To be American, in some sense, is to live in a state of revolution. It is to find in the existing order what must be remade and reordered to suit the needs and desires of the new age. Revolutionaries, in re-telling the story of the society they wish to reshape, almost inevitably rid themselves of the trappings of the old. Heroes must become villains, victories defeats, and the truths of the old world the lies of the new. It should thus surprise nobody that the movement to re-tell American history, a movement that began with the removal of Confederate monuments, has moved on to the Founders themselves, and to one Founder in particular: Thomas Jefferson.
The nation’s third president, sadly, ended up on a list of names proposed for removal from San Francisco city schools. And this is not only a San Francisco story. Other school districts, from Berkeley, California, to Waukegan, Illinois, to Falls Church Virginia, have floated or even passed such proposals. There is currently a movement to rename Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia as well, almost within sight of the national monument to his memory. Statues of Jefferson are not safe either. One in Portland, Oregon was torn down and in years past his likenesses at the College of William & Mary – which he attended – and the University of Virginia – which he founded – have been vandalized.
In a cruel historical irony, Jefferson the revolutionary has now become Jefferson the reactionary, who must be cast down. At last, the Sage of Monticello and Most Blessed of the Patriarchs finds himself on the receiving end of the revolutionary impulses he championed. As principal author of the Declaration of Independence, he articulated in writing the principles undergirding the nation our latter-day Jacobins wish to renew. As president, he oversaw the Louisiana Purchase, expanding the nation which so many residents now seem to despise. And as a slaveholder, a white man, and the probable father of Sally Hemings’s children, he is a lightning rod for those who see racism, slavery, and hypocrisy as America’s predominant legacy.
One almost wonders why Jefferson’s fiercest critics find an enemy and not a friend in the man who disestablished Virginia’s church, divested her of her holdings, and furthered the cause of modern education to free the mind of man from the shackles of tradition and superstition. If today’s radicals think our constitution an outdated relic, they might be relieved to know that Jefferson himself thought a generation only lasted 19 years, and that in such time, laws and constitutions naturally expire. Curiously, there may be little more Jeffersonian than dethroning Jefferson. In the mind of America’s great revolutionary, there was little unworthy of perpetual reshaping and remolding. “The earth belongs always to the living generation,” the great man once said. And so too would his fiercest critics today have it. If the course of human history means all that once was must be made again, it is only fitting that Jefferson would eventually become an object of revolution.
Seemingly, it appears at some level that those who want to rewrite what it means to be American do not fully appreciate just how American they truly are. Whether one likes it or not, Jefferson’s vision for America – a territorial republic committed to liberty, human progress, and the ceaseless improvement of man and his society – is the vision that won out in 1800 over the wishes of the Federalists. In snubbing John Adams and the American Court Party, Americans learned to think of themselves as always the underdog, always the outsider, always in defiance of those in power rather than the ones wielding it, always the English Country Party and never the royal court. The story Americans learned to tell about themselves, a story of a people striving to always do better, to always reform, to always improve, is at bottom a Jeffersonian story.
It is a story that lies at the heart even of what we might think would be a naturally anti-Jeffersonian tale: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton.” While the musical itself takes a rather comical view of the man from Charlottesville, it is really Jefferson, through the narrator Aaron Burr, who is telling us the story. Throughout the Broadway spectacle, “Hamilton” spares us certain aspects of the nation’s first Treasury Secretary. His proposal for a form of government at the Constitutional Convention does indeed come up. Not highlighted are Hamilton’s friendliness toward monarchy and aristocracy, values that now seem distinctly un-American, and for which he received much criticism during his lifetime. Telling the Hamilton story without mention of the national bank is almost impossible, but his fondness for standing armies and a powerful, activist state get left by the wayside, with the Whiskey Rebellion receiving only passing mention. Behind the glitz and glamor of show business, the Hamilton that Miranda leaves us with – a man who strives to remake his world, an egalitarian, a progressive – is American man as Jefferson would want him. It is a version of Hamilton that makes sense only because Jefferson won the argument over American identity.
If even a Broadway musical dedicated to the memory of Jefferson’s greatest opponent cannot escape his worldview, it is because precious little else in our nation has. The Jeffersonian vision of America has become so intertwined with its historiography and self-understanding that it at times does not occur to us that they might be different. If America’s progressive impulse to perpetually reform herself from the left is so very Jeffersonian, then so too is that particular brand of American exceptionalism often seen from the right. If America is truly “such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation,” it is so in keeping with parts of Jefferson’s vision. Their mirthlessness prevents social democrats from noticing Jefferson hovering over their shoulder with an amused smile. Though the dream of an agrarian republic has since fallen by the wayside, the American exceptionalist nonetheless stands athwart history daring it to do its worst. In a sense, the difference between a progressive and a conservative in this country is that the former wishes his country would declare independence from history, while the conservative thinks it already has.
What then should we make of the drive to recast American history and self-understanding? At one level, it is America being America, participating in the contentious dialogue about what being American even means. When Americans try to critique and deconstruct their Americanness, they cannot help but emphasize it in the process. But that process also throws into high relief some of the more volatile aspects of American nationhood. To be always remaking oneself is to never find fixity or stability. Perhaps Jefferson never intended it, but the nature of the American project is such that it can never be at peace with itself. That is all well and good so long as one has faith that everything will turn out for the better, but to think things will always be so is foolish. Confronting the present moment demands neither passive indifference nor political theater, but the bold articulation of a cohesive nationalism encompassing all Americans, with a history to match. We find ourselves in a Jeffersonian moment, a time for choosing how we will change out understanding of our world and the place we choose to take in it. We can choose to reinvent ourselves as we have done so many times before, or we can wipe the slate clean, detaching ourselves entirely from the pasts that plague us. Neither choice is as of yet certain, but no matter which path we choose to go down, there will we will find the ghost of Jefferson, watching us take so many of the same steps.