-
Introduction. The Second American Revolution
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 introduction The Second American Revolution T he date was April 13, 1943—the 200th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson ’s birth. The place was Washington, DC. The occasion was the dedication of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. “Today in the midst of a great war for freedom we dedicate a shrine to freedom,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed, using Jefferson’s memory to bridge the chasm between the American Revolution and World War II. In the midst of this grueling conflict, President Roosevelt suggested that Americans were dying in Europe for the same reason that they died during the Revolutionary War: to fight tyranny in all its forms. The president observed that “Thomas Jefferson believed, as we believe, in man. He believed, as we believe, that men are capable of their own government and that no king, no tyrant, no dictator can govern for them as wisely as they can for themselves.”1 Jefferson had, in short, what John Dewey called the “democratic faith”: an unwavering belief in the moral composition of everyday people and the merit of self-government.2 Building to 2 Introduction an eloquent climax, President Roosevelt simultaneously praised Jefferson and honored Americans fighting in Europe, Africa, and Asia by invoking a theme that would resonate with Americans both past and present: no king, no tyrant, no monarch—be he named King George or Adolf Hitler —would ever determine America’s destiny or deny the United States’ proud tradition of self-government. The centerpiece of the Jefferson Memorial is the larger-than-life, 10,000-pound, nineteen-foot-tall bronze statue of the third president that was installed in 1947. Looming just as large are Jefferson’s words as etched into the memorial’s Georgian white marble walls. “The words which we have chosen for this memorial speak Jefferson’s noblest and most urgent meaning,” President Roosevelt insisted.3 But who is really speaking through the memorial? Is it Jefferson? Or someone else? While the sentences inside the Jefferson Memorial bear Jefferson’s name, it is not at all clear that the historical Jefferson would have liked the words he was made to speak by the twentieth-century designers of his memorial, for the Jefferson Memorial presents a carefully edited, overly facile, and ultimately antiseptic Jefferson for public consumption. The memorial’s Jefferson is a staunch foe of slavery, even though the historic Jefferson held more complex opinions on the subject.4 Equally vexing, the memorial removes the crux of the Declaration of Independence, its justification for revolution. Finally, the memorial distorts Jefferson’s doctrine of perpetual revolution as enumerated in one of his most famous letters. As such, the memorial completely misses one of Jefferson’s most important contributions to American politics: his solution to the problematic legacy of revolution in the United States. I begin with the Jefferson Memorial because it acts as a gateway into an argument that Americans have been having, with varying degrees of intensity, since the founding of our nation. The argument has to do with the loftiest subjects—with government, sovereignty, and power—but at bottom it is a rumpus about revolution and the place of democracy in our political landscape. Today, with Fourth of July fireworks and in little-kid plays, we celebrate the fact that the United States was born from a revolution against a greedy king and his petty bureaucrats. We tend to forget about the problems that revolution created once Great Britain was defeated. The conventional wisdom makes it seem as though The Second American Revolution 3 the United States sprung forth from revolution like Athena from Zeus’s head, fully formed and ready to scrap. As such, the period of intense postRevolutionary conflict over the meaning of revolution and the future of a nation is lost, remembered only by conscientious historians and curious genealogists. This book is about what happened, during the latter years of the Revolutionary War and in the immediate post-Revolutionary period, when the rhetorics and energies of revolution began to seem problematic to many wealthy and powerful Americans. In the 1780s and 1790s, the leaders of revolution began to worry that common folks, emboldened by talk of the power of the people and promises of democracy, would never submit to elite control over the economy and the levers of power. They worried, in short, that the rhetorics attacking British authority would undermine American authority as well. I begin with Jefferson to create perspective by incongruity, for he saw this problem differently than...