Looking for Mr. Jefferson

 

A cynical but true saying that sometimes passes around among historians is “He who controls the present controls the past.” Man is a symbolizing creature, and political struggles can be as much over symbols as over tangible things. Those who hold power and those who seek power want to associate themselves with favourable symbols from their society’s past. It gives them an air of tradition and legitimacy. Those who hold political, cultural, educational, and media power obviously have an advantage in this game. Or sometimes the game is associating rivals with negative symbols. Who does not want to be likened to Lincoln  Me and you, I am sure Dr. Clyde :) and to stick his opponents with Hitler?

Needless to say, none of this has much to do with historical accuracy, which even at its best is an elusive and to some degree an unavoidably subjective thing. Thomas Jefferson was for a long time one of the most potent references in American discourse. I can think of nobody else who has had this role so powerfully as both a negative and a positive symbol. Jefferson’s name is still significant, as witness the relentless efforts of the present regime, which fears the real Jefferson, to destroy him as a favourable image. But, regrettably, Mr. Jefferson is no longer as important as he once was, nor does his name mean what it once did for most Americans. We live in an age of reverence for Franklin D.
 Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King and in a time in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America is as remote to most citizens as ancient Persia or China.

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