas Jefferson Was a Bad Person
Yesterday Robert Turner published an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Myth of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings” that argues that Jefferson did not, in fact, rape Hemings and father any of her children. He argues that Hemings descendants refer to Jefferson as an “Uncle” and not as a father, that Jefferson’s younger brother is the more likely culprit, that some French guy made up the whole thing.
OK, whatever. Maybe Thomas didn’t rape Sally. Maybe he turned a blind eye to his brother’s crimes. I’m not an historian, I am not one of the 13 distinguished scholars Turner says have held a concordance and declared Jefferson free of the sin of fathering Black kids. But what is not disputed, what is fact, is that Jefferson owned Hemings and hundreds of other enslaved Africans. Turner quotes Adams and Hamilton as character witnesses for Jefferson. I guess Adams and Hamilton, paragons of honesty, refused to believe that Jefferson would be so crass as to impregnate a slave (Hamilton was a somewhat famous philanderer). Perhaps they were right. Perhaps he only enslaved his slaves.
The fact that Americans even have this conversation is completely nuts. Jefferson was a horrible person. There is no context that makes him good. No restatements of English ideas about liberty for white people scribbled on yellowed parchment can redeem him. It’s a pity the Africans he enslaved weren’t able to draw and quarter him, burn Monticello to the ground and plant their own free society in it’s ashes. That the American press knows that an argument about whether or not one of the great icons of “american liberty” merely owned slaves (enslaved Africans= people subjected to terrorism) or also raped slaves ((enslaved Africans= people subjected to terrorism) is an important argument is a testament to the power of colonial thinking so many decades after formal slavery ended in North America. The real myth is not about Jefferson and Hemings, it’s about Jefferson and liberty. He was as staunch an enemy of liberty as has ever walked the face of this planet, and it is a sign of the insanity of American culture that this is not widely recognized.
A Real Asshole
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word!
If Mitt Romney can speak to the NAACP conference, I can man-up and recommend Thomas Jefferson’s blog at
http://ThomasJeffersonLeadership.com/blog/
“The Chinese learned the lesson of Gorbachev’s failure: full recognition of the ‘founding crimes’ brings the entire system down: they must be disavowed. True, some Maoist ‘excesses’ and ‘errors’ were denounced (the Great Leap Forward and the widespread famine that followed it; the Cultural Revolution), and Deng’s assessment of Mao’s role (70 per cent positive and 30 per cent negative) is enshrined in official discourse. But Deng’s assessment functions as a formal conclusion that makes any further discussion or elaboration superfluous. Mao may be 30 per cent bad, but he continues to be celebrated as the founding father of the nation, his body in a mausoleum and his image on every banknote. In a clear case of fetishistic disavowal, everyone knows that Mao made errors and caused immense suffering, yet his image remains magically untainted.”
–Slavoj Zizek
I wonder if something similar is going on here with Jefferson and the rest of the Founding Fathers. Some deviations from their squeaky-clean official presentation are acknowledged, but then it’s back to harping on the tyranny of Britain’s taxes and the genius of checks and balances. USians are educated to ignorance. The US’s excesses and errors even help strengthen its mythology: sure, Jefferson might have been a bad person, but the system he set up allowed us to change it for the better!
I think you make a very good point about how the people who produce bourgeois US ideology position Jefferson’s image. They certainly do center that image in a narrative of progressive liberalism where it is claimed that the system set up by Jefferson and the other “Founding Fathers” has allowed for what is, on the whole, an American experience that is always getting better. That is indeed the myth, and the Dengists in China have a myth of their own about how the capitalist road is doing something similar for the Chinese people. But I think the Dengist myth is significantly different because Mao and the Maoist CPC were not walking the same road as the Dengists. The lie is different.
Mao and the Maoist CPC and the Chinese revolutionary experience represent, in my view, the most developed attempt at socialism in practice that the world has yet seen. The CPC led by Mao was building a new world in opposition to the class that Jefferson belonged to and represented, just as Jefferson and his fellow “revolutionaries” were building a new world in opposition to the class that the feudal remnants of the European empires represented. The cultural revolution was part of the process of the revolutionary Chinese elements doing battle with the Chinese elements that wanted to restore a sort of capitalism to China, but they lost and the conservatives won. Now in China you have a situation where the figure of Mao is upheld as a nationalist hero, but his revolutionary legacy is ignored, stamped out, quieted and betrayed. It’s not at all a question of the Dengists hiding the so-called “excesses” of the revolution – if anything they have built a false narrative of revolutionary excess from which the nation has been saved by the moderate Dengists. Since Mao and the party under his guidance was much more advanced than the current rulers of China, it’s not really a correct comparison with the current American ruling class’s usage of Jefferson. After all, Jefferson was not more advanced than them and they all serve the same capitalist class.