MEACHAM'S JEFFERSON BOOK AND MOUNT RUSHMORE

I love to read. I read evolutionary theory, evolutionary psychology/social biology, and for entertainment I enjoy reading history particularly in the form of presidential biographies. Therefore, I was thrilled to receive a copy of Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson Art of Power as a Christmas present. Surprisingly, reading it made me think of Mount Rushmore. Mount Rushmore has beautifully rendered faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln; Washington put this county on it path to greatness, Thomas Jefferson held us on the course of republicanism, Teddy Roosevelt preserved our great wilderness lands, and Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union as expanded by Jefferson and Roosevelt. Looking at that monument to these great men, like reading the book, reminded me of many wonderful things about my country . . . it made me feel proud. Reading Meacham’s book made me feel informed but it also called my attention to the rubble littering the mountainside in a way that suggested the faces of these great men were somehow equal in importance to the rubble covering the mountainside below.

Meacham wrote a revisionist history. He called attention to the fact that Jefferson was a slave owner, that he “used” a teenage slave girl as his concubine, and that he suffered from diarrhea while he was president of the United States, among other disparaging things, which he gave unnecessary weight too. What is the point? Am I to think of Jefferson as suffering on the toilet or negotiating the Louisiana Purchase? Was his lust of equal significance to overturning the Alien and Sedition Act? Should I tell my grandchildren and great grandchildren about the weakness of character common to many men or the great and unique acts of governance of the men whose faces are on the mountainside; should I divert the attention of future generations to the granite rubble and if I do to what end?